Month: January 2015

“Yes Virginia, all that money printing did show up as inflation”


by Gaius Publius

Nice catch by Ian Welsh. Start here, then think about it:

One of the great “mysteries” of the last 7 years or so is why all the
money from unconventional monetary policy hasn’t shown up as
inflation. Many analysts thought that printing that much money must
surely increase prices, but inflation indices in most of the developed
world are barely up, and in many cases are flirting with deflation.

The answer is obvious, but you’ll hardly see anyone point it out.

My inner Modern Monetary Theorist says, an expanded money supply can’t show up as inflation until there’s way too much, which there isn’t yet. That’s the nature of fiat money systems, which we have, especially at zero interest rates.

But Welsh is onto something. There is way too much, but only for some people — our “billionaire overlords,” as the mistress of this place is wont to say. Welsh completes the thought:

First, who was the money given to?

Rich people and corporations.

Ok then, what do rich people and corporations spend their money on?  Stocks, and real estate—high end real estate.

In America as a whole, let alone New York, housing prices have not returned to pre-financial crisis values.  But luxury apartment prices now exceed pre-financial crisis prices.  Real estate prices, period, in London, are now higher than pre-financial collapse.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Index is up about 175% off its lows of 2009.
The annualized gain is therefore about 29% a year.  GDP has not risen
anything like that, neither have wages.  Corporations, however, are
flush with money, and they have spent a great deal of it on stock
buy-backs, while rich people, of course, have bought stocks.

Inflation has, then, shown up exactly where one would expect, in the
assets bought by the people who were given money.

Welsh has more to say, but I’d like to end here, with one more instance of what I’ve been calling the invisible obvious:

This is not hard, this is not difficult, this is not complex. The
fact that mainstream analysts and pundits do not connect the dots on
this is because they do not want to.

Too right.

By the way, if you think that asset inflation is a problem or an error, think again. Assets are where the global wealthy have parked their money; their piggy bank. If Fed governors don’t keep those values high, they’d be replaced by governors who will.

GP

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A slogan that gets to the heart of the matter

by digby

This:

“The womb is the most dangerous place for a child”

Well, that says it all, doesn’t it? It’s right out of a dystopian novel. This is basically saying that the half of the population that is biologically programmed to gestate the species is actually an enemy of the human race.

Here’s the thing.  If you believe that life begins at conception then that’s actually true.  The baby birthing vessels (sometimes called “human beings”, “women” and “mothers”) lose millions of zygotes, blastocysts and embryos through their natural biological processes. But apparently the birthing vessels don’t even know or care that they are committing mass murder over the course of their lives. This slogan tells all of them what they really are.

These people are talking about abortion, but that doesn’t change the basic thrust of this argument. If life begins at conception then the womb is an extremely dangerous place for children. The only people who have wombs are women.  Therefore, women are the most dangerous threat to children. You can’t separate one from the other.

This is the kind of deeply embedded misogyny that has ruled this world since the beginning.  That bitch Eve tempted poor Adam with the apple and revealed woman’s true nature. What I can’t figure out is why they think so many of these murderous baby-killers should be trusted to raise children in the first place. Back in the day they solved that little problem by giving men full property rights over their children. If all women are child murderers then that only makes sense. Maybe they’d like to go back to that.

But for some reason these same people tend to immediately lose interest in the whole question of child safety after they emerge from the dangerous, life threatening womb:

Kaleb Ahles’ grandparents sobbed as Pinellas detectives investigated the 2-and-a-half-year-old’s death.

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said the boy’s father, Kevin Ahles, put his son in the family car. As other family members helped Kaleb’s parents move out of their house, at 1094 Misty Hollow Lane in Eastlake, the toddler found a small .380 caliber handgun in the glove box. He suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound around 4:47 p.m. Wednesday, deputies said.

“It’s just one of those things that happens where everything lined up the wrong way where we had a 2-and-a-half-year-old that was able to take a gun, pick it up, turn it around, and he shot himself dead center in the middle of the chest,” Gualtieri said.

Several witnesses told investigators Kaleb was by himself when the single shot went off.

“The father turned around, heard the gun shot go off, turned around, found the child in the car, saw the gunshot wound to his chest, saw the child bleeding,” the sheriff said.

Kaleb’s mother, Christina Nigro, and his aunt started CPR. Paramedics continued on the way to Trinity Hospital, but Kaleb didn’t make it and was pronounced dead.

I’m going to say that the most dangerous place for children is any place where loaded guns are left lying around for 2 year old to find. The womb, not so much.

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Patriarchy? What patriarchy?

by digby

Yesterday:

Sixteen House Republicans delivered impassion floor speeches Wednesday evening promoting a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy – a number that included only one woman.

GOP leadership originally scheduled the vote to coincide with the annual March for Life on Thursday, when thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators will descend upon the National Mall. But after facing a high number of defections from GOP women and centrists, the House will instead vote on legislation prohibiting the use of taxpayer funds for abortions, which largely codifies current law.

At issue among Republicans in the original bill was language only allowing exceptions for rape if the victim reported it to police. The Justice Department estimates that nearly 70 percent of rapes go unreported.

Despite the swirling controversy, the series of floor speeches about the initial measure after the last votes of the day overwhelmingly featured white men. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) was the only woman to join her 15 other colleagues on the House floor Wednesday evening for what are known as “special order” speeches.

Wagner recalled first participating in the March for Life in 1990, when she was 28 years old and 12 weeks pregnant with her son.

“While killing an unborn child is unconscionable at any time, it is especially abhorrent at the 20-week mark, when a child is able to feel the pain of an abortion,” Wagner said.

That is, of course, a lie. But whatever.

The good news is that the compassionate conservative Lindsay Graham is trying to find a middle ground:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, chief Senate sponsor of the GOP’s effort to undermine Roe by banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, spoke this morning to the Family Research Council’s “ProLifeCon,” about the House GOP’s decision to cancel a vote on its version of the bill that had been planned for today. The House leadership pulled the plug on the vote in response to protests from some Republican women who objected to a provision that exempted rape survivors from the ban only if they report the rape to police. Some anti-choice groups have objected to including a rape exception in the bill at all, a last-minute addition after the bill’s previous House sponsor, Trent Franks, implied that women who are raped rarely get pregnant.

Graham acknowledged that opponents of rape exceptions are being “intellectually consistent and honest about ‘the baby is the baby’” but argued that banning rape survivors from accessing abortion is a political impossibility: “Some of us who have these exceptions do so in a democratic society believing that there are some places we will not go.”

“I’m going to need your help to find a way out of this definitional problem with rape,” he told the audience.

“The rape exception will be part of the bill … We just need to find a way definitionally to not get us in a spot where we’re debating about what a legitimate rape is, that’s not the cause that we’re in,” he said.

The problem is they’re in a “definitionally” tough spot what with the beyotches bringing up the rape exceptions all the time and it coming into conflict with the belief that said beyotches are murderers and all, which is, after all, even worse than rape. It’s a problem.

But look, this is is a feature not a bug. When we’re arguing about whether or not there should be a rape exception for an abortion ban at 20 weeks, we’ve lost ground. A lot of it. This is yet another moving of the goal post. So, basically I agree with Huckleberry. Arguing over the rape exception misses the point. But then so does he.

First they came for the women with horrible third trimester complications and called it “partial birth abortion” and we did nothing …

Born under a bad sign
by Tom Sullivan

On Wednesday, NPR ran a story about a Russian writer, Mikhail Bulgakov, whose work Stalin enjoyed, but whose ideas Stalin considered “too dangerous to publish.” Ideas are like that. Invasive. Pernicious. Bulletproof, as “V” said in the movie. They can spread like a virus. Or, reduced to shibboleths, become objects of worship. For many, freedom works like that now.

Also this week, Michael Kraus and Jacinth J. X. Tan of the University of Illinois released a paper on the role of a particularly virulent notion, essentialism, in how people see themselves and report their health:

In this research, we proposed and examined the possibility that lay theories that people hold about social class categories can mitigate class-related health disparities. Across three studies, we found that while lower-class individuals were more likely to report experiencing poorer health and greater negative self-conscious emotions compared to upper-class individuals when they endorsed essentialist beliefs about social class, this class-based difference was not observed when participants endorsed non-essentialist beliefs about social class.

Basically, if you are poor and believe social status is inbred
—in your genes—you are more likely to report being unhealthy, the study suggests. Poor people without this belief are more likely to report being healthier and less likely to accept their status as unchangeable.

A bad idea like Social Darwinism can be debilitating, studies suggest. Yet, we give lip service to the Horatio Alger myth while privately believing that some people are just “born that way.”

Kraus has been studying this effect for awhile. Last year Kraus released another such study along with Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley. Matthew Hutson wrote:

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a just world, asking them to evaluate such statements as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.” The psychologist Melvin Lerner developed just world theory in the 1960s, arguing that we’re motivated to believe that the world is a fair place. The alternative—a universe where bad things happen to good people—is too upsetting. So we engage defense mechanisms such as blaming the victim—“She shouldn’t have dressed that way”—or trusting that positive and negative events will be balanced out by karma, a form of magical thinking.

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs, and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it. (Incidentally, the argument that you “deserve” anything because of your genes is philosophically contentious; none of us did anything to earn our genes.)

The richer you are, the more likely you are to believe it is not the luck of the draw that put you where you are, but something essential about you and your breeding. Poor? You were born under a bad sign.

Social class essentialism is basically inciting social Darwinism. This distortion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in one interpretation, is the belief that only the fit survive and thrive—and, further, that this process should be accepted or even accelerated by public policy. It’s an example of the logical fallacy known as the “appeal to nature”—what is natural is good. (If that were true, technology and medicine would be moral abominations.) Social class essentialism entails belief in economic survival of the fittest as a fact. It might also entail belief in survival of the fittest as a desired end, given the results linking it to reduced support for restorative interventions. It’s one thing to say, “Those people can’t change, so let’s not waste our time.” It’s another to say, “Those people can’t change, so let’s lock them away.” Or eradicate them: Only four years ago, then-Lt. Gov. of South Carolina Andre Bauer told a town hall meeting that poor people, like “stray animals,” should not be fed, “because they breed.”

More study is required, Kraus and Tan conclude this week. But the work to date suggests that liberating people of this noxious and common essentialist idea might not only improve people’s prospects in life, but their health as well.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” H.L. Mencken wrote. Explaining high or low status in life as a product of one’s own genetic or moral superiority is one of them. Conversely, one of life’s most profound and hardest-to-accept truths can be found in a two-word bumper sticker: Sh*t happens.

Sniper sniping

by digby

I don’t think movies are historical documents so I tend to stay away from these arguments. I think “Selma” has a right to be the movie its filmmakers wanted and so too “American Sniper”.

But I do admit that “American Sniper” is likely to have a pernicious effect on our politics because the right wing is hailing is as if Moses came down from Mt Sinai to deliver Chris Kyle as an American Jesus. And Chris Kyle was a disturbed individual.

Robert Greenwald talks about one aspect of the film here.

Vox delves into it more, here.

It’s bad history and probably dangerous on some level in continuing the misunderstanding of that misbegotten war.

But what I just can’t get over the fact that right wingers love a guy who said this. It’s just sick:

We should be awfully skeptical about Kyle’s claim that the U.S. government sent him into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They perched him atop the Superdome, he said, and it was from there that he picked off 30 looters in the city.

A June 2014 Washington Post report about Kyle’s “unverifiable legacy” doesn’t outright call the celebrated sniper a liar, but it nudges the reader toward that conclusion. After including a quote from one of Kyle’s officers who said, “I never heard that story,” the Washington Post writes, “Does that mean it didn’t happen? Who knows. It’s certainly possible that Kyle… killed 30 armed assailants in New Orleans to protect its residents in Katrina’s aftermath. But it’s also possible Kyle couldn’t let go of his own legend, and, in a haze of post-traumatic stress, let his tales veer into untruth.”

No it isn’t possible. It’s racist garbage. He may have suffered from PTSD and that’s fine. it’s the people who think that’s an awesome story that are the real sick pieces of work.

Give them a bottle and put them to bed

by digby

The baby party needs a nap:

“I’ve run my last campaign,” Obama said toward the end of the nationally televised address. Republicans in the chamber applauded derisively, which prompted the president to ad-lib a zinger which wasn’t in his prepared remarks: “I know because I won both of them.”

Democrats erupted with applause.

In the Capitol after the speech, Republicans expressed displeasure at being jabbed by the president in the same speech where he asked for their cooperation.

“Probably not helpful when you rub the other guy’s nose in the dirt a little bit,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a close ally of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), told reporters.

“Look, he’s allowed to take a victory lap but he ought to be thinking about what works — what’s gonna help me actually put points on the board,” Cole said. “How are you going to define your legacy in the last two years. Is this all about a third Obama term by winning the presidency? Then that would suggest you just want confrontation and the ability for your nominee to attack a ‘do nothing right wing Congress.'”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called Obama’s jab — and overall speech — “disappointing,” pointing to the Democrats’ crushing defeat in the November congressional elections.

“If the president sticks to the tone that he chose tonight — if he sticks to anger and defiance towards the American voters, then perhaps he will veto bill after bill after bill after bill,” Cruz told a scrum of reporters. “But if he chooses to embrace and revel in gridlock and obstructionism that will be an unfortunate choice and I hope he reconsiders.”

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) was less troubled by Obama’s line, calling it “an interesting throwaway.”

“It was kind of like he got back in campaign mode and did that. And so that’s all I make of it,” she told TPM.

Senate Energy Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said Obama’s remarks did not make her feel “warm and fuzzy” about having to work with him for the next two years.

Oh boo hoo hoo. As if they would have worked with him if he’d turned around and thrown himself at the feet of John Boehner and begged him to send him a bill overturning Obamacare. In fact, that’s a good plan. Then they definitely wouldn’t do it.

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Invest in pitchfork futures

by digby

Tone deaf as usual, your billionaire overlords give the game away:

Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics.

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”
[…]
Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week, said he’s planning a conference in Palm Beach, Florida, at the Tideline Hotel called “Closing the Gap.” The event, which he said is scheduled for December, will feature speakers such as economist Nouriel Roubini.

“I live in Palm Beach, where no one wants to hear bad news,” he said. “We need to have an event where people aren’t just focused on predicting the price of oil.”

I think what always strikes me about these Masters of the Universe is what idiots they are. Making a killing on Wall Street is obviously a matter of pure luck.

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Dialing up the speech

by digby

Greg Sargent has a piece up today about a dial session  he observed during last night’s speech and it’s illuminating. It consisted of:

[M]ore than five dozen voters, all of them white, from the following groups: “Weak partisans” who had a history of voting for both parties; non-college voters; unmarried women; and independents.

These folks (who were from all over the country, and dialed in remotely) were the types of voters who will be the target of an epic argument in the next presidential race over which party has real solutions to stagnating wages and rising inequality — over which party has the more convincing story to tell about what has happened to the American economy, and how far government can and should go in acting to make it work better for everyone.

He noted some of the responses:

* They reacted more positively to Obama’s articulation of the economic challenges they still face than to general claims that the recovery is underway. The responses to Obama’s claims that we are “turning the page” and that “the shadow of crisis has passed” were not as quite enthusiastic as he surely hoped. This is in keeping with the fact that polls suggest many of these voters think the recovery is leaving them behind.

I think this is unsurprising. There are more people employed these days but wage stagnation means that even more people are just stuck. It’s doubtful that many of them feel confident enough in the recovery to change jobs or even ask for raises and there’s little evidence that employers are feeling the need or obligation to offer them. It takes time for attitudes to shift on this — and the slump was long and painful.

I worried that he might be seen as blowing smoke with all that triumphalism. But on the other hand, you do need for leaders to tout their accomplishments and the president’s “this is good news, people” line was probably the best way to communicate it. Still, until working people see improvement in their personal lives they aren’t going to react to calls for them to applaud a recovery they don’t feel.

Sargent says they preferred specific proposals to cheerleading:

* Specific policies were received very enthusiastically — more so than general suggestions of a more activist government role. The phrase “middle class economics,” and Obama’s definition of the values that concept embodies, were generally well received by independents and non-college voters, but they did not generate the enthusiasm that such applause lines were designed to elicit.

By contrast, the call for a minimum wage hike generated a big spike among independents; the promise of subsidized child care and more infrastructure investments energized unmarried women; and the call for subsidized community college and an equal pay law generated an enthusiastic response from non-college voters (many of them women). The call for closing loopholes to tax inherited wealth elicited a spike, but notably not as large as the above policies.

We already know that people actually prefer specific Democratic policies.  The problem is that they simultaneously buy into the larger rhetorical framework about government being the problem and have internalized the idea that Democratic Party “values” are in contrast to their own. So it’s important for the president to lay out a different way of thinking about this and work to reverse some of the economic propaganda promulgated by the right since the Reagan revolution. That’s going to take some time but it won’t happen if nobody ever challenges their narrative about government and “values.”

* Obama’s trade pitch and Iran rhetoric were not received all that well. Obama’s effort to reframe the argument over the trade deals he is negotiating — he sought to cast them as allowing Americans to write trade rules and open foreign markets to exports — did not generate much enthusiasm, even when he tried to speak to people’s residual anger over past trade deals. His discussion of diplomacy to curb Iran’s nuclear program sparked a notable dip among independents.

I can certainly understand why working class people don’t like free trade deals. They’ve been scammed for a long time. But Democrats seem to still be all-in on them anyway. There is no more revealing economic issue than this one.

Iran? See Republican propaganda, above. Years of demonization have an impact.

* Core liberal priorities were not received all that enthusiastically. The strong applause line about the GOP “I’m not a scientist” dodge did not generate a big approval spike among these voters, and nor did his effort to paint a lurid picture of the profound perils climate change poses. His effort to humanize the plight of immigrants, and call for strong unions, also failed to generate terribly enthusiastic responses.

It doesn’t matter. They aren’t just liberal priorities. These are issues of grave importance to the Party, the nation and the planet. And whether or not Democrats win the next election on these issues is irrelevant. They have to keep pounding away on them anyway.

It will be interesting to see if the Democrats will embrace this agenda going forward. It’s more risky than they’re used to…

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“I won both of them”
by Tom Sullivan

The State of the Union address last night did not disappoint as entertainment (although the president’s pitch for “middle-class economics” didn’t exactly sing to me). President Obama was surprisingly buoyant for a leader whose party got hammered in the fall elections and now occupies less of the House chambers than in a generation. (Transcript here.)

The zinger of the night came when Obama remarked, “I have no more campaigns to run,” and scattered Republicans applauded. The president grinned and shot back, “I know, because I won both of them.”

And maybe that’s Obama’s secret. Freedom’s just another thing…, you know. With his recent in-your-face executive actions, he looks like a leader and the country is responding. His approval ratings hit 50 percent for the first time since the spring of 2013.

Joan Walsh described the speech as “an epic combination of sweet-talking and trash-talking, cajoling and trolling.” Speaker John Boehner, looking darker than ever, sat through the speech, looking sickly. Walsh:

My personal favorite Obama taunt came during his call for a minimum wage hike. “To everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.”

Anyone who tuned in expecting a conciliatory lame duck president was disappointed.

Republicans gave not one, but four responses. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, with the official response, Rep. Curt Clawson of Florida for the T-party, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky on YouTube, and Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) with a response in Spanish. Steve Benen provided some explanation at the MaddowBlog:

As we talked about last year at this time, let’s not forget that there used to be one Republican response because the party wouldn’t tolerate any other scenario. GOP lawmakers who deliberately chose to step on – or worse, contradict – their party’s scripted message risked raising the ire of party leaders and insiders. Only one SOTU response was given because no Republican in Congress would dare challenge – or even think to challenge – the party’s message operation.

Those norms have collapsed. “There is no clear leadership in the Republican Party right now, no clear direction or message, and no way to enforce discipline,” Mark McKinnon, a veteran Republican strategist, said last year. “And because there’s a vacuum, and no shortage of cameras, there are plenty of actors happy to audition.”

But it’s risky business, says Joseph P. Williams of U.S. News:

But it’s a risky affair with a small payoff: do things correctly, and you’re likely to get mentioned in a news cycle or two — after endless analysis of the main event; screw up, and you’ll win a starring role on Twitter, cable news and a Saturday Night Live cold-open skit — and not in a good way. Just ask the wooden Bobby Jindal (2009) or Michele “Wrong Camera” Bachmann (2011).

Sen. Joni Ernst may join that lineup this week after her ham-biscuited attempt at being folksy. See #breadbagger.

The bread bags go INSIDE THE SHOES! I GREW UP POOR IN MN. You slip and fall when bags are outside the shoes. #SOTU #BNRNews— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) January 21, 2015

Fox News squirm

by digby

Can’t you just feel the anchors at Fox clenching their teeth to prevent themselves from screaming “shut up, shut up you cheese-eating surrender monkeys!!!”

After the Paris mayor threatened to sue Fox News on Tuesday over the network’s recent bogus reports on Muslim “no-go zones” in the city, the network responded that the mayor’s comments were “misplaced.”

“We empathize with the citizens of France as they go through a healing process and return to everyday life. However, we find the Mayor’s comments regarding a lawsuit misplaced,” Fox News Executive Vice President Michael Clemente said in a Tuesday statement, according to Mediaite.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo slammed Fox’s “prejudiced” coverage of the city in an appearance on CNN.

“When we’re insulted, and when we’ve had an image, then I think we’ll have to sue,” Hidalgo said. “I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed.”

Following the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, terror expert Steven Emerson claimed on Fox News that there are Muslim “no-go zones” in Europe “where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”

On Saturday, Fox News issued several on-air corrections for statements made by Emerson on the network and apologized for his comments.

I find it amazing that Fox apologized for those comments and I have to assume this was done at the behest of the management for reasons that have little to do with journalistic integrity. After all, if they cared about that all they would ever do is apologize. Somebody thought it was a very important mistake.

But whatever it is, it’s clearly making them very uncomfortable.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past couple of weeks it’s that the Free Speech requires that we defend to the death the right of the cheese eaters to tweak Fox News:

Mockery is a national weapon in France, so when an American cable news channel raised false alarms about rampant lawlessness in some Paris neighborhoods — proclaiming them “no-go zones” for non-Muslims, avoided even by the police — a popular French television show rebutted the claims the way it best knew how: with satire, spoofs and a campaign of exaggeration and sarcasm.

The show, “Le Petit Journal,” is a French version of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — irreverent and reliant on mock correspondents who showcase the foibles of the high and mighty.

Usually “Le Petit Journal” reserves its venom for French politicians and the local news media. But in the days after the terrorist attacks in Paris that left 17 dead, including 12 people at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, it set its sights on a trans-Atlantic target, America’s Fox News, after the channel claimed that swaths of England and France were ruled according to Shariah.

A Twitter user poked fun at Fox News, posting that the checkered cloth coverings of jam jars showed that even homemade preserves “have to wear hijab.”  

“They did this on a weekend when all France and Paris was in a state of shock,” said Yann Barthès, 40, who has hosted the show since it began in 2004. “I cried.” But, he said, it was also “irritating, so we chose humor to campaign against Fox News.”

“It’s important for the French audience to know about this. They don’t really know Fox News, and they think it’s an enormous channel, very American, with announcers with big voices and blonde women who look like Barbies.”

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