Breaking News

We're coming to you live with this breaking news: There is no news.

Each day I start my writing process by going to my favorite search engine, Google, and entering "News" and then setting the search parameter to the last 24 hours. This is rarely where I actually find the topic for what I end up writing about, but it's where I begin each day. Usually something that shows up on the first couple of pages leads me to something else that leads me to something else and it's around the fifth something else that the topic of the day usually appears.

Apparently many people use the "News" and last 24 hours or last hour or last whatever search parameters, because the sites devoted to news have developed the practice of posting an ad for themselves as news whenever they haven't posted any actual news for a while. This isn't terribly problematic to the searcher, because it's very easy to see the difference between the actual new story posted and the self-ad.

The self ad reads as: "X hours/minutes ago - [Insert site name] brings you breaking news/top stories/inside scoops/multimedia/all the latest coverage/naked pictures of the President's dog/current affairs/video analysis/etc. from [insert country name] and around the world..."

This morning the first actual story appeared as item number 41: Oooooooo they got me. The clever editors of Viet Nam News posted what looked like a story as their self-ad. (Clicking on the link doesn't take you to the story that begins under the link, just to the first page of the site. Filler posting!)

Item number 50. Fox News. They really need to change the name of their company. Anyway, they posted this:

In exchange for a two-month tax cut, the Senate on Saturday approved a permanent increase in fees attached to mortgages backed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).
The idea behind the fee is to encourage more homeowners to get into the private market, as opposed to seeking loans backed by troubled entities like Fannie and Freddie.

Now what actually begins to intrigue me as I read this article is the pattern of attribution.

The remarks included come from "a senior Senate Democratic aide." It's noted that the bill's memo to Republican members pointed out that the bill "had bi-partisan support" and noted that it was an item on the list of suggestions that the President gave to the Super Committee. To use Fox's terminology, that's "code" for, "Don't worry, we're going to blame the Democrats." The bill passed 89-10.

And the article closes with this:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that while the tax cut lasts two months, it will take 10 years for the associated fee hike to drum up an estimated $35.7 billion and replenish the lost revenue. That rhetorical tactic is common on Capitol Hill -- lawmakers frequently say bills are "paid for" when in fact it takes a decade for that to be the case.

Fair enough. So what about this article is tugging at the corners of my brain?

I remember now. The Democratic Senate proposed extending the payroll tax and paying for it by a combination of mortgage fees and a millionaire's tax. They couldn't get the Republicans to agree on the millionaire's tax, so they reduced the term of the tax cut from one year to two months to balance the bill and passed it as a temporary solution.

The Republican House Bill HR 3630 proposes extending the payroll tax, imposing almost identical mortgage fees, pushing through the Keystone Pipeline, lifting pollution-abatement requirements from plants that boil mercury (releasing toxins that kill 8k people a year), and raising the rates on flood insurance.

Since the mortgage fee proposed by both parties is virtually identical, the balance is: Millionaire's tax versus raising rates on flood insurance plus throwing away thousands of American lives forever in exchange for a few hundred permanent jobs.

Yeah, that's what tugged at me about it.