U.S. Government and Media... Please Make It Stop

Before I get to raving and moaning and such, let me just say that Fark.com is a great thing. It's where I got all the links for this post, and is, in my humble opinion, worth checking out.

Those of you that know me personally probably know that I hold the mass of humanity in pretty low esteem. Occasionally, I hold out hope for select individuals, but, time and time again, I've been shown that people are self- and team-centered to the point of actively damaging society as a whole... and it only gets worse the higher up the ranks you go. Here's a few examples... and these are just from TODAY's news.

• At the federal level, for the Republicans, comes news that the current administration's EPA wanted to find a way to define CO₂ emissions differently for automobiles and industry, to give a break to power plant operators (link)
• At the state level, for the Democrats, New York AG Cuomo's going further in his censorship crusade, attempting to strongarm Comcast into implementing his restrictions on Usenet, something I brought up earlier (link)
• Of course, you can hope that such issues will get brought up by broadcast media, informing the masses that government is That Messed Up... except, they're too busy editing out factual mis-statements by candidates to be bothered (link)

Now, the sad thing is that, with not that much effort, I could have found something suitable for any of those bullets for either "major" political party and most broadcast or cable news providers (and likely more than a few print providers, too). What pains me is that all of the above have principles that they should be aspiring to, as the "best" of us (that's how they got where they are, right?), yet they seem inclined to cast aside those principles if doing so will help themselves or their teammates out, or keeping to those principles would make life difficult.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot I can do about the media... being privately-owned, I have no influence other than to turn my back on them and deny them their advertising revenue, and that only goes so far. The politicians, at least those in my chain-of-government, I could, theoretically, vote out... but, while I am an Independent, I do have bare-minimum standards I stick to... namely, any candidate has to sound sane, something most third-party candidates just can't pull off reliably.

From what I can see, we're all headed for a Fall... anybody care to tell me otherwise?