Okay, with all due respect, are you serious? You focus entirely on one portion of my post, ignoring both the entire rest of it and numerous other entirely valid criticisms of your point, and try to act like what you’re almost criminally misquoting is evidence that all liberals want is more big government. Um… no. You pointed to a series of systemic, long-standing problems which very much seem to require government intervention and basically said “liberals can only think of government solutions to these problems”. Geez, I wonder why! It’s like when alt-med advocates say “Doctors can only think of invasive solutions to these problems” when talking about cancer. No kidding; nothing else we’ve found works.
Hey, got a proposal that might make sense or work? Great! Let’s see it! Because your solution to “women, as a whole, get paid less than men for the same work” is absolutely not credible. A single, local solution to a systemic, nation-wide problem is not going to fix things. Even if we assume we can get the company to the size of Wal-Mart, it still wouldn’t solve the problem for anyone other than our own employees. It would be like combatting the problem of pollution-spewing companies by starting a corporation pledged to a net neutral carbon footprint - that’s nice, but it does nothing to stop Exxon from decimating the water table.
But here’s something for you to ponder on. If the free market could solve these problems… Why hasn’t it? It’s been quite a long time, and these trends show little to no signs of stopping, let alone reversing. Most solutions proposed are utterly faith-based, with no reason to assume that they’ll make a difference.
Start a company? To solve economic downturn? What, you mean risk my very limited assets during a time of massive economic downturn where people willing to invest in my product or buy my goods are going to be fairly limited, with the knowledge that if I fail, getting a job again will be a nightmare? From the perspective of a capitalist, that seems like a terrible idea! Better wait until things get better… Solving wage inequality by making a company is like solving pollution by recycling - it’s a nice touch, but collectively, you’re doing nothing of any real meaning.
I haven’t read the whole article but if the quoted part is key then it is claptrap:
If one party is saying “we should implement the Policy because A” and the other party is saying “A is false so we should not implement the Policy” then it is not politically biased for a journalist to check and conclude A is true.
However, at least from what is quoted in the OP, this commentator seems to consider that
if one party is saying “we should implement the Policy because A” and
the other party is saying “A is false so we should not implement the Policy” but really knows that A is true but doesn’t want to implement the Policy because of other idealogical reasons,
then journalists are not being politically neutral if they conclude A is true. This is arrant nonsense. One makes one’s bed and then one lies in it. If the latter party are making false statements and not making their true position clear then it doesn’t constitute a journalistic breach of neutrality to deal with that party’s position on its face
It would be a failure of political neutrality for the media to be the body defining the bounds of the debate and for the media to then conclude that within those bounds the facts favoured one position, but I don’t understand that to be what the OP-linked article said happened in the Obamacare case.
It is probably too late for that–particularly on the SDMB–but it would certainly have made this discussion more interesting if a more nuanced response had made it into the few few posts.
As it is, (and probably will be forever), we are going to get one more partisan bicker-fest with each side standing up and chanting their mantras at each other and neither side actually understanding what their opponents really believe.
Having now read the article, I stand by what I’ve said. The author (Chait) says “The empirical evenhandedness of the new data journalists is a wonderful contribution to American public life. It is, however, anything but politically neutral”.
What he’s missing is that:
the new data journalists only check the facts in debate, as the examples he gives in his article show;
it would constitute political bias for them *not *to do so, and
political parties control the debate by choosing what points to propose and dispute; they choose the battleground.
It does not in any way constitute journalist non-neutrality to fact check what is happening on the battleground.
In other words, to use the example Chait uses, if Ryan didn’t want a debate on “the budgetary assumptions undergirding the health-care bill” then he shouldn’t have “forcefully rebutted” those assumptions. If Ryan wanted the debate to be about underlying non-empirical idealogy, then all he had to do was say so and then the fact checking journalists would have had nothing to fact check.
I don’t understand the comparison. Government is just a way of organizing human endeavors. Humans are endlessly creative so of course we can do a lot of things. It took you a single sentence to lay out everything this amazing drug can accomplish. If you typed for the rest of your life you couldn’t do the same for humans and that’s just the things we can do now. There will be so many more possibilities by the time you die.
The jumping off point for the article in the OP is that the results of Obamacare actually matter on the left. If it were failing then it would lose support among us and become vulnerable to repeal. Only to your hypothetical religious people and real life conservatives does the fact that it is succeeding not matter.
I’m not completely in the dark. I’m somewhat aware of these results but I’m not familiar with the criticism of them. In any case, this misses my point. Americans, right and left, act as if preschool matters. We put our money where our mouth is, assuming we have the money for it, and pay to prepare our children for kindergarten. That is the reality that matters and not these studies that relatively few people have heard of. If you are right and the idea that preschool percolates through society to the point that people stop paying for it then there won’t be any more Head Start program.
Again, Americans act as if this isn’t true. When a family is buying a home a lot of attention is payed to what the schools are like. A home costs more if it is in a good school district and even solidly conservative school districts are able to raise millage rate. Perhaps you are right that the money doesn’t matter but that’s not the reality people see around them every day.
It’s just as much not your money as it’s not mine. How come you care?
We don’t know that it hasn’t increased poverty. The “poverty rate” only measures whether families are above or below an arbitrary income level. The fact that this rate didn’t increase after 1996 doesn’t mean that life isn’t a hell of a lot more miserable for those kids stuck on the wrong side of the line. Does anyone honestly believe that it’s in the interest of children to have their mothers return to work promptly after they are born?
The problem here is that that point is itself a deflection. The justification for invading Iraq was the dubious assertion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the region and/or the US. I challenge anyone to present salient evidence to support that premise. Failing that, the war in Iraq really starts to look at best like a foolish misadventure, at worst a hideous fraud perpetrated by con artists.