If I was in a really sarcastic mood I’d advise Starving Artist to get his conservative friends to read more magazines. Then market forces might push Newsweek back toward the center. Sarah Palin reads ALL the magazines, but she can’t do it alone! 
The traditional answer is that radio, unlike print, uses limited publicly owned bandwidth.
And PBS doesn’t?
Regards,
Shodan
So you are being consistent in objecting to biased news, of which there isn’t any, except on the right.
:shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
Now you’re just failing to read. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t pay to run a magazine and aim for conservatives. I said the media, on the whole, does not lean left. That doesn’t mean there are zero left-biased media outlets. In fact I specifically named one.
Just so. And, you must understand, Starving, that’s a permanent realignment, resulting not merely from any momentary fashion or swing of a hypothetical pendulum or disgust with the last 8 years, but from demographic and generational changes. Republicans had better resign themselves to loyal-opposition status – indefinitely.
Is that a rebuttal, or just another stupid right wing talking point?
Christ, it’s no wonder you dudes got pasted in the polls.
Keep it up!
Snort. Before you go all Hegelian on us, recall that four years ago Karl Rove was working on a Permanent Republican Majority.
No realignment is permanent. You of all people should know that.
Well, let’s say, not evanescent. We’re talking about changes that operate on a generational time scale.
Yes, and Rove tried to do it by locking in place as many structural and institutional advantages as possible in terms of redistricting, control of judgeships, voter ID laws, etc., because he knew voter demographics alone would not be enough to preserve Pub dominance.
:eek: You were surprised to learn this?
Good lord, SA, you’ve been kvetching about liberalism all these years here on the Dope and you just now learned this elementary fact? Well, that explains a lot, actually.
No comment. 
This is overstated, but it more or less describes the general trend of the conservative shift that began in the Reagan years (and which is no news to anybody but you, apparently).
However, the pendulum is now swinging back in the other direction. The economic insecurities produced by the dominance of crony capitalism have begun to alarm many people who had earlier jumped on Reagan’s “government is the problem” bandwagon. At the same time, corrupt conservatives’ cynical exploitation of unpleasant attitudes like prejudice against gays and religious persecution complexes, in order to garner support for their own looting-and-pillaging agenda, has started to piss off a lot of decent people.
To top off, the campaign and election of a black President has increased interest and participation in the political process among many non-conservatives who had become apathetic and uninvolved. As a result of all this, liberal ideas and policies are going to get more serious consideration in mainstream politics in the near future than they have for the past quarter-century or so.
Poor Starving Artist—all that time you were pissing and moaning about how the liberals were taking over and destroying society, you were actually living in an era of relative conservative dominance, and you didn’t even realize it until it was nearly over!
With all due respect, that’s nonsense. Republicans are going to do what out-of-favor political parties have always done: shift some of their positions to accomodate long-term changes in society, and take advantage of popular dissatisfaction with the inevitable failures of some of the approaches advocated by the dominant party.
Thirty-five years from now, the official Republican Party platform will defend, for example, full civil rights for homosexuals, just as they now support full civil rights for blacks and women, and most Republicans will probably not even know that their party was ever officially opposed to those positions.
They already do.
Agreed. Perhaps instead of “Republicans” I should have said “conservatives.” My point is, the modern American ideological conservative movement that goes back to Robert Taft, became self-aware with the Goldwater campaign of 1964, triumphed with Reagan and was discredited by W, now is doomed to long-term decline. It is not going away, of course, it has too well-established a network of grassroots organizations, astroturf organizations, think-tanks, wholly-owned media outlets and wealthy donors; but it will find itself struggling up a steeper hill every election cycle, and we will live to see it reduced to near-irrelevance.
Viva La Revolucion!
Revolutions operate on an abrupt time scale.
Examples of the “greatest gains” you’ve found would be? (You could throw something showing the dominance of liberalism as an ideology in too, if you’d be so kind.)
CMC fnord!
Eight years isn’t a generation. That’s likely how long the GOP will be in the woods.
Yeah, that Industrial Revolution was a real page turner.
Ironically enough, the invention of the steam-powered printing press in about 1810 revolutionized the publishing industry nearly as much as Gutenberg’s press did in the 15th century.