In the book, I wrote at length about the problem of government secrecy.  Secrecy is a problem because a government ceases to be representative when its people do not have access to information about what the government is doing.  Elections are no longer a referendum on the government’s actions; democracy becomes a charade.

The US government would have avoided a lot of trouble if it had listened to me years ago.

Instead we get WikiLeaks, which has no principles whatsoever.  WikiLeaks would probably leak the blueprints to atomic weapons, if they could get their hands on that kind of information.  I would be so much happier if the government would just declassify all its communications and internal reports so I would never have to hear about that annoying twerp Julian Assange again.

In an earlier post I set forth a detailed argument that NPR’s coverage of the news is badly affected by its blatant conservative bias.  A few weeks after I wrote that post, NPR fired one of its senior political analysts over racist comments he made on Fox News.  Some might argue that the fact of the firing proves that NPR still possesses some semblance of moral decency; but I dissent.

The fact that a member of NPR’s senior political staff has been a regular guest on The O’Reilly Factor for the past eight years proves my point entirely.  NPR’s management hired the kind of guy who feels comfortable with the Fox News view of the world… and they put him in charge of political reporting.  What does that tell you about the worldview of NPR’s management?

It tells you that NPR’s coverage of the news is affected by conservative bias.

NPR’s Conservative Bias

A detailed analysis of political coverage by National Public Radio reveals a distinct partisan bias.  The following article provides irrefutable numeric evidence to support this conclusion.

While biased news coverage is commonplace in today’s media, most of us have come to expect better from NPR, which strives to garner paid memberships through its open-minded capacity to “consider all things” as it were.  We expect National Public Radio to make a conscious effort to provide nonpartisan news coverage.  Indeed, most people, if asked, would probably say that National Public Radio is subject to a liberal bias.  But numbers don’t lie; and the numbers say that NPR’s coverage of politics is heavily slanted in favor of the conservative viewpoint.  If you don’t believe my calculations, I invite you to visit NPR’s online archives, create a spreadsheet, and draw your own conclusions.  The data is there for anyone who wishes to parse it.

Requests for Comment

I contacted NPR’s Talk of the Nation repeatedly with requests for comment for this story, but they chose not to respond.  After several days I then went over their heads and contacted NPR’s corporate office directly; but NPR corporate likewise did not respond, much to my disappointment.

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At first I was happy to hear about the advent of the Tea Party, because of their potential for splitting the Republican vote and therefore guaranteeing that Democrats will retain control of the Presidency in 2012.  However, this group of right-wing extremists has become such media darlings that I now feel compelled to rebut their ridiculous slogans that pass for arguments.  The mainstream media is offensively captivated by the Tea Party, to the point where it has apparently lost all perspective.  It is lamentable that the media is demonstrating such an overwhelming lack of capacity for critical evaluation, but these are the days we are living in.

One might ask, why does the Tea Party get so much more attention from the media now, than the anti-war movement got in 2003?  The answer is simple: money.  The Tea Party is very well-funded by sponsors with deep pockets.  The media loves money.  The media is not interested in a movement without money, even if it is a movement that includes millions of voters and activists.  Money buys airtime: it’s really that simple. To their shame, the mainstream media refuses to ask any tough questions, so it falls to small blogs like Self-Directed Society.  And the question of the day is this:

Do the Tea Party loudmouths have a double standard, or are they simply hypocrites?

Wherever they are coming from, it is finally time to put a lid on all the hot air spewing forth from the Tea Party wingnuts.  Their arguments are self-contradictory; their principles evaporate in the face of their self-interest.  Their little costume party is too loud for our residential neighborhood of democracy, and they don’t listen when we politely ask them to take it back inside.  It is time to file a noise complaint.

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All my life, I have had friends, housemates, and in-laws who profess to be anarchists or Libertarians.  In the past year and a half, anti-Obama sentiment has taken the form of frequent calls for small government, less government, or even NO government.  Despite the absence of logic to support such political positions, these ideas seem to be growing in popularity.  The Tea Party philosophy is a modified form of Libertarianism.  The Libertarian philosophy is a watered-down form of anarchism.  It’s all more or less the same thing; and if you bother to think about the ideology, it makes absolutely no sense.

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In the book, I considered the history of the human relationship with our Neanderthal siblings for most of three pages. I concluded in Section 2.2: Competition that humans must have exterminated the Neanderthal in a prehistoric conflict that lasted for thousands of years.
New evidence published in the journal Science this week provides a new perspective on this intriguing relationship.
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The extremist conservative agenda strikes again. As most news-aware Americans have heard by now, the Texas School Board has issued its own ideologically driven “standards” for school textbooks. These standards rewrite the Social Studies and American History curricula to stress the conservative viewpoint. For example, these standards delete Thomas Jefferson from the history books.

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[Update: As it turned out, my title for this piece was premature. The measure discussed below made it out of committee, but was not enacted as a formal resolution.]

In a long-overdue move, today a Congressional panel approved a measure which labels the massacre of Armenian civilians by the military forces of the Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” Proposals to apply this term to the atrocity committed nearly a century ago have been punted down the line from one Congress to the next for many years now. The wholesale massacre of civilians by a military force is inexcusable under any circumstances, and the fact that it has taken Congress this long to call the act by its true name is shameful and sad.

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My neighbor’s car has a bumper sticker that says, “How’s that whole hopey-changey thing goin’ for ya?”   This moronic expression is not only annoying because it reads like it was meant to be a Sarah Palin quote. It is annoying because I would actually like a whole lot more change, please, and I still hold out some hope that change is possible. It is annoying because my neighbor, people like my neighbor, and the type of politicians that my neighbor supports, are responsible for the slow pace, and in some cases the complete absence, of change. It is annoying because my neighbor seems to think that I – who still have a “Got Hope?” sticker on my truck – might be regretting my earlier support of the principles of change because, in my neighbor’s view, the changes that were proposed to the health care system looked like the dangerous path to socialism. My neighbor is a fool.

What a shame there are so many millions of people just like my neighbor throughout the country. I maintain hope that rational, well-meaning people can overpower the conservative defeatism that is attempting to drag down our efforts to create positive change and to instead mire us in the conservative muck.

Conservatives are opposed to change. That is what the word “conservative” means: people who espouse this philosophy wish to conserve the status quo. It does NOT have anything to do with fiscal responsibility, as was so aptly evidenced by the egregious economic mismanagement of the Bush administration. The result of Republican economic policies: double-digit unemployment.

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The filibuster, simply put, is the practice of talking proposed legislation to death. Presently, in the Senate, a three-fifths majority vote is required to end a filibuster: a high standard that aims toward consensus instead of mere majority rule.

Back in the days of the Bush administration, when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, the Republican leadership grew frustrated that Senate Democrats had the temerity to use the filibuster block 4% of President Bush’s ideologically extremist judicial nominations. In response, then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) proposed using what he dubbed the “nuclear option.” Under the so-called nuclear option, a motion could be carried with a simple majority that would end the long-standing practice of the Parliamentary maneuver known as the filibuster, at least in the case of judicial appointments.

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