59% Say President Obama Is The Man For The Job – Suck It Media!

Continuing with my theme of the media narrative not matching what is really happening in our country. I’m watching Morning Joe, which helps to get my blood flowing in the morning and as usual, they constantly pound into the airwaves how President Obama just isn’t connecting with the American people, he lacks leadership…blah, blah, blah. The other day I heard Savannah Guthrie completely dismiss President Obama’s high approval ratings in comparison to Clinton and Reagan. She dismissed the whole issue by saying, but that it is a drop from 70%. He only garnered 53% of the vote, shouldn’t that be the benchmark instead of the 70% approval immediately after the inauguration, when a lot of people rally around their president, no matter who it is. Why would the media want to set that mark so high and use it to dismiss the fact that President Obama is extremely popular…oh, that’s right, it doesn’t fit with their manufactured narrative. Give it up already, apparently it isn’t working because his popularity is on the rise. Here is the poll that has that 59% number in it…notice how they even turn that number into a negative with their big “but”.

Washington (CNN) – Hours before President Barack Obama holds a town hall to try and energize Democratic voters, a new poll indicates that he remains personally popular but a majority of Americans disagree with his positions on issues that matter to them.

According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national survey released Tuesday, 59 percent of the public says Obama has the personality and leadership qualities a president should have, with four in ten disagreeing.

“That may be good news for Obama, but it’s not a plus for Democratic candidates in this year’s midterm elections,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Without Obama’s name on the ballot, the effects of his personal popularity are limited.”

Shouldn’t the story really be what a great leader he is if he can have such high personal approval while making tough choices and ignoring the political winds that blow in all directions. That is leadership, taking on issues that are tough like health care reform, but still garnering support from the country. It is truly amazing how popular President Obama is considering how much he inherited from the previous administration, on the brink of a depression, the stock market plummeting, 2 wars, a stupid ass policy passed by Clinton that has fallen completely at the feet of President Obama, DADT and of course all the other bullshit that he was handed on day one of his presidency. When you add on top of that, the media trying to tell the people how awful he is day in and day out, the constant drumbeat of negative, the sky is falling, people are angry, where are the jobs…But 59% think he is the right person for the job. Suck it Morning Joe, suck it CNN, suck it Jane Hamsher, suck it Arianna Huffington.

Kudos To Dan Savage – It Gets Better!

This is an awesome project that Dan Savage has started. Excellent idea, it will save lives. Hooray Dan!

The Media’s False Narrative – That’s Their Story And They’re Sticking To It

The media and their overlords, the Republican Party have been attempting with great success to tell a false narrative about President Obama and the popularity of his policies and him. I would also add that they were aided and abetted by the “firebaggers”, Jane Hamsher and her gang, Glenn Greenwald and his hatred and Arianna Huffington and her empire. They seem to be peddling the idea that the President and his policies aren’t very popular and candidates are running away from him. I don’t doubt that some of the candidates have bought into the narrative, they certainly don’t want to be seen as going against anything the big ole’ media says. But the reality is that since the president has been on the stump, the tide is turning for Democrats. And contrary to what Hamsher says, he is firing up the base and progressive voters, what she calls hectoring. This story from The Raw Story shows exactly why this narrative is false, a piece from it below…

Despite negative economic forecasts and all the rue predicted for Democrats in November, President Obama’s approval rating is actually faring better than Presidents Reagan and Clinton at this point in their terms, according to an analysis of data provided by the Gallup polling organization.In a survey of approximately 1,500 adults nation-wide, Gallup said on Oct. 6 that Obama’s approval rating was 48 percent. By comparison, Bill Clinton, the previous Democrat to reside in the White House, had a 42 percent approval rating at the same time in his presidency.

Republican icon Ronald Reagan, similarly, had an approval rating hovering around 42 percent at this time in his presidency, thanks to the country’s languishing economy which was largely credited for a Republican loss of 28 House seats in 1982.

Now if you’ve read my blog before, you know I don’t put a ton of stock in polls in general, especially when they try to predict what voters will do many months out. But shouldn’t that poll be a big story, PRESIDENT OBAMA MORE POPULAR THAN CLINTON AND REAGAN. I’m sure the Huffington Post has that blazing headline across their banner, right? They don’t? You’re kidding me right? I don’t understand.

So if you turn on the cable news channels and just see what meme they are pushing on any given day, it surely doesn’t reflect the reality of what is going on in our country. They have a narrative they have started and they are doing all they can to make it stay around, the truth be damned. Another factoid from that Raw Story piece…

Though Republican victories are largely anticipated in the media, a recent National Journal poll found that public approval ratings of GOP congressional leaders are actually lower than those for Democrats.

Now, how many times are you going to hear that today on MSNBC or CNN or FOX? Zero! Oh, it might get a mention as a throw away line, but chances are that won’t even happen. Instead we will hear how “people are hurting”…”where are the jobs”….”people are angry”….which may all be true, but according to polls, people aren’t blaming it all on President Obama. Sure, you will have a certain percentage of people who will instinctively blame the opposite party of the one they belong to, it’s a natural instinct. But I talk to a lot of people every day, granted they are mostly liberal….college kids and professors….but this is supposedly the group that is so angry at the President if you listen to the likes of Hamsher and Greenwald. I’m not hearing it. These people don’t even know who the fuck Jane Hamsher is. If they do, they usually say something like…”yea, what is her problem.”

This false narrative started almost immediately when the president was elected. Republicans were very blatant about their tactics to stop anything President Obama tried. The media bought and sold the Republican line like the corporate shills they are. The firebaggers jumped on board very soon too, fueled by their anger over the primaries and the belief that they alone will prove to those 53% who voted for President Obama that they were all wrong. But what keeps me going every day is the knowledge that each one of those media folks has only one vote. Conventional wisdom doesn’t vote. If I ever need to be reminded how the media plays the game, all I have to do is look back at the media’s anointing of President Hillary Clinton back in 2007 and the first part of 2008.

photo of the day – wha?

The look on my granddaughter’s face is how I feel about Republicans most of the time.

Photo by Extreme Liberal

Our Media Is At A Low Point In History!

How low can our media go? There really seems to be no bottom to it. We’ve all accepted certain outlets as biased, propaganda machines but when even supposed main stream media outlets join the fray, the destruction of legitimate media is at hand. You all remember the whackery of Dinesh D’Souza’s piece in Forbe’s magazine that painted our duly elected president as a dangerous anti-colonialist tribesman, you know, not one of us. Remember how it was thoroughly ripped apart and Forbe’s hid their head in shame….yea right. Well now that liberal bastion (cough, spit), The Washington Post, has given him more ink to print his lies and paranoid rantings. Steve Benen weighs in on it here, an excerpt…

That’s’ a good question. The op-ed, like the article it came from, is garbage. Worse, it’s lazy garbage, espousing cheap attacks that were exposed as nonsense weeks ago. Indeed, the lede of D’Souza’s op-ed makes sweeping arguments about the president’s psyche based on the title of Obama’s first book — arguments that appear ridiculous if one actually gets past the title to read the book itself.

Asked what on earth he was thinking, Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post‘s editorial page editor, said:

I approved publication of this Op-Eed. D’Souza’s theory has sparked a great deal of commentary, from potential presidential candidates as well as from commentators on our own pages.

[...]

But the Washington Post is giving the writer yet another platform, on purpose and probably for compensation, because people are talking about just how ridiculous D’Souza’s argument really is? Offensive, discredited ideas deserve coveted media real estate, regardless of merit, based solely on their ability to generate political buzz?

[...]

It’s also a reminder that, a little too often, it’s not altogether clear why some op-ed pages even exist. Ideally, opinion columns are intended to add context, analysis, and a larger vision to current events. But when a paper decides op-eds don’t have to be true, and publishes items that are clearly false regardless of merit, there’s a more systemic problem about journalistic standards to consider.

This is a perfect example of what our media has become. It’s not necessarily an ideological thing, but really points to how the “corporatization” of the media has come full circle. When a publication basically reprints something that has been completely debunked and actually says they did it because of the media circus it created, well, what more can you really say. You have to give Hiatt credit for being honest about it. Someday, I plan to have a media empire that will counter this kind of trash and I’m going to call it “The Truth, Bitches”.

Jane Hamsher – Making Everything Fit Her Narrative Is Hard Work!

From the first time I noticed Jane Hamsher come on the political scene, there was something that didn’t smell right to me. Even though the target she was aiming at was President Bush, I sensed something wasn’t quite right. I certainly cheered her on in her attacks, what good liberal wouldn’t, but I noticed a certain lack of depth to her arguments (I’m being polite, this time). But I still cheered. During the primaries, her lack of depth became even more obvious. I wont’ relive that in this post but rather give a couple of illustrations of what I see as shallow, self serving drivel that seems to pour out of her computer. She is a sad person who has lost her way in the world of politics. A reminder of a post I put up last week (Booman) which illustrates her utter lack of intellectual honesty with herself.

The Obama Derangement Syndrome has reached Stage Four when Jane Hamsher blames the president for not supporting Blanche Lincoln sufficiently.

…Lincoln’s vote for his health care bill cost her dearly, and without Specter’s vote for the stimulus, it never would have happened.Now I don’t feel the least bit sorry for either of them, but it doesn’t say anything good about Obama that he would abandon them in the clinch like that either.

The story is supposed to be that the president hates liberals and loves conservadems like Blanche Lincoln and Arlen Specter. But, when that story doesn’t quite add up, the story shifts to ‘the president doesn’t stick up for his friends’. If you try hard enough, you can criticize the president for taking a crap. If you can read that piece and find a Democrat-supporting author, you have more familiarity than I do with the crack pipe.

So after the Rolling Stone interview with our President came out the other day, the Awesome Bob Cesca pasted the one passage that spoke to the lethargy by some on the left. When I first read it, I thought to myself that the President was pretty diplomatic, didn’t say how he really feels, more than likely. I know I wouldn’t have been so reserved, I would have blasted those assholes like Hamsher, Greenwald and Uygur for abandoning their own principles for some irrational hatred they seem to be harboring from their candidate Hillary’s, loss. And I keep coming back to that as the only obvious reason for their irrational hatred and rabid attacks on a democratic president. I can’t bring myself to read Hamsher’s drivel, I get so enraged by her lies, misinterpretations and twisting of facts, that I have to rely on other bloggers interpretations and small doses of her words. From a story at The Raw Story titled “White House blaming left for coming losses, critics say”…

Some progressive critics of President Barack Obama claim the White House’s recent chiding of disenchanted liberals is not about motivating them to vote in November – it’s a cynical attempt to scapegoat them for the losses Democrats are expected to suffer in the midterm elections.

So you read a little further down and we get this from the deranged mind of Jane Hamsher.

“[A]ll of this ‘hippie punching’ isn’t about turning out voters. To do that, as Obama well knows, you have to inspire them,” Hamsher opined on her blog. “…No, this isn’t about [get out the vote]. It’s about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election. And once again, the White House doesn’t care if they make matters worse in order to deflect responsibility from Obama.”

There is so much wrong with that statement I don’t know where to begin. First of all, this new term they have come up with “hippie punching”, what the hell is up with that? Is she calling us liberals hippies? Is she a hippie? I don’t quite get the appeal of that, I bet there are a lot of people who just scratch their head and ask “what the hell is she talking about”, but I think that happens a lot with Jane’s nonsensical rantings. So all this trying to motivate “the base” isn’t really about motivating the base. Nah, the President’s real motivation is to blame Jane for what she seems to hope are major losses for the Democrats in November. She is rooting for Democrats to lose, if you can’t see that through her words…well, you aren’t really looking very hard. Since President Obama was elected, Jane and Glenn Greenwald have not really hidden the fact that they want to prove that electing him was a bad thing…..Hillary should have been the one, the voters be damned. And similar to Susie Madrak’s tactic from last weeks post, she wants you to believe that it is the voters that the Whitehouse is “punching” not Jane or Glenn or Cenk. They try to turn it around to their followers, smells a little like the Tea Party, doesn’t it?

Another thing wrong with that indented group of words is her poo pooing President Obama’s ability to inspire people. That is just so stupid on the face, I wonder if it really needs to be rebutted. Since he has been out on the stump for Democrats in the last couple of weeks, the polls are showing a swing back towards Democrats and a lot of races tightening. I’ve been saying all along that things aren’t going to be as bad as the media and the haters want to believe. And the last sentence where she says “And once again, the White House doesn’t care if they make matters worse in order to deflect responsibility from Obama”…that is just so bizarre, President Obama is clearly going out everyday working to get Democrats elected and trying to prevent a repeat of the disaster that was Republican rule. What the fuck have you been doing to fight Republicans, Jane? Not a goddamn thing as far as I can tell. And really, to claim that the President is all about politics, how fucking stupid is that. He took on health care, EVERYONE told him it was going to drop his numbers. Attacks from all sides. So yea, Janey, he’s all about deflecting things…what a freakin moron that woman is. I really think that the shrillness is ramping up because President Obama is out on the campaign trail, fighting and showing why he was elected in the first place. I think that really pisses ole’ Janey and Cenky and Glenny off. It’s bringing back repressed memories of the primaries.

New York State Of Mind

Photo by Extreme Liberal

We Want Everything And We Want It Now!

Having been a political junkie for several decades, I’ve learned a few things along the way. Spending that much time reading and watching and talking politics gives you a certain perspective on things. I find it almost amusing when I see or read people who obviously aren’t quite the political addict that I am saying things that show their naiveté when it comes to politics. I remember back during the health care summit when President Obama took on a room full of Republicans and eviscerated them. That night on Rachel and Keith’s shows on MSNBC, they both were so overcome, saying things like “where has he been” or “we need more of this Obama” and things to that effect. I’m hearing similar comments lately with the President out on the stump working to get Democrats elected. Steve Benen has a great post about this, read it here. A piece of that post that I particularly liked…

As this relates to the Obama White House, “where have these guys been?” Well, they’ve been knee-deep in prose, doing the ugly, messy, often-thankless work of running the executive branch of government in the midst of multiple domestic and international crises. There’s little doubt that the president is one of the great American orators of our time, but he can’t invest his time, year round, in these “Moving America Forward” rallies. The president just doesn’t have time — he’s too busy, you know, moving America forward. Besides, the speeches would lose their punch if they were delivered all the time.

It’s ironic, in a way, to appreciate the stark differences between Candidate Obama and President Obama. The concern among many throughout the campaign process was that Obama was overly reliant on charisma, style, charm, and emotion. What would happen when the crowds went home and the guy had to actually run the joint? Well, now we know — what would happen is Affordable Care Act, the Recovery Act, Wall Street reform, student loan reform, Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, new regulation of the credit card industry, new regulation of the tobacco industry, a national service bill, expanded stem-cell research, a nuclear arms deal with Russia, a new global nonproliferation initiative, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years, etc. The irony being, the ’07 and ’08 concerns were arguably backwards — this White House seems far more adept at governing than the political/communications efforts that were supposed to be this team’s strength.

So for all those people who said he was all charisma, style and charm….he is also a damn good administrator and gets shit done, even in the face of the most lock-step opposition any president has ever seen. And some would argue and have, that the communication part of this administration is lacking, but I don’t see it that way. The media has become a joke, they’ve “devolved” over the last several years largely because of the impact of Fox News.  They have been very successful at getting ratings, bringing in money and changing the news industry, particularly the cable news industry, into a money making venture instead of one based on journalistic principles. Remember the “balloon boy” fiasco.

Consider this my first “Airport Post”…..I’m sitting in Detroit’s airport, heading to New York. I doubt I’ll get a chance to post tomorrow, busy, busy, busy. But you never know, I’ll be sitting in airports tomorrow night too.

Travel Day – Apologies

Sorry about the lack of posts, I have my big meeting tomorrow in the Big Apple and I’ve been preparing and today I am traveling. Depending on the WiFi at my hotel, I may get one up later tonight. My apologies.

What He Said – The Midterm Elections

Booman says it all in this post, keep it around for election night.

I’m not optimistic about the midterms, but I do think there’s a good chance that they will be less catastrophic than we fear. I have two basic reasons for feeling a bit of optimism. The first is that I believe that Democrats will show more and more interest in voting as election day approaches. It’s only natural for the minority to be more fired up and outraged, but election day is when people really focus on politics. Most of the polling data is premised on a huge disparity in voter turnout. I suspect that disparity will be less than expected. The second reason is that I can go down the list of Senate races and not find a single instance where I think the Republicans have the stronger candidate or the stronger campaigner. We have some real mismatches, too.Obviously, Chris Coons completely outclasses Christine O’Donnell. But O’Donnell isn’t the only candidate who is hiding from the media. Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Carly Fiorina are hiding, too. I think Roy Blunt, and the whole Blunt family, are exactly the opposite of what the Tea Party wants, and I don’t see him getting out the vote. Rob Miller, Ron Johnson, and Ken Buck are basically nuts. I think Kelly Ayotte is totally out of her league. Mark Kirk is a serial liar. Linda McMahon is a freak-show. Mario Rubio has legal and ethical problems. Dan Coats is a retread. David Vitter likes to pay women to dress him in a diaper. We’re definitely going to lose the seats in North Dakota and Arkansas, but after that, nothing is certain.