{"id":620,"date":"2009-03-04T11:05:52","date_gmt":"2009-03-04T19:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/?p=620"},"modified":"2009-03-04T11:05:52","modified_gmt":"2009-03-04T19:05:52","slug":"c-span","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/04\/c-span\/","title":{"rendered":"C-SPAN"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.c-span.org\/\">C-SPAN<\/a> interesting, but not engaging enough to sit down and watch most times.  Occasionally they&#8217;ll have a good show on, but often they&#8217;ll just show live footage of the House or Senate which can be pretty slow.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday it occurred to me that I could stream it at work and listen while I worked, which I did all day.  It was interesting, and worth doing again.  Among the things I heard:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One congresswoman reading from a Dr. Seuss book, and explaining how important reading is.  It was the National Education Association&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nea.org\/readacross\/\">Read Across America<\/a> day.<\/li>\n<li>The White House Daily Briefing with Obama&#8217;s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.  This time was spent in part with him answering questions about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/29490969\">recent comments from Jim Cramer<\/a> (who said Obama has caused &#8220;the greatest wealth destruction I have seen by a president.&#8221;) and recent comments from Rush Limbaugh.  There were also a number of questions which could be paraphrased as &#8220;Obama said [insert vague statement here] about the economy, what precisely [did he mean \/ will he do] about about that?&#8221; which were largely answered by some degree of clarification, and usually some promise about him releasing more details soon.<\/li>\n<li>There was a fairly lengthy debate about re-authorizing the &#8220;Civil War Battlefield Preservation Act&#8221; which from what I gathered is some spending bill regarding battlefields in the South.<\/li>\n<li>There was some discussion of the economy taking place, but I don&#8217;t know under what context (that is, I don&#8217;t know if the legislators were voting on something.)  I was amazed at the lack of depth in discourse. People were just re-iterating soundbites such as &#8220;Socialism is great until you run out of other people&#8217;s money.&#8221;  Not so much a debate as a battle of catchphrases.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m currently listening to a debate as to whether or not March should be considered &#8220;National Criminal Awareness Month&#8221;.  And, I&#8217;m not joking, Rep Zoe Lofgren from California just said that it would help make Americans more aware of how harmful crime is.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s eye-opening to see how congress spends it&#8217;s time, and how they conduct themselves.  I&#8217;m hoping that if I listen enough I&#8217;ll have a better understanding of how things work there.  At present I cannot understand why someone would stand up and read from &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oh,_the_Places_You%27ll_Go!\">Oh the places you&#8217;ll go<\/a>.&#8221;  I&#8217;m not trying to be critical, I genuinely don&#8217;t understand why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always found C-SPAN interesting, but not engaging enough to sit down and watch most times. Occasionally they&#8217;ll have a good show on, but often they&#8217;ll just show live footage of the House or Senate which can be pretty slow. Yesterday it occurred to me that I could stream it at work and listen while [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-libertarian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TCqO-a0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lianza.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}