Midday Open Thread – This Week’s Important Tidbits In Politics (VIDEO)

Egberto Willies

11 years ago

RNC votes to ban NBC and CNN from the 2016 primary presidential debates.

The Republican National Committee formally decided Friday not to partner with CNN and NBC News for any presidential primary debates during the 2016 election cycle, a rebuke of the networks’ plans to air programs about Hillary Rodham Clinton and an attempt to seize more control of a crucial element of modern-day campaigns.
Stace Medellin figures out the real reason for the RNC ban on CNN & NBC.

The ban on CNN and NBC extends to their Spanish-language networks, CNN en Espanol and Telemundo, leaving the party with only one major Spanish-language broadcaster, Univision, to partner with on officially sanctioned debates.
President Obama pledges to ensure healthcare work..

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The jockeying for the presidency has begun.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, among others, are hewing closely to the scripted chores of soon-to-runs. Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are among those coming out with a book, almost a perquisite these days, while otherwise diverting from the usual path of preparation, for reasons that make strategic sense for them (and, you never know, could merely reflect indecision). …

Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana say it’s crazy to be preparing for a campaign this soon.

If so, then Christie, Jindal and the whole lot of them are crazy.
Krugman wants you to hammer this truth into every Republican, every Democrat, every American’s head; the deficit is shrinking at a faster rate in decades. It is not rising.

I wondered on my blog what a similar survey would show today, with the deficit falling even faster than it did in the 1990s. Ask and ye shall receive: Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, offered to run a Google Consumer Survey — a service the company normally sells to market researchers — on the question. So we asked whether the deficit has gone up or down since January 2010. And the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot.

Am I saying that voters are stupid? Not at all. People have lives, jobs, children to raise. They’re not going to sit down with Congressional Budget Office reports. Instead, they rely on what they hear from authority figures. The problem is that much of what they hear is misleading if not outright false. …
Hillary Clinton speaks. The 2016 speculation begins.

Hillary Clinton has said she is in no hurry to decide whether she’ll seek the White House. But the former secretary of state, first lady and senator stokes the assumption that she’s in the game for a second time with every move she makes.

Such status raises a question: how much time does someone in her position want to spend in the limelight at such an early stage and with no indication she will even run?
Bernie Sanders humiliates climate change deniers. This is a month old but worth a look.

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MediaMatters: The Economic Ignorance Of Fox’s Business Block

You probably don’t spend your Saturday mornings watching Fox News, but if you do, you know that they have a two-hour block of business programming called, amusingly, “The Cost Of Freedom.” It features primarily C-list Fox Hosts and D-list pundits extolling the virtues of an unfettered free market and sneeringly contemptuously at every non-military government program. The one prerequisite for appearing on Fox’s business block is that you have no real understanding of how the economy works. This morning’s edition of Cashin’ In and its discussion of poverty and government safety net programs demonstrated quite ably that Fox’s business pundits have really no idea what they’re talking about.