We closed on our house in Pittsburg this week. It's been a long, frustrating, head-scratching, expensive and annoying process. It feels inadequate to say it is be a relief to be done with that. I'll miss Pittsburg a lot. We're also under contract on a house in Liberty later this month and have already purchased a new sofa/couch/mattress/frame/fridge. Things will be very different in our family come March.
Blurred Lines
A good way to turn an issue into a non-issue is to confuse people. If it sounds like a he-said, he-said, then often people call it a tie and move on from the issue. Better yet, "the media" makes a nice scapegoat to move things into the he-said, he-said realm. Often, "the media" is afraid to push back on accusations by campaigns, even when what they say is downright stupid. Often, the issue isn't a he-said, he-said, but really just someone lying.
Take, for instance, Ted Cruz, who was accused by the Ben Carson campaign of lying just minutes before the Iowa caucus. The Cruz campaign sent out an email that Ben Carson was going home to Florida after the caucus (true) and was planning a big announcement next week (not true). The truth is that Carson flew home Tuesday, then went back to the campaign Wednesday. The original CNN report only said he wasn't flying straight to New Hampshire or South Carolina. In fact, the original report said that Carson was staying in the race.
Even in his apology, Cruz continued to misinterpret the very CNN report his campaign used, claiming that CNN said Carson wasn't going to resume his campaign in either New Hampshire or South Carolina (not true). Further, Cruz said they should have THEN spread the news that Carson was going to remain in the race once it broke that Carson would remain in the campaign. He said that "CNN got it correct" while blaming them for confusion. CNN did get it right. But Cruz's campaign didn't. He said his campaign passed on news that was relevant, "true and accurate." That's wrong. Cruz was caught in a lie that he is attempting to blame on CNN.
But CNN isn't totally innocent. Thursday morning, the headline at the top of their website was "Cruz: 'CNN got it correct'". Yes, CNN got it right, but it's not until three paragraphs into that article that there's a link to a story that Cruz's claims about CNN are false. Effectively, CNN gave high-profile position to Cruz's incorrect claims, but low-profile position to a fact-check of those claims.
I paid attention to see when CNN would change their positioning. Late Friday and over the weekend, CNN changed headlines and positioning to highlight that Cruz was lying and wrong. But why did it take a day and a half? Cruz had a whole news cycle before he got called out on it.
What's the Matter with Kansas?
I had something else written here, but the Kansas Supreme Court's ruling on school finance was too important to forget. In short, they ruled the Kansas Legislature isn't funding small schools fairly compared to big schools. They also gave the Legislature until June 30 to fix it, or else. And the "or else" has teeth: Schools would not be able to open in the fall. What most of the stories coming out on this issue will miss is that school finance rulings are on two issues: equity (is it fair to the small districts?) and adequacy (is it constitutionally enough?). Today's ruling is ONLY on equity, the smaller of the two issues. It's a $50 million fix. The bigger issue is adequacy, and hasn't been decided yet. That's a hundreds of millions of dollars fix. The schools won today, which is important, but it's only the tip of the iceberg to what's really at stake.
Poll Weasels
This headline and story by Fox News is curious. You can see the work being put in to make things look worse for Hillary Clinton. The story says that according to two national polls, Bernie Sanders is closing the gap with Clinton. The first nine paragraphs are all about these two polls and how bad they are for Clinton. However, the 10th paragraph amounts to this: A third poll shows she's still got a huge lead, but we won't talk about that. Then it goes back to talking about the first two polls. There are two interpretations of this. 1) Fox News doesn't trust the Rasmussen poll or 2) "She's losing her lead!" is the narrative they wanted to tell. If 1) were true, a responsible journalism operation would explain why the Rasmussen poll is ignored. Since they didn't, that leaves option 2. Writing a story around a narrative is bad journalism. The story should be your guide.
Summary Judgments
Donald Trump has tweeted and said insults about people in the vein of "I refuse to say these terrible things... even though I'm verbalizing them." Donald, I refuse to say you're a vacuous, narcissistic chauvinist who can't discuss real policy without staring at your notes. Instead, I'll just say you're an awful person. See? I didn't say those other things! • • • Oh, Meryl Streep. We're not all Africans, really. Maybe we were a long, long time ago... but I think enough time has passed that we can move on. • • • We haven't been getting much uninterrupted sleep lately because the kids are getting their canine teeth. Evie's is funny, however, because she hasn't got her top incisors yet. So she's got two teeth on her bottom gums, and then her two top canines. She's practically getting fangs, the poor thing.
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