Another round with Nice Guy Eddie over the filibuster. Eddie got things rolling here, I replied, then he came back to it in his "comments" section. Here's my next installment:
Many years ago, I used to argue for doing away with the Senate entirely. I haven't given that matter much thought in more recent years, but I'd probably still lean in that direction. It seems a lot bigger subject than the one on the table, though, and, honestly, not really relevant to the more narrow question of the filibuster. Feels like a bit of a dodge, Eddie. But it's out there, so I'll offer up a few words on the matter of the Senate's existence. Not to argue for its abolition--not just now, anyway--but to make the case for why it's kept around.
The Senate was created in imitation of the House of Lords, to allow societies' overdogs to act as a check on the more democratic House. Senators were appointed by the state legislatures. Eventually, democracy moved forward, and we started directly electing them. An element of the original rationale for the Senate does, however, remain: it was a place where states would have equal representation, so the bigger, more populous ones wouldn't be able to dictate everything that happens in government. It isn't, in itself, democratic--it's a compromise that allows democracy to go forward, and it's one you can understand, because you've already made the argument about the alleged danger of allowing a state of affairs wherein 6-10% of the population could theoretically elect sufficient senators to "enact whatever they want to." Checks and balances.
One of the first and most basic rules of pragmatism is "never let the perfect become the enemy of the good." In refusing to accept the argument that eliminating the filibuster would make things "better" solely on the grounds that it leaves the non-democratic Senate in place, you're violating that rule. Things like getting rid of the Senate and adopting these micro-districts about which you write may be great ideas, but they involve massive, radical, controversial change in the basic structure of government. I'm a big one for radical change,[1] but if we're going to be pragmatists, those sorts of changes would require multiple constitutional amendments, and major, comprehensive changes in the laws of every state in the U.S., while getting rid of the filibuster is a simple matter of changing an internal Senate rule that's arguably unconstitutional anyway. It's true that, in the Senate, "When you’re talking 5-10% either way, you’re about half an order of magnitude LESS than the 50% that a liberal democracy calls for to pass legislation," but what you seemed to forget for a moment, there, is a) that the Senate can't pass legislation on its own--it requires the much more democratic House. And b) that with the filibuster in place, that democratic body can't pass anything. And I'll go ahead and throw in c) the fact that the math has never worked out that way. 6-10% of the population may theoretically be able to combine and "enact whatever they want," but in practice, they never have. In practice, the senators of 48.7% of the population (in the first 2 years of Obama) were able to block everything the senators representing 74.9% of the population tried to do. No pragmatism-based or democracy-based way to defend that.
"...saying, 'To defend the filibuster is to defend its abuse,' is no more profound that me saying 'to do away with the filibuster is to defend the abuse of those who can now act unopposed.'"
...except they don't get to act "unopposed" if the filibuster is removed. They still have to deal with the more democratic House and with the president. This is the democratic process; the filibuster is the negation of that process. If you have any respect for that process, the two are not equal. They're not even close to it. I have no doubt at all that you understand this (and that you do respect the process), but that understanding left you when you wrote things like "if the Senate IS undemocratic ON THE WHOLE, BY DESIGN, then one more or one less undemocratic practice within that structure is, IMHO, immaterial." The fact that the existence of the practice completely neutralizes the democratic process[2] pretty much removes any pragmatic grounds for dismissing it as "immaterial." You say the filibuster should be kept around to "protect the rights of the minority," but it neither protects a valid right of the minority nor has it ever done so. It's just a backdoor way for the losers of an election to continue to rule, and in a democracy, that's not a "right."
Does a defense of the filibuster equal, as I asserted earlier, a defense of its abuse? It absolutely does unless one's idea for reform can prevent the sort of abuse we've seen, and, here, I'm a bit disappointed you didn't go into your idea of filibuster reform. It's true that I probably would be unmoved by it, but I'm certainly willing to listen.
Perhaps we'll continue.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] I suspect your proposed micro-districts would prove quite unworkable, but I've been an advocate of proportional representation for years. There are several ways to do it. Most are preferable to the way things are currently done.
[2] And when, as we've seen in recent years, literally everything the senators representing 74.9% of the population try to do is blocked by the senators of 48.7% of the population, the points about the Senate end of the process being theoretically undemocratic don't really hold a lot of water. Obviously, that relates to the recent actual situation in the Senate, and doesn't negate the criticisms arising from different theoretical situations, but it's another point a pragmatist probably shouldn't overlook.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
The Kidnapper-In-Chief
In what's getting to be a very old story, the Obama, today, offered up yet another huge example of why he deserves to be absolutely destroyed at the polls in 2012.
During the previous administration, the "president" claimed the power to arbitrarily kidnap anyone--even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil--and throw them in a deep, dark hole forever. No courts, no lawyers, no appeal, no due process of any kind. Just label them a "terrorist" and they disappear. That such "powers" were, in reality, utterly illegal, totally unconstitutional, and, in fact, anti-constitutional didn't deter him for a moment. That "president" was a fascist son-of-a-bitch, though, and when it came to expectations, it was probably unreasonable to think one would get anything from a pig but a grunt.
One expected a bit more, however, from a Democratic president who came into office as part of a huge Democratic electoral tsunami that drew its power from public repudiation of everything for which that prior administration stood. But, as it turned out, the Obama started letting people down before he'd even taken the oath, and that's been the story of his administration ever since.
As my regulars will have no doubt noted, the legacy of the Bush administration is one of the matters that has persistently vexed ye humble editor. Bush waged steady, relentless war on the constitution, the rule of law, and open, accountable, democratic government, and, in the process, sewed the seeds of a monstrous dictatorship. Those seeds need to be rooted out, without mercy, because if they're allowed to pass into precedent, they will yield a monstrous crop in the future. The Obama stood against these abuses before the 2008 election, but since his ascension to the presidency, he has, time and time again, gone out to the field to tend, defend, and even nurture the poisonous fruits of that prior "president's" labors.
Today, he was at it again. The Senate has attached, to the National Defense Authorization Act, a totally unrelated rider that codifies, into U.S. law, the Bush administration's asserted kidnapping powers.[*] The Obama initially threatened to veto the larger bill if this was included, but after some Senate tinkering with the wording of the rider that did absolutely nothing to change its substance, the White House announced, today, that the Obama gang would no longer advise the president to do so. The Senate passed it, then House immediately followed suit, and there's every indication the Obama will soon sign it.
Through his actions, the Obama has forcefully marked himself as unworthy of holding the office of President of the United States.
But then, what else is new?
--classicliberal2
---
[*] As soon as this "power" is used, it would face court challenge, and, in a functioning federal judiciary, it couldn't withstand constitutional challenge. Unfortunately, America is burdened with a federal court system (and a U.S. Supreme Court, in particular) swamped with right-wing ideologues. Some are mavericks on such issues, and may very well strike it down, but they're certainly no reliable check. And, in any event, the court process takes time, and the victims of the policy could be made miserable for a lot of years before the courts get around to ruling one way or the other.
During the previous administration, the "president" claimed the power to arbitrarily kidnap anyone--even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil--and throw them in a deep, dark hole forever. No courts, no lawyers, no appeal, no due process of any kind. Just label them a "terrorist" and they disappear. That such "powers" were, in reality, utterly illegal, totally unconstitutional, and, in fact, anti-constitutional didn't deter him for a moment. That "president" was a fascist son-of-a-bitch, though, and when it came to expectations, it was probably unreasonable to think one would get anything from a pig but a grunt.
One expected a bit more, however, from a Democratic president who came into office as part of a huge Democratic electoral tsunami that drew its power from public repudiation of everything for which that prior administration stood. But, as it turned out, the Obama started letting people down before he'd even taken the oath, and that's been the story of his administration ever since.
As my regulars will have no doubt noted, the legacy of the Bush administration is one of the matters that has persistently vexed ye humble editor. Bush waged steady, relentless war on the constitution, the rule of law, and open, accountable, democratic government, and, in the process, sewed the seeds of a monstrous dictatorship. Those seeds need to be rooted out, without mercy, because if they're allowed to pass into precedent, they will yield a monstrous crop in the future. The Obama stood against these abuses before the 2008 election, but since his ascension to the presidency, he has, time and time again, gone out to the field to tend, defend, and even nurture the poisonous fruits of that prior "president's" labors.
Today, he was at it again. The Senate has attached, to the National Defense Authorization Act, a totally unrelated rider that codifies, into U.S. law, the Bush administration's asserted kidnapping powers.[*] The Obama initially threatened to veto the larger bill if this was included, but after some Senate tinkering with the wording of the rider that did absolutely nothing to change its substance, the White House announced, today, that the Obama gang would no longer advise the president to do so. The Senate passed it, then House immediately followed suit, and there's every indication the Obama will soon sign it.
Through his actions, the Obama has forcefully marked himself as unworthy of holding the office of President of the United States.
But then, what else is new?
--classicliberal2
---
[*] As soon as this "power" is used, it would face court challenge, and, in a functioning federal judiciary, it couldn't withstand constitutional challenge. Unfortunately, America is burdened with a federal court system (and a U.S. Supreme Court, in particular) swamped with right-wing ideologues. Some are mavericks on such issues, and may very well strike it down, but they're certainly no reliable check. And, in any event, the court process takes time, and the victims of the policy could be made miserable for a lot of years before the courts get around to ruling one way or the other.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
The Filibuster Revisited, part 1
Early last year, I went a few rounds with Nice Guy Eddie from "In My Humble Opinion" on the subject of the Senate filibuster, him fer it and me agin' it. It started here, then continued here and here, with remarks from both of us spread through the "comments" section of both blogs in the great, totally disorganized manner that would come to mark all of my more involved exchanges with Eddie.
Eddie thought on the subject for a long time. Nearly two years! A ridiculous item on Fox News, reported via Media Matters, inspired him, yesterday, to return to the subject. I've decided to post my reply here, as well as in his comments section. I fear it's rather cursory, but I don't think, for a moment, it will be the last word in the discussion, so I've dubbed it "The Filibuster Revisited, part 1":
(A note: In order to have any idea what's going on, I recommend reading our entire exchange.)
In my second piece on this subject from last year, I ran the same numbers you did, but my results were that, "at present population dispersal, just over 5.6% of the U.S. population, residing in the smallest states (which contain 11% of the total U.S. population), can theoretically elect a sufficient number of Senators (41) to filibuster anything everyone else wants to do." You came up with 2.3%. It's been so long I don't remember exactly how I did my own calculation, but it doesn't really matter--either result supports my larger point.
I also ran the then-current numbers about actual Senate representation: "...at present, Democratic Senators represent 74.9% of the population, while Republican Senators represent 48.7% of the population (there being overlap between states that have mixed Senate delegations). The minority is still running everything."
I pretty much addressed everything you wrote, here, back then. The notion that we will get bad results without a filibuster is a) absolutely true, and b) of absolutely no relevance. One either believes in liberal democracy or one doesn't. If you do, you have to take the good with the bad.
Defending the filibuster necessarily entails defending the abuse of it we've seen since Republicans lost control of congress in 2006, and particularly since 2008. That abuse has literally changed the constitutional order and is, arguably, unconstitutional. More to the point, though, it completely nullifies our elections, rendering them meaningless exercises. This, too, is something one must defend in order to defend the filibuster. In evaluating its potential merits, one has to weigh this--a complete frustration of the democratic process, every day of every week of every year, forever--against the benefit of keeping it around, and in my view (and I think history clearly supports me in this), any alleged benefit is mostly illusory. No counter at all.
I don't see any argument in its favor.
--classicliberal2
Eddie thought on the subject for a long time. Nearly two years! A ridiculous item on Fox News, reported via Media Matters, inspired him, yesterday, to return to the subject. I've decided to post my reply here, as well as in his comments section. I fear it's rather cursory, but I don't think, for a moment, it will be the last word in the discussion, so I've dubbed it "The Filibuster Revisited, part 1":
(A note: In order to have any idea what's going on, I recommend reading our entire exchange.)
In my second piece on this subject from last year, I ran the same numbers you did, but my results were that, "at present population dispersal, just over 5.6% of the U.S. population, residing in the smallest states (which contain 11% of the total U.S. population), can theoretically elect a sufficient number of Senators (41) to filibuster anything everyone else wants to do." You came up with 2.3%. It's been so long I don't remember exactly how I did my own calculation, but it doesn't really matter--either result supports my larger point.
I also ran the then-current numbers about actual Senate representation: "...at present, Democratic Senators represent 74.9% of the population, while Republican Senators represent 48.7% of the population (there being overlap between states that have mixed Senate delegations). The minority is still running everything."
I pretty much addressed everything you wrote, here, back then. The notion that we will get bad results without a filibuster is a) absolutely true, and b) of absolutely no relevance. One either believes in liberal democracy or one doesn't. If you do, you have to take the good with the bad.
Defending the filibuster necessarily entails defending the abuse of it we've seen since Republicans lost control of congress in 2006, and particularly since 2008. That abuse has literally changed the constitutional order and is, arguably, unconstitutional. More to the point, though, it completely nullifies our elections, rendering them meaningless exercises. This, too, is something one must defend in order to defend the filibuster. In evaluating its potential merits, one has to weigh this--a complete frustration of the democratic process, every day of every week of every year, forever--against the benefit of keeping it around, and in my view (and I think history clearly supports me in this), any alleged benefit is mostly illusory. No counter at all.
I don't see any argument in its favor.
--classicliberal2
Saturday, August 20, 2011
MRC Demands Disclosure, Doesn't Offer Any
Over at Newsbusters earlier this week, Scott Whitlock, the MRC's "senior news analyst," slammed ABC News' World News Tonight for having "hid[den] the identity of a global warming activist." The gripe was that the network had shown a clip of climatologist Heidi Cullen talking about climate change without noting Cullen's connection to Climate Central, an advocacy group. Whitlock apparently couldn't be bothered to actually watch the broadcast he was purportedly critiquing--in the broadcast that occurred in the real world, the name of Cullen's group appeared in huge letters beside her face as she spoke. Zachary Pleat, over at Media Matters, appropriately scolded Whitlock for this embarrassing error, and Whitlock subsequently issued a semi-correction.
What no one appears to have noted about the incident (except ye humble editor, in a comment on Pleat's article) is that, while the MRC "senior news analyst" was bashing a network for quoting a climatologist on climate change without noting her "advocacy" on the issue (very dubious as a sin, even if it actually had happened), he, himself, had declined to disclose the fact that his own organization has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Oil, in an article in which he's writing about one of Big Oil's pet causes. As I wrote last month, Big Oil finances the climate change denial industry, of which the MRC is a part. Whitlock's behavior in concealing this isn't aberrant; it's standard operating procedure at the MRC. The Center's gang of regulars constantly churn out articles that parrot Big Oil propaganda on issues like climate change, gas prices, and domestic drilling, yet, as far as I've been able to determine, not one of these articles has ever disclosed these contributions.
--classicliberal2
What no one appears to have noted about the incident (except ye humble editor, in a comment on Pleat's article) is that, while the MRC "senior news analyst" was bashing a network for quoting a climatologist on climate change without noting her "advocacy" on the issue (very dubious as a sin, even if it actually had happened), he, himself, had declined to disclose the fact that his own organization has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Oil, in an article in which he's writing about one of Big Oil's pet causes. As I wrote last month, Big Oil finances the climate change denial industry, of which the MRC is a part. Whitlock's behavior in concealing this isn't aberrant; it's standard operating procedure at the MRC. The Center's gang of regulars constantly churn out articles that parrot Big Oil propaganda on issues like climate change, gas prices, and domestic drilling, yet, as far as I've been able to determine, not one of these articles has ever disclosed these contributions.
--classicliberal2
Friday, July 29, 2011
More on Phony Balance, the Phony Study & the Phony Crisis
Yesterday, liberal columnist Paul Krugman returned to his theme of the perils of false "balance" in the press, particularly in coverage of the current debt "crisis," where, in the name of "balance," news reports have repeatedly presented both the Democrats and the Republicans as being at fault for a problem that, in fact, is entirely the fault of the Republicans:
It seems at least part of this misrepresentation--put more bluntly, a direct and blatant lie--is, like so many others, official policy over at Newsbusters: Krugman's latest remarks on the subject have drawn another retort from one of the Media Research Center's muck-merchants, one that repeats the lie. This time, it's from Scott Whitlock, MRC senior news analyst. In Whitlock's telling Krugman "urges more bias" in the press, and is "complaining about too much fairness."
Like Sheppard, Whitlock tries to refute Krugman's characterization of press coverage of the debt ceiling by referencing a phony MRC "study" on the subject, and, like Sheppard, he misrepresents that "study":
Even if one accepts it on its own terms, however, it neither refutes Krugman's analysis of the press coverage nor supports Whitlock's assertions about it. Krugman's complaint is that too many press reports are portraying both sides as "equally intransigent." The "study" merely asserts that press reports are blaming Republicans more than Democrats, adding up attributions of blame within a report and grading who was the target of the most such attributions. That doesn't even address Krugman's point, much less refute it. Whitlock's claim that the "study" shows that "only 20 percent [of press reports] found the Democrats at fault" is a misrepresentation--the actual finding was that only 20% of reports were judged to have blamed Democrats more than Republicans. Whitlock's assertion that the "study" shows that "journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist'" is, likewise, false: of 202 stories about the debt ceiling mess, 56% were judged, by the authors, as assigning no blame at all to either side (their "conclusions" were based on only 44% of the initial sample). That, alone, is enough to falsify Whitlock's claim.
But one can play with the offered numbers in an entertaining way: when that big, discarded sample is included, over 73% of the news stories examined were judged to blame no one, to mostly blame Democrats, or to blame both sides equally--146 out of 202 stories are judged by the authors as not mainly blaming Republicans for a problem that is, as I wrote in that earlier blog, 100% the fault of the Republicans.
And that's if one grants the absurd, subjective judgments of the "study" any merit (and that it hasn't any is rather painfully evident). Not only is the MRC gang unable to manufacture a phony study that convincingly poses as a real one, they can't even properly represent the findings of the one they do cull together. One could almost feel sorry for them, if they weren't such bastards.
--classicliberal2
"Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a 'Grand Bargain' with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The [New York] Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.Krugman sees the obvious problem with this:
"But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? 'Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.' A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side--or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over--is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!"
"...this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault."Krugman had written about this same problem earlier this week, and his comments drew a typically stupid retort from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard, who completely misrepresented them as a condemnation of a balanced press, and even as a call to censor conservative views about the debt "crisis."
It seems at least part of this misrepresentation--put more bluntly, a direct and blatant lie--is, like so many others, official policy over at Newsbusters: Krugman's latest remarks on the subject have drawn another retort from one of the Media Research Center's muck-merchants, one that repeats the lie. This time, it's from Scott Whitlock, MRC senior news analyst. In Whitlock's telling Krugman "urges more bias" in the press, and is "complaining about too much fairness."
Like Sheppard, Whitlock tries to refute Krugman's characterization of press coverage of the debt ceiling by referencing a phony MRC "study" on the subject, and, like Sheppard, he misrepresents that "study":
"In fact, as a July 26 Media Research Center report found, journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist.' The MRC found that 66 percent of network stories mainly blamed the Republicans for the debt ceiling impasse. Only 20 percent found the Democrats at fault."Ye humble editor slashed that "study" into bloody, quivering sausages Wednesday when Sheppard first pulled it out of his hat; in brief, it's a phony bit of ill-conceived propaganda in the worst sense of that word, entirely dependent, for its conclusions, on wholly subjective judgments that are, demonstrably, completely absurd--an insanely partisan grasping at straws.
Even if one accepts it on its own terms, however, it neither refutes Krugman's analysis of the press coverage nor supports Whitlock's assertions about it. Krugman's complaint is that too many press reports are portraying both sides as "equally intransigent." The "study" merely asserts that press reports are blaming Republicans more than Democrats, adding up attributions of blame within a report and grading who was the target of the most such attributions. That doesn't even address Krugman's point, much less refute it. Whitlock's claim that the "study" shows that "only 20 percent [of press reports] found the Democrats at fault" is a misrepresentation--the actual finding was that only 20% of reports were judged to have blamed Democrats more than Republicans. Whitlock's assertion that the "study" shows that "journalists have not made an effort to be 'centrist'" is, likewise, false: of 202 stories about the debt ceiling mess, 56% were judged, by the authors, as assigning no blame at all to either side (their "conclusions" were based on only 44% of the initial sample). That, alone, is enough to falsify Whitlock's claim.
But one can play with the offered numbers in an entertaining way: when that big, discarded sample is included, over 73% of the news stories examined were judged to blame no one, to mostly blame Democrats, or to blame both sides equally--146 out of 202 stories are judged by the authors as not mainly blaming Republicans for a problem that is, as I wrote in that earlier blog, 100% the fault of the Republicans.
And that's if one grants the absurd, subjective judgments of the "study" any merit (and that it hasn't any is rather painfully evident). Not only is the MRC gang unable to manufacture a phony study that convincingly poses as a real one, they can't even properly represent the findings of the one they do cull together. One could almost feel sorry for them, if they weren't such bastards.
--classicliberal2
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Phony Balance, A Phony Study & A Phony Crisis
The current debt ceiling "crisis" has thrown a spotlight on a particularly damnable practice of the corporate press, the elevation of "balance" over accuracy. Columnist Paul Krugman issued an appropriately impassioned complaint about this yesterday:
Over at Newsbusters, associate editor Noel Sheppard isn't about to touch the merits of that argument, offering, instead, the fanciful interpretation of it as a condemnation, by Krugman, of "balance and centrism," a call to "censor conservative views about the debt ceiling," an insistence that "the news media... only report the side he [Krugman] agrees with." Sheppard is both a profoundly brainless man and a chronically deceitful one--I leave it to the reader to judge which of these defects are at play, here.
Sheppard seeks to refute Krugman by arguing that, actually, the big three network newscasts "have consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate," and he has a study to cite that shows it, or so he says. Except it turns out to be just another phony "study" by his Media Research Center of the kind the MRC is notorious for grinding out, and it neither refutes Krugman nor backs Sheppard's characterization of it.
The MRC's "About" page asserts that the organization aims to prove the liberal bias of the press "through sound scientific research." It mentions science a few times, actually. Makes them sound serious. In practice, the MRC gang treats "sound scientific research" as some sort of liberal trick, and steers well clear of it. Their standard game, when it comes to assembling a "study," is to invent some ridiculous, phony, completely subjective standard, one they engineer specifically for the purpose of having the press fall short of it, then collect all of the examples of the press falling short of it and report these as "findings." The aim is partisan distortion and obfuscation.
Their current "study," the one Sheppard cites, follows in this dismal tradition.[1] As they tell it, they looked at every story about the debt ceiling from the three networks' morning and evening programs from July 1 to July 22. They report their methodology thusly:
And, to be crystal clear, Republicans, when it comes to the matter of the debt ceiling, are solely and entirely responsible for making it a "crisis," and keeping it one. Not just partially responsible or even mostly responsible. 100% responsible.
Raising the debt ceiling is a routine housekeeping matter for the government.[2] Failure to do so, however, would result in a disastrous default, and, because of this, Republicans, primarily those in the House of Representatives, have attempted to use it for blackmail, refusing to support any effort to raise the ceiling unless they're granted extraordinary budgetary concessions, concessions they wouldn't be able to get under the normal budget process. In their insistence on linking the current debt ceiling to the future budget process,[3] they assumed full responsibility for the present situation. The "crisis" is their arbitrary creation, and they can end it at any moment, merely by passing a single sheet of paper containing a single sentence that alters a single number.
The Obama and congressional Democrats chose, very unwisely, to negotiate with the hostage-takers, and have offered up to the Republicans deep spending cuts, including cuts in "entitlement" programs, but, because the Obama's plan also involved some increased revenue from Big Money, Republican House speaker John Boehner abandoned the negotiations (while, in the Bizarro world of the nut right, the far-right press has loudly, repeatedly, and falsely asserted the Obama has offered Republicans nothing). Democrats hold the White House and the majority in the senate, and the cuts offered by the Obama are absolutely anathema to the Democratic base, and to the overwhelming majority of the public, as well, yet they were still offered as part of a compromise. As Peter Hart put it over on the FAIR blog yesterday, "by any reasonable standard, the White House and the Democratic leadership have made an array of drastic compromises in order to win favor with Republicans." The only reason there isn't a deal is that Republicans have been unwilling to compromise on anything on their end. They control one part of one house of congress, but are demanding a capitulation by everyone else so complete that they've walked away from proposals so heavily stacked in their favor that even offering them could spell political doom for the Obama. Again, the Republicans are entirely responsible for the lack of a deal.
So when the MRC comes along and does their little "study," and pretends as if a "balanced" report on the matter must equally blame both sides, they're shoveling the same rancid fecal matter they always have.
And there's more stink on it.
The article on the "study" by MRC Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dickens asserts that, of the stories that assigned blame to someone for the current crisis, "the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican," with 66% of stories "mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse," while 20% suggested Democrats "bore more responsibility," and 14% were "balanced."
Given that Republicans are demonstrably 100% responsible for the current mess, it would, indeed, be a scandal if 34% of press stories either blamed Democrats more or blamed both sides equally, but there's no reason to believe these results bear any relationship to reality.
Relevant to Sheppard's attempt to use these results against Krugman is the fact that MRC isn't dividing reports that blame both sides from those that blame only one side. Those who carried out the study are, instead, dividing the reports into categories based on their subjective judgment of which side a report blames more than the other.
The few examples cited by the article as representative of an anti-Republican slant don't inspire any confidence in the subjective judgments that formed the basis of the results. Amy Robach and Ann Curry from the Today Show questioned whether Republicans were wasting time or putting on a show for their constituents by insisting on debating proposals everyone acknowledged had no chance of passing--merely by asking what seem like glaringly obvious questions, they were both judged to be blaming Republicans. CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes was judged as blaming Republicans based on a story in which she reported on Democratic complaints about House majority leader Eric Cantor, even though she asserted, in that report, that Cantor was being made a "fall guy" by the Democrats. Most hilariously, ABC News' Jake Tapper is said to have "used the words of former Republican Senator Alan Simpson to shame the GOP." Simpson is, of course, an extremely conservative fellow, a die-hard Republican, and a hyper-partisan to the point of rather extreme obnoxiousness, but because he is critical of what the congressional Republicans are doing and because Tapper reported it, Tapper is judged as blaming Republicans. And so on.
Grasping at straws, see?
It's also significant that MRC threw out about 56% of its initial sample. While the "study" encompassed 202 stories, MRC's conclusions are based on only 85--always a huge warning sign. 56% of reports were judged as assigning no blame at all, and even if we embarked upon the fool's errand of accepting these demonstrably flawed subjective judgments, this is hardly the mark of a press corps dedicated to blaming Republicans. That number alone is enough to put the lie to Sheppard's claim that the "study" shows the press has "consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate." If we accept the "study," the press hasn't consistently cast anyone as the villain.
With what does this leave us? A "crisis" manufactured by ill-intentioned dolts, a "media watchdog" that acts as propagandists for said dolts, and a press corps that does things like this and faces only the complaints of lefty bloggers for it as it threatens to mislead the nation over a cliff.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] There apparently isn't any actual "study" to which I can link. The MRC analysts' results are recorded in that Geoffrey Dickens column, and that seems to be the only reference.
[2] During the Junior Bush administration, it was raised 7 times.
[3] Raising the debt ceiling doesn't involve new spending; it merely allows the government to cover the spending congress has already authorized, a fact that, notably, is barely mentioned in press coverage.
"Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating--offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.Krugman argues that the press and pundits need to "break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault" in this matter, because holding to it amounts to affirmatively misleading the public.
"So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent--because news reports always do that."
Over at Newsbusters, associate editor Noel Sheppard isn't about to touch the merits of that argument, offering, instead, the fanciful interpretation of it as a condemnation, by Krugman, of "balance and centrism," a call to "censor conservative views about the debt ceiling," an insistence that "the news media... only report the side he [Krugman] agrees with." Sheppard is both a profoundly brainless man and a chronically deceitful one--I leave it to the reader to judge which of these defects are at play, here.
Sheppard seeks to refute Krugman by arguing that, actually, the big three network newscasts "have consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate," and he has a study to cite that shows it, or so he says. Except it turns out to be just another phony "study" by his Media Research Center of the kind the MRC is notorious for grinding out, and it neither refutes Krugman nor backs Sheppard's characterization of it.
The MRC's "About" page asserts that the organization aims to prove the liberal bias of the press "through sound scientific research." It mentions science a few times, actually. Makes them sound serious. In practice, the MRC gang treats "sound scientific research" as some sort of liberal trick, and steers well clear of it. Their standard game, when it comes to assembling a "study," is to invent some ridiculous, phony, completely subjective standard, one they engineer specifically for the purpose of having the press fall short of it, then collect all of the examples of the press falling short of it and report these as "findings." The aim is partisan distortion and obfuscation.
Their current "study," the one Sheppard cites, follows in this dismal tradition.[1] As they tell it, they looked at every story about the debt ceiling from the three networks' morning and evening programs from July 1 to July 22. They report their methodology thusly:
"Analysts reviewed each story, then tallied all reporter statements and soundbites which clearly assigned responsibility to Republicans or Democrats. If the majority of statements within that story assigned blame to one party or the other, it was scored as 'blaming Republicans' or 'blaming Democrats.' If the story contained a balanced number of statements, it was recorded as 'balanced.'"While Sheppard used the results generated by this methodology to refute Krugman, a glaringly obvious hole in it--more like a gaping chasm--is the very one Krugman identified; the assumption that both sides are to blame for the current situation. If they aren't, then the reports the "study" identifies as "balanced" are, in fact, a complete misrepresentation of reality.
And, to be crystal clear, Republicans, when it comes to the matter of the debt ceiling, are solely and entirely responsible for making it a "crisis," and keeping it one. Not just partially responsible or even mostly responsible. 100% responsible.
Raising the debt ceiling is a routine housekeeping matter for the government.[2] Failure to do so, however, would result in a disastrous default, and, because of this, Republicans, primarily those in the House of Representatives, have attempted to use it for blackmail, refusing to support any effort to raise the ceiling unless they're granted extraordinary budgetary concessions, concessions they wouldn't be able to get under the normal budget process. In their insistence on linking the current debt ceiling to the future budget process,[3] they assumed full responsibility for the present situation. The "crisis" is their arbitrary creation, and they can end it at any moment, merely by passing a single sheet of paper containing a single sentence that alters a single number.
The Obama and congressional Democrats chose, very unwisely, to negotiate with the hostage-takers, and have offered up to the Republicans deep spending cuts, including cuts in "entitlement" programs, but, because the Obama's plan also involved some increased revenue from Big Money, Republican House speaker John Boehner abandoned the negotiations (while, in the Bizarro world of the nut right, the far-right press has loudly, repeatedly, and falsely asserted the Obama has offered Republicans nothing). Democrats hold the White House and the majority in the senate, and the cuts offered by the Obama are absolutely anathema to the Democratic base, and to the overwhelming majority of the public, as well, yet they were still offered as part of a compromise. As Peter Hart put it over on the FAIR blog yesterday, "by any reasonable standard, the White House and the Democratic leadership have made an array of drastic compromises in order to win favor with Republicans." The only reason there isn't a deal is that Republicans have been unwilling to compromise on anything on their end. They control one part of one house of congress, but are demanding a capitulation by everyone else so complete that they've walked away from proposals so heavily stacked in their favor that even offering them could spell political doom for the Obama. Again, the Republicans are entirely responsible for the lack of a deal.
So when the MRC comes along and does their little "study," and pretends as if a "balanced" report on the matter must equally blame both sides, they're shoveling the same rancid fecal matter they always have.
And there's more stink on it.
The article on the "study" by MRC Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dickens asserts that, of the stories that assigned blame to someone for the current crisis, "the skew was lopsidedly anti-Republican," with 66% of stories "mainly assigning them the blame for the impasse," while 20% suggested Democrats "bore more responsibility," and 14% were "balanced."
Given that Republicans are demonstrably 100% responsible for the current mess, it would, indeed, be a scandal if 34% of press stories either blamed Democrats more or blamed both sides equally, but there's no reason to believe these results bear any relationship to reality.
Relevant to Sheppard's attempt to use these results against Krugman is the fact that MRC isn't dividing reports that blame both sides from those that blame only one side. Those who carried out the study are, instead, dividing the reports into categories based on their subjective judgment of which side a report blames more than the other.
The few examples cited by the article as representative of an anti-Republican slant don't inspire any confidence in the subjective judgments that formed the basis of the results. Amy Robach and Ann Curry from the Today Show questioned whether Republicans were wasting time or putting on a show for their constituents by insisting on debating proposals everyone acknowledged had no chance of passing--merely by asking what seem like glaringly obvious questions, they were both judged to be blaming Republicans. CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes was judged as blaming Republicans based on a story in which she reported on Democratic complaints about House majority leader Eric Cantor, even though she asserted, in that report, that Cantor was being made a "fall guy" by the Democrats. Most hilariously, ABC News' Jake Tapper is said to have "used the words of former Republican Senator Alan Simpson to shame the GOP." Simpson is, of course, an extremely conservative fellow, a die-hard Republican, and a hyper-partisan to the point of rather extreme obnoxiousness, but because he is critical of what the congressional Republicans are doing and because Tapper reported it, Tapper is judged as blaming Republicans. And so on.
Grasping at straws, see?
It's also significant that MRC threw out about 56% of its initial sample. While the "study" encompassed 202 stories, MRC's conclusions are based on only 85--always a huge warning sign. 56% of reports were judged as assigning no blame at all, and even if we embarked upon the fool's errand of accepting these demonstrably flawed subjective judgments, this is hardly the mark of a press corps dedicated to blaming Republicans. That number alone is enough to put the lie to Sheppard's claim that the "study" shows the press has "consistently cast the GOP as the villains in this debate." If we accept the "study," the press hasn't consistently cast anyone as the villain.
With what does this leave us? A "crisis" manufactured by ill-intentioned dolts, a "media watchdog" that acts as propagandists for said dolts, and a press corps that does things like this and faces only the complaints of lefty bloggers for it as it threatens to mislead the nation over a cliff.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] There apparently isn't any actual "study" to which I can link. The MRC analysts' results are recorded in that Geoffrey Dickens column, and that seems to be the only reference.
[2] During the Junior Bush administration, it was raised 7 times.
[3] Raising the debt ceiling doesn't involve new spending; it merely allows the government to cover the spending congress has already authorized, a fact that, notably, is barely mentioned in press coverage.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
The Tragedy of the Obama: Debt-Ceiling Edition
Niceguy Eddie, over at "In My Humble Opinion," has offered up some thoughts on the unpopularity of the current Republican position with regard to raising the debt ceiling. I thought I'd throw in a few of my own.
Popular sentiment does, indeed, cut strongly against Republicans on this issue. It cuts against them in this same really big way on pretty much every major issue, and Eddie is right about there being absolutely no reason for Democrats to compromise with them about anything when it comes to this. Republicans are a minority party with a minority in government and no real public support behind what they're trying to do, here. The Democrats could put their collective foot down, offer nothing at all, and dare the Republicans to do anything except either fold like an accordion in the face of this, or stand firm and reap the disastrous consequences. There really is only one choice. Demos would be literally insane to allow Repubs to hold the U.S. hostage over a debt-ceiling increase.
The reason offering nothing would work is the dirty little secret behind the entire debt-ceiling fight: Republicans, in the end, will vote to raise it. The, broadly speaking, Big Money community understands the ruinous effects of a potential default, and won't allow their puppets, in either party, to bring one about. Voting against a debt ceiling increase is political theater, staged by members of both parties from time to time, but the ceiling is always raised, and, at the end of the current made-up "crisis," it will be, as well, and Republicans--a sufficient number of them--will be on board when the votes are counted. That will happen, regardless of what else may. Democrats don't have to offer any deal at all, much less make one. Anything they "negotiate" away is by choice, not anything dictated by necessity.
Unfortunately, the Obama--as usual--is choosing to try to negotiate away anything and everything. From practically the moment he left the gate, he offered Republicans massive cuts to "entitlements" in exchange for their going along with some relatively minor revenue increases. That offer is still on the table. It shouldn't be. Republicans will probably hold out for more until nearly the last minute, but if there's even a chance enough Democrats will be willing to charge over the same cliff as Obama (and, as, practically speaking, it takes so few votes, there's a good chance of this), Republicans will eventually take Obama's deal.
If this happens, Obama will go down in history as having accomplished what no Republican has ever managed--to begin the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Defending these things has traditionally been a signature issue with Democrats. Indeed, Republicans, politically speaking, committed mass suicide via their votes, last year and this, on the Ryan plan. Democrats could have used that to absolutely eviscerate the Republican congressional caucus from coast to coast. Unless, that is, Democrats can be made to agree to the same sort of ruinous cuts that makes that plan so unpopular. That would rather spectacularly neutralize it as an issue, but, more to the point, it would remove one of the major reasons the public supports Democrats. Obama is working at chucking an easy win-win for his party and, much more importantly, undermining critically important programs, and isn't just pursuing a course that would begin their destruction; he's also working toward helping elect those who would finish the task.
--classicliberal2
Popular sentiment does, indeed, cut strongly against Republicans on this issue. It cuts against them in this same really big way on pretty much every major issue, and Eddie is right about there being absolutely no reason for Democrats to compromise with them about anything when it comes to this. Republicans are a minority party with a minority in government and no real public support behind what they're trying to do, here. The Democrats could put their collective foot down, offer nothing at all, and dare the Republicans to do anything except either fold like an accordion in the face of this, or stand firm and reap the disastrous consequences. There really is only one choice. Demos would be literally insane to allow Repubs to hold the U.S. hostage over a debt-ceiling increase.
The reason offering nothing would work is the dirty little secret behind the entire debt-ceiling fight: Republicans, in the end, will vote to raise it. The, broadly speaking, Big Money community understands the ruinous effects of a potential default, and won't allow their puppets, in either party, to bring one about. Voting against a debt ceiling increase is political theater, staged by members of both parties from time to time, but the ceiling is always raised, and, at the end of the current made-up "crisis," it will be, as well, and Republicans--a sufficient number of them--will be on board when the votes are counted. That will happen, regardless of what else may. Democrats don't have to offer any deal at all, much less make one. Anything they "negotiate" away is by choice, not anything dictated by necessity.
Unfortunately, the Obama--as usual--is choosing to try to negotiate away anything and everything. From practically the moment he left the gate, he offered Republicans massive cuts to "entitlements" in exchange for their going along with some relatively minor revenue increases. That offer is still on the table. It shouldn't be. Republicans will probably hold out for more until nearly the last minute, but if there's even a chance enough Democrats will be willing to charge over the same cliff as Obama (and, as, practically speaking, it takes so few votes, there's a good chance of this), Republicans will eventually take Obama's deal.
If this happens, Obama will go down in history as having accomplished what no Republican has ever managed--to begin the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Defending these things has traditionally been a signature issue with Democrats. Indeed, Republicans, politically speaking, committed mass suicide via their votes, last year and this, on the Ryan plan. Democrats could have used that to absolutely eviscerate the Republican congressional caucus from coast to coast. Unless, that is, Democrats can be made to agree to the same sort of ruinous cuts that makes that plan so unpopular. That would rather spectacularly neutralize it as an issue, but, more to the point, it would remove one of the major reasons the public supports Democrats. Obama is working at chucking an easy win-win for his party and, much more importantly, undermining critically important programs, and isn't just pursuing a course that would begin their destruction; he's also working toward helping elect those who would finish the task.
--classicliberal2
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Newsbusters & Me, Part 3
The Media Research Center describes its mission as being to "prove" a "strident liberal bias" exists within the national news media--one that "undermines traditional American values"--and to "neutralize" the impact of this bias on American politics. In brief,
"The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media."
At some point in the recent past, this was somewhat altered. The ranting about "strident liberal bias" and the rest was left in place, but the current version of that "in brief" sentence reads:
"As 'America's Media Watchdog,' the MRC seeks to bring balance to the news media."
A wave of the flag, while all talk of "responsibility" is dropped, and it would be impossible not to note the obvious symbolism. It isn't that the MRC has changed from a more to a less noble mission--they never had any sort of noble mission in the first place. It's that, by dropping the pretense of "responsibility" while waving the flag, they're being a little more honest. But just a little.
The way the MRC gang goes about trying to bring "balance" to the news media is to complain about the fact that any views with which they disagree are given any time at all in the news media. The MRC dubs, as "liberal," just about anyone who offers any view that can, in any way, be interpreted as out-of-sync with the far right (as they define the far right, which they represent as simply "conservatism"). Of the articles that appear on the Center's Newsbusters blog, a large portion are devoted to simply complaining about the fact that someone somewhere offered a "liberal" (as they use the word) point of view, the implication being that this shouldn't happen.[1]
Today, for example, Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS News' Face the Nation, asked a pair of senators why, with the looming matter of the debt ceiling yet unresolved, the senate is going to waste time debating a balanced budget amendment that everyone, on all sides, knows has no chance of passing. This drew a complaint from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard. Though Sheppard suggests, in his closing sentence, that Schieffer was somehow poorly informing the public about the measure, he offers nothing to support that. Rather, his objection in the article is simply that Schieffer quite reasonably called into question the wisdom of setting aside a much more pressing matter in order to have a futile debate on a measure that, while apparently beloved by Sheppard, has no chance of passing.
Sheppard offered another example of this today, as well. On "The Chris Matthews Show," the host asked a panel of journalists, "of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming a great president?" None of the panelists picked one. Sheppard didn't like that. Mainstream journalists, operating in a profession that puts a premium on "objectivity," always tend to be non-committal on such questions, and three of the four panelists simply dodged it.[2] Sheppard, of course, presents their failure to endorse, as potentially great, any of the candidates as evidence of the irredeemable liberalism of the press, which is a non-sequitur that both ignores that big, obvious reason they would dodge the question and presumes that no conservative could fail to find at least one of the 2012 Republican candidates great. The latter puts a lot of Republicans in an awkward position--throughout this year, "undecided" or "someone else" has usually polled, among Republicans, ahead of any of the named candidates.[3]
This is what many--maybe most--Newsbusters articles are "about"; mere complaints that anyone with a different point of view was given any time at all. That these points of view are so often alleged to be different based on willfully negative, counter-intuitive, and even counter-factual and completely irrational "interpretations" bespeaks how little actual substance an org devoted to exposing "liberal bias" in the press has to write about.
While preaching "balance" in the press, the MRC gang doesn't practice anything like "balance" in the way they manage their blog. When I tried to sign up for Newsbusters, they took a month to approve me.[4] There were long delays, I was told, because they had so many applications, and tried to weed out troublemakers, by which, from the composition of their regulars, they seem to mean "liberals who may offer something other than blind cheerleading for the team." Somehow, I slipped through, but I didn't last long.
In my time, there, I would sometimes get pulled into side-arguments with the other posters, but, for the most part, I tried to offer substantive criticism of Newsbusters' work.
The regular posters, there, did not appreciate this effort.
The Newsbusters' regulars, it should be said, are some of the absolute worst I've ever encountered in all my years of poking through the right wing of the internet. Virtually every time I wrote anything, I was reflexively met with charges that I was a black-hearted liar, that I was a hypocrite, and so on--basically any charge that would, in some way, discredit me. I was even accused of plagiarism, after I cut-and-pasted some of my own words. This was the response to every substantive criticism. Half a dozen posters seemed to have nothing better to do than follow me around and append, to my every utterance, these same sorts of accusations. They couldn't, in even a single instance, substantiate the charges, because the charges had no basis in reality, but making any sort of substantive case wasn't the point. I was a liberal. To them, that meant I was, by definition, guilty of all of those things. Their endless barrage of charges amounted to a deployment of the Big Lie technique against me, and they seemed too deluded by their own fantasies to even realize it.
Whoever is charged with overseeing quality control at Newsbusters--very concerned about troublemakers, remember--allowed this to go on day in and day out. When, however, I offered a substantive critique of a column by MRC head Brent Bozell (the details of which are recounted here), my Newsbusters account was suspended, and the critique deleted from the site. While I've been kicked out, all of those other right-wing posters--the ones who devoted all of their energy to libelous attacks on me and the few other liberals who managed to get through the filtering process; the ones who never offer a single substantive comment on any subject; the ones who act as nothing more than an amen corner for Newsbusters' writers--are still active.
That's "balance" at the MRC, the kind they give every indication they'd apply to the rest of the press.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] Even comedians making jokes about conservative political figures end up in Newsbusters' crosshairs (the writers display a particularly intense obsession with Bill Maher and Jon Stewart).
[2] The fourth, Time's Joe Klein, picked Barack Obama, who has, indeed, ruled as a Republican president in all but name. But Klein said he was a great Republican president, and "great" simply isn't a word one can justify applying to the Obama.
[3] Two days ago, in the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, 58% of Republicans declined to express a preference for any of the Republican candidates, and of the candidates themselves, only Mitt Romney draws double-digit support (and he only manages 13%).
[4] This is in sharp contrast to the way the MRC's liberal, democracy-friendly counterparts handle such matters. If a reader wants to comment on an item from Media Matters For America or FAIR, it's a simple matter of offering the comment (at the FAIR blog), or taking a few seconds to sign up then make it (at MMFA).
"The mission of the Media Research Center is to bring balance and responsibility to the news media."
At some point in the recent past, this was somewhat altered. The ranting about "strident liberal bias" and the rest was left in place, but the current version of that "in brief" sentence reads:
"As 'America's Media Watchdog,' the MRC seeks to bring balance to the news media."
A wave of the flag, while all talk of "responsibility" is dropped, and it would be impossible not to note the obvious symbolism. It isn't that the MRC has changed from a more to a less noble mission--they never had any sort of noble mission in the first place. It's that, by dropping the pretense of "responsibility" while waving the flag, they're being a little more honest. But just a little.
The way the MRC gang goes about trying to bring "balance" to the news media is to complain about the fact that any views with which they disagree are given any time at all in the news media. The MRC dubs, as "liberal," just about anyone who offers any view that can, in any way, be interpreted as out-of-sync with the far right (as they define the far right, which they represent as simply "conservatism"). Of the articles that appear on the Center's Newsbusters blog, a large portion are devoted to simply complaining about the fact that someone somewhere offered a "liberal" (as they use the word) point of view, the implication being that this shouldn't happen.[1]
Today, for example, Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS News' Face the Nation, asked a pair of senators why, with the looming matter of the debt ceiling yet unresolved, the senate is going to waste time debating a balanced budget amendment that everyone, on all sides, knows has no chance of passing. This drew a complaint from Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard. Though Sheppard suggests, in his closing sentence, that Schieffer was somehow poorly informing the public about the measure, he offers nothing to support that. Rather, his objection in the article is simply that Schieffer quite reasonably called into question the wisdom of setting aside a much more pressing matter in order to have a futile debate on a measure that, while apparently beloved by Sheppard, has no chance of passing.
Sheppard offered another example of this today, as well. On "The Chris Matthews Show," the host asked a panel of journalists, "of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming a great president?" None of the panelists picked one. Sheppard didn't like that. Mainstream journalists, operating in a profession that puts a premium on "objectivity," always tend to be non-committal on such questions, and three of the four panelists simply dodged it.[2] Sheppard, of course, presents their failure to endorse, as potentially great, any of the candidates as evidence of the irredeemable liberalism of the press, which is a non-sequitur that both ignores that big, obvious reason they would dodge the question and presumes that no conservative could fail to find at least one of the 2012 Republican candidates great. The latter puts a lot of Republicans in an awkward position--throughout this year, "undecided" or "someone else" has usually polled, among Republicans, ahead of any of the named candidates.[3]
This is what many--maybe most--Newsbusters articles are "about"; mere complaints that anyone with a different point of view was given any time at all. That these points of view are so often alleged to be different based on willfully negative, counter-intuitive, and even counter-factual and completely irrational "interpretations" bespeaks how little actual substance an org devoted to exposing "liberal bias" in the press has to write about.
While preaching "balance" in the press, the MRC gang doesn't practice anything like "balance" in the way they manage their blog. When I tried to sign up for Newsbusters, they took a month to approve me.[4] There were long delays, I was told, because they had so many applications, and tried to weed out troublemakers, by which, from the composition of their regulars, they seem to mean "liberals who may offer something other than blind cheerleading for the team." Somehow, I slipped through, but I didn't last long.
In my time, there, I would sometimes get pulled into side-arguments with the other posters, but, for the most part, I tried to offer substantive criticism of Newsbusters' work.
The regular posters, there, did not appreciate this effort.
The Newsbusters' regulars, it should be said, are some of the absolute worst I've ever encountered in all my years of poking through the right wing of the internet. Virtually every time I wrote anything, I was reflexively met with charges that I was a black-hearted liar, that I was a hypocrite, and so on--basically any charge that would, in some way, discredit me. I was even accused of plagiarism, after I cut-and-pasted some of my own words. This was the response to every substantive criticism. Half a dozen posters seemed to have nothing better to do than follow me around and append, to my every utterance, these same sorts of accusations. They couldn't, in even a single instance, substantiate the charges, because the charges had no basis in reality, but making any sort of substantive case wasn't the point. I was a liberal. To them, that meant I was, by definition, guilty of all of those things. Their endless barrage of charges amounted to a deployment of the Big Lie technique against me, and they seemed too deluded by their own fantasies to even realize it.
Whoever is charged with overseeing quality control at Newsbusters--very concerned about troublemakers, remember--allowed this to go on day in and day out. When, however, I offered a substantive critique of a column by MRC head Brent Bozell (the details of which are recounted here), my Newsbusters account was suspended, and the critique deleted from the site. While I've been kicked out, all of those other right-wing posters--the ones who devoted all of their energy to libelous attacks on me and the few other liberals who managed to get through the filtering process; the ones who never offer a single substantive comment on any subject; the ones who act as nothing more than an amen corner for Newsbusters' writers--are still active.
That's "balance" at the MRC, the kind they give every indication they'd apply to the rest of the press.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] Even comedians making jokes about conservative political figures end up in Newsbusters' crosshairs (the writers display a particularly intense obsession with Bill Maher and Jon Stewart).
[2] The fourth, Time's Joe Klein, picked Barack Obama, who has, indeed, ruled as a Republican president in all but name. But Klein said he was a great Republican president, and "great" simply isn't a word one can justify applying to the Obama.
[3] Two days ago, in the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, 58% of Republicans declined to express a preference for any of the Republican candidates, and of the candidates themselves, only Mitt Romney draws double-digit support (and he only manages 13%).
[4] This is in sharp contrast to the way the MRC's liberal, democracy-friendly counterparts handle such matters. If a reader wants to comment on an item from Media Matters For America or FAIR, it's a simple matter of offering the comment (at the FAIR blog), or taking a few seconds to sign up then make it (at MMFA).
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Newsbusters' Newest Deal: A Depressing Lie About The Great Depression
On this week's edition of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," reactionary columnist Ann Coulter told the Nation's Chris Hayes that his mother, because she is a government employee, didn't have a real job, and is, in fact, just "a drain on society." Standard fare from Coulter, a vapid cretin who has made her fortune peddling ugly, brainless insults to an ugly, brainless audience. Among that audience is counted Newsbusters' associate editor Noel Sheppard, an exceedingly stupid and perpetually dishonest man, who, yesterday, felt compelled, by these personal qualities, to offer Coulter an "attaboy." An ill-intentioned moron praising a bird of like feather is hardly news, but in the midst of it, Sheppard let fly a Coulterish howler regarding the Great Depression and the New Deal, and I decided I'd jot down some remarks on it.
On "Real Time," author Amanda Foreman had asserted that "government does not create jobs." Eventually, a surprised Bill Maher asked: "During the Depression, government didn't create jobs?" Recounting this part of the exchange, Sheppard jumps in:
These are facts that dumb liberals and stupid ol' Bill Maher have gotten through their heads. It's likely that Sheppard has gotten them through his head at some point in his life, as well, and just preferred lying to sharing them with his readers.
--classicliberal2
---
[*] Unemployment, during that recession, briefly rose to 19%, and, in recent years, it has become a common practice, among conservative commentators, to compare unemployment as it stood at the beginning of the New Deal to unemployment as it stood at the trough of that recession, and to argue that the New Deal wasn't able to accomplish much. A big lie, but nowhere near the scale of the one offered by Sheppard.
On "Real Time," author Amanda Foreman had asserted that "government does not create jobs." Eventually, a surprised Bill Maher asked: "During the Depression, government didn't create jobs?" Recounting this part of the exchange, Sheppard jumps in:
"Once again Maher showed his stupidity. The unemployment rate in 1929 was 3.2 percent. After federal spending tripled from $3 billion to $9 billion, unemployment was 17.2 percent ten years later.The Great Depression only began toward the end of 1929. That 3.2% estimated unemployment rate is from the pre-Depression economy. Pre-New Deal, as well. The New Deal didn't begin until 1933, by which point unemployment was a staggering 24.9%. That's the proper baseline for evaluating the effect, on unemployment, of the era's spending. There's a good reason Sheppard didn't use it--unemployment was dramatically reduced during the New Deal, and, in fact, never went that high again. By 1937, it had been cut down to 14.3%. A mini-recession hit in 1938 and bumped it up a bit,[*] but the massive government spending that came with World War II finally beat back unemployment, ended the Depression, and, in fact, made the U.S. the most powerful economy in the world; the years that followed--years of largescale government intervention in the economy--saw the greatest economic boom the U.S. has ever experienced.
"Liberals just can't get it through their heads that all the money and New Deal programs thrown at the Depression did little to solve it."
These are facts that dumb liberals and stupid ol' Bill Maher have gotten through their heads. It's likely that Sheppard has gotten them through his head at some point in his life, as well, and just preferred lying to sharing them with his readers.
--classicliberal2
---
[*] Unemployment, during that recession, briefly rose to 19%, and, in recent years, it has become a common practice, among conservative commentators, to compare unemployment as it stood at the beginning of the New Deal to unemployment as it stood at the trough of that recession, and to argue that the New Deal wasn't able to accomplish much. A big lie, but nowhere near the scale of the one offered by Sheppard.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Newsbusters & Me, Part 2
Yesterday, Terry Krepel, over at ConWebWatch, wrote about a comment from Brent Bozell, the head of the Media Research Center. Bozell was complaining about the criticism of crackpot Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann by Chris Matthews, the mouthy dunce who hosts MSNBC's Hardball. "He [Matthews] would never in a million years wage that kind of insulting attack on Hillary Clinton," fumed Bozell. Krepel points out that not only has Matthews "insultingly attacked Hillary Clinton" but at least two of those attacks have been reported on Bozell's own Newsbusters blog. In the first, Matthews had suggested that Clinton owed her political career to sympathy generated by her husband's philandering. In another, Matthews, in 2008, was complaining about Barack Obama potentially tapping Clinton to be Secretary of State:
"Why would he pick her? I thought we were done with the Clintons. She's just use it to build her power base. It's Machiavellian. And then we'll have Bill Clinton, too. I thought Obama didn't want drama... She's just a soap opera. If he doesn't pick her, everyone will say she's been dissed again, we'll have to live through that again."
Krepel leaves the matter at these two examples, but, in fact, they're not only fairly typical of Matthews' very long-running series of insulting attacks on Hillary Clinton, they're actually rather mild compared to some of the other things he's said. In 2001, he told an MSNBC colleague "I hate her [Clinton]. I hate her. All that she stands for." Indeed, Matthews has hated Hillary Clinton since at least the mid-1990s, and it is a hatred that has often seemed obsessive. In 2008, David Brock, the founder of Media Matters For America, put together a list of just some of the things Matthews has said of her; "she-devil", "Nurse Ratched", "witchy", "uppity", "a fraud", "anti-male," and on and on and on.
In short, Bozell's suggestion was, in fact, a lie of monumental proportions. A thing directly and brutally contrary to reality. Back in March, I wrote about another incident, in which Bozell bizarrely suggested that, at the time of the Iraq war, the press had been very hard on Bush, and, by contrast, was allowing Obama a free ride on the Libyan intervention.
Liars lie for a reason, and what both of these have in common is that they exemplify the agenda of Bozell and his organization. Purporting to be a "media watchdog," the MRC is, in fact, devoted to preaching, to a very dismal choir, a very dismal line, the same one preached by nearly all right-wing media outlets. It tells an extremely conservative audience that, though the public is with them, they are persecuted. Those carrying out the persecution are "elites," identified, in this up-is-down-and-black-is-white narrative, as liberal intellectuals, liberal academics, liberal journalists, liberal entertainers, liberal Democratic politicians, or just plain liberals.[1] Politics is reduced to a simple contest between good and evil, with liberals filling the "evil" role[2], and "liberal" is the default designation for anyone who isn't identifiably of the far right on every conceivable issue--those so tagged are often, in reality, conservatives whom outlets like the MRC just decided aren't conservative enough, or aren't conservative in the right ways.
This manufactures an incredible amount of politically useful resentment in the target audience--no one likes being persecuted--but its most important effect--and, arguably, its intent--is to completely destroy the confidence of that audience in anything that doesn't originate from far right sources; to beat back the very idea that there is an objective fact on which everyone can agree, and make momentary political utility the thing which dictates the audience's perception of reality. In their telling, the MRC and other like-minded orgs give it to you straight. Just about everyone else is probably an enemy with a malicious agenda (and they're always enemies--there's rarely any room allowed for any honest disagreement). Chris Matthews, by virtue of his sometimes disagreeing with the far right, is tagged as a "liberal," and from that, it follows that he would never use his privileged position of prominence in the press to attack Democrat Hillary Clinton in the same way he just attacked reactionary Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Cretin-MN). Similarly, the corporate press is irredeemably liberal, and it follows that it must have been very hard on Bush over the Iraq war, and, in stark contrast, easy on Obama over the Libyan intervention. It's all about telling a tale that is politically useful at the moment. Reality doesn't even enter into the equation.
The article that, a few weeks ago, prompted me to join Newsbusters was an Alex Fitzsimmons piece from 28 April that seemed a perfect example of how far-right media groups like the MRC generate their own little self-contained world, and carefully keep out real-world considerations that could burst this bubble. Fitzsimmons was upset that MSNBC's Chuck Todd, in an interview with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), declined to blame the Obama administration for rising gas prices.
Next, the idea that further domestic oil drilling won't significantly reduce the price of gas at the pump isn't, as Fitzsimmons would have it, a concoction of "liberal experts." It's an uncontroversial conclusion that is broadly shared by experts of all political stripes, including the Bush Energy Department, only a few years ago. In 2010, PolitiFact subjected the question to a fairly detailed examination and came to the same conclusion. It's pretty basic math.[3]
Who, on the other hand, is Fitzsimmons relying upon for his assertion that Obama policies are to blame for high gas prices? His three "experts" are from the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has received millions from Big Oil interests who would directly benefit--and benefit big time--from greater and easier domestic drilling. The total investment of Big Oil in Heritage is unknown, as Heritage is secretive about its donors, but it has received over $4.1 million from Koch family foundations alone, and one of the "experts" cited by Fitzsimmons (Nicolas Loris) actually worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation before moving to Heritage.
Fitzsimmons approvingly quotes all of those senators who are beating up on Obama. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the one Todd was interviewing, has, in his political career, received $456,810 from oil and gas interests. Though Wicker claimed to have 28 senators behind his resolution, the link provided by Newsbusters lists only nine, but they're enough to make an important point. Wicker is one of them. Here are the rest:
Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska): $140,605
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.): $228,485
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.): $293,300
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.): $353,200
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): $523,689
Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana): $807,844
John Cornyn (R-Texas): $1,734,950
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas): $2,141,025
The numbers beside their names are how much the oil and gas industry has spent on purchasing them over the years (all numbers courtesy of the Center For Responsive Politics).
To summarize, Fitzsimmons is advancing an extraordinarily improbable proposition, but it's one that, if believed, would benefit a particular--and particularly conservative--industry, and, while he completely misrepresents, as liberals, those who reject it (which is a dismissal of their views), every one of his own sources has ties to that industry.
Of course, the fact that they're paid shills doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but, to put it as kindly as possible, it does make a strong case that anything they say on this matter is to be viewed, by anything approximating a reasonable person, with extreme skepticism. Fitzsimmons merely reproduces their views, presents them as entirely credible, and doesn't disclose any of the info I've just recorded here, while completely ignoring obvious drivers of high gas prices such as insane speculation and oil-company profiteering.
Is Fitzsimmons merely incompetent? Probably not. Certainly unethical as hell, but he's hardly alone in that. In context, his article was just one of many. The MRC had, for a long time, been pimping the notion that Obama's alleged--and mostly imaginary--resistance to further domestic drilling was driving up the price of gas. Part of this has to do with politics. The oil industry is very kind to the Republican candidates favored by the MRC, and this is the line the industry wants pimped. The public is very angry about high gas prices, and has largely been blaming the industry (and speculators) for them, so there is a strategic motive for wanting to try to divert anger away from it and toward the Obama administration. The big reason the MRC is pimping this line, though, is probably the same reason all those others are; the same reason the MRC doesn't disclose that those others are; the same reason the MRC pimps climate-change denial: the organization has received a fortune from the oil industry. Since 1998, the MRC has received $412,500 from ExxonMobil. Fitzsimmons didn't disclose this, either. Neither has anyone else at the MRC who has written about this subject or any other touching on Big Oil.[5] All while they work to destroy their audience's confidence in everything except orgs like their own.
That's how things work at the MRC, where political fantasy stands in for "reality," those who pay the piper call the tune, and those who dance to it never know the difference, and probably wouldn't care if they did.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] This "elite" is never defined as corporate CEOs, business associations, investment bankers, the super-rich that have such a disproportionate share of wealth, their sycophantish mouthpieces in the press, or their purchased lackeys in government, or any of the other interests that, in the real world, actually run the U.S. A lower-middle-class workaday journalist is part of an "elite"--the head of ExxonMobil is not.
[2] When I offered this analysis in my first "Newsbusters & Me" post, conservative reader Mark81150 objected: "No dude, I don't think the American left is pure evil, just knee jerk reactionary, authoritarian to it's core, savagely hostile to opposing views, and utterly unable to process irony or the hypocrisies of it's own positions." And, he added, it is "intellectually thuggish." A distinction without a difference, to be sure, but one Mark was, tellingly, unable to perceive.
[3] And even the microscopic effect further domestic drilling would have wouldn't take place for years, as it takes years to establish a drilling operation.
[4] Since 2004, the MRC has also taken in $15,005 from Koch family foundations. Not exactly a princely sum, but worth a mention.
[5] Climate change denialism was invented by Big Oil, and has been a major project of the industry for decades; the MRC--what a surprise--pimps hardcore denialism, and no one who writes any of its constant articles on this discloses its financial relationship with the industry.
"Why would he pick her? I thought we were done with the Clintons. She's just use it to build her power base. It's Machiavellian. And then we'll have Bill Clinton, too. I thought Obama didn't want drama... She's just a soap opera. If he doesn't pick her, everyone will say she's been dissed again, we'll have to live through that again."
Krepel leaves the matter at these two examples, but, in fact, they're not only fairly typical of Matthews' very long-running series of insulting attacks on Hillary Clinton, they're actually rather mild compared to some of the other things he's said. In 2001, he told an MSNBC colleague "I hate her [Clinton]. I hate her. All that she stands for." Indeed, Matthews has hated Hillary Clinton since at least the mid-1990s, and it is a hatred that has often seemed obsessive. In 2008, David Brock, the founder of Media Matters For America, put together a list of just some of the things Matthews has said of her; "she-devil", "Nurse Ratched", "witchy", "uppity", "a fraud", "anti-male," and on and on and on.
In short, Bozell's suggestion was, in fact, a lie of monumental proportions. A thing directly and brutally contrary to reality. Back in March, I wrote about another incident, in which Bozell bizarrely suggested that, at the time of the Iraq war, the press had been very hard on Bush, and, by contrast, was allowing Obama a free ride on the Libyan intervention.
Liars lie for a reason, and what both of these have in common is that they exemplify the agenda of Bozell and his organization. Purporting to be a "media watchdog," the MRC is, in fact, devoted to preaching, to a very dismal choir, a very dismal line, the same one preached by nearly all right-wing media outlets. It tells an extremely conservative audience that, though the public is with them, they are persecuted. Those carrying out the persecution are "elites," identified, in this up-is-down-and-black-is-white narrative, as liberal intellectuals, liberal academics, liberal journalists, liberal entertainers, liberal Democratic politicians, or just plain liberals.[1] Politics is reduced to a simple contest between good and evil, with liberals filling the "evil" role[2], and "liberal" is the default designation for anyone who isn't identifiably of the far right on every conceivable issue--those so tagged are often, in reality, conservatives whom outlets like the MRC just decided aren't conservative enough, or aren't conservative in the right ways.
This manufactures an incredible amount of politically useful resentment in the target audience--no one likes being persecuted--but its most important effect--and, arguably, its intent--is to completely destroy the confidence of that audience in anything that doesn't originate from far right sources; to beat back the very idea that there is an objective fact on which everyone can agree, and make momentary political utility the thing which dictates the audience's perception of reality. In their telling, the MRC and other like-minded orgs give it to you straight. Just about everyone else is probably an enemy with a malicious agenda (and they're always enemies--there's rarely any room allowed for any honest disagreement). Chris Matthews, by virtue of his sometimes disagreeing with the far right, is tagged as a "liberal," and from that, it follows that he would never use his privileged position of prominence in the press to attack Democrat Hillary Clinton in the same way he just attacked reactionary Rep. Michelle Bachmann (Cretin-MN). Similarly, the corporate press is irredeemably liberal, and it follows that it must have been very hard on Bush over the Iraq war, and, in stark contrast, easy on Obama over the Libyan intervention. It's all about telling a tale that is politically useful at the moment. Reality doesn't even enter into the equation.
The article that, a few weeks ago, prompted me to join Newsbusters was an Alex Fitzsimmons piece from 28 April that seemed a perfect example of how far-right media groups like the MRC generate their own little self-contained world, and carefully keep out real-world considerations that could burst this bubble. Fitzsimmons was upset that MSNBC's Chuck Todd, in an interview with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), declined to blame the Obama administration for rising gas prices.
"After making excuses for the Democratic president, Todd boldly asserted that 'there doesn't seem to be any expert that believes' Obama could have done anything to prevent the price of gasoline from eclipsing $4 per gallon.Fitzsimmons quotes three "experts" from Heritage. They recommend battling high gas prices by cutting back barriers to further domestic oil drilling. Further, "Wicker noted that he and 28 senators recently introduced a resolution to 'send a message to the president' in support of streamlining the review process for oil permit applications." Fitzsimmons adds:
"Perhaps the morning anchor meant to say there doesn't seem to be any liberal experts who are criticizing Obama for not doing more to curtail rising gas prices: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, offered the president some policy advice on this precise issue." [italics in original]
"And just so NBC's political director knows, Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Begich (Alaska) joined the chorus of congressional opposition to Obama's squelching of offshore oil drilling."Taking this a step at a time, there's a basic logical problem in trying to heap blame on Obama policies for $4+/gallon gas: gas actually went over $4/gallon during the Bush administration, well before Obama had even been elected, and as high as it has been under Obama since Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives, it has never risen as high as it was under Bush.
Next, the idea that further domestic oil drilling won't significantly reduce the price of gas at the pump isn't, as Fitzsimmons would have it, a concoction of "liberal experts." It's an uncontroversial conclusion that is broadly shared by experts of all political stripes, including the Bush Energy Department, only a few years ago. In 2010, PolitiFact subjected the question to a fairly detailed examination and came to the same conclusion. It's pretty basic math.[3]
Who, on the other hand, is Fitzsimmons relying upon for his assertion that Obama policies are to blame for high gas prices? His three "experts" are from the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has received millions from Big Oil interests who would directly benefit--and benefit big time--from greater and easier domestic drilling. The total investment of Big Oil in Heritage is unknown, as Heritage is secretive about its donors, but it has received over $4.1 million from Koch family foundations alone, and one of the "experts" cited by Fitzsimmons (Nicolas Loris) actually worked for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation before moving to Heritage.
Fitzsimmons approvingly quotes all of those senators who are beating up on Obama. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the one Todd was interviewing, has, in his political career, received $456,810 from oil and gas interests. Though Wicker claimed to have 28 senators behind his resolution, the link provided by Newsbusters lists only nine, but they're enough to make an important point. Wicker is one of them. Here are the rest:
Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska): $140,605
Thad Cochran (R-Miss.): $228,485
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.): $293,300
Richard Shelby (R-Ala.): $353,200
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): $523,689
Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana): $807,844
John Cornyn (R-Texas): $1,734,950
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas): $2,141,025
The numbers beside their names are how much the oil and gas industry has spent on purchasing them over the years (all numbers courtesy of the Center For Responsive Politics).
To summarize, Fitzsimmons is advancing an extraordinarily improbable proposition, but it's one that, if believed, would benefit a particular--and particularly conservative--industry, and, while he completely misrepresents, as liberals, those who reject it (which is a dismissal of their views), every one of his own sources has ties to that industry.
Of course, the fact that they're paid shills doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but, to put it as kindly as possible, it does make a strong case that anything they say on this matter is to be viewed, by anything approximating a reasonable person, with extreme skepticism. Fitzsimmons merely reproduces their views, presents them as entirely credible, and doesn't disclose any of the info I've just recorded here, while completely ignoring obvious drivers of high gas prices such as insane speculation and oil-company profiteering.
Is Fitzsimmons merely incompetent? Probably not. Certainly unethical as hell, but he's hardly alone in that. In context, his article was just one of many. The MRC had, for a long time, been pimping the notion that Obama's alleged--and mostly imaginary--resistance to further domestic drilling was driving up the price of gas. Part of this has to do with politics. The oil industry is very kind to the Republican candidates favored by the MRC, and this is the line the industry wants pimped. The public is very angry about high gas prices, and has largely been blaming the industry (and speculators) for them, so there is a strategic motive for wanting to try to divert anger away from it and toward the Obama administration. The big reason the MRC is pimping this line, though, is probably the same reason all those others are; the same reason the MRC doesn't disclose that those others are; the same reason the MRC pimps climate-change denial: the organization has received a fortune from the oil industry. Since 1998, the MRC has received $412,500 from ExxonMobil. Fitzsimmons didn't disclose this, either. Neither has anyone else at the MRC who has written about this subject or any other touching on Big Oil.[5] All while they work to destroy their audience's confidence in everything except orgs like their own.
That's how things work at the MRC, where political fantasy stands in for "reality," those who pay the piper call the tune, and those who dance to it never know the difference, and probably wouldn't care if they did.
--classicliberal2
---
[1] This "elite" is never defined as corporate CEOs, business associations, investment bankers, the super-rich that have such a disproportionate share of wealth, their sycophantish mouthpieces in the press, or their purchased lackeys in government, or any of the other interests that, in the real world, actually run the U.S. A lower-middle-class workaday journalist is part of an "elite"--the head of ExxonMobil is not.
[2] When I offered this analysis in my first "Newsbusters & Me" post, conservative reader Mark81150 objected: "No dude, I don't think the American left is pure evil, just knee jerk reactionary, authoritarian to it's core, savagely hostile to opposing views, and utterly unable to process irony or the hypocrisies of it's own positions." And, he added, it is "intellectually thuggish." A distinction without a difference, to be sure, but one Mark was, tellingly, unable to perceive.
[3] And even the microscopic effect further domestic drilling would have wouldn't take place for years, as it takes years to establish a drilling operation.
[4] Since 2004, the MRC has also taken in $15,005 from Koch family foundations. Not exactly a princely sum, but worth a mention.
[5] Climate change denialism was invented by Big Oil, and has been a major project of the industry for decades; the MRC--what a surprise--pimps hardcore denialism, and no one who writes any of its constant articles on this discloses its financial relationship with the industry.
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