WARNING PERSONAL OPINION AND POLITICS

I listen to the radio to and from work and try to listen mainly to news…unfortunately…news is hard to find.  What I do hear concerns me a fair bit.

Spin

What bothers me is people who believe that Talk Radio is news or that Talk Radio gives the straight news.  The “No Spin” zone, had a lot of spin.  For full disclosure, I consider myself center left but certainly also like the concept of fiscal discipline.  Such a thing is possible, or at least, I hope it to be so.

In particular, these days I am concerned about extreme spin.  It seems like words like communist, comparisons to Hitler and Stalin, etc are very much in vogue.  Two of the biggest culprits in this are Glen Beck and Michael Savage.

Today I heard Glen Beck go off on a comment made in speech to a group of gifted 12 year olds.  I am guessing the speaker was Al Gore from Glen’s comments but can’t be sure.  Apparently, the speaker said something like: “You know things that your parents don’t know”, and Glen responded by drawing analogies to the Hitler youth movement and that our kids are being taught to disregard their parents.  He even played part of the speech to illustrate his point.  I was decidedly unimpressed, Kids do know things that there parents don’t or have forgotten

• Optimism
• Hope
• openness

I would guess my nephews certainly know more about MySpace, twitter, and some other topics that I know very little of.  More-over, I think the speaker was coming from a good place and think that Glen took the comment in a very extreme direction.

Savage does the same thing all the time.  Most recently I had him go off against a politician who was trying to put controls on Talk Radio.  I buy his argument that she was being partisan and do think she was guilty of some level of spin in hiding her intent behind the concept of standards (which I would agree too, how about a rule that prohibited from opinion shows calling themselves news show, probably would not work but is intriguing).  However, he went extreme in his response and certainly set a low bar by calling her the “Beast from Michigan”.  That is just not appropriate.

Bailout

I am not a big fan of the bailout.  I understand how difficult it is to not do anything, especially to the people who just lost their jobs but I am not optimistic that we can spend our way out.  Certainly there has been no fiscal discipline for the last 8 years, so I am not adverse to some stimulus plan but have some major concerns:

• The Tarp was huge at ~700 billion.  Unfortunately, anything less than this appears to be considered chump change. 
• The concept with aligning the Presidents agenda with the need to do stimulus is a good one, but it falls apart if taken to the point where every democratic program is now a stimulus.  Obama should be very aggressive in keeping the stimulus as lean and as targeted as possible.  I am getting the impression this is not happening.
• Nancy Pelosi appears to be extremely partisan.  Perhaps this makes her a good match against her republican counterparts but not the type of person I wish was in power.  To me she comes across as business as usual and I wish there was a way for voters to send her a message that this is not what they want.
• What is the success criteria, or more importantly, how long do we wait before further action is deemed necessary.  My fear is that we will just continue doing more and more stimulus which will create more and more debt…