Month: November 2014

The Newsroom: A Fantasy Network Reality Show
by Spocko

Aaron Sorkin writes more fantasy than George R.R. Martin. The Newsroom is Sorkin’s latest. I watch SF and fantasy for entertainment first and if I get some insights into human nature and into a different world that’s a bonus. The season three opener of The Newsroom was useful in both these ways and also gave me some ideas for media activism.

These things happened in Sunday’s episode of The Newsroom:

• A TV news network learned from a major mistake made last season. They changed their behavior to maintain a higher professional standard and are trying to do better.

 

• People in the news division have values and responsibilities in their lives and profession other than the bottom line. They will act on these even at the cost of their ratings or job.

 

• The president of the network states that the news division’s autonomy can only be protected if they have good ratings. Rating are not separated from quality or ethical work. Ratings equals money. If they don’t maintain high ratings they will lose autonomy.

 

•  It appears the news division’s recent failure impacted the parent companies’ financial projections. The parent company is now under some kind of attack from outside entities with unknown goals.

Which of these are fantasies, which are likely real life situations? It’s tempting to say one and two are fantasies and three and four are realities. But I think they can all be realities.

Emergency “Boston Bombing” Reporting vs. Regular Reporting


In this episode they deal with the Boston Bombing reporting and mention how Reddit members, Twitter and “Citizen Journalists” are covering the news. Of course there are digs at all including other networks, “We don’t go in based on tweets from witnesses we can’t talk to. What kind of credible news agency would do that?” cut to Fox News.

But this is Emergency Reporting where mistakes are often made.  So they can blame the fog of breaking news, but getting it right does matter. Especially when someone’s life is put in danger because of a failure of the people working as journalists.  People might forgive some mistakes in a breaking story, but what if it’s a regular occurrence?

What kind of mechanisms are in place for people at news organizations to do the right thing? Can we help them? Get other interested third parties to help?  Can we get others to punish them for failing to do the right thing?

Who cares about Regulatory Violations and Journalism Ethical Failures?

Remember Lee Fang’s report: Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?  He showed how the TV networks weren’t identifying the weapons makers who were actually paying the retired generals and pundits on the news and discussion shows.

Depending on the situation, these failures could be violations of the FCC, FTC and SEC regulations.  They could also be violations of the networks’ own journalism guidelines.

When the retired generals and pro-war pundits went on it wasn’t an emergency with no time to check details.  The producers and hosts failed to do their job, not only the ones implicated in Fangs’ story, but also many more in 2013 based on a Public Accountability Initiative report.

Unlike the cast in The Newsroom, we have not seen any of the networks changing their behavior around their failure to identify people.  Is it because no regulatory or employment lawyers were involved? No public pressure? Is it because no revenue was threatened? Because all the cool kids are doing it? (Except for that stuck up suck up News Hour on PBS.)

When people in TV news divisions got busted in 2008 in the New York Times story for using the Pentagon officials working for military contractors, the issue was one of identification AND financial conflict of interest.  The TV networks acted. They fixed the problem as they saw it by taking the financial conflict of interest out of the equation and firing the retired generals they were paying. They now bring new retired generals back as guests.  But the identification problem still exists.

Why did TV networks change their behavior around retired generals talking on the news in 2008 but not in 2014?  Again, we might get some ideas from The Newsroom.

In this episode you can see which types of pressures appear to take priority over others.  Some are internal to the person, some to the division, others to the company and then still others to a higher power, or for some the highest power, The Shareholders.

In a scene with the president of the company:

I want you to do the news well, but your power comes from your ratings and the autonomy of the news division comes from your power.

You are not going to be able to do the stories you want. You are not going to be able to say what you want. And frankly are not going to be able to stay on the air because my mother and I can only protect you from the board if you are making money.”

If the parent companies only see their news divisions as a profit center, like any other, then they will use the standard club, “Make money or we cut you loose.”

In the episode, Will, the ACN anchor laments. “But we did everything right!” when they didn’t get good ratings, as if quality and ratings were tightly linked. He thinks the news is special, that they have a responsibility to the public and viewers, not just The Shareholders.

However, as we have seen in the case of MSNBC, a parent company will cancel a highly rated, money-making show to serve another goal.

Were The Shareholders served by canceling Donahue, the highest rated show? The executives needed to make a case to someone for losing ad revenue when they canceled that show.

Did they use a larger picture revenue goal?  Did they articulate to The Shareholders that the brand image might become anti-war, and that would be a bad thing?   (MSNBC was partly owned by military contractor GE at the time.)

The issue of which of the many pressures the ACN team are under and which they will prioritize was still in flux at the end of the episode. In the real world all these same pressures are going on at the TV networks, but assuming that it’s always about the money is incorrect.

At different times, certain groups within a company will respond to and act for reasons that aren’t always directly tied to The Bottom Line.  And, if you are clever enough, you can even give them reasons why doing the right thing is good for the bottom line.

Headline ‘O the Day

by digby

I think they are eminently qualified to lead this inquiry:

A penal strategy dressed up to look like a medical procedure



by digby

Spencer Ackerman at the Guardian is reporting that more of prisoners who claim they were tortured by the US have come forward to say that those who conducted the big “investigation” of the torture regime never bothered to to interview them. But have no fear. The investigation was very thorough otherwise. They interviewed all the people who were accused of torturing and they said it never happened.  So that’s good.

I have to say that this really floored me:

Tom Malinowski, an assistant secretary of state who traveled to Geneva to testify, conceded to the UN committee that the US had tortured post-9/11 terrorism detainees.

“At the same time,” Malinowski said, “the test for any nation committed to this Convention and to the rule of law is not whether it ever makes mistakes, but whether and how it corrects them.”

How would anyone know they’ve corrected them? Because they say so? There are plenty of people who say otherwise. This is from Joe Nocera in the New York Times just last week:

Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab is a Syrian man who has been a detainee at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. In 2009, the Guantánamo Review Task Force ruled that he was not a threat to national security and could be released. Yet here we are five years later, and Diyab is still imprisoned at Guantánamo, having never been tried, or even accused of a crime, and with no idea when — or if — he’ll ever get out. Last year, to protest their continued confinement, he and many other detainees began a hunger strike.  

One reason many detainees abandoned their hunger strikes is because, twice a day, the government used what is called “enteral feeding” to ensure that they were getting nutrients. A more common term is force-feeding. The ordeal begins with something called “forced cell extraction,” which one of Diyab’s lawyers, Jon Eisenberg, described to me as “a highly orchestrated procedure.”

“A five-man riot squad in complete armor pins the guy to the floor, shackles him, and carries him out,” Eisenberg says. Then the detainee is strapped into a restraint chair — which the prisoners have dubbed the “torture chair.” One soldier holds the detainee’s head, while another feeds a tube into his nose and down to his stomach. It is very painful to endure.

Last year, I wrote several columns about force-feeding, asking whether it could be classified as torture. At the time, I didn’t think there would ever be a way to test that premise in an American court. The federal judge who seemed most sympathetic to the detainees’ plight, Gladys Kessler, had concluded that she simply lacked the authority to rule on the conditions of their confinement, based on a 2006 law intended to prevent the prisoners from petitioning the judiciary and challenging their detention.

Lo and behold, Judge Kessler turned out to be wrong. Earlier this year, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled, 2 to 1, that she did have jurisdiction. There are strict medical protocols for force-feeding hospital patients or prisoners. If the military violated those protocols — especially if detainees were force-fed in an abusive, punitive manner — then she could order them to stop.

Thus began eight months of legal wrangling between Diyab’s lawyers and the government that culminated in a three-day hearing that took place last month. Though no one put it like this, its purpose, at least in part, was to decide whether the military’s methods for force-feeding detainees was a form of torture.

One of those who testified on Diyab’s behalf, Steven Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, said it’s not even a close call. He was first horrified to discover that the government had been lubricating the tube with olive oil instead of a water-soluble lubricant. “When you pass the tube, some of the lubricant can drop into the lungs,” he said. Olive oil in the lungs can cause an inflammatory reaction called lipoid pneumonia. (The government says it stopped using olive oil as a lubricant over the summer.)

After listing a half-dozen other ways the government’s force-feeding violated medical protocols, he concluded: “They turned it from a medical procedure to a penal strategy dressed up to look like a medical procedure. The procedures look nothing like medicine.”

And then there’s the matter of affirming the Army Field Manual despite plenty of evidence from experts that it includes torture techniques.

But what makes the spokesman’s comment so galling is the fact that the administration continues to do everything in its power to make it impossible for the people of this country to ever know exactly what happened and ensure it doesn’t happen again. No, the test of any signatory to the convention against torture is not correcting it’s boo-boos but whether it allows torture and if it does whether it punishes that illegal activity. You cannot have a “rule of law” where everybody just gets to say they “made a mistake” and carries on as if nothing happened.

And I won’t even address the fact that nobody has ever been held responsible for what happened. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is still running around squawking about torture being a “no brainer” even as we contemplate the possible election of the brother of the president who approved the heinous practice. Yeah, we’ve really learned our lesson.

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Nice little town you have there …

by digby

… be a shame if anything happened to it.

The town council in Rossville, Ga. on Monday voted to ban abortion clinics because the mayor was worried about the “drama” one would bring to the city, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

“We want to be a peaceful city,” Rossville Mayor Teddy Harris said during a council meeting. “We don’t want to have any protesters.”

So they’ve finally reached a point where they don’t have to protest anymore. Just the idea of clinic protests is enough to give politicians an excuse to ban abortion clinics.

*I assume there’s no need to point out that the protesters at abortion clinics are the ones who want the clinics closed.

And good for Senator Gillibrand for pointing out that blaming women for the entirely predictable loss in 2014 is BS:

“I resent the notion that women shouldn’t be talked to directly about issues we care about,” she said during a Center for American Progress Action Fund event, according to the Huffington Post. “It’s a shame that the range of issues that affect women have been successfully rebranded into this one tight phrase to dust off the shoulder.”
[…]
“Republicans don’t have a branding problem with women, they have policy problem with women,” she said. “Let me be clear: There’s a real difference between the parties on the full range of issues that affect women and their families, so the answer is not to stop talking about these issues.”

Still, she said she’d rather call these “family” issues. And I guess that’s fine except for the fact that they really are women’s issues and there shouldn’t be a problem with saying that since half the population is female. But I guess it is still a man’s world and we just live in it.

I eagerly await the next iteration of “family issues” from the Democratic Party. I’m thinking “birth control: shameful, legal and rare” has a ring to it.

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Bye-bye Blue Dogs

by digby

I wrote about the last of the Blue Dogs going extinct in the wild over at Salon today:

One of the headlines coming out of each of the last three elections has been the impending extinction of the Blue Dog caucus in the House of Representatives. Last week’s trouncing sounded the death knell of the last Blue Dog left in the wild of the Deep South, John Barrow of Georgia, and that fact has got a lot of political pros running around in circles lamenting the loss of that Democratic species and trying to figure out how to reintroduce them back into their habitat. What they don’t realize is that the Blue Dog was a horrible Frankenstein experiment gone wrong and it’s far better for the political environment if they just pass quietly into extinction before they permanently damage the eco-system.

Blue Dogs weren’t just a southern phenomenon, although their leadership was certainly centered there and the concept behind them was consciously derived from the old Southern Dem saying “I’d even vote for a yellow dog if it was a Democrat.” There was more to it than that, though. As Ed Kilgore pointed out in this piece, the Yellow Dog Democrats were simply Southerners who saw the Democratic Party as “the default vehicle for day-to-day political life, and the dominant presence, regardless of ideology, for state and local politics.” In that sense it was similar to the machine politics in the urban centers. This was how you got business done, got favors, wielded influence in your community. Ideology existed but there wasn’t anything particularly consistent about it.

Read on. It may surprise you to learn that Blue Dogs were not organized around regional, social or cultural concerns. They were organized exclusively around … money. And it will also not surprise you to learn that while they’ve been going extinct, the Democratic Frankensteins have cobbled together a new hybrid monster to take their place. And they’ve let it loose to run all over the country.

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Memo to pundits

by digby

Dear Pundits,

Please stop saying that the election results show that “American people” came together and said they wanted congress to work together with the president on behalf of the American people as if that’s some kind of a mandate for moderation.

The American people spoke but that’s not what they were saying. In fact, they didn’t agree on much:

The majority of Republicans only want to pass their own policies and somehow force the president to sign them.  They do not want compromise and they do not want moderation.  Democrats, on the other hand, are much more likely to want both.

This isn’t brain surgery. As long as this dynamic exists the government will get more and more conservative regardless of what the more pragmatic Republican leaders and the  Democratic Party wants.  There is no incentive for the right wing to do anything but hang in there.  They may not get everything they want in one fell swoop, but they’ll be getting more of what they want than if they compromise. And they simply do not want “moderation” they want to make a point.

The Democratic plan to deal with this seems to be that a bunch of Republicans will eventually wake up and realize that they have been wrong. Good plan.

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Firebombing democracy

by digby

Here’s a nice story about our civilized nation:

The home and two cars of a campaign finance director for a pro-solar energy candidate running for Louisiana’s utility regulatory board were blown up Thursday.

No one was injured in the explosions, and authorities have yet to established a direct link between the apparent attacks and the campaign’s efforts to promote solar energy, according to local station WWL.

But the ATF is assisting in the investigation of the incidents, according to NOLA.com. The finance director targeted, Mario Zervigon, a well known political operative in the state, is taking a break from campaigning for candidate Forest Bradley-Wright.

Bradley-Wright is campaigning on a program that allows Louisiana solar-panel users to continue to sell their excess electricity to utility companies. He is facing incumbent Eric Skrmetta, who seeks a cap on how much electricity solar customers can sell. They are competing in a run-off election for a seat on Louisiana’s Public Service Commission, which sets electricity rates in the state. Bradley-Wright has received most of his campaign funds from the solar industry, according to WWL.

Important to note that they don’t know the motive for this firebombing. But if it is political you have to shake your head in wonder that there might be people who are so opposed to people selling their excess solar energy back to the utility companies that they’d fire bomb someone’s house. Let’s just say, I wouldn’t be surprised. I could easily see someone taking it all just a bit too personally.

(No, I don’t think it’s likely that the oil industry hired someone to do this — this is a little below their pay grade.)

What will happen if SCOTUS strikes down Obamacare federal subsidies?

by Gaius Publius

As you may know, the Supreme Court recently decided to hear another ACA (Obamacare) case, this one also crafted by the right wing to gut the law. At risk are subsidies and tax credits given to people who buy insurance on the federal exchanges, as opposed to the state exchanges. Igor Volsky at Think Progress (h/t Ken at DWT):

[The suit] could result in serious implications for Obamacare beneficiaries and the 36 states that have refused to establish their own exchanges. In fact, should the Supreme Court eliminate the tax credits for the millions who have enrolled in coverage through the federally-run marketplaces, the consequences wouldn’t be too dissimilar from stripping out the law’s individual mandate — something the justices refused to do in 2012. 

Read for more detail if you want it. Volsky does a good job laying out the specifics of the lawsuit. More detail here as well.

The “news” part of this news is that the Court gets to take another run at Obamacare, another shot at neutering it. But that’s not what I want to point to. Volsky’s article also looks down the road at specific consequences if the suit succeeds. Unlike Volsky, who makes six points, I want to make just three.

■ These are the consequences as Volsky sees them:

1. Millions of people [in no-exchange red states] will see triple digit premium hikes. …

2. Millions of people [in no-exchange red states] will lose health care coverage. …

3. Obamacare will face a death spiral. …

4. Insurers will advocate for repealing market protections. …

5. States [i.e., no-exchange red states] will lose billions of dollars. …

6. The health of Americans living in [no-exchange] red states will worsen. …

■ Most or all of the people who will be effected in Volsky’s points 1, 2, 5 and 6 are people living in red states where elected state governments have rejected setting up state exchanges:

While states with state-run marketplaces won’t experience a disruption, those that allowed the federal government to build their exchanges will. The latter are mostly run by Republican-leaning lawmakers and already have higher numbers of uninsured on average. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would thus perpetuate a health care divide between so-called blue and red states. 

■  The effect of this red-state disruption creates Volsky’s points 3 and 4, which might (but won’t necessarily) spell the end of Obamacare. Because:

Eliminating the subsidies increases costs and discourages healthy people from remaining insured, leading to even higher premium increases and a very expensive risk pool full of sicker — and by definition more expensive — beneficiaries.

And:

[I]f the pool of beneficiaries shrinks as coverage without subsidies becomes too expensive for healthy individuals, insurers will likely advocate to repeal these protections. The industry has spent millions on lobbying and political contributions guaranteeing that Congress will be more than happy to listen to its demands.

This leads to a number of questions. Will the Roberts Court pull the trigger on red-state health insurance, and pull even more of the mask off its wealth-serving self? I’d hate to see the first occur, but if Roberts does do that, I’d welcome the second. The Roberts Court is arguable the worst since the start of the last century. I’d be pleased to have that be obvious. A revolt against that Court, a real one, is long overdue.

And what about voters for red-state governments who refuse to allow their own, often poor, citizens to be insured? Again, I’d hate to see it — human suffering is never a good thing — but hastening the fall of red state governments via voter revolt might solve other problems going forward. (And frankly, don’t people have the right to choose their government, and also experience the real consequences of that choice, especially in red states? Sometimes experiencing consequences is a good thing, especially if prëemptive thoughtful examination fails to work.)

And finally, Obamacare itself, for all the good it does, is designed as a profit-protection program with a government guarantee. I would not vote to destroy it at this point (at least I don’t think I would), but in a perfect progressive world, replacing it with actual Medicare would be a net positive. We may never again have a moment like Obama had in 2008 — a Democratic president with an FDR Congress and an FDR mandate — a moment that Obama, by the way, totally threw away. But if we had it to do over, I’d want enough spine in the Congressional Progressive Caucus to force the single-payer (Medicare for All) issue to its conclusion. I’m certain if the hardball choice was “Medicare or nothing,” the whole country would jump for joy, and Medicare.

None of us is in control, of course; these are just thoughts. Red state voters will do what they want, and the Roberts Court will do what it wants — all independent of our wishes or even our existence. So consider this a scorecard for when the actual contest is held. Arguments are expected in February or March with a decision in June or so. Here’s what’s at stake. Stay tuned.

GP

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A gated democracy
by Tom Sullivan

The Worst Voter Turnout in 72 Years the New York Times declares this morning, condemning continued efforts to suppress turnout among poor, minority and younger voters. They don’t even bother to add qualifiers anymore when calling out Republicans for voter suppression.

Sean McElwee at Huffington Post runs down some preliminary analysis of new voting restrictions. Photo ID laws, eliminating same-day registration, and felon disenfranchisement were contributing factors in the low turnout.

More than 600,000 in Texas could not vote this year because they lacked the newly required documents. How many tried and were turned away? The nonpartisan Election Protection Voter help line received over 2,000 calls in Texas, according to the Brennan Center’s director of its Democracy Program, Wendy Weiser. A federal judge had determined that the Texas law was purposely designed to suppress minority votes.

As Ari Berman wrote last week, “Since Republican legislatures across the country implemented new voting restrictions after 2010 and the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, it’s become easier to buy an election and harder to vote in one.”

Speaking of both, AOL is leaving the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), joining other tech firms in the latest exodus [Emphasis mine]:

In the space of two weeks in September, Google, Yahoo, and Yelp announced they had already left or were in the process of leaving ALEC, an exodus that began when Google Chairman Eric Schmidt charged that the group was “just literally lying” about climate change. Facebook also said it was “not likely” to renew its membership with ALEC next year.

Shortly after, Occidental Petroleum, the fourth-largest oil and natural-gas company in the U.S., also said it would separate from ALEC.

And just last week, SAP, a German-based software company with regional offices in the U.S., announced it would “immediately disassociate itself from ALEC.” A company representative for SAP cited ALEC’s conservative stance on climate change as well as its historic positions on gun control and voter rights. Earlier in the year, Microsoft, too, said it would leave ALEC.

On Election Day here in western North Carolina, voters turned out Republican state Rep. Tim Moffitt, an ALEC board member. Statewide, however, another ALEC board member, state Rep. Thom Tills, R-Mecklenburg, got elected to the U.S. Senate. After Republicans gained control of the state legislature, Tillis, Moffitt, and other allies immediately set about implementing an ALEC agenda to voucherize schools, privatize public infrastructure and utilities, weaken cities (blue votes), and of course, to restrict voting.

Because oligarchs worldwide, including those in the world’s most unequal developed country, have never been comfortable sharing power with their lessers. Democracy will never be tolerable until they can make it a gated democracy.

The Beck diagnosis

by digby

Far be it from me to question the “medical” diagnosis here, but let’s just say it’s fair to wonder if the jury’s actually still out on what ails Beck:

Glenn Beck revealed on his network The Blaze on Monday that he has been battling a series of health problems that have left doctors baffled.

The conservative media personality said the problems started when he was on Fox News and became so severe that the crew worked out hand signals to indicate when to take the camera off of him.

“We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands or feet or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them or set them on fire or pushed broken glass into my feet,” Beck said. “I can’t tell you how many nights my wife would sit in the light, looking at the bottom of my feet to make sure that there really wasn’t any glass in it.”

At times crying, Beck explained how he has visited various doctors who were unable to figure out what was wrong.

He’s also experienced sleep problems, which at first allowed him to function with just two to four hours of shut-eye per night.

“Quite honestly this isn’t a symptom that you look to fix,” Beck said. “If you have a ton to do, you’re like, ‘I don’t need sleep this is great.'”

However, doctors told him he hadn’t had any REM sleep in about a decade. And soon, other problems appeared, including what he called “time collapse,” or the inability to remember if he had met someone just a week ago or years earlier.

Beck said he suffered in ways he publicly revealed at the time, including macular dystrophy and vocal chord problems, as well as some had not, such as seizures that would strike while flying and in times of exertion.

“Most afternoons my hands will start to shake or my hands and feet begin to curl up and I become in a fetal position,” Beck said. “When it gets real bad my friends just kind of try to uncurl me.”

In New York about 18 months ago, Beck went through a battery of tests, including one for traumatic brain injury.

“I did so poorly on this test the doctors shared the results with my wife and didn’t focus on them with me. I never wanted to see the results,” Beck said. “I knew I was functioning at about the bottom 10 percent. I knew when I couldn’t figure out simple math problems or remember a series of words I was in real trouble.”

Beck said doctors told him he may be unable to function in five or 10 years.

“It has baffled some of the best doctors in the world,” Beck said. “It has frightened me and my family as we didn’t know what was happening.”

At one point, Beck looked into the possibility that he was being poisoned.

Beck said he moved from New York to Dallas because he believed the better climate might help. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he also moved near Carrick Brain Centers, a brain rehabilitation center that specializes in experimental therapies that are not covered by insurance.

There Beck was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and adrenal fatigue, among other things. He said these conditions are being treated with diet, lifestyle changes and hormones.

Beck said his faith has played a major role in his recovery.

“My doctors told me that it was my faith in God that was powering me through all this, that I shouldn’t be standing,” Beck said, adding that the move from New York to Dallas may have saved his life.

I’m happy for him that he feels better. Whatever works is my motto. But let’s just say it’s an unusual therapy. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the man who created it:

Dr. Frederick Robert “Ted” Carrick, DC, PhD, (born: 26 February 1952) is a Canadian-American Chiropractic Neurologist who is considered the father of modern chiropractic neurology.

He is best known for assisting Sidney Crosby and Alexandre Pato as well as being the founder of Carrick Brain Centers.

In the spring of 1986, Carrick was asked to establish the chiropractic neurology diplomat certification program by the American Chiropractic Association.

Carrick returned to clinical practice in 2012. He joined the clinical faculty of Life University’s LIFE Functional Neurology Center. He left the LIFE Functional Neurology Center in the Spring of 2013.

In the summer of 2013, Carrick became Chief of Functional Neurology at the Carrick Brain Centers

ABC News did a story on Carrick’s practice a few months ago:

Most of Carrick’s patients are referred to him by doctors, but his results are often dismissed as a placebo effect, meaning the patients feel better because they believe in his cure. But the doctor denies that’s the case.

“If it was placebo, we’re doing a pretty darn good job of it,” he said. “What we do is that we do things other people do. We don’t do anything that is really original in our work. We just combine things that other people have done in a different fashion.”
[…]
There are plenty of skeptics who say Carrick’s methods do not pass scientific muster, and yet Carrick said he has months-long waiting lists with people desperate to see him for treatment. When he treats Hubbard, he walks her through an exercise where he has her close her eyes and try to relax.

“I look very, very carefully and what’s happening with her eyes, with her heads, the degree that her pupils are open or closed, and then her ability to track,” Carrick said. “We find that if we do a certain motion, and we get a different tracking, this is going to have a good probability of working.”

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with Beck’s problem of “adrenal fatigue” or whatever but if it helped him more power to him. On the other hand … there’s always been a lot of money to be made in snake oil. And when it comes to Beck there’s an Occam’s Razor diagnosis that makes just as much sense: mental illness.

It’s fascinating to look back and realize that at the time when Beck was King of the Tea Party, he was going through all of this. I think the implications of that for both Beck and the Tea Party are fascinating, don’t you?

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