he said / she said journalism and 2012 election . . .

The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog calls this "the cult of false equivalence" . . . somehow much more to the point than my own "balance" lines earlier . . . Dan Froomkin calls it How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign . . .

... according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.

Dan Froomkin's column has valuable links to Thomas Mann's and Norman Ornstein's work.

up there with the mona lisa . . . and the david too . . .

love you til I die . . .

balance . . .

too much is excess . . . not enough is unacceptable . . .

ed . . . my man . . .

fox hannity is an asshole . . . ed asner is a pisser . . .

"right to work" laws are anything but . . .

A "right to work" law does not provide work nor give workers any right other than free representation at the expense of their unionized coworkers. No state requires a worker to join a union to keep a job. In free bargaining states, people in union workplaces pay a fee to cover the direct costs of representing them. By creating such free-riders, RTW laws weaken union workers and provide employers additional power over workers. Follow the reasoning behind a 2011 briefing paper from the Economic Policy Institute:

Wages in right-to-work states are 3.2% lower than those in non-RTW states, after controlling for a full complement of individual demographic and socioeconomic variables as well as state macroeconomic indicators. Using the average wage in non-RTW states as the base ($22.11), the average full-time, full-year worker in an RTW state makes about $1,500 less annually than a similar worker in a non-RTW state.

moving on . . . casually enough . . .

made in usa . . .

They make and sell sweatshirts and tees in San Francisco . . .

omg . . .

HuffPost is reporting that Elizabeth Warren will have a seat on the banking committee!

wherefore reality . . .

It's becoming clearer - the President is overplaying his hand . . . he is attempting to pursue what he promised to pursue during the recent election . . . a clear sign to the right that he has gone overboard . . .