“Moving on, Congress has passed a compromise bill allowing illegal immigrants to live in the US as long as their feet never touch the ground.”

Too funny.

As our problems mount, too many Americans are losing confidence in the future. Restoring that confidence requires systemic reforms that begin to move us from the politics of point-scoring to a new politics of problem-solving.

MUST READ.  The New York Times recognizes Jon Stewart’s impact on the 9/11 responders health bill, comparing Stewart to Murrow and Cronkite.  What do you think?

For me, the most staggering part of last months Rally to Restore Sanity was Jon Stewart’s closing speech criticizing today’s media environment.  If you have not seen it, watch it here, and why haven’t you seen it yet!?  The speech is perhaps summed up by this paragraph:

The country’s 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then perhaps host a week of shows on the dangerous, unexpected flaming ants epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

It explains, in my mind, the essence of Jon Stewart: the most influential media critic of our time, who also happens to be a gifted comedian.  Though he spends a lot of time mocking politicians and other public figures, Stewart’s satire is targeted primarily at the media, specifically at the 24 hour cable news networks and all of the pundits and bloggers that surround it.

So in the name of Stewart’s “political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator,” I’ve decided to start a weekly segment on IDTIK titled “Conlfictinator Concoction of the Week.”  Each post will point out what I find to be the most fabricated conflict the media has hyped up that week, and this week, obviously, it has to be the “uproar” about TSA Pat Downs.

When I first saw this story I laughed, because I personally don’t care about doing a body scan or even getting an “invasive” pat down.  The idea of someone looking at an xray style picture of me naked is funny to me more than anything else.  If going through the body scanner has a negative impact health-wise, that is a complaint I can understand, but I haven’t seen any serious arguments on that note.  So the whole “controversy” made me laugh at first, until I ran into more and more people who were jumping on the anti-TSA/pat down band wagon.  It started to make me mad, especially if you consider the context.  There are people all over the world risking their lives in the name of fighting terrorism and preventing terrorist attacks, and here we are complaining about walking through a scanner or getting a pat down…  Really?

Of course, if it’s not “necessary” to get a pat down or walk through a body scanner then it would be bad TSA policy to make people do it.  But since when are we all aviation security experts?

In the end, though, the point is that on Thanksgiving, the busiest travel holiday of the year, there was absolutely no uproar about body scans or pat downs (other than that lady who wore a bikini to avoid a pat down).

It’s clear that the media completely misread the situation, seeing a major conflict where there wasn’t one.  Or, perhaps, they didn’t misread anything, and were simply acting out their role as perpetual panic conflictinators.  I mean, throughout their reporting they kept mentioning that polls show a majority of Americans agree with TSA policies… yet the mentioning of these polls didn’t seem to have any affect on the rest of their reporting.

So, Jon Stewart, thanks for exposing 24-hour cable news for what it really is, and maybe IDTIK can help out a little.  On another note, the New York Times did a great piece on this very subject, check it out here.

Of course, I don’t.  I find it hard to believe that most Americans have reason to mourn when we are still the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.  I find it even less reasonable to suggest that the Obama administration is to blame when it comes to our long-time-a-comin deficit problems.  Two years ago, before Obama was elected, what I appreciated most about him as a politician was the fact that he balanced his idealism with a healthy dose of pragmatism.  A pragmatism that understood, how, in our democracy, change has always happened slowly, and the politics that leads to change has always been messy.  While, these days, Obama may be stuck in mirky political waters, I still believe that he is a President who does not lose sight of the most important issues we face–the ones that take time and patience to fix, and plenty of context to understand.  So lets cut down on the “Obama’s grand experiment=the end of America” rhetoric, especially when he has yet to finish his second year in office.  Because the creators of “Mourning in America” surely know that Reagan didn’t—as Obama put it, “change the trajectory of America”—in his first two years in Office.

Bratwurst at the Biergarten

Fresh seafood in Nice

Brats, with Sauerkraut this time!

Curry Gnocchi

A french desert plate...

Okay fine, 6 dishes, I gotta add my favorite:

Nutella Crepes!

I recently discovered that Michael Sandel’s famous “Justice” course at Harvard had been video taped and produced for a WGBH television series.  The 12-episode series is available to view online, along with suggested readings (from Bentham to Kant) for free!  As a philosophy addict, I quickly fell in love with “Justice”, and if you like the concept behind my blog, I’m guessing you’ll love it just as much.  Here is a preview:

Many of my friends claim they don’t like philosophy.  In reality, though, we all know that basic philosophical questions are a part of life.  Can you go through life without asking Sandel’s question, “what’s the right thing to do?”  Even if you “don’t like philosophy,” it’s impossible to go through life without tackling such a question.  I think what many of us really don’t like about philosophy is it’s lack of resolution.  As we heard in the preview; the fact that there is still no definite answer to the questions that Plato and Aristotle asked so many years before us makes philosophy seem impossible.  But while it may seem impossible, it is also inescapable, and in many ways beautiful.  So I hope you enjoy the series as much as I have, and, in the mean time, I’ll do my best to continue blogging with Sandel’s closing thought in mind:  ”We live some answers to these questions every day.”

Seriously though, along with the Massachusetts I thought I knew I was pretty bummed yesterday when I watched the previously unthinkable outcome of our special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s senate seat.  Yes, I know it’s not “Ted Kennedy’s seat, it’s the people’s seat.”  None the less, the people elected Ted Kennedy–the liberal lion of the senate–to sit in that seat for a long time.  I was never a huge Coakley fan (I voted for Capuano… though I wasn’t obsessed with him either), but I am a huge Obama fan and I was pretty sure that a republican win in Massachusetts would pretty much spell disaster for his agenda.  So, I proudly voted for Coakley–who’s campaign I never really got excited about–as a way of supporting Obama.  Plus, she could have been the first female senator from Massachusetts, which would have been exciting as well.  Obviously, things did not go down that way, but while I was initially devastated I am starting to see things differently.

After a night of taking a step back and thinking about what really happened I’ve come to two simple conclusions.  First, contrary to my initial reaction, it is unclear what this will do to the Health Care bill.  There seems to be a possibility that a “stripped down” “bipartisan” bill could still pass.  While such a bill would not represent “sweeping” health care reform, it would still count as a first step, which is more than the last bunch of presidents were able to accomplish.  Second, while many see this outcome as a political disaster for President Obama (my first reaction as well), I think it may actually present him with some big political opportunities.  As he has already acknowledged in his interview on ABC today (which I thought was a great first step), “The people of Massachusetts spoke… the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.”  Instead of teaming up with the democrats who want to rush a health care vote before Brown is sworn in, Obama is doing what great leaders do: taking a step back, acknowledging what the people had to say, re-evaluating the situation and looking for a way to move forward.  This election result, which seems to be a referendum on health care, the democrats, and Obama, could represent an opportunity for a change in Obama’s agenda.  Now that the super majority is gone, Obama may have to really “reach across the isle” and become a more compromising president, which won’t help him with the left wing of the democratic party, but could help him with independents and maybe some republicans.  In other words, if the democrats had him on some sort of “leash,” that leash is no longer there because “the people have spoken,” and the democrats can no longer claim a public “mandate” to pass whatever they want.  Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be forced to be a little more creative in their bill writing and a little more bipartisan in their approach to the issues we face.  That’s not necessarily bad, right?  Of course, I’m being somewhat naive, but Obama already seems to be heading in that direction.

As always, David Brooks wrote a great analysis of the situation at NYTimes.com today.

They usually just make me laugh but this one got my blood boiling a little:

Lastly, here’s Media Matters with a great recap of Glenn Beck in 2009:

More posts coming.  I swear.

follow me on twitter