This is an interesting read that goes to the heart of the issue with the mainstream media today.  It is all about ratings and money.  Do you ever wonder why the person being interviewed can say something that you know is totally false and have the interviewer just sit there and nod, no follow-up question, no calling them out.

There are a few hosts out there that don’t pull punches and will press an interviewee despite their attempts to dodge a question (Rachael Maddow comes to mind).  Then again, Mark Sanford would never have gone on one of those shows when his scandal broke.  From the article:

All the networks aggressively wooed Sanford’s office in the period during and just after his disappearance, in an effort to convince that their show offered the perfect forum for him to address the controversy. CNN’s John King told Sawyer he had always appreciated Sanford’s “kindness, candor, and hospitality,” and added, in a transparent attempt to bond, “I’m all for anonymous escapes myself.” George Stephanopoulos offered his show, ABC’s This Week, as a “civil forum to address this week’s events.” And producers for CBS’s Face the Nation, ABC’s Good Morning America, several Fox shows, and many others gave Sanford’s office the hard sell too.

But the emails of Gregory — who in the past has been known as a pretty aggressive questioner — make particularly clear just what a get Sanford was seen as, and how far the networks were willing to go in promising a safe landing place for the governor.

It is just how things work on the Beltway and I am not sure we can do much about it.

The single-payer and hybrid systems in place in every other country in the developed world have many admirable features: lower costs, universal coverage, and better health outcomes. But what ought to make us most envious is their security — it’s what they have and we desperately need. If you live in Canada or Germany or France or Japan, there are some things you need never fear. You need never fear that your insurance company will tell you it won’t cover treatment for your asthma because you had asthma before they signed you up. You need never fear that you will bankrupt your family because of expensive treatments for a serious illness. You need never fear that you will find yourself without coverage after your insurer dropped you or you lost your job. You might fear getting sick, but you won’t fear that your life will be destroyed by not being able to pay for getting sick.

In the United States, unless you’re over 65, extremely poor, or a veteran — thus, already covered by a government health insurance plan — you do have to fear all that. That’s because the central pathology of our deeply pathological health-care system is that most of us have no choice but to get health coverage from an entity whose sole reason for being is to take our money and then try to avoid paying for our care when we get sick.

That may sound harsh, but let’s be realistic: The purpose of a private insurance company is to make money, as much money as possible.

Paul Waldman goes on to talk about how the 4 major insurance companies earned $44 billion in profits over the past 5 years and continuously lobby the government to take responsibility for their sickest customers (elderly and chronically ill) so they can reap the profits of only insuring the healthiest people.

In other words, private insurance companies make money by insuring people who need health care the least and denying it to the people who need it the most.  There is something fundamentally wrong with this system.

I don’t think we will ever be free from the media narrative, but we can only hope that more voters (progressive, liberal, conservative, and otherwise) will engage themselves in a more factual policy debate free from the advertising driven sensational story that sells.

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few”: Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events — a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth.

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it’s a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate,” says the one-page flier. “Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. … Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders.”

I know times are tough for newspapers lately, but this sort of selling-out of journalistic integrity is beneath the pale.  To be fair, the Washington Post is saying that the flier “went out before it was properly vetted” but I think the damage to their reputation as a valid news source is already done.

The email states that the ACLU filed a suit attempting to have all cross shaped headstones removed from military cemeteries (i.e. Arlington National Cemetery) as follows.

I AM HONORED TO DO THIS

Did you know that the ACLU has filed a suit to have all military cross-shaped headstones removed and another suit to end prayer from the military completely.  They’re making great progress. The Navy Chaplains can no longer mention Jesus’ name in prayer thanks to the retched ACLU and our new administration.

I’m not breaking this one. If I get it a 1000 times, I’ll forward it a 1000 times!

Let us pray…

The email comes with several images of cemeteries, military funerals, and flag draped coffins which is meant to appeal to the very patriotic core of the recipient and make the antagonist of the email unpatriotic in contrast (in this case, the ACLU and the Obama administration).

First off, the email has been completely debunked by the people over at Snopes. The email is designed to generate hate and anger. It appeals to a person’s religious core beliefs in order to manipulate the person to a political end.  Such manipulation is done through lies and deceit – meaning it is, in its very essence, anathema to the very ideals it is trying to promote.

This kind of propaganda is particularly disturbing to me since it is designed to entrench established misconceptions and propagate hate.  I am fairly certain that the person passing this email along is not complicit in the deceit and genuinely believes that he is a political activist passing along crucial information, that he is a true patriot.  In reality, he became a pawn of a political propaganda machine designed to install a corrupt government that can be easily manipulated for cultural suppression and monetary gain.

It is OK if you don’t like the ACLU (although I am not sure you shouldn’t like them just because they don’t pick and choose which civil liberties they will defend).  To propagate hate and to do it through deceit is just plain wrong.

Conservative ideals have failed us and silence when it comes to how our country is run means being complicit in failed government policies.

Religion has a place in politics in the same sense that ethics and human compassion have a place in politics.  When ideology trumps sound policy, the result is an easily corruptible government that does not hesitate to discard individual civil liberties in the name of God. Equal rights becomes unpatriotic, dissent becomes un-American, war becomes a righteous crusade, and money becomes God.