“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.

Thanks to this bill Bank of America can no longer rob me blind with their “overdraft protection” scheme, through which they made millions of dollars last summer.  Thankfully, we won’t ever be buying a $40 cup of coffee again.

Also thanks to this bill, we now get awesome little warning messages on our credit card statements educating us about how much extra money we’ll be paying if we stick to the “minimum payments.”  It’s not like this information wasn’t available before, but you may have needed an accountant or two to figure out how much money you were losing.  Haven’t seen any of these messages?  They look like this:

So anyway, this is one piece of legislation that I think is a great achievement, and since the cool thing these days is to label the Obama presidency as unsuccessful (mainly because they have yet to fix an economic slow down that took over ten years to develop…) I thought I’d point out one of Obama’s successes–because they don’t seem to get much attention.

Here are the signs I’ve designed so far.  Post your sign ideas and I’ll design them (if they’re good).

“I’m not a witch, I’m you”

Well, Christine O’donnell, even if you were me (doubtful), I’d rather not elect myself to the US Senate.  If I did, I would run my own campaign.

I’m tired of politicians trying to be “me,” or “you.”  I know it’s not a new phenomenon, and I completely understand the appeal of a politician who is down with life on “main street” (as well as Wall Street and K Street), or more specifically, a politician who knows what life is like for “Joe the Plumber” or Velma Hart—I mean, “down to earthness” is one of the things I like about Obama.  But why do these factors become the central talking point of our political campaigns?

The Federal Government is an immensely complex organism that deals with many complicated issues on a daily basis.  So why would we be looking for the most average and ordinary Americans to run this thing?  Sure, I don’t want my politicians stuck inside a Washington bubble where nobody knows the price of a gallon of milk, but that doesn’t mean I want them to be on the same level as me when it comes to experience, education or intellectual capacity…  I would rather have my Senator be a whole lot wiser than myself.

So stop trying to be me (especially if you’re not), and then maybe I’ll vote for you.

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!