Political Chatter Worth Your Attention

Here's some political chatter from around the net I've found to be worth my time:

From the Left: Rachel Maddow explains Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure I completely buy her arguments, but I certainly found them educational and insighful.

From the Right: David Brooks talks about the Baucus Bill. He raises some excellent points, and provides a conservative opinion that goes beyond the usual outrageous claims of government takeover of health care. He even laments the fact that what we're going to end up with is Health Insurance Reform instead of Health Care Reform. That's a bold and positive stance to take.

From the funny: Jon Stewart takes CNN to task over their fact checking. While the clip (as you can see below) is funny stuff, I did find an interesting insight between the wisecracks.

One of the fundamental problems with cable news is that they have too much time to fill - they've got to find the next controversy to put in front of viewers, and they've got to do it now. They've got to bring on anyone and everyone who in some way might be an expert, to beat a topic absolutely to death. And because they've got to do it all day and night, the cycle just never takes a breath.

Jon brings up an excellent point: if you've got all this time, why can't you use it to have a complete and comprehensive debate. Why can't they use it to not just allow every opinion to be aired, but also to be thoroughly fact checked and refuted on air.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle on 24 hour news - it's a fact of life. But, perhaps we could demand more from our news stations, in terms of the quality of news prestented.