This is from last week, but remains on-point ~ Chuck Todd [who I used to like/trust] made the most asinine comment about a week ago that produced a firestorm of commentary ~ something along the lines of it's not the media's job to correct the "misinformation" being spewed about Obamacare ~ for me, that comment exposes the depths of media/journalism's corruption ~ OF COURSE IT'S THE MEDIA'S JOB ~ and, in my own view, the media/journalism's "false equivalency" reporting aids/abets/inflames the GOP/TPers and their "true believers" ~ ~ Sooz

Don’t fall prey to ‘both sides-ism’: Republicans are to blame for government shutdown
By Michael Cohen, The Guardian
Monday, September 30, 2013 15:36 EDT

There is a frustrating tendency in American political reporting to adopt a position of “both sides-ism” – as in, “both sides” are equally to blame for the nation’s chronic political dysfunction. Sometimes, it must be said, this assessment is correct. After all, the US political system was practically designed to breed legislative gridlock.

Not this time, however.

There is one party that is solely to blame for the first government shutdown in 17 years. And it’s the Republican party.

Indeed, the debate happening in Washington right now is not even between Democrats and Republicans. It’s not even about the deficit, or the budget, or government spending priorities. Rather, it is one strictly occurring between Republicans who are trying to find some magic bullet to destroy “Obamacare” – the country’s fiscal health be damned.

In the House of Representatives, bills that would allow the government to continue to operate were amended with provisions defunding or delaying Obamacare. This is, for Democrats, a nonstarter. The reason is obvious: the Affordable Care Act is the president’s signature achievement and he is not going to sign a bill that undoes or even delays it.

Nor should he. Obamacare is the law of the land. It was passed by Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the US supreme court, and it is already going into effect. There is no reason for President Obama to be cowed by such legislative extortion.

Yet, rather than accept the reality of Obamacare, Republicans are using the prospect of a government shutdown and/or a default on the nation’s debt to try to stop it.

In key respects, this dispiriting series of events is the logical conclusion of the Republican party’s descent into madness. The GOP has become a party dominated by a group of politicians who are fundamentally nihilistic, contemptuous of democracy and willing (even proud) to operate outside the long-accepted norms of American democracy.

In the US system of government, compromise is perhaps its most essential element. Republicans must work with Democrats; the House of Representatives must work with the Senate; and both bodies must find common ground with the president. It’s not always pretty, but it generally works.

The problem today is that the modern GOP thinks about compromise in the same way that imperial Japanese soldiers thought about surrender in the second world war. At least in defeat, Republicans can argue they fought to the last; but by compromising, they would be surrendering their principles.

That’s the only explanation for how members of the party can view the possibility of a government shutdown – or even worse, the catastrophe of debt default – as somehow a better option than reconciling themselves to the abomination that, bizarrely, they believe Obamacare to be.

Granted, this isn’t the view of all Republican office-holders – or even a majority. But it is the view of the party’s most extreme supporters, and today, it’s these individuals who are guiding the party’s leadership.

In fact, if the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, were to bring a clean budget bill to the House floor, with no provisions defunding or delaying Obamacare, it would almost certainly pass – with Democrats and Republicans joining together to support it. It would then get majority approval in the Senate and be signed by President Obama.

So, why hasn’t that happened yet? Because Boehner has pledged only to pass legislation that has the support of enough Republican members (unaided by Democrats) to be enacted. Since that is impossible right now, the government will shut down.

In the end, however, we have a pretty good sense of how this will turn out. The government will shut down for a few days, but perhaps more; and the US will come perilously close to a debt default. In the end, however, semi-sane Republicans will come to their senses, concede defeat and pass a budget resolution and debt limit extension with Democratic support.

That the US will have come to such a pass – for no reason other than the extremism of the Republican party – is an important reminder of who is blame for the governing dysfunction that has come to define the US democracy today.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/30/dont-fall-prey-to-both-sides-ism-republicans-are-to-blame-for-government-shutdown/

The WaPo editorial [which I'll post next] is a GIANT step in the right direction ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

Breaking the 'blame both sides' mold
By Steve Benen - Wed Oct 2, 2013 10:31 AM EDT

There's perhaps no greater arbiter of the Beltway conventional wisdom -- in all its frustrating, exasperating glory -- than the aggressively centrist Washington Post editorial board. It therefore did not come as a surprise over the weekend when the Post blamed "both sides" for the government shutdown -- Republicans for making ridiculous demands and Democrats for not leading more.

Today, the paper's editorial board apparently changed its mind.


Jay Rosen called it a "remarkable editorial," paraphrasing the Post's editors: "We'd like to blame both sides. We tried. We've blamed both sides before. But in this case..."

Outside the Beltway, this may seem like inside baseball, but it's worth appreciating the fact that it's editorials like these that end up reflecting and shaping the conventional wisdom.

Republicans will be more inclined to keep their shutdown going if they perceive the political winds at their backs. In other words, if GOP leaders believe they're "winning" some amorphous public-relations game, they'll keep playing it. But it's editorials like these that suggest they are clearly losing.

Part of the problem for Republicans is that no one can understand or even identify their rationale. Roll Call's Steven Dennis had a good tweet on this earlier:


This is no small detail. House Republicans are arguing this week that they couldn't possibly approve a stopgap spending bill that leaves the Affordable Care Act intact. But here's the key detail: they've already approved plenty of stopgap spending bills that leave the Affordable Care Act intact -- including one earlier this year -- without any fuss.

Democrats aren't asking Republicans to do anything different, or accept a compromise, or even to make some painful concession. They're asking Republicans to keep the lights on by doing what they've already done.

Even the laziest, most ardent "blame both sides" proponents are finding it difficult to see how to spread responsibility around evenly.

And for congressional Republicans, that's very bad news, indeed.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/10/02/20786777-breaking-the-blame-both-sides-mold

Here's the WaPo editorial ~ GAME, SET, AND MATCH! ~ ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information accessible via the end link ~ Sooz

The Post’s View
House Republicans are failing Americans in their effort to kill Obamacare
By Editorial Board, Published: October 1

AMERICANS’ RESPECT for their Congress has, sad to say, diminished in recent years. But citizens still expect a minimal level of competence and responsibility: Pay the bills and try not to embarrass us in front of the world.

By those minimal standards, this Congress is failing. More specifically, the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives are failing. They should fulfill their basic duties to the American people or make way for legislators who will.

We don’t come to that view as rabid partisans. On many of the issues stalemating Washington, we find plenty of blame to go around. We’ve criticized President Obama’s reluctance to pursue entitlement reform. The last time the country reached the debt ceiling, we urged both sides to compromise on revenue and spending in the interest of long-term fiscal soundness.

This time, fiscal responsibility isn’t even a topic. Instead, Republicans have shut much of the government in what they had to know was a doomed effort to derail the Affordable Care Act. That law, in case you've forgotten in the torrent of propaganda, is hardly revolutionary. It is an effort to extend health insurance to some of the 40 million or so people in this country who have none. It acts through the existing private-insurance market. Republicans tried to block its passage and failed; they hoped to have it declared unconstitutional and failed; and they did their best to toss Mr. Obama out of the White House after one term in order to strangle it in its cradle, and they failed again.

They’re entitled to keep trying, of course — though it would be nice if someday they remembered their promise to come up with an alternative proposal. But their methods now are beyond the pale.

After months of refusing to confer with the Senate on a budget proposal, they have demanded a conference committee to keep the government funded for six weeks. They are rejecting a budget extension that includes limits on federal spending — the so-called sequester — that they insisted on and that Democrats oppose. In a particularly shabby piece of faux populism, their final proposal Monday night included a measure to deprive congressional aides, many of whom earn considerably less than the esteemed members, of the subsidy to purchase health insurance that employers routinely provide.

That measure was emblematic of Republicans’ heedlessness of the impact of their actions on ordinary Americans and their government. Incoming FBI Director James B. Comey was stunned to discover that his agency has had to stop training recruits, close criminal cases and even deny gasoline money to agents because of budget cutbacks, as The Post’s Sari Horwitz reported. Now, with the shutdown, 800,000 workers are being furloughed, and thousands of others are being ordered to work but may not get paid. And these effects pale beside the economic havoc that would be caused by a failure to honor the government’s financial obligations, a prospect that looms just a couple of weeks ahead.

Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Budget Committee chairman and former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and their colleagues may be in a difficult political position. Honestly, we don’t much care. They need to reopen the government and let it pay its bills.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/house-republicans-are-failing-americans-in-their-effort-to-kill-obamacare/2013/10/01/49995ed0-2ab1-11e3-b139-029811dbb57f_story.html

If I remember correctly, Democrats came up with cuts in spending and small revenue increase. Republicans refused to consider any revenue increase.
Did the definition of compromise change?

IMO, reporting is exactly that - record and publish that which happens as it is presented.
If one wishes an analysis one consults op-eds.
If one wishes to "know the facts" one consults investigative reports.
Unfortunately, the MSM has become a mish-mash of all the above as a form of entertainment for mental midgets rather than a medium of information.