Actors are known to speak before Mirrors and staring at space to practice their lines.
Probably Clint Eastwood thought he was doing this.
Or he has become an adept Politician for whom speaking is important than to whom he is addressing to.
Irony is that by believing what the politicians say we confirm by voting them that it is as good as speaking to empty chair.
Romney will make a great President and Clint Eastwood a popular Foreign Secretary.
Actor and director Clint Eastwood made the day of the GOP faithful at the Republican National Convention when he gave a surprise speech Thursday night in which he laid out what he sees as the good, the bad and the ugly state of American political affairs.
And he did it all while addressing an “invisible” President Barack Obama sitting in an empty chair. Eastwood, who played the iconic tough guy character “Dirty Harry” during his long career in Hollywood, fired up the party base when he said he cried when Obama was elected and cried even harder years later when millions were out of work.
“It’s a national disgrace,” Eastwood said. “It may be time for someone else to come along and solve the problem.”
Follow live coverage of President Obama’s 2012 state of the union address to Congress, promising ‘No bailouts, no handouts and no cop-outs’
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9.32pm: You may recall from the final season of the West Wing, Matthew Santos‘s presidential nomination hinged on a deal with the teacher’s union over tenure? Well, tonight we have this:
Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.
9.26pm: This is a very unusual presidential debate: the moderator hasn’t stopped Obama speaking. In fact he appears to be the only candidate on stage.
Now he’s on to international trade – a subject in which Obama has been repeatedly bashed by the Republicans, especially Mitt Romney. Hence this:
It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.
Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China.
Software piracy? If only Congress would get an act to stop online piracy … oh maybe not”
True that the bickering over the current Financial imbroglio has left a bad taste and makes one disillusioned with Democracy in general and the two-party system in particular. The problem encountered is inherent in Democracy where majority rule is important. Again the value system of each individual is different while looking at problems. Hence this controversy. The alternate suggested will breed only anarchy at a later date. However the emergence of third/fourth parties will be a certainty. This is being witnessed in India where innumerable parties on the national level and at the State level have made governing an impossible task. The the US you have people fighting for what they believe to be in the interest of the country. In India it is personal aggrandizement that is ruining the country. Multiparty system is good but people who run the parties matter. All said done two-party system is the best bet until we frame a an alternate system to Democracy.
Confidence in the U.S. Congress is at a historic low, more than half of Americans think that the Republican and Democratic parties are doing such a bad job that a third party is needed, and the word “dysfunction” has been common currency in the drawn-out debate over the national debt.
Does this mean the bells are tolling for the Republican-Democratic duopoly which has dominated American political life for more than 150 years?
The answer is yes for a budding political force that aims to get the millions of voters who are disaffected by the present system to bypass the traditional selection of presidential candidates through primary elections.
Instead, the new organization, Americans Elect, says it wants voters “to decide the issues that matter, find candidates to match your views and nominate the President and Vice President directly.”
It’s a novel and extremely ambitious idea, backed by a 50-strong board of advisors that includes business executives, seasoned political operatives and senior former government officials, including ex-FBI director William Webster and former U.S. Trade RepresentativeCarla Hills. Also on the board: Doug Schoen, a pollster who worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The chairman of the group is Peter Ackerman, who heads the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and made a fortune in the 1980s working for Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk-bond dealers. His son Elliot is chief operations officer. Both are confident that the Internet and social media are the right tools to change the way the system functions.
It is like burying one’s head in the sand assuming that Journalists are apolitical.
Every individual has his opinions:one can not be expected not to express his views.
If,by expressing in Public,Public opinion is molded, even then it can not be called as a sin.
Let the Majority (?!) decide.
However the expressions used are in bad taste.
( I think most people agree to the fact that all politicians are not only ‘anti intellectual’ but buffoons and Criminals as well,at least as far as India concerned;that Jews control US is a fact)
We might say ,by being hated by all the parties, Media can be said to be Neutral.
Is this a sound argument?
Fact is media is as Neutral as its proprietors are.
On the other point that public Funds for media in the form of subsidy is that it leads to arm twisting by Governments at critical times.
Look at new York Times; they wih-held information on Raymond Davis at the pleasure of the White House.
Inject more funds from Government to media, the result is Goebbels in full force.
Private sector in Media is also not above board.
Look at media influencing Government right from Cabinet posts in India.
( please read my stories under Media/corruption ).
With all these warts Democracy is still the best available system for governance right now.
NPR lost its chief executive Wednesday, a day after the news organization was embarrassed by a secretly recorded video that caught one of its top managers calling Republicans “anti-intellectual” and tea party members “racists.”
Vivian Schiller, NPR’s top officer, was forced out of her job after two years, just as a Republican-held Congress has accelerated the debate on cutting funds for public broadcasting.
Schiller officially resigned, but there was little doubt she was ousted under pressure from NPR’s board and officials from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization that acts as Congress’s liaison in distributing about $430 million a year to public radio and television stations.
Schiller announced she is leaving only about 24 hours after a video surfaced on the Internet with comments by NPR’s top fundraiser, Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian Schiller), made during a luncheon meeting with two men who posed as wealthy donors from a Muslim charity. During the meeting, which was recorded by James O’Keefe, a well-known conservative provocateur, Schiller disparaged Republicans as “anti-intellectual” and tea party members as racists and xenophobes. He also suggested that Jews control the nation’s newspapers and that NPR would be better off without its federal subsidy.
Mr. Obama took on those issues, and the Republicans, squarely. Rebutting their single-minded focus on slashing discretionary domestic spending, Mr. Obama said we have to “stop pretending” that cutting this kind of spending “alone will be enough.”
The speech was a chance for Mr. Obama to talk about the need for government investment in highways and railroads, schools and new, clean-energy industries. And we were encouraged that Mr. Obama set national goals in these areas — 85 percent of the nation’s energy should come from clean energy by 2035; 80 percent of Americans should have access to high-speed rail within 25 years; and 98 percent should have access to high-speed wireless within five years.
These are grand, and expensive, ideas, and it was vital that Mr. Obama talked about the need to pay for new spending.
He proposed eliminating taxpayer subsidies for oil companies, for example, to help pay for his clean-energy initiative. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” the president said, “but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.”
Mr. Obama also is calling for extending his proposed three-year freeze on some discretionary programs to five years. The White House said that would create $400 billion in savings over 10 years — a deep cut at a bad time, but far saner than Republican calls to slash spending so deeply that it would surely cripple the recovery.
The White House said Mr. Obama needed to make some proposal like that to remain in the debate. That is likely true. But he also made clear that there is no long-term solution without cutting military spending and mandatory spending on Medicare and Social Security.
He made a strong case for ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy when they expire in two years. “Before we take money away from our schools or scholarships away from our students, we should ask millionaires to give up their tax break,” he said.
That’s important, but letting high-end tax breaks expire won’t raise enough revenue to pay for needed investments or reduce long-term deficits. Mr. Obama proposed to simplify both the corporate income tax and the personal income tax, but he did not call for raising other taxes. Americans may not want to hear that taxes have to go up, but until Mr. Obama and other political leaders are willing to say so, credible deficit reduction will remain out of reach.
Mr. Obama’s speech offered a welcome contrast to all of the posturing that passes for business in the new Republican-controlled House. On Tuesday, House Republicans pushed through a resolution calling for reducing spending on domestic programs to 2008 levels. In a fragile economy, cutting spending on transportation, education, scientific research, food safety and childhood nutrition will do huge damage.
At times Tuesday night, Mr. Obama was genuinely inspiring with a vision for the country to move forward with confidence and sense of responsibility. Americans need to hear a lot more like that from him.
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