Tabloids: Backtracking on Egypt, wooing business, cuts for us

So, forget about the lofty milk toast promises made for Egypt’s people – they are now discarded

unlike the promises Obama makes to his real base

For the rest of us, there are always those cuts. The two parties race to make the most

And when he is cutting education, Bloomberg asks to pick and choose whom he fires. You don’t hate kids, do you?

Those wacky scientologists, probed by the FBI

and the battle for new domains,

,,

Mubarak loses, Mets in Madoff fraud

It seems Obama’s hesitations paid off – NOT! The dictator he propped will go anyway

In NYC, as the Madoff trials are ongoing, new enablers emerge

DUdies: DU is not cruel, so stop saying that!

Hope springs eternal

President Obama Needs to Speak Up NOW….

Journalists from all over the world are being arrested and their camera’s seized.

There’s a massive protest scheduled for Friday and it looks like Mubarak is planning a bloodbath TONIGHT (that’s NOW our time).

If this happens, President Obama will share the guilt UNLESS he intervenes strongly.

I don’t push the “It’s Obama’s Fault” button often. But this is one of those times.

and in the religion forum

Obama’s prayer: ‘To walk closer with God’

Some attempts to exculpate

The Reports of DU’s Cruelty Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.

So I’m Browsing DU, and for the first time I catch a headline about Duer’s cheering the savage beating of Fox News reporters. This is the first I’ve heard of this horrific event, and it’s not about the event, but rather about the apparently widespread callousness and inhuman schadenfreude being expressed by ‘many’ on DU.

Now, first, I’d like to say that open condemnation of anyone experiencing glee at human suffering is a trademark of what makes a progressive site for good, responsible, civil persons the shining example of the best traits in a national population of otherwise borderline psychotic primates. Not that I’m necessarily blaming the primates, but it’s nice to see one place that tends to rise above the visceral and vitriolic far more often than not.

By that same shiny token; Why would so many nasty, horrible, violence-glorifying, vindictive, petty people be expressing so much viciousness on such an otherwise civil site?

So, I picked two prominent threads where the issue itself (the beatings) had been brought up, and took a snapshot. (I just left the various browsers window open and took tallies)

I did this; I counted up the number of posts in the threads, then meticulously went through and read every single one. At the time of counting, it was approximately 11:26pm EST. Between the two threads there were, at the time, 155 post. Now, I have no illusions that my time and effort to determine whether DU was a bastion of civility or a wretched hive of scum and villainy will be terribly appreciated, but I really wanted to get some kind of empirical sense of just how bad (or not) DU really was.

I used a fairly reasoned, if somewhat imperfect methodology to quantify my findings. I’ll lay out the method as I put down the stats.

Between 23:20 and 23:30 on 2/3/11, a total sample of 155 posts was recorded between two total threads.

The selected categories of personal displays were as follows;

1)‘Empathy/Concern’ (for the reporters)
- This parameters for this category were very simple; any expressed concern or well-wishing for the victims, or condemnation of the attacks. -That was the easy one.

Out of 155 total posts, in this category, there were 50 indisputable instances of true empathy for the Fox News Crew.

2) Deleted posts/sub-threads
- This one seems fairly straightforward, but we’ve all seen the popular ‘deleted scapegoat’ on DU. If someone can’t find an example to back something up, then it had to be a deleted post. In this case, I treated each of them as a quantity of one as it was either a single rules violation, or likely a post by one person followed by a rules violation by one or both of (usually) two adversaries. Either way, there is no way to determine the relevance of those deleted posts, and they permit a standard sample in the ‘uncertainty’ category.

It goes on too long for me to read, but you get the idea.

And this question comes a bit late

Does Obama have a clue?

You think in the very least he would denounce the harassment of reporters and journalists in Egypt for the last two days.
Maybe you think he should be diplomatic about the protest situation, but when journalists are being beaten, jailed, handcuffed, etc, just for reporting, how can he remain silent?
Today he prayed for Egypt. Nice.

How about a real statement on the current situation from the prez?

this is a good comment

5. He said a real statement. You know, a position. An actual position.

Remember how George Bush used to take positions and we disagreed with him? Just like that, except taking a position that’s sane and smart. Apparently our choices are politicians who take terrible positions and politicians who ramble and speechify in the face of taking a position. Permalink

.

Tabloids: US blowing it w Egypt et al

You can see how the press is trying to find a good angle for the historical one in the Egypt business, but it’s hard.

2 headlines in Wapo:

OBAMA RAMPS UP PRESSURE, GINGERLY

and a more realistic one, using “US” instead of Obama because is unflattering:

IN UPRAISING SIGNS OF WANING US INFLUENCE

 

Politico has an even funnier headline

OBAMA TRIES TO BALANCE JOBS, EGYPT

Oh, good. To think I was worried.

In NY, the rich are having a ball

Tabloids: Egypt clashes, snowbound, Bloomberg vs the people

Things in Egypt took a turn for the worse with Mubarak men getting in the fray

While Chicago is buried in the snow