Official media vs. Independent media
Bruce Walker at American Thinker summarizes leftist chokehold on intellectual institutions:
The grotesque bias of television network news and the national press media is an old story -- a very old story. Forty years ago, Spiro Agnew gave his Des Moines Speech in which he described how three powerful corporations -- CBS, NBC, and ABC -- through their television news division determined what the overwhelming majority of Americans got as "news." In the next few years, groups were formed like Accuracy in Media, which began to compile the powerful brief against leftist bias in the news media.
...
What was true in the media was true in education. The radical nature of college is also a very old story. This extreme leftism was not a student movement; it was a faculty movement. In 1975, Victor Hickem wrote:
Distinguished and conservative professors were forced to suffer indignities in silence. Sometimes ‘unperson' to their colleagues, they failed to match the promotions and salary increased of liberal and conforming colleagues...by 1968, academic liberalism reach the position that no applicant for a faculty job could be considered unless he or she possessed the standard precepts of liberal ideology.
As depressing as this might seem, I have hope in the free press.
All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
Media bias, especially the established, official media is nothing new. Sometimes they lean right, sometimes they lean left. In our lifetime, they happen to lean left.
The good thing about capitalism is when media outlets stop representing their audience's interest, they start going out of business. Independent media that represent the views of Americans (and yes, this is a center-right country; tea parties are the proof) will rise, both in power and prestige, and they will eventually replace the current leftist mainstream media. I have some hope that it'll happen in my lifetime, but even if it doesn't, I have faith that it will eventually happen.
All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
Time to dissolve the people and elect a new one?
Because that's the only thing that can be meant by "ungovernable America" (via HotAir.com):
The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.
Why yes. It is time for the government to dissolve the people and elect another, preferably one that wouldn't hold tea parties or petition the representatives to represent them.
And as for,
We’re suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the victorious majority’s governing agenda, shaping policy around the margins in ways more to their liking.
With Barack "I won" Obama in the office? The president refuses to recognize that the loyal opposition has legitimate concerns and workable alternatives. I don't see how the defeated minority can get a voice in this culture, except by using what may be called obstructionist tactics and making the majority hear them.
If you have a problem with that, get 60+ seats in the Senate. FDR did that, and even so he couldn't pass some of his most outrageous bills.
America is working fine. Our system has stood the test of time and there is no reason to change it (yet). Just because far left elements of the Democratic Party cannot stand the fact that they live in a center-right country doesn't mean we should dissolve the whole country for their sake.
Keep religion out of politics
At least that's what voters seem to be saying, according to this Rasmussen poll, and rightly so:
But only 14% of all voters believe it is appropriate for their local religious reader to suggest whom they should vote for. Seventy-eight percent (78%) say it is not right for their parish priest, minister, rabbi or imam to make such a suggestion. The latter figure is an eight-point jump from two years ago.
Christians (who account for a vast majority in this country) would do well to remember Jesus' own words: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is His. Many, many of the issues in our politics is entirely secular and religious leaders are better off not getting caught in the crossfire of secular politics. There are some matters of life and death where religion—more specifically, religious requirements—intersects politics, such as when Catholics are forced to pay for abortions by federal funding of abortion clinics, but those are, thankfully, far and few between.
Aside from those very few issues—and perhaps even on those few issues; if the pastor did his spiritual job correctly, he wouldn't have to worry about politics of his flock—religious leaders should stay out of politics, lest they become yoked with the wrong crowd.