Tag: MSM

It’s the Leaks

Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:

The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.

Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York

if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:

…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.

James B. Robenalt, Washington Post

We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.

As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.

Chris Cillizza: [Trump] is producing the greatest reality show ever.
Soledad O’Brien: It’s not accurate. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. It’s not analysis. It’s facile. It shows an actual lack of understanding of reality tv (can’t believe I’m typing that). It’s mediocre. It’s a time when viewers need to understand what’s going on at the highest levels of govt.

A Few Differences

Juan Cole runs down the Top 10 differences between the treatment of Edward Snowden and recently outed (suspected) Stuxnet leaker General James “Hoss” Cartwright:

  1. No one will obsess about the exercise habits of Gen. Cartwright’s wife.

  2. Gen. Cartwright will not be characterized as “a 63-year-old hacker.”

  3. Gen. Cartwright will not be described as “nerdy” or “flaky.”

  4. David Gregory will not ask that David Sanger be prosecuted for espionage because he aided and abetted Cartwright’s leaking.

  5. We won’t get stories every day about where in McLean, Virginia, Gen. Cartwright is living.

  6. Gen. Cartwright won’t be accused of being a spy for Iran.

  7. No lurid stories will be rehearsed on the Sunday afternoon shows about Cartwright’s allegedly overly familiar relationship with a young female aide in 2009, with heavy innuendo as to what the episode said about his reckless character.

  8. No FBI informants will be placed inside the elite Alfalfa Club in DC that Cartwright was known to attend.

  9. Cartwright’s loyalty to the United States won’t be impugned by anchors or congressmen.

  10. Dirt won’t be dug up on David Sanger’s private life in an attempt to discredit his reporting on Cartwright’s Stuxnet.

It’s not what is done. It is who does it that matters in Washington. Even past closeness to power covers a multitude of sins.

Yep. Read the whole thing

A Few Differences

Republicans have very decidedly not agreed to any kind of tax reform that raises federal revenues. This is the whole crux of the debate. They have never agreed to anything other than revenue-neutral tax reform.

Kevin Drum, saying what should be printed in the maximum size possible, laminated in armor-strength plastic, and posted on the wall of every news agency large and small. Every single news outlet gets this simple, straightforward fact utterly and completely wrong every single time they venture here. Wishing hard and clapping louder will not make the GOP sensible. Neither will acting as though they want a “sensible” deal when they have made no such overtures, large or small.

Reporting this as though both parties are equally at fault is doing The Republic no favors.

[The Hastert] rule is completely dead. The Democrats now effectively control the floor because nothing ‘big’ will come to the floor without knowing in advance that lots of Democrats support it. That gives the Democrats tremendous power in a body where the minority is not designed to have much power.

Unnamed Republican Aide, likening the appropriate and intended function of the House to “tremendous power.” How we can have an MSM that drones on and on about “reaching across the aisle” in the face of a reality that includes a de facto rule stating that nothing moves unless it will pass with only majority votes is and long has been beyond me.

Even still, former Speaker Hastert’s own reaction to the weakening and even ending of his “rule” is all the more telling:

Maybe you can do it once, maybe you can do it twice, but when you start making deals when you have to get Democrats to pass the legislation, you are not in power anymore.

So, then, making a deal at all is tantamount to surrendering all power. Breathtaking.

Source: rollcall.com

Any Reasonable Definition

Dear media, please read and understand every word of this before your next utterance re: Aaron Swartz:

MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.

In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not too.
MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices.

At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.
Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser.

Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.
The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.

I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.

These facts are just not that complicated. Do us and yourselves a favor and look into them. Understand them. Then report.

Any Reasonable Definition

There Is No GOP Budget Proposal

Can we please at least agree that vaguely worded letters sent to the President do not constitute a legislative proposal? Or did the CBO start scoring letters that are 90% vacuous talking points; add to that the fact that these very empty talking points were soundly crushed by plebiscite just weeks ago?

Likewise, slightly less vague details provided on background do not a serious proposal make. These details are provided on background precisely so they may be disavowed at any moment. This is not “Boehner’s Proposal.” It is bullshit. But, even then, the GOP proposes extracting from the backs of the poor, elderly, and infirm a dollar value less than half of what Obama attains by slightly inconveniencing the very rich. Apparently this fact was not worth noting, background or otherwise.

Our media entertainment complex finds none of this worth noting. Math is hard and so very boring, but can’t we at least admit the vacuity and shady sourcing of this “plan” when reporting it? Apparently not.

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.
[…]
I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But [journalists are] not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.

Michael Grunwald writing for Swampland because such things just aren’t said in the polite company of mainstream journalism or even journalistic criticism like that on offer at Reliable Sources. Still: Huzzah. That anyone says it, even a lowly blogger out here on drugs, is a small victory. And, just as he concludes, it will take people screaming about this, every day, for decades, because that’s exactly how the GOP has done it since the late 70s. And it’s worked out pretty well for them.
Source: TIME