will Fox News lean left?

At last glance, President Bush had the highest disapproval rating, 69%, of a U.S. president in the 70 history of the gallop poll. At was not always this low, in fact, after 9/11, Bush, was in fact one of the most popular presidents as the nation banded together in light of the terrorist attacks.

One organization that gained a lot of momentum following 9/11 and our run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was Fox News, with its right leaning media coverage. Fox News made a living heralding the Bush administration, demonizing liberal elites, the far-left media conspiracy, painting war protesters as unpatriotic, etc. America ate it up, after all, there were terrorists running amuck and boy were we mad. Fox News is a business triumph any way you look at it, they are the number one rated cable news network and subsequently, the advertising dollars have rolled in, and the administration has been especially conciliatory towards Fox News, gracing them with exclusive interviews with President Bush and other members of the Executive Branch which have largely shut off access when it comes to other networks.

I am curious how Fox News will proceed in the coming years. As I mentioned before, President Bush is the most unpopular President in modern history, presidential candidate John McCain while being a Republican is still distrusted and hated by a significant portion of his own party, and Barack Obama (or Hillary Clinton for that matter) seems well positioned to be our next President of the United States. Come 2009, the Executive Branch will most likely be run by a Democrat, the House and Senate will probably still have a Democratic majority, your average American thinks the Republican party is full of out-of-touch idiots, Republicans can't recognize their own party anymore, the economy is in a tailspin caused in my opinion by the deregulation of the housing and credit markets, and politics for the most part have made a complete 180 in favor of anyone who is not associated with the neo-conservatives.

I think with America growing increasingly disillusioned with the right wing, it is inevitable that viewership moves back towards left leaning/centrist MSNBC and CNN. You just don't make money by pursuing an opinion that few people embrace. Next year are people still going to want to hear from Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Nancy Grace, and Glenn Beck drumming us to increasing anti-immigrant fervor, made up facts, blaming Democrats, screaming at people for not supporting the troops, and boycotting companies for ridiculously tenuous ties? No, I don't think so. I think regular Americans will be able to tell that 8 years of majority Republican rule led to failed foreign policy, failed economic policy, uncompetitive wages, job loss, and soldiers being over stretched and under-provided for. I think it's pretty obvious to most people that 8 years of Bush didn't lead to a better America. McCain still seems like he's part of the Bush club.

Fox News is a business; it is still part of News Corporation. How is Fox News going to change and adapt to a shifting American political sentiment? When Scott McClellan comes out and writes a book basically saying, the Bush administration misled us into Iraq, the media didn't hold him responsible, outlets like Fox News facilitated the move to war, are people really going to believe it when Fox News analyst, Karl Rove, comes out and says "oh he's full of it" and the network and White House try to paint him as a disgruntled employee that wants to sell books? Fox News will have to change; otherwise ratings are going to drop like a rock. I think Rupert Murdoch knows this. I am curious what kind of content changes are going to be made, if punches will be pulled back, if zealous right wingers will be pulled out of prime time slots?

Recently, Rupert Murdoch had this to say about Obama and McCain:

[speaking about Obama]. "He's become a rock star. It's fantastic... he may not carry Florida because the Jewish people are suspicious of him and so are the Hispanics... but he'll probably win in Ohio and who knows... he'll probably win [the election]"... Personally I want to meet Obama, I want to know , is he going to walk the walk. If you read his education policy, it's just great, he's got a revolution there, the education system in this country is a total disgrace... He wants a break with the past, I do know that he is a highly intelligent man with a great record at Harvard, at the Law Review, and I just hope he's as good as he promises."

[Speaking about McCain]. " He has been in Congress a long time, and you have to make a lot of compromises... So what's he really stand for?... He's a patriot, he's a friend of mine, he's a decent guy but he's unpredictable. He doesn't know much about the economy, and I say this sympathetically, I think he has a lot of problems."

Murdoch seems to be jumping on to the Obama band wagon, We'll have to wait and see if he directs Fox News to follow in step.

Absolutely stupid

I maintain that the present-day Republican Party is one of the most awful, selfish, and callous organizations I have ever seen in my life, but there is a reason why I maintain 'independent' status on my voter registration card. As I wrote about in my last post, Democrats continue to get issues wrong, it's like they are not thinking.

As I do every night, I fire up teh internets and goto www.Huffingtonpost.com for some left wing news. The big headline is "Romney Caught Employing Illegal Immigrants, it's pretty obvious, at least to me, that this is pretty stupid; the headline that is and not Romney. What exactly has Romney done? He hired a lawn care service, said lawn care service had illegal immigrants working for him and the media (at least the Huffington Post) chose to jump on it in a big GOTCHA! moment. How are we supposed to make progress on illegal immigration when we are attacking politicians for things like this?

It is ironic that most left wing media sites would and have been completely opposed to the idea of stereotyping people by race/skin color and asking workers/neighbors for immigration papers. What are we, the Gestapo? Of course, it's completely not okay to assume that someone is an illegal immigrant because they are working for a lawn care service and look Mexican; that's not okay. But when we start to find things to embarrass a presidential front-runner about, it all of a sudden becomes no holds barred at the expense of the people that the left wing are trying to protect. How was Romney supposed to know that the lawn care service hired illegal immigrants? After it was brought to his attention that such hiring practices occurred, he brought it to their attention, how was he supposed to know that there were no more illegal immigrants working for the company and thus at his house? The expectation for him to be cognizant of these kinds of things is absolutely absurd. Can I guess who is an illegal immigrant and who isn't? No, and that's the way it should be. Let's keep the GOP out of the White House, but not like this, HuffPo should be ashamed.

Even the Democrats Don't Get It.

There is a reason why my voter registration card lists me as an 'independent' and not a 'Democrat'. Most of the time, I would associate myself with the Democrats, I would consider myself socially progressive, I would say that I'm a liberal, but... there are times when I listen to the Democrats and I wonder how they just don't get the issue at hand.

I'm watching the CNN debate and they were discussing what the future President of the United States should do about trade with China given that there has been an uproar about unsafe products coming out of China. Everyone is talking about enforcing the WTO law and shut off trade with China, they are talking about how bad China is this, and how bad China is that, is that the real heart of the issue? I think they are missing it.

At my workplace, we make consumer electronics. No they aren't immediately threatening products like a medical device, but they still need to be safe. The products need to be lead-free, they need to not explode in your hand, in short, we test them extensively to make sure they don't hurt people. At the same time, we manufacture things in China, like everyone knows, manufacturing at places like Foxconn just makes financial sense, they do it fast and they do it well. If something went wrong, the attention I think is on us, not on China. It is our responsibility to make sure that everything is defined to a T. This includes giving them materials so that we know the resistors and capacitors are in fact Pb Free/RoHS compliant, that the paint we use has no lead in it, it is our job to make sure that things are so explicitly defined that no shortcuts can be taken. It is ridiculous in my opinion to not do these things and then turn around and plead ignorance when something bad happens.

There were very few people on the debate stage that identified the problem, that we should be checking what China exports to us. But they are going about this incorrectly, they want to set up a foreign FDA/watchdog type arm of the US government to inspect exports. Why? This is a complete waste of money. This is one of those things that is very Republican in a way (although I haven't heard any of the Republican candidates even bring this up), we live in a capitalist system, we keep preaching how market forces drive things; market forces should drive safety.

It should be up to each individual company to define everything that goes into the product, to test a sample of the products before they are exported and sold into the American marketplace. I find myself in disbelief when we are blaming China for what happened. Even Mattel apologized to the Chinese government and Chinese people about the lead in the paint ordeal. It's not for the most part, China's fault. If Mattel didn't define what goes in the paint, if they aren't testing the products for lead, if they aren't the first line of defense, they should be held criminally liable. We don't need a government organization to check this kind of stuff, there is no way that a government organization can have the expertise to know exactly what safety concerns they should be looking for. It needs to be up to the experts, it needs to be up to the corporation designing the goods. What's so hard about this? We need to stop being so afraid of holding American corporations liable and scapegoating China. We manufacture in China because it's cheap, and we should understand that you get what you pay for. If you as a company find that it is no longer financially beneficial to build in China because of all the safeguards you need to implement, don't build there!

Let's stop blaming China for things that we should be responsible for. Now alternatively, if we do everything we can to be explicit about how they are to manufacture things, how to be safe, and things still go wrong, then and only then should we be making a public issue about it. Then and only then should we be going after Chinese manufacturing. We need to start being really on the ball about this issue, it is inevitable in my opinion that as profits begin to grow in China, Chinese business owners are going to start realizing that cutting corners can mean more money in the pocket. That's what we need to be watching out for, but first and foremost we should be doing our due diligence and making sure we take all the precautions necessary. As you can read in the news, due diligence is what has been lacking in almost every one of these public scandals.

A Signal For The Death Of The Two Party System?

For my entire life American politics has been dominated by the two party system. It is broken. The only thing that having two political powerhouses has done is create an artificial classification of citizens as either conservatives or liberals. These terms are not representative of beliefs or a view of the future, they are mud-slinging labels that fuel the fire of their respective voting base.

Conservatives are cold hearted, money loving, un-progressive stick in the muds. Liberals are tree hugging hippie peaceniks that don't understand market economics or the military.

In reality, the conservative/liberal labels probably accurately describe 1% of the population.

The reign of George W. Bush has only made the situation in Washington worse. If you were not lock step with the Bush administration you were cast aside and excluded from the election dominance machine that is Karl Rove. If you were not following in the footsteps of Pelosi and Reid, you were acting detrimentally to the overarching goal of defeating Bush. Now that George II is reaching the finale of his second term, those who would not speak out against the administration and their peers, are coming out of the woodwork. It is a good sign that perhaps Washington isn't secretly controlled by a cabal that identifies political candidates via a tap on the shoulder from Skull & Bones, and candidates have the ability to think freely.

Chuck Hagel has publicly stated (he has for a long time now), "I am not happy with the Republican Party today... It's been hijacked by a group of single-minded almost isolationists, insulationists, power-projectors." For most of us, this has been obvious for a long time. If you were actually a traditional "conservative", you must have been shitting a brick watching the Bush administration freely spend, drive the economy into a nosediving level of debt, and grow the government and its special interest attachments to sizes that would have made President Reagan squirm. How could anyone possibly be happy with the modern Republican Party?

The possibility of a Hagel-Bloomberg independent ticket is intriguing, especially with New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, on the ticket. While people herald Rudi Giuliani as the hero of 9/11 and the cleaner-upper of NYC, in post 9/11 times, he can only be seen in my eyes as a political opportunist and one trick pony; I can't think of anyone who has ridden the 9/11 card so hard, not even George W. Bush mentions it with Giuliani's frequency. Given Bloomberg's progressive stance on social issues and his guidance over NYC, I would vote for him in a heart beat.

Historically, people like Ralph Nader have been longshots, emphasis on the "long". Are there other independent Dark Horses, strong ones, electable ones? So far we have the specters of Hagel, Bloomberg, and perhaps even Al Gore. America should monitor Gore's weight, should he lose enough to bring him back to non-fat ass status, consider him a serious candidate for 2008.

Do They Actually Care?

The Democrats are now in control of the U.S. House and Senate, even with the Republican majority ousted I still can't tell if politicians actually care about what is happening to the American public. Speaking on the recent veto of the Democrat's funding proposal for Iraq by President Bush, Senator Harry Reid was adamant that Republicans, Democrats, and yes, the Bush administration would work together and hopefully they'd have a solution before Memorial Day.

I heard this on my way home from work while listening to NPR. This announcement came during the same week where I have been working 7:30 AM to ~ 9 PM all week long. When something happens at work, when I have responsibilities to take care of something, you just suck it up and put in the time. Americans do this every day, some may work two or more jobs, some work the worst of the worst jobs to provide for their family, and they do it because they have to do it. For once I'd like to see a similar effort from politicians. From the laziest and least working 109th Congress to the new and improved "100 hour plan" 110th Congress, what's the difference? If the Democrats were serious about withdrawing our troops from Iraq, they should hunker down, put their heads together and begin serious negotiations and proposals immediately. Memorial Day is more than three weeks away, while they are engaging in their political dance of posturing and expedience, men and women are dying.

Chris Shays spoke out against the Iraqi government going off on vacation,"If they go off on vacation for two months while our troops fight — that would be the outrage of outrages," said Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn. On the same side of the coin, a solution needs to be proposed now. If withdrawal is the serious conclusion of months of developing the spending bill, they should resubmit it with no changes. The politicians take forever to come to any sort of usable consensus, the Bush administration led us into a deadly Catch-22 in Iraq, and all the while blood continues to spill; the future of Iraq seems bleak.

2008 Presidential Race

The most provocative 2008 Presidential Candidate stand-off that no-one is talking about... yet: Al Gore vs. Jeb Bush. It would be incredible.

minimum wage increase good?

The business community (at least part of it) is dreading the new federal minimum wage increase. In the majority of the articles I've read, small business owners have overwhelmingly stated that they think that the sizable increase to minimum wage is a moral obligation. At the same time, they fear that an increase in minimum wage is going to hurt their business; either they will have to cut jobs or increase prices, either way they are predicting a loss in their own yearly income.

Not being an economist, I couldn't tell you what I think is going to happen, nor do I think a model is necessarily going to accurately tell you how businesses will react and their bottom line along with it.

This morning I read an article in the NYTimes about Washington State. For about a decade, each year they have increased the wages of the lowest paid workers. Washington state did not crash and burn, losing all of its jobs to Idaho. Washington added 90,000 jobs in 2006, the interviewed business owners say they are doing more business than ever (maybe they got lucky), border residents have streamed to Washington for employment, and even the Association of Washington Business stopped fighting the minimum wage law.

To be fair, the percent of small businesses in Washington State's overall scheme is 2.4%. Can it be used as an accurate prediction for what is to come after all states adopt the new higher minimum wage? We'll all wait and see, but in my opinion, an increase in minimum wage has been a long time coming. It's about time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/us/11minimum.html?hp&ex=1168578000&en=bf304392cdc5baf4&ei=5094&partner=homepage