Congress is hardly doing anything -- which would be, in saner times, the preferred state of affairs -- so today's "Show So Far" won't be long.
The DISCLOSE Act failed yesterday by 51-44 -- that's right, 51 votes in favor, 44 against, and still it fails. Among the nays, of course, you may find the three Last Northeastern Moderate Republicans and ex-campaign finance hawk/putative Citizens United v. FEC opponent John McCain (R-AZ). Sen. McConnell (E-KY) also called the DISCLOSE Act "un-American," which I guess means supporting campaign finance disclosure, as he has done, isn't "un-American," but actually doing something about it is. Calling something most Americans support "un-American" is usually the kiss of death, and thus I feel compelled to remind folks that Mr. McConnell got a mere 53% of the vote in his 2008 re-election effort, and has cleared 60% just once in five elections.
In far better news (don't we deserve it?), the Chicago Tribune has suspended its relationship with Journatic, which you may remember is the corporation that provides "local" news from overseas, and Journatic's editorial head resigned. In addition to the complete absurdity of trying to write local news from thousands of miles away, Journatic has, it turns out, serious ethics problems -- fake bylines, plagiarized quotations, even completely made-up quotations. I'm sure local journalists occasionally commit the same sins, but the temptation has to be even harder to resist when, as I may have already mentioned, you're writing "local" news from several thousand miles away. Journatic still has clients in many big American cities such as Houston and San Francisco; more news on that development as it arrives.
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