Mass.live covered Kerry'sspeech

[karynnj]

Other than saying it was last night, they gave an interesting description.

In a lengthy and impassioned speech on the Senate floor last night, Sen. John Kerry said that Congressional inaction on raising the nation's debt ceiling, with a little under a week left before the Aug. 2 deadline, is "already hurting the economy of our country."
<snip>
Now almost 30 years later some House Republicans have turned their back on the legacy of Ronald Reagan," Kerry said. Kerry isn't the first to pull the Reagan card on the GOP; members of President Barack Obama's administration, most notably Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, have been quick to use Reagan's 1983 letter to deflate claims from some House Republicans that they were overstating the consequences of default.
<snip>
Republican Sen. Scott Brown, Kerry's colleague from Massachusetts, remains reticent with regard to the debt ceiling debate.

"It's changing by the hour," Brown told The Boston Globe. "My position hasn't really changed."

http://blog.masslive.com/thefray/2011/07/sen_john_kerry_some_house_repu.html

They have a link to the full speech. (As to Brown, if his position hasn't changed, it means he actually has one and isn't still studying the issue - but shouldn't he state what his opinion is?

[Mass]

1. The Republican is a much better paper than the Boston papers.

[Mass]

2. The Globe talks about it in another of these articles that talk about nothing

People will have absolutely no idea what Kerry said, except for talking about "unchartered waters". This is what is newsworthy in the Globe.

http://www.boston.com/Boston/politicalintelligence/2011/07/congress-could-run-out-metaphors-before-country-runs-out-money/XvouxFSscR1GsDt8wJ8EuJ/index.html
Congress could run out of metaphors before country runs out of money
...
If Congress doesn’t pass a debt plan soon, not only could the country run out of money but the lawmakers themselves may soon run out of metaphors.

“We do not want to be known as a country that pays its bills out of a cigar box,” Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican, told reporters yesterday.

“The Tea Party Republicans are driving the country into a Thelma and Louise moment,” Representative Edward Markey, a Malden Democrat, said in an interview. “Unfortunately the American people are tied into the back seat.”

When Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, rose to the Senate floor he used a comparison that would fit in with the Bay State’s maritime history.

“These are completely dangerous and uncharted waters that we’re sailing into,” Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, said on the Senate floor.

[karynnj]

3. The Boston Globe makes the debate just a series of sound bites

I guess compiling the sound bites is easier than trying to articulate the various concerns and positions, but it leads to a very dumb article with very little information on the positions of any of the people quoted. The Republican was much better - and they linked to the speech.

They lead off saying Lawmakers were running out of metaphors - but only Alexander's really proves the point. Markey's is a different way to say that the tea party is driving us off the cliff. But Kerry's is really not a metaphor for the sake of a metaphor, but the most normal way to speak of the situation he foresees. It is such normal usage, I did not even think of the maritine meaning - though it is obviously there.

Not to mention, they are ignoring the sobering point that he made with that sentence and then reinforced speaking about having been told that no one knows by experts he trusts. The scariest thing to me is that we really really don't know what will happen if we do default. It really is not clear that if we then - a week later passed the debt ceiling increase that things would revert back to where they were - I actually expect they wouldn't.