Month: November 2013

The kids are all right

by digby

I’ve seen lot’s of hand wringing over this Pew poll on American news habits.  This one is from Alternet, via Salon:

This month, the Pew Research Journalism Project reported how Americans get their news at home. If you think it’s from the Internet, you’ll be surprised that the 38 percent of us who access news at home on a desktop or laptop spend an average of only 90 seconds a day getting news online. America’s dominant news source is television, and the disparity between heavy viewers of TV news and everyone else is as startling as the gap between the plutocrats and the people.

As for those heavy news viewers, says Pew, “There is no news junkie like a cable junkie.” A heavy local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day at home, and a heavy network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a day. But a heavy cable news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day. The gap between heavy, medium and light cable news viewers is especially stark. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that 72-minutes-of-cable-news-a-day class. But medium cable news viewers see barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day. In other words, either you live in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly, Maddow, et al, a day – or in the country that watches virtually none of them at all.

If you want to know where this is heading, consider another cheery piece of Pew research. Americans 67 to 84 years old spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading or listening to the news. Boomers (48 to 66) are close behind, at 77 minutes a day. But Gen Xers (33 to 47) spend 66 minutes, and Millennials (18 to 31) spend only 46 minutes a day. The kids are tuning out. I love it that 43 percent of “The Colbert Report” audience, and 39 percent of “The Daily Show” viewers, are 18 to 29 years old; the young audiences of those fake news shows get real news from them. But fewer than a million and a half Americans under 50 are watching them.

I hate to be the one to interrupt a good garment rending, but there is nothing unusual about this. Young people have never followed the news as closely as older people and that’s born out by the fact that “the news” used to be sponsored by Geritol and Metamucil and is now sponsored by Viagra. The audience for this stuff has always skewed old.

When you’re young you’re busy socializing, getting laid, raising kids, getting ahead and … living your life. I’ve been a news junkie as long as I can remember and yet my interest has grown constantly over the years. Now that I’m old I find that my interests have changed in a number of different ways. This is a natural thing.

What’s important is that most people’s ideological identification is formed when they’re young and it tends to stick throughout their lives. So, the fact that these millennials aren’t paying as close attention right now as their elders isn’t a tragedy. They mostly identify as progressives and will likely maintain that identity. They’ll vote along those lines and the politics of this country will be more progressive than the politics that came before as they come into power and go through the same process as the rest of us.

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Quote of the millenium


by digby

Richard Cohen, highly paid “liberal” columnist for the Washington Post.

“I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life….slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks…Steve McQueen’s stunning movie “12 Years a Slave” is one of those unlearning experiences.”

Read the whole thing. That is not a misrepresentation. He truly didn’t understand the horror of slavery until he saw it depicted in a movie.

Again, this is a person who is a designated “liberal” columnist at one of the two most influential newspapers in the nation.

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But Huckleberry knows better

by digby

“Sen. Graham and his colleagues seem completely ignorant of the real, far-too-often tragic stories of women facing a decision to have an abortion later in their pregnancy,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Instead of playing politics with women’s lives, they should stop to listen to stories like Dana Weinstein’s, whose much-wanted pregnancy was met with a heartbreaking diagnosis every family dreads. These women could also be survivors of rape or incest who are dealing with severe emotional trauma and often can’t come to terms with a pregnancy as a result of their attack. No matter the story, women and families deserve the dignity to make this very personal and private decision without political intrusion.”

In the ad, Dana says, “As a mother I didn’t want to bring a child into this world for her only to exist in immense pain and suffering. I had always thought – personally – that people who needed late-term ignored their prenatal care. It never occurred to me that the reason people are primarily in late-term is because of a horrific fetal anomaly that cannot be detected earlier.”

Many 20-week abortion bans do not have exceptions for severe medical conditions or adequate exceptions for the health of the mother. This is true about the bill Sen. Graham is introducing today and the companion legislation which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June.

Since there is limited access to this care, the only option available to Dana when seeking later abortion was to travel to Colorado, 1500 miles away, putting an incredible emotional and financial strain on her and her family.

“Being able to come to a decision that was right for us is really what’s important here,” Dana continues in the ad. “And that’s not for a legislator to decide.”

Senator Graham has to be the most imperfect messenger for this legislation I can imagine. But it’s very telling that he would choose this issue to shore up his Tea Party credentials. Don’t listen to anyone who says they are libertarians who don’t care about social issues. it’s a crock.

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Who is going to be designated as panicked red state Democrats’ human sacrifice?

by digby

And the freak-out begins:

“The American people are frustrated with the White House’s botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and I am too,” said Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, one of the chamber’s most vulnerable Democrats. “In today’s meeting, I told the President and Vice President three things: 1) fix the website immediately 2) address the problems with the law and 3) hold the individuals in charge accountable for these mistakes. I won’t let up until these problems are fixed.”

“It was a real policy-heavy meeting,” a Democratic aide said. “The White House chose this group because this is a group that’s going to be ultra-sensitive to their constituents’ frustrations. This needs to be fixed. We all want this to work.”

The members at the meeting were Pryor, Mark Begich of Alaska, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Chris Coons of Delaware, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Al Franken of Minnesota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Mark Udall of Colorado, Tom Udall of New Mexico, Mark Warner of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado, according to Senate aides and the White House.

Since the Democrats have absolutely no choice but to see this through and try to get it fixed, the fact that these red state Senators (whose own states have done everything they could to sabotage the ACA)are having a hissy fit is troubling. They are going to demand some right wing red meat to vote for in order to prove their bona fides to their conservative voters. The question is, what could it be?

This is a very dangerous but familiar dynamic for progressives. Keep your eyes open for what pound of flesh from the Democratic base their going to ask for. When the going gets tough, Red State Democrats start selling out almost immediately.

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The trendlines are looking good

by David Atkins

I mentioned yesterday that although the chattering heads continue to point to unexpectedly close results in Virginia as a sign that the Affordable Care Act is hurting Democrats, it doesn’t appear that Democrats actually fared poorly in nationwide results.

I’d also like to point out that it wasn’t just Democrats who performed well. Self-avowed socialists did as well, which is something of a shock for a sleep odd-year election cycle usually dominated by conservatives:

It’s a far cry from a revolution, but socialists had a surprisingly strong showing in two city council races on Election Day, November 5. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant picked up 46% of the vote while challenging 15-year Democratic incumbent Richard Conlin. And in Minneapolis, Ty Moore is only 131 votes behind Democratic candidate Alondra Cano.

While Sawant and Moore both trail their opponents, neither race has been officially called. And even if they both lose, they will have received an unusual amount of grassroots and institutional support for two avowedly anti-capitalist candidates running in major American cities. Additionally, they both received major labor union endorsements, and Moore even managed to raise more money than the Democrat in the race.

“This is an indication of how eager people are for real change,” Sawant told msnbc. Both she and Moore ran as members of the Socialist Alternative party, an organization alternatively described as Trotskyist or democratic socialist.

“I think the situation across the country is ripe for this, and our organization Socialist Alternative. What’s unique is our organization took the initiative,” said Moore. “I think in the post-Occupy world, with the political discrediting of most capitalist institutions, including the two major parties, Wall Street, the corporate-owned media—no offense intended—there’s openness to a more bold working class challenge to the two-party system.”

Progressives often despair at the seemingly unbreakable corporate control of American politics. But when you consider where we were as a nation in 2003, it has frankly been a remarkable 10 years. No, haven’t yet elected Howard Dean or Elizabeth Warren, income inequality hasn’t been staunched, no one is doing a damn thing about climate change and Wall Street is still thumbing its nose at everyone. But we did make George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hide in an electoral hole, we elected an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama (really, imagine someone telling you we would do that in, say, 2003), gay marriage is now mainstream, we had a full-fledged pseudo-socialist movement in Occupy, we passed a major healthcare law (imperfect though it may be) that had eluded the country for five decades, and Republicans are reduced to extreme gerrymandering and radical abuse of Senate rules to remain relevant in governance even as they erupt in civil war. Meanwhile, seriously progressive candidates are making big headway with voters in some of the country’s biggest cities.

From day to day things can look hopeless, and the macroeconomic trend lines suck. But there’s also a great deal to be very optimistic about. If we can sustain the momentum we’ve had for the last ten years, and create as much change in this country between now and 2023 as we have between 2003 and 2013, I think we’ll be in very good shape.

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It feels good to do good

by digby

A Life Lesson for all of us:

It’s as natural a thing for humans to do good as it is to do evil. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.

(And whatever they do I hope they keep Atlas Shrugged out of those kids’ high school.)

h/t to Politics blog

A better substitute

by digby

This is a true fact now born out by science but obvious to many millions of us from anecdotal observation over many years:

In a paper in the winter issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, two researchers — D. Mark Anderson of Montana State University and Daniel Rees of the University of Colorado at Denver — report that legalization of marijuana for medical purposes has been associated with reductions in heavy drinking, especially among 18- to 29-year-olds, and with an almost 5 percent decrease in beer sales. In addition, the increase in the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 seems to encourage greater marijuana use among people under 21, usage that drops sharply when they reach the legal drinking age.

If marijuana is widely legalized for recreational purposes (only Washington State and Colorado have taken that step), the consequences are far from clear. But assuming the argument that alcohol and marijuana are “substitutes” bears out, that could be good news, especially for road safety. Of the two substances, alcohol is far more hazardous.

For the most part, marijuana-intoxicated drivers show only modest impairments on road tests. Several studies have suggested that drivers under the influence of marijuana actually overestimate their impairment. They slow down and increase their following distance. The opposite is true of drivers under the influence of alcohol.

Let’s just say that most parents who have real experience with both drugs would rather have their college age kid smoking pot than getting drunk. I’m sure that many don’t want their kids doing either but there’s really no choice between the two when it comes to impairment.

(And, yes, it’s obviously best not to drive under the influence of anything.)

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A McAuliffe problem, not an Obamacare problem

by David Atkins

I haven’t had time to do a full analysis yet–I’ve had my hands full and then some with local election activities and analysis–but it seems that on the whole, Democrats and progressives had a pretty good night last night. There were a few disappointments–the biggest being in Seattle–but generally speaking Democrats did fairly well. That was reflected in the Ventura city council race as well, where one of our Democrats was the top vote getter ahead of three GOP incumbents, and two of our Democrats defied conventional wisdom to come within 1.5% of unseating two GOP incumbents few believed could be defeated. A bigger win would have been nice, but smashing conventional wisdom was also its own reward. The Democrats’ national showing is actually pretty impressive considering that it was a sleepy, very low turnout odd year election cycle.

So what happened in Virginia? First off, Democrats did win, just not by quite the margin many expected. That said, I think it’s fairly safe to point out that it was a nasty race that drove down turnout even further, and more importantly that McAuliffe just isn’t a terribly attractive candidate.

If the Affordable Care Act were dragging down the Democratic Party and the progressive base at a national level, that didn’t seem to be reflected in most of the other races across the country. Whatever weakness there was in Virginia should probably be seen as a local phenomenon relevant to that particular election, rather than as an indictment of the Party and its chances as a whole.

That’s not to say that continued problems with ACA implementation won’t pose a risk to Democrats as they approach November 2014. But it’s not at all clear that those issues had dramatic impacts in November 2013. The purveyors of conventional wisdom will disagree. But then, those purveyors are usually wrong.

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Colbert on ladyparts

by digby

I think he pretty much nails why these men don’t want to pay for women’s health care:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

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Don Lemon worried that ending stop and frisk will destroy the country

by digby

No really:

“So goes New York City, so goes the rest of the country,” he said of stop-and-frisk, adding his suggestion that if a new mayor “alters the equation of the formula that has reduced crime in New York City to its lowest in decades,” it could result in the “creeping back up” of crime rates, the reduction in tourism, and the suffering of “international consequences.” He posited that other major cities could follow suit.

“Whatever the mayor here decides will be reflected in your city, reflected in your crime rate, and in your economy,” Lemon concluded. “So the question is: would you rather be politically correct or safe and alive? That’s the real issue facing the citizens of New York and, pretty soon, ultimately you.”

You know what would make him feel really safe? Super-duper totally safe? If the cops were able to quarantine “suspicious” people into camps where they can’t possibly “hurt” anyone at all. Sure, innocent people would be forced into these camps too, but that’s the price we pay for safety. And think what it would do for tourism!

*I guess Lemon isn’t aware that “other cities” have experienced similar drops in crime without stop and frisk. He clearly doesn’t get out much. Let’s just say the rest of us aren’t all that worried about New York dropping their heinous policy. We have our own mayors and city councils and everything.

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