Jonathan Wallace

Dick Morris agrees: “My guess is that Obama will more like Clinton…” Source

Robert Kuttner wrote a book about a Lincoln-Reagan-JFK amalgamation: Obama. No more Clintonian triangulation or letting Conservatives frame the debate; Obama would unite not divide. Obama created (or organized) a vision and people were drawn to it. People weren’t polled to create an “average” of positions.

Now, David Axelrod is encouraging the use of strategic semantics; “recovery” instead of recession, “investment” instead of infrastructure. The Obama administration is utilizing focus groups to figure out how to handle the economic crisis. This isn’t the leadership style of a community organizer, or the author of “Audacity of Hope.” This is not the work of a “team of rivals”–this a page from the Clinton play book.

“It’s the same abuses, the same scenario, that led to the crash of ’29. It’s the same dynamics of the financial economy dragging down the real economy—these are enduring lessons. Everybody who was talking about being in a kind of post-liberal world, they’re the ones who don’t have much purchase on what’s going on. The question is whether Obama will come to this.” The answer will depend in part on the advisers he chooses. In Kuttner’s mind, the deficit hawks and deregulators of the Clinton Administration—Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers—have been discredited by the financial crisis, and he thinks that it would be a big mistake for Obama to give them powerful roles in his Administration.“
Source – New Yorker

Too late…
Geithner, Summers among key economic team members announced today
Change.gov

If Summers is any reflection of the economic policies of Bill Clinton (and he should be, he was a big player in Clinton’s administration) than all we have to fear is a repeal of the Bush Tax cuts. Who liked those anyway?

The mass media is the term used to denote the behemoth of corporations and businesses (News Corporation, Viacom, AOL/TimeWarner) that own the news outlets and media. The mass media operates solely to provide a means for the respective corporations to gain profit. This is a truism. When understood, it is crucial to understanding the control the media exerts over the masses. The mass media is merely a conglomeration of profit machines that utilize talking heads and flashy graphics to produce profit. Altering the public perceptions is just an interesting by-product. This fact blows away the credibility of all major news commentators and should also blow away the credulousness that is intrinsic to human viewers. Media information has little relevance to our daily lifes. It operates by utilizing the three-pronged behavioral truisms: fear, rage, and love. It creates fear over rarities, rage over insignificant minutia, and love for superficiality.

This is not say that a person motivated by profit cannot do good, rather this is an indictment against those who preach distrust of media. Those “it’s not fair”, “they are manipulating us” people are missing an important concept. FOX does not give Fair and Balanced news to inform people; (like all news media) they get your attention, then sell it to other corporations. The young people who distrust the media; you certainly have a reason to, but you (me, the populace) should know better. In the vernacular of Bill Clinton; it’s the media, stupid.

The “dangerous”(for lack of better word) powers of the mass media come to fruition when people substitute thought for opinions of Viacom’s Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, et cetera. The danger is the effect you let media giants have on your world view. The danger comes when all you know about your nation, state, city, or world is that people die and people die horribly and whichever station plays it like a Jerry Bruckheimer film gets our attention. Remember “TV star killed the-radio-star?” This is TV media has killed every other agent of socialization and the last remaining agents are in their throes. This idea is succinctly articulated by a girl on Myspace. In the little box where you list your favorite books, she writes: books? hell no!

Seeing something over and over conditions humans to place a certain amount of importance on an otherwise trivial story, thereby creating an issue of it. For instance: the War on Christmas, or whenever a little ‘Jon Benet’ gets raped/kidnapped, when Ten Commandments get hauled out of courtrooms, or when separation of church and state means taking God off our currency. As a result of the constant inundation of insignificant minutia, when I talk politics with someone I can immediately gauge their political efficacy. “The liberal bias in the media is destroying our values”- watches Fox news. “We have to watch our children, its just not like it used to be” – watches NBC’s Dateline and/or 60 Minutes. “Republicans want to institute a theocracy, and control our sex lives!” – watches Bill Maher. “What America needs is a man dedicated to truthiness” – watches Stephen Colbert. Don’t think I am making a value judgment about the content of these messages. I am simply saying the messages are delivered to you by a news corporation that wants your attention to sell to other corporations. All I ask is that you ponder that little truism.The world will be a better place because of it.