Did this dynamic of media balance play out in the healthcare debate?
Obama’s healthcare proposals were designed to avoid the pitfalls of past failures by negotiating with many of the healthcare stakeholders and embracing ideas that had been the centerpiece of past Republican proposals. These included state exchanges to foster competition in private insurance, subsidies for low income households, significant insurance reforms including guaranteed issue and affordability for those with pre-existing conditions, and an individual mandate to encourage universal coverage. But once Obama was for them, Republicans turned against them. They refused to negotiate on the contents of a health reform plan, and characterized their old plans as socialistic. Whatever Obama’s messaging failures, the press itself failed to inform the public of the disingenuousness of the Republican opposition and the inaccuracy of much of the rhetoric leveled against the Affordable Care Act. It was safer to cover the politics of health reform and avoid making judgments that were tougher on one party than the other.
Does this apply in other situations?
It applies in many situations. You see it in healthcare and on taxes. Reporters should be examining, is it plausible to hold to a no new taxes pledge and be responsible to the issues of the deficit and the debt? What the no new tax pledge has done to the Republican Party is to limit its ability to deal with the problem. Instead they say let’s talk around it. What are the implications in the Ryan budget? Do you ever see that laid out in a television show or a major print piece? Once in awhile the Times or The Wall Street Journal will have something. But most of the time you don’t get this.
So how should reporters cover this?
Help audiences understand asymmetrical polarization. Document, and report on it. Who’s telling the truth? Who’s taking hostages?
Can we really expect this to happen?
That was one of the reasons we wrote the book. We have learned our book has led to heated discussions in some newsrooms. We know there are enormous challenges. Our goal is get into the discussion within media organizations.
Is the press innately defensive?
Yes. It’s getting harder and harder to take risks. That’s part of the argument we’re making. In the face of these partisan wars, the press has become even more defensive and looks for safe harbors. One of these is to treat both sides as equally implicated. It was probably easier to cover things when both parties were operating in the mainstream of American politics. When one party has moved off track in such a breathtaking fashion, he said/she said serves to obscure the underlying reality rather than expose it.
What would be ideal for the press right now?
The key thing is not to try to return to some imagined golden age. It’s to try to make sure there is a mix of reporting and writing that is a description of the political and economic reality—and get that to the electorate. It means going beyond the fact checks, whose results seldom make it to the front page and are routinely ignored by candidates, and get to a point in which telling lies is punished and not rewarded in the political arena.
Can the media alone help change the discourse?
The media has to have help from other leaders in society speaking the truth. There once were voices in the business community. You need voices that support the commonweal. The press can’t do it alone.
What are the consequences for democracy if this does not change?
They are enormous. It’s concern for the wellbeing of our democracy that motivated us to write this book. The war between the parties is being waged in a way that does serious damage to the country. It’s not the reporters’ fault but it’s their job to clarify for the public what is happening in our public life—who is responsible, and how we might overcome these problems. They are constrained by professional norms and by the expectations and demands of their supervisors. I want to be clear we’re not attacking reporters.
Damn!
You've hit the nail on the head!
Journalists have been too hard on Democrats and too easy on Republicans!...
If only those dirty Republicans would just raise taxes, the Dems would slash spending and balance the budget! Everybody knows it.
It's not like the Dems would do anything sneaky... Say, like cram a hugely unpopular 3000 page healthcare reform bill down the throats of the American people through a corrupt reconciliation procedure, or anything.
It was the GOP that did that, right?
What a bunch of crap.
#1 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 07:57 AM
padikiller, the point being made on health care, for example, is that the bill was largely one of Republican proposals, but the republicans refused to back the bill, negotiate key points, or engage in rational political discourse in any way. They simply opposed it on the grounds that they would do nothing to be seen as aiding a democratic president.
Now, regardless of if you, or anyone, likes the resulting bill or not, the issue is not that the democrats would enact the best policies. The issue is that with the republicans refusing to engage in rational discourse and act for the interest of the nation and instead engage in radical slash and burn politics, that good government is impossible. And that impossibility is the fault of the radicalized republican party right now.
#2 Posted by daw55, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 09:40 AM
@daw
The POINT is that most of Americans opposed Obamacare in draft form, most of them opposed it in its corrupted form (after the "Louisiana Purchase" and the "Cornhusker Kickback"), most of the opposed it after the politically corrupt reconciliation process and most of them oppose it today.
Nonetheless, the Democrats crammed this bill down the throats of the American people, not the Republicans.
Sure, there were plenty of ideas in Obamacare that had previously been suggested by Republicans. But at the end of the day, when it came time to vote, the Dems are the ones who shafted the American people. The GOP walked away from it.
For the record, the GOP has put tax cuts on the table - the argument to the contrary is just false. The Dems simply refuse to cut spending.
But hey! Why let the mere truth ruin another Fairy Tale here in Lieberman Liberal La La Land, right?
It doesn't matter.
The liberals (especially those in the MSM) underestimate the degree to which Obamacare pissed off the American electorate. The midterm elections were nothing. Just wait and see what happens in 98 days. Just wait and see how that "you didn't build that" commie nonsense plays out here in Virginia.
The list of Dems who are bypassing their own convention is growing faster than Obama's deficit.
Lieberman and her liberal buddies can't give cover to the collectivism anymore.
Unless something HUGE happens before the election, Obama is toast, the Senate is lost to the Dems, and you will see some serious, serious use (probably even abuse) of the "reconciliation" process the Dems used to foist Obamacare on us.
#3 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 10:18 AM
Make that "the GOP has put tax INCREASES on the table"
#4 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 10:21 AM
There's another element of this debate Mann doesn't talk about - biased journalists who are proud of their partisanship. They're the new breed we see quickly replacing traditional methods of journalism, some funded directly by PACs or indirectly through a complex system of nonprofits. They're creating their own audience from a partisan niche, making story choices based on their beliefs and creating their own truths based on their opinions. I am seeing this happen already in small markets, where nonpartisan journalists such as myself are being replaced by nonprofit groups who blatantly lie about their partisanship. The GOP will eventually cannibalize itself, but what will happen to this new breed of journalism?
#5 Posted by Melissa Bower, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 12:17 PM
This is nonsense. The voters have a right to send representatives to Washington to buck a system that has obviously shown incompetence. Thomas Mann came to maturity and influence in an era of go-along, get-along Republicanism. In this interview, he does not explain, to a left-wing interviewer, exactly why those Republican voters who sent Tea Party representatives to DC should be motivated to opt for Bob Dole-style dealmakers.
If the Democrats want $10 billion more for social programs for their voting constituencies, and the GOP leaders bargain it down to $5 billion, that's probably a sign to Washington cave-dwellers of good policy-making. But there's a sizable constituency out there, which helps pay these bills, that rejects any more money for leftist social programs at all. That's something that lifers such as Mann and Ornstein can't accept, and so they fall back on name-calling. In the showdown over the debt ceiling, supposedly the measure of Republican 'extremism', there were 66 GOP votes against the compromise. But 95 Democrats, nearly half their House caucus, also took the crash/burn position. Mann has, like a lot of DC people, internalized the concept that history/events always move to 'the Left', so left-wing radicalism is tolerated.
The current administration took the position in 'Citizens United' - quite explicitly - that the government has the power to ban political expression (pamphlets, documentaries, advertisements) if such is deemed the product of a 'corporation', First Amendment or no. The Democrats in Congress support this view. The current administration also took the position, in the Obamacare case, that the Constitution permits complete and total regulation of any activity by any private individual by the federal government, from growing food on your own property for your own consumption to deciding not to purchase health insurance - a blank check to a Chavez-style 'democracy'. So, who exactly are the 'extremists' again?
#6 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 01:27 PM
Shorter Mark Richard & padi - Bawwww.
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 02:03 PM
PS. It should be mentioned that the stupid debt ceiling fight, which the republicans are pledging to do again, cost America 1.3 billion dollars.
The 'party of fiscal responsibility', what a bunch of putzes.
And what was the coverage of that issue like? If Dancing Dave is any example, it was Both Sides Do It.
Centristy non-analysis that enables radicals and constantly pushes democrats rightward.
Say you have a bully on the playground beating on a kid half his size. If the teachers are operating under the 'both sides do it' model, which side is constantly getting behavior excused and which side is constantly getting nitpicked for provoking a beating.
That's what you see on meet the press and it's truly disgusting when you see the bruises from these beatings show up not the politicians, but the people whom these politicians represent.
Make no mistake, the radicals and bullies represent wealth and corporate power. The kid half their size, begging for bipartisanship and compromise, is the closest thing the poor and vulnerable have got to representation.
And the press has been standing in the middle, watching as the poor and vulnerable take their shots, pretending it's a game and that both sides are equally responsible.
How they can do that and sleep well at night is a mystery to me.
#8 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 03:04 PM
Gee, Thimbles, is that the best you have? BAWW? You post on here, and at greater length, than I do, and use a lot more aggressive language, with all those scary/evil rich people and big corporations that seem to haunt your visions.
Meanwhile, I'll stick to my contention that Mann and Ornstein are Beltway establishment folk who sense that the Tea Party, and not some leftist groups that are easily controlled and co-opted by the DC elite, are the real threat to mediocre business as usual. And that they are unable to explain exactly why 'moderate Republicanism', however defined, has been good for the rest of the country, whatever it may be for those inside the Beltway.
#9 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 03:17 PM
Both sides do it, right?
#10 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 04:23 PM
Those state-worshiping dupes totally agree with our political agenda. This bodes well for Our Democracy.
#11 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 04:29 PM
This is a both sides thing, right?
#12 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 04:32 PM
.
Thanks to those small-govt, laissez-faire Republicans, there are only 88,000,000,000,000 federal laws and regulations! We must overcome the extreme Republican obstructionism! We shall achieve Our Glorious State!
.
#13 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 04:58 PM
Uh, Thimbles, your links indicate that both sides indeed do it. You should read them some time. The narrative that the Democrats are just too darn nice to use hardball tactics against Republican nominees is ridiculous. Look at votes for Supreme Court nominees - only recently have Republicans started to roll up large numbers of 'anti' votes, against Kagan and Sotomayor. The Democrats, by contrast, have been recalcitrant and obstructionist since Bork.
What's all the fuss? Some Americans profess to admire the British parliamentary system, in which compromise is behind closed doors, but where the two main parties almost never have any voting overlap, and their MPs yell at each other in House of Commons debates.
#14 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 05:00 PM
Centristy Johnathan Alter can't even bring up the topic of voter suppression without throwing in a 'both sides do it'.
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-21/republicans-voter-suppression-project-grinds-on.html
"Across the country, the Republicans’ carefully orchestrated plan to make voting harder -- let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project -- may keep just enough young people and minorities from the polls that Republicans will soon be in charge of all three branches of the federal government.
Yes, both sides try to change voting laws to favor their team. The 1993 “motor voter” law that made voting more convenient by extending registration to the Department of Motor Vehicles helped mostly Democrats. That was at least in the long American tradition of expanding the franchise."
Contrast that with Mike Lofgren, who had to work with these people over the last 30 years:
"But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics...
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages...
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation...
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself...
Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies[until it was scrapped after people brought attention to it]); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.
This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens... [D]omestically, they don't want those people.
We live in interes
#15 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 05:43 PM
"But domestically, they don't want those people voting."
I got all snipped up at the end by the cgi and my own c & p skillz.
People who are interested about the raficalization of the republicans should read more about the history of voter suppression under the guise of "voter fraud" here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html
Guys like Hans A. von Spakovsky and Bradley J. Schlozman should be familiar names to those who watched the corruption of the Justice Department under Bush and the clampdown on any followup investigation after (what? Republicans refusing to investigate the crimes and corruption of a president? What's going on?)
If you want to know what's going on, and has been going on since the eighties, in the republican party look at John Dean work on authortarians in 2004-2007 and now:
http://verdict.justia.com/2011/07/29/the-tea-party
The problem is the republicans. Conservatives are crazy in the sense that they are not motivated by facts - that is why the findings of history and science bounce off of them like a ball in a racketball court - they are motivated by identity.
They exist to defend their group identity and no amount of principle or national interest is enough to change that. They want to win and liberals to lose and if the country - the world - suffers for it, conservatives don't care. They will find a way in their heads to blame a liberal for it anyways.
Both sides do not do this. This is a conservative problem that the press loathes to talk about. Blame cannot be equally apportioned. Facts are unfortunately tallied on one side. Justice is not with the bully, it's with the kid being pummeled upon.
And nobody wants to say it because that bully is f'in scary, look what it did to Robert Scheer.
But if you care about the republic more than your career, then you must challenge the enemies of that republic until they stop acting like a tribe of insane freakjob enemies.
There can be no accountability so long as the predetermined result is 'both sides do it'.
One side is completely delusional and sick. One side doesn't ate about hostages or consequences. One side refuses to compromise and promises to hurt the most vulnerable by putting their fates in the hands of the oligarchs who have funded them immensely for decades In the wake of the Powell Memo.
One side is moderately conservative, and that side is the Democrats. The other side is off the map, fully willing to be big government when it benefits their tribe and/or funders, screaming about small government when it benefits anyone else.
There is no radical, marxist ideology driven, willing to take the whole country down with them, separated completely from the rational world, left to contrast with the major figures in the republican party.
There are no both sides to blame. There are conservatives. They are awful people. If it wasn't for the Bush Administation and their conduct since, you could give them the benefit of the doubt in spite of their attempt to impeach a president over a blowjob. (and not say boo over the thousands of lives tossed into the dumpster over Cheney's lies and connections to crony capitalism).
But this record is in. Republicans do not play fair because what the political press sees as a game, they see as a jihad. One side is at war. Try reporting that.
#16 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 06:36 PM
"Look at votes for Supreme Court nominees"
Yeah, I've seen the votes on judicial nominees. Have you seen the names? Democrats propose moderate candidates and moderate proposals and republicans torch them in commitee.
Republicans nominate Robert Bork, Scalia, Alito, and tea party Thomas and dare the democrats to fight it. They propose radical policies and dare the democrats to filibuster them. They put lobbyists and show horse commisioners in charge of vitally important agencies and the democrats let them do it.
When the republicans put forth really radical policies and nominations, the democrats filibuster - what sixty or so times?
When democrats put forth moderate proposals and candidates, some former conservative choices, so that republicans have no reasonable basis to object, republicans double the amount of filibusters and use every legislative tactic they can scrape to turn the legislative process into thick syrup.
While Americans are suffering the greatest financial crisis in our lifetimes which took place under republican watch when the republican federal government assumed jurisdiction over predatory loan regulations and then the republican appointees whistled as the global economy tanked.
Both sides do not do this.
#17 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 06:57 PM
The Atlantic has a couple of good articles. One about the anniversary of the 1.3 billion dollar debt ceiling fight:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-not-so-happy-anniversary-of-the-debt-ceiling-crisis/260458/
"The crisis began when congressional Republicans announced that they would refuse to authorize what had previously been a routine increase in the debt ceiling. By itself, raising the debt ceiling does not increase federal spending. It merely authorizes the Treasury Department to float new government bonds to pay the money that Congress has already appropriated...
After weeks of negotiations, Democrats and Republicans agreed on the Budget Control Act of 2011...
The act also created a "supercommittee" of six senators and six representatives -- three from each party -- charged with identifying additional cuts that would be presented to both houses for a up-or-down vote. If Congress passed the supercommittee's proposal, or sent a balanced budget amendment to the states, the debt ceiling would be raised by an additional $1.5 trillion.
Neither of these things happened...
Under the terms of the act, the president was then entitled to authorize an additional $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, but a series of automatic cuts of approximately $1.2 trillion over 10 years automatically go into effect in January 2013. Approximately half of these cuts will come from defense spending. Not entirely coincidentally, the Bush tax cuts, which had been extended in December 2010, also expire in January 2013. The resulting change would return tax rates to the levels that applied during the Clinton Administration, with a top tax rate of 39.6 percent for income over $250,000...
[T]he combination of the sequester and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts creates a completely different bargaining situation than the one prevailing during the debt crisis of 2011 -- one that greatly favors the Democrats over the Republicans."
So what do the republicans do?
"[T]he Republicans, who were perfectly willing to hold the economy hostage to score a political victory, will find that the shoe is now on the other foot. All the Democrats have to do is sit on their hands and tax rates will return to Clinton-era levels, government revenues will increase by trillions, and the federal budget will go a long way toward being balanced once again, as it was during the Clinton Administration. No wonder Republican politicians have begun, without a hint of shame or irony, to accuse the Democrats of taking hostages."
And the other good article is about voter suppression :
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/republican-virtue-and-the-fraud-of-voter-fraud/260306/
"Pennsylvania officials have the luxury of having confessed that there has no proof of voter fraud:
The state signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there "have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.
... and having confessed to the laws true purpose:
Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R) said that the voter ID law passed by the legislature would help deliver the state for Mitt Romney in November. "Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it's done. First pro life legislation -- abortion facility regulations -- in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," Turzai said at this weekend's Republican State Committee meeting .
#18 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 31 Jul 2012 at 10:33 PM
I do love me some Charley Pierce:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/voter-suppression-2012-11248300
"So, in Ohio, a bipartisan commission actually solves a real problem with how the state runs its elections, and a problem that may have played a central role in deciding the 2004 presidential election. Then, in 2010, as was the case in many states, Ohio handed its legislature over to the crazy people and those crazy people torpedoed the new plan. Therefore, QED, what happened in Ohio was the fault of both sides.
There is no need for someone as good as Bronner to play this naive. He knows good and well what's been going on over the past two years. He knows good and well who's trying to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act in the federal courts. He knows good and well whence most of the shenanigans regarding the voter rolls came in Florida in 2000. He's just pretending not to know any of this here. This we might be able to pin on his editors, or on the cold, dead hand of "balance" at Mother Times. But there's simply no excuse for this passage...
"Republicans are very much in favor of cleaning up and maintaining voter lists and Democrats want to make sure access is available, and we believe there are tools that address both," he said.
Republicans are "very much in favor of cleaning up and maintaining voter lists" by purging them of as many Democratic voters as possible. That has been made quite plain since 2010...
To draw a moral equivalence between these efforts to restrict access to the ballot for purely political purposes to Democratic desires to register as many voters as can be registered, and to maintain that they demonstrate two sides of a "bipartisan" reluctance to fix the system, is flatly bizarre."
If you critique the actions of a bully, you wouldn't be balanced.
Oh, but there's more!!
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/robert-bachrach-nomination-11218245
"There are those people who believe that the whole problem we have with getting things done can be laid on the doorstep of what is generally called "partisan gridlock," in which both political parties are equally guilty. Generally, these are people who should not be trusted to hold their own money, lest they buy some magic beans, or to cut their own meat at dinner time. The basic problem with the government right now is that nothing gets done because the Republican party handed itself over to vandals and yahoos, and said vandals and yahoos would prefer to pose for the folks in the tricorns and knee breeches back home than actually, you know, govern the country. This is no longer in dispute because, this week, the deliberate Republican campaign of intransigence screwed... some Republicans."
These were the idiots who, if you remember, filibustered their own amendments to the health care bill when they were accepted without debate.
Of course, filibustering your own candidates and legislation just so the government can get shut down and the president can be restricted to one term.. that's a both sides thing.
Do you think the democrats would have gotten away with this under Bush? Do you remember the republican a-holes at the time screaming about the Nuclear Option and up or down votes? How did the press cover that? Did every bill fail back then because the congress "couldn't get a sixty vote super majority"?
#19 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 11:14 AM
Just for review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz5AmhI9g7o
This is every day in congress since 2006 when Pelosi took the gavel.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/dear-media-tell-readers-the-truth-about-gop-filibustering/2012/04/17/gIQAIumNOT_blog.html
"The death-by-filibuster of the Buffett Rule in the Senate yesterday revealed, among other things, that the news media still has a ways to go in learning how to report on the era of the 60-vote Senate.
Most Americans, not surprisingly, do not realize that majorities can no longer get their way in the Senate. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that most key votes in the Senate were based on simple majority voting. Only since 1993 has constant filibustering been common, and only in 2009 did Republicans create a situation in which virtually everything requires a supermajority...
The decision of the Republican minority to create the 60 vote Senate — and the willingness of the Democratic majority to go along with it — remains perhaps the most important single structural fact of Congressional procedure. It has been at least as important as any other factor in shaping Obama’s legislative agenda. And news organizations still aren’t telling readers and viewers the full truth about what’s happening."
Print is no saint, but TV news is especially bad for this kind of coverage.
#20 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 11:34 AM
Obstruction in general and judicial nominees specifically, laid out stark.
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/republicans-unprecedented-obstructionism-by-numbers
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/07/judicial_confirmations.html
Carter And Reagan? 90% confirmed.
Clinton (who consulted with Orrin Hatch before putting up his nominations so they wouldn't get axed)? 84% confirmed.
George Bush II? 86% confirmed.
Obama? 43%.
Judges are retiring at twice the rate they are being appointed.
This is a problem. A one sided problem.
#21 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 12:22 PM
Yet another symptom of the unnamed "conservatives are not part of the problem, they are the problem" disease.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/08/01/postal-service-challenges-have-plenty-of-answers/
"The US Postal Service will default on a $5.5 billion prepaid retiree health benefit payment today, and this will surely lead to calls for privatization or mass jobs cuts. But the default concerns the unusual way in which the USPS, unlike virtually any other company in the world, pre-pays its health benefits many years out. "
Oh my, how did this happen under our noses?
http://www.esquire.com/_mobile/blogs/politics/the-post-office-lives-8757430
"Authors Marlene Park and Gerald Markovitz, who wrote about why post offices were built the way they were, explained that "The New Deal sought to make the national government's presence felt in even the smallest, most remote communities.... The post office was 'the one concrete link between every community of individuals and the Federal government' that functioned 'importantly in the human structure of the community.... [The post office] brought to the locality a symbol of government efficiency, permanence, service, and even culture."
Well, we certainly can't have that, can we?..
In 2006, when nobody was paying attention, a lame duck session of Congress, in which there was still a Republican majority, passed a neat little poison-pill called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required the USPS to pre-fund 75 years worth of health-care benefits over the next 10 years. (No other government entity ever has been required to do anything like this.) Among other things, this prevented the USPS from raising rates, or doing anything else that would lift the weight of the fiscal millstone that had been hung upon it. That this was a deliberate act of sabotage was revealed by the fact that a report indicated that, absent this pre-payment requirement, the USPS would be running a profit of $2.5 billion. With the requirement, the service is $24 billion in the hole....
The entire modern conservative movement consists of an ongoing attempt to sever the relationship of a self-governing people to their government, to break down the concept of a political commonwealth. Many of the conservative attempts to wedge people apart through the use of an Other to be feared and despised — whether that was black people, or empowered women, or immigrants, or gay people — have been framed to attack the government's attempts to ameliorate discrimination against the groups in question. In modern conservative thought, then, and in the mindset it seeks to ingrain on the people of the country, the government is the ultimate Other."
Killing the post office because we hates gubmint? Both sides are responsible, haven't you heard?
#22 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 02:48 PM
Watching Thimbles spam this thread makes me laugh. He's one of the few who post at CJR who is so cowardly he won't say who he really is. Makes one wonder which astroturfing operation he works for.
#23 Posted by Dan Gainor, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 02:57 PM
I think the author is on to something. I always hesitate to consider the Republicans -- or any party -- as obstructionist, but it is hard to see them as working for the good of all when they block legislation that they once proposed (e.g., the insurance mandate).
It is hard to imagine from the way our congress functions, but at least in classical political theory the purpose of politics is the common good. It is an art that enables us to live together. When political action is reduced to disempowering the other party only winning the next election, it is the citizens who suffer.
#24 Posted by Charlie B, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 03:15 PM
"Watching Thimbles spam this thread makes me laugh"
Actually Dandilion, unlike you, I'm not an astroturfer for some yahoo organization. I'm a guy who didn't care about politics and went about his own business, earning a salary, making his rent, until you conservatives made it impossible to ignore the piles of stinking carcasses you were dropping at our doorsteps.
You see, at some point conservatives just decided to leave the reality based community. This made discussion with conservatives fruitless, since they were making up sh@t as they went along, and made the world highly unstable as they accumulated power, since they were basing their decisions not on a factual basis, but whatever happen to suit their purpose.
Soros, you may have heard of him, wrote of this as a Bubble of American Supremacy but to me it seemed the most powerful nation in the world was suddenly being run by dick swingers who thought you were a puss if you didn't torture or suspend habeus corpus.
And the mythology was these were supposed small government conservatives when, in truth, these were police state conservatives who had no problem with government power wiretaping your sexlife funded by budget busting borrowing and deficit financed tax cuts so long as it enriched them, their donors, and their party while kicking the poor and democratic opposition in the stomach.
So no, I don't do this because it pays. I do this because it costs not to do it. Because you people trash everything you touch while pretending your failures are someone else's fault. And when you wreck something, it stays wrecked for generations, if not forever. Look at what you've done with the banks. Look at what you're doing to the post office. Look at what you are going to do with Social Security and Medicare. When you've put the wrecking ball through Glass Steagal, the USPS, and the social safety net, that stuff isn't going to get rebuilt without a fight and we both know modern democrats are crappy fighters. When we lose these things, they're likely lost for good. When soldier die because of fraud wars based on false reasons, those are breaks you are responsible for that you can't fix.
So I do this to reduce costs, values destroyed, lives lost, national treasure and national dreams made ruin. I believe people guided by truth and facts are fundamentally less destructive than people like you who lie for money.
So I tell the truth out of charity, because it seems the people who are paid to tell the truth can't.
Because when a group of people choose not to be reality based, the truth is not on their side. Can an honest journalist be balanced when the world he is reporting on is not? When conservatives and the republican party have rejected the norms which have allowed the country to function, is the reporter's job to report that fact or is it her job to say 'both sides are responsible'? Pick one, truth or balance, you can't do both.
And you can't have an informed electorate if you don't report the truth.
#25 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 10:30 PM
A better version of that Soros article. Highly recommended read for the effect it will have on Dan Gainor - who's career seems based on a high conservative fatwa against Soros - if for nothing else.
#26 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 1 Aug 2012 at 10:49 PM
Why people like us post:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.ca/2012/08/the-choice-by-davidoatkins.html
"If the Republican Party were sane, it could run a middle-of-the-road Eisenhower/Ford style candidate, focus on the bad economy, and probably slide into victory. But that's not who the Republicans are. They're wholly dominated by Objectivists and Dominionists...
It would be nice if all the Ayn Rand and Tim LaHaye worshippers would go found their own country and destroy it apart from the rest of us. Sadly, they're intent on dragging this country and the world down with them."
#27 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 2 Aug 2012 at 01:59 PM
One hell of a post with a ton of nifty links and vocabulary:
http://vagabondscholar.blogspot.ca/2012/08/both-sides-do-it-partisanship-redux.html
"Basically, saying "both sides do it" is a form of trolling. In almost every case, when a Very Serious Person says "both sides do it," "both sides are to blame" or any of its variants, it is to shut down discussion, not to bring it to a deeper, more nuanced level. (There are exceptions, but they are few. We'll delve into this further in future posts.) Obsessing about "tone" and other cosmetics serves the same function. 'Sensible Centrism' is very popular because it gives the appearance of wisdom, objectivity, independence, impartiality and so on without having to commit to much of anything. It can adapted to almost every occasion, and is ideal for pundits who don't want to do their homework or deal with backlash from angry hyper-partisans (predominantly right-wingers). The tactic is a bullshitter's dream. Effective government and citizenship depend on making judgments and choices, the more informed, the better. Some level of qualitative analysis is essential for political figures when discussing policy, and for citizens in terms of voting and activism. Typically, our national political discourse shuts down honest discussion and reality-based analysis rather than encouraging it."
Gorge on the whole thing.
#28 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Mon 6 Aug 2012 at 03:17 AM
LOL
The Thimbles response to complaint that he was spamming the thread was FOUR more unanswered posts.
Again, all under the cowardly nom de plume.
Hey Thim, when you grow a pair and are willing to be honest who you are and what your REAL motivations are, get back to us.
#29 Posted by Dan Gainor, CJR on Sun 12 Aug 2012 at 04:37 PM
Dan, the fact that Thimbles's piles of facts have gone unanswered reflects far more poorly on you and your arguments than it reflects on his/hers.
I've been a Red State Republican since 1978. And if I'm going to be honest, then I have to admit that since no later than 1994, Republicans really have been dropping stinking carcasses on the doorsteps of the body politic. Since Bush the Lesser took office, they have gone beyond that and sought to render the very concept of "the commons" unthinkable, even though economists since Adam Smith have warned us that doing so will not end well. And in an era of climate change, letting this go on isn't just a political inconvenience, it's an existential threat.
One point Mann makes that needs more attention is that business leaders used to object when politicians set out to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Now they apparently believe that if they take enough money out of the system RIGHT NOW, they can use gold bars or bricks of currency to insulate themselves from the shitstorm to follow. In all of history that has never worked, but for some reason, this generation's C suite has convinced itself that THIS time, things will be different. Well, no, they won't. They'll be even worse.
#30 Posted by Lex Alexander, CJR on Sun 19 Aug 2012 at 03:43 PM
I just found this article and read all the comments. Thanks so much, Thimble, for an amazing summary of what we have been witnessing over these last 12 plus years. The Republicans are a wierd, sick amalgam of no-nothing ignoramus haters and large wealthy corporate interests who have succeeded in paralyzing government and polarizing the country because the media still acts like the abused spouse at the hands of a violent tyrant....
#31 Posted by Dee, CJR on Fri 30 Nov 2012 at 10:54 PM