I was thinking of an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from high school.\u00a0 A radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a chat show.\u00a0 A commentator declared “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”.<\/p>\n
A phone call comes on the air. “What do you think about the\u00a0 rumors that the Americans have a nuclear missile that would wipe out any Soviet city?”<\/p>\n
The commentator promptly declared “Smolensk is the most beautiful city in the Soviet Union”.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
Kerry Miller at MPR spent an hour this morning talking about the perils of partisanship <\/a>and the supreme virtue of compromise.<\/p>\n Here’s the blurb:<\/p>\n Depending on your political outlook, Gov. Scott Walker was either showing leadership or over-reaching when taking on the unions. In today’s highly-charged, partisan climate, is it possible for politicians to play to their base without going to extremes?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The interesting bit is the guests:<\/p>\n Now, there’s a balanced panel – not only do we have a progressive from the East Coast, and one from the West, but we have one that works for an academic “progressive” hothouse, and one from the putative “private sector”!<\/p>\n Just saying, MPR – when the entire conversation about “compromise” is framed in terms of “how do we get conservatives to stop acting like conservatives”, and the one about “partisanship” sounds entirely like “why do you conservatives have to disagree wtih us”, we might question your commitment to balance.<\/p>\n Or at least Miller’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was thinking of an old Soviet-era joke that I remember from high school.\u00a0 A radio station in Minsk was broadcasting a chat show.\u00a0 A commentator declared “Minsk is the most beautiful city in all of the Soviet Union”. A phone call comes on the air. “What do you think about the\u00a0 rumors that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-tc-media-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18815"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18819,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18815\/revisions\/18819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}