Month: September 2011

Two People Hold the Keys to the GOP Primaries

Buck Banks

At this moment of inflection, two people hold the keys to the GOP primaries. First, Sarah Palin: if she enters, Perry will have far more trouble on his right and Romney will become much more likely to enter Iowa to win… The second is Perry’s debate coach. If the governor of Texas cannot dramatically improve his performance in his next showdown with his GOP rivals, he may not even make it to Iowa.

— Mike Murphy, writing in Time Magazine.

Media Matters: What If Occupy Wall Street Was Sponsored by a Cable News Channel?

Jon Ponder

There’s been a lot of chatter about the difference in the “liberal” media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the rise of the tea party mobs in 2009 and its failure to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement today.

There are several reason for this, including the fact that tea partyists signaled that they were on the verge of violence from the outset. First, they put their propensity toward violence on display by showing up in a succession of congressional town halls where they indulged in fits of rage, supposedly over government spending, directed at their representatives. Then they began showing up armed outside venues for presidential events and other political gatherings fully armed.

“If it bleeds, it leads” in journalism. And the corporate media could not risk not being on the scene when some nutcase finally popped off and attacked a politician — except of course, there were no reporters around when that finally happened, to Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, in January 2011, nearly two years after the tea bagger summer.

Media Matters points to another reason Occupy Wall Street is not getting the same coverage as the tea baggers did early on — the tea party was sponsored indirectly by Fox News, which gave it virtually wall-to-wall coverage that first year:

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Cain: Obama Supporters Use Race Card to Cover His Failures

Buck Banks

While I don’t believe that Barack Obama used racial issues to get elected, I do believe that many of his supporters selectively use race to cover up some of his failures. Whenever President Obama is criticized over policy mistakes, his surrogates tend to play the race card, as if there’s supposed to be something inherently morally wrong in such criticism.

— Herman Cain, writing in his new book coming out next week, “This is Herman Cain!,” charging that President Obama’s surrogates often use the race card to cover for the president’s failings.

One in Six Americans Trusts Government

Buck Banks

15%

Of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what’s right just about always or most of the time, according to a new CNN/ORC International Poll.

The previous all-time low was 17 percent, set in the summer of 1994. Before the Watergate scandal, a majority of Americans said they trusted the government always or most of the time, but since 1974 that has happened only during a brief period in 2001 immediately after the 9/11 terrorism attacks.