Fact-checking the Miami Herald's local coverage of the "fiscal cliff" budget issue shows their obliviousness; Charles Krauthammer ponders "Cliff-jumping with Barack"; I suggest everyone check their ropes now!

Louisthx YouTube Channel video: Countdown clock for an NBC News Special Report. Uploaded on July 27, 2007. http://youtu.be/41sQCLKpi78 

Since I don't have my own Breaking News countdown clock yet... 

Question: How many of South Florida's 8 present or future Members of Congress have been interviewed or quoted by the Miami Herald regarding the "fiscal cliff" federal budget issue since Election Day?

Answer: ZERO.

But we all know that this would hardly come as Breaking News to any well-informed person who reads the 2012 version of that newspaper, though they still might be surprised that the Herald could do such a poor job of following a big national story by not writing about the local angle, i.e. have meaningful reporting on what this area's elected representatives to Congress were inclined to do.

The Herald of the 1970's and 1980's would've not only done something, they'd have had an entire page about it in Section A or in their Sunday Op-Ed section, with each rep. having the opportunity to try to explain -in some cases, explain away- why they believed what they did.

Not the lackluster and lazy Herald of today against the worldwide talent and resources of the N.Y. Times of today, but rather than the lackluster Herald of today against the Herald of 25 and 35 years ago that had to make do without cell phones and the crutch of the Internet, but with hard-working reporters who wanted to get the story done right, NOT run away from it.
There's your compare and contrast.

To repeat what I've written here on the blog in the past, when I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area from 1988-2003, because of what I did, whom I knew and what the full array of my interests were, I spoke fairly often to some print/TV reporters and columnists based in the Beltway whom you've heard of. 
We talked about all sorts of things, of course, but among them were also the general state of journalism, trends in the industry and general industry gossip.

Sometimes that took place over the phone after some bit of Breaking News, or over an Orioles game up at Camden Yards, sometimes after movies at popular restaurants, 
Other conversations took place over a hot dog and Coke from a vendor at a nearby park at lunch time -McPherson Square- on one of those sunny Spring days in Washington that are amazing, and which pull everyone out of their offices after months of cold weather, a sure sign that the baseball season is approaching.

The fact that some of these people had earned Pulitzer Prizes for their hard work and resourcefulness and had become known "names," was not something they spoke about, per se, but because they were so recognizable, it was always something in the back of my mind, even when we pretended it wasn't.

So it's with that in mind that I can tell you this with absolute certainty.

Newspapers and reporters do NOT receive the Pulitzer Prize for making a very bad habit of habitually ignoring what's right in front of them and NOT asking hard questions of elected officials facing difficult choices.

People are elected to Washington to make tough choices, after all, and reporters are supposed to ask them how they made their choice and what it is.

That's their job.

And yet...

Which of the 80 federal entitlement programs does Frederica Wilson or Joe Garcia want to seriously reform in order to avoid the fiscal cliff?

http://www.nationaljournal.com/blogs/influencealley/2012/11/boehner-calls-fiscal-cliff-progress-disappointing--29

To repeat Charles Krauthammer in his Washington Post column titled, Cliff-jumping with Barack:

Where are the spending cuts, both discretionary and entitlement: Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare (the health-care trio) and Social Security?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-cliff-jumping-with-barack/2012/11/29/6ddd39f8-3a5f-11e2-8a97-363b0f9a0ab3_story.html

I can't tell you that now because the very people in the best position to actually find out, the South Florida news media, don't want to ask, in large part I suspect because they really don't care. But I do.

If only I could bolster my argument by linking to a single example of this. 
Oh, okay, here are eight examples of that media obliviousness, courtesy(!) of the McClatchy Company's Miami Herald.

Is that enough for you?

FL-17 Frederica Wilson

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Frederica+Wilson

FL-18 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Ileana+Ros-Lehtinen

FL-19 Ted Deutch

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Ted+Deutch

FL-20 Debbie Wasserman Schultz

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Debbie+Wasserman+Schultz+

FL-21 Mario Diaz-Balart

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Mario+Diaz-Balart

FL-22 Congressman-Elect Patrick Murphy

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Patrick+Murphy

FL-23 Alcee Hastings

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=%22Alcee+Hastings%22

Bonus:  http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2012/05/alcee_hastings_complains_about.html

FL-25 Congressman-Elect Joe Garcia

http://www.miamiherald.com/search_results?aff=1100&q=Joe+Garcia

Mitt Romney's summer of discontent: GOP discontent with the message AND the messenger 17 weeks before the election: "He wants to stick to biography. It's not enough." Romney's political instincts are increasingly seen as tone-deaf & defensive, not proactive

Journal Editorial Report on Fox News Channel, July 7, 2012. "Romney's tax confusion." Host: David Asman. Romney's faltering response to SCOTUS ruling on Obamacare over whether mandate is a middle-class tax increase or penalty has GOP activists concerned that the campaign is not nearly as savvy as it ought to be, and his jet-skiing on holiday in front of photographers has many saying his political instincts are tone-deaf, esp. when it comes to his family. Guests: James Freeman, assistant editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and Mary O'Grady, member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/07/wsj_the_problem_with_romneys_campaign_is_mitt_romney.html
http://video.foxnews.com/v/1725168420001/


Mitt Romney's summer of discontent: GOP discontent with the message AND the messenger 17 weeks before the election: "He wants to stick to biography. It's not enough." Romney's political instincts are increasingly seen as tone-deaf & defensive, not proactive


Of course, a lot of these sorts of points also apply to South Florida pols.



George F. Will: Mitt Romney "Can't Get To The Presidency Running Out The Clock"
ABC News "This Week", July 8, 2012.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/08/george_will_romney_cant_get_to_the_presidency_running_out_the_clock.html


Charles Krauthammer: Mitt Romney "Hasn't Been Ideological Enough"
FOX News "Special Report", July 6, 2012.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/07/krauthammer_romney_hasnt_been_ideological_enough.html

Syria bleeds while dithering O 'condemns' -Charles Krauthammer calls out Obama's ineffectual foreign policy on Syria that's unsatisfactory to GOP, Democrats AND our overseas allies

Above, the segment that Channel 4 News in Sweden ran this morning on Syria, as the United States continues "to condemn."
How's that working out so far?
It’s time for President Obama to back up his rhetoric with firm action.




The Washington Post
While Syria burns
By Charles Krauthammer
Published: April 26, 2012

Last year President Obama ordered U.S. intervention in Libya under the grand new doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” Moammar Gaddafi was threatening a massacre in Benghazi. To stand by and do nothing “would have been a betrayal of who we are,” explained the president.

In the year since, the government of Syria has more than threatened massacres. It has carried them out. Nothing hypothetical about the disappearances, executions, indiscriminate shelling of populated neighborhoods. More than 9,000 are dead.

Read the rest of the column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/while-syria-burns/2012/04/26/gIQAQUC0jT_story.html


-----
For more on Obama's failed foreign policy re Syria, see my previous posts on the subject:


April 29, 2011 blog post titled, Marco Rubio is crystal clear in Foreign Policy magazine - "How America Must Respond to the Massacre in Syria
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/marco-rubio-is-crystal-clear-in-foreign.html


March 20, 2011 titled, Marco Rubio on dithering O: “So if Russia doesn’t care and China doesn’t care and we care but won’t do anything about it, who’s it up to, the French?
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/marco-rubio-on-dithering-o-so-if-russia.html


It's completely impossible for me or any of my like-minded friends to think of any time since he's been in the U.S. Senate when 'nice guy' Bill Nelson has said anything nearly as pointed or effectively as what Rubio has done repeatedly on Syria since last year.


My vote for Senate will be FOR people with similar intelligent and articulate views and AGAINST someone who wants to be a U.S. Senator because they think it would be cool.
That completely eliminates Connie Mack IV and puts George LeMieux back in the U.S. Senate.


-----
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/


http://www.foreignaffairs.com/


http://www.youtube.com/user/SenatorMarcoRubio


http://www.heritage.org/

"A lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence." That would be us. No, not Dolphins fans or Hallandale Beach, but humans. Classic Charles Krauthammer!

"A lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence." 
That would be us. 
No, not Dolphins fans or Hallandale Beach, but humans. 
Classic Charles Krauthammer!


The Fermi Paradox and Goldilocks in one column?
Charles Krauthammer zings us out of our post-Christmas/holiday blues -sorta!


But if what Charles Krauthammer says is true about intelligent life in the universe, does this also mean that for many single people who've been looking for a serious long-term relationship, for some of them, despite what they and their friends have convinced them of otherwise, there really is no "special somebody" or future "significant other" out there, just waiting for fate to intervene?


Just an empty universe?
That's too depressing to even think about!  


Which is why they make films like New Year's Eve, to fool us into believing something that, maybe, isn't there.
And why there are TV marathons this time of the year:




The Washington Post
Are we alone in the universe?
By Charles Krauthammer
December 29, 2011

Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large.

Read the rest of the column at: 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-we-alone-in-the-universe/2011/12/29/gIQA2wSOPP_story.html





The Wrap

63 TV Marathons for New Year's Eve Weekend (Including Every Episode of 'The Walking Dead') 
By Kimberly Potts
Published: December 30, 2011 @ 2:23 pm 
http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/62-tv-marathons-new-years-eve-weekend-including-every-episode-walking-dead-33967




Charles Krauthammer columns at The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/charles-krauthammer/2011/02/24/ADJkW7B_page.html


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Charles Krauthammer's analysis of Obama's ineffective & wrong-headed foreign policy; Blue Valentine's Michelle Williams as Jean Seberg? A big YES!

My comments follow the excellent column by Charles Krauthammer.

----------
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/20/AR2010052003885.html

The fruits of weakness

By Charles Krauthammer
May 21, 2010

It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.

It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.

They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).

They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the United States and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."

They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chávez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.

Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)

Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the United States retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.

-----

So, did you happen to notice as I did whose name is NOT mentioned at all above: Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, who has helped make this foreign policy embarrassment possible.
Sh-h-h!!!
Keep it to yourself, so the MSM can maintain their prohibition on public criticism of her a little longer.

Here's an actual Saturday headline from Reuters:

Clinton avoids China disputes, hands out teddy bears

And if you think that headline is bad, wait 'til you read the first paragraph: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64L0X020100522

(Reuters) - Secretary of State Hillary Clinton passed out teddy bears to Chinese children as she toured the Shanghai World Expo on Saturday and carefully skirted the United States' many policy disputes with China...

Reading some truly bracing criticism like Charles Krauthammer's reminds me of two things: why I voted against Obama in the first place, as well as that I'm not the only American who's been noticing all these negative things happening with American foreign policy under Obama.

As Krauthammer correctly notes, seeing Obama perform this way -intentionally- only increases pressure on other countries we consider allies to make their own side deals.

For years under Bush 43, the MSM constantly spoke about how unpopular the image of the U.S. was becoming overseas, as if that was really something we needed to either lose sleep about or could change.

Living in the Washington area at the time, one could hardly ever get on the Metro train in the morning without at some point hearing some rider who was no fan of Bush complaining out loud to someone that Bush was personally responsible for how unpopular the U.S. was over in, well, for example, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

The Mouse that Roared

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7L7WLFBYR4

In this one-sided PR game where the point was never to ask any hard questions about the methodology of such polls, you never heard of corresponding polls of Americans on what they thought about the various government policies of France or Germany or whomever, but every other month brought forth some anecdotal news about what Greece thought about the U.S.

Question: Sixteen months later, can you name a single country where the U.S. is now MORE respected than it was before his inauguration?
Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

Funny that the same folks who said that Obama could be the foreign policy cure for Bush 43 haven't publicly acknowledged that the reality is that that he has only made our allies MORE nervous, NOT our legitimate adversaries.

-----

By the way, you'll notice in that trailer I included above of the The Mouse that Roared, a few shots of the beautiful Jean Seberg, whom I had, of course, read much about, but first became genuinely aware of thru showings of Bonjour Tristesse and Breathless at the National Gallery of Art's film series on French New Wave directors, one of the most interesting summers of my film-going life, with weekends spent alternating between Camden Yards and
the NGA, depending on whether or not I had Oriole tickets for a game.
http://www.nga.gov/programs/film/


From the first time I ever saw actress Michelle Williams, in Dawson's Creek and then Dick with Kirstin Dunst, I was absolutely convinced that if I could ever have anything to do with it, I'd do everything in my power to convince her to be in a well-written bio-pic on Seberg's interesting yet very tragic life.

Williams, currently starring in Blue Valentine, could do wonders with that role and win an Oscar.
Michelle Williams is scary talented, it's just that her attractiveness often disarms you into
forgetting how terrific an actress she truly is -one of the best around.

Jean Seberg http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0781029/
Michelle Williams http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0931329/

From last week in Cannes, with Ryan Gosling promoting Blue Valentine: http://www.popsugar.com/Photos-Michelle-Williams-Ryan-Gosling-Promoting-Blue-Valentine-Cannes-8496257

Sundance: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams show you what acting is all about in the wrenching 'Blue Valentine'
by Owen Gleiberman
http://movie-critics.ew.com/2010/01/26/the-wrenching-blue-valentine/

Cannes 2010: The Euros love 'Blue Valentine' like Nutella; Sony Classics makes this not just another year
May 18, 2010
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/05/cannes-blue-valentine-another-year-mike-leigh.html

See also: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7FD6EARmLg



http://media.michelle-williams.net/videos/load/recent