Month: August 2015

Keeping the door to that smoke filled room closed up tight

by digby

Think Progress has just published the list of “rules” the Koch’s demanded of the press before they allowed them to cover their very transparent and open little event this week-end. It’s not pretty. They might as well have tugged on their forelocks and bowed and scraped to their betters.

Journalism ethics experts are appalled:

Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said in a email that she found the agreement “outrageous — on the part of the media organizations, that is. The organizers can ask for whatever they want and think they can get. I don’t like it, but it is up to the news organizations to draw the line and to refuse to attend under these circumstances.”

As “the restrictions could stop journalists from reporting what’s right before their eyes,” she added, they reflect “a profound contempt for the role of an independent press, and by extension, the public.”

“The idea that reporting something like a donor’s attendance would be forbidden unless the donor agrees sounds like the European right to privacy on steroids,” Kirtley quipped. “When I think back to how hard the news media fought to avoid restrictions on combat reporting, I really despair. At least in the case of combat reporting, there was a plausible argument that national security was at stake. What’s at stake here is press independence.”

Actually, elite journalists often fail to tell the public what they know in order to maintain their access to important people. Sometimes they are nice enough to hint around in their articles at what’s really going on but they are mostly very happy to keep whatever it is to themselves if it means they will get some more information — which they will also not share.

Huffington Post Senior Media Reporter Michael Calderone noted in a Sunday column that restrictions like these could prevent an important part of the story coming out: “The problem is that the ground rules could restrict journalists from reporting what’s right in front of their eyes. If, say, Rupert Murdoch, or even a lesser-known billionaire, walked by, they couldn’t report the person’s attendance without permission. So it’s possible journalists end up reporting largely what the event sponsors want, such as fiery speeches and candidate remarks criticizing Democrats, but less on the power brokers attending who play key behind-the-scenes roles in the 2016 election.”

Other media ethics experts were even more critical of the attendees for agreeing to such strict conditions. Robert Drechsel, a professor and director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email, “Given how serious an issue secrecy and anonymity have become in the context of the flow of dollars to influence election outcomes, I find it especially remarkable that any media organizations would agree to in effect become complicit in facilitating such secrecy and anonymity.”

Dreschel added that, while it was understandable why journalists would want to attend, the agreement to follow these rules sets a bad precedent. “When the Kochs are attempting to give themselves more of a positive public face, why would the media be willing to assist in such image-building by agreeing to conditions on access?” he asked.

So they can get more access? Isn’t that the most important commodity in the whole world these days? Access to billionaires? The public’s right to know pales in comparison to rubbing shoulders with the most important people on earth. Who knows where it might lead?

The Koch confab is basically a return to the old smoke-filled rooms. They vetted which candidates to display for the Big Money Boyz to choose between — Walker, Rubio, Bush and Cruz. (And Fiorina…just because.) The billionaires will then “vote” by the size of their checks.

And the press agreed not to report on who was there or what they said without getting permission from the Kochs.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of the waiters or bartenders in attendance will have recorded some of it their phones.

Update: This looks promising.

Booing the bully boy

by digby

Poor Christie. To think people actually used to believe he could be president:

It was not a good day at the races Sunday for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

The Republican presidential candidate was on hand for the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park in Oceanport, New Jersey, where he presented a trophy to first-place finisher American Pharoah’s handlers. While the crowd of more than 60,000 cheered for the Triple Crown winner, the governor elicited “long,” “loud,” “sustained” booing, according to NJ.com.

The record-setting crowd booed yet again when Christie’s name was brought up in the American Pharoah team’s victory speech, according to the news site.

They just can’t stand the guy. In New Jersey. His home. And if they don’t like him there, where else could they possibly like him?

And anyway, if people want to vote for an asshole for president, Lord knows they have a whole bunch of them to choose from, starting with the King of Jerks, Donald Trump. John Kasich is a total creep, Carly Fiorina is known to be a nasty piece of work and Mike Huckabee can make Christie look like a blubbering baby all with a creepy grin on his face. Christie’s just another in a crowded field of Republican blowhards these days.

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“A different ‘culture'”

by digby

I know that I am racist in a million different ways.  I’m a white woman of a certain age who grew up in America.  It’s inevitable that my attitudes were shaped by my own privilege and that my racism is so deeply a part of my personality that I can’t see it.

This person, however, has more of it and much closer to the surface than that. He shouldn’t have been a cop:

I asked him if he agreed with Randolph that the neighborhood’s main problem was the absence of jobs. “There’s a lack of jobs everywhere,” he replied, brusquely. “But there’s also lack of initiative to get a job. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” He acknowledged that the jobs available in Ferguson often paid poorly, but added, “That’s how I started. You’ve got to start somewhere.”

Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.

Several times, Wilson recalled, he responded to calls about gunfire in the woman’s neighborhood and saw “people running either from or to that house.” Wilson would give chase. “It’s midnight, and you’re running through back yards.” If he caught the kids, he checked them for weapons, then questioned them. He recounted a typical exchange: “ ‘Why you running?’ ‘Because I’m afraid of getting caught.’ ‘Well, what are you afraid of getting caught for?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, there’s a reason you ran, and there’s a reason you don’t want to get caught. What’s going on?’ ” Wilson said that he rarely got answers—and that any contraband had already been thrown away. Once, he arrested some of the woman’s kids, for damaging property, but usually he let them go. In his telling, there was no reaching the blind woman’s kids: “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He added, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”

This sounded like racial code language. I pressed him: what did he mean by “a different culture”? Wilson struggled to respond. He said that he meant “pre-gang culture, where you are just running in the streets—not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” He added, “It is the same younger culture that is everywhere in the inner cities.”

That’s from a fascinating New Yorker article about the man who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri last year.

It is racial code language. There is just no other way to see it.

When I was working in the film business we used to package films together to sell to territories around the world. I would routinely be told upfront that buyers in other countries did not want to even look at what they called “urban films.” This was, obviously, code for films about black people. (And yes, they called them “urban” even if they were historical or were about Africa.) Everyone was terribly polite about all this, saying it was nothing to do with black people, it was simply a “culture” difference. It’s always something …

Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating. It doesn’t answer the ultimate question of what happened that day. He doesn’t share what was was going on in his mind. But it’s obvious that his attitudes informed his thinking. This is what this country needs to deal with.

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Looks like they can’t stand Rand

by digby

I wrote about what appears to be the flame-out of the Rand Paul campaign for Salon today.  Apparently, his followers have noticed that he’s a hypocrite. It’s sad:

read on …

Poseur for president
by Tom Sullivan

During one sequence in Buster Keaton’s comedy The General, the hapless train engineer Johnnie Gray (Keaton) finds himself caught in a battle between Union forces and Confederate Army friendlies. Finding a sword, Johnnie discovers that when he brandishes it (the way officers do) Confederate soldiers mistake him for someone actually in charge.

That also works for Donald Trump: posture as if you are a leader and people will think you are. He’s just better at it than his fellow poseurs.

Washington Monthly‘s Nancy LeTourneau believes Trump is what you get when you follow Republican rhetoric “to its logical (?) conclusion“:

What is it that Trump is suggesting he would do on the issues the Republicans are so concerned about. When it comes to Obamacare, he’d “repeal it and replace it with something terrific.” Sounds good, huh?

And when it comes to the 11 million undocumented workers in this country, just round ‘em up and get rid of them. If you think that Mexican immigrants are nothing more than rapists and murderers, that sounds good too, doesn’t it? But don’t bother fretting your pretty little head about how to go about doing that. Donald will “manage” it.

As I said, this is the “logical” conclusion of the path Republicans have taken. Climate change…deny it. Iran nuclear deal…oppose it. Terrorism…talk tough, but don’t get into specifics. Their own party leaders are admitting that their agenda is being set by a conservative media that “doesn’t give a damn about governing.”

Governing requires compromise, and compromise is for wusses like Alexander Hamilton, the subject of a new musical:

Ron Chernow, whose biography of Hamilton inspired the musical, said that compromise was the timeliest theme in the musical. “What Lin is showing is that it’s very easy when you’re in the political opposition to take extreme ideological positions, but when you’re dealing with real power, you have to engage in messy realities and compromises to move forward,” Mr. Chernow said.

Trump supporters such as last week’s New Hampshire focus group don’t want leaders who school them in messy realities. They want to feel “strength and power.” They want a wise-cracking, Daddy Warbucks action figure, someone to step in, talk tough, and solve problems with a punch or a roundhouse kick. They don’t just want to vote for Trump; they want to be him.

LeTourneau writes, “They have an idealized view of America where white men are in charge, authority is unquestioned, and the world bows to our dominance. The fact that things are more complicated than that pisses them off.” Trump is the big, swinging d*ck who can fix anything with a wave of his, uh, hand.

Daddy Donald is just the ticket, a more manly version of these kiddie-show problem solvers:

Today’s Trump: Why they love him edition

by digby

There’s this:

I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2015

Oh yeah, he’s his own man yadda, yadda, yadda. As if it matters.

But baby, this is gold with the base:

CHUCK TODD: And, again, I know we’re going to get into a lot more issues with you in a couple weeks. But I want to ask you about Black Lives Matter. The latest shooting of a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man. Do you see this as a crisis in America?

DONALD TRUMP: It’s a massive crisis. It’s a double crisis. What’s happening and people. You know, I look at things. And I see it on television. And some horrible mistakes are made. At the same time, we have to give power back to the police because crime is rampant. And I’m a big person that believes in very big– you know, we need police.

And we need protection. Look, I look at some of the cities. You look at Baltimore. You look at so many different places in this country. Chicago. Certain areas of Chicago. They need strong police protection. And those police can do the job. But their jobs are being taken away from them. At the same time, you’ve got these other problems. And there’s no question about it. They are problems. There is turmoil in our country.

CHUCK TODD: Do you understand why African Americans don’t trust the police right now?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I can certainly see it when I see what’s going on. But at the same time, we have to give power back to the police because we have to have law and order. Hundreds of killings are in Baltimore. Hundreds of killings are in Chicago. And New York is not doing so great in terms of that front. And so many other cities.

We have to give strength and power back to the police. And you’re always going to have mistakes made. And you’re always going to have bad apples. But you can’t let that stop the fact that police have to regain some control of this tremendous crime wave and killing wave that’s happening in this country.

That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Silent majority. Law and order. He is tapped directly into the racist, right wing id. He’s Nixon with privilege and without the brains.

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Fools for Scandal redux

by digby

There have books written about the New York Times’ vendetta against Bill and Hillary Clinton but apparently nobody in Washington or New York ever read them. It’s not as if it’s anything new. Neither is the paper’s willingness to swallow whole every story they’re handed by congressional wingnuts and conservative career bureaucrats. They cannot seem to help themselves. Nonetheless, it’s taken an excessively long time for the political establishment and other members of the media to admit/notice this phenomenon.

Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor, took another look at the latest example of journalistic malpractice:

With this most recent event as a catalyst, and reader concerns in mind, I talked to Times editors about their approach to covering Candidate Clinton. One top-ranking editor, Matt Purdy, agreed that she gets a great deal of scrutiny, but for good reason: “We are dealing with a situation unique in American history: A leading candidate for president is not just a former senator and secretary of state, but she’s also the wife of a former president and the two of them, along with their daughter, have a large global philanthropy.” There’s a lot to explore, he said, and The Times owes it to its readers to do so.

Since 2013, a Times reporter has been assigned to cover the Clintons as a full-time beat. Other candidates were spared that particular blessing, and at times the whole thing has seemed excessive. For Mrs. Clinton, it has meant that her every move is tracked, often to a fault. Separately, readers objected last April to the way The Times, touting an “exclusive agreement” with the author, reported on aspects of a highly critical book, “Clinton Cash.” And some observers make the case that there’s no substance to the story line about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email system as secretary of state. (I disagree; it is both a significant and telling story.)

Mr. Purdy and the executive editor, Dean Baquet, insist that this scrutiny is necessary and that it is being done fairly. Because Mrs. Clinton stirs such strong emotions, they say, there are bound to be unending complaints from both her supporters and detractors.

But I agree with this sentiment from a reader, Evan Hannay, who is troubled by some of the Clinton coverage: “Hillary deserves tough questions when they are warranted. But it is undeniable that she is already facing significantly tougher coverage than any other potential candidate.” He thinks The Times should make “a promise to readers going forward that Hillary is not going to be treated unfairly as she so often is by the media.”

Last Thursday, I handed Mr. Baquet a printed copy of Mr. Hannay’s email and asked him to address it.

To that end, he told me that he has urged reporters and editors to focus anew on issues stories. And he pledged fairness.

He went on to point out that back in 2012 they did a big story that laid out the facts about Benghazi (which also happened to exonerate Clinton) so it’s not as if they have totally abdicated their duty. So that’s good. I’m glad they were able to find it in themselves to actually provide true information to their readers. They seem quite proud. Let’s hope they are able to continue.

I haven’t hear that they plan to stop running whatever lies Trey Gowdy’s phony committee feeds them so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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The primary revolution

by digby

Go read this piece by Rick Perlstein about how the political press is covering the presidential contest completely bass-ackwards. They don’t seem to recognize that something very, very revolutionary is happening with Big Money just blatantly taking over the process. If anything they’ve become quietly complicit:

To see how consequential the handing over of this kind of power to nonentities like these is, consider the candidates’ liabilities with another constituency once considered relevant in presidential campaigns: voters. Chris Christie’s home state approval rating, alongside his opening of a nearly billion-dollar hole in New Jersey’s budget, is 35 percent. While Christie has only flirted with federal law enforcement, Rick Perry has been indicted. Scott Walker’s approval rating among the people who know him best (besides David Koch) is 41 percent, and only 40 percent of Wisconsinites believe the state is heading in the right direction. Bobby Jindal’s latest approval rating in the Pelican State is 27 percent. Senator Lindsey Graham announced his presidency by all but promising he’d take the country to war; Jeb Bush by telling Americans they need to work more. Rick Santorum not so long ago made political history: he lost his Senate seat by 19 points, an unprecedented feat for a two-term incumbent.

That political facts this blunt are no longer disqualifying for presidential candidates is a sort of revolution. If the winnowing of front-runners from also-rans has traditionally been a financial process (when the money dries up, so do the campaigns) Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas and Macau began tearing up that paradigm in 2012 by shoveling money to Newt Gingrich; $20 million total, including $5 million dispensed on March 23, three days after Gingrich won 8 percent in Illinois’s primary to Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, keeping Gingrich officially in the race more than a week after the RNC declared Romney the presumptive nominee.

Now, four previously unheard of super-PACS supporting Ted Cruz, who has no support among the GOP’s “establishment,” raised $31 million “with virtually no warning over the course of several days beginning Monday.” The New York Times reported this shortly after reporting that “[t]he leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reigning in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.”

The Koch Brothers, you can learn if you take a deep enough dive into the relatively obscure precincts of campaign coverage, are battling to take over a major functions of the Republicans National Committee.

And all this, admittedly, gets reported, in bits and pieces. But all this noise doesn’t amount to an ongoing story by which citizens can understand what is actually going on. Not just concerning who might be our next president, but what it all means for the republic. And not just concerning the candidates, but the behind-the-scenes string-pullers whose names, really, should be almost as familiar to us as Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, and, God forbid, Dr. Carson.

Instead, we get the same old hackneyed horse race—like, did you know that Rick Santorum is in trouble? Only one voter showed up at his June 8 event in Hamlin, Iowa. The Des Moines Register reported that. Politico made sure that tout Washington knew it. Though neither mentioned that Santorum is still doing just fine with the one voter the matters: Foster Friess, the Wyoming financier who gave his super-PAC $6.7 million in 2012, and promises something similar this year. “He has the best chance of winning,” Friess said. “I can’t imagine why anybody would not vote for him.’’ Which, considering only 2 percent of New Hampshirites and Iowans agree with him, is kind of crazy. And you’d think having people like that picking the people who govern us would all be rather newsworthy.

I’ve been writing about this too for a long time. The fact that the press is just now reckoning with the fact that the right wing is extreme tells us how long it takes for them to see political reality. By they time they figure this out, it could very well be too late. After all, it was their embrace of the right over many years that brought us Citizens’ United in the first place.

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Kindergarten teachers deserve to be beaten

by digby

This is what the Republicans define as “presidential” these days.  They hate foreigners and hippies and uppity black people, of course. But that’s not all:

Jake Tapper: “At the national level, who deserves a punch in the face?”

Chris Christie: “The National Teachers Union”

At least he didn’t compare them to ISIS as Scott Walker did.

Update: And then there’s this …

KARL: Would President Trump authorize waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, even torture?

TRUMP: I would be inclined to be very strong. When people are chopping off other people’s heads and then we’re worried about waterboarding and we can’t, because I have no doubt that that works. I have absolutely no doubt.

KARL: You’d bring back waterboarding?

TRUMP: …you mention waterboarding, which was such a big subject. I haven’t heard that term in a year now, because when you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.

This is what we have on offer from the right these days. I hope liberals don’t get too smug about this. Wingnut insanity is being normalized. That is not a good thing.

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Your betters get together to save the little people from themselves

by digby

The Koch pageant is in full effect:

Koch, speaking on a low stage in front of an elaborately manicured lawn at the St. Regis Monarch Beach luxury resort, warned about 450 assembled donors and a slew of Republican elected officials – including Sens. Cory Gardner, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse and Dan Sullivan – of a “life or death struggle for our country.”

“One of the things I ask you to think about over this weekend is will you stand together with us to help save our country. It can’t be done without you and many, many others,” said Koch, who seldom speaks in the presence of reporters.

This address was to a group of multi- millionaires and billionaires who have come together to decide on which of the candidates to spend the almost 1 billion the Kochs plan to raise to buy themselves the presidency— er….”save our country.”

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