Corporate Media is making Americans Political Idiots

http://www.alternet.org/media/how-our-media-helping-america-turn-land-political-idiots?akid=12476.294211.YLADJe&rd=1&src=newsletter1027278&t=5

 Just days after the midterm election, President Barack Obama made a big climate change deal with China, asked the F.C.C. to regulate Internet service providers as if they were public utilities and pledged to address the immigration mess on his own instead of continuing to wait for Congress to arise from its dysfunctional deathbed.
The president’s inaction on these issues until now was intended to prevent the electoral debacle and partisan caterwauling that happened anyway.  His previous patience has proven to be time squandered, and his search for common ground with folks who wanted his head on a pike turned out to be a case study in bad poker playing, if not wishful thinking. 
This post-election Obama is the one voters thought they put into office in 2008, but who spent the next six years being called naïve for projecting their civic hopes onto a cypher.  Whatever triggered his transformation – legacy clock ticking, nothing left to lose, stopbullying.gov – it’s a heartening moment for his base.  The challenge now for him is to deliver on that change; the challenge for his supporters is to rescue the stakes of these changes from soap opera.
We loves us our political melodrama.  “Will the Republicans force a government shutdown by baiting Obama to veto a budget that defunds immigration reform?”