Maybe so, but it will have to shift leftward before it can come back. See post #54.
I welcome our new media overlords. More accurately, I would welcome publications openly embracing their bias. Pretending to straddle the middle has left a muddle.
When I read National Review (online, since I am a cheap bastard) - I know the bias that is there. When I read Time (6 months old at the dentist), I have to wonder which bits are clean reporting and which bits are biased reporting and which bits are biased fact inclusion.
One newspaper per city came about because people started these centrist bits. I would welcome some competing viewpoints, where the right wing paper focuses on the great things the cops do and why homeless addicts should be locked up. The left wing paper can talk about police brutality and why we need to help the homeless single mothers doing their best. Biased people can subscribe to one paper, people interested in all of it can subscribe to two.
Bring on the REAL competition, and quite pretending to be fair and balanced. That is impossible.
“Pobes” was from some lunatic rant in the BBQ Pit one time from some crazy-quick-flameout poster. Nobody was sure if it was supposed to be plebes or short for ‘poor bastards’ or what, but I always thought it was hilarious. A couple people used it for a while, but I think I’m the last one left.
-Joe
No, it came about because of rising newsprint costs, rising labor costs, and a limited amount of available advertising dollars in any given city market. (And that was all before the Internet.)
And you’ll magically figure out what the truth is, I guess, even though you can’t do that with an issue of Time. 
At lunch I happened to read this New Yorker piece about the early history of newspapers.
I disagree. The philosophies of the New Deal and the Great Society are still alive and well. We still have the results of those programs. I can still collect Social Security, unemployment, and disability. I can still earn a minimum wage. Last time I checked, the FDIC is actually insuring MORE money than ever before. I can still send my kids to Head Start. I still hear about the SEC all the time. Medicare, Medicaid, PBS. My black friends can vote. Even the Warren court, that supposed institutional bastion of radicalism, keeps getting affirmed: Miranda was upheld in an opinion by Rehnquist; you can still wear a rubber (Griswald); and last time I looked, a black man was in the white house and was no longer “seperate but equal.” (see Brown v. Board of Education).
The New Deal and the Great Society, while overreaching in some places, have reshaped the American political landscape. Those “largely repudiated” programs, as you put it, are now accepted parts of American government and nigh untouchable. Take Griswald, for instance; it recognized a constitutional right to privacy, which eventually led to Roe v. Wade; how has overturning that “right” gone for conservatives? Or, for that matter, the FDIC: I bet all those people with deposits in IndyMac would have LOVED if the New Deal had never happened. Would have made them rush home and read Adam Smith, it would. And God help any politician, conservative or otherwise, who tries to take away Social Security.
In short, you’re wrong. The New Deal and the Great Society are still around, not because we like suckling off the government teet, but rather because they showed us that government can work for us. And there is no difference between the philosophy of the programs and the programs themselves; we accept these programs as givens, as things the government should provide to the citizens. Sure, many may call themselves"conservatives" and bemoan the encroachment of the big bad government and hold socially reactionary beliefs, but they still want what the New Deal and the Great Society have to give.
And for your capitalism v. socialism argument? No. Even big business has recognized that capitalism has its faults and needs some assistance (see the current economy and how so many players in the “free market” are lining up gov’t money).
Albrecht, old thing! How the hell the hell are ya doin’? I haven’t seen you for centuries. Still keepin’ that pencil sharp? 
Seriously though, those philosophies, if they are alive and well, aren’t producing any major new programs and haven’t for quite some time, which was pretty much the thrust of my comment. There have been major reductions in welfare, and the rules for who gets it and for how long have been tightened greatly from what they once were. The efficaciousness of public housing, which turned out to accomplish little but to create hotbeds of crime and neglect, has been largely repudiated as well.
Admittedly, public health care is on the horizon, and what a debacle it promises to be. Still, all in all I’m not that opposed to it anymore. Most of the reasons I wasn’t in favor of it to begin with (faceless, uncaring beaurocrats governing your health) has happened anyway with regard to insurance companies and HMOs. Still, that leaves the question of how effectively the government can manage such a program; how long the waits will be and how much red tape will be involved; the amounts, if any, that people will have to pay themselves and whether they can afford that, etc., so while I don’t object to it as much as I once did, I’m far from eager for it, and I think a lot of people share that apprehension.
Also, I tend to dislike the idea of redistribution of income, and universal health care, being something that everyone can derive benefit from sort of like the interstate highway system, fits better with my idea of how goverrnment programs, if they have to exist, should.
Well, you know what they say: government programs are like government employees – once in place they’re almost impossible to get rid of. 
And not all of these programs and/or laws are bad ones. But again, my point was that the impetus among the populace to see more and more of these types of programs has lessened greatly, especially since the late sixties.
Yes, they can…by virtue of their own efforts, I maintain. I know liberals love to take the credit for civil rights, but the fact of the matter is that duing the period of the New Deal and the Great Society, even the Democratic party was rife with racism. Blacks themselves, largely through the peaceful, dignified sit-ins and demonstrations fifties and early sixties (aided in having their struggles publicized by the recent advent of television) are the ones most responsible for the success of civil rights.
Again, it’s my belief is that it is blacks themselves who are responsible for the fact that Obama is in the White House.
Of course they’re untouchable. Too many people have been forced to pay into them for too long, and now everyone is determined to get whatever benefits they can out of them in return. The fact that these programs have become untouchable doesn’t mean they are good programs or that they return acceptable benefits for what one is forced to pay into them.
And philosophically speaking, I think most people are highly skeptical of these programs and not only feel that they won’t get a good return on what they’ve been forced to pay in, but that there is a very good likelihood that the programs won’t even exist when it comes time for them to apply for benefits.
So all in all, I think the population at large accepts these programs because they don’t have any choice, and they’re highly skeptical of the government’s ability to handle these programs properly so that benefits will be there when they need them. At this point I think public sentiment is such that most people would be just as happy if the government wasn’t in the nanny business and they could just keep their money themselves.
Which, of course, isn’t actually in the Constitution (as Antonin Scalia himself has pointed out numerous times) and is the result of liberal judges legislating from the bench. It appears to me to be a so-called right that emanated from the judiciary and not from predominating liberal public sentiment.
I’m sure you’re aware that once a Supreme Court decision has been reached, subsequent courts are loathe to overturn it. Still, even after all these years and with so many people having grown up knowing nothing but pro-abortion rights, it’s still a matter of great contention for much of the country. Even strident liberals such as Christopher Hitchens are now going on record as saying that there is clearly such a thing as an unborn child and that this results in a conflict of rights (the child’s rights vs. the mother’s) and that thanks to imaging technology the notion of viability is being pushed back. So who knows, perhaps we’ll arrive at a ruling at some time based on hard science that recognizes the rights of unborn children as human beings and prohibits abortion save for the first trimester or other time when it can be more realistically said that a conscious, feeling human being does not yet exist. This is an approach that would be vastly preferable to me.
Again, these programs, once in place, are largely self-propagating…both in the sense that acceptance of them gets passed from generation to generation and in that it gets spread to and accepted by an increasingly large segment of the population.
Most of the people who exist these days have come to accept these programs simply because they’ve never known anything else. It isn’t indicative of liberal public sentiment post 1980 that these programs exist.
Economic assistance of the type going on now is a highly dubious endeavor and no one is really sure whether it’s the right thing for the government to do, they’re just hoping it will turn out that way.
And certainly a reasonable amount of regulation is required, but that’s a far cry from national public sentiment in favor of socialism.
In other words, the status quo has shifted liberal. The average American expects that there will be universal healthcare for the elderly, and universal pension and disability plans for workers, just as s/he expects that women and blacks will be allowed to vote.
Those were liberal causes back before they were universally accepted, and the “No We Can’t” crowd of conservatives fought them tooth and nail. The fact that they are now taken for granted as aspects of our society that most Americans wouldn’t tolerate giving up means that what used to be liberal is now mainstream.
As it will always be. The hard part is forever having to wait for the slow-pokes to catch up.
You don’t understand. It isn’t that people accept them because they want them or think they’re a good thing. They accept them because presidents and congresses and judges decades ago cooked these things up, and, having been born into them, people nowadays have no choice but to accept them. There is also the phenomenon that people tend to accept programs that have always been more readily than they do new programs.
The mere fact that the average American voter expects women and blacks to vote doesn’t that mean they embrace liberal philosophy, it just mean they’ve grown up during a time when these things were the norm. Hell, I expect women and blacks to vote. Does that make me an adherent to liberal philosophy? If so, it’ll certainly make this the first time I’ve ever been called a liberal by anyone.
You fail to realize that it’s certainly a liberal notion by the standards of the era that you worship so much, back before the dirty fucking hippies ruined western civilization.
Interesting. So, the black population was able to get court decisions and legislation decided in their favor even though no judge and only five congresscritters were black at the time? There were no actual liberals involved in any of those actions or decisions? This is silly hand-waving and I am disappointed that you (claim to) believe it. You are ignoring the very serious efforts of people of good conscience, (the overwhelming majority of whom were liberal), to make the case to their fellow citizens so that there would actually be support for those positions in the courts and legislatures. Without overall popular support among the majority of the citizens, none of the ciivil rights actions would have occurred.
You also ignore, (even though this has been pointed out to you in previous discussions), that the laws and court decisions did not automatically correct the injustices. Despite Brown being decided in 1954, there were still de jure segregated school districts as late as 1970 and it took the active efforts of blacks and whites–pretty much all of them liberal in this case–to actually open the polls to blacks across most of the South following the various court cases and legislation. There was a tremendous amount of feeling across the South that “Washington” could say what it wanted, but they were going to do what they had always done. (A similar effort was required for open housing in the North–an effort that is not yet complete.)
Finally, you show your odd bias by conflating the Democratic Party with liberals. There was an extremely conservative wing of the Democratic Party, (some of whom actually briefly broke with the Party inder the heading of Dixiecrats). There were also socially liberal Republicans, (e.g., “Rockefeller Republicans”), who supported the civil rights movement. So here you are trying to pretend that it was “liberals” who ruined the country and “blacks” who overthrew repression all by themselves, yet you do not accurately portray the required efforts of liberals and you (deliberately?) pretend that liberal=Democrat and conservative=Republican despite the fact that none of those claims are true.
Yesterday I read an article in a recent Newsweek which explained that Cheney wasn’t bad, he was right to try to expand presidential powers, and that it would be best if Obama continued many of Cheney and Bush’s policies.
That’s liberal?
-FrL-
I can’'t tell - are you really an idiot, or do you just play one on TV?
Or, more properly, on the radio.
Regards,
Shodan
It show’s your acknowledgment that conservatism can be quite wrong headed. So can Liberalism, it’s your jingoism of conservatism that’s blinding you.
Is the assumption that those who are willfully ignorant about current events (political or otherwise) are probably not the most profitable audience for a news magazine somehow flawed? That’s like criticizing Ms. for slanting their coverage towards an overwhelmingly female, feminist audience. That’s what all magazines do; they write to their audience.
It was not an editorial decision. it was a business decision. They want to sell more mags and stay in business. Problem is ,nearly all the mags, TV stations and newspapers are filtered through a corporate net. They are pretty interchangeable.
It has not been in other industrialized democracies. Why is America so different?
That impetus is coming back. To stay, you may be sure.
Which does not exist, as such, but see above.
It is now that the POTUS is a Dem.
Yes, it is liberal. Why do you think plenty of people denounce the Bush admin for not being truly conservative?
I don’t see anywhere in that report that suggests recent liberal demographic shifts are in any way a permanent or overwhelming obstacle to conservatism, like you’re claiming.