Happy Birthday to Dave Edmunds, 69.
The good stuff...and by the way, I have no idea of the blogging schedule for this week, thanks to, yup, jury duty. Meanwhile, there's this:
1. More in an excellent series of posts from Sarah Binder on the House, John Boehner, and the Hastert rule.
2. Kevin Drum on words.
3. Steven Taylor on the Gosnell flap.
Binder's piece points out, but doesn't make a meal out of the fact that now that there is willingness to violate the Hastert rule, John Boehner is actually more powerful. Despite the perception that he's impotent, he can decide with a small group of conservatives whether legislation with wide support (ie outside the bubble) is "worth passing." Makes the language of him as completely impotent during the fiscal cliff seem silly, he's found a way to maximize that position in a time, when it appears he had been stymied. For all the hemming and hawing from conservatives about supporting the president, he falls on his sword for them every time he does it.
ReplyDeleteOf course, now he'll be primaried.
From Gosnell piece:
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think that subscribing to a pro-choice liberal bias as an explanation is problematic, because a) it would seem that what commentary that existed prior to the last week was mostly in the liberal sphere of things, and
A liberal refers to CBS and NPR as in the liberal sphere. Progress!
On Taylor:
ReplyDeleteAbortion supporters want people to avoid envisioning the mechanics. Cutting off the head of a just-delivered baby and cracking apart the skull of an in utero baby sound similarly gruesome. Delivery is a little more risky for the "mother" but the last thing liberals want is for fetuses to be viewed as human victims. Kermit makes that more likely. As the media lies about Zimmerman proved to even liberals, all media is biased and almost all is liberal.
Plain blog favorite Sarah Kliff on why she hadn't covered Gosnell:
ReplyDelete"Hi Molly – I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime, hence why I wrote about all the policy issues you mention."
The hilarious response:
"So when a private foundation privately decides to stop giving money to the country’s largest abortion provider, that is somehow a policy issue deserving of three dozen breathless hits. When a yahoo political candidate says something stupid about rape, that is a policy issue of such import that we got another three dozen hits about it from this reporter. It was so important that journalists found it fitting to ask every pro-lifer in their path to discuss it. And when someone says something mean to a birth control activist, that’s good for months of puffy profiles."