Howard Dean suggests Dems score political points with gov’t shutdown ('rooting for it')

Yahoo ^ | 3/29/11 | Rachel Rose Hartman

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If there is anything that has disgusted me over the past few years, it has been the way the media is merely an extension of the Democrat Party. It’s like living in the USSR.

Indeed; understanding that phenomenon has been my major interest for quite a long time.
My conclusions are:

• Nobody can safely take their own, or anyone else's, objectivity for granted. Indeed, taking one's own objectivity for granted is precisely what subjectivity is, and that's the opposite of objectivity.

• The only way to attempt objectivity is to eschew any claim of objectivity and to explicitly disclose any interest one may have in any case they discuss. This journalists never do; they are far too busy promoting themselves to ever do that.

• Yet journalists do have identifiable interests apart from the public interest:
  • promoting themselves,
  • raising alarums over the results of everyone else's decisions/actions - everyone who does not flatter journalists, that is, and
  • reciprocating the flattery of those who flatter journalists. This explains the relationship between journalists and those whom journalism labels "moderate" or "liberal" or "progressive".

• It follows that journalists, all protestations of dispassion notwithstanding, are not even trying to be objective.

• Journalism as a profession was not ideologically homogeneous in the founding era but it is ideologically homogeneous today - and has been for well over a century. The reason for the change is hiding in plain sight - News service journalism. The Associated Press (founded in 1848 as The New York Associated Press) is monopolistic, and it functions as a Borg which gives the journalist what he wants - an endless stream of news which the public hasn't heard yet, and the suppression of any competition over objectivity. All at the cost, not only of money, but the surrender of the independence to be able to question the objectivity of any other journalist.

The Right to Know

[Ronald_Magnus]

The 50 Billion we’re trying to cut is less than 1/2 of 1 per cent of our total debt of 14 Trillion. If the Rs in Congress don’t hang tough for these measly cuts, we are screwed people.