Republicans and Closed Government

First this President, now the Republican Congress, too, show how closed and aloof and distant Republican government out of both houses of Congress and this White House are.

Trump did this last February.

Trump Ousts Real News Outlets 

From Press Conference

White House Bars CNN, NYT, LAT, Politico 

From Briefing

This happened yesterday.

No cameras, no audio: White House keeps undermining press briefing

It got worse, too.

Sean Spicer took questions from 

Russian media but not CNN, WaPo 

 or Politico

And then there's Congress' well-publicized but very private internal negotiations over our health care.

Senate GOP defends writing its 

healthcare bill in private

Fortunately, some even in their own political party are, in fact, thinking this is maybe wrong.

Secrecy Surrounding Senate Health Bill 

Raises Alarms in Both Parties

Can you imagine if that last President and the other political party tried ANY of this?

Why aren't we raising Hell yet?

More of our imbalanced American priorities

Fifty States of Fear

On the demise of the American newspaper

"We draw ever closer to the once-unthinkable day when some major American city has no newspaper whatsoever."

That quote is from a column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. of the Miami Herald newspaper this past Saturday. (Link, as usual, below).

When this happens--heaven forbid, though it seems as though it's going to happen--that a city or cities across America won't have newspapers, it will not just be a sad day for that city or those cities and even America, it will be a tragic day, a dangerous day for all of us.

When there aren't reporters to ferret out stories about our government representatives or our government overall, we will lose yet more power in our societies.

When those newspapers aren't there to pay those reporters to search out stories about our corporations and what business is doing in private, with or without those same government representatives and/or institutions, we will be a weak people, indeed.

There are other problems and losses, too, like the fact that newspapers could and frequently did give us both sides of an issue and the fact that we all had a common basis--that newspaper--from which to draw our common background, whether we accepted or believed it all or not.

So go ahead, make fun of your local newspaper or reporters or what have you. Tbey may not be great, they may not be perfect, they may not be what they once were but they gave us what information we would not otherwise have gotten.

It may have been some backroom deal. Some "sweetheart deal." Some illegal or even just unfair or unethical one.

But without that newspaper and without their payroll and without, again, those reporters, we know nothing.

Or we run that risk, surely and simply.

Link to original article: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/23/2863825/these-are-not-ordinary-times-for.html#morer

Yet more proof of why we need newspapers

The Star on Sunday printed a front page article about a doctor locally who had been reprimanded many times about possible bad health care practices and may even have been responsible for patients dying but the hospitals he worked for and other health care givers around him didn't warn antyone. It's a great article, serves terrific purposes and is, as I said here in the past and above, why we need good reporters, journalists and newspapers. Yet, with newspapers dying, no good online source, at least locally, has yet stepped in to fill these huge and important shoes. I'm comfortable with newspapers dying if for no other reasons than that they are on paper and fell far too many trees and then must be distributed by truck and so, burning oil which keeps us addicted to the Middle East but some online site needs to, one day very soon, fill in this important role and that of reporting on local government and public agencies and institutions, etc. Until that happens, we are all weakened, mightily as a community. We know less so we're far less likely to have control of our lives. Here's hoping it happens soon and we get a local online media site with good reporters and journalists. Maybe that's the Star's online site but it doesn't seem that that's filling the need yet. Link to original post: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/09/03/3119465/bad-medicine-doctors-with-histories.html

"Infotainment" killing important reporting we need

I just ran across this quote from Chris Hedges on ‘The Death and Life of American Journalism’ at Truthdig.org:

"Newspapers, which engage rather than entertain, can no longer compete with the emotional battles that hyperventilating hosts on trash talk shows mount daily. The public, which has walked away from newspapers, has embraced the emotional carnival that has turned news into another form of mindless entertainment."

The same, unfortunately, is also true of too many blogs. That is, they think they must "entertain", rather than give news solely. This explains some blogs self-perceived "need" to post sexist pictures of scantily-clad women or other waste (in this case, hurtful waste) along with reports of local, regional or city news. These same kinds of blogs are also good at either "preaching" what is right, and true and good or they're particularly good at proclaiming the end of the world or the end of the city or some such tremendously horrible thing.

More:

"We are shedding, with the decline and death of many newspapers, thousands of reporters and editors, based in the culture of researched and verifiable fact, who monitored city councils, police departments, mayor’s offices, courts and state legislators to prevent egregious abuse and corruption. And we are also, even more ominously, losing the meticulous skills of reporting, editing, fact-checking and investigating that make daily information trustworthy. The decline of print has severed a connection with a reality-based culture, one in which we attempt to make fact the foundation for opinion and debate, and replaced it with a culture in which facts, opinions, lies and fantasy are interchangeable. As news has been overtaken by gossip, the hollowness of celebrity culture and carefully staged pseudo-events, along with the hysteria and drama that dominate much of the airwaves, our civil and political discourse has been contaminated by propaganda and entertainment masquerading as news. And the ratings of high-octane propaganda outlets such as Fox News, as well as the collapse of the newspaper industry, prove it."

Now, here's the part that indicts the "man on the street", the average citizen:

"Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism. And the mass communications systems they control pump out endless streams of gossip, trivia and filth in lieu of news. But news, which costs money and takes talent to produce, is dying not only because citizens are migrating to the Internet and corporations are no longer using newsprint to advertise, but because in an age of profound culture decline the masses prefer to be entertained rather than informed...Money flows to advertising rather than to art or journalism because manipulation is more highly valued than truth or beauty."

Here, then, is the core of the problem:

"American society, once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality."

It is really sad. And maddening.

Worse, it weakens the citizenry.

But what're ya' gonna do, you know?

If you want me, I'll be over here, banging my head against this wall.

It needs to be said

Dave Helling and Steve Kraske are two of the best things happening in Kansas City when it comes to reporting political issues and stories for the Kansas City metropoltan area, the state of Missouri and the Midwest.

Without their reporting and writing, we wouldn't know a lot about what's going on in this city, for good or ill and we need them and their work.

You think the next administration should be open?

After the darkness of the current Presidential and Vice Presidential administrations, don't you want to think the next one will be open and accountable to us, the American taxpaying and voting public?

Sure you do.

So do I, naturally.

And wouldn't you think that, right now, with so little time left in this campaign that the candidates would both be open AND promising that their administrations would be open?

I would. But that's not the case.

Check this out:

According to the Kansas City Star newspaper yesterday, "John McCain hasn't spoken to the press corps that follows him for five weeks, or invited national reporters onto his bus in more than two months."

TWO MONTHS??

And this is the guy who wants us to vote for him?

Are you kidding me?

There's more:

"On the Straight Talk Air Express, reporters chanted: 'Bring Mac back! Bring Mac back!' The staff smiled and pulled the cabin curtain."

Still more:

"Another time, after they asked McCain adviser Steve Duprey to bring the candidate back to talk, Duprey returned--wearing a McCain mask."

Funny, huh?

NOT.

And finally, to really top things off and close out today, there's this: On the campaign trail in the past few days, the McCain staff isn't letting "Little Miss Sunshine", Sarah Palin, interact with reporters and ask questions. They're just propping her up for speeches, letting her regurgitate her studied diatribes and then scurrying her off the stage and out of the public eye.

No questions.

No answers.

So, if all those rocket-scientist "undecideds" out there help vote these 2 clowns into public office in November, don't expect any light coming out of the White House. That place will be so dark, it'll make Dick Cheney proud.