Pundits
Sadly, i have somewhat neglected this category:
pension plan: expand 6/17 to include zombie/pundit ability to be useful/paid even after outed eg happer, soon
distinct from public intellectual
see agnatology (but intent?)
see bad trio ben stein award econ
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omg trio consistently, spectacularly and devastatingly WRONG! punditry at worst/lethal
jon chait
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/arthur-laffer-lawrence-kudlow-stephen-moore-public-health.html
no lnx
THE NATIONAL INTEREST APR. 25, 2020
The Fatal Calculations of the Economists Steering Our Public Health
By Jonathan Chait
One night in late March, President Trump, seized by one of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials, sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is again lurching toward the opposite pole — one anchored by Laffer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Lawrence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administration’s public-health wing because they have a particular competence of their own, honed over decades: persuading Republican officials to ignore experts.
Even before his current role, Laffer was perhaps the most successful policy entrepreneur in modern American history, at least if measured by political influence.In the 1970s, as an economics professor who had served in Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, Laffer developed a friendship with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, whose job had previously included defending Richard Nixon’s conduct in the Watergate scandal. The two came to believe that Laffer had developed a blinding insight with world-historical ramifications. A tax rate of either zero or 100 would yield no tax revenue at all, Laffer posited. Drawing a sloping, sideways curve between those points, he further hypothesized that reducing tax rates might increase revenue.
The “Laffer curve,” which at one point Laffer drew on a cocktail napkin for an impressed Dick Cheney (the Smithsonian now claims to display the original), formed the basis of what became known as “supply-side economics.” The doctrine held not only that tax cuts could increase tax revenue, but that changes in tax rates were the primary driver of all economic events. Republican economist Herb Stein coined the name as a term of derision, intending to highlight the absurdity of building a model entirely on one side of the economy instead of considering both supply and demand. Economic experts mocked Laffer’s notion that reductions in tax rates at existing levels could produce anywhere close to enough new economic growth to pay for itself.
And the experts … were completely right. After supply-siders converted Ronald Reagan and promised his tax cuts would pay for themselves, revenue hemorrhaged. Reagan’s non-supply-side advisers prevailed upon him to sign a series of tax increases for the purpose of “reducing the size of the nation’s fiscal disaster,” his budget director later admitted. When Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, supply-siders insisted he would kill the recovery and reduce tax revenue. Instead, revenue soared far higher than anybody had forecast.
Kudlow and Moore began ascending in the 1980s, shuttling between right-wing think tanks and media — especially the Journal editorial page, which remained the high temple of the supply-side cult. I first came across Moore when he was writing Journal columns arguing that the supply-siders had been right to predict Bill Clinton’s tax hike would reduce revenue. (A hallmark of supply-side thought has been to refuse to concede any error or complication in its analysis.) The supply-siders went on to insist that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would produce untold prosperity. Moore wrote a book called Bullish on Bush, and Kudlow wrote the foreword to The Bush Boom and a series of columns dismissing “pessimistas” who detected economic turmoil. “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong,” he wrote in December 2007.
In the spring of 2016, just after Trump had sewn up the nomination, Laffer, Kudlow, and Moore set out to meet the candidate at Trump Tower. Like many members of the conservative elite, they initially harbored reservations. But unlike foreign-policy hawks or social traditionalists, their concerns were devoid of any moral component, like a suspicion of dictators or philanderers. Their sole misgiving concerned Trump’s populist rhetoric and occasional campaign vows to raise his own taxes. The troika wanted to find out if he really meant it. To their relief, he didn’t. “He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get the government out of the way,” Kudlow recounted in the foreword to Laffer and Moore’s laudatory book, Trumponomics. “The three of us saw Trump in a whole new light.”
We’ll come out of this soon, the economy will reopen, the economy will restart. It will, I hope, take care of itself. Markets will take care of themselves over time.
— Larry Kudlow, optimistic as oil prices tanked, on April 22
Kudlow joined the administration as Trump’s chief economic adviser. Trump announced he would nominate Moore for the Federal Reserve Board, but the Senate killed Moore’s bid over a combination of embarrassing ignorance of the subject — just two years before, he’d admitted on a panel, “I’m not an expert on monetary policy” — and years of sexist comments, including an obsessive hatred of women working as play-by-play commentators on basketball games. He and Laffer instead served as outside advisers and allies to Trump, who last summer bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laffer.
Trump rewarded their confidence by implementing a large corporate tax cut, which was intended to encourage more corporate investment and therefore “would yield about the same revenue — and possibly more — than the current system,” Laffer and Moore wrote in Trumponomics. Naturally, it failed. Business owners got a windfall, but there was no corporate-investment boom and corporate-tax revenue fell by more than a third. Just as naturally, they acted as if events had proved them right.
And so, when the coronavirus struck, Trump had on hand a coterie of loyalists who would not hesitate to question legitimate experts.Kudlow forcefully endorsed Trump’s optimism that the virus would never spread. On February 25, Kudlow said it had been “contained … pretty close to airtight.” Even two weeks later, he was insisting, “I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”
When public-health officials persuaded Trump to abandon his denialism, the supply-siders formed the resistance. Applying Laffer’s old dictum, “All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” they reasoned that the problem facing the economy was not a deadly pandemic but, as ever, bad incentives imposed by government — in this case, restrictions on business and excessively generous unemployment benefits that “discourage work.” If the government just stopped suppressing incentives, the economy would spring back to life.
The Journal editorial page published some of the first pushback against the wisdom of lockdowns. As early as mid-March, Moore denounced on Fox News the first closings, in California, as “a very dangerous, almost Orwellian situation.” Trump began repeating the supply-siders’ warnings that he had ceded too much authority to scientists (“If it was up to the doctors,” he mused, “they might say shut down the entire world”). Trump relented to his public-health experts but, by early April, was again listening to the supply-siders. Moore began proposing May 1 as a deadline to reopen the economy, a timeline Trump endorsed soon thereafter.
The supply-siders’ struggle to tug Trump away from his medical experts has both public and private facets. Laffer and Moore promoted a new administration task force to focus on economic reopening, a counterweight to the coronavirus task force led by doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Moore encouraged anti-shutdown protests in several states to pressure governors to speed up their timetables for reopening businesses. “I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,” he explained, “They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties.”
In their book, Laffer and Moore fondly recall Kudlow’s instructing Trump to ignore budget forecasts that tax cuts would reduce revenue. “Don’t get stressed out by the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters,” he said. “They are always wrong.” The message today is largely unchanged. The main difference is that the experts they are urging the president to dismiss are counting lives. We’re the beans.
This article appears in the April 27, 2020, issue of New York Magazine
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How the border-cop-to-pundit pipeline fuels anti-immigrant coverage | Media Matters for America
for Tom Homan, the answer is always simple, no matter the question: Harsh punishment and brutal tactics get the job done. As a lifelong cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has found a new career as a Fox News pundit, Homan deals in absolutes, regardless of his job title.
“Look, when it came to zero tolerance, it worked,” Homan said in a May 2020 interview, explaining and justifying the Trump administration’s family separation border policy, which he'd been advocating for since his time in the Obama administration. “Law enforcement uses zero tolerance across this country all the time, whether it’s drug enforcement or prostitution.”
:{:{Homan is one of three prominent border cops turned right-wing pundits who exert considerable influence in conservative media and policy circles. Along with Todd Bensman and Jaeson Jones, both former officers at the Texas Department of Public Safety, Homan pushes his hardline nativist messaging to any and all audiences that will have him. He and Bensman are both fellows at organizations founded by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”}:
...?
As ex-cops, Homan, Bensman, and Jones speak with a practitioner's authority. Their claimed expertise, supposedly gleaned from firsthand experience, allows them to mask xenophobia as hard-won knowledge about public safety. They provide a faux-empirical justification for anti-migrant policies, giving viewers a sense that they’re getting the unvarnished truth from people who have lived it. (In reality, border officers are frequently ignorant about basic immigration facts.) But the role these three play isn’t to inform; it’s to reinforce existing anti-immigrant prejudices and provide scaffolding for new laws and policies restricting immigration.
Tom Homan: From family separation architect to Fox News stardom
Of this cop-turned-pundit trio, Homan is the most influential. He has made at least 357 appearances on weekday Fox News since becoming a contributor in August 2018, affording him a massive platform to influence conservative thinking about immigration. Homan’s history in border enforcement — which dates back to 1984, when he became a Border Patrol agent and later joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service — is integral to the authority he commands among conservative activists, politicians, and audiences.
One Fox appearance from 2019 shows how Homan uses his sway to legitimize outlandish proposals — in this case, sending the U.S. military to Mexico to target drug cartels. In late November of that year, then-President Donald Trump floated the idea of designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which could potentially facilitate operations into the country. Days later, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade interviewed Homan and asked about a recent mass shooting in Mexico that left 21 people dead.
“Tom, I know you say we should go help — but don’t we need to be asked?” Kilmeade said to begin the segment.
“Well, yeah. I think that would be great, and I think the Mexican president is going to ask,” Homan replied. “He has proven he can’t handle it. Mexico has failed at handling these cartels for the last three decades. They can’t succeed without us.”
Homan then approvingly referenced the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust its then-leader Manuel Noriega before arguing that Mexican drug cartels should be formally designated as terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement — and presumably the U.S. military — to wage war against Mexican drug cartels on their home soil.
“If we declare them [Mexican drug cartels] a terror group, what changes?” Kilmeade asked. “What does that legally let us do?”
“I think that helps the U.S. do some out-of-the-country operations to attack these organizations,” Homan responded.
If there was any confusion about where Homan stood, in its write-up of the interview, FoxNews.com characterized Homan’s remarks as “agreeing that the cartels should be designated as a terror organization by the U.S."
Homan wasn’t the only conservative pushing that idea, but he was an early adopter. Just as importantly, his years of appearances since then on Fox News have helped solidify the racist ideas used to justify the proposed terrorist group designation: that the United States is being invaded by migrants, and that those migrants are responsible for bringing a majority of the fentanyl that arrives in the country — which is factually incorrect.
Trump eventually backed off his threat to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations. But the idea of using such designations to confer authority on federal authorities to bomb or invade Mexico has essentially become a consensus position on the right. Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary, for instance, sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy, with each of them pushing for hardline restrictionist policies that are justified by dehumanizing language about immigrants “invading” the southern border.
Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy.
Homan's hawkishness has been rewarded, as the conservative media and policy ecosystem has warmly embraced him since his departure from the Trump administration. In addition to his employment at Fox News, he was named a visiting fellow at the influential Heritage Foundation in 2022. He’s also a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the nonprofit legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a branch of the Tanton network that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.
Given Homan's association with that Tanton-founded organization, it’s not surprising that he has repeatedly pushed the great replacement theory, the racist idea that liberal elites are bringing people of color to the United States to replace white people. On October 11, Homan appeared on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite where he claimed that the Biden administration is trying to purposely destroy the country by opening the borders to bring in “millions” of “future Democratic voters.”
Homan has pursued commercial endeavors as well. In 2020, Hachette Book Group published Homan’s Defend the Border & Save Lives, complete with a front-cover blurb from his Fox News colleague Mark Levin. He is a featured speaker at JL Wilkinson Consulting, a right-wing talent agency that also represents far-right cops Sheriff David Clarke and Sheriff Mark Lamb.
Homan also founded Homeland Strategic Consulting, which pulled in over $83,000 in consulting fees for services provided to Arizona businessman and failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Money began flowing Homan’s way just four months after he publicly endorsed Lamon’s candidacy. (Homan denied that the endorsement was related to the consulting contract.)
Homan has extensive links to extremist organizations and individuals, beyond his affiliation with the Tanton network. Earlier this year, Homan spoke virtually at an event honoring Mel K, a QAnon influencer and conspiracy theorist who has spread lies about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and denied the results of the 2020 election.
In March 2022, HuffPost reported that Homan had been scheduled to speak at an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. When confronted by HuffPost about his appearance at the racist conference, Homan blamed his assistant for arranging the appearance and the fact that “so many names of conservative groups sound the same."
Homan then claimed that he left the conference after reading that Fuentes was supportive of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he stopped short of criticizing the openly bigoted group. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” Homan said, referring to Fuentes and his racist supporters, known as groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know."
Later that year, HTom Trentooman co-founded an anti-immigration organization that bears the same name as Homan’s book, Defend the Border & Save Lives, with fellow Islamophobe . In addition to helping Homan pilot the new group, Trento, who once told an audience at a 9/11 commemoration in 2013 that the goal of “all Islam” is to “get every single one of us to convert to Islam,” also runs an organization called The United West, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-Muslim group.
This March, Homan was named CEO of election denialist organization The America Project, founded by far-right multimillionaire Patrick Byrne. In addition to his duties as CEO, Homan also heads the group’s Border911 initiative, which has sponsored anti-migrant events throughout the country. The organization frequently posts videos of its rallies on Rumble, an extreme right-wing YouTube clone. Newsmax’s Jaeson Jones is also part of Border911, and he spoke alongside Homan at many of the group’s recent events.
Homan frequently denies that he has any political agenda, instead couching his preferences simply as apolitical enforcement of existing laws enacted by Congress. In 2018, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Homan if ICE’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, a policy Homan was overseeing at the time, was “humane."
“I think it’s the law,” Homan replied.
“It may be the law, it may be the policy, but is it humane?” Blitzer asked again.
“I think it’s the law, and I’m a law enforcement [officer],” Homan reiterated. “I must follow the law.”
But for Homan, not all laws are meant to be followed. In April, he headlined a Border911 fundraiser with Donald Trump at the former president’s residence and club Mar-a-Lago to raise money for families of people who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Speaking to the crowd, Homan reminisced about an early conversation in which Trump told him to “enforce the laws, that's all I'm asking you to do.”
“We kicked ass,” Homan reflected. “We kicked ass.”
Todd Bensman: Not an expert on immigration, by his own admission
Like Homan, Bensman has leveraged his history in law enforcement into a new career as an immigration restrictionist pundit and writer. Most of his work appears on the website for the Center for Immigration Studies — another branch of the anti-immigrant Tanton network — but he’s also written two books, and has published pieces at The Daily Wire, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and other prominent conservative news outlets. He’s been on Fox News and Fox Business combined at least 27 times since 2017, according to a search of an internal Media Matters database and Bensman’s official website.
As Media Matters previously reported, Bensman has also appeared on extremist streaming programs as well. In June, he appeared on The Stew Peters Show, whose eponymous host is a white nationalist. He’s also been on at least three programs or platforms with ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, including: The Mel K Show, Making Sense of the Madness (hosted by QAnon supporter Sean Morgan), and The Debbie Aldrich Show, from Creative Destruction Media, an outfit that in addition to endorsing QAnon also posts racist and anti-LGBTQ content.
In 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies brought Bensman on as a senior national security fellow. From his first days at the organization, Bensman stoked fears about terrorist “infiltration” at the southern border, a framing he regularly returns to despite evidence that conservatives wildly overstate the perceived threat as a way to demonize migrants.
In mid-September, Bensman spoke at a conference that also hosted John Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force officer who once spoke at a conference organized by a white supremacist group and has praised Confederate leader Jefferson Davis and pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. QAnon-promoter Alex Newman was also a featured speaker at the event.
A granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.
Bensman frequently adopts a flood-the-zone style of content production, using his Center for Immigration Studies-sponsored trips to the border to create images and videos that confirm the bigoted prior assumptions of his intended audience. One of his recent successful operations was seeding a myth that the Biden administration was providing all migrant families with $2,200 monthly cost-of-living checks. Experts fact-checked the claim as false in real time, and news organizations have long debunked earlier versions of the persistent rumor,but a granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.
On September 6, Bensman posted a video on X purportedly showing a Border Patrol agent saying migrant families “get a check every month” of “about $2,200.” Bensman characterized the imaginary program as a “scam,” but acknowledged that he would have “to independently confirm” its existence, which he did not do. Instead, Bensman repeated the false claim three days later, even while admitting the accusation was “short of details” and “unverified.”
In the meantime, the conspiracy theory-amplifying pipeline kicked into overdrive. The same day he first posted on X about the supposed checks, Bensman went on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and continued to spread the myth.
Video
CitationFrom the September 6, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
“The government gives them cost-of-living checks, for one family per month: $2,200. So if the father brings one of the kids and the mother brings another of the kids, and they just act like two families, they’re pulling in $4,400 a month, according to that Border Patrol agent,” Bensman told Bannon. Bensman again acknowledged he hadn’t confirmed whether it was true or not, but that didn’t stop him from spending more than two minutes spreading the misinformation.
On September 7, junk news site The Gateway Pundit picked up the story, citing Bensman as its primary source.
The same day, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy parroted Bensman’s conspiracy theory, telling Fox’s audience that the Biden administration was “paying $2,200 per family."
Republican politicians spread the myth even further. “We are literally subsidizing our own invasion,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on X, reposting The Gateway Pundit’s story. Former Trump official and Christian nationalist Russ Vought, a well-connected policy adviser on Capitol Hill, then reposted Gaetz.
Rep. Lauren Boebert repeated the $2,200-per-month claim on X/Twitter without any sourcing. When asked by local 9News Denver where she got her information, Boebert’s press office sent a link to the Gateway Pundit story. (9News’s ruling on Boebert’s statement? “Not true.”)
On September 10, Bensman obliquely walked back his initial claim, without clearly admitting he was wrong. He later defended himself to The Washington Post, saying: “I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. Maybe an expert would send a link or explain it.”
At least one element of Bensman’s story is true. As he inadvertently acknowledged, he is not an expert. He is a propagandist, and his distortions are all the more potent in right-wing media because of his history as a cop.
Jaeson Jones: Bringing the war on terror to Mexico
On May 19, Newsmax border correspondent Jaeson Jones posted a promotional video for The America Project and Border911 to his Instagram account. In the video, Jones, sitting alongside Homan, directly addresses Border Patrol agents.
“I’m Jaeson Jones, retired captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and someone who’s out there on the border every day working with you guys to try to get out what you’re going through to the American people,” Jones said.
No viewer would expect Newsmax, which has sought to outflank Fox News from the right, to adhere to journalistic standards of neutrality and balance, but it’s still remarkable that Jones would openly admit that his goal as a correspondent is to show what his fellow border cops are “going through” rather than gather facts. By his own admission, he’s not covering a story — he’s “working with” the Texas Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol agents.
When Jones, Homan, and Bensman speak, they are speaking on behalf of border cops and law enforcement writ large, acting as representatives of what journalist Jessica Pishko describes as a “baronial class” of public employees who enjoy special rights and privileges. These ex-cops are pushing the ideological and material interests of that class, with the end result of expanding law enforcement budgets and political influence. The explosion of federal spending on immigration and border enforcement stretches back for decades, but the fearmongering that Homan, Bensman, and Jones push has the predictable effect of directing ever more public funds to this repressive apparatus.
That dynamic explains, in part, why — like Homan — Jones has repeatedly called for the U.S. government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Such a move would almost certainly open up vast resources for state and federal border officers, in addition to conferring more political power and legal authority on those departments.
In fact, Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.
Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.
During a June 18, 2019, interview with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, Jones described cartels as “global violent networks who are acting as terrorist organizations around the world.” He added that several cartels had “gone through a quantum leap in capabilities,” in part because of “what they’ve learned from the FARC, which is a designated terrorist organization."
Jones was referring to the Colombian guerilla group that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization from 1997 to 2021, and the reference wasn’t incidental. In the early days of the war on terror, the group served a crucial role for another federal organization, the Drug Enforcement Agency.
As journalist Trevor Aaronson has described, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began funneling money into any project that could be described as counterterrorism. With Washington focused on global terrorism, the DEA, a key combatant in the previous generation’s war on drugs, found itself sidelined and relatively starved of federal funds. To bolster its raison d'être, the agency invented a new category of crime — narcoterrorism — and used the FARC, a designated terrorist organization funded in part by drug trafficking, as a pry-bar to access all the counterterrorism money sloshing around Washington at the time.
Under the DEA’s new mission, agents and their informants pretended to be members of the FARC and engaged in elaborate sting operations targeting purported terrorists. Given the FARC’s designation as a terror group, the DEA could claim that it stopped a would-be terrorist if its undercover agents convinced FARC rebels to act on their behalf. (Nevermind that they would have manufactured those would-be terrorists.) With federal resources on the line, fighting terrorism was as much a bureaucratic turf war as it was about waging any other kind of war.
As a former counterterrorism official at Texas Department of Public Safety, Jones likely would have known that specific history. More broadly, he surely understood how the federal funding game is played, and he kept pushing the new line. In a July 2019 interview, also on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Jones was even more explicit in calling for cartels to be labeled terror groups, and again referenced the FARC.
“These are terrorist organizations that are no longer just drug trafficking organizations,” Jones said. “They have evolved into something much larger."
“The U.S. government has not transitioned yet to look at them as terrorists and to designate them as terrorists but yet, they employ the FARC — that is a designated terrorist organization,” he added.
Jones repeated his calls that August, September, October, and November — when Trump publicly contemplated moving forward — and then again the following December, February, March, and June, all on Lou Dobbs Tonight. In the September segment, Jones told Dobbs he had lobbied four members of Congress, “trying to get this foreign terrorist designation.” In 2021, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to push for the change, and he continues to agitate for it from his new perch at Newsmax.
The once-fringe idea is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom on the right. Jones and Homan played a significant role in normalizing it, specifically by appealing to their identities as former cops. If their pitch is successful under the next Republican administration, their former agencies would almost certainly benefit handsomely from their advocacy.
The porous border between the hard-right and mainstream media
Homan, Bensman, and Jones are not the only former cops in the right-wing media and think tank ecosystem. One of Bensman’s colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jon Feere, is a former ICE and DHS official whom NPR quoted in June. Randy Clark, a writer at Breitbart, is retired from Border Patrol. Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protections, is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and is a member of Homan's Border911. The list goes on. These figures agitate for nativist immigration policies, channeling reactionary law enforcement attitudes into content served up in conservative media. The answer for them is always zero tolerance, harsher punishments, and more funding and discretion for cops.
The cop-turned-pundit pipeline isn’t unique to conservative outlets, but these figures loom especially large in their reactionary ecosystem given the centrality of nativist politics in the age of Trump. The programs where they appear, especially on Fox News, often set the tone for how mainstream outlets frame immigration, as mainstream outlets frequently adopt language that there is a “crisis” at the border.
One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage. In mid-September, Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria called for the president to “use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending."
To support this extreme and seemingly illegal position, Zakaria cited Nolan Rappaport, a former Department of Homeland Security official who now writes xenophobic op-eds at The Hill. Zakaria identified Rappaport only as “a longtime congressional expert on the issue,” but there’s much more to the story.
One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage.
Rappaport, as it turns out, appears to be profoundly influenced by the organizations that employ Homan and Bensman. Rappaport blurbed Bensman’s first book, has cited him in at least three recent op-eds, and cited the Center for Immigration Studies in another. Rappaport frequently directs his stories, which he posts on X, at the Center for Immigration Studies’ policy director by tagging her username and at the account for Immigration Reform Law Institute, where Homan is a legal fellow. The Immigration Reform Law Institute then regularly reposts Rappaport’s stories to its own feed.
The pipeline from the Center for Immigration Studies and Bensman, and the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Homan, to Rappaport to Zakaria is invisible to the average reader. But Homan, for his part, sees it clearly.
“Please support CIS,” Homan said at the end of the conversation where he defended zero tolerance punishment against sex workers, people who use drugs, and families who crossed the southern border. He was speaking with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “When I was the director of ICE, even when I was running ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations, number three in ICE — CIS was a great help to the rule of law and helping ICE do their job."
“And they’re on the right side of the argument, folks, and we’re in a fight for our — we’re in a fight for our lives right now,” he continued. “We’re in a fight for this country. CIS gets it. They’re on the right side of the issues and they’re helping shape immigration in the future. So please support them.”
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{{ NEWSMAX
see ruddy ceo
see greg kellypow
see grift 3
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Griner
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12 22 mma
In 2013, Fox News dropped Dick Morris after he confidently predicted that Mitt Romney would win in a “landslide,” among other comical prognostications. Newsmax has so little respect for its viewers that it’s now airing Morris’ hopium, including his wildly inaccurate predictions that Republicans would win the midterms in a “wipeout” and cause “the extinction” of the Democratic Party.
Morris is the host of the weekend Newsmax program Dick Morris Democracy and the network’s supposed elections expert. The right-wing network hired him despite his reputation as an unethical commentator who is widely known for being so bad at his job that not even Fox News wanted his pro-Republican commentaries. (Newsmax’s business model is partly predicated on hiring other disgraced or washed-up former Fox News commentators, including Eric Bolling, James Rosen, and Greg Kelly.)
During the 2012 election cycle, Morris predicted Romney would win in a “landslide”; wrote that “it’s very possible” that President Barack Obama would drop out of the race; and told viewers Republicans would “win 10 seats” in the Senate (Democrats actually gained two seats).
While his venue has changed, Morris’ wildly inaccurate prognostication has remained the same. Now that the 2022 election is officially over with Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) victory — Morris called GOP nominee Herschel Walker “an excellent candidate,” something Walker’s own staff didn’t believe — here are some examples of Morris’ midterm forecasts for Newsmax in the lead-up to the November election:
Morris on October 17 said Walker “evolved into an excellent candidate.”
Morris on October 22 spoke about expected Republican gains with the chyron “The Red Wave Is Coming.”
Morris on October 28: “I'm predicting something more than a tsunami, more than a tidal wave, more than an earthquake. … Do you remember, in the history books, how the theory is that a meteorite hit the Earth right around where the Caribbean Sea is and that the resulting dust killed all the dinosaurs and made them extinct? Well, that's the magnitude of what I think is going to happen.”
Morris added: “I think they may go up to 270. … I think they may pick up 60 seats. That's why I likened it to that prehistoric event because what I think you're really dealing with, to a certain extent, is the extinction of an entire generation of Democratic wannabees, Democratic candidates, where they're basically going to lose their whole freshman and sophomore class.”
Morris on November 1: “We have most likely Arizona, and Georgia, and Nevada as victories, and possibly New Hampshire, and possibly some others. So I see a minimum at this point of 53 Republican senators.”
Morris on November 2: “I think there's going to be a wipeout, I think Republicans will win something in the neighborhood of 60 seats in the House, I think that they will win the Senate.”
Morris on November 3: “I think the Democrats will lose all 60. … I think the [Republicans] are going to win a solid 60 seats in the House.”
Morris on November 7: “I do feel that in Pennsylvania, [GOP Senate nominee Mehmet] Oz is going to win.… I believe that the Republicans are going to end tomorrow night with somewhere between 52-55 seats in the Senate.”
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trump pension:
no lnx GUK
Robert Reich explores the compelling question of why CBS News hired Trump loyalists Mick Mulvaney
Meaghan Ellis April 19, 2022
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is offering insight on a controversial topic that many have questions about: Why on earth did CBS News hire former Trump White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney?
In an op-ed written for The Guardian, Reich tackled the issue of Mulvaney's hiring just days after he made his first CBS appearance on “MoneyWatch."
During that segment, Mulvaney, who is now an on-air contributor for the network, was asked to break down President Joe Biden's plan to increase taxation on America's ultra-wealthy. He also noted that the anchor, Anne-Marie Green, introduced Mulvaney as a former White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director and that she failed to mention the chaotic presidential administration he worked for. While he did serve in that capacity, he was also a partisan Trumpist.
Then she asked him if "regular working-class Americans" should be concerned about Biden's tax initiative. Reich highlighted Mulvaney’s answer: “It’s easy to look at it and say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not going to pay this,’but regular working Americans would have to 'prove that they don’t have to pay it,' a burden that 'could be troublesome: every single year proving that you’re not worth a hundred million dollars.'”
Mulvaney's response is what Reich suggested is most problematic and also an example of the reason for concern about his hiring.
"This is as misleading as it gets in broadcast media (except for Fox News)," he wrote. "Nothing in Biden’s proposal to tax the super-rich requires that people prove they’re not super-rich. Mulvaney’s claim was pure demagoguery."
He added, "That’s what we should expect from Mulvaney. In 2019 Mulvaney threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine to fight Russian aggression unless President Zelenskiy came up with dirt on Hunter Biden. (This was the call in which Zelenskiy’s plea 'we need more Javelins' – anti-tank missiles that have proved crucial in Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion – was met with Trump’s 'I would like you to do us a favor though.'”
Reich went on to offer a number of times Mulvaney has dropped the ball for the sake of politicization. From his 2019 threats toward Ukraine demanding dirt on Hunter Biden to his conspiracy theory stance on the COVID-19 pandemic he described as a "media hoax," Reich highlighted the unfavorable moments in his career that should raise questions about his credibility.
He also criticized CBS News noting the stark difference in the network now compared to what it once was. "When I was growing up, CBS News was the home of news legends like Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite – pioneers who set the standards for broadcast news," he wrote. "So why is CBS News now reaching into the cesspool of Trump conspirators and enablers to hire Mulvaney?"
Reich went on to push back against the explanation for Mulvaney's hiring which was provided by CBS News' Neeraj Khemlani. When asked about Mulvaney, Khemlani claimed "when it comes to contributor hires, 'getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.'”
For that statement, Reich raised questions. “Getting access” to what? To the big lie about the 2020 election? To lies about Covid? To bonkers economics?" he wrote.
Reich concluded by saying, "CBS News, like every news outlet, has a cardinal responsibility to protect American democracy from this growing menace," he wrote. "To fulfill this responsibility, it must report accurately what is occurring. It should not pander to the menace by hiring a person who has had a hand in it and will further obscure the truth."
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1/22 an
reality is that Biden has done a great job — but the pundits can't admit it
January 21, 2022
As President Biden marked the anniversary of his first year in office Wednesday, the reviews have come in. A raft of pundits and pollsters describe him as “limping,” “struggling” even “failing"...
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no lnx twt
Sunday shows are a relic of a lazy low-stakes era
Hunter and Daily Kos October 24, 2021
On one of the now unwatchable Sunday "news" shows, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd introduced a segment on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic by—I'm just kidding. It wasn't about the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a segment about the most favorite of all Sunday show segments, and indeed largely the only segment any of the Sunday shows ever do: How will This Thing, the major news of the day, Affect Mah Politics?
"The economy's inability to fully recover from the shock of COVID-19 is both an economic story and a political one," intoned Todd.
The economy's inability to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic is in large part due to anti-distancing, anti-mask, vaccine-skeptical, pro-virus-spreading policies from Republican politicians who have been using conservative frustration with safety measures as a rallying cry for their own careers, resulting in a new wave of overwhelmed hospitals and dead victims that was entirely preventable if sociopathic politicos had not turned pandemic crisis protocols into the latest spite-riddled "culture war."
"All those economic problems add up to a big political problem for the president. Is all of this his fault? Of course not, but it is now his responsibility. And he and fellow Democrats are in real danger of suffering some serious political consequences. Mr. Biden ran on a promise of a basic return to normal—or at least a path to normalcy. But with the midterm elections just over a year away—"
Stop. Just stop. Fine, we get it. We're doing this again. Republicans continue to get their constituents killed at elevated rates; let's now turn to our panel of experts to determine what the political implications of Republicans killing off their constituents will be for the Democrats who, uh, failed to convince them not to die to own the libs.
"Whadda think, Bob? Think all those surviving family members are gonna punish Democrats in the midterms?"
"I dunno, Steve, but between that and Americans quitting their dangerous bullshit pandemic poverty-wage jobs to look for better ones, there's real chaos out there on the streets. And it doesn't look good for anyone waiting for a Tickle-me-Elmo toy because the container ships are real backed up over on the left coast. And what if Republicans decide to start shooting constituents in the face? That'd look real bad for Joe Biden, who's run on a platform of not shooting people in the face."
And it ain't just that. Another of the Todd segments scraped up another entry in the "obsessively arch-right fascist Trump supporters still like Trump" press compulsion. Hey, the guy may have attempted to end our democracy through hoaxes and violence, but a bunch of Jesus-punchers think, if anything, that just makes him even more awesome.
We've been here before. This ain't new, andMatt Negrin, in particular, has brought all the necessary receipts and then some to show that Chuck Todd's Meet the Press, in particular, is a relentless promoter of Republican frames, one that uses the "panel" format to mix hard-right Republican strategists and figures in with neutral journalists while studiously avoiding Democratic guests. Most insipidly, Todd has been a prime rehabilitator for the Republican supporters of an election hoax that led to a violent insurrection.
[https://twitter.com/MattNegrin/status/1449747691639119873
Why? Is that "neutrality"? Is it "news"?
The problem with Meet the Press is the problem with all political journalism: It shouldn't exist. It's lazy. It's cheap, hackish, phone-it-in programming cobbled together because doing journalism is hard but talking about the "political implications" of any news story is easy. Ask how the ongoing mostly Republican-state COVID-19 crisis is affecting social programs and you'll have to do research to find out. Ask whether the stance of anti-mask politicians like Ron DeSantis is morally defensible and you'll have to expose your own moral convictions.
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Ask how the widespread death and economic chaos will affect the political winds when whatever-the-next-election-is rolls around, though, and you don't need to know a damn thing. It's easy. It's trivial. Pick out whichever guests will most reliably say something "exciting" and you've got yourself a show.
"Hey, Trump campaign spokesguy Jason Miller, the price of chicken went up by ten cents over the last six months. How do you think that's gonna play among [spins wheel] Evangelical voters in [throws dart] Wyoming?"
"I think this is great news for Donald Trump, and I'd also like to mention here that Wyoming Evangelicals are also very worried about Joe Biden's surrender to the mole people that happened last Thursday but that nobody here is reporting. Also, Joe Biden eats children."
"Thanks, Jason, we'll have to leave it there."
Anyone can opine about politics. It requires no expertise. It requires little thought. On television, where nobody in front of or behind the cameras gives a particular damn whether or not a guest just lies outright to the nation because they'll already be three lies beyond that one before anyone else can get a word in edgewise, there is absolutely no penalty for being wrong. Or lying. Or undermining democracy. Or egging on violence. Or anything else.
The Sunday shows are the worst thing politics can be: no-stakes. It is all just a game, a little game among the wealthy professional class to fill time while questions of morality and decency are pooh-poohed as the naive domain of the common rabble. True political journalism covers democracy and fascism as neutral ideological combatants; considers death ancillary to poll numbers; judges economic policy based on the analysis of whoever has the most money to spend on analysis; considers false propaganda to be Reasonable, if it can be made Effective; and, above all, dodges all policy considerations in favor of meta-debate about which political figures will most have their images buffed or tarnished from the policy's defeat or acceptance.
Would it be economically wise to avoid a worldwide climate catastrophe that sinks Florida, burns much of the West to a cinder, causes widespread crop failures, and renders certain parts of the globe literally uninhabitable if the air conditioners fail? There's not even a question! Set aside every moral and environmental question, and you're still left with the unambiguous case that moving national energy policy toward less-polluting alternatives will save the country from unfathomable economic costs in the decades to come.
We're not going to get that conversation on Meet the Press, ever, because no non-journalist booked on Meet the Press knows a damn thing about it. We're not going to get the kind of hard-edged reporting that the profession idolizes in fictional stories but shudders with contempt at providing itself, reporting in which political figures are confronted about their astonishing ineptitude in managing this or any other of the existential issues of the day.
We will get an unending parade of professional know-nothings to discuss how Joe Manchin's posturing or Bernie Sanders' gruffness might bump off-year poll numbers in the span between now and the future crisis, because that's the sort of talk that allows charlatans who don't believe in anything to have opinions on everything.
I'm tired. We're all tired. These shows are astonishingly tired, shambling along like brainless zombies wandering past thickets of political violence, environmental cataclysm, mass disease, widespread government failure, and the alteration of the nation's democratic discourse into, literally, an arena of professional hoax-promotion. The old formats were designed for sleepier times when the nation could coast along, ineffective and only a little bit corrupt, with no wars that affected the Important People or economic tragedies that the Important People could not weather. Now that we have passed through decades of ambivalent puttering to come face-to-face with genuine crisis, we learn that none of the shows are built to grapple with crises. They were a child's toy, a little playground in which the powerful could snip playfully at each other on camera before going to eat in the same tony restaurants and golf at the same posh resorts. They were not meant to tackle true problems—only to provide small, timed skits showing what tackling problems might look like, according to the fictions of the day, while making sure that none of it ever truly solved anything or even moved the conversation forward.
Those are not the formats in which a nation can grapple with a pandemic that will likely kill a million of its citizens. It would be farcical in the case of, say, a predicted asteroid strike or supervolcano eruption. It would be rendered so grotesquely absurd, if God Himself were to saunter down with a message or if alien life punched a hole through dimensions to invite us to dinner, that it would pass only as low comedy. Nobody on these shows gives a damn if the nation falls or the atmosphere burns. It was only meant to be a club for idle banter, nothing bold enough as to even scrape the lines of are laws based on overt bigotries bad or just a cultural choice, the sort of vapid dorm room debates on "are seat belts good" or "does unleaded gas represent government tyranny" that nobody involved would give two shits about, on their way home from the studio.
Meet the Press found itself confronting an actual insurrection—and folded. It couldn't cope. It had no tools for the job. So Chuck Todd invited the insurrectionists onto the program and helped redeem even election hoaxes, party-backed propaganda and candidate-organized insurrection as a reasonable political choice to be made.Not because he or anyone else involved gave a particular damn either way, and not because they did not, but because there is no Sunday morning format that can handle violent insurrection except as fodder for the professional know-nothings to banter aimlessly about. It was never meant to have actual stakes. Nobody, in any of the network executive suites, even knows what such a thing would look like.
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some kind of poster boy?
Trump announced that he is naming Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve Board. Moore is a hack who has been repeatedly proven to be sloppy and dishonest.
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always wrong, never in doubt
cover for mcconn inaction on heroes? bad economy trump covid in gen'l?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-millionaire-economic-adviser-celebrates-gales-of-creative-destruction-as-millions-lose-their-jobs-and-go-hungry/
no lnx twt
With millions of Americans out of work, struggling to afford food for themselves and their children, and facing the possibility of losing their homes, President Donald Trump's top economic adviser on Friday celebrated what he described as the "gales of creative destruction" supposedly unleashed by the U.S. economic system in the midst of the pandemic-induced recession.
"The talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed, alright, most regrettably—but, they're sticking with it and they're going out and starting new businesses," Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said in an appearance on Fox Business. "They're going to be small businesses."
"But that's the great part of American capitalism, gales of creative destruction," Kudlow continued, deploying a phrase popularized in the 1940s by economist Joseph Schumpeter. "I just love that new business start-up story."
Watch: fox biz
Critics immediately noted that the millions of people across the U.S. who are teetering on the brink of complete financial ruin are likely not impressed by the so-called "creative destruction" praised by Kudlow, who in June complained that the $600-per-week federal unemployment insurance boost many jobless workers were receiving at the time was excessive.
"Wonder how the 14% of households with kids who reported that they didn't get enough food to eat in the last seven days or the 32% of adults who are having trouble paying for usual household expenses feel about the'gales of creative destruction,'" tweeted Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany, pointing to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Kudlow's comments came a day after the Labor Department reported that an additional 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits, yet another indication that the strong economic recovery Kudlow has repeatedly predicted in recent weeks is not materializing.
"As American capitalism becomes even crueler, the rhetoric of its apologists will only grow more explicit," Jacobin's Luke Savage tweeted in response to Kudlow's remarks.
On top of being cold comfort for Americans struggling to get by as the prospect of another federal relief package before the November election remains uncertain, Kudlow's rosy insistence that the economic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic spurred a major new wave of entrepreneurship was also likely factually dubious.
"Self-employment is absolutely helping us to adapt to the pandemic," Adam Ozimek, chief economist at freelancing platform Upwork, told the Post's Jeff Stein. "But it's really nowhere near enough to make up for the massive shortfall in overall employment that we still have. Not even close."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-white-house-is-trying-hard-to-throw-peter-navarro-under-the-bus-lets-wish-them-well/
The sheer number of sources on this *Washington Post* report of abusive behavior by and the belligerent wrongness of Trump trade adviserPeter Navarro, who has for some reason inserted himself into a position of prime and unqualified decision-making on the administration’s COVID-19 pandemic responses, sends a clear message: Team Trump is trying very hard to push Peter Navarro under the bus, but Navarro is such a nasty old cuss that nobody can quite get him to stay under there.
That Navarro’s pandemic decisions have been questionable is not news. Navarro’s focus on hydroxychloroquine sent the administration far down a useless path. His push for reforming Eastman Kodak into a drug producer quickly turned into a federal investigation on possible insider trading. His self-lauded contract purchasing ventilators at a near-500% markup from what they might normally go for was met with derision and, eventually, scaled down drastically. Those are all known instances of Navarro screwups.
What we didn’t know, but should have guessed, is that Navarro is a living bloody terror to work with, something akin to putting mittens on a rabid wolverine, giving him his own office, and Just Seeing How That Goes. Navarro was so consistently abusive towards women on his staff, reports the Post, that then-Chief of Staff John Kelly ordered the White House Counsel’s office to launch an investigation. Navarro only kept his job because that investigation concluded Navarro was a raging asshole to absolutely everyone.
Indeed, the Post‘s sources seem to indicate that every last person in the building hates him, as do Republican lawmakers, as do Trump’s other allies. “Navarro is often hostile and overbearing in arguments, prone to attack anyone who disagrees with him as a representative of the ‘deep state,'” reports the Post. And Navarro’s one notable instance of being right—warning that the emerging COVID-19 pandemic could become a severe threat in the United States—was apparently dismissed inside the White House precisely because Navarro was similarly frothy about other things, all the time.
so what we have here, then, is a White House that collectively has gotten so fed up with Navarro’s toxic behavior that they’re willing to go to thePost and give as much anonymous dirt as they can. Trump, though, won’t fire him—yet. If the wider Team Trump is successful in tying Navarro to the consequences of his many pandemic failures, however, it is possible that he will be reassigned to a new position as human speed bump.
Really, though, we can’t overemphasize how on board we are with this particular White House plan. Navarro has long been a notorious crank even in areas of his supposed expertise—theman’s sole proven talent has been an ability to fling himself onto American television screens. He’s been a paranoid, “deep state”-screaming-about jerk in every interaction because, like Trump, that’s how he blusters his way through being provably incompetent at his actual job.
Of course everyone hates him! Everyone in the White House hates absolutely everyone else—that’s why seemingly every story about the White House for nearly four years now has consisted of anonymous Trump someones telling tales about other someones! The whole place is a zoo with no keepers, broken locks on every gate, and the gorillas have gotten hold of Tasers.
It’d be lovely if Navarro’s dozens of enemies manage to get him under that bus tire, but nobody should count on it really happening. Donald Trump fires people for making him look bad, not for gross and abusive incompetence. Gross and abusive incompetence is, after all, the Trump family motto.
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aha rw pundits have an almost perfect record of being wrong [cleese Tetlock 284?], yet somehow paul Ehrlich gets to be poster boy punching bag for inaccurate prediction (did not help he lost long bet). Club of Rome? greens get tarred with that brush.
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Search Results
Web results
Everybody'S an Expert | The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com › everybodys-an-expert
1.
Do Political Experts Know What They're Talking About? | WIRED
www.wired.com › 2011/08 › do-political-experts-know...
2.
Philip E. Tetlock - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Philip_E._Tetlock
2.
Nationality**: Canadian-American
Born**: 1954 (age 65–66); Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Alma mater: Yale University (Ph.D.) (1979)
Work · The Good Judgment ... · Accountability and ... · Political versus ...
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1019 aha-let ex pols get hired to be [various titles] to cable news, they want cross-fire fights, but also seen as objective/both sides?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/cnn-hired-a-habitual-liar-as-the-republicans-strategy-to-work-the-refs-pays-off/
no lnx
CNN hired a habitual liar as the Republicans’ strategy to ‘work the refs’ pays off
Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos October 23, 2019
Former Republican Rep. Sean Duffy,recently hired by CNN to be a paid political commentator, can’t stop fabricating facts when he goes on the air. Since making his CNN debut on Sunday, Duffy has lied about the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords. He’s lied about Joe Biden trying to fire a Ukraine prosecutor in order to protect his son. And Duffy’s helped spread the preposterous lie about the Democratic National Committee’s email servers from 2016 somehow ending up in a foreign country.
Sean Duffy, who staked his congressional reputation in recent years on being an undying Trump loyalist, is not a serious person. And Sean Duffy appears to be a habitual liar. (He once claimed George Soros was rigging voting machines, and that Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.) You would think those unfortunate traits would represent two large check marks against someone who wanted to be in the business of commenting on the news.
And yet, here we are.
CNN executives, having surveyed the political landscape in search of new voices to add to its discussions, decided to hire Duffy, which says a lot more about CNN than it does Duffy. What’s newsworthy about Duffy’s hiring is the timing. It just seems odd since much of the press, including CNN, has moved to toughen up Trump coverage in recent weeks and temporarily abandon the hallmark timidity that has defined so much of the reporting and commentary over the last two-plus years.
“The mainstream media seems to have quietly removed its Trump-normalizing gloves in the past few weeks,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.
CNN anchors and commentators have often been part of that change. They have been out front since the Ukraine collusion scandal broke last month, emphasizing that Trump’s pronouncements and denials are almost always wrapped in lies and deceptions. That’s a good thing.
So why now, of all times, would CNN decide to shift into reverse and hire another Trump loyalist who cannot be trusted to be honest or state anything factual each time he appears on air? Why would CNN want to go back to playing the silly and time-consuming game of blocking off lots of airtime so conservative contributors can make stuff up, which CNN anchors then have to point out is, y’know, made up? What does CNN hope to accomplish with this?
It’s all just a colossal waste of time, and CNN already tried to pull off that losing strategy for two years. Looking to capture the cable news “middle” between Fox News and MSNBC, CNN often obsesses over its Both Sides presentation. And on paper, there’s nothing wrong with that. (Think: Crossfire format.) The problem is trying to find honest conservatives these days and, specifically, the nearly impossible task of finding honest conservatives who are also Trump loyalists, since that’s the Both Sides debate CNN often wants to present.
CNN has hired many such Trump loyalists who have chewed up the cable news scenery, spreading lie after preposterous lie. That includes people like Jason Miller, Jack Kingston, Ed Martin, Jeffrey Lord, and Corey Lewandowski, among others. None of them, to be generous, covered the network in glory. Following the 2018 school massacre at Parkland High School in Florida, Kingston claimed on the air that students who rallied against gun violence were being taken advantage of by “left-wing gun control activists” led by billionaire George Soros.
It all badly muddies the waters, because by allowing—and paying—people like Duffy to disseminate nonsense like he’s already spewed about DNC servers, CNN is legitimizing that lie, even when it’s fact-checked. “First of all, what you are stating is completely inaccurate and factually wrong,” CNN contributor Jen Psaki told Duffy when he started in with the server conspiracy. “It’s a conspiracy theory on the right-wing blogs.” And frankly, that’s where that garbage should stay.
By hiring someone like Duffy at this juncture, it appears CNN has learned very little since 2017, and specifically very little about how to cover a liar like Trump. It’s not up to CNN and other media players to hire bad actors simply because the conservative movement is filled with bad actors. All news outlets ought to have easily identifiable standards, and if would-be paid contributors can’t meet those standards, they should not be hired.
Keep in mind that CNN remains under constant bullying attacks from Trump and the entire conservative movement. Last year, the White House lashed out at CNN by pulling reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. Trump routinely defames the network on Twitter. And just last week, Trump’s personal attorney sent a ridiculous threat to CNN, threatening to sue the network for its “biased” coverage of Trump. (“Never in the history of this country has a President been the subject of such a sustained barrage of unfair, unfounded, unethical and unlawful attacks by so-called ‘mainstream’ news, as the current situation,” etc.) Lawyers everywhere mocked the move as deeply unserious, but the cumulative effect adds up.
And that makes Duffy’s hiring even more distressing. It certainly seems to send a signal that “working the refs” is an effective strategy, and that if Republicans complain loudly and long enough, the cable news channel will bend, in small ways, to the GOP’s will.
Recall that back in January, CNN seemed to make a similar and equally misguided concession to Trump when it hired a hyper-partisan Republican flack with no experience in journalism to oversee the network’s campaign news coverage. After a public outcry, CNN changed the Republican’s job duties.
Note to CNN: It’s not too late to do the same with Duffy.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-to-fix-the-conservative-pundit-problem-in-the-age-of-trump
no lnx
How to fix the conservative pundit problem in the age of Trump
Written by David Atkins / The Washington Monthly August 31, 2019
Big media organizations have a Bret Stephens problem.
It could also be called a David Brooks problem. Or a George Will problem. But Bret Stephens’ embarrassing actions in the bedbug controversy over the past few days make him the perfect poster child for a challenge that spans the much of the journalism industry. To recap briefly, a university professor called Stephens a “bedbug” in response to a typically sophomoric column; Stephens responded by trying to get the professor fired in email exchanges; the professor took the issue public; and Stephens escalated with a ludicrous and falsely attributed column comparing the professor’s rhetoric to Nazi dehumanization that should never have made it past the editor’s desk.
Stephens is the sort of conservative columnist that major newspapers love to hire: anti-Trump, contrarian mediocrities ostensibly concerned with free speech and liberal overreach. He and others like him allow editors and ombudsmen to include “conservative opinion” without actually giving voice to conservatism as it truly exists today. A more genteel version of the provocateur pseudo-intellectualism of a Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, Bret Stephens and his fellow NeverTrump commentators offer the sort coded antebellum conservatism that even a good book-fair-tote-bag-carrying liberal can love. They provide climate denialism not as an affront to God’s plan or a conspiracy of pointy-headed nerds in it for the grant money or an interference in the workings of glorious libertarian capitalism, but merely as a questioning of consensus tyranny of thought; they offer imperialism as expansion of human freedom rather than jingoistic corporate and militaristic predation; they offer appeals to a patriarchal order of racial hierarchy not as a matter of overt Bible-thumping or white supremacy, but coded appeals to a “culture” of “family” and “respect” that just so happen to resemble a whitewashed Norman Rockwell painting where Father Knows Best.
The problem, of course, is that men like Stephens, Will and Brooks–and they almost uniformly middle-aged or older white men–represent very few people in actual civil society. Notably, very few of their kind wind up in elected office. Somewhere around 85% of Republicans support and approve of Trump; most Republicans think anti-white racism is a bigger problem than anti-black racism. And neither Democrats nor independents are buying in to their perspective. Ostensibly non-prejudiced, anti-Trump conservatism is far overrepresented in the media compared to its actual constituency. Why is this?
While some of the explanation lies in the sort of interpersonal chumminess among select opinion-makers who go to the right parties and went to the right schools as Chris Hayes lays bare in his Twilight of the Elites, it’s also true that big media organizations face an unenviable challenge when it comes to presenting conservative opinion in the Trump era.
On the one hand, editors have an obligation to their readers to present a wide spectrum of opinion–including ones with their core readers may disagree politically. On the other, editors also have a duty to maintain accuracy and social responsibility. Finally, they have both a financial and moral incentive to ensure that the opinions they print be interesting and well-considered, and not just a rehash of partisan talking points. As the conservative movement delves ever further into anti-scientific ignorance, overt bigotry and lockstep loyalty to its current leader, presenting responsible, accurate and interesting conservative opinion can be a challenge.
So let’s say you’re the editor of a major magazine or newspaper, and you want to give voice to the somewhat less than half or so of the country that identifies broadly with conservative perspectives. Do you hire an alt-right figure with openly racist and sexist attitudes who actually represents what modern conservatism truly is and what its voters are, even though it will outrage your readers and provide a dangerous platform for hateful views? Do you hire partisan operatives who will parrot the talking points du jour and defend whatever outlandish pronouncements Donald Trump makes next, at the risk of ruining your brand in much the way CNN has done by inviting commentary from the likes of Jeffrey Lord and Trump Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany? Or do you hire a never-Trump conservative like Bret Stephens who doesn’t actually represent very many people, but won’t unduly offend readers’ sensibilities or actively encourage racist violence (unless, of course, you include stumping for the Iraq War as the racist violence it is)?
Time and again, editors choose the third option as the path of greatest comfort and least resistance, at the cost of actual representation.
For what it’s worth, they do this on the left as well. Despite the strong progressive tilt of the Democratic electorate over the last decade, including but not limited to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ideological allies, the resilience of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary, as well as of course Sanders’ own surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 primary, both cable news and major newspapers have a dearth of representation from pundits and opinion writers who might generally be described as falling into the Sanders coalition. They continue to sample opinion from writers much more concerned about preserving the false veneer of past cultural unity and the economic stability of those with six-and-seven-figure mutual fund and real estate portfolios, than the more representative and growing class of people struggling to afford a downpayment on their first mortgage while working two gig economy jobs, paying off exorbitant student loans and stuck in a private insurance hell of making too much for Medicaid, but too little to afford adequate medical care. The opinion-makers are still much more old, white and male than the Democratic electorate at large, and even when younger women and people of color are added to the mix, they rarely espouse the more openly democratic socialist and social democratic positions of those demographics among the actual public.
Solving this problem for left-leaning commentary is simple: including more diverse and more progressive voices won’t endanger or embarrass anyone or damage a media company’s brand, though it may discomfit some centrist traditionalists.
But in terms of conservative commentary, media organizations should look to err more on the side of actual representation. Why risk the ire of readers and do potential harm in order to present contrarian viewpoints that few Americans truly share? There is nothing novel or interesting in the sort of content that George Will, David Brooks and Bret Stephens provide; their takes are as predictable as the rising of the sun and the passing seasons; and it’s not actually instructive as to the opinions of the Americans who continue to empower Republican policymakers.
A better approach would be to hire Trump loyalists willing to defend the president and his actions (as well as those of Senate Leader McConnell and the Roberts Court), while strictly adhering to standards of fact-checking and anti-racism. If a conservative writer could manage to defend modern Republican politics while remaining honest, accurate and without resorting to bigotry, that would be both potentially interesting and skillful enough to deserve publication. It would be more satisfying to conservative readers and more informative for liberal ones.
But the time for providing a special platform for contrarian NeverTrump conservatives should be at an end. It’s both embarrassing and unproductive.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/2020-democrats-dont-only-have-to-face-trump-they-must-say-how-theyll-take-on-the-blob/
If a Democrat is elected president in November 2020, he or she will have two challenges: one global and one municipal.
The first challenge will be how to run the worldwide $643 billion a year military empire of the United States, which surveils the planet while fighting four undeclared wars. The second challenge is much smaller but still formidable: what to do about “the Blob” in Washington, D.C.
No, this isn’t a science fiction joke. The Blob is the nickname that Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s speechwriter, gave to America’s foreign policymaking elite in a May 2016 interview. According to Rhodes, the Blob included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other supporters of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
More generally, Rhodes was referring the coterie of operatives who have made U.S. foreign policy under every president from Truman to Trump. With his unkind epithet, Rhodes suggested these men and women responsible for the U.S. foreign policy record are a shapeless mass lacking a coherent identity yet somehow ominous.
While Rhodes was reviled inside the Beltway, his coinage has stuck. The Blob is useful shorthand for a recognizable and powerful group: the former officials, analysts, diplomats, writers and military officers who espouse orthodox U.S. foreign policy views.
They are not a secret cabal. They work at think tanks and elite universities and consulting firms. They talk to reporters. They opine on cable TV talk shows. And they rotate in and out of government positions. They range from multilateral liberals to hawkish neoconservatives. While they have had deep differences, they have collectively promoted a broadly consistent set of policies that has defined the United States in the world over the last 30 years.
Right now, they favor a hard line on Russia, intervention in Syria and Venezuela, bolstering NATO, and promoting free-trade agreements. They oppose defense spending cuts, rapid denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and a jobs-driven foreign policy.
At its best, the Blob gave us the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, Cuba normalization, the Millennium Challenge to address global poverty, and the now-abandoned treaty on nuclear weapons in Europe.
At its worst, the Blob gave us proxy wars (leading to failed states) in Central America; expansion of NATO (to the fury of Russia); free-trade agreements (which did little for Americans living inside the East and West Coasts); invasion of Iraq (on false pretenses); the (unsuccessful) occupation of Afghanistan; the implementation of a torture regime (and its removal); the furtive implementation of mass surveillance (since abandoned); the illusory “two-state solution” in Israel/Palestine; and unauthorized wars in Libya, Somalia, Niger, and Yemen, the last with catastrophic human consequences.
What should President Sanders (or Warren or Biden or Buttigieg or Gabbard) do upon taking office on January 21, 2021? Should they follow the Obama strategy of implementing incremental course corrections in the trajectory of current policies? Or force a fundamental change of direction on issues of war and peace?
The answer depends, in large part, on how she or he thinks about the Blob.
The Blob Today
Trump has marginalized the Blob. He has abandoned the orderly policymaking process they revere. He ignores their briefings. He scorns their expertise. He demonizes their concept of a (neo)liberal world order. Instead, he uses the U.S. foreign policy apparatus for his own ends: to feed the family business, withdraw from land wars, collaborate with like-minded autocrats, stimulate arms sales, demonstrate belligerence, and dominate the news cycle.
The Blob fears Trump, for good reasons and bad ones.
This is the Democrats’ dilemma. Trump’s successor cannot run, much less reorient, America’s global empire without a policymaking elite. Yet the existing elite—the Blob—is wedded to the status quo ante Trump, and adamant in defense of its unimpressive-to-awful record since 9/11.
Exhibit A: Robert Kagan, liberal-minded neoconservative, adviser to both George Bush and Hillary Clinton. He is using the platform of the Washington Post to offer an alternative to Trump’s foreign policy. Since Trump has no use for the Blob, Kagan is appealing to Democrats and post-Trump Republicans to return to the foreign policies of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era. He wants America to face the challenge of the populist authoritarianism.
Kagan doesn’t spend much time defending the Blob’s record on Iraq’s non-existent WMD, torture, mass surveillance, election-meddling, Libya, or Yemen. He doesn’t spend any time addressing what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have said about the roots of today’s authoritarianism.
Kagan’s eloquent disquisition on the course of world history ends with the argument that to oppose his policy prescriptions is to oppose democracy itself:
“A broad alliance of strange bedfellows stretching from the far right to self-described ‘realists’ to the progressive left wants the United States to abandon resistance to rising authoritarian power. They would grant Russia and China the spheres of influence they demand in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. They would acquiesce in the world’s new ideological ‘diversity.’ And they would consign the democracies living in the shadow of the authoritarian great powers to their hegemonic control.”
One could describe the same reality by saying the repeated failures of the U.S. foreign policy elite—two unsuccessful trillion-dollar wars, the use of torture and mass surveillance, and near-total indifference to the impact of foreign policy on the U.S. economy have generated widespread opposition to the pretensions of the foreign policy elite. It is a “broad alliance” indeed.
The idea that post-Trump U.S. policymakers will act in defense of democracy is belied by the failures of democracy that have occurred on their watch. Kagan’s rhetoric of democracy is about as convincing as when Hillary Clinton tweeted “America is already great.”
What Is to Be Done?
The position of the three leading Democratic candidates on the Blob are pretty clear.
Joe Biden, who has not yet announced, was among the most dovish of Obama’s advisers, but he seems comfortable with the national security status quo. He might invite Kagan for an interview but not give him a job.
Bernie Sanders, gruff socialist, is an outsider. Along with his foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, he insists on a fundamental change from Blob policies. Sanders wouldn’t return Kagan’s phone calls.
(See David Klion’s “Who Is Matt Duss, and Can He Take On Washington’s ‘Blob’?” on the Nation.)
Elizabeth Warren, impassioned Harvard professor, is a policymaking insider par excellence (she almost single-handedly created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). She too wants to break with the Blob. Warren would return Kagan’s phone call—and tell him to hold her beer.
In short, Biden would most likely embrace the Blob, Sanders would purge it, and Warren would bend it to her will.
Another Democratic aspirant who has signaled their independence from Blob thinking is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who served two tours in Iraq as a medical specialist. She is an outspoken anti-interventionist, who has flouted liberal sensibilities with her willingness to take meetings with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a brutal dictator. She serves on the board of a foreign policy group funded by the Koch Brothers. She’s a Blob-buster.
Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso congressman, has shown an independent streak. According to Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, O’Rourke “bucked Obama on several important issues, pressuring him to close Guantanamo, supporting legislation to curtail NSA spying, opposing war in Syria and arming the country’s rebels, and demanding Obama get congressional authorization for his continued war on ISIS.” O’Rourke looks like a Blob skeptic.
Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, served as naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, but has not focused on foreign policy or national security issues. He did endorse the suggestion of Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent that all Democratic presidential candidates pledge to abide by the War Powers Act. The oft-ignored 1975 law requires the president to get congressional approval for U.S. military action lasting longer than 90 days. That’s the kind of useful reform the Blob would never propose but could probably live with.
Jay Inslee, governor of Washington state, is running a one-issue campaign: climate change, which implies a U.S. foreign policy agenda very different than the Blob consensus. He’s a Blob skeptic.
The foreign policy views of John Delaney, a Maryland congressman and former businessman, flow from his belief in free trade, long a staple of semi-official Washington thinking. He’s Blob-friendly.
The other declared candidates—Sen. Cory Booker, former HUD secretary Julian Castro, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Kamala Harris, Senator Amy Klobuchar and entrepreneur Andrew Yang—have said little about issues of war and peace beyond platitudes. What they have (or have not) said about Venezuela indicates they are Blob-friendly.
Of course, the 2020 campaign has just begun, and voters are notoriously uninterested in foreign policy issues, at least until they become issues of war and peace. The candidates have just begun to face questions about how they would administer the American empire after Trump. And those questions begin with: What do you think of the Blob?
Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.
This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
==
classic on sports
https://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-heres-why-americans-know-so-much-about-sports-so-little-about-world-affairs
QUESTION: You've written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken -- in some places you call it a "Cartesian common sense" -- of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you've written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it's very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?
The following is a short excerpt from a classic, The Chomsky Reader, which offers a unique insight on a question worth asking -- how is it that we as a people can be so knowledgable about the intricacies of various sports teams, yet be colossally ignorant about our various undertakings abroad?
CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.
In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.
Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used -- would be used -- under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.
There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.
...
QUESTION: Do you think people are inhibited byexpertise?
CHOMSKY: There are also experts about football, but these people don't defer to them. The people who call in talk with complete confidence. They don't care if they disagree with the coach or whoever the local expert is. They have their own opinion and they conduct intelligent discussions. I think it's an interesting phenomenon. Now I don't think that international or domestic affairs are much more complicated. And what passes for serious intellectual discourse on these matters does not reflect any deeper level of understanding or knowledge.
One finds something similar in the case of so-called primitive cultures
...
[punditry?]
QUESTION: I asked a while ago whether people are inhibited by the aura of expertise. Can one turn this around -- are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on?
CHOMSKY: I suspect that this is rather common. Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them. Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed. Everyone who writes and speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine. I'm sure just about everyone exploits these privileges. I know I do. When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical about the practice of one of the Holy States: the United States itself, or Israel, since it was enshrined by the intelligentsia after its 1967 victory. This freedom from the requirements of evidence or even rationality is quite a convenience, as any informed reader of the journals of public opinion, or even much of the scholarly literature, will quickly discover. It makes life easy, and permits expression of a good deal of nonsense or ignorant bias with impunity, also sheer slander. Evidence is unnecessary, argument beside the point. Thus a standard charge against American dissidents or even American liberals -- I've cited quite a few cases in print and have collected many others -- is that they claim that the United States is the sole source of evil in the world or other similar idiocies; the convention is that such charges are entirely legitimate when the target is someone who does not march in the appropriate parades, and they are therefore produced without even a pretense of evidence. Adherence to the party line confers the right to act in ways that would properly be regarded as scandalous on the part of any critic of received orthodoxies. Too much public awareness might lead to a demand that standards of integrity should be met, which would certainly save a lot of forests from destruction, and would send many a reputation tumbling.
The right to lie in the service of power is guarded with considerable vigor and passion. This becomes evident whenever anyone takes the trouble to demonstrate that charges against some official enemy are inaccurate or, sometimes, pure invention. The immediate reaction among the commissars is that the person is an apologist for the real crimes of official enemies. The case of Cambodia is a striking example. That the Khmer Rouge were guilty of gruesome atrocities was doubted by no one, apart from a few marginal Maoist sects. It is also true, and easily documented, that Western propaganda seized upon these crimes with great relish, exploiting them to provide a retrospective justification for Western atrocities, and since standards are nonexistent in such a noble cause, they also produced a record of fabrication and deceit that is quite remarkable. Demonstration of this fact, and fact it is, elicited enormous outrage, along with a stream of new and quite spectacular lies, as Edward Herman and I, among others, have documented.
...
==
==
susan bordo
Cultural historian, media critic, feminist scholar. Author, most recently, of The Destruction of Hillary Clinton
Nov 17
George Orwell Visits Broadcast News
https://medium.com/@susanbordo/george-orwell-visits-broadcast-news-bdec6b30d1e9
===
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com**/2015**/04/10/the-laffer-swerve/
no lnx
Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog
The Laffer Swerve
APRIL 10, 2015 10:03 AM April 10, 2015 10:03 am 151
Jim Tankersley has a good article on Arthur Laffer’s never-stronger influence on the Republican party, with just one seriously misleading statement:
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Laffer’s ideas have also grown out of fashion with much of the mainstream economic community. There is an entire branch of economic literature that uses detailed equations to show cutting top tax rates does not spark additional growth.
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No, Laffer hasn’t “grown out of fashion” with mainstream economics — he was never in fashion. There was never any evidence to support strong supply-side claims about the marvels of tax cuts and the horrors of tax increases; even freshwater macroeconomists, despite their willingness to believe foolish things, never went down that road.
And nothing in the experience of the past 35 years has made Lafferism any more credible. Since the 1970s there have been four big changes in the effective tax rate on the top 1 percent: the Reagan cut, the Clinton hike, the Bush cut, and the Obama hike. Republicans are fixated on the boom that followed the 1981 tax cut (which had much more to do with monetary policy, but never mind). But they predicted dire effects from the Clinton hike; instead we had a boom that eclipsed Reagan’s. They predicted wonderful things from the Bush tax cuts; instead we got an unimpressive expansion followed by a devastating crash. And they predicted terrible things from the tax rise after Obama’s reelection; instead we got the best job growth since 1999.
And when I say “they predicted”, I especially mean Laffer himself, who has a truly extraordinary record of being wrong at crucial turning points. As Bruce Bartlett pointed out a few years ago, Laffer was even wrong during the Reagan years: he predicted that the Reagan tax hikes of 1982, which partially reversed earlier cuts, would cripple the economy; “morning in America” promptly followed. Oh, and let’s not forget his 2009 warnings about soaring interest rates and inflation.
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The question you should ask, then, is why this always-wrong economic doctrine now has a stronger grip on the GOP than ever before.
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It wasn’t always thus. George W. Bush’s inner circle clearly had little use for the likes of Laffer; they engaged in a lot of deceptive advertising about the economy (and a few other things), but they never made extravagant supply-side claims — and remember that Greg “charlatans and cranks” Mankiw served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But since 2009 the GOP has swerved hard right into fantasy land — and it has done so despite a remarkable string of dead-wrong predictions by the people peddling that fantasy.
Tankersley quotes me as saying that it’s about wanting economists who tell them what they want to hear, which is self-evidently true. But that kind of wishful thinking is always around. What seems to have happened to American conservatives is that they have lost all the checks and balances that used to limit that kind of solipsism. And of course it’s not just economic policy.
What do we do in the face of a major party gone mad?
---
==
7/18 eg
PDATE (7/26):Following the publication of this post, Cuccinelli deleted the image from his Facebook page.
CNN legal and political commentator Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican who formerly served as Virginia's attorney general, shared a fake quote from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that an “illegal immigrant” should be nominated to the Supreme Court.
In late June, a Twitter “parody” account pretending to be CNN tweeted an image of Waters appearing on CNN with a fake chyron that said “Waters: SCOTUS Pick Should Be Illegal Immigrant,” along with the text, “Rep @MaxinePWaters: ‘The next Supreme Court Justice should be an illegal immigrant.’” The fake quote and chyron subsequently spread as real across social media and radio, with multiple memes created around the tweet.
On July 25, Cuccinelli shared one of those memes on Facebook. The image also said, “Read that again- slowly- and let the full depth of abject stupidity and desperation behind the statement, uttered on nationwide television, sink in fully….”
==
6/18 neo-cons geo shultz and yoo are back b/c of contrast with disaster djt
==
https://www.alternet.org/illusion-competence-what-know-it-alls-dont-know
==
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/the-gop-should-always-do-the-opposite-of-what-bill-kristol-says/267362/
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==
(ISIS attack toward Bagdad 7/14 sparked outrage at zombie neo-cons on sunday shows)
fun: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Very_Serious_People and http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pundit
non-experts paid to have opinions (to entertain) but hedges speaks to public intellectuals
see media corporate consolidation
Fox has made punditry standard b/c it's cheap; Colbert is a parody for rightwing mycountryrightorwrong
Stewart often mocks bad punditry?
nice gig for pension plan; you don't even have to be right about predictions
also nice because it's cross-platform: you can peddle same media in bunch of formats (and even leverage one to another? free blog leads to paid prrmium online content, book?)
who has lost Fox gig and why? they take in refugees? Palin was personally dislike by Ailes?
Beck ratings slipped? his sponsors were targetted and defected?
==
Conflicts of interest in the Syria debate
An analysis of the defense industry ties of experts and think tanks who commented on military intervention
October 11, 2013 http://public-accountability.org/2013/10/conflicts-of-interest-in-the-syria-debate/
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http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/04/05/report-partisanship-and-diversity-on-the-sunday/193482
Republicans And Conservatives Dominate Broadcast Networks' Sunday Show Guest Lineups
Broadcast Networks Hosted Republican And Conservative Guests Most Often. Out of 400 total guests hosted by ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press, and Fox's Fox News Sunday during the first three months of 2013, 40 percent were either Republicans or conservatives while only 29 percent were Democrats or progressives. Centrist, nonpartisan, and ideologically neutral guests made up 31 percent.
-Elected Republicans Were Hosted More Often Than Elected Democrats And Obama Administration Officials. Except for Face the Nation, elected Republicans were featured on the Sunday shows significantly more often than elected Democrats and Obama administration officials combined. Again, Fox News Sunday was the worst offender, with 67 percent of guests in this category being Republicans.
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Truthdig [1] / By Chris Hedges [2]
America's Sell Out Intellectuals and the Perks They Get
April 1, 2013 |
The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller [3], Michael Ignatieff [4], Nicholas Kristof [5], David Remnick [6], Fareed Zakaria [7], Michael Walzer [8], Paul Berman [9],Thomas Friedman [10], George Packer [11], Anne-Marie Slaughter [12], Kanan Makiya [13] and the late Christopher Hitchens [14]—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.
These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker [15] Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism��� about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands. DONOHUE MSN?
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.
Leslie Gelb [16], in the magazine Foreign Affairs, spelled it out after the invasion of Iraq.
“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility,” he wrote. “We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ��perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common��often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”
The moral cowardice of the power elite is especially evident when it comes to the plight of the Palestinians. The liberal class, in fact, is used to marginalize and discredit those, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein [17], who have the honesty, integrity and courage to denounce Israeli war crimes. And the liberal class is compensated for its dirty role in squelching debate.
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,” wrote the lateEdward Said [18]. “You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”
“For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence,” Said went on. “If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
Julien Benda [19] argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” These intellectuals were not, Benda conceded, very often able to prevent the powerful from “filling all history with the noise of their hatred and their slaughters.” But they did, at least, “prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities.” In short, Benda asserted, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.�� But once the intellectuals began to “play the game of political passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators.” And this is why Michael Moore is correct when he blames The New York Times and the liberal establishment, even more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for the Iraq War.
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran [20], the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.
intellectuals [21]
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/americas-sell-out-intellectuals-and-perks-they-get
Links:
[1] http://www.truthdig.com/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/chris-hedges
[3] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/billkeller/index.html
[4] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/michael-ignatieff
[5] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html
[6] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/david_remnick/search?contributorName=david%20remnick
[7] http://fareedzakaria.com/
[8] http://www.ias.edu/people/faculty-and-emeriti/walzer
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Berman
[10] http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Packer
[12] http://www.princeton.edu/~slaughtr/
[13] http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/03/16/kanan-makiya-regret-about-pressing-war-iraq/k6ZsBxp4sXptfXrcRAocdO/story.html
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/arts/christopher-hitchens-is-dead-at-62-obituary.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/opinion/calling-bush-a-liar.html
[16] http://www.cfr.org/experts/afghanistan-iraq-terrorism/leslie-h-gelb/b3325
[17] http://normanfinkelstein.com/biography/
[18] http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=634
[19] http://www.answers.com/topic/julien-benda
[20] http://www.nndb.com/people/134/000026056/
[21] http://www.alternet.org/tags/intellectuals
[22] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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Extra! February 2011
Pundits Fuel the Right’s Latest Rage
‘Constitutional’ conservatives’ selective love for Bill of Rights
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Right-leaning pundits play a key role in a growing fad of self-styled ���constitutional conservatives” who say Barack Obama is subverting the U.S. Constitution—and brandish pocket-sized copies of the document to prove it. The pundits cite a potpourri of purportedly unconstitutional policies, including healthcare legislation, corporate bailouts and perhaps even a cover-up over where Obama was born.
And they’re making an impact. A Nexis database search of U.S. newspapers and news wires using the terms “constitutional conservative/conservatism” gives some indication of the growing prominence of the trend. Rarely mentioned in the year 2000 (12 times) or even in 2009 (30), it caught fire in 2010 with 628 mentions and now outpaces “compassionate conservative.”
Constitutional conservatism counts among its ranks some of the GOP’s biggest names: relative newcomers like Sarah Palin, senators Jim DeMint and Rand Paul, and Rep. Michele Bachmann, along with old-guard conservatives such as senators John Kyl and Orrin Hatch and Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese. The right’s leading think tank, the Heritage Foundation, regularly decries assaults on the Constitution (e.g., “Restoring the American Compact,” 9/16/10). The Cato Institute, which challenges the healthcare act on constitutional grounds (Cato.org, 12/17/10), specializes in arguing that the financial bailouts were unconstitutional (Cato.org, 10/20/08.)
In February, 80 conservative groups signed on to a manifesto, “The Mount Vernon Statement: Constitutional Conservatism: A Statement for the 21st Century.��� In addition to Heritage president Edwin Feulner, signatories included Meese, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Foundation. Conservative media figures who signed on included Human Events’ Tom Winter, National Review’s Kathryn Lopez and Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.
Right-wing appeals to “constitutionalism” are not unprecedented; the Clinton years also saw a surge in constitutionalism on the right, largely located in militia and so-called patriot groups, whose ideology resembled today’s constitutional conservatism. The transformation of fringe views of the ’90s into today’s mainstream conservatism has much to do with an enthusiastic corps of apostles in the corporate media.
“That Rock in the Healthcare Road? It’s Called the Constitution” was the headline over a widely syndicated George Will column (Washington Post, 1/14/10) lambasting White House��backed healthcare legislation for requiring individuals to buy private insurance. In another column (Washington Post, 3/29/09), “Bailing Out of the Constitution,” Will targeted the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (better known as the TARP bailouts) for allowing the White House to decide where the funds should be spent, which Will says violates a constitutional doctrine forbidding Congress from delegating such powers:
FreedomWorks, a Washington-based libertarian advocacy organization, argues that EESA violates “the nondelegation doctrine.” Although the text does not spell it out, the Constitution��s logic and structure—particularly the separation of powers—imply limits on the size and kind of discretion that Congress may confer on the executive branch.
Will’s appeal to the constitutional authority of GOP partisans at FreedomWorks, and to constitutional language he admits ��does not spell out” what he is attempting to argue, is amusing. But it’s also worth noting that the bailout law was originally signed by George W. Bush (10/3/08); Will’s column declaring it unconstitutional ran five months later, after Obama, who continued the program, took office.
Fox News contributor and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (Special Report, 7/9/10) also says the healthcare act subverts the American compact: “Obama-care won’t stand a minute of scrutiny under Tenth Amendment analysis.” (The Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers not granted to the federal government “to the States…or to the people,” is a favorite of “constitutional conservatives.”)
On Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, where calling the president a “boy” (10/27/09) or describing him as looking “demonic” (10/18/10) is considered responsible commentary, charging the White House with subverting the constitution is de rigueur (e.g., “Obama Thugocracy on Display in Un- constitutional Chrysler Takeover,” Rush Limbaugh.com; 5/5/09).
Fox News talker and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol boasts (Weekly Standard, 6/28/10) of “the peaceful constitutionalists-populist political realignment” that he and fellow conservative pundits have helped create, adding, “The small people are winning.” According to Kristol (Fox News Sunday, 4/11/10):
One thing that motivates conservatives today is the sense that the Constitution has become a nothing…. There’s no constraint on government…. I think the notion that there’s a kind of constitutionalist agenda on the right to oppose the progressive agenda on the left has actually gone further down into the populace, you know, than constitutional-type issues normally do.
That’s for sure.
From the McCarthy Era through the Patriot Act, the right has been more associated with assaults on the Constitution than appeals to it. Thus current calls for the trial, execution or assassination of WikiLeaks representative Julian Assange (see p. 5) are no aberration, but exist on a continuum with conservative calls for the heads of New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen and the Washington Post’s Dana Priest for revealing official secrets about the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping and CIA “black sites” (American Journalism Review, 10/11/06).
And indeed, for people who profess to revere the Constitution, many of today’s “constitutional conservatives” have a strange way of showing it. For instance, many “constitutionalists” in the Tea Party movement would repeal the 14th Amendment, because it confers automatic citizenship on anyone born in the U.S., as well as the 16th, for instituting a federal income tax, and the 17th, for establishing direct election of U.S. senators (San Jose Mercury News, 12/20/10).
Not that it’s wrong to scrutinize the constitutionality of government policies. On healthcare, there are serious questions about requiring citizens to buy a private commodity. (At this writing, two federal judges upheld the healthcare act’s constitutionality, while another has challenged it.) But over the past decade, many of the conservatives who complain about the lawlessness of the Obama administration have shown little interest in arguably more serious Bush-era breaches of the Constitution, including those that have been continued by the Obama White House.
Take the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogations,” which involved water torture, sleep deprivation and other techniques traditionally considered torture under U.S. and international law. By any reasonable measure, torture violates the Fifth Amendment restriction on self-incrimination as well as the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But “constitutional conservatives” have treated the Bush administration’s use of torture with silence or equivocation at best, applause at worst.
“Torture is not always impermissible,” wrote Charles Krauthammer (Weekly Standard, 12/5/05), arguing in a Washington Post column (5/1/09) that the Bush administration demonstrates that sometimes torture “works.”
Bill Kristol (Special Report, 8/26/09) made a similar anticonstitutional argument, defending cruel and unusual Bush-era practices because the CIA’s inspector general said they “clearly were very helpful.” Kristol also criticized Obama (Special Report, 4/16/09) for disavowing “the good faith efforts of a previous administration to protect us in ways that I think were entirely appropriate.”
George Will’s constitutional certainty on the healthcare act contrasts with his equivocation on waterboarding. After secret documents revealed that a key terrorism suspect had been waterboarded 183 times (ABC’s This Week, 8/30/09), Will’s central concern was that the documents had been made public, and his only qualms were expressed in terms of moral relativism: “Whether or not these techniques are immoral or how immoral they are surely depends on whether or not they work.” In his Washington Post column (4/30/09), Will argued that while most Americans would consider “enhanced interrogation” torture, they may be wrong��because it’s effective.
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly (NYMag.com, 4/21/09) dismissed concerns over waterboarding and other banned Bush-era practices: ���Most Americans understand, when life and death is there, you’ve got to do something more than the Army Field Manual.” His Fox colleague Sean Hannity (Hannity, 3/10/09) seemed to make almost a religious argument for waterboarding: “I don’t have any problem taking [a terrorism suspect’s] head, sticking it underwater and scaring the living daylights out of him and making him think we’re drowning him, and I’m a Christian.”
How far “down into the populace” does conservative support for torture go? Covering a focus group conducted by conservative pollster Frank Luntz during the 2008 Republican primaries, in which GOP voters were asked to rate their approval of candidates’ remarks on a mechanical dial, Time columnist Joe Klein was shocked by how pro-torture the participants were (Swampland, 11/29/07.) According to Klein, when candidate John McCain, a former victim of torture, expressed opposition to waterboarding, “the dials plummeted… about as low as you can go.”
And so it is with numerous constitutionally dubious policies, like the policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial, which has continued under the Obama administration in spite of the Sixth and 14th amendments’ guarantees of a speedy trial and due process of law. A Fox panel (Special Report with Brit Hume, 12/8/08) discussing Obama’s campaign promise to close Guantánamo and hold trials for some detainees, featured Krauthammer arguing, “We’re going to have to have a law which is going to allow indefinite detention,” to which the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes responded, “As Charles says, you have to pass a permanent detention law in the case of some of these guys.”
The “some of these guys” exception to the Bill of Rights has not yet been identified by “constitutional conservatives.”
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4236