Political Conventions are just big, expensive parties where rich and powerful people pat themselves on the back while they tell us how awesome they are.

I've tried to watch some of the speeches, but it's an utter and absolute waste of time. No one says anything at all. Praising one guy, attacking another, and making promises without details. I don't care how charismatic these people are, or how good their speech writers are, or why THIS time their party will save us all. The worst part, the most chilling part, is how many people in the audience are smiling like they've in the presence of demigods. I see something like worship in the eyes of a few of them.

As far as Romney goes, I'll consider him when he says something of substance. As far as I know, most of his promises are of the "details to be added later" variety, and that's not going to cut it. Telling us what you intend to do, that's fine, as long as you also tell us HOW you're going to accomplish it. How are you going to drastically reduce gas prices? How are you going to reduce the deficit? How are you going to cut taxes, fix Medicare, and still generate enough revenue to come in under budget? Details, Mittens.

I'm mostly open-minded about who I'll vote for, but they've got to tell me why I should. Political Conventions, it seems, are not the place for that.

Well on the brightside, you'd probably qualify as a conservsative as far as the Atlantic goes and would be ostersized as such.

Also, interesting artlce on Eastwood from the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/in-defense-of-clint-eastwood.html?mbid=gnep&google_editors_picks=true

You're right technically, but let's be honest here; we both know that Ryan was trying to link that plant closing to Obama in the minds of his audience.  It's a crafty bit of political speaking and it's still fundamentally dishonest.  I'm sure you're aware that Ryan did state previously that Obama promised to keep the plant open, which certainly is untrue.  Obama could not have known the plant would close at the time of his speech, and the decision to close the plant came before he was elected, even if the final shut-down came after.  Ryan is implying that Obama is responsible even if he didn't directly say it this time.  At least he knows to clean up his statements when called out, I'll give him that, as many politicians keep saying falsehoods as long as they can.

So, yes, some of the fact checkers didn't dig deeply enough.  It's happened before and it will happen again.  I see no reason to see a conspiracy here, and I hope you're not climbing up on the "all media is liberal" soapbox that many conservatives use to deflect any and all criticism.

Ryan was being a typical politician when he said that, so I see very little reason to make a big deal out of this.  

Im aware what Ryan said previously in Ohio earlier that month. Im just saying that during the speech there was nothing about the context of his speech that was false and yet many media outlets did in fact say his story was false. In this story here is what he was implying when he said this:

"It is locked up and empty to this day.  And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight. "

All that was clear about that story is that he made promises to America that there would be "hope and change". That it "Government was there to support you" then you will be successful. He was relating the same closed state of that factory to the rest of the U.S. economy how there are many other closed businesses or factories in this economy. Yet media outlets just wanted to say he implied the closing was Obama's fault.

And about media. All of media is not liberally biased. some do have a conservative bias and very few are not biased, however a majority of them in fact are. It was harder to catch after around 1960. Before then many different newspapers were known by the public as to what angle they obviously took on sports/world news/political matters. After that the media began being more cloaked about their bias under a "just the facts" montage. Its harder to spot now days but by watching carefully you will see it, but you will have to obsess pretty much over the way they phrase their statements and run their stories. I can give you countless examples where a display of media bias instances far outweigh instances of media conservative bias in the U.S. I wont give you those unless you are interested. Here are a few...

In 1987 and in 1991 when Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were respectively nominated to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, both men were utterly destroyed by the press. In the case of Bork they were successful in preventing his nomination, not so in the case of Thomas. It was so bad for Robert Bork that a verb was made of his name. After it was succeeded in ruining his career and reputation the term “Borked” gained cache. On the other hand, when Elana Kagan was nominated by Obama to serve on the highest court in the land, the media went out of its way to ignore key factors in her career in order to facilitate her ascension to the court. 

In an effort to damage George W. Bush’s 2004 run for reelection, Dan Rather whose bias goes back decades floated a story based on forged documents that said Bush had gone AWOL from his Texas Air National Guard unit back in 1973. Internet sleuths, though, realized that the documents purporting to have been created on a 1970s era typewriter were actually made using a Microsoft computer font and obviously these computers did not exist in 1973. Rather refused to admit the truth, however, and ultimate lost his spot as the anchor of CBS’s nightly newscast. This takedown of a network news anchor put the Internet on the map as a force to be reckoned with.

In June of 2010 the Daily Caller news website seized on the existence of a secret, private web message board open only to left-wing members of the news media, found its messages, and exposed them to the world. The message board was revealed to be openly plotting to make sure that negative coverage of Barack Obama was either explained away or, better yet, ignored by the media. This collusion showed that “the fix was in” and that liberal “journalists” saw no reason not to coordinate along ideological lines instead of simply reporting the truth.

After the crime against Representative Gabrielle Giffords became national news, members of the media began to blame her attack on the “violent rhetoric” of conservatives in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. A “climate of violence” perpetrated by the right was at fault, said the media. This line of attack on the right was unleashed by the media before the name of the attacker was even known. It later turned out that shooter Jared Lee Loughner had no discernible political beliefs at all and, in fact, had been targeting Giffords before the Tea Party movement was even started. We also saw something like this happen in a recent theatre shooting in Colorado. A reporter from ABC news stated that there was a James Holmes affiliated with the Tea party. They later corrected themselves saying it wasn't the right person but the damage was already done, we see an obvious effort within many news outlets to tie crimes to conservative right wing type organizations.

We hear a lot about the Koch brothers, but why do we not hear about George Soros' ties to over 30 major news organizations? It is a good question. While the media constantly slams conservative/libertarian donors David and Charles Koch, George Soros is consistently ignored by that same media seemingly so interested in showing the influence of big money in politics.

We also saw in 2008 there were very few stories of Brack Obama's past and associations within most major news outlets. This seemed very disproportionate to how many other politicians are publicly vetted with past associations and involvements.

of course NBC News (MSNBC) is by far the worst at liberal spin on issues and often goes over the edge of ridiculousness. Take for instance the recent countless accusations of "racism" they claim within the Republican party. I can name them all for if you would like. I am not going to claim that bias dosn't happen on both sides of the isle or that it is solely left wing media bias, but once you do all the digging and searching you will find that a larger majority of U.S. media outlets do tend to report in a way that leans toward their chosen candidate for office or their views on certain policy ideas. I encourage you to really do some deep digging and you will find it. It is hard to see because the media has gotten much better at concealing their bias to the average viewer.

Seat them now! Seat them now!.. U-S-A-U-S-A... :D

To illustrate. This's pretty big. And just after I started thinking this's going to be usually boring.

Moar!

Bias doesn't even have to be a conscious thing... it's pretty easy to articulate the issue.

In a "Representative sample" scientifically you try and get a sample that perfectly represents your population to get fair research.

Meanwhile, studies of journalists political leanings aren't so representative.

http://www.journalism.org/node/2304

Even if were were to assume nobody in the media was trying to spin anything to their point of view.  Psyologically you would in fact expect people to spin things to their point of view, simply because they would have a very different basic reaction to a story to begin with.

For example, to use the other side of the coin, say a Pro Life reporter is reporting about the chick fil-a founders comments and the protests, his natural first reaction would be "So what, this is stupid" and such a thing would show through in his reporting and writing of the story... even if he goes way out of his way to even it out.  (Which i'd suggest most reporters don't.)

Proof of this is actually shown in that most "Middle of the road" reporters are actually more liberal then they think... as mentioned in the article.

"The research from Weaver and his colleagues echoes the findings of a Pew Research Center survey from 2004 revealing that while the majority of journalists described themselves as moderate, they were clearly to the left of the public. One example was that journalists were considerably more willing to say that society should accept homosexuality than the average citizen was."

So most journalists view of "Moderate down the middle"   Is actually middle left... meaning that when journalists aim to tell an unbiased story, they invariably end up telling a more middle left story, since that's what they think is moderate.

And this was 2002.   Reporters got a bit less liberal then... who knows what the report is going to show when it's done... I think next year actually.

With Bush being Bush, I can only imagine it's shifted even more liberal.

How come they are allowed to do the "show" full of lies?

So now we know, there is a Barack Obama-clone running around that only republicans can see.