reporting politics, not policy

CBS released a poll showing that huge majorities of Americans don't understand the reforms Democrats are pushing on health care. Newspapers and TV networks have been giving us nonstop footage of the parade of crazy going on in town halls across the country. I've even seen some reports on Obama's/Democrats' inability to galvanize support being based on people's lack of understanding of what they're proposing.

So... eh... why don't you tell us? I've seen several online videos that explain the proposals clearly and concisely, often in cartoon form. Why can't the Nancy Snydermans of the various networks do something like that? Why are they all just waiting for an instructive voice to drown out the din on nonsense?

After all, apparently health care literacy is so low, even other journalists need a couple of basic lessons. It would be nice, for instance, for someone to tell Maria Bartiromo that Medicare isn't available to people under 65 (then again, judging from her Celebrity Jeopardy! performance, she might be a lost cause. Yes, CNBC hired this woman to tell you about financial news every day). Or tell other journalists that the public option does not establish a single payer system.

balance in the Washington Post

apparently means preparing a story on the Obama Administration and North Korea by interviewing three Bush officials and one guy from a nonprofit. I love the credulous way the first wanker's answer is nestled in there all alone like sage advice, as if it's inconceivable that somebody from the Bush Administration could have a partisan axe to grind.

down in the West Texas town of El Paso

Some needed perspective on the violence at the border from the Texas Observer. It's a good article.

yet she gets paid to write it

It's become like clockwork. Once every couple of weeks, I glance at the Salon article titles and see one that makes me think: "What the hell? What planet is that wanker living on?" It always turns out to be Camille Paglia's biweekly column.

This week she slaps down Obama for totally botching his first major trip abroad and the G-20. He sure embarrassed the hell out of all of us on that gaffe train, am I right?

yeah, educated-sounding presidents are THE WORST!

Why does Obama stay short on details so often? Among other reasons, it could be because this is the reaction he gets from the supposedly-details-hungry press when he offers them some substance:

For just under an hour on Tuesday night, Americans saw not the fiery and inspirational speaker who riveted the nation in his address to Congress last month, or the conversational president who warmly engaged Americans in talks across the country, or even the jaunty and jokey president who turned up on Jay Leno.

Instead, in his second prime-time news conference from the White House, it was Barack Obama the lecturer, a familiar character from early in the campaign. Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, “as I said before” — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell.

Yeah, what the hell, Obama? No one wants to sit and listen to whole paragraphs about the collapse of the economy. What's with all this smarty talk, with numbers even?! This is TV, for God's sake; you're cutting into NCIS! Can't you just bow your legs, squint, and say, "we're gunna git'em varmints!" like the last guy? He was entertaining, and so strong and folksy!

Do us all a favor: next time we tell you we want details, just substitute an Old West-sounding catchphrase. Those are so cool!

That quoted paragraph, by the way, isn't from FOX News, or Yahoo! Entertainment News, or Maureen Dowd's catty, superficial editorial column. It's from the New York Times. At the top of the homepage. The first two paragraphs.

What I think is most interesting about this reaction is what it says about these reporters' opinion of the American people. Apparently the vast majority of us who bother to watch pressers are either insufficiently affected by the economy to care about this stuff as anything more than entertainment, or too stupid to pay attention through "long paragraphs." Apparently all journalism, no matter how serious the subject matter, is just entertainment now.

Stewart/Cramer

You should really watch this interview. It's the culmination of a week's worth of brick-throwing on both sides that ends with Jon Stewart utterly demolishing Jim Cramer and CNBC, and Cramer pretty much totally owning up to his network's failures. I gotta say, props to Cramer who treated this interview as less of an entertainment showdown, and more of a chance to get serious and face the music.

At the very end, Stewart tells a story about his mother that alludes to something we really need to address: after all the years of compound interest and all the following market losses, would all of those people who trusted the financial community and conventional wisdom, all those who put their retirement savings in the stock market (or whose conventional retirement plans were phased out in favor of 401(k)'s), would they have been better off had they just left all that money in a plain jane savings account at their local bank? Because if so, then we seriously need to talk about the fact that 401(k)'s have now been shown to entail a huge amount of risk.

of course, ABC News will still never beat the champion

You may have heard the recent GOP talking point about a supposed magnetic levitation rail line in the stimulus bill from "Disneyland" to Las Vegas. It's a Rush Limbaugh canard; there is no such earmark in the stimulus bill (though in all honesty, a direct line from LA to Vegas actually makes a lot of sense). Nevertheless, you wouldn't expect FOX News to settle with an average Limbaugh whopper, would ya?:

KELLY: It's a super railroad, of sorts -- a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the moonlight bunny ranch brothel in Nevada. I say, to the moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. So should your tax dollars be paying for these kinds of projects? [...]

Now the phantom flying train runs straight from Disneyland to Las Vegas the Bunny Ranch brothel. You know, the one near Carson City. Incidentally, if any of you are heading to Las Vegas, I would not suggest hopping a train to Carson City.

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Amazing that there are people out there who still refer to FNC as a "news channel."

a major booboo from ABC News

Ok, I'm really surprised by this one. Those of you who know a little bit about taxes are going to get a laugh out of this one. From ABC News' Emily Friedman:

President Barack Obama's tax proposal – which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay, even if it's just by a dollar.

A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law.

So far, Obama's tax plan is being looked at skeptically by both Democrats and Republicans and therefore may not pass at all.

"We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00," she said.

"We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama's tax plan," she added. "Why kill yourself working if you're going to give it all away to people who aren't working as hard?"

Ok, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the way income taxes work in this article that completely undermines its entire thesis. Can you see it? Admittedly, I did not know this (yay Turbotax!), but I'm not a journalist writing about tax brackets without understanding how tax brackets work.

Here's the thing: The federal income tax is progressive. That means that when you move up to a new tax bracket, it's only the extra income that is subjected to the new tax rate. That is, if Barack Obama says incomes of $250k/year and over will be taxed 39%, and you make $260k/year, you only pay 39% on the $10,001 that put you into that tax bracket. As Wikipedia puts it:

A progressive tax taxes differentially based on how much has been earned. For example, the first $10,000 in earnings may be taxed at 5%, the next $10,000 at 10%, and any more income at 20%.

Thus, it makes no sense to lower your pay under $250k because the person who brings in $251k will always make more than the one making $249k.

Says Jonathan Chait at TNR:

This article is obviously an outlier, but it is an extreme manifestation of a broader phenomenon. Clay had a good post about how Politico's Jeanne Cummings has turned into a sounding board for right-wing economic notions. And Matthew Yglesias had a good point about how the media massively overrepresents the perspective of the rich in reporting and commentating on the tax debate. (It has framed Obama's plans as a tax hike when the vast majority of Americans will experience it as a tax cut.) Sadly, I think the next few months are going to bring us a massive surge of sympathetic and/or uninformed coverage of the tax debate from the perspective of the wealthiest segment of America.

Then again, it can be hard to consider ABC News a "serious" news organization sometimes.

the bizarro press

Hysterical. Pundits and reporters rate the winners and losers of the stimulus debate and come to precisely to the opposite conclusions of the rest of the country. In the bizarro world inside your TV, Nancy Pelosi, who got everything she wanted in the House and even got to rewrite the Senate compromise, is a loser, and the Republicans, who got steamrolled in the House and ended up compromising out a bill in the Senate that, after Pelosi re-fixed it, was very close to Obama's original draft, and who spent 3 weeks telling the American people that the only real answer is cutting the capital gains tax, are the big winners! And Harry Reid, who has a 58-41 advantage and yet couldn't keep the Republicans from watering down the bill, is another big winner!

As Marshall has put it, the DC press is still hardwired for the Republicans, and thus they continue to benefit from irrationally positive press.

lobbyists

Greenwald combines several of my favorite things: decrying the very practice of lobbying, accusing the media of complicity, and trashing David Brooks. The Moyers Journal episode he references (the one with him and Jay Rosen) was very good, too.

crying themselves to sleep in their million dollar homes

It's hard knock life being rich and incompetent. Seriously though, this media swill about how it's hard to live in NYC on a half million dollar/year pittance is just silly. Who do they think they're going to convince?

The argument is that $500k/year is overly punitive because that means these execs will have to cut their standard of living. Notice from the article:

“As hard as it is to believe, bankers who are living on the Upper East Side making $2 or $3 million a year have set up a life for themselves in which they are also at zero at the end of the year with credit cards and mortgage bills that are inescapable,” said Holly Peterson, the author of an Upper East Side novel of manners, “The Manny,” and the daughter of Peter G. Peterson, a founder of the equity firm the Blackstone Group. “Five hundred thousand dollars means taking their kids out of private school and selling their home in a fire sale.”
...
Few are playing sad cellos over the fate of such folk, especially since the collapse of the institutions they run has yielded untold financial pain. But in New York, where a new study from the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group in Manhattan, estimates it takes $123,322 to enjoy the same middle-class life as someone earning $50,000 in Houston, extricating oneself from steep bills can be difficult.

What? You mean people who get paid millions of dollars a year yet squander it all on an absurd lifestyle, run their businesses into the ground, eat up hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, and send the economy into a tailspin costing millions of poor and middle class people their jobs, might have to lower their standard of living, perhaps even living with the same lifestyle as the hoi polloi in Houston who make (gasp!) a mere $200,000/year? How will they eat?

The article then ascends to a sort of nirvana of unintentional comedy, listing all of the highlights of these people's conspicuously consumptive lifestyle and how much it costs to maintain them, stating with no hint of irony, "The cold hard math can be cruel." The first thing on the list is taxes. Taxes. Do I even need to discuss the audacity of an article defending the lifestyles of people whose businesses accepted government bailout money to complain about their tax burden?

The second thing on the list? Two annual vacations at a minimum of $16,000. It only goes downhill from there.

Let's try to come up with some more revealing facts about these people's new lifestyle. I wonder, just what kind of a house can one of those $500k/year-making practically-Texas-ditch-diggers afford? Assuming a 35% tax burden (most people pay closer to 25%, but I estimated upward to account for high income bracket) and that they're spending a quarter of their income on their mortgage (a conservative estimate for most people), a New Yorker of that income level could afford a monthly PITI (principal, interest, taxes, and insurance) of $6,770. We'll use double the New York property tax rate of 1.2% to account for higher taxes in the city, a 5.1% interest rate, and an insurance rate of 1% (which is high). Using this calculator that comes out to a roughly $1.2 million mortgage. Looking through Google Base, I found a picturesque 4 bedroom house on a 4 acre paradise in New City, this 3,216 ft. monstrosity overlooking the ocean, and a pair of nice condos on the upper east side for that amount.

Poor saps, who could live in those hell-holes?

the Bush legacy: the big-ass hole on Church St.

I would like to assert, for the record, that everyone will expect the incoming president to start protecting us Tuesday afternoon. If terrorists engage in a major attack on American soil 9 months from now, the Republican party and the nation's media will have no compunction about placing the blame for it squarely at the feet of President Obama. This will be especially true if it becomes clear that President Obama was warned beforehand by such things as a National Security Memo titled "Bin Laden determined to strike within U.S." and sidelined his Terrorism Czar to shut up his constant yapping about the gathering threat.

To this day, I still find it maddening that even liberals in the papers and on TV persist in giving Bush a pass on what is without a doubt his single most egregious failure as President, and one of two moments at which his neglect led to the deaths of hundreds (or thousands) of Americans. Quite the contrary: he was able to ride that failure to 80+% approval ratings in 2002 and 2003. It was the defining event of his first term (perhaps of his entire presidency) and the root cause of his re-election. It was the justification for Afghanistan and Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, for warrantless wiretapping, the War on Terror, and the USA PATRIOT Act. It was the pretense for his entire foreign policy, and to my knowledge he had no domestic policy aside from tax cuts.

I still have yet to see any evidence refuting the biggest political blasphemy of the 2000's: that 9/11 was George W. Bush's fault. The only thing I see refuting it is the almighty narrative that Republicans Are Better On National Security Than Democrats. It is one of many reasons why our grandkids are going to cackle at our unending stupidity when they read about the turn of the 21st century.

whatever the reason, good for Today

The premise of Ann Coulter's body of work is that one quarter of all Americans are subhuman monsters who deserve to be put to death. As much as our prestigious media loves handing a microphone to the most incendiary of morons, gasping at the left-wing ones and treating the right-wing ones like they're constitutional scholars, perhaps Today is not an appropriate avenue for that level of "discourse" at a time when this country has real problems to worry about.

they've got big bowls

Dan Wetzel, champion of the NCAA tournament system for college football, on the current bowl system, why we have it and what it looks like on the inside. It's a great article, very informative, even if it stifles debate by accusing anyone who disagrees of being on the take. I'm all for scrapping the system, and even I can admit that the "tradition" of the big bowl games is a perfectly valid argument on its own merits-- in fact, the big bowls and the big rivalries are the only instances where most NCAAF fans see anything relating to "tradition." Hell, I work on most of the most "storied" campuses in college football, and "tradition" here generally is just a euphemism for bizarre superstition and rank hedonism. Oh, and let's not forget ritual mockery of minority ethnicities!

Warren-mania: throwing God's pit bulls a bone

This morning I heard someone on NPR refer to those angry with Obama for choosing Warren to lead a prayer on Inauguration Day as "activists." What, exactly, makes them "activist?" The act of being disappointed? Why are they "activists," but those who fought to pass Prop 8 are merely "social conservatives" or even worse, "family advocates?"

While we're at it, it's not like liberals and liberal-leaners don't have a legitimate beef with Obama's choice; after all, he now has more Republicans in his administration than avowed liberals, and does so even if you concede that Hillary Clinton is a liberal. You can't swing a cat in Obama's cabinet without hitting a blue dog or three.

Nevertheless, it's worth considering that apparently there will be 2 preachers at Obama's inauguration, and the one giving the closing benediction is GLBT friendly. That, I would imagine, is a first, while every previous preacher probably had views similar to Warren. Furthermore, for all Warren's faults, he's willing to lead the evangelical community back to sanity on aid to the poor, HIV/AIDS work, and climate change. Obama and the Democrats have an interest in seeing Warren's influence over the evangelical community further increase for those reasons. Obama wants to send a message to the evangelical community that they matter in an Obama Administration, that they don't have to go Republican to have leaders who listen to them, and gay-friendly evangelical pastors just don't have much credibility within that community.

Plus, let's face it, this isn't exactly a cabinet position.

UPDATE: And as I write that Obama has appointed hardly any progressives, he names Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor, who's almost as solidly pro-labor as you can get.

Captain Obvious brings you TIME's Person of the Year

It's true that they shouldn't get into the habit of making every new president the Person of the Year, but really, this one is pretty clearly the right call. Barack has dominated the news the entire year, he's felled two of America's political titans, taken over the Democratic party, and been forced to become de facto president 2 months early. His election victory made millions of people proud to be Americans again and humbled formerly snickering European nations who have been forced to admit that, for all their liberal politics, they're not yet egalitarian enough to elect an ethnic minority head of the government. That victory also led the Iraqi government to finalize a power-sharing agreement with the United States, now confident that the next president will fulfill Bush's promise to leave Iraq.

These are really cool.

TIME also gives an uninspired list of runners up and "people who mattered," including people like John McCain and Sarah Palin who were proven notably inconsequential in front of the Obama steamroller. In fact, I would have added Katie Couric to the list of special people for single-handedly laying the death knell to Sarah Palin's fledgling career in national politics. Nevertheless, Palin landed a runner-up slot rather than Hillary Clinton, who was the first legitimate female presidential contender, a far tougher, more resilient opponent than McCain/Palin, and who exits 2008 with a much louder bull-horn than Palin as Secretary of State. More of that vaunted media "balance," I'm guessing. Both McCain and Palin place higher, incidentally, than Robert Mugabe, who has certainly influenced more lives worldwide more profoundly, not to mention international politics. One name is conspicuously missing from the list entirely, and it's the only name I can think of that could possibly have "mattered" this year anywhere near as much as Barack Obama: Vladimir Putin.

Yet TIME saw fit to add Robert Downey, Jr. to the list instead.

It looks like TIME's only real metric for deciding these lists is who gets the most mentions in the news, but that's a terrible way to decide who makes the most significant impact. In the case of Obama, that works because the United States has been obsessed with him all year long, but that system also preferences celebrity over substance. Hence you get Michael Phelps on your list because Phelps won 8 swimming medals, and not Hu Jintao, who is the president of the biggest nation on the planet and the one that hosted said Olympics. You get the CEO of Lehman Bros. because his firm made a big splash when it splattered against the pavement, but you don't get Alan Greenspan or Phil Gramm, who may be the two figures most intimately responsible for the economic collapse that's now affected the entire world. You get Mikheil Saakashvili because his name showed up in the news a lot for "poking the Russian bear," but the big winner in that conflict, the one who looked a lot bigger afterwards and affected the state of international politics, was the bear. And, of course, you get people like Downey and Phelps and Tina Fey, people we liked to watch but who weren't meaningful to our lives. Does making 2 successful movies that revive your moribund acting career mean you "mattered" this year in the same sense that Hillary Clinton or Henry Paulson "mattered?"

it would be irresponsible NOT to speculate!

The liberal media asks if Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.

Luckily the sources, a learned and utterly balanced mix of right-wing Christians and religious conservatives, keep this story's feet firmly planted on intellectual terra firma:

Strandberg says Obama probably isn't the Antichrist, but he's watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means "fasten your seat belts." Obama's win pushed the index to 161.

God may try to hide his plans from the ever-vigilant eyes of the blogosphere, but, by golly, if Dan Rather couldn't fool them,...

the regional party of the South

Reading these botched predictions and thinking about a conversation I had the other day, it occurs to me that the central reason the Republicans seem so out of touch is because they assumed there were always enough conservatives to win every election. The Democrats make a play for every demographic, to both their benefit and detriment, but that's a very different strategy than the Republican one. If you're not a social conservative, an economic conservative, or a foreign policy neoconservative, the Republicans are not interested in your vote, and will use you as a bogeyman to scare conservatives to the polls. The problem is those groups the Republicans have spent the last 30 years willfully antagonizing-- atheists/agnostics, feminists, liberals, immigrants, gays, religious non-Judaeo-Christians-- are among the fastest growing demographics in the country. Meanwhile, George W. Bush and the Christian Right made Republicanism uncool to a whole generation of Americans just now becoming politically aware, while congressional Republicans chased Hispanics and college-educated whites into the waiting arms of the Democratic Party. And yes, Americans are becoming slightly more liberal.

That's why it's so deathly important for Karl Rove and the rest to keep repeating "America is still a center-right country." They have to convince themselves, because the alternative is too scary.

librarians to the rescue!

How did I never hear about this? According to a journal article I just read (Moody, Kim, "Covert Censorship in Libraries: A Discussion Paper," Australian Library Journal 54), Michael Moore's Stupid White Men was originally set to be released on September 11, 2001. Needless to say, the publisher (Harper Collins) asked to postpone the release even though the books had already been printed, and Moore agreed. When Moore contacted them some time later to see when the book would be distributed, Harper Collins demanded they be allowed to redact parts of the book, such as the criticisms of George W. Bush. When he refused, they said they would pulp the books.

Thankfully, the ALA pressured Harper Collins to release the book, which they eventually did.

Matthews has had it

Matthews slaps around McCain surrogate and soulless spinster Eric Cantor (R-VA) on Republicans running on change:

Wow. Where has that Matthews been these last 8 years?