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Congress -- even in a good year -- barely works. That can be taken (equally correctly) either as "barely functions" or "barely ever shows up for work." In a pathetically-unproductive year (this Congress is on track to be the least productive Congress since records were kept), this should already have become painfully obvious to all.
Fifty years ago today, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior gave a seminal speech. This anniversary has been marked today by many, by presidents and by bloggers alike. Many have taken as their springboard for commentary the immortal phrase "I have a dream," completing it with their own new dreams of justice and righteousness for America.
So, after an awfully slow and non-obsessive August, it is indeed refreshing to see our national news media -- collectively, even -- do something right in the reporting of actual news in a way that actually imparts important information to the public. Yes, journalists everywhere -- even on television! -- are incredibly living up to the basic definition of journalism. And all it took was one big fire.
Once again, the question on everyone's minds as they turn on their evening news is: "Are we at war yet?" This time, against Syria. Have the bombs started dropping? Have the sorties started? Have the cruise missiles been unleashed?
"Boehner's trouble isn't even that he's trying to herd cats -- it's that he's trying to herd stupid insane cats."
We begin today with some awfully short memories, from both the Right and the Left, on the crossover subjects of presidential debates, television, and Hillary Clinton. It all stems from the news that the Republican National Committee has announced it will not sanction 2016 Republican candidate debates on CNN and NBC, because the two stations are both putting together movies about Hillary Clinton. The RNC feels that this will unacceptably prejudice the networks in the 2016 presidential race, in which Clinton is likely to be a Democratic candidate.
While I normally don't go in much for directly attacking media personalities publicly, at times it becomes almost necessary to do so. I offer this up as a warning that the rest of this column will be nothing short of a heartfelt plea to the folks who run the NBC News division to please, please, please replace David Gregory as host of the venerable Meet The Press (the longest-running television show in history). So if that sort of thing isn't your cup of tea, then I'd suggest just skipping today's column.
The Huffington Post just highlighted the worst example of this from last Sunday's political chat shows on television, and while they did an exemplary job I feel further deconstruction is necessary. David Brooks, in discussing the online changes in the journalism business, falls back on the sneering contempt print journalists have long voiced towards the blogosphere:
The big political news today, of course, was President Obama's press conference. While the subject matter largely revolved around the National Security Agency reforms Obama is belatedly proposing, I found the rest of the presser to be more interesting, personally -- mostly because the excerpt we're going to provide will in all likelihood be virtually ignored in most media reports. But we'll get to all that in the remainder of the column.
President Barack Obama's job approval polling numbers continued a rather dramatic slide in July, resulting in the lowest public approval yet of his second term. He hasn't quite hit the low point of his first term, but he is getting dangerously close. Whether he can turn this trend around in August remains to be seen, but he's certainly got his work cut out for him. A quick look at this month's chart shows the size of the problem Obama's going to have to overcome, to do so.