If John King had half of a brain he would have framed the question a different way. It shouldn't have been about your ex giving a sit down interview and telling the world what a bad husband you were. It should have been about you being a first class hypocrite and liar. MORE...Howie P.S.: As an observer of American politics, I have developed quite a high tolerance for "crap," but Newt's poutrage is just too much.
Inside Story US 2012, discusses with guests: Amy Goodman, a broadcast journalist and the host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news programme; Rocky Anderson, a 2012 presidential candidate for the newly-formed Justice Party and the former mayor of Salt Lake City; and Eleanor Clift, a journalist for Newsweek and a former White House correspondent.
I agree with a lot of Peter Daou's analysis. I especially agree on three points. First, the culture of Washington DC is absolutely toxic and really does resemble a bad movie about high school. Second, the political Establishment, including the Democratic Establishment, is not in tune with progressive politics. Third, if we're ever going to stop losing ground to the radical right, the Democratic Establishment is going to have to learn to work with the activist base. Where I have a problem with Daou's take on things is that he places all the blame for this less-than-ideal relationship on the Democratic Establishment and he gives the progressive blogosphere a complete pass. MORE...
At the root of the problem is this: the GOP benefits from a superior communications mechanism with which to shape and reshape conventional wisdom. Faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions — Republicans almost always choose the latter, bolstered by a highly sophisticated framing and messaging infrastructure crafted and funded over decades. MORE...
Howie P.S.: Daou ends his piece with thisThe one thing that gives me hope is that the inexorable march of human progress is the activist left’s secret weapon, ultimately trumping manufactured conventional wisdom, the deceptions of the right and the weakness of the Democratic establishment. It’s a harrowing journey, but eventually progress wins out.
Everything has been on the GOP's terms in this debate, since the President pretty much adopted the GOP's debt/deficit talking points. MORE...Howie P.S.: More on the deal from Bloomberg and the San Francisco Chronicle:
A compromise has appeared to hinge on guaranteeing a second round of spending cuts beyond the roughly $1 trillion in overlapping savings in Reid's plan and one by Boehner that the House, solely with Republican support, passed July 29. The second round of cuts most likely involve rewriting U.S. laws on entitlements and taxes, something the tentative framework would assign to the new joint congressional committee.And, finally, from "Welcome to Teapocalypse" (Mark Sumner-Daily Kos):
Such a mechanism is called a "trigger," and it would force the across-the-board spending cuts if Congress failed to approve the committee's recommendations. MORE...
...somehow, a good fragment of people got into a position where their operating rules were: big business & billionaires=good, government & ordinary people=bad. How this happened isn't completely clear, though it's just possible the TV and radio channels that big business & billionaires set up expressly to flog this message 24/7/365.25 had something to do with it. In any case, it's an admirably simple bit of code. A brain running this program requires less power than a cell phone and still has room for the deluxe edition of Angry Birds. MORE...
Balance Bias (bal-ance bi-as)
1. The assumption that there is truth and legitimacy to both sides of every dispute.
2. The iron law in political journalism that one side in a debate can never be exclusively right, or have a monopoly on the facts.
This increasingly disorderly fight over raising the debt ceiling has not only exposed the petty dysfunctions of the US Congress, it has also revealed a core failure of American political journalism. The press has made the debt fight the top story for the last two weeks [1]—even accounting for half of all stories on radio and cable news—but much of the coverage has failed to tell the very basics of what is happening.I don’t mean how this deficit was created (by tax cuts, Medicare and recessions [2]), or why the debt ceiling gets raised (in response to past decisions by Congress). That stuff matters, but at bottom, this is a story about politics, not the bond market.
This fight started with a partisan threat to sabotoge the economy in order to extract policy concessions, but then, when Democrats offered most of the concessions, it ricocheted and morphed into something else: a high-stakes lightning round of intramural GOP posturing. MORE...
Why the palpable nervousness and purging of all things spontaneous?
Just look what happened to ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich after the infamous "Meet the Press" appearance where he dissed House Republicans' plan to privatize Medicare as "right-wing social engineering." An Iowa Republican grasped the candidate's hand, held on, telling Gingrich he was a disgrace and should leave the race. It aired on MSNBC's "Daily Rundown" the next morning.
Another gambit is bait and switch. No cameras or computer-stained wretches at the McDonnell fund raiser, but the McKenna adviser quickly added that "we'd like to get you and Rob together" ASAP. McKenna had already worked an interview to cop a flavorless, favorable Seattle Times editorial page column.
With an increasingly partisan press and blogosphere, a new tactic has emerged: allow access or confide in only to those who agree with you. Palin and ex-Govs. Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee use Fox News as a Republican house organ to disclose their intentions. Or make your announcement by video; nobody will interrupt with a critical question. MORE...
This may come as a surprise to those of you who are new to politics or the Northwest: for a while, The Seattle Times was by far the local newspaper that did online content the best. Sure, it was mostly that they had a guy (Postman) who was willing to do a regularly updated, well written blog. It wasn’t like they had a brilliant strategy, they just sort of lucked into it, as evidenced by the fact that (a) it was just one guy and not the whole newsroom (b) they let him go and (c) since he left they haven’t come close to recreating it. MORE...
The capture and killing of Osama bin Laden is unarguably the biggest foreign policy news to occur during the Obama Administration, and arguably the biggest foreign policy development of the last ten years. So how did the Sunday morning talk shows treat this huge news? By booking a bunch of former officials from the Bush administration. Or as Rachel Maddow asked last night, “Is the biggest story in American politics right now ‘retiree’s from the Bush administration and how they feel about stuff?’”
Maddow correctly points out that the Sunday morning political talk shows are considered by many to be the “apex” of political discourse in this country, likening an invitation to appear on any number of these shows to getting a “seat at the grownups table.” So one can reasonably wonder what the bookers for these shows were thinking when the invited guests from the right outnumbered those from the left at a ratio of three to one. MORE...
Ezra Klein (WaPo): America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya. MORE...Howie P.S.: H/t to Ari Melber. (Last week and next week as well, most likely.)
Bob Beckel, a Democratic analyst for Fox News, agreed.
“When it comes to budgets and numbers, Republicans own that issue, they have for a long time,” he said. “We’re not going to win the fight on numbers. We’re going to win it on what government means, and what it means to people, and how Republicans don’t care what it means.
“If you expose what [Republicans] have done, as opposed to numbers, then you expose what this whole thing’s about, which is a bunch of fringe right-wingers,” said Beckel, a longtime veteran of Democratic campaigns. “That’s what’s missing in this debate, and that’s where Obama needs to pick up the slack. MORE...
Amanda Terkel (HuffPo):Though thousands of Americans have turned out this week to show solidarity with Wisconsin's public employees and oppose a threat to their collective bargaining rights, union officials say they have not been able to place a labor voice on this Sunday's editions of the weekly public-affairs TV shows. The shows' producers, they complain, are shutting out the workers' perspective.
A union official told The Huffington Post that when none of the Sunday shows' producers reached out to them to book a labor representative this week, several unions started to pitch the shows with affected workers and local and national leaders who they felt could discuss the protests. The official said the response from the shows was essentially "thanks, but no thanks." MORE...
The media are full of commentary on President Obama's "failure of leadership." There is some truth to the critique but not in the way the charge is typically made.Howie P.S.: I think it's a mistake to say the Tea Party is "winning." They are just the willing pawns (mouthpieces, if you prefer) for the extremely wealthy and powerful interests who are behind them.Obama is not at fault for his budget proposals. But any fair examination of the news suggests that he is in danger of losing control of the national narrative again, just as he did during the stimulus and health-care battles.
In his State of the Union address, Obama made a good case that budget cutting is too small an agenda and that this is also a time for more government - yes, more government - in areas that would expand opportunities and strengthen the economy. That argument has been entirely drowned out. If politics is reduced to a crabbed and crabby accountants' war, Obama loses. The country will, too.MORE...
"Palestinians burn posters with the logo of Al-Jazeera TV station."A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. American foreign policy, even in Afghanistan, was all but invisible throughout the 2010 election season. Foreign aid is the only federal budget line that a clear-cut majority of Americans says should be cut. And so now — as the world’s most unstable neighborhood explodes before our eyes — does anyone seriously believe that most Americans are up to speed? Our government may be scrambling, but that’s nothing compared to its constituents. After a near-decade of fighting wars in the Arab world, we can still barely distinguish Sunni from Shia.Howie P.S.: "In Cairo, Al-Jazeera finds itself in line of fire" (Michael Moran-MSNBC):
(SNIP)
That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience. We see the Middle East on television only when it flares up and then generally in medium or long shot. But there actually is an English-language cable channel — Al Jazeera English — that blankets the region with bureaus and that could have been illuminating Arab life and politics for American audiences since 2006, when it was established as an editorially separate sister channel to its Qatar-based namesake.
(SNIP)
The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. The “Ground Zero” mosque melee has given way to battles over mosques as far removed from Lower Manhattan as California. Soon to come is a national witch hunt — Congressional hearings called by Representative Peter King of New York — into the “radicalization of the American Muslim community.” Given the disconnect between America and the Arab world, it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.This week brings the release of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. The eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last week’s fiery video from Cairo — mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t understand and don’t know — it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of “Shock and Awe.” Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe distance — no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on. MORE...
No one who watches Al-Jazeera can argue that it isn’t driven by a missionary zeal to upend the status quo in the Middle East. Its targets include pro-American despots (Mubarak, the Saudi monarchy or Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika) and anti-American despots (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). That has given it unrivaled credibility in the eyes of an Arab public that long ago concluded its own state-run media outlets were often little more than propaganda outlets for the regime in power. MORE...
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow told Roll Call she believes the right “has long had a wider-reaching, more fully-formed messaging apparatus than the left.”“It may be that there’s more rightwing media echo in their politics simply because the right’s echo-chamber works better,” Maddow said in an e-mail. “Comparatively speaking, messaging on the left is much more ad hoc, much less disciplined and repetitive, and much less wide-reaching.”
Rosenberg and other Democrats agreed there’s a less cohesive message on the left. Several said efforts by MoveOn to influence Democratic leadership end up providing fodder for conservatives in that ecosystem, proving the right’s echo chamber is more effective.
“It always seems that if you turn on Hannity or Beck or Limbaugh, you seem to be hearing the same things come from Representatives’ and Senators’ mouths in the next 24 hours,” said Stefan Hankin, a Democratic strategist. “The voices on the left just don’t have the same drumbeat.” MORE...
Matt Taibbi:In politics, you don't need to treat everyone with decency and humanity, just 51% of the crowd. Actually, given that half or less than half of all people don't vote, the percentage of people who require basic decency and indulgence is probably even lower than that, maybe 20-25% of the population. There's plenty of power and money to be won by skillfully stimulating public anger against some or all of the rest, and there are few rewards for restraint.
In the media, the situation is even worse. You can make vast fortunes riling up mobs. And because it's a fiercely competitive market, there's an obvious and immediate benefit to using superheated rhetoric -- it's more entertaining, gains more attention, and definitely gets more viewers and listeners and, er, readers.
And not only is there no incentive for restraint, there's actually a huge disincentive for restraint, because for many of us in the punditry world, our livelihoods depend upon cultivating audiences who come to expect a certain emotional payoff for tuning in. MORE...
Basically, I think there is a structural disadvantage for the left in American politics. We can occasionally get large majorities and make historic progressive change, but we can't do it without incurring a massive backlash that quickly dissipates our majorities.Howie P.S.:
We just cannot compete in the media.
A side effect of this is that we have a permanent segment of the Democratic Party which is more concerned about keeping our majorities than it is in making progressive change. It's a self-preservation kind of thing, and it has the advantage of attracting lots of corporate cash.
I don't know how much we should hate this segment.
I think it's short-sighted to have a complete indifference to maintaining our majorities. And that's why I find myself equally disgusted by the DLC types and the holier-than-thou progressives. Neither of them places enough importance on something that is critically important. Power is almost useless if it doesn't bring positive change. But it's stupid to turn up your nose at positive change that is the best the system can produce at a given period of time.
What we need is a balance, but almost no one advocates for balance. MORE...
One of the interesting comments on this post (there are more):...the failure to keep Howard Dean at the DNC expanding the 50-state strategy of rebuilding state parties turned out to be a killer. In a number of states, parties that had recently made gains lost ground substantially. North Carolina has its first Republican-controlled legislature (both Houses) since Reconstruction. Koch Brother financed candidates took over the Wake County NC school board (with the organization of Americans for Prosperity's Art Pope) and are reversing the most successful desegregation plan in the nation, are considering dropping regional accreditation so they can redefine their curriculum, and have hired an unqualified superintendent named Tata. Yes, it's TTFN good education in Wake County. The wash of money into local races should have been anticipated and made an issue after Citizens United. Democrats again caught flat-footed.
The lack of balance in the media and Village discussions when it comes to Social Security is a common topic among us DFH bloggers, but we're not the only ones who've noticed it. So has Columbia Journalism Review.Howie P.S.: Just a little OT, from Greg Sargent:
(SNIP)
The traditional media has been incredibly lazy on this story, which isn't a tremendous surprise--they're lazy on just about every story. But in this case, it's not just the media. Far too many of our Democratic leaders, including President Obama find it easier to spout conventional wisdom than the refute it with the facts. Back in the old days, politicians used to get heat for governing according to the polls. On the issue of the Social Security, they appear to be governing according to the Village. On this one, they should be listening to the people. MORE...
Obama's place in history (so far): Harold Meyerson says Obama clearly bested Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter when it comes to the grand progressive project of moving the country towards social and economic equity. But he now has to prove he can match FDR and Lyndon Johnson in persuading the public he is providing for their economic security.
The other day, Wall Street was captivated by talking bears.
There were two of them, blue and tan, ripping into the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. “Printing money is the last refuge of failed economic empires and banana republics,” declared the tan bear, who accused Fed officials of using jargon like “quantitative easing” to hide their true plans from the public. In computerized voices, the bears held forth in an ironic, rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, taking the Fed to task for everything from deflation strategy to its close relationships with investment banks. The odd six-minute cartoon was an instant hit on YouTube, racking up over two million views in its first week, and now topping 3.5 million overall. MORE...
Danny Goldberg:Research is seductive because it has the aura of rationality. But public opinion forms in mysterious ways. Attempts at persuasion require experimentation, the risk of failure, crazy ideas and temperamental creative personalities. But if progressives want to “make” the President or other Democrats do anything, they will need to rely less on math men and more on mad men. MORE...Howie P.S.: Danny Goldberg was CEO of Air America Radio from 2005 until mid-2006. He is president of Gold Village Entertainment and has worked in the music business since the late 1960s.
Denver Nicks (The Daily Beast):How did you feel on November 3, 2010?
I thought it was really telling that the day after the election the Republicans started talking about repealing the Volcker rule, which was the thing that got passed over the summer that banned proprietary trading by the banks. That perfectly encapsulated everything the Tea Party was about. The Tea Party was all this political energy that was directed at the bailouts. It was a lot of people that were angry about government spending. The Volcker Rule was specifically designed to prevent bailouts. The whole idea is to prevent federally insured banks from engaging in risky gambling behavior. So the day after all this anti-bailout fervor wins an election, the first thing they do is give this big favor to Wall Street, or at least they tried to. I think that summed up perfectly what the Tea Party was all about. They captured the anger, but they’re going to use it for the opposite of what these people think they’re getting.
So are they just getting the wool pulled over their eyes? Are these people stupid? What’s going on here?
A lot of people that I’ve talked to in the Tea Party, their experience with government regulation is something like: they own a hardware store and they have to deal with a building inspector, or a tax collector, or an EPA inspector or something like that. It’s some minor financial nuisance, and that’s what their idea of regulation is, and they see it as just something taking money out of the pockets of ordinary people. So they conflate that with the idea of policing Wall Street. They just think that it’s the same thing, and they’re completely different universes. I just don’t think they understand it, because the one thing that’s easy to understand is that it’s incredibly hard to understand. MORE...
