Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

the *real* liberal media is grossly inept because it's either trying to earn brownie points with people that those people that might be registered Democrat, but consider themselves 'moderates' and split down the middle on issues.

say what you want about the right, but one thing they've never had a problem with is saying 'fuck it' and broadcasting their shitty platforms without watering them down. our liberal talking heads will partake in the mudslinging, but they always court that audience of idiots who believe "the truth lies somewhere in the middle".

most of my Democrat friends are probably actually right of center if you were to boil down where they fell on issues.

would a prize be commensurate with the billions in profits earned from patents and monopolies? Serious question.
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

the reform to patent laws would also presumably leave existing patents grandfathered so the plan to drag down costs of treatment (for the immediate term at least) relies on the government's ability to negotiate corporate pharma to reduce the cost to the consumer. or am i way off base?

say what you want about the right, but one thing they've never had a problem with is saying 'fuck it' and broadcasting their shitty platforms without watering them down.

you know their big reactionaries say the same exact thing

NPR is just corporate media w a "liberal" sheen

http://images.publicradio.org/content/2012/10/24/20121024_cokie-roberts_33.jpg

NPR is just corporate media w a "liberal" sheen

wtf does that mean

dick_nixon goes long

"Trump and Sanders understand that winning is making others believe in the devil."

Hillary Clinton "plays a grandmother—at best, a school principal—when America wants a hangman... Tone-deaf, crippled, insensitive, overmatched, and politically stupid. And that's this week."

http://mashable.com/2016/03/13/dick-nixon-angry-america/#xiS6fLpXbPq1

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/12/17/PieChart_01_2015-01_custom-3ec10bd89b469c991bb411857757654d6a14a077-s800-c85.jpg

what the left really needs is a Cyrano de Bergerac type campaign where some badass left-leaning comedian runs and is fed his political dialogue off-stage from like a Bernie Sanders type fellow, while he can fling zingers at the other candidate during lapses in dialogue.

so what it means is that it gets 19% of its funding from corporations as opposed to 34% from individuals? xp

dick_nixon goes long

per this BBC article from 2014

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223

On average, only three in 10 drugs launched are profitable, with one of those going on to be a blockbuster with $1bn-plus revenues a year. Many more do not even make it to market.

what the left really needs is a Cyrano de Bergerac type campaign where some badass left-leaning comedian runs and is fed his political dialogue off-stage from like a Bernie Sanders type fellow, while he can fling zingers at the other candidate during lapses in dialogue reagan

lol. good point

perhaps what the left needs is Dick Gregory

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/13/436334/-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UofbZVTIYMU

remarks on george wallace pretty familiar!

"Once I accept injustice, I become injustice. For example, paper mills give off a terrible stench. But the people who work there, don't smell it. Remember, Dr. King was assassinated when he went to work for garbage collectors. To help them as workers to enforce their rights. They couldn't smell the stench of the garbage all around them anymore. They were used to it. They would eat their lunch out of a brown bag sitting on the garbage truck. One day, a worker was sitting inside the back of the truck on top of the garbage, and got crushed to death because no one knew he was there."

damn - and that was from 3 years ago!

so what it means is that it gets 19% of its funding from corporations as opposed to 34% from individuals? xp

that is 53% from private sources. it means they tote the standard pro-corporate and pro-state power line. look to how in 2009 they banned the use of the word "torture". during the health care debates i recall zero stories taking a serious look at a public option. NPR is useful to the right as a boogieman and that's why people think they are leftist but in truth they are FOX News for the yoga crowd.

so drug patents expire 20 yrs after filing and i saw some sources say it can take 8-10 years for drugs to get fda approval so that leaves 10-12 years of $1bn+ revenues before much of the drug value is eroded by generics. I

speaking in terms of present value of future payments a successful drug looks like $7.5-9bn (assuming 5% interest and $0 revenue beyond the patent period) vs $3bn for the prize. obviously lots of stuff is at play there - is having that $3bn immediately more valuable for reinvestment purposes? is the company trying to sell that 10-12 yr stable cash flow to a hedge fund?

i guess the sanders plan could work in theory but im not sure without some non-voluntary component it flies w business

that is 53% from private sources. it means they tote the standard pro-corporate and pro-state power line. look to how in 2009 they banned the use of the word "torture". during the health care debates i recall zero stories taking a serious look at a public option. NPR is useful to the right as a boogieman and that's why people think they are leftist but in truth they are FOX News for the yoga crowd.

this is so dumb but i don't know what i expect

it means they tote the standard pro-corporate and pro-state power line. look to how in 2009 they banned the use of the word "torture". during the health care debates i recall zero stories taking a serious look at a public option. NPR is useful to the right as a boogieman and that's why people think they are leftist but in truth they are FOX News for the yoga crowd.

lol this formulation makes no sense

also - are the kind of labs that produce pharmaceuticals capable of being repulsed for a more profitable endeavor should the patent system be reformed to remove incentives for producing big dollar drugs as in the cutter the environment?

I am not a fan or regular listener of NPR but to say they advance the same ideology as FOX News is bizarre, unless you meant that they are the lefty equivalent of FOX news, but that doesn't make any sense either because that would imply that NPR actually does have a lefty agenda (analogous to FOX's righty agenda)

xp

Adam, do you think tonally and editorially NPR and FOX are similar? Do you think Sanders and Trump are similar too?

adam i don't remember where you live but my local NPR affiliate is always covering public interest stories - tons of original reporting about PA education, politics, environmental concerns. there have been huge attention paid to things like fracking and under-funded philly schools over the last few years. they are 100% a public service organization and if they sometimes do things you do not approve of (like not explicitly calling Trump an evil fascist on the air, or using a euphemism for torture when discussing water boarding) i imagine it has much more to do w/ their being a public institution and less to do w/ citibank demanding that they pledge fealty to the donald.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M_b4w3jb-E

(By the way, that chart slightly misleads by placing the "federal government" in a different bucket from "CPB and public broadcasting entities." It's not a problem from my POV, but the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is us - technically a nonprofit, but taxpayer-funded by congressional mandate.)

In the distant past (late 80s maybe), I regarded myself as a Serious Print Journalist. Even then, I don't think anybody truly believed in objectivity or neutrality; one was expected to try for at least the appearance of decorously attempted fairness.

These days I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to be neutral, or even how to seem neutral. But I know it doesn't mean that 50% of your articles make Democrats look bad and 50% of your articles make Republicans look bad. First of all, that's just stupid. Second of all, no one on earth will ever notice this false type of "balance," let alone praise you for it.

One can always fall back on quote-based reporting: Person X Said Thing Y. And fortunately, these days no one shuts up, ever, about anything. So matter what viewpoint you want to report as being out there, you can pretty much always find someone who has said it, no matter how unhinged. The resulting stories cannot be faulted, because the people really did say the things.

NPR will often bring two dissenting POVs which could basically be broken down to the right-wing position v. the left-wing position but I think that's a public service. As long as the neutrality means exposing listeners to a variety of opinions, I don't see the problem. Personally I appreciate hearing intelligent ppl with whom I disagree state their case (and get pushback from the interviewer or other guest).

There are plenty of people here who see Hillary Clinton as a right-wing politician, and if I saw Hillary Clinton as right-wing, surely I would see NPR as right-wing, too. (I don't.)

And remember, there are only two points of view on ANY topic. That's the American Way (TM)!

(also the MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour way inherited by most "public" media)

personally, i think that either sanders or clinton, having secured the democratic nomination, stands a strong chance to stop trump in november, though i don't consider either of them locks, and i will definitely support and vote for whichever candidate wins.

as for the two points of view on any topic, a lot of it is by design- american political parties were created in significant part to marginalize outsiders. clearly that system isn't working particularly efficiently right this second.

I'm off today, so I had a rare chance to check out how execrable the Diane Rehm show is and she came through! She and the Daily Caller guy and Kathleen Parker agreed Sanders and Trump are "exploiting" the "same phenomenon" of discontent.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 14, 2016 3:48 PM (1 hour ago)

i remember listening to this a few months back and being appalled to hear rehm's whole chorus of "experts" for the day jocularly ridicule the idea that the koch brothers have any significant say in our politics and insist that it's all about pluralism, etc etc. this show is basically only listenable if the subject isn't politics.

i thought rehm retired. maybe she just announced it?

@mtaibbi Matt Taibbi
The election is about to turn into a giant Jerry Springer episode, w/different camps throwing chairs at each other.

Avi Bueno
‏@JasperAvi
@mtaibbi You have no idea how literally true that is, since @marcorubio was just accused of stealing a NH man's gf:

https://twitter.com/JasperAvi/status/709411291593576448

that's the nicest thing anyone's said about marco rubio in months

read that as a NH man's gif

o/u on whether the girlfriend is actually a hollowed out pumpkin

this is kind of hilariously boring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftf-i5_qFpw

God help me, but the way Marco handled his heckler made me like him a little. Which is only the case because Trump, but still.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.html

^^ interesting but mistitled i think. this is where it gets interesting:

The 10 Variables Most Closely Linked to a County’s Support for Donald Trump
A correlation of 1 means the variable is a perfect indicator of Trump support.* Negative correlations are shown in red.

(For no good reason, in my head I call it the "Ream Diane Show.")

this is kind of hilariously boring

now eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs, on your, on your

wow @ christie as lickspittle interlocutor

wait -- a three-hour clip?

it's full.

xp No silly, it's only two hours long! But not a lot happens for the first hour - Trump and Christie come out past the hour mark, in the middle of Folsom Prison Blues.

lol:

"we win with evangelicals so big-league ... we won the evangelicals. we've been winning them all over. it's been amazing, the relationship. it's been-- well, i'm a good christian, i'll tell ya." [applause] "i'll tell ya. i'm a good christian. i'm a believer." [cheering]

adam i don't remember where you live

Atlanta, where we are blessed with identical NPR programming on two different FM frequencies ever since GPB ripped off a bunch of college students

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdhpIWXWAAA6la9.jpg