Drive-by Media Political Contributions

Hat tip to Drudge Report for highlighting that the drive-by media contributes 9 to 1 to Democrats over Republicans.

 

MSNBC compiled an exhaustive list of media personalities and their political donations.

 

The results speak for themselves.

 

Here is the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113455

 

GAGGLE

T. Blair on the news media

Exiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered a speech on how the media has blurred the lines between news and commentary.

 

Unfortunately, Blair, who has a record of favoring the "big-government" philosophy, concludes that reviewing government imposed news standards may likely be streamlined and put under one authority instead of the various public overseers present in the U.K. today.

 

It appears that he places little faith with the punishment that the marketplace can deliver to sub-standard reporting even if the marketplace moves slowly but surely over time.  If there is a demand for delivering hard-news in an unbiased fashion, the marketplace will reward those who fulfill that what has become a rather niche market, in light of the hard news being who is up or down in the latest offering of American Idol.

 

Here is an excerpt of Blair's speech:

 

Fourth, rather than just report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more important than the news itself. So - for example - there will often be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean. This leads to the incredibly frustrating pastime of expending a large amount of energy rebutting claims about the significance of things said, that bears little or no relation to what was intended.

In turn, this leads to a fifth point which is the confusion of news and commentary. Comment is a perfectly respectable part of journalism. But it is supposed to be separate. Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible. The truth is a large part of the media today not merely elides the two but does so now as a matter of course. In other words, this is not exceptional. It is routine.

Understanding Taxes

From the National Taxpayers Union blog Government Bytes

Inside Story about how the Senate Immigration Bill was killed

From the Right Wing News:

A GOP Aide, who's one of my sources in the Senate, gave me the rundown on what happened to the Senate bill today.

After the 2nd cloture vote failure at noon on Thursday, Harry Reid could not get unanimous consent to call up amendments to the bill because Jim DeMint refused to give his consent. This was extremely problematic for Reid because he wanted to get in votes on 6 more amendments before the last try at a cloture vote.

At that point, all the senators who were participants in the "Grand Compromise" AKA the "Masters of the Universe" by the opponents of the bill, leaned on DeMint to try to get him to give consent for the bill to move forward.

Unfortunately for them, DeMint wouldn't budge. This essentially killed the entire afternoon that the pro-amnesty side hoped to use to shore up support for the bill.

While DeMint was gumming up the works, the opponents of the bill, including most prominently Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, and Tom Coburn, huddled and came up with a list of conservative amendments they wanted considered ... [more]

Fence First ... We'll worry about the rest later

Immigration is not that complicated if you break it into pieces and do things one-by-one.

Granted, the fedgov is very incompetent, so it makes sense to simply complete one project at a time, then move on to the next project.

Build the already authorized and funded fence -- First.

Rudy gets a shocker

Well, it seems that something is happening in the pro-life debate.

Here is the YouTube link from the GOP debate in NH (6-5-07) that shocked candidate Guiliani: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibqwKb4cCsg