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Originally Posted by tecoyah
This post is a copy of something I just wrote in GD...but I would like opinions:
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Sounds like "dumbing it down", to me....and it both vindicates and further encourages the practitioners of the art of the "drive by, one liner". It's a biiiigggg INTERNET.....so, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to live in a time of unprecedented "information availability at our fingertips".
Even with that opportunity, we observe that a sizeable portion of the posters on the politics thread eschew obtaining their sources of information from the established "news media", from sources of original quotes, and from webpages as relevant and unequivocal as "whitehouse.gov".
Instead, they obtain the information that "helps" them to "know what they know", from websites that "filter" the news of the day, "for" them.
A half hour review of existing threads on the politics forum, tecoyah, will leave anyone who samples the content of the actual "discussion" agreeing that those posters who regularly disagree with my opinions, for example, more often than not, refuse to post links to webpages supporting their key points.
The reason I think this is so, is because, although they continue to obtain their opinion shaping information from the same websites they are in the habit of obtaining it from, they are increasingly reluctant to admit it. Could it be because linked quotes of the POTUS, the VP, or their press secretary, from pages at whitehouse.gov, trump linked quotes from "news articles" from frontpagemag.com, or from Rev. Moon's washingtontimes.com?
We live in an age with unprecedented "info at our fingertips", yes! We also live, because of this, in a time with unprecedented risk of confusion. The best example I can come up with is here:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...0&postcount=20
PLEASE give it a read. The post documents the "ridiculousness" of this:
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Bloomberg Moves Closer to Running for President
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: December 31, 2007
.....Former Senator David L. Boren of Oklahoma, who organized the session with former Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat of Georgia, suggested in an interview that if the prospective major party nominees failed within two months to formally embrace bipartisanship and address the fundamental challenges facing the nation, "I would be among those who would urge Mr. Bloomberg to very seriously consider running for president as an independent."....
Bipartisan Group Eyes Independent Bid
First, Main Candidates Urged To Plan 'Unity' Government
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 30, 2007; Page A04
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a potential independent candidate for president, has scheduled a meeting next week with a dozen leading Democrats and Republicans, who will join him in challenging the major-party contenders to spell out their plans for forming a "government of national unity" to end the gridlock in Washington.....
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<h3>Considering the "seemingly" savvy, "bi-partisan", political "insiders", named in the two "articles", are attempting to pass Bloomberg, who has said and done the following, as a "unifier", a bipartisan "standard bearer":</h3>
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....Bloomberg, in fact, identifies strongly with the defeated Democrat from Connecticut. "I think what they're doing to Joe Lieberman is a disgrace," the mayor volunteered when I met with him in his offices in July, shortly before anti-war bloggers helped Ned Lamont beat Lieberman in the primary. . . . A few days later, Bloomberg was offering to campaign for Lieberman.....
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Mayor Mute
Bloomberg gives Bush a four-year pass at city's expense
by Wayne Barrett
October 18th, 2005 11:05 AM
...Even though the City Council passed a resolution opposing the war, Bloomberg called an old friend, Paul Wolfowitz, to express his desire to host a ticker tape parade "to say thank you," apparently as unaware as the "Mission Accomplished" president that the troops would not be coming home for years. Bloomberg actually contributed $5 million to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Affairs in the late '90s, when war architect Wolfowitz was dean. . . .
Even before the war, Bloomberg brought his mother and daughter to the United Nations, where he addressed the General Assembly a day after Bush did in September 2002. Echoing Bush's warnings that the U.S. would go it alone if the U.N. didn't act, Bloomberg "praised" Bush's war on terror "and offered support for an attack on Iraq," according to the Daily News....
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Bloomberg, Looking to Convention, Restrains Cheer for Bush
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: January 29, 2004
...We are going to get George W. Bush re-elected as president of the United States! We are going to carry New York City and New York State. Everybody thinks I'm crazy, but I think we can do it...
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I think, in a time when a neocon like Michael Bloomberg, a man who has amassed a $5 billion personal fortune on Wall Street, a man who switched from being a lifelong democrat, in 2000, to position himself to "buy", with $70 million from his personal fortune, the republican nomination for mayor of NYC, who spent even more of his money to achieve reelection, and who has recently switched again, from republican to independent party affiliation, to better "position" himself for a possible 2008 presidentail run, can be "foisted" on the rest of us, by experienced former holders of high elected office, who should effing KNOW BETTER......as a "unifier", the "solution" for "improving" the politics forum at TFP, is most definitely NOT what you are proposing.
Complicated political times, an unprecedented plethora of available information, and my example of the above group of "esteemed bi-partisan" luminaries, attempting to preserve the political "status quo", by giving us the neocon "unity" candidate, Bloomberg, and the response here at TFP is to LIMIT, drastically, it sounds like, what each of us, can in the future, include in a post on a politics forum thread.