Newshoggers.com

The Enigma Of Juan Williams

Commentary By Ron Beasley

After being fired from NPR I could understand why Juan Williams would take a big bucks gig from FOX.  He had not done any serious journalism for a few years and he was not getting any younger.  The money probably looked good.  I must admit I lost a lot of respect for him never the less.  But as Ed Kilgore points out Williams is not playing by the FOX rules.

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives.

But bless his soul Williams is willing to risk his FOX dollars and call it like it is.

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

The code also extends to attacks on legal immigrants, always carefully lumped in with illegal immigrants, as people seeking “amnesty” and taking jobs from Americans. 

But the code sometimes breaks down.

Last week a passionate Republican told GOP candidate Rick Santorum: “I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he is not [president]. He constantly says that our Constitution is passé and he ignores it. … He is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president.”

Santorum did not blink. The man who recently said he meant “blah people” — when the world heard him say “black people” — as  he spoke about parasitic Americans who get better lives by taking “somebody else’s money,” did not correct the assault on the truth. Instead he agreed that Obama is attacking the Constitution and said: “Well, look, I’m trying my best to get him out of office.”

The secret code words, the creation of Lee Attwater. They have been used by many Republican candidates on FOX News from the beginning.

Good for Juan Williams - but does he have a future at FOX?

The Buddy System

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I remember a lot of things from my college days - parties, drunken field trips and did I mention parties?  But I also remember hours at the chalk board doing physics home work with fellow student friends.  Well that was the 60s - no calculators, no computers - the slide rule days.  The academic social network was the blackboard, yes not even the white board.  Times have changed - too late for me academically since at 65 I'm not academic anymore - but social networking is a part at today's students life.  So why not make the blackboard of my academic life a social network?  Well guess what?  it's here - StudyUp.  We have a link in the sidebar.

Tim Minchin song cut from Christmas special

By BJ Bjornson

Possibly due to concern over possible negative coverage, unlike the negative coverage that cutting it will cause. In any case it sucks given the song is an absolute hoot. Oh well, at least we can all still enjoy it on YouTube.


This guy really needs to do a Christmas album.

The Rule of Law is for other people

By BJ Bjornson

How nice of Newt Gingrich to remind everyone of how absolutely bugfuck nuts he and his party actually are:

Newt Gingrich on Sunday hammered at the nation’s judiciary system, saying that if a court’s decision was out of step with American popular opinion, it should be ignored.

There’s “no reason the American people need to tolerate a judge that out of touch with American culture,” Gingrich said on CBS’ Face the Nation, referring to a case where a judge ruled that explicit references to religion were barred from a high school graduation ceremony. And Gingrich recently has said judges should have to explain some of their decisions before Congress.

Host Bob Schieffer asked Gingrich how he planned to enforce that. Would you call in the Capitol Police to apprehend a federal judge, he asked.

“If you had to,” Gingrich said. “Or you’d instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshall in.

This particular line of attack has been ongoing since the debate on Thursday, but is part and parcel of the Republicans ongoing assault against “activist” judges, meaning any judge who makes a ruling not in line with their ideology of the day, going back for nearly as long as I can remember from following such things, though even by those standards, Gingrich’s attacks are looking fairly radical.

In order to restore balance between Congress, the White House, and the courts, Gingrich recommended ignoring rulings, impeaching judges, subpoenaing justices to have them explain their rulings and, as a last resort, abolishing the courts altogether.

Well, I suppose once you start detaining people without trial, having courts to run those trials does seem kind of redundant. Still, this kind of idiocy should put to rest any lingering doubts about Newt being any kind of intellectual, though given the competition he’s currently running against, and the quality of the village media, that seems unlikely.

A quiet brushing away of a horrific blunder

By BJ Bjornson

A flag ceremony marks an official end to the US military operations in Iraq. Well, so long as you ignore the 15,000 personnel still based in the world’s largest embassy and who knows how many mercenaries still running around the country.

Still, Charles Pierce notes that there is still an accounting to be made, even if such an accounting seems entirely unlikely.

On Wednesday, the president said that the Iraq War belongs to history. This, of course, is true. So, for that matter, does whatever he had for breakfast that morning. But history is not just all the stuff that happened in the past. It's why all that stuff happened in the past. It's who made all that stuff happen in the past. Until that accounting takes place, the war does not belong to history. Vietnam doesn't even fully "belong to history" yet. Our politics are still fought out over the fault lines created during that previous exercise in waste and treachery. I suspect — nay, I fear — that a great effort will be made among our political elites not to let that happen again here. Nobody will want to be "divisive." We  will move forward. It will not be allowed to affect our current politics, except as a handy tool with which the war-hungry claque in our conservative foreign-policy elite can bang the president over the head a few times.

The Iraq War will "belong to history" in the sense that it will be buried there.

That will not pay all the bills. And until those bills are paid — until the proper people pay the proper recompense for what they did to this country, to that country, and to the world — the Iraq War is not over.

In this, I fear he is right. There will be no real accounting for the crimes that have taken place in Iraq, and most particularly for the crimes of those who led the US into the war there in the first place, no more than they will be held to account for any of their myriad other crimes.

Much like the elites in Wall Street are not going to be held to account for their roles in destroying the lives and wealth of millions, so long as you have your hands on the levers of power, no crime is too big to simply walk away from and tell everyone that they need “to look forward, not back”. The whole mess will get brushed aside and dumped down the memory hole as much as possible, much as it already has.

Little wonder such things keep happening.

WTF?

By BJ Bjornson

I don’t know what kind of self-induced coma Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen have been in these last few years, but it must have been caused by some pretty heavy stuff.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Now, I happen to think Hillary would make an excellent president and all, but it’s the reason these two think Hillary should take over that left my mouth hanging open.

But this is about more than electoral politics. Not only is Mrs. Clinton better positioned to win in 2012 than Mr. Obama, but she is better positioned to govern if she does. Given her strong public support, she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington.

Yep. As they see it, and even say further up the column, the problem with Obama has been his insistence on traveling down his overly partisan road, causing all of that nasty gridlock and fighting in Congress. If only they could find someone who could reach out to the Republicans and change the dialogue.

That they’ve completely missed the point of Republican obstructionism and Obama’s attempts to reach out and change the dialogue since he was elected, claiming he’s done the opposite, is bad enough. That they think that Hillary will somehow be the one to overcome the lockstep obstructionism on the Republican side just leaves me beyond words.

Seriously, what are these guys on?

What Merits This?

By BJ Bjornson

The facts tend to speak for themselves sometimes.

... the most popular way to find a job is through family and friends. That holds true for all of us, but it is immensely more likely for the kids of the very rich. Look at this picture from a research paper that a colleague and I published in the Journal of Labor Economics (available here if you really want all the details).

The bottom line is that about 40% of us have at some point worked for exactly the same firm that at some point also employed our fathers. But if dad’s earnings put him in the top 25% these chances are above average, they start taking off if dad was in the top 5%, and reach the stratosphere for top earners. Almost 7 out of 10 sons of top earning dads had a job with his employer.

All parents want to help their children in whatever way they can. But top earners can do it more than others, and with more consequence: virtually guaranteeing, if not a lifetime of high earnings, at least a great start in life.

I won’t speak to the methodology of only looking at the male half of the species, though given the rather recentness of large-scale female participation in the workforce, I suppose you could make the argument that looking at the father’s employer is more appropriate for an intergenerational study at this point, though I'd say it’s a little less defensible to only focus on the son’s employment.

In any case, it does bring to mind this post by Glenn Greenwald on the “meritocracy” of the national media in the U.S., noting the hiring of Luke Russert, Jenna Bush, Meghan McCain, and Chelsea Clinton by major broadcasters. All, we are quite certain, based solely on their outstanding achievements in the field of journalism and never on anything so crass as their famous fathers’ names.

Honestly, how could anyone look at all this and argue that the 1% all very much deserve their wealth due to the hard work and pluck they’ve shown?

The Undead Big Lie

By BJ Bjornson

Ryan Chittum has a post up that documents a pretty decent push back of the mainstream press on Mitt Romney’s repeat of the Big Lie of the financial crisis, that is was somehow the government’s, and in particular Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s, fault and not that of the unregulated private sector.

Of course, that was Thursday. Today, glancing at memeorandum, I see one of the top stories is titled, “Facts show Fannie, Freddie led mortgage market to the collapse”. Sure, its from the Washington Examiner, but it helps to show why “the government did it” remains the conventional wisdom of the right and GOP candidates.

It doesn’t matter how many times the myth gets debunked and the facts are trotted out to show that it was the private sector and their speculation in toxic mortgages that were the cause of the financial crisis, you have an entire party ideologically opposed to the idea that the government can do anything good (unless it involves the torture or death of brown people, beating up peaceful protestors, or procuring expensive means to better carry out the same), while also being continuously brain washed into the belief that the private sector, left to its own devices, is the greatest and most efficient distributor of wealth that can ever be, with wondrous (and so far illusionary) self-correction mechanisms that would never allow these paragons of fiscal discipline to do something as terrible as cause a world-wide financial crisis with their poor judgement and often illegal dealings.

Combine those two points and the government just must be at fault. Anything else causes too great of a cognitive dissonance amongst the true believers, and as with every other faith-based movement, the vast majority of folks are just going to ignore the information they can’t process without changing their worldview, so the Big Lie that Fannie and Freddie are responsible for the financial crisis will live a long and happy undead life, impervious to the multiple stakings of fact-based commentary.

Moving the Conversation

By BJ Bjornson

I noted a little over a week ago that the Republicans have every incentive to deliberately sabotage the economy in order to improve their own election prospects. Such an idea is hardly new or original, but I did note that at least some part of the conversation was beginning to change.

There are some glimmers of hope, such as the recent headlines linked above. And though it may be more about early campaign rhetoric than anything else, the fact that the Democrats looked poised to force further votes on popular job-creating bills to make the Republicans finally face some heat for their obstruction is definitely the right track to take.

I don’t know how much Occupy Wall Street can take the credit for possibly stiffening some Democratic spines in this continuing battle, or in helping put the focus on jobs rather than the deficit, but I do agree with John Cole’s point some time back that this is the way the Overton Window gets moved. Properly focused, it may just get the incentives of elected officials back into line.

This morning, I read this post by Greg Sargent which notes that the Obama campaign has began making the same kinds of noises about the Republicans efforts to stall the economy, and what it might mean.

As you know, Obama’s newly aggressive populism and (gasp) partisan rhetoric has sparked a good deal of handwringing and complaining from centrist columists (see Brooks, David) and leading GOP officials (see Ryan, Paul), who have been arguing that the new approach is somehow out of bounds or that it risks alienating the middle of the country. Axelrod’s amplification of the charge that the GOP may be tanking the economy on purpose suggests the Obama campaign isn’t taking these objections too seriously.

Indeed, it’s worth asking whether we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the thinking of the Obama team and some Dems — a basic recognition that the old rules don’t apply anymore, that the unprecedented tactics being employed by the opposition require a new kind of response. As Dana Milbank notes, you can see the evidence of this in the unapologetic populism driving Elizabeth Warren’s Senate candidacy, which suggests that “Democrats will no longer play by Marquess of Queensbury rules while their opponents disembowel them.”

But this may be about something broader than just a new approach to Republicans. The Occupy Wall Street protests; our political conversation’s intense new focus on inequality and economic justice; and the extraordinary levels of voter anxiety and dissatisafaction with our institutions all seem to suggest that the political landscape is shifting in ways we can’t really appreciate yet. It looks like the Obama campaign is placing its bet on what kind of political response these big changes are demanding.

On that last sentence, there will no doubt be many pixels spilled on how Obama is making a cynical play for votes and that once re-elected he’ll turn around and kowtow to the financial giants once more. And the truth is that they’ll probably be proven entirely right should the Occupy movement fizzle and fade back into the background.

One of the biggest lessons of the last few years is that holding elected officials accountable goes beyond just the ballot box. Say what you will about the legitimacy of the Tea Partiers calling themselves a grassroots movement, their storming of town hall meetings during the ACA debate helped solidify the Republican opposition and strengthen the Blue Dogs' hands in the continuing negotiations. (If you want to understand some of the anger directed towards the “firebaggers” and “professional left”, I’d start by looking at their almost universal lack of effective pushback during that period, instead focusing on attacking the President while the battle was being waged in Congress.)

Note as well the massive protests and recall efforts that accompanied anti-union legislation in Wisconsin, and similar efforts in Ohio and other states, which I would argue were precursors to the Occupy movement, even though they remained quite localized.

Make no mistake, while the wealthy control the media for the most part, a sustained effort by the rest of the population can at the very least change what’s being talked about, from deficits and the confidence fairy to jobs and accountability for those who tanked the economy. And it can boost the arguments of those who are willing to put those issues front and centre and expose those who really don’t care much about them.

Will any real change come as a result? Who knows, there are still some pretty powerful forces opposed to such, and their pockets are deep. All I can say is that without such sustained action, the powers that be will quickly steer the conversation back to their preferred narratives of how they have to cut away the safety net and stop regulating companies that poison our air, water and food to pay for tax cuts.

Keep Those Goalposts Moving

By BJ Bjornson

Starting from Krugman’s post:

What I found myself thinking about, however, is the way the inequality debate illustrates some typical features of many debates these days: the way the right has a sort of multi-layer defense in depth, which involves not only denying facts but then, in a pinch, denying the fact that you denied those facts.

Think about climate change. You have various right-wingers simultaneously (a) denying that global warming is happening (b) denying that anyone denies that global warming is happening, but denying that humans are responsible (c) denying that anyone denies that humans are causing global warming, insisting that the real argument is about the appropriate response.

I’m not sure there are three levels (yet) on inequality, but we definitely have (a) right-wingers denying that inequality is rising and (b) denying that anyone is denying the rise in inequality, but attacking any proposal to limit that rise.

You might ask, how is it possible to take such mutually contradictory positions? And the answer is, it’s very easy if confusing the debate is your job.

Emphasis mine.  I can assure Mr. Krugman that he is far from the only person who has noticed this, and climate change and inequality are far from the only two topics where this dynamic plays out. What is even more annoying, is that this clearly defective logic not only gets a pass in the mainstream media, but winds up dominating the debate for the most part. As DougJ puts it:

I defy you to name even one issue where this dynamic—multiple layers of conservative denialism, with a creamy name-calling filling, topped with the icy frosting of neo-liberal contrarianism and general smart-assery—doesn’t effectively dominate the national discourse.

Let me know if you find one.