The Truth Should Matter

Yeah, the stimulus bill failed....




Steve Benen goes in on Dana Perino and her bullshit theory about how the stimulus failed because people THINK it failed. Really, if anything, that's just proof positive that it doesn't matter what reality is most of the time in this country, its all about perception. And of course its also points to the failure of our mainstream media to report the truth rather than employing horse race coverage.

Its very very depressing.

The Very Definition of "Real Talk"

Matt Taibbi takes out a hatchet and absolutely annihilates the political press in this country. I can't exerpt this, you gotta read the whole damn thing

Our Media Fails Us

This back and forth between Norah O'Donnell and Matt Yglesias just tipifies how shitty journalism is in this country. The whole time Matty Y is making the case that the Republican pushback on Nancy Pelosi could end up creating the needed buzz for a Truth Commission, Norah O'Donnell won't even consider his point because she is adamant that there won't ever BE an investigation. Never once does it cross her mind that as a journalist on a "cable news" network SHE should be pushing for an investigation also. Nope, she is much more comfortable hiding behind President Obama and his administration's stance that there be no investigation. Its not even worth pointing out to her that President Obama has no ability to block such an investigation should they take it up in Congress. It is amazing how people who have no clue what it means to be a journalist are given a prime platform. You have to wonder why they invited Matty Y on in the first place unless they just wanted to pour cold water on his article in the Daily Beast. Just pathetic.

School Is In

Dave Waldman aka KagroX breaks out the whupping stick on all 3 other guests and the host on CNN over the media coverage of the Bush Administration's torture program. As sorry as some other supposed surrogates for the left perform I hope we get to see a lot more of Waldman on cable news representing our point of view!

Cheney Denied Torture Docs By Bush

Stephen Hayes of the Weakly Low Standard broke the story this afternoon that Dick Cheney's request to declassify two reports that he says validates torture was denied. Here is how Hayes characterized the denial.

Although Obama decided yesterday to block the public release of photos depicting prisoner abuse, he has promised to run the most transparent administration in history. The day after he took office, Obama issued a memorandum for executive branch departments and agencies.

He proclaimed: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears…All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

A senior Bush administration official points to the irony of Obama administration’s position -- using a FOIA technicality to block the public disclosure of information.

“So, because Amnesty International has filed a broad FOIA request for detainee related materials, the American people are unable to see memos that document the effectiveness of our detainee program. Wouldn’t the legal memos previously released also, presumably, have been subject to this FOIA? Why wasn’t their release blocked under the same provision?”

Now mind you Stephen Hayes starts off his post referring to the rejection letter. However he doesn't allow his readers to see the actual letter. Well a REAL journalist, Greg Sargent, actually posted the contents of the letter. Here is the pertinent passage.

As you are aware, a request for Mandatory Declassification Review is governed by Executive Order 12958, as amended, which was signed and executed by the President on March 25, 2003. Under section 3.5.(a)(3) of that Executive Order, a document is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review if that document contains information that is the subject of pending litigation. This provision ensures that the Mandatory Declassification Review process is not used to disrupt simultaneous litigation proceedings that are already pending. In researching the information in question, we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency). Therefore, the requested document, which contains this information, is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review.

What that means, obviously, is that President Bush actually the one who signed the Executive Order in 2003 that does not allow the CIA to declassify the reports that Dick Cheney is requesting. Basically, its all Bush's fault. Again. Seriously. But Hayes and his merry band of wingnuts would have you believe it was all President Obama's doing. Now I am not going to go too far into the thought that Dick Cheney probably already knew the rules and knew he wouldn't have a chance in hell of getting the reports which is why he started grandstanding in the first place, but thats a discussion for another day. I won't also point out that the OLC memos that are referred to in Hayes' post that President Obama were released IN RESPONSE TO a FOIA request. For now I say just marvel at how shitty of a journalist Stephen Hayes really is.

Stenography

Today Jay Newton Small of Time magazine's "Swampland" blog serves up this steaming pile of bullshit appropriately named "He said, She said" in yet another example of a Villager mistaking stenography for journalism. Its bad enough that most of her information is ,in news worthiness terms, old, but there also isn't one single thing you will find in the post that isn't just a repetition of what other, mostly anonymous, people said. Journalists nowadays seem to believe that the only thing worth reporting is quotes, mostly anonymous of course, instead of actual verifiable facts. And of course its doubly important to report it in a Villager's mind if its a Republican saying it. At some point we are going to need to draw a line in the sand and demand better than the bullshit out media serves us on a daily basis. At some point we are going to need to let them know that if they aren't going to do their job then they won't have one for long. I don't give a damn about reporting a story from the right or the left but what I do give a damn about is getting a story that has facts and on the record quotes in it. But until we actually make a stand we will keep getting served up these shit sandwhiches with grey poupon on the side.

The Smearing Of Judge Sotomayor By The Coward Jeffery Rosen

I have read many posts over the last day and a half lambasting Jeffery Rosen of The New Republic over his ridiculous post on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, one of the potential nominees to the Supreme Court, but none have been as extensive or thorough as Glenzilla's. You have to read the whole thing to get the full effect of the PWNING Greenwald hands to Rosen but here are a few excerpts.

Jeffrey Rosen's New Republic smear of Sonia Sotomayor's intellect and character -- based almost exclusively on anonymous, gossiping "sources" -- is such a model of shoddy, irresponsible, and (ironically enough) intellectually shallow "journalism" that it ought to be studied carefully. Standing alone, it reveals quite a bit about anonymity-dependent "reporting" generally, The New Republic specifically, and how much of our political discourse is conducted.

Most of the gaping flaws in Rosen's piece have been fully highlighted by others. While most of those criticisms have focused on Rosen's horrendous use of anonymous sources -- one of the most apt reactions to Rosen's piece comes, appropriately enough, in the form of well-earned derision from Wonkette -- I highly recommend this post from Law Professor Darren Hutchinson. As Professor Hutchinson conclusively documents, one of the only issues raised by Rosen that was anything other than anonymous gossip -- a claim that one of Sotomayor's judicial opinions was harshly criticized in an "unusual" footnote by another Second Circuit judge -- is totally false. In fact, it's so obviously false that, as Hutchinson suggests, it could be the by-product only of Rosen's extreme sloth or (ironically enough again) his lack of intellectual capacity. Just read Hutchinson's post for an idea of how vapid, bereft of worth and downright misleading is Rosen's attack on Sotomayor.

snip

Based on those experiences, I'm genuinely amazed at how -- overnight -- she's been transformed in conventional wisdom, largely as a result of Rosen's piece, into a stupid, shrill, out-of-her-depth Puerto Rican woman who is being considered for the Supreme Court solely due to anti-merit, affirmative action reasons. The New Republic thus fulfills its principal function in life: to allow the Right to spout any sort of invective and bile and justify it by reciting the "even-the-liberal-New-Republic-agrees" defense.

In the last 24 hours alone, Rosen's article has been used by three different National Review writers -- who, I'd be willing to bet lots of money, know virtually nothing about Sotomayor -- to declare her to be "dumb and obnoxious." That's a phrase they've revelled in repeating three times now (and counting), culminating with this: "I'm sure Mark H. is right about Sotomayor's being dumb and obnoxious, just as Derb is right about her being female and Hispanic is all the [sic] matters." The amazing speed with which so many people who know absolutely nothing about her are willing, indeed eager, to assume that she's stupid and doesn't deserve her achievements -- based on the fact that she's Puerto Rican and female and Rosen published some trashy, unaccountable gossip feeding that perception -- is really remarkable.

My perception of Sotomayor is almost the exact opposite of the picture painted by Rosen. I had a generally low opinion of the intellect of most judges -- it's one of the things I disliked most about the practice of law -- but I found her to be extremely perceptive, smart, shrewd and intellectually insightful. The image that has been instantaneously created of her as some sort of doltish mediocrity, based on nothing but Rosen's water-cooler chatter, is, at least to me, totally unrecognizable. Of the countless federal judges with whom I had substantive interaction over more than ten years of litigation, I would place her in the top tier when it comes to intellect. My impressions are very much in line with the author of this assessment of Sotomayor, who had much more extensive interaction with her and -- unlike Rosen's chatterers -- has the courage to attach his name to his statements.

Greenwald has a lot of more information that you will want to know about Sotomayor but I just wanted to give him some props for taking this line of bullshit down and exposing Rosen and TNR for the hacks that they are.

WingNuts Love Jake Tapper

How embarrassing should it be for a member of the mainstream media to be called out by name on right wing radio as someone who will easily fall for and spread their propaganda? Just ask Jake Tapper.

Step 2: Right-Wing Pressures White House Reporters To Take Up Its Attack

After the story was cooked up by right-wing hate radio, it was peddled to members of the White House press corps, at least one of whom took the bait. On his radio show on Friday, right-wing talker Mark Levin discussed Lauria’s claims against Obama, and then called on his listeners to pressure the White House press corps — specifically ABC’s Jake Tapper — to report the story:

LEVIN: Somebody needs to pursue what’s going on in the White House behind the scenes! And stop playing games and making nice! American citizens — whatever walk of life they’re in — should not be threatened by the White House! Should not be told we’re going to drag you through the mud with the White House press corps! So confident is the White House that they have the White House press corps wrapped around their little finger! Maybe Jake Tapper will take a look at this. Ask that doofus — Gibbs.

Jake Tapper is now official the go to guy for the wingnutosphere. I can only imagine how proud that makes him.

Glenzilla Tears Brian Ross A New One

Its really a joy to behold!

The Tangible Harm Our MSM Causes By Promoting Republican Talking Points

You know what would be nice in the midst of this swine-flu outbreak? If we had some extra funding for pandemic preparedness...

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

Now, as the World Health Organization says a deadly swine flu outbreak that apparently began in Mexico but has spread to the United States has the potential to develop into a pandemic, Obey's attempt to secure the money seems eerily prescient.

And his partisan attacks on his efforts seem not just creepy, but dangerous.

snip

Rove specifically complained that Obey's proposal included "$462 million for the Centers for Disease Control, and $900 million for pandemic flu preparations."

This was wrong, the political operative charged, because the health care sector added jobs in 2008.

As bizarre as that criticism may sound -- especially now -- Rove's argument was picked up by House and Senate Republicans, who made it an essential message in their attacks on the legislation. Even as Rove and his compatriots argued that a stimulus bill should include initiatives designed to shore-up and maintain any recovery, they consistently, and loudly, objected to spending money to address the potentially devastating economic impact of a major public health emergency.

The attack on pandemic preparation became so central to the GOP strategies that AP reported in February: "Republicans, meanwhile, plan to push for broader and deeper tax cuts, to trim major spending provisions that support Democrats' longer-term policy goals, and to try to knock out what they consider questionable spending items, such as $870 million to combat the flu and $400 million to slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases."

Famously, Maine Senator Collins, the supposedly moderate Republican who demanded cuts in health care spending in exchange for her support of a watered-down version of the stimulus, fumed about the pandemic funding: "Does it belong in this bill? Should we have $870 million in this bill No, we should not."

Even now, Collins continues to use her official website to highlight the fact that she led the fight to strip the pandemic preparedness money out of the Senate's version of the stimulus measure.

The Republicans essentially succeeded. The Senate version of the stimulus plan included no money whatsoever for pandemic preparedness. In the conference committee that reconciled the House and Senate plans, Obey and his allies succeeded in securing $50 million for improving information systems at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

But state and local governments, and the emergency services that would necessarily be on the frontlines in any effort to contain a pandemic, got nothing.

Did Rove, Collins and their compatriots want a pandemic?

Of course not.

They were just playing politics, in the exceptionally narrow and irresponsible manner that characterized the Republican response to the stimulus debate – and that, because of Democratic compromises in the Senate, dumbed down the plan President Obama ultimately signed.

No serious player in Washington has been unaware of the fears with regard to a flu pandemic. They have been well-publicized and well-discussed. Even Collins admitted as she objected to the House allocation for preparedness: "I think that everybody in the room is concerned about a pandemic flu."

Gread fucking job there GOP and mainstream media. In the name of political gamesmanship you have put the country in peril. I wonder how many media outlets will actually point out what happened earlier this year. Of course they will probably be more concerned with looking forward instead of looking back for retribution.

What FBI Director Mueller Said Last Year

When will the MSM remember that Bush FBI Director Robert Mueller himself said this past December that he didn't believe that any information gleaned from torture helped to disrupt an attack?

"These Tea Parties Are A Sham"

Good on Faiz Shakir for calling FoxNews out ON FoxNews. Funny how they aren't promoting something that they clearly promoted right after the panel discussion ended. I didn't hear them saying people should exercise their right to voice their opinion when it came to the people protesting the war in Iraq. I wonder why that is....

David Gregory Continues To Mainstream WingNut Talking Points

David Gregory and all his right wing friends decided to wingnut out this Easter morning...




If Red State was a Tee Vee show, thats what it would look like. I am pretty sure I will never watch Meet The Press on TV again.

The Mainstream Media's Fuzzy Math On The Defense Budget

Jon Stewart takes the media to task for framing a 4% budget increase in military spending as some kind of massive budget cut. And I gotta say that his Droopy Dog impersonation to mock Joe Liberman has me on the floor every time.

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Dave Waldman AKA Kagro X Is A BEAST!

Dave Waldman has a diary up over at dailykos that is definitely worth the full ready about the mainstream media's epic fail covering the cop massacer in Pittsburgh by right wing nutjob Richard Poplowski. But I just HAD to excerpt the ending because it expresses my thoughts exactly.

It's a little shy of two years now since reporters at the press conference at the last event held under the Yearly Kos banner in Chicago expressed amazement at having been shown the FOX Nutwork record of "mistakes" in reporting basic facts that were embarrassing to Republicans. And it seems clear that even now, traditional media reporters are unable to come to terms with the fact that there are people masquerading as "their kind," yet who not only can't and won't work in the same fact-based reality as they do, but actively beam out a steady stream of incendiary, counter-factual rhetoric that you'd have to be willfully blinding yourself not to connect to shooters who end up parroting, well, pretty much exactly what they're broadcasting on FOX.

Wake the hell up, people. There's a 24-hour eliminationist "news" nutwork broadcasting poison to already-fevered minds. Call it what it is. Be aware of what they're doing. And reporters, be clear on what they're up to, and whose profession they're using as cover.

And really, when a cop killer's best friend tells you casually that he was consumed with Zionist control of the government and imminent martial law and gun confiscations... that's actually the story!

When a shooter's best friend tells you he killed cops because his mind was being controlled by aliens from planet Xoltron, you have a sad and inexplicable illness on your hands, and "just the facts" reporting is all you can responsibly do.

When a shooter's best friend tells you he killed cops because he believed fake stories you can hear reported as "news" on a well-known (and even "respected!") 24-hour cable television network, you've got a very serious story on your hands that it's actually irresponsible not to look deeper.

This stuff isn't just appearing from out of nowhere. It's being beamed out under the protections you've worked hard to protect for your profession.
To the extent that you refuse to call FOX out for their nonsense, you become partly culpable for its continuance.

Take the reins and lead.

Stay Classy Michele Bachmann

Still more fearmongering from Michele Bachmann and allusions to Nazi facism this weekend on a radio show when talking abou the bipartisan approval of the expansion of Americorps.

It’s under the guise of — quote — volunteerism. But it’s not volunteers at all. It’s paying people to do work on behalf of government. …

I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.

Steve Benen fisks this dreck

Now, I feel kind of awkward fact-checking obvious madness, but I suppose it's worth noting two quick points. First, there's nothing in the legislation requiring public service. It's about expanding service opportunities for those who choose to pursue them.

Second, support for the expanded community service programs was bipartisan. The bill passed the Senate with 79 votes, and passed the House with 321 275 votes. Bachmann apparently believes some of her own conservative Republican colleagues backed an initiative to mandate public service and force young people into re-education camps that only exist in her twisted imagination.

Stepping back, though, this reminds me of a great post Kevin Drum had over the weekend in which he pondered why, exactly, so many on the far-right are feeling besieged and panicky.

"Who, exactly, is their enemy these days?" Kevin asked. "I'm not sure they know themselves. But maybe that makes it worse.... Like a horror movie where you're surrounded on all sides by something you can never quite make out, I guess it seems to them like there's something horrible going on, but it's something so insidious that they're only allowed to catch occasional foggy glimpses of it."

Right. And to take this one step further, I think this also helps explain why truly batty conservatives like Bachmann and Glenn Beck fabricate dire threats that don't exist in our reality. They're struggling to deal with legitimate progressive policy ideas, so they're stuck manufacturing make-believe policy ideas that suit their worldview. Obama wants to adopt a global currency! He wants young people in government-sponsored re-education camps! He wants to take medical decisions away from doctors and give them to bureaucrats! He's going to impose a tax on every time we flip a light switch!

These ideas are clearly delusional, but for those who need to see a political apocalypse, they apparently don't have a choice. Debating real ideas on the merits is proving too difficult, so they're creating their own reality and hoping their supporters play along

Now the overriding question is WHEN WILL THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA CALL THIS BULLSHIT OUT? Some journalists evidently think its not their job to do so or that they would be irresponsible to link events to right wing rhetoric. And in the next breath they wonder why they are working in a dying industry.

Go figure.

WEAKSAUCE Express

The usual suspects are apoplectic about the fact that President Obama admitted that recently the US has been derisive and dismissive towards Europe. Of course as I pointed out earlier that's not all that he said, but it suddenly came to me why these people are so upset at what he said. THEY are the main ones he is referring to when he talks about people having those fucked up attitudes towards Europe. You don't see liberals or progressives or Democrats wagging their fingers at the EU or France or Spain. Its the wingnuts who came up with "Freedom Fries" and it was John McCain who said he might not meet with the President of Spain. What they are really made about is that President Obama called them out and as Congressman Grayson said the other day, "a stuck pig squeals loudest".

Stupid Villagers

There is a very good post up over at Vanity Fair entitled What’s Wrong with Washington? about how out of touch beltway journalists and talking heads are. An excerpt:

If it were possible to reach into the television screen and throttle the scrawny neck of the Washington establishment, shake it until the dice rattled and the stem came loose, would that be wrong? Would that be considered unsporting? It pains me, as a bringer of dharma and light, to feel driven to imaginary acts of symbolic violence, but even a man of peace can take only so much until frustration blazes to the upper floor. Watching ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, for instance, is like receiving an engraved invitation to apoplexy. When the panel that Stephanopoulos conducts after his “Newsmakers” interviews includes Sam Donaldson, George Will, and Cokie Roberts, longtime observers of Roman folly, it is like being swallowed by an hourglass; they saw away at the same old creaky strophes of received wisdom as if nothing short of divine revelation could awaken a new thought, eject the dust bunnies from their brains. (Will, who might have filled the throne of conservatism’s beloved elder statesman vacated by William F. Buckley Jr., seems to have resigned and consigned himself to tedium.) To delve into the editorial pages of The Washington Post is to crack open an even creakier sarcophagus, where the dead paw of consensus maintains a semblance of order, continuity, prudence. Screams of boredom echo through the vault, but the sneer etched on columnist Charles Krauthammer’s face remains unmerciful. Every time political analysts Dick Morris, Bob Beckel, and Karl Rove surface on Fox News like plump juicy roasters, I think, Shouldn’t they be floating on a barge somewhere, bound for obscurity? Why’s Pat Buchanan still hanging around? On CNN’s political panels Jeffrey Toobin appears to be the only intellectually adept non-android. With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers.

That the cultural eco-system of Washington, D.C., is out of whack with the rest of the country isn’t tree-shaking news. In 1994, Kevin Phillips published a polemic called Arrogant Capital, and the arrogance has only compounded since then, keeping pace with the rising price of psychodrama. The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton’s standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak. It reprised the Monster Mash with the frenzy over the Congressman Gary Condit and Chandra Levy scandal, in the summer of 2001, the nightly panels on Hardball, Fox News, and Larry King Live spinning ever more baroque abduction/homicide theories about the intern’s disappearance as al-Qaeda quietly put the finishing touches on its surprise package for September. The ramp-up to the war in Iraq—no need to rewind that chapter of disgrace. Nor re-stage the tragic soap opera of Terri Schiavo from 2005 (though it seems so much longer ago, the product of a more primitive people), and the unhingement that ensued, with a recessed Congress scurrying to the Capitol for a special weekend session to pass hasty legislation putting her case under federal review, a bill that President Bush flew back from his Crawford, Texas, hobby farm to sign. And yet despite getting it so dependably, stupendously wrong, the hive-mind of the Beltway bubble seems incapable of evolving and developing the introspective faculties that distinguish sentient beings from the Real Housewives of Orange County. Its wagon wheels travel the same old ruts.

In the first weeks of the Obama administration, “bipartisanship” was the reigning buzzword, and when the Beltway thinks bipartisan, it pictures President Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill putting aside their differences and forging a legislative partnership, a ruddy pair of genial patriarchs bonding over the Blarney Stone. (Their Sunshine Boys routine supplies the first point of reference for nearly every stream of consciousness Sam Donaldson wades into on This Week.) If only the ghosts of the Gipper and the Tipper could inspire similar outreaches across the aisle, pined the Beltway oracles, playing matchmaker. When the newly elected Obama was assembling his Cabinet, Time reporter Karen Tumulty, writing for the magazine’s Swampland blog, offered “an out-of-the-box suggestion” for who should become health-and-human-services secretary—former Republican governor and candidate Mitt Romney, that aerosol can that couldn’t. As with so many who pride themselves on thinking outside the box, Tumulty would have been better off closing the cardboard flaps instead. Such stunt-casting would have dashed any hopes of a political future for Romney within the Republican Party against the jagged rocks, and stuck the Obama administration with a possible prima donna, violating its no-drama edict. Throwing Romney’s name into the hopper reflected the fetish that Washington entertains for a centrism that converts everything to mush.

At his Trail Mix blog at Congressional Quarterly’s site, Craig Crawford ventured even farther outside the box—and into the ozone—to unveil his own magic pick for H.H.S. secretary: Mr. Flour Power himself, Newt Gingrich. Anticipating the rhubarb this selection would provoke, Crawford wrote:

Now before you lefties have a collective heart attack, think about it. Something as big as overhauling our entire health care system will be tougher to get done on a purely partisan basis. There are Republicans who want to play.

As much as it would infuriate liberals, picking Gingrich would be a hyper-bipartisan move.

Only within the Beltway popcorn popper could Gingrich, whose serpent tongue and ogre ego did so much to polarize discourse in the 1990s and abort reform, be considered a foxy catch. Only in Washington, D.C., could Gingrich, a magpie of futurist jargon and a bumptious opportunist, pass himself off as an iconoclastic force and centrifuge of ideas, a cross between Buckminster Fuller and Che Guevara leading a commando raid on the buffet table. And only within the punditocracy could “hyper-bipartisan” be bandied about as an aphrodisiac.

Now I personally like Karen Tumulty and the posts she puts up over at Swampland but the author has it right here, her pronoucement that Mitt Romney might be in the running for HHS Secretary was just.....weird. And I told her so at the time. Mittens isn't a health care reformer and neither is Arnold Scharzenegger. They are both grand standers who only wanted to push health care reform to burnish their own resumes. But when push came to shove they both blinked and in Mittens case watered down his health care plan. The whole post deserves a full reading.

Nicholas Kristoff Looks In The Mirror

Nicholas Kristoff in his opinion piece in the New York Times today says unlike Jim Cramer he welcomes accountability in the media and offers up some thoughts on why its needed.

Ever wonder how financial experts could lead the world over the economic cliff?

One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.

snip

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.

Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

snip

The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. We trumpet our successes and ignore failures — or else attempt to explain that the failure doesn’t count because the situation changed or that we were basically right but the timing was off.

For example, I boast about having warned in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq would be a violent mess after we invaded. But I tend to make excuses for my own incorrect forecast in early 2007 that the troop “surge” would fail.

So what about a system to evaluate us prognosticators? Professor Tetlock suggests that various foundations might try to create a “trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry,” monitoring and evaluating the records of various experts and pundits as a public service. I agree: Hold us accountable!

Kristoff's call for a "trans-ideological Consumer Reports for punditry" kinda comports with an idea I have been tossing around in my head about a kind of "truth in advertising" for "news" sources. I personally believe that we have come to a point in time were any media outlet that uses the word "news" to describe its content should be held to a high standard. The thing about it for me is that we hold advertisers to account when they lie to consumers. We have truth in advertising laws that say that a business can be fined or worse if they put up a commercial that makes false claims about its product. But the ironic thing is those same commercials that are held to a standard of factual accuracy many times run in between "news" shows or one cable "news" networks or along side columns in print media where the pundits get to stretch, pervert or outright suppress the truth. Now what I am talking about isn't matters of opinion. For instance its ok for a person to believe that the stimulus bill is wrong for America. That is basically their right of free speech. But when they start making up what is in the stimulus bill or taking something in the stimulus bill and use deception to give a false impression about what a certain provision is supposed to do where the facts are verifiable, we should have some kind of independent arbiter of the truth that has the ability to fine these outlets and expose them for putting out bad information. As an alternative these outlets could have the option of not using the word "news" to describe what they do and then they could do and say whatever they like but without the same level of credibility.

Now I understand that this concept would be hard to implement in the real world. Both sides of any argument will claim that the independent commission leans to the other side. And then there would be the question of who would set up the commission and most people wouldn't want it to be the government for fear of subverting the first amendment rights of a free press. Still I believe there can be and has to be a way to make this happen that is satisfactory for all sides. In the end, I believe, that with this added measure of accountability our news sources will step up to the plate and start putting out more accurate data and the populous would be better served by our press because of it.

PWNED On National Tee Vee

Yesterday before President Obama's Press Conference I heard that Ed Henry likes to write his questions down in advance. After watching him get his ass handed to him I have to say he should have saved the ink.




Yes the rest of the press core laughed at you last night Ed Henry. No amount of spinning by your colleagues at CNN will change the fact that you got dismissed like the pretentious prick that you are in front of everybody. Deal with it.