Bad stuff to report, worse reporting

Well hello, everyone. It's been a while. Clearly I can promise myself that I'm going to do this more often a thousand times, but it doesn't make a lick of difference. No promises from here on out, but I enjoy this immensely whenever I do it, so hopefully that'll keep bringing me back. Enjoy this classic album opener - it's only a minute long:

7 Seconds - Regress No Way

Now that you're awake, we can check out what's happening in the world. Oh, the entire place is falling apart. Budgeting fiascos, closing of programs, classified document leaks, protests, revolutions, upheavals...what a mess. Crummy reporting makes it especially hard to get the right information about what's going on. Take these budget cuts, for example. Politicians and news outlets alike are vying to prove that they alone are the voice of the American people (regardless of how far to the right of actual public opinion they all are on certain issues). You can find literally miles of crazy stuff, and all of it can be so easily distorted. For example, Fox reports here that "voters want to cut spending over raising taxes by 2-1." They cite a Reuters poll:

Weighing in on the Washington budget debate, 59 percent of Americans prefer to cut existing programs while 30 percent would rather raise taxes to reduce deficit spending.

That seems reasonable. However, when you look at the actual Reuters article, you find a small detail that Fox left out:

Weighing in on the Washington budget debate, 59 percent of Americans prefer to cut existing programs while 30 percent would rather raise taxes to reduce deficit spending.

And they prefer to cut defense spending rather than programs that affect them more directly like Medicare and Social Security.

What a difference that extra sentence makes! Now, I realize that Fox is sort of low-hanging fruit, but this is important when their news channel still is still blowing away the competition. In any case, the idea that the public might be overwhelmingly in favor of defense spending cuts is unmentionable in any mainstream media sphere, let alone a tentacle of the Murdoch empire, so they can simply not report that part and the reader is none the wiser.

Speaking of the fact that 59% of Americans might have some opinion on the state of Medicare, it's a sad state of affairs for opinion polling on health care reform - I found this survey a while back from the Commonwealth Fund showing that 72% of Americans think the health care system needs major overhaul. This, of course, was hardly reported anywhere, and now seems to sort of contradict a Rasmussen poll asserting that 52% of voters favor repeal of the health care law. Rasmussen is sort of shady, however, because of their tendency to selectively sample (they once published a poll about Sarah Palin in which they asked only voters who identified as Republican), so there's that. And yet, this story from last September indicates that most voters are opposed to health care reform not because it is too liberal, but because it isn't liberal enough.

While U.S. social policies and institutions suffer attacks from regressive, anti-people politicians, the Middle East is trying to move in the other direction. I won't even try and get into it here since you've probably already read everything you care to about it. However, it is funny to watch our leaders selectively praise the uprisings. Lots of love for Libya, not a peep on Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. Tyrannies more directly backed by the U.S. are taking advantage of the situation and taking steps to increase violence and repression; here's a good Al-Jazeera editorial on crackdowns on dissent and press freedom in Iraq.

Where can the U.S. get involved next? Syria.