Month: January 2011

What Is It Good For?

by digby

This story about the ongoing journalistic malpractice involved in the reporting on the Wikileaks cables from Columbia Journalism Review sheds some light on just how lazy/corrupt/inept much of journalism has become. (Perhaps it’s always been this way, but I think we can definitively say that it’s not improving.)

The reveal the confusion and misinformation that’s characterized the recent reporting on the release of the cables, in all the ways we’ve discussed here from the beginning. The fact that many continue to insist that all 260,000 cables were indiscriminately dumped is bad enough. That’s just simple misinformation at this point. But it turns out there is something more subtle — and insidious — at work. For instance:

Greg Brock, a senior editor who oversees corrections at The New York Times, told me the paper is in possession of all 250,000 cables, which means it’s technically correct if it says the documents have been released (as in released to the Times). He also pointed to several examples where the paper was delicate in its descriptions of the documents, such as this …

[Assange’s] incarceration has not stanched the controversial flow of classified American documents from WikiLeaks, the most recent drawn from some 250,000 diplomatic cables, mostly between American diplomats abroad and the State Department in Washington.

That said, Brock agrees the language being used by many media outlets is problematic, if not wholly incorrect. “I think you’re correct that the language being used causes the confusion,” he said in an e-mail. “‘Released’ means different things to different readers. But I think the average person would take that to mean released ‘publicly.’ But they did ‘release’ them to several news organizations.”

Well, duh. Of course people are going to assume that “released” means released to the public — particularly since the media generally have been telling them so for weeks! In fact, it’s so misleading that I have a hard time believing they actually meant “released to to media outlets.” It’s absurd on its face.

Getting this straight is not that hard. Neither is the fact that Wikileaks have been working together with major newspapers around the world to vet these cables before publishing, another fact which seems to elude most of the media. I don’t know why they can’t seem to do it, but at this point I don’t think it’s reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are either lazy incompetents who can’t be trusted to report yesterday’s weather or they are purposefully misleading their readers.

And that’s the most amazing thing about all this. If they cannot be trusted to even get the Wikileaks story right on basic facts — how in the hell can we trust them to get anything right? Don’t they understand how damaging to their credibility this is? Don’t they see that they are making Wikileaks’ case for them? If the implications of all this weren’t so serious, I’d think it was some kind of elaborate joke.

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Rebuilding The Coalition

by digby

Ron Brownstein points out that a large majority of white people voted Republican in the last election and says this means that he may need a new coalition:

Fully 60 percent of whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives; only 37 percent supported Democrats, according to the National Election Poll exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Not even in Republicans’ 1994 congressional landslide did they win that high a percentage of the white vote.

That’s of people who actually voted, which means that it was also skewed older — which explains a lot. And I’m afraid Adam Serwer’s going to get a wag of the finger for suggesting that the Republicans have been exploiting “white” anxiety for nefarious purposes. But he’s right:

If you’re curious as to why we spent the late summer discussing the New Black Panther Party, the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, Shirley Sherrod, and birthright citizenship, I think you have your answer. Ever since the first genuine race pseudo-scandal, Barack Obama suggesting the the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly” in arresting Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home — Republicans sensed an opportunity in exploiting the anxieties of white voters. So it’s no surprise that formula — blowing a minor incident out of proportion to suggest the president has, as Glenn Beck put it, “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” has been replicated over and over again ever since. Republicans characterized the Affordable Care Act as “reparations” and Finreg as “racial quotas.” With few opportunities for future legislation in the new Congress, Republicans have already signaled their interest in investigating the NBPP case and the Pigford Settlement, which Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has compared to reparations for slavery (It actually involves USDA discrimination against black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s.)

It’s not that this is the only thing they used to get out their vote, of course. The “socialism” and “Muslim” tags were just as potent. Still, this is one of their base strategies designed for the mid-terms and the Tea Partiers newfound obsession with “voter fraud” indicates that they’re not done yet.

Brownstein also thinks that the exodus of these white voters from the Democratic Party may not be temporary, but rather a genuine ideological defection. (Why only white people had an ideological conversion is unexplained.) But this is very interesting:

That resistance could, in turn, increase the pressure on Obama to accelerate the generation-long transformation of the Democratic electoral coalition that he pushed forward in 2008. With so much of the white electorate, especially working-class whites, dubious about the president’s direction, to win a second term he will likely need to increase turnout and improve his showing among the groups that keyed his 2008 victory—minorities, young people, and white-collar white voters, especially women. In 2012, Obama may be forced to build his Electoral College map more around swing states where those voters are plentiful (such as Colorado, North Carolina, and even Arizona) and less on predominantly blue-collar and white states such as Ohio and Indiana that he captured in 2008. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist, said in an interview that “it would be a mistake to take exit polls from a midterm election and extrapolate too far” toward 2012. Conditions—and the composition of the electorate—will change a great deal by then, he said. But he acknowledged that Obama must “reset” the public perception about his view of government’s role. Axelrod, who plans to return to Chicago next month to help direct the president’s reelection campaign, also made it clear that he sees as a “particularly instructive” model for 2012 the case of Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado, who won his contest last fall by mobilizing enough minorities, young people, and socially liberal, well-educated white women to overcome a sharp turn toward the GOP among most of the other white voters in his state.

Hmmm. How does that square with what seems to be an open embrace of the center right by the administration and the Villagers’ insistence that he must fight for those “independents” who want austerity and tax cuts more than anything else in the whole wide world, I wonder? I’m guessing that they believe that “success” however it’s defined will be what brings over all those “minorities, young people and socially liberal, well-educated white women.” And it might. That’s probably a group that is generally still idealistic about Obama and inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I don’t think this is a given — Obamamania can’t be replicated. (And I have to point out that these are people who are more likely to be influenced by the grumpy professional left than anyone else.)

This is very interesting if true and we may see something different than the predicted re-election strategy if it is. Stay tuned.

Update: Atrios is absolutely right that the older (white) skew in this last election was as much a result of the elderly being manipulated into thinking that Obama was going to turn them into Soylent Green as it was about race. (I do expect that for some of them, the fact that it was a black man trying to turn them into Soylent Green was what made it believable.)

And it’s certainly true that if they want to get back any of these voters, talking up social security cuts isn’t going to get it done. The GOP proved in the last election that they have no problem marshaling Independent Expenditure groups to shamelessly lie outright to this demographic to scare them into voting their way. It won’t matter at all if the cuts only affect people who were born after the year 2000 — they will be easily convinced that Obama is throwing them into the streets immediately. He is, after all, a scary black man.

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Power Play

by digby

This is just creepy:

Last August, Jane Mayer wrote a long investigative article in The New Yorker about the Koch brothers, the conservative billionaires who bankroll a host of right-wing causes. Since then, she’s apparently become the victim of a disturbing, organized smear campaign. Mayer, who’s reported extensively on America’s use of torture during the “War on Terror” and co-authored books on Clarence Thomas and Ronald Reagan, is certainly no stranger to peals of right-wing outrage. But her work on the reclusive Koch brothers (whose official objections to the story are laid out in this letter) seems to have raised it to a new level. Sources tell us that rumors have been circulating for some time now that a private investigator was hired to dig up dirt on Mayer in the wake of the Koch brothers story. (Dirty business, but that sort of thing does happen.) Nothing’s been confirmed so far. But the circumstantial evidence does seem indicate that someone out there is planting (weak) negative stories about Mayer with any news outlet who might take them. There have been at least three efforts so far

Read on for the details.

If this is really happening to Mayer, it’s very ugly. But it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s one thing to take on the US Government, it’s quite another to take on the plutocrats. They have real power.

Update: I had just read this when I saw a tweet that said Eric Schneiderman, the new AG for new York, talked about the “rigged casino” of Wall Street. I hope he learned from Eliot Spitzer that you’d better be so clean you squeak if you’re going to take those guys on. They play for keeps.

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Pay It Forward

by digby

Tbogg has drawn my attention to the fact that Roy Edroso, one of the most incisive, entertaining and purely talented writers in the blogosphere (and journalism)could use some financial help at the moment. Being without health insurance really, really sucks when you get sick.

Tbogg writes:

Roy Edroso, possibly the Single Greatest Blogger in the Universe, has hit a bad streak and, despite the entreaties of his minions, refuses to ask for help…. the big fucking martyr.

So frequent commenter and occasional TBogg blogger JayB has set up a paypal account, the proceeds of which will go towards getting Roy over the hump. So maybe you could see clear to forgoing your erectile dysfunction drugs for a week or two or put off buying that Collectible NASCAR Commemorative Plate for a month and help a brother out.

Here’s the link to donate.

I’ve passed along a few of the bucks some of you fine folks sent me over the holidays. If you have any more to spare, this is someone worth supporting. It could happen to any of us.

Update: Another old blogging friend, DCblogger, is in similar straits. If you can spare a couple more for her, she could really use it.

It’s ugly out there.

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No mandate For Dead Babies

by digby

I’ve heard of the movement to grant fetuses full individual rights from the moment of conception and I’m familiar with the view that the health care mandate to buy insurance is unconstitutional. But I hadn’t heard about the requirement that forces babies to buy their own health insurance.

Or something:

Rep. Steve King (R-IA), master of the pithy C-SPAN clip, made an original argument today for why health care reform is unconstitutional during an emergency House rules meeting about the GOP’s upcoming vote to repeal it.

After Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) said that health insurance counts as interstate commerce and therefore falls under the Congress’s constitutional powers, King argued that there are people who never even use health care — and therefore a law requiring them to buy insurance is unconstitutional.

“There have always been and likely will always be, babies that were born, lived and died within the jurisdictions of the individual states,” he said, “who never cross a state line, access no health care and therefore do not impact interstate commerce. Therefore, to compel someone who fits that category to buy an insurance policy” does not fit under the interstate commerce clause.

“You find the baby that was not born in a hospital or with a midwife, who did not receive inoculations,” Polis said. “You find that baby and identify them and I’ll be happy to have that discussion.”

“I hate to tell you but they show up in garbage cans around this country, sir,” he said.

You have to appreciate someone who can use a dead baby in a garbage can as a reason why the government can’t require that everyone have health insurance. That takes some real imagination.

Who says this congress isn’t going to be the freak show of the Dan Burton years?

Update: I mean, come on:

Two House Republicans have cast votes as members of the 112th Congress, but were not sworn in on Wednesday, a violation of the Constitution on the same day that the GOP had the document read from the podium.

The Republicans, incumbent Pete Sessions of Texas and freshman Mike Fitzpatrick, missed the swearing in because they were at a fundraiser in the Capitol Visitors Center.

Meanwhile In Bizarroworld

by digby

Following up on my post below, here’s the Village version:

Gloria Borger: I have this funny story with Bill Daley. I was working for CBS at the time and as you remember, we were all going back and forth on Florida, Florida, Florida and I got a call on my cell phone at some point, late late in the evening in which it was Bill Daley saying “Gloria tell your network we’re not conceding. this election is not over.” And then he hung up and that was it. At that point I knew, “this is going to take a while.”

He’s a real fighter, Bill Daley.”

Borger went on to extol him as an excellent choice because Obama needs to move to the center, appeal to big business, be a “grown-up” … and then I fell asleep.

Howard Fineman cites that phone call as well. They all seem to believe Daley was a real scrapper when he was Gore’s campaign chairman. Except, you know, he wasn’t.

Fineman also says:

What Daley knows is how to be a Democrat who can acquire and hold power — something the Daley family has modeled for more than half a century.

That’s certainly true.

Update: Greg Sargent ably lays out why the Village CW is wrong.

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Making The Case For Surrender

by digby

Election mandates are always a matter of interpretation. Nobody ever knows for sure exactly what it was that caused them to go one way or the other. And unsurprisingly, whatever one chooses to believe is usually whatever validates one’s own biases. In other words, people usually believe they win or lose on the basis of their own worldview.

This last election, officially known as “the shellacking”, was easily predicted by history and by the fact that we are in a monumental recession featuring very high, sustained unemployment. However, there were many people who predicted that it would go badly based upon other criteria. Here’s one of those predictions, from December of 2009:

The announcement by Alabama Rep. Parker Griffith that he is switching to the Republican Party is just the latest warning sign that the Democratic Party — my lifelong political home — has a critical decision to make: Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.

Rep. Griffith’s decision makes him the fifth centrist Democrat to either switch parties or announce plans to retire rather than stand for reelection in 2010. These announcements are a sharp reversal from the progress the Democratic Party made starting in 2006 and continuing in 2008, when it reestablished itself as the nation’s majority party for the first time in more than a decade. That success happened for one major reason: Democrats made inroads in geographies and constituencies that had trended Republican since the 1960s. In these two elections, a majority of independents and a sizable number of moderate Republicans joined the traditional Democratic base to sweep Democrats to commanding majorities in Congress and to bring Barack Obama to the White House.

These independents and Republicans supported Democrats based on a message indicating that the party would be a true Big Tent — that we would welcome a diversity of views even on tough issues such as abortion, gun rights and the role of government in the economy.

This call was answered not just by voters but by a surge of smart, talented candidates who came forward to run and win under the Democratic banner in districts dominated by Republicans for a generation. These centrists swelled the party’s ranks in Congress and contributed to Obama’s victories in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and other Republican bastions.

But now they face a grim political fate. On the one hand, centrist Democrats are being vilified by left-wing bloggers, pundits and partisan news outlets for not being sufficiently liberal, “true” Democrats. On the other, Republicans are pounding them for their association with a party that seems to be advancing an agenda far to the left of most voters.

The political dangers of this situation could not be clearer.

The White House has evidently decided that person was right. It’s William Daley, the new White House Chief of Staff.

I don’t think this is just a matter of “center vs left” or populist vs neo-liberal however. This is about temperament and personal philosophy. This passage from Jeffrey Toobin’s book about the 2000 electionrecount (in which Daley served as Gore’s campaign chairman) probably illustrates how Daley will be advising the president better than anything else could:

Even though the automatic recount had cut Bush’s lead dramatically in the previous three days, Christopher and Daley offered little hope that the margin could be eliminated completely. “Look you got screwed,” said Daley, “but people get screwed every day. They don’t have a remedy. Black people get screwed all the time. They don’t have a remedy. Sometimes there’s no remedy. There’s nothing you can do about it…

Lieberman did not share the advisers’ reluctance to push forward on all fronts. This became a recurring theme of the post-election period. The Connecticut senator always sounded like a warrior — in private settings. (Much to the frustration of the Hawks on Gore’s team he sounded much different before the cameras.)

Gore too railed against the prophesies of hopelessness he was hearing from Daley. He drew a series of concentric circles on the butcher paper to illustrate what he saw as his responsibilities.Inside the smallest circles were Gore and Lieberman; their closest supporters were in the next circle, then Democrats generally, finally the country as a whole. Gore said his actions had to serve all those groups not just those closest to him. An immediate surrender would be a violation of his obligations to all those who supported him, he said —- all the people in the circles…

In the end Gore thought they shouldn’t make “any momentous decisions.” But it was clear that Daley and Christopher felt any victory for Gore was impossible even though more people had gone to the polls there intending to vote for the Vice President than for Bush. Gore and Lieberman couldn’t wage the battle alone, of course, and their two principle deputies were telling them, in effect, to give up.

This Saturday had begun with Bush and Gore locked in a closer contest than earlier in the week.Indeed, the Vice President had made gains over the past three days. But the day ended with James Baker leading the attack — and Bill Daley and Warren Christopher making the case for surrender.

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Deficits Of Imagination

by digby

I’m going to be very interested to see how the village media respond to this:

Moments ago, the Congressional Budget Office released its cost estimate for the GOP’s health care repeal bill — H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, introduced yesterday in the House by the new Republican majority:– Increases deficit by $230 billion over 10 years: “Consequently, over the 2012–2021 period, the effect of H.R. 2 on federal deficits as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues is likely to be an increase in the vicinity of $230 billion, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes to CBO’s and JCT’s projections for that period.” (p. 5)– Huge deficit increases over next decade: “Correspondingly, CBO estimates that enacting H.R. 2 would increase federal deficits in the decade after 2019 by an amount that is in a broad range around one-half percent of GDP, plus or minus the effects of technical and economic changes that CBO and JCT will include in the forthcoming estimate. For the decade beginning after 2021, the effect of H.R. 2 on federal deficits as a share of the economy would probably be somewhat larger.” (p. 7)

They’ve explicitly excluded it from “cut-go” and I imagine they are going to rationalize it by saying that it is a “job-killer.” But I don’t see how even the supine media can allow them to get away with calling themselves deficit hawks after this.

Yet somehow, I imagine they will. The Republicans have already convinced them that it makes sense to fix the deficit without even considering raising revenue. I see no reason why they shouldn’t maintain their reputation as strict guardians of the budget even though their first set of votes will be to raise the deficit by 230 billion dollars. Up is always down when Republicans are in charge and nobody seems to think a thing about it.

Update: Howard Kurtz just tweeted:

Boehner says Obamacare repeal won’t boost deficit and CBO is entitled to its “opinion.” Haven’t both parties respected CBO’s numbers?

That’s kind of adorable, don’t you think?

I have little doubt that the Village will absorb the fact that the CBO is now just another special interest group with an opinion very quickly. This kind of dissonance makes them very uncomfortable.

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My Crystal Ball Tells Me…

by tristero

…that the silly paper described here is some kind of bogus nonsense, most likely a prank or meta-study of how fragile and prone to fraud are authority and reputations in some fields of scientific inquiry today. Then again, it could simply be one of several other factors that created the illusion of esp; my crystal ball is kind of cloudy right now.

By the way, to assert that current scientific practices, in many fields, have vast room for improvement is not to fall into Jonah Lehrer’s fallacy , that “When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” Rather, it is simply stating the obvious, that scientific inquiry is a difficult process, that genuine knowledge of the world is hard to come by, inevitably contingent and subject to revision and refinement.

Consequences

by digby

Ok, this is officially freaking me out:

Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, residents found 50 to 100 jackdaws on a street in Falköping southeast of Skövde. The incident echoed a number of unexplained incidents earlier this week across the southern US.

County veterinarian Robert ter Horst believes that the birds may have been literally scared to death by fireworks set off on Tuesday night.

There have now been similar reports from all over the world.Booman Tribune, via Alternet:

Fireworks have been blamed. Power lines have been blamed. Lightning and hail have been blamed. Stupid bird tricks have been blamed. Unexplained internal bleeding has been blamed. Bird flu or other diseases have been blamed. The Antichrist has been blamed. Nostradamus has been blamed. All we know is that the people picking these dead birds up wear toxic protection suits that look like this one:

Keep reading to find out about the tons of dead fish that are washing up on shores around the world too. Obviously, I have no idea what’s going on there. But you do have to wonder if the ecosystem hasn’t been just a tiny bit affected by the millions of gallons of oil and chemicals (to this day) that gushed into the Gulf Of Mexico which we are supposed to believe just “disappeared” like magic. Or it’s Armageddon. One or the other.

Update: I’m reliably told that this is a common occurrence but nobody usually puts it together. Who knew?

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