Month: November 2013

“Quote-unquote” journalism

by digby

After the segment on CBS This Morning in which we saw  Lara Logan forced to admit to her egregious Benghazi hoax, here’s Norah O’Donnell interviewing Ben Smith from Buzzfeed:

“What about the flip side of twitter, where anyone can be a ‘quote unquote’ journalist and so many mistakes are made as a result?”

There wasn’t even a moment’s reflection about the magnitude of Logan’s admission or a second’s worth of humility about the limits of  journalistic (quote-unquote) integrity.

Be sure to watch the whole segment to get a sense of the disdain in which the vaunted CBS News division holds the upstart internet pretenders on the very day (on the very program!) their flagship news show admits to an epic botch of an extremely important story. I laughed out loud.

Lara Logan gives us a perfect illustration of how the establishment press thinks “real journalism” should be practiced. This is from Kevin Drum:

So here’s what we know. Davies never told Logan about the incident report. He never told the co-author of his memoir about the incident report. When the content of the report was revealed, he invented an entirely implausible story about lying to his supervisor in the report because he respected him so highly and didn’t want him to know that he’d disobeyed orders not to approach the compound. And yet, in a story that should have set off all sorts of alarms in the first place, this still didn’t set off any alarms for Logan. She continued to defend Davies and her reporting until news emerged yesterday that the incident report matched what Davies had told the FBI in a debriefing shortly after the attack.

You see, when someone comes to you with a blockbuster story about government malfeasance in which he depicts himself as a super-hero fighting off terrorists with his bare hands,
the last thing a quote-unquote journalist would do is check with this person’s employer to see if he told them the same story at the time. You certainly wouldn’t bother to check with the officials investigating the story to see if they have uncovered the same details. After all, she only had months to report it. You can’t expect her to do something that unorthodox under those time constraints. Just imagine what the tweeters would have done with this.

Update: Kevin proposes in his piece that Logan has some sort of agenda. Indeed she does:

Lara Logan, a correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” delivered a provocative speech to about 1,100 influentials from government, politics, media, and the legal and corporate arenas. Such downtown gatherings are a regular on Chicago’s networking circuit. (I am a member of the BGA’s Civic Leadership Committee, and the Chicago Sun-Times was a sponsor).

Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report, “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.

Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.

“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .” Logan declared in her native South African accent.

The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.

Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”

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The greatest nation in the world

by digby

America, fuck yeah!

For many, a $10 or $20 cut in the monthly food budget would be absorbed with little notice.

But for millions of poor Americans who rely on food stamps, reductions that began this month present awful choices. One gallon of milk for the kids instead of two. No fresh broccoli for dinner or snacks to take to school. Weeks of grits and margarine for breakfast.

And for many, it will mean turning to a food pantry or a soup kitchen by the middle of the month.

“I don’t need a whole lot to eat,” said Leon Simmons, 63, who spends more than half of his monthly $832 Social Security income to rent a room in an East Charleston house. “But this month I know I’m not going to buy any meats.”

Mr. Simmons’s allotment from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, has dropped $9. He has already spent the $33 he received for November.

The reduction in benefits has affected more than 47 million people like Mr. Simmons. It is the largest wholesale cut in the program since Congress passed the first Food Stamps Act in 1964 and touches about one in every seven Americans.

You know what would be an awesome idea? If we cut his Social Security too. Isn’t it a fact that his benefits are calculated improperly because it fails to take into account that he can always substitute the expensive food he might prefer with cheaper versions? I’m sure I heard that somewhere:

The chained CPI assumes that when prices for one thing go up, people sometimes settle for cheaper substitutes (if beef prices go up, for example, they’ll buy more chicken and less beef).

See? This man is doing exactly what’s the Chained CPI wants him to do — well, he can’t afford meat at all. Maybe not even food. But still, this is obviously the sort of discipline our disabled and elderly need to develop. It’s character building.

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Factoid ‘o the week

by digby

I think that overlooking this single fact is at the center of the administration’s failure to properly sell Obamacare:

The study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that people who already have individual coverage, like the Hodges, are less likely to qualify for the tax credits that will make coverage more affordable through the health law’s insurance markets.

According to the findings, 73 percent of potential customers who are uninsured will be eligible for tax credits that limit their premiums to a fixed percentage of their income. However, fewer than 40 percent of those who currently have individual health insurance will qualify.

That means that 60% of people who bought the crappy private insurance we’ve been offered up to now are not qualifying for subsidies and will actually be paying more for insurance. What that adds up to is the fact that those are the people who are subsidizing the uninsured. On some level, I think they instinctively understand this and it’s why they are rebelling against the arguments that are being made.

For instance, I’m watching defenders of the ACA on television news all day using the standard talking point that sacrifice is necessary to cover the uninsured — and scoffing at those who are complaining. But everyone isn’t sacrificing, are they? In fact, most people who work at news networks and newspapers are probably covered by their employers. And those who work for the government certainly are. These sacrifices are not being widely shared among the population at all — they are only being asked of those who are already in the private insurance market. (Yes, tax dollars are being spent for the subsidies, but nobody who isn’t making over $250,000 a year is going to feel that “sacrifice”. And yes, we’ve all been indirectly subsidizing the uninsured’s emergency room use. But it’s not quite the same as having your monthly bills increase is it?)

Obviously, I’m not defending the millionaires who are shedding crocodile tears over their higher premiums, and I’m not saying that everyone who is complaining is justified. (See my previous post.) Clearly, money to cover the uninsured had to come from somewhere. But the administration made a mistake in not anticipating that many of those who are going to be paying more would feel that it’s unfair they are the ones being ostentatiously lectured about how they must sacrifice for the greater good. I’m happy about the ACA and will end up with a better policy for about the same money, so on balance it is a plus for me. And I am a bleeding heart liberal who wants desperately for poor people to have coverage. But even I have to admit that the excessive moralizing about sacrifice from people who have generous employer paid health insurance grates on me a bit.

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Poor little millionaires


by digby

I have been writing with some sympathy about a certain subset of people in the private insurance market who are going to be paying higher insurance premiums under the ACA. It’s probably a small group who are living in high cost cities and who make just a little bit too much to qualify for subsidies.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about people like this:

I have no idea why a middle aged male millionaire would only buy catastrophic insurance, but I’m going to guess that he figured he could afford the out of pocket expenses of routine care. (Otherwise, he’s an idiot who didn ‘t understand what he was doing.) Either way, the additional money he will be paying for a policy is likely to be less than what he will pay if, for instance, he has an episode of kidney stones for which he needs a CAT scan in the emergency room and some medication. Non-lethal medical emergencies that don’t add up to “catastrophic” do happen to otherwise healthy people and they are expensive.

Those of us who had to buy only catastrophic insurance because we couldn’t afford a better policy would struggle to pay a 4-5,000 dollar emergency room bill, which is what something like that kidney stone episode costs. This rich celebrity will just put it on his American Express card.  He has no idea how most middle aged people think about their catastrophic plans — they pray they don’t need medical treatment.  The only peace of mind they have is knowing that if they get a diagnosis of cancer or some other exceptionally expensive diagnosis, they might be able to get through it (or die) without their families going bankrupt on top of it. Other than that, you just keep your head down and hope you make it to medicare.

I don’t think the millionaire who are getting these notices have those concerns.

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You don’t fire people you can’t replace

by David Atkins

Republicans want Kathleen Sebelius fired. The President is defending her, noting that she’s not a web developer and not responsible for the website woes.

But whether Sebelius deserves to be fired or not (I don’t believe so) is largely irrelevant to the question of whether she should be fired. The reality is that one of the primary reasons for the difficulty of implementing Obamacare, beyond the fact that it’s a needlessly complicated Rube Goldberg public-private neoliberal contraption, is Republican sabotage.

That sabotage will only continue if anyone whose replacement Republicans can block is fired over the rollout. If Obama were to fire Sebelius, Republicans would see to it that no one to the left of Newt Gingrich would be allowed to replace her. Nor is there any reasonable incentive for the President to allow the saboteurs to be given a trophy of that magnitude regardless of her alleged culpability.

Frankly, not only should Sebelius not be fired, the Senate must go forward with filibuster reform at least for Presidential nominees. That way the President will have the leeway to make necessary personnel decisions without the threat of sabotage standing in the way.

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An armed society is a polite society

by digby

If only more people had been armed:

The incident began when Raymond Lindstrom, 35, of New Port Richey, pulled out of his parking space in a black Ford pickup at around 12:40 p.m. at the Home Depot, at 1712 N. Dale Mabry Highway.

As he tried to exit the parking area, he drove near a gold minivan driven by Latasha Strong, of Tampa, in the parking aisle. The two vehicles got too close, making it difficult to pass safely, police said.

Lindstrom and Strong were side by side and exchanged words through the driver’s side windows, police said.

As the two exchanged words, Strong’s husband, Darrell Strong, 27, of Tampa, and his friend, John Christian, 40, of Tampa, pulled up in a separate vehicle, police said.

Darrell Strong and Christian confronted Lindstrom, who remained in his truck. The argument escalated and a fight broke out as Lindstrom was still in the driver’s seat, police said.

Lindstrom took out his gun, which Darrell Strong and Christian tried to take from him, police said.

Darrell Strong and Christian ran to their car. Lindstrom drove off, but he headed down a parking aisle that was a dead end, police said. He turned around and tried driving out of the lot.

Darrell Strong retrieved a gun from his car, police said, and went to the front of the store. As Lindstrom drove by, Darrell Strong fired two shots at the pickup, police said. Two bullets hit an unoccupied white Toyota Corrolla that belonged to someone not involved in the incident. The bullets knocked out the back and a side window.

Police estimate there were about a dozen people between the shooter and the truck when the shots were fired.

Through sheer luck, nobody was shot.

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Triple A strategy: ALEC, ACORN and the ACA

by digby

I think this signals a shift in tactics, or at the very least an experiment:

Attorney General Greg Abbott hinted strongly Tuesday that Texas may impose additional training and background checks on “navigators” hired under federal grants to help people sign up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

A day before President Barack Obama was to meet with navigators in Dallas, Abbott said his office and the state Department of Insurance have found weaknesses in federal rules.
The flaws could allow criminals to obtain Texans’ personal financial and health information through navigator sloppiness, Abbott warned. Crooks themselves could become navigators, he said.

In a letter to Insurance Commissioner Julia Rathgeber, he urged the department to “move quickly to establish state regulations that will protect Texans’ medical privacy.”
Republican members of the U.S. House, GOP state attorneys general and Gov. Rick Perry have warned that the federal government’s rules and online 20-hour training course for navigators were inadequate.

And this:

On the Senate floor yesterday, Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) took this to an almost comical level.

“We’ve already heard anecdotal reports about Obamacare navigators, including a woman who had an outstanding arrest warrant at the time she was hired – along with former members of an organization known as ACORN, that’s had its own share of problems with corruption and lawbreaking.

“As I said a moment ago, these people will be allowed to collect some of the most sensitive personal information that we have as Americans.”

Gosh, I hope they don’t go undercover and make a video out of your sensitive personal information and then put it out on the internet. That would be just terrible. That is, of course, if ACORN still existed, which it doesn’t. Except in the fevered imaginations of a lot of conservative white folks apparently.

This sounds like the anti-abortion “death by a thousand cuts” style of opposition. If they can’t defund it in one fell swoop, which I think they now realize cannot happen since the reforms are completely reordering the private insurance market already, they will chip away at it in increments, with targeted complaints and legal challenges on the state as well as the federal level. It’s not unanticipated, but this signals that they’ll use ALEC’s patented techniques to make the law unworkable and unpopular wherever they can. FYI.

And clearly, they’ll also use the lowest forms of racist fearmongering to do it: ACORN is a euphemism for “black.” Basically, the senator from Texas is telling people that scary, criminal negroes are going to have access to all your personal information and will use it to hurt you. There can be no other explanation for his absurd comments.

So, it begins. I hope that people are prepared to fight this in the US Congress and in most of the states because that’s how it’s going to be.

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The candidate of the bro

by digby

This is the best analysis of the Chris Christie phenomenon I’ve read:

So here come the flurry of theories for Christie’s success from journalists eager to unleash their pent-up chatter about his presumed White House bid (“The real race is just beginning,” announced the Hill). Any number of explanations tell at least part of the story. Yes: Christie bludgeoned the NJ Democrats into submission, since his stewardship after superstorm Sandy made him near unstoppable. I submit, however, that there exists a grand unifying theory which has thus far eluded the commentariat—Chris Christie is the candidate of the Bro.[…]

Attitude is of paramount importance to the Bro, who disdains “politics,” even as he relishes the opportunity to root for strong leaders. (Bros believe a “leadership” deficiency ails America, though they have trouble identifying precisely what proper “leadership” might entail.) The triumph of Christie’s persona—his refusal to “mince words” or “tolerate any crap,” with a wisecrack-y edge, and yet win elections, represents a political victory for the Bro more than passing any legislation.[…]

It should be clarified that the appeal of Bro politics is by no mean limited to males, but back in January 2012, when he snickered “You know, something may go down tonight, but it ain’t gonna be jobs, sweetheart” at a woman who was concerned about New Jersey’s economic trajectory, the governor cemented his predilection to stoke more…masculine-oriented passions. (Christie won the male vote by 43 percent.)

Besides unlimited bearhugs, nothing titillates the Bro like a good, crisp, super-shoutable catchphrase. Once ownership of a catchphrase is established, it can be used as a rite of passage as well as a bargaining chip for Bro camaraderie. (Better still if the catchphrase is easily convertible into a fiery chant.) On the campaign trail, Christie specializes in extemporaneously reprising his repertoire of memorable catchphrases from over the years. Much to the delight of boardwalk-goers, whenever somebody tried to elicit a classic zinger, he’d happily oblige. For instance, in Ocean City, a Bro within ear-shot chortled about defying evacuation orders during the first “once-in-a-lifetime storm” of Christie’s tenure, Hurricane Irene in August 2011. “I told you to get the hell off the beach and you didn’t listen!” the governor retorted good-naturedly, harking back to one of his marquee YouTube soundbites. The Bro appeared satisfied with the exchange, high-fiving an associate.

At the climax of his keynote address to the 2012 Republican National Convention, Christie proclaimed, “Tonight, we choose respect over love.” The meaning of this exhortation has become clearer since then: Good order is best maintained when everyone knows their proper place, and when leaders aren’t afraid to remind them of where they belong. In fact, lots of folks long for this reminder, especially if it can be communicated with a little humor. “People want leaders, not lawyers,” Christie declared yesterday, postulating that his victory signified an “affirmation of leadership.” My patently untestable theory holds that he won at least 95 percent of the Bro vote.

Read the whole thing for a series of anecdotes that beautifully illustrate the point.

It must be noted that Christie managed to win a majority of the women vote in this election, but then Republicans usually get a majority of white married women anyway. And I think there are plenty of Jersey Girls who love Jersey Bros. But the point still stands: he’s got a uniquely masculine appeal. As I’ve said, even my liberals male friends like him.

If Clinton runs and Christie gets the GOP nomination I’m afraid that Maureen Dowd will have to be medicated she’ll be so excited. It will be the ultimate test of her overarching thesis of politics: the girls vs the boys. Unfortunately, having dealt with an awful lot of “bros” of both parties over the last few years, I’m not entirely sure that this country is ready for the “gals” to win one.

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A photo for Richard Cohen

by David Atkins

Digby posted earlier about the amazing historical ignorance of “liberal” columnist Richard Cohen, who apparently only awoke to the fact that slavery was not as depicted in “Gone with the Wind” until he saw “12 Years a Slave” recently.

Since Thanksgiving is coming up soon, I figured Richard Cohen might want to learn about this:

These are tiny children’s handcuffs used to pacify Native American children as they were led away into indoctrination camps schools to keep them pacified.

This sort of ugliness has always been present in America, mostly perpetrated by the same Southern Jacksonian forces that are trying to deny Americans healthcare coverage today. It’s all still the same wars, with the same sets of cultural actors.

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Heartless

by digby

This story is just so sad:

I guess if they didn’t have the taser they would have had to kill him.

This man had a right to try to save his little baby even if he had to risk his life to do it. But even if they truly believed he had to be stopped there must have been a more humane way to do it. The idea that he would be tortured with electricity and handcuffed by police while his son burns in a fire is almost too much for me to take.

Tasers have changed policing in a way that our society has not yet fully reckoned with. It’s changing police officers into lazy sadists. I doubt they even realize it themselves.

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