Closing Your Digital Blinds

Pragmatic Left is hosted on Blogger which is a Google property.  With news breaking today that Google is among the (numerous) participants in a massive NSA data mining and intelligence gathering operation known as PRISM I'd just like to take a moment to give a shout-out to all my readers over at Fort Meade.

But before everyone freaks out about the NSA spying on their Gmail accounts and their Microsoft cloud services I'd like to ask a provocative question: what's the big deal?

We Are All Journalists

Among the things Congress is presently squabbling over is a new media shield law which would serve to help protect journalists and their ability to conceal sources from government.  Of course, "journalist" is a term that's up for grabs these days.  As Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) put it "Who is a journalist is a question we need to ask ourselves.  Is any blogger out there saying anything—do they deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times."

I'll spot Graham the short-hand on the First Amendment.  Obviously Bloggers are entitled to the free exercise of religion and the right to peaceably speak and assemble.  What Graham is speaking to specifically is the question of what defines "the press."  Are bloggers "press" or just malcontents with keyboards?  Where -- or even can -- we draw a line between speech and journalism in our modern world?

Those who try to do so are missing the point.

A Legacy That Costs Lives

I simply can not imagine that the GOP's resistance to the Obamacare Medicaid expansion won't cost them dearly.  In very short order we'll see major difference in the cost of care between the states that implemented the expansion and those that resisted it.  This is a Republican legacy that's going to cost lives.

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The Gift That Keeps On Giving

The Republican Party needs to do something about immigration reform.  By "needs to do something" I mean that if the GOP fails to make meaningful progress on issues of importance to the Latino community it is never going to win another Presidential election again.

Ever.

So Democrats have to got to be thrilled beyond measure to hear that not only is the GOP unable to find a middle ground on the issue that they can live with but that the sticking point is, as someone familiar with the recent history of the party might expect, predictably insane.  From ABC News:

The stumbling block is GOP insistence that newly legalized workers now working in the shadows have no access to government-sponsored health care during their 15-year pathway to citizenship, according to two sources with access to the secret house “Gang of 8″ meetings.

Yep.  Obamacare.  It's the political gift that keeps on giving.

Speculation

I have been struggling with what to say about the Boston Marathon Bombings for the last couple days.  For most Americans the bombings came on "Tax Day," though, if you're a Bostonian you might have thought of Monday as "Patriot's Day," the annual observation of the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

But I am not a Bostonian; I live in the New River Valley and for me April 15th will forever be "the day before the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings."  When those shootings happened in 2007 I was writing for Newsvine and I provided a moment by moment account of what we were learning as we learned it: I camped onto every local news station in the area; listened to police scanner feeds; called friends who were on campus; checked little known web-cameras; and basically did everything within my power (from within my locked-down office building) to work out, for people scattered all over the country, many of whom were trying to figure out if their sons and daughters were alive, what was going on.

I did my best to verify things before posting them but even as close to the events as I was the media echo chamber distorted a lot of what I was hearing and I was, eventually, forced to retract several things I'd previously asserted as true.

That was in 2007; things move much faster now.

There Are No Accidental Racists

As a college educated liberal raised by two liberal midwestern professors, I have a confession to make: I rather like Brad Paisley. His music is twangy and rockabilly and kind of terrible but in an oddly afable way that seems to go well with warm summer nights here in south western Virginia.

But his latest album's big track, "Accidental Racist" is just rage-inducingly awful.  Paisley's balad in the key of "whining about being a white guy" tells the tale of him walking into a Starbucks with a Confederate Flag t-shirt and how he's bitter that everyone treats him like a bigot.  It also features L.L. Cool J rapping over-top of the latter half of the song in an attempt to validate Paisley's complaint which, while laiden with its own cringe-worthy lyrics and false equivalencies, at least serves to make the track sound a little more like a Confederate apologists' wet dream and a little less like a Klan anthem.

But back to that confederate flag t-shirt.

No Bad Ruling

Now that the Supreme Court has listened to the arguments over not one but two same-sex-marriage cases it'll be a few weeks before it delivers a ruling. When the Court does so it can essentially deliver one of three verdicts and while a lot of folks are going to be in pins and needles until the Court makes its decision, there is really no decision this Court can make which will mean anything bad for either marriage proponents or the left writ-large.  In broad strokes, the Court can do one of three things.