I do not like @Politico and think no one has captured the mentality of that rag better than @CharlesPPierce who named it "Tiger Beat of the Potomac" BUT this Boehner story is worth reading. politico.com/news/magazine/…
And not so much because Boehner is calling the reactionary right and the right-wing propaganda machine out. It's worth reading because it is a cautionary tale for Democrats.
Read this paragraph and ask yourself, are there Democrats this describes? I can think of more than a few.
And then there is this...people who raise so much money independently, darling of social and news media whose power base is outside the party? We have those as well.
I don't mind that the Democratic party does not have complete ideological subservience to one person or one idea. In fact, that's a relief. We need a mix of ideas to keep improving and proposing good policy and improving old policies. That is good
But people who operate in opposition to the party in the media and accomplish little in Congress because they are always demanding more? They turn wins into losses.
That includes those who before we lost the $15 MW hike would have made even a win a loss by saying it needed to be $25. The people who make the perfect the enemy of the good and won't support $2 trillion because they want $10 trillion
These are the people who would put all the ornaments from the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on a tabletop tree and break it.
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There is a lot that is wrong with the media. Some problems are structural. Some are economic. Some are our own damn fault. There are some things we can do.
Structurally, the media remains very much in the hands of white men. Even though we see more diversity in the public face, there is little progress where the decisions are made.
This study looks at more than the US, but then the structural problems are broader than the US.
Reading "Sisters in Hate" and this made !e think of @eminently_me5
"Everyone has “the potential for resisting false ideas,”a trio of researchers note in a paper about Spinoza’s theory, “but this potential can only be realized when the person has
(a) logical ability, (b) correct information, and (c) motivation and cognitive resources.” No one, it seems, is immune from the psychic glitch of sometimes believing that what’s wrong is right.
Among the chinks in our intellectual armor is a susceptibility to repetition. Research shows that people become more credulous of an idea the more times they encounter it. In what’s known as the illusory truth effect,
Today I learned that some people call their big toe after a racist epithet. Someone nonchalantly called it that in a post with a question in a disease support group. I said "most people call that the big toe so as not to offend" and reported his question to the admins.
Somehow I think it is my comment that will be deleted.