Go read the job numbers from today.

Back? Ok good. Now re-read this part:

The Labor Department data showed private sector employment increased by 104,000, while government jobs continued a downward trend, reporting a loss of 24,000 jobs.

Private sector? Check. They’re hiring. Not at huge paces, but they are hiring. Public sector? Nope. Our government is actually reducing the amount of jobs they provide. And for the most part, I blame that guy up there, Mitch McConnell.

For a Congress that’s supposed to be all about jobs (even though it’s really all about denying President Obama a second term), they’re being awfully hypocritical. Take some of the GOP’s favorite talking points, for example—they’re completely at odds with each other. Even “Create more jobs!” directly contradicts “Reduce the size of government!”

Republicans in Congress are essentially saying that some jobs simply don’t count—specifically, government jobs. It’s fine, as long as it’s not public service, says the GOP.

Is that what we really want to promote? I’ve always thought public service was a good thing. That is was good and honorable to want to serve your country, whether in the military, through volunteerism, or through public service. Why do public sector jobs, apparently, not count anymore?

Of course the GOP would probably respond to this post saying that federal workers are lazy, and the the government is inefficient and can’t get anything done. But aren’t there better solutions to fixing that than cutting jobs? Republicans and their senseless, over-the-top “we need a surplus” agenda are causing the problem. We should be finding ways of training existing government workers to make the government work better. We should be trimming programs and unnecessary projects, yes, but we should do so in a way that salvages as many jobs as possible.

Anyway, my point is: I’m sick of hearing Republicans complain about slow job growth. Progressives and moderate conservatives are pushing to take three steps forward, while the far right is forcing us to take one step back.

America, please look at this carefully. Read, learn, watch, and observe closely. The problem here isn’t President Obama or his policies. It’s progress being held back by ancient ideals and outrageous politics and personal vendettas. That’s not the way a democracy should run.

Here’s the best of what I got. What’s your favorite? Let me know in the comments. Check below the jump for the rest.

@alexpriest I didn't watch, but twitter stream tells me this: Bachmann wore a sailor suit, Perry got pissed, Cain was lame. #cnndebate

October 18, 2011 9:09 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@cajunjen

Jenna Sauber

@alexpriest They’re all loons. (too long?)

October 18, 2011 9:09 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@NathanDunbar

Nathan Dunbar

@alexpriest Hate & paranoia.

October 18, 2011 9:10 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@zentaratea

Zen Tara Tea

@alexpriest Romney pwns Perry, Herman Cain electrocuted immigrants, Rick Santorum’s may as well not have been … http://t.co/HlJ2OVGn

October 18, 2011 9:11 pm via UberSocial for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@TheHarrisWalker

Harris Walker

@alexpriest really though: Perry vs Romney slapfight, Newt chided all, Bachmann brought the crazy, Cain a kook, Paul & Santorum irrelevant.

October 18, 2011 9:11 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@NathanDunbar

Nathan Dunbar

@alexpriest Apples, oranges, anchor babies, Bach loves moms, Obamacare & Herman Cain invites you to do your own math & to show your work.

October 18, 2011 9:12 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kaotate

kaotate

@alexpriest Obama sucks; Muslim sharia pizza; batshit crazy googley eyes

October 18, 2011 9:14 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@myerman

myerman

@alexpriest More of the same I’m afraid #thatisall

October 18, 2011 9:18 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@FineProperties

Nick Downes

@alexpriest Didn’t see it but I’m assuming something like: candidates spend hour demonstrating their own ignorance and incompetence.

October 18, 2011 9:18 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@ipenguin67

Mike Knerr

@alexpriest Libya is in Africa. Otherwise, same shit different day.

October 18, 2011 9:28 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@LacyMB

Lacy Baugher

Consider this a public service announcement, if you will. My thoughts on the whole Occupy Wall Street movement are considerably more long-winded and complex, so I’ll save them for another time.

For now, just look at this image, think about this image, share this image, and act on this image. Please.

That said, sometimes they write things that are just absurd. Like this article, for example, citing a survey that shows that Congress uses social media more than millennials. It’s the same story we hear all the time, throwing out a “shocking” social media statistic that isn’t really shocking because it’s naively considered newsworthy and tends to drive pageviews. Here’s a quote from the article:

About 80 percent of House and Senate members have social media accounts, reports The Associated Press, more than that of 18- 29-year-olds, the age cohort with the highest usage of social media. Only 75 percent of so-called millenials have social media accounts.

At first glance, of course this sounds like a great story.

But let’s keep in mind three things:

• Politicians are trying to get elected. Millennials—for the most part—are just having fun.
• There are 535 people in Congress. There are countless millennials, all from very different demographics. Of course there is going to be a higher percentage on the former than the latter.
• If you are just now figuring out that social media is important for politicians running for office, you’re about five years behind.

I mean really, guys, how is this news? Of course, politicians are on social media. Of course, there is a significant portion of millennials who are not on social media (contrary to popular belief). I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a survey to tell me that.

I’m beginning to grow weary of the “____ survey says ____ demographic uses ____ social media ____ amount” article template. I mean “shocking social media stats” are just cookie cutter media at this point. How about we talk about how social media is affecting the issues? Or what innovative things one of these audiences is doing with social media to make an impact on politics? Now that, I think, would be worth reading.

The Westboro Baptist Church Counter Demonstration: Rally to Reaffirm Sanity

Date: Friday, January 14
Time: 3:30 – 4:45pm
Place: The grassy hill behind the Kay Spiritual Life Center and in front of Massachusetts Ave.
What: A peaceful and uniting rally consisting of a capella performances, remarks by Student Government President Nate Bronstein and tabling by campus groups and clubs such as the Methodist Student Association and God Loves Poetry.
Who: All members of the American University community
How: Bring your commitment to tolerance, acceptance and respect. May also bring posters for the rally along with monetary donations to be contributed to causes the Westboro Baptist Church targets.

Message

“The American University community is holding the WBC Counter Demonstration: A Rally to Reaffirm Sanity not because of the Westboro Baptist Church. The American University community is holding the WBC Counter Demonstration: A Rally to Reaffirm Sanity to show our commitment to tolerance, acceptance and respect.”

Mission Statement of the Westboro Baptist Church Counter Demonstration: Rally to Reaffirm Sanity

The WBC Counter Demonstration: A Rally to Reaffirm Sanity is an ad-hoc organization advised by Student Activities at American University. The WBC Counter Demonstration: A Rally to Reaffirm Sanity is a unified student effort to demonstrate our community’s respect, tolerance and acceptance of every member of our community. The WBC Counter Demonstration was created in response to a press release issued by the Westboro Baptist Church stating that they plan to hold a demonstration/religious service adjacent to the American University campus. As a university that prides itself on its diverse community, its strong political involvement and ongoing effort to engage in an open dialogue, we join together to demonstrate our love of every member of our community.

The WBC Counter Demonstration: A Rally to Reaffirm Sanity is devoted to demonstrating our student body’s continued affirmation of tolerance, respect and love for one another. While we acknowledge the right to freedom of speech, and by extension, the rights of the Westboro Baptist Church, we affirm our community’s ongoing desire to remain unified in the presence of hate, rebuke hate with a message of acceptance and stand together, as one student body, as one campus and as one community to speak out against hate and reaffirm our commitment to tolerance.

Why is Westboro Baptist Church coming to American University?

Keep on reading for more…

The Westboro Baptist Church announced their plan to “picket the fag-infested, pervert-run American University” and has characterized the demonstration as “religious opinion & bible commentary on current events.” The Westboro Baptist Church hopes to “give [American University students] an opportunity to see what truth looks like.”

Who is the Westboro Baptist Church?

The Westboro Baptist Church is an independent church not affiliated with any Baptist conventions or associations and is consisted mostly of its founder’s large family. The Westboro Baptist Church is known for its extreme views against homosexuality, for picketing military funerals and for desecrating the American flag.

What does the Westboro Baptist Church believe?

Homosexuality: The group condemns homosexuality and maintains that God hates gays above all other kinds of “sinners” and that homosexuality should be a capital crime.

Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy: The group refers to Catholic priests as “vampires” and “Draculas” and says Catholic priests suck semen out of male children’s genitals like vampires suck blood from their victims, describes the Roman Catholic Church as being “the largest, most well-funded and organized pedophile group in the history of man” and accuses both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy of committing idolatry.

Protestantism: The group criticizes several mainline Protestant churches including Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Baptists.

Islam: The group believes Mohammed was a demon-possessed whoremonger and pedophile who contrived a 300-page work of satanic fiction: The Quran!

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: The group believes Mormons are “America’s own whoremonger and pedophile that wangled their own hokey Book of Mormon.”

Hinduism: The group believes Hinduism is a religion “full of idolatry that inevitably results in fags and fag-enablers.”

Judaism: The group believes “Jews killed Christ” and that “the only true Jews are Christians. The rest of the people who claim to be Jews aren’t, and they are nothing more than typical, impenitent sinners.”

President Barack Obama: The groups believes Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and that he forms an Unholy Trinity with Satan and Pope Benedict XVI who is believed by the group to be the False Prophet.

That’s what the AMP Summit, being held today and tomorrow here in Washington, D.C., is all about–and so far, it’s a fantastic conference.

This morning I had the pleasure of volunteering with registration at the conference, which earned me a free ticket and the chance to bump into more than few cool people right from the get-go. Once off my shift, I attended a session on online advertising with representatives from Aol, Google, and Facebook–lots of good content, albeit mixed in with some heavy sales pitches and brand plugs.

Not a whole lot of time to discuss it much right now, but if you’d like to keep up with the conference be sure to follow the hashtag, #AMP10, and check their website to follow along with the schedule of events. And of course, follow me on Twitter for all of my own exciting updates and commentary.

It’s all especially relevant lately, and here in D.C., as Stewart and Colbert prepare for their big rallies on the National Mall in October.

American University Professor Matt Nisbet has been writing a lot about this lately on his Age of Engagement blog and he has a lot of fascinating things to say. One of the coolest parts about his most recent posts on this topic, too, is that he’s interviewed one of my other favorite American University professors, Dr. Lauren Feldman, about the issue (she also happens to be our AU-SMCEDU advisor–more on that soon).

It’s all absolutely fascinating to read. Read the whole series on the Age of Engagement blog here–Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. And check out a quick excerpt below the cut.

Q: Are audiences learning about politics when they watch these programs or are these programs, as some fear, replacing the use of more valuable sources of news and information?

Feldman: During the 2004 election, the Pew Research Center reported that young people were relying on satirical comedy programs like SNL and The Daily Show and late-night talk shows like Leno and Letterman for information about the campaign. While this group was the most likely to say they learned from comedy, it was the least likely to say they learned from network news and newspapers. These trends fueled a media narrative that young people were deserting traditional news in favor of comedy.

Well, it turns out that although at a macro-level, yes, young people as a demographic are consuming much less traditional news and more late-night comedy, it is not necessarily that the same individuals who are tuning out the news are those watching late-night. A 2006 study conducted by Danna Young and Russ Tisinger found that those young people who reported watching and learning the most from late-night comedy also reported the highest rates of exposure to more traditional forms of news.

As a follow up to that study, I partnered with Danna Young to investigate whether exposure to political information in late-night comedy might actually lead people to pay more attention to traditional news. We were testing something called the “gateway hypothesis,” originally proposed by Harvard political scientist Matthew Baum.

This is the idea that entertainment programming that contains political content will motivate otherwise uninterested viewers to start paying attention to the news by making politics more salient (via its political interviews, jokes, etc.) and providing them with a cursory understanding of political issues.

Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that over the course of the 2004 primaries, the audiences of Leno and Letterman increased their attention to campaign news in traditional sources at a faster rate than non-viewers—suggesting that coverage of the election on Leno and Letterman fostered interest in conventional campaign news.

The audience for The Daily Show, on the other hand, maintained high levels of news attention regardless of that program’s election coverage. This is likely because, unlike Leno and Letterman, the content of The Daily Show is consistently and reliably political—not just during campaign events and elections, but all the time. These results confirm that late-night comedy audiences—of both The Daily Show and Leno/Letterman varieties—are not tuning into these programs instead of traditional news.

I would also argue that traditional news is not necessarily more valuable as a source of political information than The Daily Show or Colbert Report. Although it is unclear how much people learn about politics from The Daily Show and Colbert Report, any absence of learning is not due to a dearth of political substance – for example, a study by Julia Fox and colleagues found that The Daily Show was at least as substantive in its coverage of the 2004 election as the network evening news.

More likely, audiences are already knowledgeable about the news of the day when they tune into The Daily Show and Colbert Report. All in all, I would argue that The Daily Show and similar programs provide a useful complement to, rather than a replacement for, citizens’ traditional news diets.

Q: It seems that the Daily Show, Colbert Report, and SNL have become an important part of our personal conversations about politics, at least among a younger generation of Americans. If these programs are not only being watched but also frequently talked about at school, at the office, or online via Facebook and blogs, does this add to their impact?

Feldman: Absolutely. Conversations about these shows – both online and offline – only serve to increase their profile and reinforce their impact. People don’t have to actually see the original broadcast of these programs in order to be influenced by them. Moreover, when relayed by a friend or colleague, along with a personal endorsement or commentary, this is apt to give more weight – or provide new context – to the show’s message.

Comedy Central apparently recognizes the importance of informal sharing of its shows’ content; its website facilitates online conversations about The Daily Show and The Colbert Report by making it easy for people to embed or link to their video clips on blogs, social media, etc.

Call me a crazy liberal, but I find it difficult to argue with the success and the good things that came out of the WPA. This article on Brainpicker got me thinking–while I agree with the idea of the stimulus, maybe we should’ve structured it a little more like we did way back when. Problem is, something like that would never happen today. It’s too much government power, it’s taking power away from the private sector. I can see conservatives now–they call Obama socialist already! What if he passed a package like this?

And of course that’s regardless of the results. There’s no doubt in my mind that a renaissance of the WPA to help us tackle the current crisis would’ve helped us recover more quickly than almost any other solution. But conservatives will be conservatives, and they would never in a million years even dream of support such a “radical” solution.

That’s not even to mention the cultural and artistic brilliance that came out of the era. Brainpicker said it best:

We just wish the political powers of the day would consider investing in such art-driven efforts the way the WPA did. What would $7 billion be, adjusted for inflation? Roughly $160 billion. And how does that compare to what today’s government is investing in war? As the kids say, just sayin’.

I couldn’t agree more. Check out some of the amazing posters on this Flickr set.

What do you think? Would you like to see this? Is it too “socialist” for you? I’m curious.

Four Years. Go., at first, might seem like another re-hash of the same tired theme. Time is running out, climate change is going to kill us all, yada yada yada. It’s not. Not at all, and even from this very brief introduction I’ve seen to their campaign, I can tell it’s different and it lifted my spirits like none other tonight.

For weeks now we’ve been watching the tragic oil spill in the Gulf. And every single time I see an image, hear a story, watch another failed attempt, or see more of BP’s bullshit (not to mention professional bad) public relations attempts, it makes me want to cry. Watching the video below reminded me that we can still have hope. Sure, time is running out, but if we set a realistic goal–like four years–it gives us a realistic chance of meeting, or even exceeding that goal.

So here’s the basic premise: we’re setting a goal of four years. It’s not four years to get to carbon neutral, or to decrease carbon emissions by X%, or to reduce crime rates and war in developing countries… it’s all those things–it’s to make the world better. It’s a global call to action, by activists, organizations, politicians, students, and everyday people, to just work a little harder to make our planet a better place. To save the next 1,000 years by stepping up our game in the next four years. Buy a car with better gas mileage. Get to know your neighbors. Learn about issues abroad, donate to a worthy cause, or start a rally in your town or city.

I’m thrilled to have signed up tonight. I’m thrilled to watch this movement come to life, and I’m thrilled to hopefully play a role in it–no matter how small. Check out the video below, and go to their website and check out all the details and sign up.

Congratulations, Democrats. You’ve got a lot to be proud of. Significant health care reform has finally become a reality for the United States after a year of contentious debate. But moreover, the political tides have clearly shifted in your favor.

While we have won this battle, we have not won the war, that war being the rest of President Obama’s ambitious agenda.

Many may be tempted to say, let’s take it easy. We can back off major legislation, and press on in 2011 with the 112th United States Congress.

For God’s sake don’t do that.

This year presents enormous opportunity for passing more than just health care reform, all the while improving our chances of winning in November. You just have to play the cards right, and at the right time.

Dear President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid:

As the key figures setting the legislative agenda, the cards are in your collective hands. Combatting the 24/7, conflict-addicted, Tea Party-obsessed news cycle will not be easy, but by timing your messages right, I’m pretty confident you can get not just one more reform done this year, but three.

First, tackle education reform. Everyone knows education is a politically safe topic. Few are opposed to it, and most on both sides of the aisle recognize the abysmal failure that was No Child Left Behind. In addition, few politicians are willing to raise the same kind of ruckus for education as they did for health care. It’s for the kids, after all.

If you pass a bill by the middle of May, you can even tie your message to the end of the school year. Imagine the headlines: “American students celebrate summer; America celebrates a new era of high-quality education.”

Secondly, duke it out for the climate bill. One version has already passed the House, and there is bipartisan support in the Senate. It will still be a tough fight, but the climate — the weather, not the political climate — will work in your favor.

Remember the ignorant skepticism of global warming because of the unusual snowfall in Washington this past winter? That same mentality applies in reverse, too. As the temperatures increase so will belief in global warming.

As more Americans travel and the economy improves, gas prices will rise, sparking more demand for energy reform and investments to reduce our dependence on oil. Nobody likes paying $4 a gallon for gas.

On top of that, hurricane season kicks off on June 1, and with it, the approaching five-year anniversary of the devastating Hurricane Katrina. Scientific evidence shows a correlation between global warming and hurricane activity, and fear of another Katrina will be just one more factor adding to popular support of a bill to combat climate change.

Finally, wrap up the year with immigration reform. Activists are already demanding it — although their rally on March 21 was largely drowned out by the health care debate.

As holidays approach, Americans will be more sympathetic to immigrant families being torn apart due to unfair immigration policy. In addition, the myriad of holidays celebrated serves to underscore the diversity in America, providing an excellent backdrop for the immigration debate.

The media won’t mind either. Passing a bill by Christmas would mean more heartwarming tales of immigrant families together for the holidays. Let them have that story.