Month: December 2015

How to think about the Paris climate talks – four takeaways and a reminder

by Gaius Publius

The Paris climate talks — officially COP21, or the 21st “conference of the parties” to the UN’s climate treaty-making body, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) — are much in the news these days, and I imagine most people have no idea how to think about them. That is, they don’t think much will happen there that will help, and beyond that, it’s just numbers and speeches, stuff that flies over people’s heads.

So here are four points to consider as you listen to the reports and analyses. For easy reference, these are:

• The most ambitious emission pledges on the table would still result in catastrophe.
• Two degrees warming is still too much.
• Paris, at best, is baby steps and a scoreboard.
• The media can spin, but nature bats last.

If you remember these things, especially the first and the second, you’ll have the least you need to know to understand the Paris climate conference. I’m drawing much if this from Mark Hertsgaard’s recent article in The Nation, as well from Bill McKibben’s Paris conference piece in Foreign Policy. Both pieces are worth a full read.

Finally, as a reminder, a fifth takeaway from me:

• This isn’t a discussion. It’s not a negotiation. There’s a lot of money on the table, and it’s going to take force to make the Bigs walk away from it.

Nothing I haven’t said before, but in light of the above, it seems to need saying again. The conference will produce “some” progress, but given the speed we need, it will take force to get us the rest of the way. Click the link for a brief discussion. Now the four points from the list above.

The Most Ambitious Emissions Pledges Would Still Result in Catastrophic Warming

From a climate standpoint, all of the national pledges (whatever that means without retributional force) to reduce emissions, if implemented, would still result in a climate-killing 3.5°C warming. Hertsgaard:

The road to hell, it’s said, is paved with good intentions. A case in point is unfolding at the landmark United Nations climate summit in Paris, where president Obama and other world leaders seem eager to define a scientific failure as a political success. This triumph of political spin over scientific reality is unfolding for understandable, even well-intentioned reasons, but its effects would be ruinous for human lives and institutions now and for generations to come.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Obama said today in his speech to the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us. But if we act here, if we act now, if we place our short-term interests behind [those of our children’s future], then we won’t be too late for them.”

This lofty rhetoric, however, clashes with the actual proposals the United States, China, and other big powers are putting forward at the summit. As Obama noted, more than 180 countries have outlined pledges for future reductions in heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But the combined effect of these voluntary pledges—even assuming, generously, that each is fully implemented—would still result in global emissions continuing to increase for decades to come, soaring well past the goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius above the level that prevailed prior to the Industrial Revolution. Temperatures would instead rise to 2.7 to 3.5 C above the pre-industrial level, a catastrophic amount.

The takeaway here — some improvement, but not enough.

Two Degrees Warming Is Still Too Much

The best takeaway from Hertsgaard’s piece is the recognition, which I’ve seen many places, but never in the news, that two degrees warming is way too generous a ceiling. One-and-a-half degree is almost all we can tolerate, given that we’re at one degree warming now, and the climate is already going out of control (my emphasis):

Bear in mind, 2 degrees is often described as a “safe” guardrail, but the latest science and real-world observations demonstrate that in fact it marks the threshold between “dangerous” and “extremely dangerous” warming. Just ask the leaders of Kiribati and other low-lying Pacific island states who are already planning the evacuation of homelands doomed to disappear within decades beneath rising seas. Or ask farmers in the Sahel region of Africa and other areas that already endure hot and dry conditions. Man-made warming has already increased temperatures by 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels, worsening droughts, heat waves, and storms, with predictable impacts on crop yields, rural incomes, and hunger in much of Africa and other poor regions.

Thus the majority of the world’s governments urge a temperature limit of 1.5 C. This view is virtually absent from the US media, perhaps because these governments represent the world’s most vulnerable nations and the US government dismisses the position as unrealistic, but the disagreement is likely to permeate the rest of the Paris summit.

It’s pretty simple. Global warming of 1.5°C is already in the pipeline, guaranteed. We have to … well, stop now.

Baby Steps and a Scoreboard

On the plus side, at least they’ve started making commitments. Will they honor them? If past is prologue, not likely. But still, baby steps?

Here’s how to think about what happens in Paris over the course of the next two weeks: The conference isn’t the game — it’s the scoreboard. …

We won’t win the climate fight; we won’t even come close. But at least we’ll know the score — and we’ll know how much we have to do in the next few crucial years.

As McKibben points out, the 2009 Copenhagen meeting ended with an expressed desire to keep global warming below 2°C, and nothing else. Paris will be more than nothing else. Baby steps?

The Media Can Spin, But Nature Bats Last

All the bought political spin in the world won’t change the facts. Science — the natural world — bats last. Senators can hold all the snowballs they want in their hands. The laws of physics aren’t paying a dime’s bit of attention. Hertsgaard:

Science does not care about humans’ emotions or political conundrums. The laws of physics and chemistry do not compromise; they don’t know how. We must either find a way to respect these laws or, our good intentions notwithstanding, we will find ourselves on a road to hell.

And those are your takeaways; the rest is expansion and explanation, something I and others will gladly provide later. This, though, is all you need to know if you want to remember just what matters.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Thoughts and prayers and a latte
by Tom Sullivan

There were not enough little blue pills to treat the electoral dysfunction on display yesterday in the wake of the San Bernardino mass shooting. Another 14 dead and 17 wounded. Details are still
trickling in in this morning.

Elected officials speak as if keeping us safe is their highest duty. (Have they reminded you today how strong they are?) It is important enough to Jeb Bush to insist in the face of contravening evidence that his brother W. kept us safe. Keeping America safe is a solemn duty they promise to fulfill by rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants
— men, women, and children
— and by bombing the shit out of ISIS in Syria (Trump). Safety-conscious Texan leaders promise to turn away refugee families fleeing this sort of slaughter in Syria and Iraq because it is too easy for might-be terrorist infiltrators to get guns in Texas.

Our leaders pledge to keep us safe, by god, unless it means keeping us safe from armed-to-the-teeth, red-blood-spilling fellow Americans. For that the swaggering geldings have nothing to offer except thoughts and prayers. With those and a couple of bucks you can drown your grief in a Starbucks latte.

Twitter was awash yesterday in the familiar, boilerplate “thoughts and prayers” messages from politicians. Enough so that this time the pap response drew mockery:

An early look at tomorrow’s front page… GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS: https://t.co/eKUg5f03ec pic.twitter.com/j4gEFg9YtJ— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) December 3, 2015

Igor Volsky of Think Progress appeared with Chris Hayes last night after an epic Tweetstorm lambasting politicians for their ties to the National Rifle Association and for offering thoughts and prayers in lieu of actions aimed at putting an end to the epidemic of mass murder. Listing their NRA contribution totals, Volsky’s clear implication was that the NRA is paying for their inaction. Video here.

It began with this, calling for gun reform:

Seems like your "thoughts and prayers" aren't enough. Maybe support gun reform next time? https://t.co/v2hm7ftjlW https://t.co/wt5hZznTKQ— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) December 2, 2015

Later, Volsky began adding NRA contributions to the tweets:

Got $9,900 from NRA during 2014 cycle, so all he can do is pray…not pass anything useful https://t.co/ejXxoTFYsl https://t.co/NAZhjRMVaA— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) December 3, 2015

Got $2,500 from NRA during the 2014 election cycle, so he'll do little more than pray to prevent gun violence https://t.co/sVXEQUZwX9— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) December 3, 2015

Hayes noted that the ability of the NRA to prevent weapon restrictions comes not only from the money spent on lobbying, but from the committed minority of Americans who hold NRA memberships.

At the Washington Post, Roberto Ferdman summarized the stream and the frustrations behind it:

There are dozens more. The Tweetstorm, which lasted several hours and runs nearly 100 tweets and responses long, can be read in full below. And it spares no one. Volsky calls out virtually every right-leaning senator, topping their messages with the amount of money they have received from the NRA. He also reminds of the vast dollar amount of NRA contributions altogether: “$30,650,008 in independent expenditures during the 2014 election cycle.”

[snip]

None of this is to say that there is anything wrong with extending condolences to the victims of tragedies, such as Wednesday’s. A lawmaker can sincerely offer sympathy to those affected by the shootings while still believing in very limited restrictions on the ownership of firearms.

But for those who view guns as a significant contributor to mass shootings, it’s hard to see politicians offering thoughts and prayers without feeling a little miffed.

Thoughts and prayers are fine, but no substitute for action, as Volsky said. For thoughts and prayers we have ministers. We expect actions from elected leaders. Sen. Bernie Sanders told Hayes he had no “simple answer” to the problem, but offered a list of reforms that so far are dead on arrival in a Republican Congress. Republican Mr. Smiths these days go to Washington to prevent action.

Oh, and there were other shootings yesterday. One dead outside a Houston clinic. And one dead and three wounded in Savannah. Not that anyone will notice.

Who needs research on gun violence?

by digby

This happened:

On Wednesday morning, a group of doctors in white coats arrived on Capitol Hill to deliver a petition to Congress. Signed by more than 2,000 physicians around the country, it pleads with lawmakers to lift a restriction that for nearly two decades has essentially blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun violence.

Joined by a handful of Democratic lawmakers, the doctors spoke about the need to view gun violence as a public health epidemic and research ways to solve it – as the country would with any disease causing the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

“It is disappointing that we have made little progress over the past 20 years in finding solutions to gun violence,” said Nina Agrawal, a New York physician and member of the advocacy group Doctors for America, according to the group’s Twitter feed.

I wrote about this nonsense for Salon a while back.

At the same time the right is telling doctors what they are required to tell their patients about abortion, they are passing laws requiring them not to talk about other things. Think Progress had this from Texas last month:

Under a proposed bill currently being considered in Texas, doctors wouldn’t be allowed to ask their patients whether there are any firearms in their homes — and could be subject to punishment from the Texas Medical Board if they do initiate any conversations about gun safety in the office.

The lawmaker who’s sponsoring the measure, Rep. Stuart Spitzer (R), is backed by the National Rifle Association and the Texas State Rifle Association. He believes that the federal government is inappropriately reaching into doctors’ offices to figure out who owns gun.

That’s correct. They are proposing to censor doctors from speaking to their patients about gun violence. And their ostensible reason for doing this is because the federal government in reaching into doctors’ offices. It’s hard to believe their brains didn’t explode from the dissonance.

And Representative Spitzer’s rationale is almost as ludicrous as the old John Birth Society “Commies put fluoride in the water” theory:

“Pediatricians are asking children away from their parents, ‘Do you have guns in your house?’ and then reporting this on the electronic health records, and then the federal government, frankly, has access to who has guns and who doesn’t.”

Clearly, the federal government’s real agenda is to engage in a clandestine sweep of pediatricians’ young patients’ electronic medical records to determine whose parents have guns. And then obviously they are planning to send in the jack-booted thugs to confiscate them. So in order to stop such a terrible overreach of state power, the “let’s get government out of our lives” people are no longer just interfering with doctors who treat the elderly and women but now they must interfere with how they treat children as well. Evidently, their vaunted fealty toward individual rights does not extend to the examining table.(And if there’s one place I think most Americans would really like to have some individual rights and privacy it’s there…)

The reason the American Medical Association recommends that doctors talk to their patients about gun safety is because NRA, which used to consider that its primary goal, is so devoted to collecting money from its members, lobbying on behalf of gun manufacturers and flooding the streets of America with as many deadly weapons as possible it no longer wants to do this job. This isn’t a back-door attempt to make firearms illegal. That would quixotic in the extreme. It’s an attempt to cut back on the huge numbers of tragic gun accidents in this country — something which nobody is out there defending, not even the NRA. (If someone’s saying that we all have a constitutional right to accidentally shoot people, I haven’t heard it.)

Researchers are trying to gather statistics on gun violence and that is seen as an assault on gun rights, something which has long been blocked by the NRA and their minions in the congress. Only a very insecure movement would be afraid of such data. It carries no meaning in itself, it’s just numbers and observation. After centuries of debate the Supreme Court finally declared the 2nd Amendment to mean that an individual has a right to bear arms and that is highly unlikely to be reversed. They can relax about that. Information won’t kill them. A gun accident might, however, and it’s downright nihilistic to believe that trying to prevent them through education and research must be stopped, especially by preventing doctors from discussing it with their patients.

Just one more example of the lunacy we are living with every day.

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Victim blaming 101

by digby

If you ever wonder where right wingers get their Pee Wee Hermanesque arguments, look no further than this guy:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: I know, I know, the staff is all worried now because they think I’m going to get roasted here for blaming the victim with my simple innocent question: why doesn’t Planned Parenthood get blamed? Before you go off the deep end on that may I remind you a couple things.

After 9/11 what was one of the most frequent questions you heard in the drive-by media? I’ll tell you what it was. What did we do to make them so mad that they felt they had to do this to us? Do you remember the State Department convened a — I don’t know what — a forum, a panel, some such thing — they had a bunch of experts to come in to examine what it is we had done to make the hijackers on 9/11 so mad. In other words the left in this country immediately sought to assign blame to the United States for the terror attack on 9/11. And they did not hesitate to do this.

It didn’t take until the next day for this question to start reverberating all over the country. What did we do to cause it? So I’m simply trying to learn the way the left thinks about these things and incorporate it here into the way I do my program. Barack Obama blames this country for stuff that happens here and he runs around world and apologizes for it. OK, so if Planned Parenthood had this incident and the shooter starts running around talking about no more body parts, who is it that’s dealing in body parts? If the left were being consistent they would ask themselves what have we done to make people so mad at us?

This is too cute by half even for that smug piece of work.

“The left” didn’t seek explanations about why Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, “America” did. And while I’m sure there were some people who thought the US rather than al Qaeda was responsible for the 3,000 dead, the only one I can think of who made that case openly was a professor named Ward Churchill whose career was destroyed because of it. It certainly was not a mainstream view held by famous celebrities with millions of followers.

Ironically, in this case the right spent days desperately hoping that the terrorist had no anti-abortion motive and have gone to great lengths trying to excuse what he did as the actions of a madman having nothing to do with their incitement. Unsurprisingly, he turned out to be an anti-abortion fanatic.

Rush’s “I know you are but what am I” logic may convince his followers that there is some merit in this ridiculous argument but there isn’t. “The left” didn’t “blame America” for 9/11 and insist that the US government capitulate to terrorists demands. That never happened. But that is what Rush is saying Planned Parenthood should do. That makes him a terrorist sympathizer. But we knew that.

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Since Sandyhook:1,029 mass shootings, killing at least 1,300 people, wounding 3,699 more

by digby

Smell the freedom in America in just the last three years:

Today, like virtually every day, we added one more.

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The favorite son of Wingnut Nation has a plan

by dogby

I wrote about Cruz’s play for the libertarians in Salon today:

“Very conservative” voters can propel Mr. Cruz to victory in Iowa, a caucus state, but according to exit poll data from 2008 and 2012, those types of voters represent a smaller share of the electorate in every primary state. To win, he will need to broaden his appeal, count on a divided field or hope to face a candidate with even more limited appeal.

In the most recent Quinnipiac survey of Iowa, he had a large 16-point lead among voters who described themselves as “very conservative.” With 38 percent of their support, his strength there was greater than that of any other candidate in any ideological category. But he held the support of just 14 percent of “somewhat conservative” voters and a mere 6 percent of self-described moderate or liberal Republicans. The most recent national Quinnipiac survey showed the same basic breakdown in support for him.

To win, Mr. Cruz would have a few options. He could do so well among “very conservative” voters that he could swamp his challengers, especially if multiple candidates with more appeal among self-described moderate voters split the rest of the field. He could broaden his appeal among the party’s center — for the “somewhat conservative” voters who tend to play a decisive role in primary contests. Or he could face off against a candidate who has even more narrow appeal than his own — for example, if John Kasich or Chris Christie won the New Hampshire primary. It could also turn out that “very conservative” voters represent a larger share of the electorate than in the past, given the broader trends.

All of these possibilities remain in play for Mr. Cruz. He has strong favorability ratings across the party, which makes it easier to imagine that he could broaden his appeal. There are a large number of well-funded establishment candidates who could split the moderate vote, not to mention Donald Trump, who has underappreciated appeal to moderate voters. New Hampshire could easily vote for Mr. Trump, or a candidate like Mr. Christie or Mr. Kasich, who might have as little appeal to “very conservative” voters as Mr. Cruz does among moderates.

He has referred to the March 1 “SEC primary,” in which eight Southern states go to the polls, as his “firewall”: that is, a backstop against whatever losses he might sustain beforehand. This year, these Southern states will go to the polls before Florida and before the traditional Super Tuesday, a change in the primary calendar instituted by RNC chairman Reince Priebus. Most of those contests, unlike the ones that precede them, are not winner-take-all, and Cruz’s goal is to win the most delegates rather than to take entire states.

Throughout the primary season, Cruz has crisscrossed the South, sweet-talking voters unaccustomed to playing an outsized role in presidential contests. “He has made the largest investment in those Southern states of any candidate,” [GOP strategist]Mackowiak says. “Most of those political leaders in those states have never been asked to participate in the process.”

Texas is one of the “SEC primary” states, and it alone will award 155 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination. Cruz, of course, holds a natural advantage. His team spent over a year developing detailed knowledge of the state’s political contours just three years ago. Mackowiak says there’s a “very real possibility” that Cruz will be the overall delegate leader on March 2.

Read on to see what he’s doing. Its subtle but it could be important.

The most obvious play for Cruz is to inherit Trump’s voters when/if he melts down. But that may not happen. So Cruz is working to gather up enough of the remainders to win in some very interesting ways. His campaign is the most strategic and the most disciplined of all the candidates. He’s for real.

Most fatuous presidential candidate of all? 


by digby

It’s very hard to choose the stupidest argument a right winger has made about the Planned Parenthood shooting, but I think this one might just be it:

“The problem is, the bad guys — the bad guys have guns. That’s the problem. The more people that we have responsibly carrying, the less — the less violence we are going to have in this country. And there’s no way around that. I believe that responsible people carrying weapons actually reduces crime in America and saves people’s lives. ”

That was Rick Santorum on Hardball yesterday. He also said that doctors and nurses are law abiding people who “should have the right to carry guns wherever they want to carry guns.” In other words the real problem is that the clinic was a “gun free zone” and that’s why those people died:

“Where do you think these people commit crimes? They go to places — these people who are ill, they go to places where they know no one’s going to have a gun.”

I honestly don’t know how to respond to sophistry on that level. Does he really think that some armed fanatic with a long gun could have been stopped by a nurse with a handgun before he opened fire?? That she could shoot the gun out of his hand somehow before he could kill anyone? Because unless that’s what you believe, that anti-abortion zealot would have killed innocent people regardless of how many guns and nurses and doctors were carrying on their person. Apparently, that’s just the price we pay for “freedom.”

And in any case, the man shot five well-trained armed police officers who were backed up by SWAT teams with military hardware. If they couldn’t “take out” this right wing religious radical I doubt that some receptionist with a handgun would have had better luck.

How long is this country going to stand for this fatuous logic? What will it take to stop it? It’s killing vast numbers of innocent people, far more than terrorism or war, and yet we just keep on facilitating carnage of sentient, breathing individual humans living in this world while the same fanatics who fetishize blastocysts throw up their hands and suggest we all become sharpshooters so we can protect ourselves as we go about our daily lives.

This is insane. We are insane. And there doesn’t seem to be thing we can do about it.

Update: I wrote this before San Bernardino. Jesus Christ …

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Old fashioned All American values

by digby

It’s a good thing there isn’t any racism in America anymore that’s all I can say:

For years, white supremacists in a Dothan, Alabama, police department planted drugs and guns on black people. According to Internal Affairs documents obtained by the Henry County Report, their superiors, several of whom have since been promoted, knew about the practice and helped cover it up. Indeed, the lieutenant implicated by the documents is now the chief of the department. The sergeant who obstructed the Internal Affairs investigation went on to become sheriff and then director of homeland security for the state, a position he continues to hold today. The district attorney at the time (still in office) sat on exculpatory evidence and proceeded with felony prosecutions against the individuals the officers had framed.

Oh, and many of those involved belonged to racist organizations that believe the civil rights movement is a Jewish conspiracy too. Who says we’re losing all of our traditions?

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The wages of dissatisfaction
by Tom Sullivan

Thomas Piketty told Le Monde he believes inequality is a major motivation for Middle Eastern terrorism and that Western nations share blame for it:

Piketty writes that the Middle East’s political and social system has been made fragile by the high concentration of oil wealth into a few countries with relatively little population. If you look at the region between Egypt and Iran — which includes Syria — you find several oil monarchies controlling between 60 and 70 percent of wealth, while housing just a bit more than 10 percent of the 300 million people living in that area. (Piketty does not specify which countries he’s talking about, but judging from a study he co-authored last year on Middle East inequality, it appears he means Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, Bahrain and Oman. By his numbers, they accounted for 16 percent of the region’s population in 2012 and almost 60 percent of its gross domestic product.)

Piketty’s argument that terrorism rooted in inequality is best countered economically has not gained much traction in the U.S., writes Jim Tankersley at the Washington Post. That is in part because measuring inequality in the region is hampered by low-quality economic statistics.

While Piketty’s premise sounds reasonable, it might be a bit less than a Grand Unified Theory of Terrorism. Thomas P.M. Barnett’s NewRuleSet.Project found that “when a country’s per-capita income rises above ~$3,000, war becomes much less likely.” War in the classical sense maybe, but what about terrorism? And where does terrorism end and war begin?

A new study from George Washington University finds that U.S. arrest records reveal an incredible “diversity of ages, backgrounds and locations among ISIL’s U.S.-based recruits — from the ‘keyboard warriors’ who share the group’s propaganda online to those who actually take up arms in Syria and Iraq.” There is “no common profile” in one of the world’s richest nations:

The findings, which drew from 7,000 pages of legal documents, reflect ISIL’s call for any disaffected Sunni Muslim or willing convert the world over to join its ranks. But researchers managed to paint a rough picture of who might be vulnerable to ISIL recruitment. According to the data, the average age of those arrested is 26. The vast majority — 86 percent — of recruits are male. About 40 percent are converts to Islam. And, rather than immigrants or refugees, “these are people born and bred here,” Vidino said.

Other trends are harder to pin down, including the threat an individual may pose to the U.S. Most the U.S.-based sympathizers are connected to the group or exposed to its ideology over social media, and the involvement of most pro-ISIL Americans stops there. The data show that only 27 percent of those arrested on ISIL-related charges planned attacks on U.S. soil. And all appear to have been intercepted by law enforcement before they could do any harm.

About 50 percent of those arrested have made the leap to “actual militancy,” traveling or attempting to travel abroad and fight in places such as Syria and Iraq, the study found. A few may even have “reached midlevel leadership positions within the group.” However, the total number of Americans seeking to fight for the group has dropped markedly in recent months — an average of two Americans a month since July, compared to nine a month over the preceding year, according to U.S. officials.

That’s comforting, but still not much of an explanation for why anyone in a country as rich as ours would choose that path. Inequality is clearly high and rising in the U.S. Barbara Ehrenreich examines the plight of working class whites in the country and sees the demise of economic prospects driving racial animus in the U.S.:

All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege, especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.

If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap — perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.

These partial explanations give me a rather Dylan-eque feeling that something larger is going on that we don’t yet understand:

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

He rules their world

by digby

Drudge, of course. That’s what Villager prince Mark Halperin once said of the political media.