Month: July 2011

H-A-C-K in in the USA

by digby

Looks like the oceans can’t protect us after all:

Mr Murdoch arrived in London yesterday, wearing a Panama hat and clutching a final copy of the News of the World, in a bid to save his crumbling organisation after the phone-hacking scandal saw the 168-year-old paper axed.

But he flew straight into another storm as it was claimed 9/11 victims may have had their mobiles tapped by News of the World reporters. And there was more bad news when it was revealed nine reporters ­allegedly at the centre of the phone scandal and claims of police corruption could face jail, along with three officers.

After he spent time at News International’s Wapping HQ in East London, 80-year-old Mr Murdoch held crisis talks with Mrs Brooks, 43 – who denies any knowledge of the Milly phone tapping – at his home in Mayfair.

The pair chatted behind closed doors as a former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.

Now working as a private ­investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victim’s phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.

A source said: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives.

Here’s a thought for you: Rupert Murdoch also owns the Wall Street Journal.

Update:

Les Hinton, Rupert Murdoch’s lifelong lieutenant and closest adviser, faces questions over whether he saw a 2007 internal News International report, which found evidence that phone hacking was more widespread than admitted by the company, before he testified to a parliamentary committee that the practice was limited to a single reporter.

News of the existence of the 2007 report – the conclusions of which were kept hidden from the public, MPs and police – came as Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation, arrived in the UK to deal directly with the rapidly developing crisis.

The collection of memos that formed the inquiry were sent to the Metropolitan police earlier this year. This step came after executives who had joined NI more recently discovered its existence and sent it to the Operation Weeting team investigating News of the World phone hacking.

Despite the alleged conclusions of the memos, NI executives repeatedly went on the record to say hacking was confined to a single “rogue reporter” – and gave evidence to parliament that that was the case.

Where is Hinton now?

He was appointed CEO of Dow Jones & Company in December 2007, after its acquisition by News Corporation.

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Sunday Reading

by digby

When Walter Shapiro tweets that we should read something for the great writing, it’s a really good idea to listen. Case in point, this profile of Jon Huntsman in the Weekly Standard.

A delicious excerpt:

Among the campaign’s consultants was the adman Fred Davis, a veteran of various John McCain campaigns who most recently gained fame for the mysterious “demon sheep” ad he produced for the California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina last year. (The ad featured a pasture full of sheep and a guy in a sheep’s costume and was, of course, catnip to bored-stiff reporters but less appealing to voters, whose sensibilities haven’t yet evolved into postmodernism, even in California.) I see that the 2012 Political Reporter’s Stylebook requires that upon first reference Davis must be called “unconventional,” although “maverick” is allowed as a substitute under some circumstances. True to form, the scene Davis staged for Huntsman’s announcement was unconventional in the conventional manner.

The event had the feel of an unsubtle satire dreamed up by some snotty 1970s aging-hippie movie director—Robert Altman, say—to prove that political candidates are just pretty-boy airheads engaged in a show-biz sham. In addition to the lifted lamp of Lady Liberty and the overdone backdrop, there was the handsome candidate and his excellent hair, tossed Kennedily by a gentle wind off the river. There was the lovely wife wreathed in smiles, accompanied by a raft of offspring who looked as if Madame Tussaud’s “Brady Bunch” exhibit had sprung wondrously to life.

Wow — “tossed Kennedily”.

Read the whole thing and not just for the writing. Read it for the thesis that Hunstman is a joke mostly because he foolishly made the miscalculation that 2008 was a repudiation of conservatism:

Lucky for Republicans, the “broad discussion about the future of our party” never took place. Instead, Obama’s liberalism gave them a chance to position themselves as unhyphenated conservatives, the kind that existed before rethinking. (It’s good to remember that the Bush-era party the rethinkers wanted to rethink was itself a product of rethinking, a hyphenated conservatism called “big-government conservatism.”) In 2010 Republicans were swept back to power without moving a muscle, ideologically, and the issues that Huntsman wanted to place at the top of the party’s agenda, education and the environment, have fallen low on the list of voters’ concerns, as they always will when times are rough. Matt Bai in the New York Times compared Huntsman the 2011 presidential candidate to a cave man transplanted from his own time to ours. From early 2009 to 2011 is hardly a geological epoch, but it’s true—to switch metaphors—that as 2012 approaches the rethinking man’s candidate looks like last year’s model.

We’ll see. I have to say that as much as liberals (and some sort-of moderate style Republicans) may have misread the 2008 election, the conservative misreading of 2010 is epic.

But the writing sure is enjoyable.

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Slave to Ideology

by digby

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the “Marriage Vow” put out by the looney tunes FAMiLY LEADER by now. (I just learned that the small “i” represents individual submission, which just creeps me out.)And this even creepier passage within it:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

Yes, a slave child was often more likely to be raised in a two-parent “household” — by her slave mother and her white owner father. I would have thought that such an unorthodox arrangement would be slightly problematic for the strict nuclear family crowd. I guess as long as the Plantatation owner wasn’t gay, they’re fine with it.

And needless to say, one of the greatest tragedies associated with slavery was the cruel breaking up of families. Didn’t these morons even watch Roots fergawdsake?

Old Mitch lets the cat out of the bag

by digbyu

Mediaite reports:

Baier, filling in for Chris Wallace, pressed McConnell on what would happen if no deal could be worked out and whether he was concerned with the consequences of what might happen if the debt ceiling is not raised. McConnell confidently responded, “nobody is talking about not raising the debt ceiling. I haven’t heard that discussed by anybody.” Yet Baier informed him that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, among others, have explicitly said just that. Baier even quoted Bachmann saying “don’t let them fool you that the economy is going to collapse” if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.

I’m fairly sure he’s talking about the people who are negotiating the deal, not Michele Bachman. And yes, they all agreed up front that they must raise the debt ceiling. Nobody is seriously contemplating walking away. The President hasn’t even made the slightest feint in that direction by issuing a veto threat if they send him something outrageous, so the Democrats aren’t even pretending to play that game. And McConnell just let the cat out of the bag (it has never exactly been in) that they don’t take the Tea party caucus seriously either.

While they may be playing around the edges with tax hikes, the trial balloons all show that the “negotiation” is really over how much cutting — and in what areas — each side can agree to. And since austerity is counterproductive and illiberal in any case, the GOP has already won. They are actually just negotiating the spin.

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Trickle Down Austerity

by digby

David Leonhardt:

In all kinds of ways — consumer demand, the federal deficit, even the weather — the medium-term future is highly uncertain. But this uncertainty, while the main problem, is not the only problem. We are also committing an unforced economic error. We’re cutting government at the same time that the private sector is cutting.It is the classic mistake to make after a financial crisis. Hoover and even Roosevelt made a version of it in the 1930s. The Japanese made a version of it in the 1990s. Now we are making it.Federal payrolls have been roughly flat for years (even as the population has been growing). But state and local payrolls grew over the last decade, by almost 20,000 jobs a month on average.

Since the crisis began and state and local taxes began plummeting, though, governments began to cut back. At first, the federal government stepped in, with the 2009 stimulus bill, and sent fiscal aid to states. Then the aid stopped.In round numbers, state and local governments have cut about a half million jobs over the last two years. If they had continued to hire at their previous pace — expanding as the population expanded — they would have added about a half million jobs.

You already knew this, of course. We’ve been discussing it here for months. But it does illustrate just how purely ideological “austerity” really is. It’s clearly making things worse. But they’re going for more.

What ideology you ask? Why the ideology that Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon espoused during the great Depression (well, except for the stocks part.)

Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” He insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people” —
Herbert Hoover

They are “wringing out excesses” and putting the people on a more moral footing in which they will work harder for less money and cease depending on government programs to be there when they get sick or can’t work. Some people call this having “skin in the game” and others call it “fiscal responsibility”, but in the end, you cannot help but suspect that all this austerity is the ruling class’s way of preparing America for less affluence as globalization moves into the next phase — by making them grateful for having less. After all, suffering is supposed to be good for the soul. For the little people anyway.

Kabuki Square Dance

by digby

It’s hard to know where the negotiations on the debt ceiling really stand, but from what we can gather today, Boehner has said that he can’t “Go Big” but they might be able to “compromise” by going back to the prior 2-trillion-in-cuts-in-exchange-for-air “medium” deal.

“Never say anything against the family again”

by digby

This story of the Murdoch empire’s bullying and extortion of British politicians sounds remarkably familiar:

However much they might deplore tabloid methods and articles — the photographers lurking in the bushes; the reporters in disguise entrapping subjects into sexual indiscretion or financial malfeasance; the editors paying tens of thousands of dollars for exclusive access to the mistresses of politicians and sports stars; the hidden taping devices; the constant stream of stories about illicit sex romps — politicians have often been afraid to say so publicly, for fear of losing the papers’ support or finding themselves the target of their wrath.

If showering politicians with political rewards for cultivating his support has been the carrot in the Murdoch equation, then punishing them for speaking out has generally been the stick. But the latest revelations in the phone-hacking scandal appear to have broken the spell, emboldening even Murdoch allies like Prime Minister David Cameron to criticize his organization and convene a commission to examine press regulation.
[…]
[P]oliticians have always been most afraid of the sting of The Sun and its Sunday sister (at least until this Sunday, when it is to close), The News of the World, because the papers’ good will is so important politically.

“They go on little feeding frenzies against various politicians,” said Roy Greenslade, a professor of journalism at City University London. Until the floodgates opened on Wednesday, when the outrage over the latest phone-hacking revelations had politicians voicing disgust in a cathartic parliamentary session, most members of Parliament were terrified of crossing Mr. Murdoch, Professor Greenslade said.

“Privately, M.P.’s say all sorts of things, but most of them have kept very, very quiet about Rupert Murdoch until now,” he added. “When you are facing the wrath of News International, you can bet they will turn up anything about you — whether it be true or just spun in a certain way.”

Labour politicians still shudder about the fate of Neil Kinnock, the party leader in the early 1990s, who was leading the Conservative Party’s John Major in the 1992 election when The Sun mounted a sustained attack on him. The reasons were political — the paper supported the Conservative Party — but the means were personal. Mr. Kinnock was the subject of a barrage of articles depicting him as inept, long-winded, strange looking, and even mentally unstable.

Thank goodness that could never happen here.

Our media culture is different and oddly it operates a little bit more subtly than Britain. But the “tabloidization” of our politics since the advent of Drudge (who commonly laundered GOP dirt through the British press) and then Fox News has also taken its toll. And the Murdoch empire’s fundamental thuggish nature is fully operative here as it is there.

Which is why this column by Joe Nocera is so lame — he attributes all this to Murdoch’s high spirits and immaturity:

Most people outgrow their twentysomething selves. As they age, they realize that the impulses and excitements of youth need to be tempered with the judgment, empathy and caution that come with maturity. They get a better feel for the lines that ought not to be crossed. Journalists, in particular, learn that there are stories that ought not to be pursued. Not every scoop is worth it.

Murdoch’s essential problem is that he never grew up. His instincts as a journalist are the same as when he was 22. “I love competition,” he said at the end of that Esquire interview. “And I want to win.”

A little too much, it turns out.

I’m sure old Rupert loves to win. Most business moguls do. And for all I know his early years on Fleet Street were hugely influential in forming his personality and ethics. But the problem is a little deeper than that. Murdoch uses his powerful and highly political media empire explicitly to punish anyone who criticizes the mepire and that’s a lot more insidious than an overweening love desire for a good competition.

And anyway, his boy Ailes also goes ballistic whenever anyone insults the Fox cult here in the US, so I’m guessing this runs much deeper in the corporate ethos. Remember this?

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Leave F. Scott Fitzgerald Aloooone

by digby

Dear God. First they bowdlerized Huck Finn. Now they’re dumbing down Gatsby.

I can hardly bear to direct you to the full text of her edition, which begins, “My name is Nick Carraway. I was born in a big city in the Middle West.”

That is an abbreviation of:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”– it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

It’s pointless and stupid to do this. If students can’t understand the language, then use a different book. As Ebert says, it’s not really about the plot. Doh.

h/t to KP

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Feel the centrist magic

by digby

In case you were wondering what the White House’s optimistic scenario for the Grand Bargain (within the debt ceiling fight or cumulatively in the ongoing various budget negotiations), I think this from Alice Rivlin last March probably captures it:

First, a bipartisan group of senators crafts a long-run budget plan that slows the future growth of Medicare and Medicaid, puts Social Security on sound fiscal basis, simplifies the tax code to raise more revenue from broader base with lower rates, and caps discretionary spending (defense and domestic). This step doesn’t take long, because the bipartisan group is already working and has the Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin plans to build on. Next, the president and the House leadership join the negotiations. Political perceptions begin to shift. After the sharp world-market reaction to the brief battle over the debt-ceiling increase, all participants are scared of not acting. Fear of taking the first step to slow entitlement growth or raise additional revenue is replaced by fear of being blamed for blowing up the deal and throwing the economy into a new tailspin. The deal no one thought possible is signed in the Rose Garden in the October sunshine, markets react positively, business steps up hiring and economic growth accelerates.

Voila, Le Grand Bargain.

I’m just guessing, but that certainly sounds like the recipe we’re currently seeing being cooked up.

Make note of one thing in there: “simplifies the tax code to raise more revenue from broader base with lower rates.”

I’m sure there are models that can show that could work. There are models for everything. But why does it sound so much like the same feel-good bullshit that brought us “Supply Side Economics”? Let’s lower taxes and bring in more money!

It assumes that those who will actually be paying more in taxes than they are today either won’t notice or won’t care, thus making the anti-tax forces and Big Money Boyz all calm and docile about this whole thing. Is that logical? After all, somebody will have to be paying more under this scenario or it will be revenue neutral — and thus completely useless in terms of closing the deficit. So what’s the point of doing it in that context? However, it sounds as though Rivlin and the others are convinced that this is another one of those supernatural economic theories which posits that just the act of reform alone will stimulate such a surge of optimism and business activity that it will create more revenues because of the explosion of economic growth.

Now, maybe this is different. Just because it seems to be promising new revenue while lowering rates (or behaving as if no one’s going to notice that they are paying more in taxes)it doesn’t mean that it’s magical thinking designed to make people accede to a one-sided deal. But the usual “flatten and broaden the base” theory really says nothing about raising revenue unless you include some psychological mumbo jumbo about how much better everyone’s going to feel about themselves now that the tax code has been cleaned up. And maybe they will. But let’s just say that all this talk about “tax reform” in exchange for huge cuts in spending at a time of economic crisis and GOP lunacy just doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the revenue side of this so-called deal is going to materialize. The magical thinking portion of the program always tends to make one a little bit suspicious.

See how the Wall Street Journal crew frames it:

Gigot: All right. Joining me now with reaction, Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger and Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady.

So Dan, you think that Congressman Ryan is on to something here with his thinking that tax reform is actually possible–lower the rates, broaden the base?

Henninger: Absolutely. I mean, as you mention, Paul, this fellow is going to be chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Gigot: Right.

Henninger: That’s likes a miracle, OK? House Ways and Means writes the tax laws. It’s been run for a long time by Charlie Rangel, who has been in the news lately. The new chairman is Congressman Dave Camp of Michigan, cut from the same cloth as Paul Ryan, gave a strong speech this week in favor of lowering taxes, broadening the base. He’s in charge of writing these laws.

And the centrists in Washington, including this commission and another one, the Bipartisan Policy Center run by Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin, released a report calling for lower taxes and flattening the base. There is a consensus building for doing this. I don’t think it’s going to happen during the Obama administration, but I would definitely point it towards 2012.

Gigot: Well, that’s the issue–I think one of the lessons of the 1980s, Mary is to do something like this–and it did get done in 1986, with a Democratic Congress and a Republican president, Ronald Reagan–but the lesson is it has to be bipartisan, at least in some respect.

O’Grady: Yeah, and I think, you know, Dan’s point about how the environment is really ready–I mean, Obama may be very much of a class warrior, as Paul Ryan said. I think that’s true. But at some point, you know, the people on his side have to recognize the fact that if you don’t have growth, you don’t have any revenues, you know.

Gigot: Right.

O’Grady: And you have a capital strike right now. And they have to do something to get money–to get the economy growing again.

Gigot: When you say capital strike, you mean people holding back, businesses in particular.

O’Grady: In particular–

Gigot: Not investing because of the environment.

O’Grady: Yes. And in particular, people who pay the higher marginal rate. And that’s the key point here, I think, that you have to start bringing those rates down for people who have money. And if you employ a tax increase after the first of the year, I mean, that is just going to kill growth.

Gigot: Tax reform is the–maybe breaks the Gordian knot here. Because everybody’s talking about the Bush tax increases, and then–you can’t do it–the Bush tax cuts, rather. You can’t just solve the budget problems with budget cuts alone.

Henninger: Well, you know, I was so fascinated, Paul, by this Domenici-Rivlin group, whose report came out this week. And they say in there, they’re doing this to create incentives to work, save and invest. Ronald Reagan said that.

Gigot: Yeah, we remember those words.

Yeah, and Reagan also proved deficits don’t matter. To Republican presidents.

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