String Quartet in G Minor, 3rd movement – Andantino, doucement expressif – by Claude Debussy, performed here by the Emerson Quartet.
Despite having to study this piece for A-level music exams over a decade ago, I still very much enjoy hearing it. The CD recording by the Belcea quartet is also particularly good.
Apparently I’m not the only one with words of advice for CNN today.
Ramesh Ponnuru, writing at Bloomberg.com, believes that cable news “talking head” shows are getting a disproportionate share of the blame for the decline in the intellectual standard and civility of American political discourse, and that one way to redress the balance might be…to bring back “Crossfire”.
“Crossfire” is, of course, the show that Jon Stewart memorably mocked for “hurting America” with its adversarial, Left vs. Right format:
Ponnuru, however, makes a reasoned argument in favour of resurrecting the format:
By the time Stewart appeared on it to promote his book, the show had degenerated. At its height, though, it did a good job of sharpening political arguments. And the original format, to my mind, has never been bettered.
The show ran for half an hour and examined one question. There were two hosts: one liberal, one conservative, both opinion journalists rather than operatives for a political party. In the early 1990s, Michael Kinsley (now a Bloomberg View columnist) and Patrick Buchanan did the job. There were two guests, usually politicians or public-policy experts on each side of the debate. There was no studio audience.
Each of these features made “Crossfire” better. The one-subject rule made it impossible for the politicians to make it through the show on sound bites alone. That both hosts were journalists made for a fairer debate than the usual practice of today’s political shows, which put journalists up against political operatives.
This idea in its purest form would make a great format for actually getting to the rub of important issues. Spending a full thirty minutes debating an issue means that even the most cookie-cutter, by-the-book politician or political operative will soon run out of approved talking points and eventually have to speak freely based on their underlying core beliefs, better educating the public in the process.
The danger always comes, of course, when new gimmicks are included in an attempt to broaden the appeal of the show – in the case of “Crossfire”, the addition of a live studio audience significantly harmed the show, as hosts and guests alike started pursuing the soundbite that had previously been so successfully kept at bay in the show, in order to win a positive reaction from the audience:
It got worse, as well, when it added a studio audience. Hosts and guests alike now played to the crowd, which itself could add nothing more intelligent to the conversation than hoots and hollers.
Ponnuru concludes:
“Crossfire” was balanced by design, and I bet there would be an audience for it once again. Of course, I’m not a professional TV executive. Then again, the professional executives at CNN sank millions into “Parker Spitzer.” Maybe it’s worth listening to someone else.
If CNN is determined to maintain and consolidate the non-ideologically biased middle ground so thoroughly, depressingly vacated by Fox News and MSNBC, there could be worse ways to go about staging a comeback.
Politico reports on some of the cable news network’s more recent missteps:
Earlier today, CNN played an excerpt from Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” after a segment Monday on the shooting, prompting a familiar apology from the network just a week after it announced regret for playing Pink’s “Stupid Girls” ahead of a segment about Sarah Palin.
“We aired a song from a guest’s playlist on the morning show following a three-minute commercial break and before a segment on presidential politics, unrelated to the Wisconsin shooting,” the network said in a statement today. “Given the news of the day, this was regrettable and we apologize to our viewers.”
Here’s a radical idea.
Since CNN has probably already haemmoraged most of it’s wavering audience to Fox or MSNBC, why not quit catering to that tiny remaining sliver of their viewers who need their news to be lubricated with frequent doses of perky music, and just…y’know…report the news?
The world doesn’t need another Fox & Friends.
If you were out of work for a length of time and were told that you had to participate in a mandatory work experience placement as a requirement for receiving your unemployment benefits, would you:
1. Be grateful for the safety net that exists to support you, and comply with the programme, or
2. Take the government to court for enslaving you, citing the European Convention on Human Rights?
Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson both decided to opt for choice 2. According to The Telegraph:
Ms Reilly’s barrister told the High Court that the geology graduate’s stint at the Poundland near her home in Kings Heath, Birmingham, involved her carrying out “unpaid menial work”.
This consisted of very basic tasks such as sweeping and shelf-stacking “without training, supervision or remuneration”.
If indeed this is all that the work involved, this is disappointing as it breaches the terms by which the companies participate in the back-to-work schemes. In exchange for receiving free labour, the participating firms should ensure that they fulfil their obligations by providing a suitable induction, training and supervision. However, this is a reason to update and modify the scheme, not to abolish it altogether. The secondary benefits (keeping people in the habit of work during a period of unemployment, and providing additional labour to British companies so that they can generate further profits and employ more people) remain intact, even if the primary benefit was not realised in this case.
And it is hardly slavery.
Fortunately, the presiding judge agreed. The Telegraph gors on to report:
Mr Justice Foskett criticised the DWP for the lack of clarity over the potential loss of benefits to claimants who fail to take part in the schemes without good reason.
But addressing the issue of article four of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans forced labour and slavery, he said the schemes were “are a very long way removed from the kind of colonial exploitation of labour that led to the formulation of Article 4. “
“The Convention is, of course, a living instrument, capable of development to meet modern conditions, and views may reasonably differ about the merits of a scheme that requires individuals to ‘work for their benefits’ as a means of assisting them back into the workplace,” he added.
If the Department for Work and Pensions has not been crystal clear on the conditions for receiving benefits and the potential ways in which they could be forfeited, this needs to be remedied immediately.
However, the broader ruling, upholding the government’s back-to-work schemes, is very satisfactory indeed. Crying “slavery” and running to the European Convention on Human Rights because you dislike the “menial” work you are asked to do is overdramatic in the extreme, and does a disservice to the many people around the world who are in actual bondage, the victims of sex trafficking or any other kind of real slavery.
Not being able to watch Jeremy Kyle on television every morning while you balance a work placement with job searching ≠ modern day slavery.
It just doesn’t.
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Run for your lives! The Obama Jobs Sequester is coming!
The evil President Obama sneakily – and somehow avoiding the notice of Congress – inserted into a congressionally approved bill a provision that would make large, across-the-board cuts in domestic spending if Republicans and Democrats failed to work together to reach a grand bargain on spending, tackling tax revenues and federal spending in a unified and bipartisan way.
And now that congressional leaders have failed to agree on these items, the undiscriminatingly large cuts are about to fall on the federal budget, which will result in many lost jobs, particularly in the area of national defence, which is just terrible. And all because of Obama. Right?
At least that’s how Kimberley Strassel, writing in The Wall Street Journal, sees it:
A year ago, the president demanded a $500 billion “sequester” of defense dollars as a penalty should Congress fail to cut a grand debt deal. Congress of course failed, and Mr. Obama’s sequester is now imminent. The sequester slash comes on top of the $487 billion in defense cuts Mr. Obama had already ordered in January of this year, threatening the likes of Mansfield.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned of the damage the sequester will do to national security. Yet the far more immediate political problem for Mr. Obama is that the cuts are compounding his domestic jobs liability—in the final stretch of the campaign.
More than one million lost private-sector jobs, to get down to it, as estimated by groups ranging from the National Association of Manufacturers to the Aerospace Industries Association. Military jobs are on the block, but the bulk of the pink slips will come from private businesses—from giant defense companies on down to smaller businesses that are the economic mainstays of their communities. They’ll come from states crucial for President Obama’s re-election: Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and more.
So apparently, according to the Kimberley Strassel school of thought, what we should be doing in this recession is cutting government spending, because government doesn’t create jobs, entrepreneurs do. Unless that government spending is supporting jobs in the defence sector, of course, in which case we should be increasing it, dramatically!
Some more “moderate” Republicans argue that while they support cuts in principle, they are appalled by these looming defence cuts in particular because they are across-the-board and arbitrary, and pay little heed to particular defence programs or areas that could be more reasonably targetted for cutting. That’s the point of the sequester that they and their Democratic colleagues agreed to. It inflicts blind, undisciminating pain on areas of government spending precious to both sides of the political aisle, with the intention of presenting such an unthinkably draconian package of cuts that leaders would get together to forge a compromise.
If you don’t like the idea of a scythe being taken to defence spending or to welfare programmes without regard to their individual merit, get together, in the name of patriotism and bipartisanship, and for the sake of the people who elected you, and hammer out a compromise that cuts the welfare state while raising tax revenues to help close the massive hole in America’s federal budget.
Interestingly, you never hear Republicans making the same arguments against across-the-board cuts to welfare programmes, or social security, or food stamps. In those cases, apparently, it is fine to slash away at the budget with little regard for the people who were led to believe by their government (Republicans as much as Democrats) that certain benefits would be available to them, and who planned their lives accordingly, often with little left in reserve.
We can argue the rights and wrongs of this – personally I find the welfare state too generous, and politicians of all sides too cowardly in failing to tell voters the truth about the unsustainability of current levels of provision over the past recent decades – but surely we can all agree that just as you cannot rip a bandage from an open wound and expect the patient to be unharmed, so you cannot remove anticipated benefits or support from citizens overnight, at a time of economic hardship, and expect their lives, or the social fabric, to remain stable.
In fact, there is only one other area of government spending besides national defence that I can think of where Republicans have come out in outraged horror at the mere talk of blanket cutbacks – I’m speaking, of course, about Medicare. Those lofty words about scaling back federal spending and shrinking the size of government sure do fly out of the window awfully fast when one of their core constituencies (in this case, the grey vote) is in the firing line.
But Kimberley A. Strassel is not troubled by any of these arguments or contradictions, content instead to bob gently in the vast ocean of her own ignorance, wilful self-deception and cynically fiscally irresponsible propaganda.
No, for her it is the Obama Jobs Sequester, the Machiavellian outcome that he desired all along in order to gut his own nation’s capacity to defend itself. It’s the only plausible explanation for how we find ourselves in this situation. Unless it isn’t.
Semi-Partisan Politics 