I don’t care which party has the right ideas — or which party has the wrong ideas. I am very, very, very interested in civility.
Ron Paul shows up to local diner, hoping to find regular ‘Mericans who, we are informed, actually eat in such places; he is instead greeted by ~97 high school students. From Massachusetts. Whose teacher had reserved the entire restaurant. Circus ensues. Vermin Supreme was even in the parking lot, which was also the location of the (apparently) sole New Hampshire voter:
Karen Heller had come to “fall in love with Ron Paul.” Heller remains undecided. “I really love Jon Huntsman,” she said, “but every year I feel like I’m throwing my vote away.”
Gods help me, some days I love politics. Which we all know ain’t the beanbag.
Compare and contrast Jonathan Chait’s approach to Paul Ryan’s fantasyworld with dread Liberal Mouthpiece NPR’s view from nowhere approach in which Ryan is simply allowed to say whatever he wants, without challenge or even follow up of any kind.
Day by day, hour by hour, brick by brick NPR is building its own tomb. Once they’ve chased off all thinking individuals from their “coverage,” a defunding move by the GOP will be a non-event. NPR has vastly higher listenership than FOXnews and still, occasionally, reports facts. Therefore NPR must cease to exist. This is who they are. This is what they do. They want to destroy you, NPR, and you are going out of your way to help.
Across several posts, Dean Baker lays into the dread Liberal Media for just plain making it up when it comes to pushing their preferred, center-right “cut deficits now” agenda.
“The national debt will exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy by 2021 — and balloon to nearly 200 percent of GDP within 25 years — without dramatic cuts to federal health and retirement programs or steep tax increases, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday.”
Actually, this is not what the projections showed. The CBO projections showed that if Congress simply followed current law, letting the Bush tax cuts expire, not fixing the alternative minimum tax, and most importantly, allowing the spending caps in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to remain in place, then the debt to GDP ratio will soon stabilize and head downwards.
“The national debt is on pace to equal the annual size of the economy within a decade, levels that could provoke a European-style crisis unless policymakers take action on the federal deficit, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office.”
This is not true. The CBO report did not warn of “a European-style crisis.” The reason it did not is that a European style crisis does not make sense in the context of the United States. The United States can never be like Greece or Ireland for the simply reason that we print out own currency.
In the event that we actually ran up against serious constraints in credit markets the United States would have the option to have the Fed buy up its debt. Greece and Ireland do not have this option. This could create a risk of inflation, but there is not the risk of insolvency that euro zone governments face.
In the top of the hour news segment on Morning Edition, NPR told listeners that the Congressional Budget Office warned that the national debt will soon equal the annual size of the economy and this could lead to a European-style crisis [see: New York Times above].
This is critically important stuff. Deep cuts right now will strangle the economy and deeply hurt Obama’s chance at reelection to boot. This, coupled with the knowledge that as conditions improve, the ability (in the form of public desire) to make huge cuts to the social safety net will diminish precipitously is precisely why the GOP is for deep cuts now. They know that doing nothing and simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire will do more for improved deficits than almost any of the “plans” on the table. The CBO has said so again and again. These “plans” are not and never will be about the deficit. They are about pushing a preferred social agenda. Period. We just can’t get anyone in the media to break free from their “view from nowhere, compromise must always be the preferable, serious person postion” lens for long enough to get them to even report the simple facts of the case at hand.
tl;dr: We’re doomed. There will be a default. Maybe not this time, but soon. Once you’ve set up the terms of debate such that they always include wrangling over lifting the debt ceiling and treating it essentially as a hostage situation, then you’ve created a system that, sooner or later, someone will push too far for their own purely political purposes. And when that happens it will be the end of America as we’ve known it. And I suspect that will be happening pretty damned soon.
…you just need to be really brazen about your flip-flops. Sure, sites like ThinkProgress or Politifact with catch you, and the first few times that happens maybe you’re a little worried about what’s going to happen. But then it dawns on you: nothing is going to happen. Your base doesn’t read ThinkProgress. The media doesn’t really care and is happy to accept whatever obvious nonsense you offer up in explanation. The morning chat shows will continue to book you. It just doesn’t matter.
Gee, I’ve never been more surprised by a reveal of misleading editing:
If you watch the entire conversation, it becomes crystal clear that O’Keefe’s provocateurs didn’t get what they were looking for. They were ostensibly offering $5 million to NPR. Their goal is clearly to get Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley to agree to slant coverage for cash. Again and again, they refuse, saying that NPR just wants to report the facts and be a nonpartisan voice of reason.
And this also falls into the utterly gobsmacking shock of the ages category:
James Poniewozik of TIME’s “Tuned In” blog admits that he reposted O’Keefe’s video without watching the entire two-hour exchange and suggests that many other reporters did the same.
Poniewozik speculates that O’Keefe posted the extended video because he was confident that “by the time anyone took the time to go over the full video, the narrative would be established, the quotes stuck in people’s minds and the ideological battle won.”
No shit. After all, one can’t expect journalists (and especially not millionaire pundits) to spend their time watching the thing they’re going to report on. They can’t even be bothered to force an intern to do it and report back. There’s just no time. People have to be fired. Now. After all, there’s no reason to believe this all might be purely manufactured horseshit. And, of course, one should never forget that we sorry rubes out here in our pajamas just can’t understand what it is to do journalism.
That aside, it’s almost like even serious people should begin to gather that this sort of pattern is their whole operation. They throw out a distorted narrative, claim some scalps, and move on. They haven’t even had to bother to find a new messenger, despite the fact that every one of these things has been utterly disproved as shamefully and willfully misleading. That would be bad enough, but you, the media, still misreport the ACORN business (among many, many other potential examples) as though no newer information ever emerged on that front. To this day and probably right now.
And, it’s worth noting (as the linked article does) exactly who due diligence in this sorry case fell to:
Glenn Beck’s website, “The Blaze,” ran a critique titled, “Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?” The short answer: Yes.
So it takes Glenn Beck’s folks to do what NPR and any other respectable journalistic outfit should have done immediately and for as long as it took before taking action: study the actual source data because we know this guy has a long, long history of purposefully misleading and creative editing. But do you come out immediately and say that? Eviscerate the messenger? Of course not. You fire people and strengthen their case against you by creating the implicit appearance of guilt.
Truly, truly the Republic is at an end. We have crossed the Rubicon once and for all and there is nothing left worthy of salvage. This is what the intellectual discourse has become. This is the level of intellect running the discourse in our public square…essentially that of a sad rube, caught out playing Three Card Monty. Again and again and again and again. Publicly. But I’m sure the Queen’s in there this time; after all, he keeps showing it to me!
The article concludes:
At this point, any news outlet that runs an uncorroborated James O’Keefe video is committing journalistic malpractice.
At this point?!? Anybody paying any attention to O’Keefe about anything several episodes ago was committing journalistic malpractice. That NPR merrily still fires people over this sort of horseshit is just flat out astonishing. Newsflash, NPR: they want to destroy you. Nothing you do, say, print, broadcast, or color favorably to the Right point of view is ever going to change that. Start acting like it.
Or, better yet, start acting like the responsible news organization you claim to be. As Dear Leader once said, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
[Tea Party activists and junior lawmakers] literally think you can just balance it, you know, [by cutting] waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid, and NPR. And it doesn’t work like that.
Charlie Louvin remembers his brother:
When Ira was killed by a drunk driver in 1965, he died with a warrant out for his arrest on DUI charges and with three bullets buried near his spine-the work of his third wife, who had shot him five times in 1963, after Ira had tried to strangle her with a telephone cord.
For Ira, to be a man was to be a drunk, and he was by all accounts the kind of drunk whose sickness looks and feels like a kind of possession. “Today they call it an illness,” Charlie says. “In those days it was bein’ mean.” Ira’s meanness was legendary. When Ira drank, he fought, cheated compulsively on each of his four wives, and worst for his career, [and] killed a tour with young Elvis Presley, a devoted Louvins fan
The article as a whole is a fascinating remembrance of the duo. Charlie died today at 83.
#306: Does anyone believe that the tragedy in Arizona would have been less dangerous and less tragic if 20 people had pulled out their guns and started firing at the shooter?
#307: Did anyone else notice that in Arizona, one of the most gun-friendly states in the United States, that the shooter was subdued by people who hit him and jumped on him? Not by armed vigilantes who wielded their guns?
On this topic I’d only add: does anyone think that Arizona’s gun laws, which basically amount to “anyone over 21 can buy, concealed-carry, and be armed at any time and in any place” make that state a safer place to reside?
Every time an incident involving a lone shooter occurs in a state with stiff gun laws, we’re treated to moans about “if only they’d let more people carry guns there, they’d have taken care of it before it ever started”; when it transpires in a gun crazed, heavily armed state like AZ: sounds of silence.
Journalists: How many folks on the ground in the immediate vicinity had guns on them? In the store? In the parking lot? Yet it was a well timed open field tackle that reportedly incapacitated the gunman.
In 1966, Howard Dully became one of the youngest recipients of an “icepick” lobotomy at the age of 12. The psychiatrist who administered the procedure, Dr. Walter Freeman, believed that mental illness was tied to overactive emotions, and that this procedure of cutting the brain dulled the errant feelings, and “cured” the patient. Howard Dully was brought in for the procedure because his stepmother described him as “unbelievably defiant,” saying among other things: “He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says ‘I don’t know.’ He turns the room’s lights on when there is broad sunlight outside.” After Howard’s stepmother visited with Dr. Freeman, he suggested that “the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard’s personality by means of transorbital lobotomy.” Dr. Freeman’s transorbital lobotomy procedure was literally an ice pick hammered through the back of each eye socket into the brain then wiggled in a stirring motion, often taking just a few minutes under local anesthesia.
Wow. Even more information in the original NPR story.
Lemkin 