Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today announced that the public option (Charles Schumer's "opt out" plan, in particular) will be contained in the bill he moves to the Senate floor. This is an absolute shock to the media, since they have been obsessing over only one bill out of a total of five that congressional committees have passed to date -- the one produced by Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee. Baucus' bill (which took the longest to appear) is the only one of these five bills without a public option. But, in apparent widespread confusion as to how Congress actually works, the media has been pushing the "public option is dead" theme for so long, it's no wonder they're so astonished at today's news. Because it proves (yet again, I might add) that the media's credibility is really what should have been pronounced dead months ago, and not the public option.

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When a stage magician makes a flourish, causing a puff of smoke and a flash of light to appear, there's a reason for it. It is called "misdirection." It is meant to dazzle the audience with a shiny object, so that they don't notice what is going on elsewhere on the stage, or perhaps even in the magician's other hand. It is an effective technique, so effective that it is the basis for most stage magic tricks. And there's a huge story that's sucking up a lot of oxygen from the inside-the-Beltway media scene right now that seems to be tailor-made misdirection which has been tossed into the media shark tank in order to stir up a feeding frenzy.

I speak, of course, of whether NBC's Chuck Todd will (or will not) shave off his goatee.

No, of course, I'm kidding. The real head-scratcher for serious media-watchers right now is what the "war" between the White House and Fox News was meant to distract us from this week. The "war" itself is laughable, for a number of reasons. The first is that all presidents do this to one extent or another. Press access is not a constitutional right or anything, meaning that the White House is free to invite anyone it wants into the press room, and exclude anyone it wants. Secondly, it's not "unprecedented" in any way, shape, or form. White Houses criticize the press all the time, and sometimes kick them off official planes, or completely deny them access in retaliation for stories they've run. It happens all the time, from both Republican and Democratic presidents. Anyone who thinks differently just doesn't have all that good a memory.

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No solid news is coming out of the negotiations over healthcare reform between Majority Leader Harry Reid and his two committee chairs, or from Speaker Nancy Pelosi's similar efforts in the House. Which doesn't stop us from talking about it, of course, because the absence of hard news directly causes a flurry of rumors as to what is "really going on." These rumors are flying so fast and thick from inside the Beltway that suburbanites in Maryland and Virginia have been dive-bombed by them repeatedly, and have taken to cowering and ducking whenever they must walk outside. Or so it's been rumored....

Kidding aside, though, I'm going to latch onto one of these rumors and see how it could fly or get shot down, because it seems to be a Thursday type of story. If you disdain unsourced rumors masquerading as news, then I would advise you to just stop reading now, and maybe go do a sudoku or crossword puzzle for ten minutes instead.

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It's crunch time, people.

For those not versed in the way Washington works (and the glacial pace of Congress), the last couple of months may have been a little frustrating. The marathon effort to reform our nation's healthcare system began in early spring, continued throughout the summer, and is now entering its last laps. Some people thought this was going to be a sprint and thus had unrealistic expectations for the schedule it was going to follow (this includes, I might add, President Obama -- who initially called for an insanely-optimistic timetable from Congress). As the process has ground slowly forward, frustration and despondency about the pace of Washington was to be expected at times from reform advocates. The relentless drumbeat from the media saying "healthcare reform is dead," or even "this or that aspect of healthcare reform is dead;" coupled with the over-the-top media coverage of this summer's town hall hotheads has surely taken its toll, one would think.

One would be wrong about that. Yesterday, over 300,000 people picked up the phone and called Congress demanding healthcare reform this year. This effort largely passed unnoticed by the media, of course. But the phones ringing off the hook certainly did not go unnoticed by Congress.

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Do we (not unlike government) get the news media we deserve?

That question has been on my mind of late, due to an overload of idiocy on the airwaves. But, I had to wonder, is it truly idiocy from the media talking heads, idiocy from the people who decide what stories to air (and what prominence to give them), or could it quite possibly have something to do with the idiocy of those watching as well? It's a hard question to ask, which is why "Do we get the media we deserve?" is so much more polite.

Consider the last few days. The "Boy Who Was Not In A Balloon" story raced like wildfire across television screens at virtually every "news" channel on cable television. Even after the balloon landed -- when responsible news organizations should have realized that there was no story at all -- the cable channels refused to give up on it. The more respected broadcast channels went along for the ride that night. But even after it became obvious that the whole thing was a hoax by an attention-seeking publicity hound, the media refused to give up. The whole thing was like watching a drunk try to push himself away from the bar, or (more politely) like a poker player who has bet too much on a bad hand, and therefore cannot fold because he is "pot committed." The media went for the story in such a big way that to suddenly drop it would have made it obvious to all who were watching that they had been wrong about the whole thing. Since the media rarely likes to admit mistakes, and since they turn vicious when they realize they've been spoon-fed a storyline which proved false, they turned on the sympathetic father with their usual claws out.

The moral of the story is, for the attention-seeking father: when you chum the water for sharks, sometimes the sharks climb up in your boat and eat you alive.

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The Obama Justice Department made news today by codifying a previously-announced policy of ending raids on medical marijuana dispensaries which comply with state laws. Even though medical marijuana is legal in fourteen states -- over one-fourth of the country -- it is still illegal under federal law (the Controlled Substances Act). Since federal law always trumps state law, this has led to continuing raids on dispensaries which state and local governments have explicitly allowed to operate. When President Obama took office, he announced that these raids by the feds would cease, as long as the dispensaries weren't breaking applicable state laws in their operation. A few raids subsequently took place in California, leading to some distrust and skepticism, but today Attorney General Eric Holder sent out guidelines to federal attorneys to halt these raids. This is good news for medical marijuana advocates, but even though this is a historic shift in the War on Drugs, it simply does not go far enough -- because it does not adequately resolve the illogic of the underlying legal issue. At best, it should be seen as only a good first (baby) step on the road towards a rational and cohesive federal medical marijuana policy.

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I have to admit before I begin that I don't watch cable television "news" during the day, because I consider it largely to be a waste of my valuable time.

Which, I have to say, the whole "balloon boy" episode proved beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt.

The cable media apparently went wall-to-wall on the story, breathlessly awaiting a development which would lead into one of their off-the-shelf well-worn storylines. It really didn't matter to them what the outcome was -- "Boy saved! It's a miracle!" or "Boy injured after wild ride" or even "Boy falls to death, we've got the tragic video!" -- the media was prepared for any of these options, which they knew would all drive up their viewership. The only option they weren't ready for was what the story turned into -- "The media got played!"

I mean, seriously, if you call yourself a "journalist," shouldn't you be able to tell when you're being suckered? Here's an enormous hint: if the main character in the story is described as "a former reality-show contestant" then you might just take a few seconds to check your facts before rushing the story on the air, because he might just be an attention-starved publicity hound. Especially when he started the whole media circus in the first place, by calling up the local media and begging them to use their helicopters (oh, and don't forget to take along a cameraman, of course!) to chase this silvery wild goose across Colorado.

So, to honor (and blatantly rip off) Stephen Colbert, I'd like to introduce a new word to the American zeitgeist -- "newsiness." This term (which everyone should start using immediately, of course) is defined as: "An event or subject which the mainstream media determines to be newsworthy by plastering all over national television screens, but which is ultimately proven to be nothing of the kind." Furthermore, I'm going to peg the first story ever covered for its newsiness alone as O.J. Simpson cruising across L.A. in his white Ford Bronco. Since then, of course, there are simply too many stories full of newsiness (but not actual news) to even contemplate counting. Just turn on a cable TV station, and wait awhile -- pretty soon, another one will be along.

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I can't accurately use the Beatles line "It was twenty years ago today..." because the anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake is actually this Saturday. I do not blog on the weekends, though, and Fridays have their own regular feature, so here we are, two days early. Hoping you'll forgive me for the premature anniversary, I would like to relate my own earthquake story. I've included some general quake info as a prelude (mostly for the benefit of people who have never felt an earthquake), so if you'd like, you can just skip to the second section, where I tell my personal story of 1989.

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[The scene: a football lockerroom. Hundreds of Democrats are sitting on benches, to hear Coach's halftime pep talk, in the Healthcare Reform Superbowl. Some appear exhausted, some appear battered. Enter Coach, downstage.]

OK, people, that was a good half. We made some mistakes, we took some hits, but at the end of the half, we put five field goals up on the board. That's good enough for a first half, but we've got to score some touchdowns in the second half, or we're just not going to win this thing.

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While the passage of a healthcare reform bill through Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee is the big news today, the even bigger news is that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe voted for it, the only Republican so far to cross the aisle in support of Democratic efforts to pass a bill this year. While Snowe warned today that just because she's voting "yea" today, she might not do so on the final bill, depending on what it looks like. While this may not even matter in terms of getting a bill through, Snowe will now be known as Senator Bipartisan, since with her vote the claim can be made that it is "bipartisan legislation," but if Democrats lose her they won't be able to make this claim. But while courting Snowe for her vote on the Senate floor is the only way to accomplish this, Democrats should also consider courting Snowe on an even more important front: switching parties.

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