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The Schneiderman appointment

2012-01-25T18:00:00.003-05:00

The President's announcement of a mortgage investigation committee, or whatever it is, was one of a relatively few substantive things in the SOTU that wasn't known very far at all in advance. Let alone that NY AG Eric Schneiderman would be a co-chair. I don't really follow this stuff, so I don't know what to believe. RJ Eskow has a look at the arguments that this is a victory, a sell-out, and various possibilities in between.

Associated Press Calls Suspect Abu Zubaydah a "Terrorist"

2012-01-23T15:41:00.000-05:00

Abu Zubaydah is being held indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay, and he has not been convicted of a crime -- or even charged.

The Associated Press, which is usually more careful about these things, today referred to Zubaydah as a "terrorist."

A former CIA officer who told reporters he participated in the interrogation of terrorist Abu Zubaydah has been charged with leaking classified secrets about CIA operatives and other information to reporters.

The AP has changed it in a later version of the article, although the original one still appears on some sites. This new version refers to Zubaydah as a "top suspected terrorist" and "suspected al Qaeda financier."

The Washington Post, which sent out an email news alert this afternoon using AP's flawed language, now has its own article, terming Zubaydah an "alleged al-Qaeda operative," while Politico goes with "alleged al-Qaeda leader." The DOJ press release uses "terrorism suspect."

It's good that AP changed the language in its later versions, but the original version should be corrected. And this shouldn't happen in the first place.

The Mini Minimalist / ganache videos

2012-01-22T11:53:00.000-05:00

Time to rewind to a classic series of three videos.

1. Mark Bittman makes chocolate ganache.
2. The Mini Minimalist version (he was three).
3. Minimalist and Mini Minimalist make popsicles.

"... ganache -- a word that's so intimidating that many people never bother to make the stuff."

Things Obama did you didn't even know

2012-01-19T00:22:00.001-05:00

Actual lines from Andrew Sullivan's Obama lovefest on the cover of Newsweek:

Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels. Under Obama, a crucial state, New York, made marriage equality for gays an irreversible fact of American life.

I mean, really. If we're listing events that aren't the actions of the federal administration, why even stop there?!

Joe Nocera's BP lovefest

2012-01-17T22:17:00.001-05:00

David Gessner sets the record straight on Nocera's column from last week, which said that on the Gulf Coast, the "beaches are sparkling."

Tea Party relevancy

2012-01-14T12:40:00.006-05:00

I'm surprised when I hear people ask about "what has the Tea Party actually done?" or suggest it doesn't matter anymore. David Weigel lays out how the Tea Party has completely set the Republican agenda, and the policies of the GOP presidential candidates (excluding Huntsman, sort of, but including Romney). Yeah, we all know this stuff already, I think. But sometimes people forget it.

The Tea Party isn't what they were a few years ago, obviously. But in many senses a lot of their work is done and remains in place -- moving the goal posts, creating a new normal.

More tornadoes on weekdays

2012-01-14T11:53:00.002-05:00

Yup. Linked to pollution during the week.

Vindication

2012-01-14T11:20:00.003-05:00

Ok, to everyone who makes fun of me for bikesharing the fairly short distance from the Woodley Park metro to 18th and Columbia. This just in from data crunching by a GGW reader:

The four most common one-way trips are Adams Mill/Columbia to Calvert/Woodley and back as well as Eastern Market Metro to Lincoln Park and back.

Basically everyone's doing it.

"Non-stop" with a stop

2012-01-11T15:32:00.002-05:00

WSJ catches several airlines, particularly United Continental, making unscheduled refueling stops on flights from Europe to the Northeast. The problem: the airlines are using more 757s on the routes, and the winter winds have been unusually strong. The issue actually isn't new, but it's gotten worse:

Last month, United said, its 169-seat 757s had to stop 43 times to refuel out of nearly 1,100 flights headed to the U.S. A year earlier, there were only 12 unscheduled stops on roughly the same volume of 757 flights.

Note that if a WSJ article is locked when you get to it, you can cut a phrase from the first paragraph, put it in Google, and then you can read it.

Politics & Prose in Doonesbury

2012-01-10T23:41:00.001-05:00

Yay!

Discussion of "The Obamas" begins

2012-01-06T18:35:00.002-05:00

Huffington Post seems to have gotten an advance on some parts of Jodi Kantor's new "The Obamas" book. And it's very interesting, about conflict between Michelle Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

Of course, these books should always be taken with a grain of salt, no matter who writes them (I don't have an idea of Kantor's history and how it compares to some of the others who do these things, like Suskind or Woodward). You can tell pretty clearly in that article that these are the claims of Michelle Obama's camp, and of Rahm Emanuel's camp. So it's not one clear factual story out of here, but effectively a series of accusations, which is very different but still extremely important.

Reading the HuffPost piece made me think how little information has emerged about Michelle Obama's role in the White House. Kind of important. And, if Kantor's right -- and it does make sense -- a rather important positive force.

Oh Hank Johnson

2012-01-06T00:13:00.003-05:00

Remember Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, who was concerned that if there were more people on Guam the island might tip over and capsize?

A small earthquake the other day had Johnson declaring victory:

Don't say I didn't warn y'all. "Magnitude 5.2 Earthquake - Guam Region" on.doi.gov/ykLyab

Not sure which is worse: no one on staff explained he was wrong, or he didn't get it. Or he gets it, but thinks he can dig himself out?

Fact-checking as separate from most journalism

2012-01-05T23:28:00.001-05:00

Alec MacGillis nicely sums up the point that the "fact checker" columns shouldn't be something totally separate from all reporting; indeed, this new "fact checker" set up seems to explicitly imply that it's not the job of "normal" news pieces to hold anyone accountable. Leave any actual thinking to the fact checker column, apparently.

Of course, (do pardon me here), while it's nice everyone is getting on this point now (while the self-appointed factcheckers are rightly in ill-repute), a number of us were making this point back several years ago when the "fact checker" trend was taking off.

It's not unrelated to the problem of the term "investigative journalism" -- implying that other journalism doesn't involve investigating stuff.

"Walking Wikipedia"

2012-01-02T16:54:00.001-05:00

Oy. The term is "walking encyclopedia," not "walking Wikipedia," NY Times.

Politico: Boston Globe Undermined Its Claim to Expertise by Getting John Kerry's Vietnam Story Correct

2011-12-29T16:57:00.001-05:00

In "Boston Globe wants the Mitt Romney franchise," Politico's Dylan Byers rightly gives the Globe a tip of the hat for being one of the definitive sources on Mitt Romney -- particularly his history and biography.

But mixed into the story, Byers takes a bizarre tangent:

Presidential elections always present newspapers with the chance to be an authoritative voice on their hometown candidates, but they also bring in national media eager to find just the overlooked biographical detail or unexplained financial transaction that will redefine the candidate — and undermine the local paper’s claim to expertise.

The Globe learned this lesson the hard way in 2004, shortly after it published its biography of another Massachusetts presidential candidate, Democrat John Kerry — a seven-part series on the candidate had appeared a year earlier. The Globe authors offered what, at the time, was the most detailed portrayal of Kerry’s Vietnam War experience, only to have that account overshadowed by the narrative presented by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Republican group that largely succeeded in redefining what had been the highlight of Kerry’s career.

Though the Globe’s initial reporting may have been accurate and thorough — “it stands the test of time,” said Michael Kranish, one of the book’s authors — the narrative was no longer theirs.

Other papers have struggled on the national stage, as well.

So while the Boston Globe's coverage of Kerry's time in Vietnam "may have been accurate and thorough," somehow the Globe had its expertise "undermine[d]" because other outlets later went on to get the Kerry history wrong?

By the Byers rule, imagine the stories various papers could be getting wrong right now! Perhaps the Dallas Morning News is failing in their Rick Perry coverage because they haven't yet reported future untrue allegations that Perry is Hindu! Perhaps the Salt Lake Tribune's Jon Huntsman coverage today will one day be seen as having missed future untrue allegations that Huntsman is actually a giraffe! The possibilities.

The Swift Boaters certainly had a huge effect on the 2004 election. But Byers and Politico are so post-fact that they think that's all that matters, and that it's actually irrelevant that the Swift Boaters were wrong. If the facts really don't matter, perhaps nothing's left to stop you from convincing yourself that the Globe had somehow undermined its claim to expertise in the matter by getting it correct.

Those crazy echo chambers

2011-12-24T12:38:00.000-05:00

As David Roberts put it,

There is no "echo chamber" more closed, more immune to outside correction, than the echo chamber of self-styled non-partisan technocrats.

That captures the irony. These same people -- the center-right echo chamber -- are in fact the ones who make the "echo chamber" accusation most often, of people to their left and right.

Of course, you can't convince them of this. If you could, they wouldn't be the echo chamber.

So ready to be done with this Politifact thing

2011-12-23T00:34:00.000-05:00

Actually I think Gawker's post is one of the best:

What Politifact is, really, is just a blog written by some people at the St. Petersburg Times. But since it calls itself Politifact and assigns ratings that you can just glance over, it undeservedly becomes a irresistible cudgel to use against your political opponents. Politifact! It's a portmanteau of "politics" and "facts," so it can't be wrong.

The Downside of the Boston Globe Still Having a Serious DC Bureau

2011-12-21T00:12:00.001-05:00

I feel bad for the Globe. They manage to hold on to a fair amount of their talent in Boston. Then they send people to the DC bureau, where many of them shine (see this and this and this), and then get stolen away by larger news organizations, or higher posts. (Ok, Kornblut may never shine, but still got recruited away). The latest steal was Donovan Slack, nabbed the other week by Politico.

Yeah, maybe there's something in it for the Globe, in that people within the news biz know they find and develop talent, and it gives the paper cred. But I'd think for the Globe it's mostly just got to be frustrating.

Post-Politifact Era?

2011-12-20T11:20:00.000-05:00

So Politifact picked as their "lie of the year" something that was actually true.

Matt Yglesias (Politifact's Bizarre "Lie of the Year") and Paul Krugman (Politifact, R.I.P.) sum this up well.

Hitchens

2011-12-19T14:23:00.002-05:00

Once you're done reading the 20 or so Hitchens tributes in Slate ("Anna Wintour on Why Hitchens Was So Fun To Hang Out With"), here's some better stuff: Katha Pollitt on the various ways in which he was awful.

How did that Iraq war thing start, anyway?

2011-12-19T09:23:00.003-05:00

Washington Post comes up with all sorts of other reasons why the Iraq war started, relegating WMD to just one little reason among a bunch.

Blackwater FOIA

2011-12-14T21:57:00.003-05:00

I know sometimes Gawker does some silly stuff, but I think often they do really impressive stuff, too. For example: FOIAing the State Department for documents on Blackwater's horrible actions in Iraq.

Today in news to make you feel old

2011-12-14T10:31:00.002-05:00

Sarah Ganim, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter who broke many aspects of the Penn State story, is 24. Read an interview with her here.

Parallel parking

2011-12-11T11:38:00.000-05:00

Better Civil War reading

2011-12-10T00:48:00.002-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates's new article is about claiming the Civil War as black history. He sets up how to this day the war is usually portrayed in the US as a tragedy, not a triumph. And how he hopes that will one day finally change.

For that particular community, for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.

I found it very useful.

Inside the warehouse

2011-12-08T00:27:00.001-05:00

LA Times tours Greenpeace's SF warehouse of fun. They have one in Maryland, too.

How we got here, here being that Obama uses Occupy language

2011-12-07T20:06:00.002-05:00

Words are just words, and they're not policies. Still, that the President has dramatically changed his tone and now gives a speech railing about economic inequality is a rather big deal. I think Ezra Klein's piece this morning captures nicely how big the shift is and how it would be hard to believe Occupy didn't play a significant role in making this happen.

Mid-sized papers giving me hope

2011-12-06T21:50:00.003-05:00

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is in the middle of a nine-part series on "how Florida police officers can stay on the job despite multiple complaints, crimes."

Reporters analyzed the 22,000 cases in the FDLE’s misconduct database, then filed public records requests to get the personnel files of more than 250 current and former officers.

Impressive stuff (and depressing). Gives me hope.

Gates Foundation in the news

2011-12-06T00:51:00.001-05:00

Gates Foundation giving grant to far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Just great.

Martina Correia, 1967-2011

2011-12-04T21:47:00.002-05:00

Martina Correia was the older sister of Troy Davis, and the driving force behind everything in the struggle to save his life. She was, meanwhile, fighting breast cancer, and she died on Thursday. No one can do this justice, but Laura Moye and Liliana Segura, who knew her well, are worth reading. Martina was a force to be reckoned with and everyone could only be in awe. She will be sorely missed.

Amy Gutmann and the Academic Imprimatur For Compromise Fetishism

2011-11-30T23:37:00.009-05:00

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson promoted their upcoming book in a NYT op-ed Wednesday that told us that Congress just needs to learn to compromise. I mean, really.

Reading this stuff about how both sides need to give ground, you might think Gutmann and Thompson have been off the grid the last several years. They seem unaware that one, and only one, of the major American political parties was willing to hold the country hostage and extort concessions from the other party in exchange for votes to raise the debt ceiling. And the supercommittee, to them, was a "breakdown in an attempt at compromise in Washington" -- which makes sense only if you think that cutting federal spending amidst a rotten economy (policy even many center-right economists don't recommend) was an example of fair compromise in the first place.

Gutmann and Thompson call for grand compromise from both sides, but they have Thomas Friedman syndrome: they're unable to admit that President Obama -- much to our disappointment -- has offered the very kind of compromises they beg for. It's as if their way of thinking is unable to accept the results of the grand empirical experiment that is the Obama presidency: a guy who actually, truly believes in compromise giving it a go.

There was a time when compromise was relevant, because you could actually battle out policy differences. That's often not how it works anymore, at least for now. We're in an era of post-truth politics, where the outcome is mostly dependent on power politics, not the nuances of the policy.

It's annoying enough that Gutmann and Thompson buy into the notion that it's been Both Sides Fault in the last few years. But the broader problem is that they serve to give an academic imprimatur to the compromise fetishists, the line of DC pundits who think compromise is in itself a victory and necessarily good.

Much of the time "compromise" is used to give cover to the backroom deal that avoids a tough vote. In these cases, the deal is done by members of congress who aren't in it for compromise itself, but use "compromise" to put the best spin for all sides on what they've done.

Gutmann and Thompson seem to be the real deal, though: they actually believe that compromises are simply good, a goal in and of itself. But what about compromises that didn't turn out so well? The three fifth compromise -- was that one to be proud of?

I think many of the better moments in American history were in fact not compromises -- they were outright victories, instilling new rights. Sometimes a compromise can lead to an incremental victory that leads to final victory and justice, certainly. But some of our biggest advances in the end have nothing to do with compromise, be it the ending of slavery or the start of women's suffrage.

Gutmann (I'm a bit familiar with her work, and not Thompson's) needs an answer to American history. "Mutual respect" and "dialogue" sound well and good and all, but it sure helps if you're already the people in power. The victorious tactics of the civil rights movement, of course, would be looked down upon by Gutmann's prescriptions. How will they square that in the book?

Update 12/2: more on this from Daniel Denvir of the Philadelphia City Paper.

"Giant Radio Controlled Flying Shark"

2011-11-30T15:07:00.001-05:00

Not making this up. It was in today's Groupon email. For real.

(I can't believe they just got a blog post out of me on this).

Politics of inequality

2011-11-29T08:40:00.001-05:00

John Harwood has a bit in the NYT explaining just how much the politic of economic inequality may have changed in the last few months.. coinciding with the Occupy movement.

Occupy post Zuccotti

2011-11-23T23:00:00.002-05:00

What next?

Randy Shaw makes a pretty good case that a public square occupation is just one tactic among many, and there's no reason this tactic must be seen as the be all and end all. On the other hand, this tactic has worked in ways all of the 'usual' tactics (marches, letter writing, etc) haven't.

At a GA on Saturday, the folks in New York apparently decided that another permanent outdoor occupation isn't in the works, at least not right now.

(SEIU, meanwhile, is actually trying to get people on board with some campaign about Republicans Bad, Democrats Good, which Glenn Greenwald rightly mocks. SEIU will surely get some bodies on board with this to a rally, but most occupiers will remain independent of this stuff.)

What will the next tactics be? No one knows. The unpredictability of the movement is one of its key strengths. Well, assuming there's something still to come.

Losing momentum is a huge threat. And on that front I think people need to get what a difference Occupy has already made. Hard to get the masses if they don't think you're making a difference. And to me it's fairly clear we are. Occupy has already shifted the debate tremendously, accomplishing more than the vast majority of things we've tried in the last few years.

This is working and the old tactics weren't. There are times when it's appropriate to worry "but will this make a difference?" Based on the evidence of effectiveness so far, this shouldn't really be one.

Meme time

2011-11-21T22:56:00.002-05:00

Source: nickbatson

Oh Internet. BuzzFeed has a whole gallery of collected images on this.

Lobby firm to bank: long term threat from Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-19T12:04:00.003-05:00

Chris Hayes breaks the story this morning of a Wall Street lobbying firm that says the banks need to fight back hard against Occupy Wall Street, or risk consequences. That is, from their pitch to the bank:

Leading Democratic party strategists have begun to openly discuss the benefits of embracing the growing and increasingly organized Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to prevent Republican gains in Congress and the White House next year. We have seen this process of adopting extreme positions and movements to increase base voter turnout, including in the 2005-2006 immigration debate. This would mean more than just short-term discomfort for Wall Street firms. If vilifying the leading companies of this sector is allowed to become an unchallenged centerpiece of a coordinated Democratic campaign, it has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.
It shouldn't be surprising that the Democratic party or even President Obama's re-election team would campaign against Wall Street in this cycle. However the bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies -- and might start running against them too.

This is impressive though of course is should be taken with a grain of salt: this is a lobby firm trying to drum up more business with its client, a bank. Lobby firms need business to keep going, so they make pitches that are sometimes turned down (the bank says, of course, that they have turned this one down). And even pitches that are accepted don't mean they're actually the right answer for the client.

But as Hayes points out, the bigger point is that this probably isn't the only document like it. This specific proposal may not be taken up, but it's evidence of the possible level of discussion amongst the target. And that says something.

WashPost Misleads On Own Poll Showing More Support Occupy Wall Street Than Oppose It

2011-11-16T22:30:00.008-05:00

Peter Hart touches on this point but I wanted to expand on it. From the Washington Post's hit piece on Wednesday's front page about the Occupy movement:

In the wake of so much controversy, the Occupy movement — which began as a populist uprising to represent all but the wealthiest 1 percent — has begun to lose some of its mainstream support. A Washington Post poll early this month showed that only 18 percent of responders “strongly supported” the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There you have it: only 18 percent!

But wait, what exactly did the Post's poll from earlier this month actually find? It found this:

In other words, slightly more respondents "supported" the Occupy movement than "opposed" it. Of course, that didn't fit the Post's thesis, so...

The relation between the Keystone XL victory and Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-13T18:44:00.002-05:00

The Administration's decision last week to delay final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline was a huge victory. It remains unclear what will happen ultimately, but this was a giant unexpected victory in the process.

Did Occupy Wall Street play some role in making this happen?

Naomi Klein makes the case:

when we started this campaign, we—and this was just three months ago that the first protests happened outside the White House—we thought we had a very slim chance of winning, like a kind of a 1 percent chance of winning. And when Occupy Wall Street happened, I had a conversation with Bill McKibben, who has just been the powerhouse behind this campaign, just a hero. And I said to Bill, "I think this is helping us. What do you think?" And he said, "I think it’s helping us, too." And the reason we believe this is because—precisely what Patrick was talking about—the ground has shifted, the climate has shifted. And what it would mean for Obama to cave in to this corporation, especially after we exposed all the cronyism going on between TransCanada and the State Department and TransCanada and the White House, this kind of corruption is precisely what’s on trial in parks and plazas around the world right now. And now that it’s been exposed, this has become the ultimate example. You know, as Bill said, we’re occupying—we’re occupying Wall Street because Wall Street is occupying the State Department. So there is a—there’s been a clear connection between, and a conversation between, these campaigns. I don’t think we would have won without Occupy Wall Street. I really—I can’t imagine how we could have. And this is what it means to change the conversation. And that’s why this whole idea—you know, "What are their demands?" and, you know, "What are they trying to accomplish?" There are already victories happening. And this is just one example of it.

Evidence that Occupy Wall Street is changing the debate

2011-11-11T14:54:00.002-05:00

See this little chart from Dylan Byers. Seems use of the words "income inequality" in the US media has shot up in the past two months.

Of course, you can't control for other factors. But this seems rather dramatic (a factor of 4), and I'm not sure what other factors there really are.

A Patrick Pexton state of mind

2011-11-08T23:18:00.003-05:00

1. Read the Washington Post op-ed page for a few days.
2. Try not to cry as Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton declares: "I think The Post needs conservative voices to balance its many liberal ones."

Bill Daley's demotion

2011-11-08T09:39:00.001-05:00

As Ezra Klein explains it: ".. when you're promising to orient much of the election around your support for financial reform and the Republican Party's opposition to Dodd-Frank, does it really make sense for Daley, an ex-JPMorgan Chase executive who was brought on partly to repair relationships with Wall Street, to lead the effort? Probably not. And so he isn't."

Let's call this what it is and nothing less: a victory.

Post Ombudsman defends social security attack

2011-11-06T00:04:00.002-04:00

Washington Post Ombudsman defends Lori Montgomery's social security hit job.

Strange American history

2011-11-04T13:15:00.001-04:00

The Onion: Remains Of Ancient Race Of Job Creators Found In Rust Belt

Important to keep them in office?

2011-11-02T11:17:00.001-04:00

Depressing alert: The Center on Budget has a report saying that what the supercommittee Dems are offering is well to the right of the horrible Bowles-Simpson and Gang of Six plans.

Joe Nocera and Robert Bork

2011-10-28T17:58:00.002-04:00

I'm catching up now on Joe Nocera's column from last weekend saying Robert Bork was really not very extreme at all, and it is congressional Democrats who started the gridlock craziness in opposing Bork.

You can't make this stuff up. The shame is that this is the NY Times op-ed page. They can get anyone they want. They have some good people. Some people who know what they're talking about. And some who don't. It's not like there is a shortage of smart people out there.

Nocera has just been a joke, period.

For more on Nocera and Bork: David Weigel, Jamie Raskin.

The murder of Brad Will, five years later

2011-10-27T09:19:00.005-04:00

Five years ago today, Brad Will was murdered in Oaxaca. The men responsible for his death have still not been brought to justice.

The U.S. is expanding its operations within Mexico, with the DEA reportedly taking a direct role in building up informants in the cartels. Meanwhile, we can't seem to get justice for our own guy.

Basic justice in much of Mexico is rather lacking. Until that's repaired (and this isn't stuff you do overnight), it will be rather difficult to restore security, short term or long. That should be the basic goal.

The U.S. if funding a chunk of Mexico's internal war now, through the Merida Initiative. That's pretty certainly bad in its current form. If the US is to fund Mexico, the funding should be going toward building the institutions of justice.

The U.S.'s relationship with Mexico is already pretty awkward. We're running our own operations, going around parts of the Mexican bureaucracy we (perhaps rightfully) don't trust. Demanding justice for our own guy isn't exactly going to be what tips the boat. And so what if it did? It would in fact fit in with, not clash with, what should be our main theme: building justice. The Bush and Obama administrations have, for whatever reasons, decided to just let it go.

Previously: A small step toward justice in Brad Will case: court forces release of activist Moreno (2/10), Three years later, no justice in Brad Will murder (10/09), In Brad Will case, Mexican government moves ahead with its farce (7/09) and Grim but expected development in Brad Will case (10/08).

Post fronts Facebook

2011-10-24T09:23:00.002-04:00

Re the Washington Post's front page Facebook story today... I've stopped counting. It just got too exhausting. I don't think those people are ever going to get it. It's too bad.

WaPo now giving away Sunday paper for 50 cents

2011-10-23T23:25:00.003-04:00

From the October 18th LivingSocial email in the DC area:

Many papers do discount deals to woo customers, who then stick with the subscription after the price goes up to the normal amount. But giving away a full year of Sunday papers for 50 cents each? That sounds extreme to me. And remember, the Post doesn't get that full amount -- usually these discount services, the Groupons and such, keep about 50%. So the Post is not getting 50 cents, but probably just somewhat more than half of that.

At some point I think the print advertisers would start getting unhappy about this. How do you know the people are looking at the Sunday paper if they're only paying 50 cents for it?

The Iranian "plot", follow-up

2011-10-23T22:54:00.002-04:00

This is back from October 12th, but I wanted to highlight it: Glenn Greenwald's rebuttal to the US claims on the Iranian 'plot'. I haven't followed the fall-out. But they sure backed down from some of those claims awfully quickly.

Obama thinks he can convince people he's suddenly populist. I doubt it.

2011-10-17T16:26:00.003-04:00

Peter Wallsten reporting in the Washington Post last week:

President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.

The move comes as the Occupy Wall Street protests gain momentum across the country and as polls show deep public distrust of the nation’s major financial institutions.

And it sets up what strategists see as a potent line of attack against Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a former investment executive whom Obama aides plan to portray as a wealthy Wall Street sympathizer.

The campaign can and will yet take many tacks. But it sure sounds like they're going to give this one a try.

It says something about the impact the Occupy Wall Street movement has had on the politics. The White House seems to genuinely fear a populist movement from the left leaving them behind. That's good that they fear it.

Wallsten rightly points out several ways in which the Obama campaign's strategy will be, um, tricky. The Administration bailed out the banks and is filled with the bank people (right up to Chief of Staff), and the campaign relies rather heavily on the bank people's money. How on earth does the campaign expect to fool people into thinking Obama is suddenly a populist? It seems unlikely.

The President can make pledges about what he'd like Congress to do, and what he'll do in 2013. But suffice to say it's not exactly likely he's going to give back all his donations from the bankers, and renounce all such future donations. Or that he'll get rid of the bankers who occupy many of the key posts in the administration.

The Obama Campaign thinks, I think, that it can pull this off because they'll be running against Mitt Romney. And when both general election candidates claim to be men of the people, team Obama thinks they can make a more convincing claim, and will win over the public.

I'm not so sure it would work that way. Romney, or whoever the Republican candidate, will come up with endless grist about how much the Obama Administration and campaign are one with the bankers. They won't even have to stretch the facts if they care not to. And while it would be awkward for Mitt himself to criticize Obama as being Big Money, he can have his surrogates do much of that work, or hand over their tips for free to the press.

Such a battle, over who is more populist, likely wouldn't be won based on the facts of which candidate gets somewhat less money from bankers than the other candidate. It would instead probably be won based on the usual: which candidate plays the refs better, or is perceived to be more like the guy you'd want to have a beer with. In the 2012 election, it may also be heavily dependent on which candidate people think will be more likely to get them a job. It's not clear yet which candidate will win on that. But populist rhetoric by itself, not backed up by action, probably won't fool that many people.

If team Obama thinks they'll necessarily win a populist battle because they'll be running against Romney, I think they're mistaken. Remember, many people thought George W. Bush was something of a folksy man of the people. They were unaware, or didn't care about, his wealth.

As progressives, I think we should judge Obama on these issues in the same way we should judge him on most issues: on his actual actions, not on his pledges. If he pledges, for example, that he'll actually prosecute some bankers, but that it will take time, so hold until 2013, we should mostly ignore the pledge. But if he actually did it, then perhaps we'd reward him with our votes.

The Iranian plot?

2011-10-11T15:38:00.003-04:00

It just seems hard to believe: that the Iranian government could have been behind a planned attack on the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington. Time will tell. But I think it likely that the story will turn out to be much softer on at least one of the two sides -- either the link to the Iranian government, or the extent to which an attack was planned. We shall see.

Politics 101

2011-10-11T14:02:00.001-04:00

Every once in a while I go back and read David Roberts' "Policy in an age of post-truth politics." You should too. Because he's right.

Right wing coffee

2011-10-11T09:08:00.003-04:00

Turns out Peet's Coffee & Tea is on the board of the far-right California Chamber of Commerce. Jonathan Zasloff has the story.

Will the Media Ever Get That a Movement Might Not Have a Leader?

2011-10-01T15:06:00.007-04:00

I didn't want to put "Tahrir Square" and "Occupy Wall Street" into the same headline, because I didn't want anyone to think I was saying there's much equivalent about them. There isn't. But they, along with the Tea Party, are examples of movements that don't have individual leaders. And in each case, the U.S. media has had an outright fit about it.

Start with the Tea Party, which the media have not been able to get enough of. Demonstrations with just a few dozen people often bring waves of reporters. And the accomplishments of the Tea Party are indeed huge: literally dozens of new radical members of congress, a change in Republican politics and indeed a fairly dramatic influence on domestic policy. The movement doesn't have a leader. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck may be heroes, but even their role is frequently overplayed.

But when the Washington Post did a big look at the Tea Party in 2010, it simply could not get over the lack of a leader: "a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process. ... As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general."

That the movement had accomplished so much without an individual leader could have been a lesson about the potential of movements without leaders. The article, like just about every other one, went the other direction: the lack of a leader was a sign of something wrong.

The story in Egypt, and in other movements in the Middle East, has been similar. For various reasons, these movements have been largely decentralized. And, suffice to say, often successful.

But even articles that reported on the decentralized nature of the movement sometimes led with an individual. And a lot of media were giddy about ElBaradei, and the possibility that he would be the 'leader' they were looking for.

Again, the lesson could have been that movements without an individual leader can be enormously effective. But few outlets considered that thinking, instead insisting that the decentralized nature was a hurdle to be overcome.

Look, there are two parts of this. One is just that stories about individuals are in high demand, particularly in certain forms of media, like magazines (have you read the New York Times Magazine in the last decade?). So there's a bias toward that sort of story. But the second is just this continued refusal to look at the successes of decentralized movements as evidence that leaderless movements can be effective.

Which brings us back to Zuccotti Park and the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. It's decentralized, which is often reported as a weakness. But as always, the leaderless system actually has many advantages and disadvantages. Everyone can have their opinion on which are greater. But the historical record shows that centralized and decentralized each guarantee neither success nor failure.

Obama at CBC speech: "stop complaining"

2011-09-26T14:46:00.004-04:00

Over the weekend, Obama spoke to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The transcript of the key part seems pretty horrific. The video, here, makes it more unclear exactly what Obama is talking about, and you can hear the audience continues to applaud. And the context of the whole speech makes it seem somewhat better. Maybe.

This was the ending:

I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We've got work to do, CBC.

I'll divide this into two parts:

1. the "stop complaining" part. The most charitable interpretation you can give is that Obama didn't mean this to CBC members specifically, but as sort of a general call. That's pretty generous to interpret it that way. Even if you do, who is the President accusing of just "complaining?" That doesn't seem accurate. Nor does it seem like a good idea to be saying.

Black unemployment is at 16.7%. Is there someone specific the President would like to accuse of "complaining" rather than being productive? The President has rejected nearly every single policy proposal from the CBC. These haven't been complaints. They've been... policy proposals.

2. the "We are going to press on. We've got work to do" part. Makes it sound like they're on the same team. The whole point, as everyone knows, is that Obama has, in fact, not been on their team.

More from Lauren Burke, Courtland Milloy.

This just in: WashPost teaches reporters how to properly use "links"

2011-09-23T11:56:00.001-04:00

Can't make this stuff up.

Eww Eww Eww

2011-09-21T09:18:00.000-04:00

Yucky alert. Not going to click on that stuff.

Op-Ed Columnist

The Re-election Tango

By MAUREEN DOWD

Bill shows Barry how to dance with adoring women.

Troy Davis denied clemency

2011-09-20T09:57:00.000-04:00

Happened this morning. See AJC.

How many continents are there?

2011-09-16T14:49:00.000-04:00

This!

Rhetorically playing for the other team

2011-09-16T13:31:00.002-04:00

Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware is "supportive" of Obama's jobs bill, but decided to throw in this real helpful line:

I think the best jobs bill that can be passed is a comprehensive long-term deficit-reduction plan. That's better than everything else the president is talking about -- combined.

The ELF documentary

2011-09-14T21:50:00.002-04:00

"If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front" is a new documentary just out. It goes deeper and with way more access than anything before. It aired on PBS Tuesday and it's viewable for free on their website for the next few weeks.

Somehow I had thought the ELF in the US went way back further; in fact it started in the later 90s. The documentary focused on one particular cell, so it was hard to get a sense of the whole scope. But do watch it.

Breaking from WaPo

2011-09-14T15:49:00.002-04:00

Take a look at the 5 stories below from today's "Afternoon Buzz" email from WaPo. What do #'s 1, 3, 4 and 5 have in common? They're not news! Who cares about these things? (re #4, the patent bill itself is a real story, but it's over -- it's done).

***

Today’s News Update

Justice Ginsburg aboard plane evacuated at Dulles International Airport

Ashley Halsey III and Patricia Sullivan

United Airlines Flight 586, scheduled to depart Dulles airport at 12:34 p.m. for San Francisco, has been evacuated after a fire was reportedly spotted in an engine.

More from Dr. Gridlock

No abortion ban in Senate D.C. spending bill

Ben Pershing

Advocates for District autonomy and abortion rights won a partial victory Wednesday, as the Senate released a draft spending bill that does not include a ban on the city using taxpayer money to fund abortions for low-income women.

U-Md. plans major classroom facility

Daniel de Vise

A $10 million gift from a Baltimore developer will enable the University of Maryland to build a “world-class teaching and learning center.”

Obama to sign patent bill in Alexandria

Ben Pershing

One week after going to Richmond to deliver a speech on jobs, President Obama will cross the Potomac River again Friday to sign legislation.

Aruba suspect’s family hires Casey Anthony’s attorney

Maggie Fazeli Fard

Jose Baez has been retained to defend Gary Giordano, who has been jailed in Aruba in connection with the disappearance of a Maryland woman.

DN does 9/11 anniversary

2011-09-12T13:44:00.003-04:00

Important stories, yes, but might be stretching it a bit here. From Democracy Now in last few days:

That's the 18th anniversary in Guatemala, of course. Nice round number. And Attica began on the 9th and ended on the 13th, so no particular significance for the 11th.

The Obama jobs speech

2011-09-09T15:29:00.003-04:00

I mean, hardly perfect, but, uh, this is largely in the direction we wanted, right? That is, for the President to finally propose stimulus, and campaign for it, and try to make it hard for Republicans to vote against it (fore more, see Jonathan Cohn). Put me in the camp believing this is not impossible. It's been easy to forget it, but the truth has been and remains that a lot of Congressional Republicans are plenty vulnerable.

Assuming the Worst: How the Rikers Island Hurricane Irene Story Went From Innuendo to Absurdity

2011-08-31T13:58:00.020-04:00

You can't say it wasn't a provocative headline: "Locked Up and Left Behind: Hurricane Irene and the Prisoners on New York’s Rikers Island." The story, by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway, co-editors of Solitary Watch, went up on Friday, and was also posted on Mother Jones on Saturday.

It took off quickly. New York Magazine conjured up the possibility of "letting prisoners wallow in half-flooded cinder-block cell buildings." TIME reported that "Bloomberg has been frequently echoing his call for people to get away from Hurricane Irene's path as soon as possible. But if you find yourself among the 12,000 incarcerated inmates at Riker's Island, you'll be waiting the storm out, despite the fact its 400 acres are built on landfill." The irreplaceable Center for Constitutional Rights issued a statement Saturday saying it was "extremely concerned" that there were no plans to evacuate the island for the hurricane, and that the Mayor "evacuated hundreds of thousands of people from vulnerable neighborhoods in low-lying areas just like Rikers Island yet seems prepared to leave the roughly 12,000 men and women jailed there to their fate."

Days later, most (though not all) of the contentions in the original article have been debunked. What's left is an embarrassing tale of bloggers, reporters, tweeters and advocates making broad statements based on limited information, assuming the worst and hurting their own credibility for taking on the real injustice next time.

**

At Mayor Bloomberg's press conference on Friday afternoon, a reporter asked, "Rikers Island - is there any evacuation for that?" The mayor replied, "We are not evacuating Rikers Island," and moved on to answering another part of the question. Bloomberg was terse (40:10 in the video) -- just as he was with many of the questions in the press conference.

In their article, Casella and Ridgeway charged that "in response to a reporter's question, the mayor stated in no uncertain terms (and with a hint of annoyance) that one group of New Yorkers on vulnerable ground will be staying put." And then without much further information, they plowed ahead and started the saga:

New York City is surrounded by small islands and barrier beaches, and a glance at the city's evacuation map reveals all of them to be in Zone A (already under a mandatory evacuation order) or Zone B–all, that is, save one. Rikers Island, which lies in the waters between Queens and the Bronx, is not highlighted at all, meaning it is not to be evacuated under any circumstances.

According to the New York City Department of Correction's website, more than three-quarters of Rikers Island's 400 acres are built on landfill–which is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters.

The city's flood evacuation map indeed showed Rikers not to be in flood zones A, B or C. It seemed surprising, certainly, and a ripe subject for further inquiry. But many chose to jump beyond inquiry and assume the worst: that Rikers inmates were being left behind to risk disaster.

The Mayor's Office tried to put the matter to rest. A spokeswoman emailed reporters:

We carefully reviewed Rikers Island, as we have done with the entire city, and no section of Rikers Island facilities are in Zone A.
Rikers Island facilies are not in low-lying areas, it's not a coastal location and, like nearby small islands Roosevelt Island and City Island, it does not need to be evacuated. We focused on the areas where real dangers exist.
A full Corrections Department staff will remain on Rikers Island and the facility is a fully self-sustaining entity, prepared to operate and care for inmates in extended emergency conditions."

Mayor Bloomberg made similar statements in response to a question at a press conference on Saturday. The story had lost most of its legs.

Yet it kept running. On Monday's Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman noted that "even though Hurricane Irene prompted a series of extraordinary measures in New York City ... officials did not take any steps to evacuate some 12,000 prisoners held in the city jail on Rikers Island." Casella and Ridgeway added updates to their original story, but rather than admitting error, simply re-emphasized the parts of the story that hadn't been debunked.

Many of the propagators of the story had mentioned the landfill angle -- that Rikers was particularly vulnerable because landfills, in the words of Casella and Ridgeway, are "generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters." If the city was saying Rikers was above Zone A, maybe the island was still at risk because it is a landfill.

That notion was unceremoniously trounced on Monday by none other than James Ridgeway himself. In response to Amy Goodman's broad introduction, Ridgeway chose to start here:

Well, in the first place, Amy, I don’t really see what whether it’s built on landfill or not has to do with this.

Ouch. Not only did he not admit he was the one who had propagated the landfill argument, he admonished Goodman for bringing it up.

**

Is the whole island indeed high enough to be above not just Zone A, but zones B and C, as the map shows? Almost, but not quite. When I called the Mayor's press office on Monday, they directed me to the Department of Corrections. The DOC spokeswoman, Sharman Stein, said in an email that the vast majority of the island is higher, in no flood zone. Some outer parts of the island, including one jail, are in Zone C, which means areas that could be flooded in a category 3 or 4 hurricane. "The first floor of that one facility may be vulnerable to flooding and in that case, those inmates would be relocated from the first floor to higher floors in the jail or moved temporarily to other facilities on Rikers Island," says Stein.

(For the record, Stein adds that there were no storm-related incidents. Any damage was confined to trees and possibly trailers).

It's not clear why the city's map doesn't show part of Rikers as being in Zone C, and that merits follow-up. It doesn't seem like the worst offense, though.

**

There is one area of the saga where the critics have a grievance that remains unresolved. Casella and Ridgeway pointed to a NYT City Room Q&A (with answers provided by Times staff, un-signed) which said:

According to the city’s Department of Correction, no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another.

These words were cited over and over again in the past several days; no one had any other information. This hadn't been the original focus of the critics, but it was becoming it, and rightly so. Was the Times getting this right?

This was as specific as Stein would go:

The DOC maintains plans and periodically updates its plans to respond to a variety of disasters. ... Any emergency impacting the whole of Rikers Island would also be affecting the region. It is the position of this administration that the personal safety of its staff and the inmate population be preserved and as such, evacuation to the extent it may be warranted would occur. The DOC response to a disaster of this magnitude would be integrated of course, into a city or region-wide strategy.

It's not a satisfying answer, though it's better than what we had before. Certainly it merits follow-up from bigger fish than myself.

Remember that there is no evacuation plan, at least not one publicized, for the entire island of Manhattan. It would be rather hard to do. Rikers is a different matter; if a disaster were to strike that impacted the entire island, but not the rest of the region, there ought to be a plan for that. And DOC's not saying there is one.

Evacuating all of New York City quickly is impossible. In such a case, lots of people, be it at Rikers or anywhere, might be left behind. Public officials understandably don't want to discuss such scenarios publicly. Pressing them to make claims that everyone will get out alive can be unhelpful.

But the matter of a disaster that struck Rikers specifically, beyond a single jail but not beyond the island, needs to be addressed more directly by DOC. This saga has illuminated that. We don't know the whole story yet, and we need to.

**

Throwing a bunch of darts at a board and seeing what sticks is not a good practice for journalists or advocates. Yet that's what happened here. Many darts were thrown (publicly), most fell, and one is sticking with question marks.

The city -- in this case the Mayor's Office and the Department of Corrections -- should be more transparent than they are. But you can't erase the reality that these are overworked civil servants, busy responding to an unusual weekend storm.

The practice of throwing a question at them and then assuming the worst when they don't get back to you within 24 hours is not a fair one. That's not what transparency is. You could leave a message with the White House asking if Obama is Muslim, and then when your call isn't returned, you could post "White House Refuses to Deny Rumors That President is Muslim!" But you don't do that.

If a deputy mayor of a city of more than 8 million people responds to your tweets about Rikers with a pretty good answer for 140 characters, but doesn't fully answer all of your question, you can still complain if you want. But that's not news.

The critics don't come out of this well. The usually-sharp Colorlines objected that "Major publications in New York city avoided the story." London's Daily Mail said: "The city's official evacuation map and you'll see that pretty much every island and coastal zone is classified as either a Zone A, B, or C. ... While Irene may give New York a heavy soaking, the possibility of flooded prison cells remain, nymag.com reports." An Indymedia post by Steven Argue declared: "Prisoners abandoned to die."

Some of the responsibility goes to the original storymakers, though certainly a lot of this is a lesson in how a wrong story goes wildly wrong after it starts. It was like a game of telephone.

**

I asked Casella and Ridgeway what criteria evacuation decisions should be based on, if Rikers being above zone A wasn't good enough. Casella says by email:

We are not geologists or emergency planners. We are journalists, and reported what seemed to us some notable facts: first, that Rikers is the only small island that is not in ANY evacuation zone, second, that there is NO evacuation plan for the island, third, that there is no transparency regarding these matters on the part of city government, which initially dismissed the question without any kind of explanation.

But they had gone so much further. They insinuated the similarity to prisoners left behind during Katrina. That story was an important lesson, and one that hasn't been learned in all parts of the country. But it wasn't relevant here.

Most importantly, they started the thrust of the story, that inmates on Rikers were being "left behind" for this storm, and that that put them in danger. They weren't in danger. There are other injustices out there -- right at Rikers Island, in fact, not to mention in many other places.

This saga proved mostly a distraction, one that could have been avoided if everyone had not assumed the worst. Next time.

Update 9/2: On the same day that I posted this, Casella and Ridgeway posted a follow-up story with similar response from the DOC as I got.

Boarding planes the wrong way

2011-08-31T13:40:00.002-04:00

Empirical experiment shows that, sure enough, boarding planes back to front is the worst idea.

Nine Weeks Later, NY Times Corrects Eat'n Park Error

2011-08-29T09:47:00.005-04:00

I wrote in June about how a NYT food section article about hometown snacks provided in DC congressional offices incorrectly said that Eat'n Park's headquarters in Homestead, PA, were within the district of Jason Altmire. Homestead is actually in Mike Doyle's district, I pointed out. The article was by Jennifer Steinhauer.

The Times was informed of the error the day the article ran, but the paper did nothing. Only after the office of the Public Editor became involved in the matter did the Times do anything. The correction ran earlier this month, on August 10th, nine weeks after the error:

An article on June 8 about local foods that members of Congress give out in their Washington offices misidentified the Congressional district that includes Homestead, Pa., the home of Eat ’n Park, which makes a cookie given out by Representative Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania. It is the 10th District, not the 4th, Mr. Altmire’s district. A reader pointed out the error in an e-mail the day the article was published and again on July 20. This correction was delayed because the e-mail went astray at The Times.

New Yorker cartoons

2011-08-26T13:15:00.004-04:00

In Slate, James Sturn describes the process of trying to get a cartoon in the New Yorker.

Arne Duncan tries to co-opt Matt Damon; Matt says no

2011-08-25T09:33:00.003-04:00

Last month I mentioned Matt Damon's speech against high-stakes testing at the teachers rally in DC.

Now the Post's Valerie Strauss reports that US DOE tried hard and failed to woo Damon:

According to two people familiar with the efforts, the administration tried to arrange a meeting with Damon and government officials, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, before the July 30 march.

There was no meeting. Go Matt.

Train runs over Thai vegetable market

2011-08-24T11:03:00.002-04:00

In a good way, not a bad one. (h/t Grist)

Joe Nocera has no idea what he's talking about, part #256

2011-08-24T09:40:00.002-04:00

Laura Clawson at Kos responds to Nocera's NLRB/Boeing column.

Update: much much more here on Nocera getting the basics wrong on this.

Poor Detroit

2011-08-22T12:17:00.000-04:00

Alas: "CU-Boulder study: Dog-poop bacteria found in air over Detroit, Cleveland"

Credit cards

2011-08-16T21:24:00.000-04:00

Visa Exposed As Massive Credit Card Scam

O probably will want to have some union people for the reelection thing

2011-08-16T21:19:00.002-04:00

Obama, in Iowa, on Monday, doing much better:

There are a whole range of things that people take for granted, even if they’re not in a union, that they wouldn’t have had if it had not been for collective bargaining. (Applause.) So I think it is very important, whether you are in a union or not -- and I speak particularly to young people, because you’ve grown up at a time when in a lot of circles “union” somehow is a dirty word -- to understand all this is is people joining together so they’ve got a little more leverage; so they’ve got better working conditions, better wages; they can better support their family.
And a lot of us entered into the middle class because our parent or a grandparent was in a union. Remember that. (Applause.) When I hear this kind of anti-union rhetoric and anti-union assaults, I’m thinking these folks have amnesia. They don’t remember that that helped build our middle class and strengthen our economy.

The Bryant Park Dash

2011-08-15T09:26:00.003-04:00

There are tons of great videos on youtube showing the Bryant Park Dash, where everyone runs in with their blankets to grab a good spot for the Monday night movie. I like this aerial view (jump to :40) which makes it seem less chaotic than all of the ground-level shots.

Where the White House goes next

2011-08-14T12:18:00.003-04:00

I recommend "White House Debates Fight On Economy" from the front page of Sunday's NYT. It's hard to know what to believe about what's actually going on in the White House, so I think it should all be taken with a grain of salt. But it's interesting and scary.

Binyamin Appelbaum and Helene Cooper describe competing factions in the White House, with the political team (favoring small economic measures) probably set to win, and report that:

Administration officials, frustrated by the intransigence of House Republicans, have increasingly concluded that the best thing Mr. Obama can do for the economy may be winning a second term, with a mandate to advance his ideas on deficit reduction, entitlement changes, housing policy and other issues.
...
Republicans contend that the Obama administration has mismanaged the nation’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Mr. Obama’s political advisers are struggling to define a response, aware that their prospects may rest on persuading voters that the results of the first term matter less than the contrast between their vision for the next four years and the alternative economic ideas offered by Republicans.

This "Just wait, we'll do better in 2013" doesn't sound like a winning political message to me. Obviously this will suffice for some life-long Democrats. But to a campaign so obsessed with winning "independents" this seems a rather stunningly bad message. They're not saying this message publicly yet, but someone's letting it out to a reporter here. If they actually take the next step and say it publicly, the Republican candidates will go after it fiercely.

Are unemployed people going to vote for a candidates who says "just wait a year and then we'll get on this economy thing" or the candidates who says "I'm running against the guy who told you to just wait a year"?

The articles goes on:

Mr. Obama and his aides are skeptical that voters will reward bold proposals if those ideas do not pass Congress. It is their judgment that moderate voters want tangible results rather than speeches.

I think there's some truth to this. But if this were fully true -- that having votes on things you aren't going to win isn't politically worth it -- you wouldn't see Republicans doing this all the time over the last many years. They know what they're doing.

And of course in the bigger picture, once you've publicly said "we're not actually going to win this vote" then you've lost much of the purpose to it. It would be one thing if this administration had tried to push Republicans into hard votes -- if it had actually tried what should have been one of the top strategies. But it didn't. And remember, a significant number of House Republicans are actually in moderate districts with close contests likely for 2012. The White House shouldn't try to negotiate with them; instead it should design bills that would create jobs and be politically difficult for these members to vote against. And then take the next step of working their districts.

Joe Nocera, Aug 2011: We Should Totally Focus on Jobs Now!! With Bipartisanship!

2011-08-13T15:19:00.006-04:00

Coming off his recent gaffes, Joe Nocera gives over his column in Saturday's Times to Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, who has an exciting new idea! Boycott campaign contributions! Like this:

The contribution boycott, as Schultz envisions it, would be completely bipartisan; indeed, it would have to be for it to work. Schultz isn’t calling on Washington to come up with solutions that are aligned with his political leanings (which are Democratic). Rather, he wants solutions, agreed to by both parties, that will help get the country back on its feet.
He believes Congress needs to come back from the August recess now, instead of waiting until September. Then, he says, the president and Congress should hammer out a debt deal, which will restore confidence. And finally, and most importantly, they should start focusing “maniacally” on the nation’s most pressing concern: job creation. Once they’ve done that, the boycott would be lifted.

Yes, solutions agreed to by both parties to get the country back on his feet. Not making this up. It's almost as if Schultz and Nocera have not had their eyes open for the last several years. Of course, they have had their eyes open, which makes it all the more scary.

Oh, and we need to push congress and the president to focus more intensely on jobs! Great, where were brave campaigners like Schultz in 2009 again? Not exactly on the barricades pushing for more economic stimulus.

The Times op-ed page has long differentiated itself from so many others by not filling itself with "we just all need to get along" pundits. It's particularly sad that they picked this particular era as a time to hire one.

Panda FOIA

2011-08-12T09:08:00.004-04:00

The Washington Times fronts a story on the behind-the-scenes discussions among US diplomats about trying to convince China to allow Tai Shan to stay here.

Taken together, dozens of pages of State Department correspondence concerning the famous zoo resident provide an inside look at “panda diplomacy” at work.

The story doesn't come up with that much; we still don't know what discussions did or didn't happen between the U.S. and China. We just know high-up people in the U.S. were involved in discussing the possibilities. Which doesn't seem that surprising. Still, foia-ing the panda case. Only in DC.

The American Drought

2011-08-11T11:47:00.001-04:00

TIME has an incredible gallery of photos by George Steinmetz showing the current drought affecting swaths of the country.

A380 Porn

2011-08-10T22:34:00.001-04:00

This is better than any other gallery I've seen -- from LATimes, photos of the interiors of the A380s from each of the six airlines that have them.

The new Rent

2011-08-09T09:28:00.002-04:00

The NYT looks at the new off-broadway Rent. The original Rent ended just three years ago. Apparently the new one sticks relatively close to the original.

I'm conflicted.

WaPo Alternate Universe: Obama "Held Firm to His Initial Bottom Line" in Debt Ceiling Talks

2011-08-06T11:01:00.007-04:00

The Washington Post -- faster than ever! -- has a front pager Saturday about congressional Democrats being upset with President Obama for his negotiating tactics over the debt ceiling ("Obama's friends unsettled by debt talks; Some Democrats fault willingness to compromise with GOP"). Toward the end, writer Peter Wallsten throws in this stunner:

By the final weekend of talks, as an agreement came into view, Obama held firm to his initial bottom line. No default, no second debt-limit vote.

Back in the real world, the President's initial bottom line was something rather different.

The White House had long called for a clean debt ceiling raise. As late as April 11 Jay Carney said: "we do not need to play chicken with our economy by linking the raising of the debt ceiling to anything. We should do that right away." And the following day: "we don’t believe, going back to questions I had yesterday, that there should be a link between efforts to address our long-term deficit problem and debt problem and the imperative of raising the debt ceiling." It was on April 15 that the President changed the line on including spending cuts at all, saying "I think it's absolutely right that it's not going to happen without some spending cuts." White House officials immediately insisted the administration still wanted a clean bill, though it was too late.

With that bottom line dropped, the White House moved to another big one: that if a bill was not "clean" it should include new revenues. The Administration pushed multiple plans to this effect, with substantial new revenues. The Washington Post, and pretty much every outlet, covered this rather extensively. On July 21, the White House was still insisting it wanted new revenue: "Anyone reporting a $3 trillion deal without revenues is incorrect. POTUS believes we need a balanced approach that includes revenue" tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, WH Communications Director. I think I even remember Obama giving a decent prime-time address on July 25th: "How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries? How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for? That’s not right. It’s not fair."

But it was becoming clear the White House was losing yet again, and it eventually agreed to a deal with no new revenues.

Only in the Post's alternate universe was the President's initial bottom line "No default, no second debt-limit vote."

Gmail catching up to the competition on basic feature, years later

2011-08-05T17:45:00.003-04:00

From TechCrunch: Gmail Gets A Preview Pane (Hooray!), Needs Work (Aww)

Hey didn't Eudora and Outlook (ick) have this feature like, more than a decade ago? Also, Thunderbird (2003).

Alright, 95% of you readers who swear by gmail.. Bring on your snarky comments in defense of your beloved email system.

Six years later, a batch of justice in New Orleans

2011-08-05T15:34:00.001-04:00

From the Times-Picayune:

A jury this morning convicted all five New Orleans police officers accused in the Danziger Bridge shootings, which took place amid the chaos after Hurricane Katrina and claimed the lives of two civilians, and a cover-up of startling scope that lasted almost five years.

The verdicts were a huge victory for federal prosecutors, who won on virtually every point, save for their contention that the shootings amounted to murder. The jury rejected that notion, finding that the officers violated the victims' civil rights, but that their actions did not constitute murder.

How the polls show GOP won debt ceiling battle

2011-08-05T09:13:00.002-04:00

From the NYTimes poll this morning:

The Republicans compromised too little, a majority of those polled said. All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations.

72 and 66, that's really not much difference. Especially considering one party held the U.S. economy hostage and the other didn't. Sure, Obama did better -- only 47 disapproved of his handling of the negotiations -- but that's to be expected. The fair comparison is between congressional Ds and Rs.

Huge win for the GOP.

If we say it, it will be!

2011-08-03T11:09:00.002-04:00

From NYT today:

But Jim Messina, the manager of the president’s re-election bid, said the discord among Democrats in Washington did not reflect what campaign officials were hearing from rank-and-file supporters of the president through nightly telephone calls and door-knocking.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm, and I don’t see anything as contentious as this coming down the pike in terms of an intraparty situation,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president. “There will be a unified, motivated and very aggressive Democratic Party supporting the president next year.”

Obvi!

The details

2011-08-01T14:51:00.003-04:00

See Brian Beutler and Nate Silver on the details of the debt limit thing, including a few better than expected things -- mainly how much of the cuts are military, and how there's not that much cutting in the first year. These are very important. They still don't make the events of the last week anything less than terrible, but they're important.

NYT with some good economic reporting

2011-07-31T23:41:00.004-04:00

Binyamin Appelbaum and Catherine Rampell have a great article on the front page of Monday's Times, "From Big Spending to Big Cuts, All While the Economy Stalls." It looks at what the actual research says regarding cutting spending in an economy like ours. Nothing crazy or new or groundbreaking here, but it lays out nicely how this is not such a good idea.

The best part is where they get some Chicago economist talking about his theory that it's actually the opposite:

Some conservative economists argue that even the immediate impact of a deal could be positive. Classic economic theory holds that people respond to the growth of government by spending less of their own money, because they assume that taxes will increase. A reduction in the federal debt therefore should encourage people to spend more of their money.

“From an accounting point of view, it seems obvious that you would reduce G.D.P. if you cut government spending,” said Randall Kroszner, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a former Fed governor appointed by Mr. Bush. “But the key is really the impact on consumption and investment. If you reduce government spending and if people think that reduces uncertainty about the tax burden down the line, they may be more comfortable with spending.”
Economists who have examined the historical record, however, say the evidence is clear that the immediate impact of spending cuts outweighs any short-term benefits to confidence.
“When you look at the history of these things, the finding is that we shouldn’t be kidding ourselves,” said Paolo Mauro, chief of the fiscal affairs department at the International Monetary Fund and the editor of a book of case studies, “Chipping Away at Public Debt.” “When you do fiscal adjustment in the near term, it does have an adverse impact on economic growth.”

Ouch.

WaPo asks: Did Obama maybe actually win this battle?

2011-07-31T23:08:00.003-04:00

The Post has an article up a couple hours now trying to come up with a case that maybe Obama did alright ("Did Obama capitulate — or is this a cagey move?")

Not exactly the most impressive work from Peter Wallsten and David Nakamura. They even go for this:

And Obama, branded a socialist by many Republicans for his big-spending stimulus program and his health-care overhaul, can declare himself a deficit hawk as he courts the political middle.

He could indeed do that! Turns out, though, there aren't all that many independents who care that much about the deficit. Yes, over the last year, polls show people care somewhat more about the deficit (not surprising considering the power and money going into the issue, and constant barrage from the columnists). But it's still mostly folks on the right. The independents who are actually in play, there's not much evidence you'd win many of them over by being a deficit hawk. And there is evidence that you lose a lot of them by threatening social security.

The White House presumably does indeed really think they can win over some independents this way. And they can tell that to the Washington Post. But the Post should give us some basic reporting on what the evidence is that the White House's strategy has a chance for success.

The debt limit big picture

2011-07-31T14:51:00.002-04:00

Greg Sargent on how the GOP is on the verge of a victory that is not just unbelievably huge, but unprecedented in manner.

Go Matt Damon

2011-07-31T14:50:00.003-04:00

Here's Matt Damon's speech against testing yesterday at the teachers rally in DC. Kudos to Matt for not having a problem with criticizing the administration. Some other celebrities could use help on this front.

The long-term damage President Obama is doing to the country

2011-07-28T18:37:00.002-04:00

As Ari Berman eloquently lays it out today, by trying to out-austerity the austerity-hawks, "President Obama has successfully used the bully pulpit to undermine the case for progressive governance."

It's tragic. A bigger point is that in weighing the Obama presidency -- discussing the good and the bad -- we shouldn't forget the long-term damage he is doing on many fronts in defining American debate and influencing public opinion.

He's throwing current and future progressive goals under the bus. That would be one thing if there were short-term gain; in this case, the Administration has only lost the short-term battle, not won, by trying to out austerity-hawk the austerity hawks.

The slightly revised happy meals

2011-07-28T14:03:00.003-04:00

Michele Simon argues that the slightly-less-unhealthy Happy Meals are not in fact a small step in the right direction, but not a step in the right direction at all. Remember, McDonald's is only trying to remain in control of the process.

Saturday Night Special: Metro Quietly Announces Red Line Trains Will be 30 Minutes Apart This Saturday Night

2011-07-25T23:28:00.003-04:00

Metro quietly announced Monday afternoon that it would be providing less service during a single tracking operation than it previously had when single tracking the exact same section of track. As a result, trains on the entire red line will be 30 minutes apart this Saturday evening, beginning at 9pm.

All weekend, trains will be single tracking between Van Ness and Friendship Heights, as well as between Takoma and Forest Glen. No surprise. But Metro's plan is:

Red Line trains will depart endpoint terminals about every 30 minutes. On Saturday and Sunday between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., additional Red Line trains will operate between Van Ness and Fort Totten, resulting in service about every 10 minutes between these stations.

That's a new system. On the weekend of June 17, Metro single tracked those same sections -- yet provided 24 minute headways for the outer section of the lines, and for the entire line after 9pm (with 12 minutes on the inner section, until 9pm). And Metro has done that arrangement other times the Takoma-Forest Glen stretch was single tracked, too. (Takoma-Forest Glen is longer, and thus harder to single track, than Van Ness to Friendship Heights).

This time, it will be 30 minutes, not 24.

There was a time when far fewer people rode the metro on the weekend. Today, Saturday nights are bustling. This weekend, Metro will ask us to walk up to a station, and perhaps see an empty arrival board -- leaving us not knowing if our train is coming in 21 minutes, 30 minutes, or more.

Metro could continue to operate some of the core-segment trains after 9pm, and provide a 15 minute service, with alternate trains going the full length of the line. In fact, 15 minutes is what the regular schedule calls for. Metro is choosing not to do it.

A lot of us have tried hard to give Metro the benefit of the doubt. Weekend construction is a necessary evil; semi-permanent manual operation of trains has led to horrible spacing messes. These problems are somewhat beyond Metro's control. Having trains 30 minutes apart, when they used to be 24 -- and then not providing 15 minute service in the core segment -- are not issues beyond Metro's control, though.

Metro is making it awfully hard for us to want to give it a chance on the weekend anymore.

The pending trade agreements

2011-07-25T10:38:00.002-04:00

Dan Froomkin has a good rundown of where things stand on the Korea, Colombia and Panama trade deals ("Free Trade Deals: Lobbying Fever Foreshadows Winners, Losers.") Some small domestic manufacturers are lobbying against it (small business!), but don't have much clout compared to the multinationals. And though dozens of tea party types in congress had campaigned against such trade agreements, most of them have now been whipped into line.

The echolocation guy

2011-07-23T19:01:00.002-04:00

From Men's Journal a few months ago, a long article about Daniel Kish, a blind man who navigates the world by making sounds and hearing what comes back -- bat style. There are various videos on youtube, too.

How bad are CAP's education politics?

2011-07-23T18:02:00.003-04:00

Education is one of those issues where the political lines are all weird. Or, I might say, an issue where otherwise sensible people lose it.

The Center for American Progress is fairly progressive on most issues, but not so much on education. In fact on Wednesday they're going to be jointly issuing a report on education with the American Enterprise Institute. Not good.

NYTimes goes with style that terrorism by definition depends on whether Muslims involved

2011-07-23T11:48:00.002-04:00

The NYT has this in the version of the Norway story online at the moment:

Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible.

In previous cases the NYTimes has used "terrorist" and "terrorism" inconsistently. In this case, the article is outright saying that it doesn't consider the acts of a Norwegian right-wing dude -- capable of killing 80 people! -- as being "terrorist". But if an Islamic group is linked to the crime, than "terrorists" will indeed have been responsible.

Not a good day for the Times.

Lots more on this from Glenn Greenwald.

NYT names David Leonhardt DC bureau chief

2011-07-22T13:27:00.000-04:00

Very cool. A good day.

The NYT Facebook / Israel / Palestine article

2011-07-21T21:41:00.005-04:00

See first Ethan Bronner's article from the NYT a couple weeks ago, Virtual Bridge Allows Strangers in Mideast To Seem Less Strange, then Ali Abunimah's response, and then the back-and-forth Abunimah has posted.

The Times article reported on a Facebook page where Palestinian and Israeli youth are hanging out. I wouldn't have thought to make that much of it one way or the other.

Abunimah lays out an extensive case that the article misrepresents the basic facts. Bronner had written that the page had "22,500 active users" - 60 percent of whom are Arab. Abunimah went through the page, and argues that there are in fact only a handful of Arabs who have any sort of regular participation at all on the page. I haven't gone through it, but these seems fairly convincing, and a relevant indictment of the NYT article, because it's a pretty central point. (There's a lot more to the dispute, but this is one of the key points of contention).

Why is Abunimah arguing, I wondered at first, that Palestinian youth in fact aren't interested in peaceful chit-chat with Israeli youth? Because:

Moreover, while falsely presenting the project as popular with Palestinians and Arabs, Bronner ignores the vast body of Palestinian public opinion that opposes such projects for violating the Palestinian civil society call for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

This is the part I have no sense of, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who does. What's the polling data actually say? How homogenous or diverse is opinion among Palestinian youth these days, and what does it say? Regardless of their views on the state of the situation in general, what are their views toward Israeli civilians? If Palestinian youth do in fact overwhelmingly shun contact with Israelis, is it even largely because of the civil society call for a boycott, or not? (I don't know the answer to this stuff, or how clear an answer there is).

At this point, I'm thinking, the NYT article seems to be a bullshit piece, trying to make something of this Facebook page, when it really has few participants. I don't know what Palestinian youth actually think, but a handful of them participating in a Facebook page doesn't provide much information one way or another.

But the weird twist is that in the 10th paragraph of a 23 paragraph article, Bronner throws in this: “At a time when Arabs generally shun contact with Israelis...”

That's exactly the view that Abunimah has of the situation, and what he would have wanted the article to flesh out. But it's frustrating -- misleading -- that Bronner just slips it in, without getting into the larger point. He's admitting that his article is something of a "the general trend is X, but look, here's Y going on over here" piece.

Those kinds of articles can be interesting. They're certainly popular, and editors know it. But they can also be rather misleading. And it's especially a problem when point X has barely been examined and reported in the first place.