I just got to spend about a half hour watching Anderson Cooper, Chris Hayes, and Bill O’Reilly. Actually, only Chris Hayes was on his show. It was that old white guy on CNN and one of the blond women on Fox News. But it was striking. I don’t mean the tone of the shows; I mean the content. Not surprisingly, MSNBC is doing blanket coverage of Ferguson, where things look almost celebratory now that law enforcement duties have been taken over by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. But CNN is doing the same thing, in their tired way.

So the liberal and centrist cable news networks are paying a lot of attention to the situation in Ferguson that has been getting international attention. But for Fox News, it is pretty much a non-story. Or rather, the murder of an unarmed teen was a non-story. The many peaceful protests was a non-story. Militarized police use of excessive force against protesters was a non-story. Pretty much everything about Ferguson was a non-story except for some looting that took place Sunday evening.

This is an interesting contrast with the Bundy ranch crisis where the story got blanket, hysterical coverage. But it also got pretty much blanket coverage on the other two stations. What I think we are seeing is that if a story can’t be molded to a conservative narrative, Fox News just isn’t interested. I’m sure that in their story meetings, executive producers have said, “Unless there are a bunch of black people breaking windows, none of our viewers will care!” And maybe they are right, but it seems to me that the basic narrative is of wide interest: police shooting a young man about to enter college when he had his hands raised above him.

It would have been different if it had been a white suburban boy killed by a black officer in a police force that was over 90% black with a history of harassing whites. Then they could rant about “black anger” and the “out of control” government, but also regular things like actual news sources are discussing about the Michael Brown murder. When it comes to a black or brown skinned person, however, it just isn’t interesting to Fox News. Their key demographic—The median age is 68 years old!—might be upset to hear any news that conflicted with their belief that racism was solved in 1865.

So what was Fox News offering up instead of details about the Michael Brown murder and the situation in Ferguson? Well, they had a sequence about the supposed fight that’s going on between Obama and Clinton. And there was speculation about Robin Williams. And I’m sure they had a segment on Ferguson earlier on; I didn’t get to a television until a bit into the hour. I mean, Fox News can’t be that bad. Well, maybe it can.

I have worked very hard to avoid dealing with the Michael Brown murder in Missouri. I feel helpless. This kind of thing happens all the time. Last year, in my hometown, Andy Lopez was killed by a police officer who mistook his toy gun for real. The officer shot Lopez seven times in six seconds. The authorities looked into it and decided that the office acted appropriately. And if you check the internet about the killing, most of what you will see is that Lopez was high on cannabis, as though that has anything to do with the situation.

At this point, it seems that the police can kill anyone who isn’t white, and somehow it will be decided that the murder was proper. There is apparently an unwritten law against living in the United States with a dark skin color. And the maximum penalty is death. So when I heard about the murder of Michael Brown, I just turned away. Yet another example of what probably happens all the time. It is just that most of the cases get no coverage.

In the case of Brown’s murder, I suspect that the officer will get at least some punishment. He might even go to jail. But this won’t work as any kind of deterrent. Police officers will just see that whether their bad behavior is punished or not is just a question of bad luck; most of the time nothing at all happens. So what does it matter? Will anything change? I don’t really think so. As a nation we have decided that the police have a job that is so dangerous (it isn’t) that they can do anything they want. It’s actually funny in a way, because all their violence and body armor and tanks just show that they are a bunch of wimps. Does a real man panic and put seven bullets in a boy because he doesn’t immediate respond to the officer’s command? Of course not.

I’ve been very pleased to hear how people are protesting by putting their hands in the air and saying, “Don’t shoot!” Of course, the reaction of the local police to the protests have shown that the entire force is made up of a bunch of fearful white people who are afraid of the scary blacks. Is that too much? Of Ferguson’s 53 police officers, 48 are white, and only three are black. According to The Los Angeles Times:

So Ferguson’s police department has major problems and the murder of Michael Brown is just the event that made it widely known. But as the protests go on and the police continue to act as scared bullies, I am reminded of the Bruce Cockburn song “Nicaragua.” In that, he sings, “In the flash of this moment, you’re the best of what we are. Don’t let them stop you now…” Here’s hoping things get worked out soon:

Las personas vive en la lucha por la paz!

Like all of us, Jonathan Chait has written a couple of times on Robert Draper’s “libertarian moment” article in The New York Times Magazine where he claimed that young people were libertarian: socially liberal and economically conservative. The whole thing has come as a shock to those of us who know the polling data and are thus aware of the fact that young people are especially big supporters of government intervention in the economy. Chait’s article today is, How Libertarians Snookered The New York Times Magazine. I just want to write about a small bit of the article.

Much of Chait’s article is about Draper’s dependence upon a poll by the libertarian Reason Magazine. In the past, Chait has rightly referred to it as “advocacy polling.” The pollster, Emily Ekins, took exception to this. According to Chait, “Young voters, the poll found, favor a living wage, higher taxes on the rich, more spending on infrastructure and job training, and so on.” And Ekins ask if that sounded like a “libertarian advocacy poll.” It doesn’t, of course. And no one is claiming that people who do advocacy polling are bad pollsters.

But the whole thing shows how one can lie with polls. Imagine you were doing a poll of Democrats about government spending. You ask three questions. Do you think it is better to have a much bigger military or to have a smaller government? Do you think it is better to cut spending or provide more corporate welfare to millionaires and billionaires? Do you think the government should be involved in women’s reproductive health or that there should be a limit placed on the size and power of the government? The Democrats would obviously go overwhelmingly for the “small government” answers in each of those. But it would be totally deceptive to publish your poll results as, “Democrats Overwhelmingly Prefer Smaller Government.”

This is what Ekins did. The poll asked if people “prefer a smaller government with fewer services or a bigger government with more services.” The under-30 set preferred the bigger government choice by a large margin. But the poll also asked if people “want bigger government with high taxes or smaller government with low taxes.” Not surprisingly, this pretty much reversed the answers. I’m not fond of either of these questions. The size of government doesn’t really mean anything to people. But the first question does get to the heart of libertarian thinking: small government is good as an end in itself. There is no indication that the millennials actually have a problem with big government.

An even bigger problem that Chait points out is that the Ekins poll was only of the under-30 crowd. So it was impossible to compare the results to other age groups. When Pew did such a poll, they also did Gen-X, Baby Boom, and Greatest generations. And what they found is that the millennials were shockingly more liberal than the other generations, across the board.

It all reminds me of those stupid partisan fund raising drives where they ask for your opinion and a contribution. They contain questions like, “Obama should be impeached because: (a) Obamacare; (b) Benghazi!; (c) Fast and Furious; (d) all of the above.” That’s not an exaggeration. And they are obvious. But these kind of advocacy polls are much more professional and they look a whole lot more reasonable. But there results are predetermined by who is paying for them.

The always insightful Tom Tomorrow is out with a new installment of This Modern World, We Tortured Some Folks. You should click on over to see the whole thing. But I thought this first panel was the best part of it. That government whistleblower is, of course, John Kiriakou. He is currently in federal prison. He got two and a half years for disclosing classified information. But that was only because the government couldn’t make a stronger charge stick. He is in prison because he disclosed government waterboarding.

I’m afraid that now, most people don’t know what to make of waterboarding. But until it was disclosed that we were doing it, the government had always been clear on the practice: it was torture. It was only when it was revealed that the government was doing it that all the apologetics started to fly. According to ABC News, “Water boarding was designated as illegal by US generals in Vietnam 40 years ago.” As Tom Tomorrow lampoons in his comic, “Brave patriots working under pressure made mistakes.” I think an actual hot war where there are two armies going at each other has far more pressure associated with it than the highly asymmetrical War on Terror.

But what works so well in the comic is the contrast: it was well meaning patriots who tortured many people, at least some of which were completely innocent. But the guy who revealed this misconduct was not a well meaning patriot. Good God, no! I mean, he actually embarrassed the government! A patriot would never embarrass the government. But in the heat of four years after 9/11 with detainees who were inside a prison that was itself inside a prison, of course mistakes would be made by patriots who were only looking after the good of the country and weren’t just functional psychopaths.

Obama has an amazing ability to show empathy and kindness to his political enemies. I like that. I share that! I’ve always been in favor of a 9/11-aftermath “truth and reconciliation commission.” I don’t want to punish the people who did wrong during this time. Let’s just think the best of them. But let’s admit what we’ve done. So I’m all for forgiving the abuses of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, I’m also for forgiving my own side. Obama doesn’t share that feeling. He seems afraid to stand up for his own side, most likely because he is.

Of course, John Kiriakou doesn’t need to be forgiven. He is an American hero. The Obama administration needs to apologize to him. But you can be sure that Obama won’t do that. And you know the reason, because it is the same reason for everything: Obama can’t do anything liberal because then everyone would know he was a liberal. And don’t forget: Obama is black! So if he showed any empathy for the poor and the weak or (God forbid!), someone who didn’t think the country should be torturing people, well everyone would know he was black, or liberal, or a human being. We can’t have that!

So America’s response to its previous torture is to put the man who told us about it in prison. Case close. Can’t look back! Gotta look forward! You remember the Obama slogan:

Via The Daily Show, by Bill Wright, Indianapolis, Radio X in Basel, Switzerland

See Also

Torture Worse Than Torture Disclosure
Kiriakou on Conviction
Problem with Unenforced Laws
How We Treat Real American Heroes

David Frum has written a very interesting article over at The Atlantic, Why the “Libertarian Moment” Isn’t Really Happening. It is a major push back against this idea that that the country is ready for a libertarian Republican Party. Frum did an excellent job of explaining why this idea is total nonsense. But he’s wrong about why libertarian rhetoric has become so big in the Republican Party since 2009. This is hardly surprising. Frum is a Republican, and as much of a reformer as he may be in some areas, he’s just not willing to admit certain truths about his chosen party.

Before getting to that, let’s lay out the environment, because Frum does such a good job of it. He notes that the idea that young people are turning libertarian is based upon three facts: (1) they are more open to LGBT rights and drug legalization; (2) they aren’t as supportive of Social Security; and (3) they aren’t very fond of either party. If this collection of facts doesn’t sound like libertarianism to you: ding ding ding! You win the prize: you are smarter than a reporter at The New York Times. Frum observed, “[These three facts] reveal (modest) generational self-interest, social liberalism, and political demobilization.”

Frum also noted that the libertarian policies that the Republican Party has been pushing are not the ones that the people want. This is Frum at his absolute best and most insightful:

He followed this brilliant insight that (to me) leads clearly to the answer, with a vague argument about the difference between libertarians and conservatives being effectively a matter of degrees. He claimed that the party’s recent flirtation with libertarianism was just a matter of despair. And then, he claimed, “For mainstream conservatives, concerned about the growth of government since 2008, libertarianism can sometimes sound like only a slightly more exuberant version of what they already believe.” Frum really needs to get out more. As Jonathan Chait wrote just this morning:

All the “growth of government” has been due to automatic increases in social safety net programs because we just went through the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Yet Frum just parrots the patently false Republican talking point that the federal government has grown thanks to the secret Kenyan socialist in the White House. No wonder Frum is confused about his party’s recent infatuation with libertarianism.

The issue is very simple. There are big funders who push a one-sided version of libertarianism—most notably the Koch brothers. There is a whole conservative media echo chamber that does the same thing. We must abolish the IRS because of liberty! We must never allow same sex marriage because of religious liberty! The libertarian rhetoric works very well to push the same old Republican desires: cut taxes on the rich, cut benefits for the poor.

But let’s remember back to the start of the Tea Party movement with all its libertarian rhetoric. Remember: it didn’t start because the Bush administration was bailing out the banks. No, it started when the Obama administration decided to use a lot less money to help out middle class homeowners. But the truth is that the movement would have gone nowhere if it hadn’t been for all the money that the Koch brothers put into it and for the constant advertising that Fox News and hate radio did on behalf of it. And when all was said and done, what was the one issue that all these supposed libertarians agreed on: abortion should be illegal. And it is no surprise that the Paul family are libertarians except when it comes to reproductive rights. Because libertarianism in the Republican Party is nothing but a pretense. It is simply a way to make their funneling of money from the poor to the rich look ideologically reasonable.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

Well, Jonathan Chait has let the cat out of the bag. He actually wrote down what I’ve been thinking for a couple of years but was too superstitious to put into print or bits or whatever it is we are doing here. I probably have mentioned it along the way, but I didn’t write a whole article about it! My mother always told me, “Don’t tempt the gods.” So I try not to. Apparently, Chait never learned this lesson, because today he wrote, Have House Republicans Extended the Economic Recovery Into 2016? Well, in a word: yes. In a couple of words: almost certainly.

The speculation is that by doing everything they can to stop the recovery, the Republicans have only succeeded in creating a slow but very long recovery. The economics on this is actually pretty simple: left alone, economies do recover. In a downturn, people may put off buying new cars, but eventually they will have to do it. So unless the government just does everything wrong, the economy will heal. The Republicans have had enough power to do really bad things to slow the economic recovery (for example: the Budget Control Act of 2011 with its sequester), but they have not had enough power to stop it.

So the economy continues growing, but slowly. As it is, the unemployment rate is 6.2%. Even if you forget about the fact that this is artificially low because of all the discouraged workers, this is much higher than the 4%-5% unemployment rate generally thought to be full employment. So barring anything surprising happening, the economy should continue to grow at its anemic pace for long enough to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 (or whoever else the Democrats run).

In one sense, there is no fear of letting the cat out of the bag. The Republicans have already created this destiny. It’s not like they could start legislating properly, allow an economic boom, and hope for a bust some time in the middle of 2016. But in another sense, this is extremely dangerous. There are things the Republicans could do to destroy the economy in 2016. In particular, they could refuse to raise the debt ceiling and throw the world economy into untold chaos. Now the people might actually blame the Republicans for this and destroy the party. But I’m not convinced it would work out that way. It could quite easily lead to President Ted Cruz.

Regardless, I think it is a mistake to give the Republicans the idea that they have painted themselves into a corner with regard to 2016. This will only encourage the consistent call from their base, “The problem with the Republican Party is that it isn’t conservative enough; we need to destroy the economy in order to save it!” More and more, it seems that the Republican Party will do anything to get and keep power. I don’t, for example, ever remember a minority party actively sabotaging the economy because they thought it was in their best political interests. So I don’t know what they’d do if they got the impression that 2016 was hopeless. Most likely, however, they won’t conclude that. Instead, they will stay in their own echo chamber and assume that economic calamity is just around the corner, and the country is as conservative as they are.

Dean Baker made a great observation this weekend, Robert Samuelson Says Economics Is An Inexact Science, Except When He Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare. For those of you who don’t know him, Robert Samuelson is a Washington Post columnist who spends much of his time talking about how we have to cut entitlements for the kids. You see, his great interest is that we are taking money out of the pockets of future generations. But of course, raising taxes (like the payroll tax cap) is unacceptable to him. So he isn’t really interested in future generations in a general sense. He’s worried that the taxes of the rich in the future might go up a bit.

What Baker noted is that Samuelson’s arguments are generally dependent upon long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office. Like all long-term economic projections, they are famously useless. But okay, you use the best economic information that is available. This week, however, Samuelson has written a column calling for the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates because he’s afraid that inflation will go up and “take on a life of its own.” And he specifically says that we shouldn’t listen to those economic models that he so loves to use to argue for cuts in Social Security. It’s truly amazing.

Note why this is an instructive case in point: because it is necessary to make his point. It is not an instructive case in point when it comes to entitlement “reform” (the smart conservative word for “cuts”). In fact, reading his constant stream of articles about how we have to cut Social Security now now now, you would never get the impression that economic projections weren’t handed down to Moses himself on Mount Sinai.

More broadly, Samuelson is making the argument that low inflation is a Very Big Deal. But as regular readers here note, modest inflation is good for everyone who actually works for a living. About the only ones who would suffer due to 4% inflation would be Robert Samuelson’s rich friends who have a lot of money in bonds. Dean Baker went on to note what it all means:

And he ended the article with, “But hey, we all have our priorities.” And that is the ultimate problem with Samuelson and the scores of other conservative pundits like him. They have their priorities, which are to enrich the rich at the expense of everyone else. But they know they can’t say that. So they claim that they are looking out for the common good. I appreciate the bind that they find themselves in. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that they represent a small slice of society without admitting it. And that makes them pernicious. But hey, what do you expect from Fox on 15th Street.

D R Tucker over at Political Animal brought my attention to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were on Face the Nation to chat with Bob Schieffer about Watergate 40 years later. Tucker was impressed with it, which amazes me. I’ve come to think rather highly of his work, but he missed it on this one. I realize that everyone is having a great good time this week dumping on Nixon, but we don’t want to let that blind us to our modern reality.

Let’s start with the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were on CBS. Schieffer notes at the beginning that the dynamic duo’s two books All the President’s Men and The Final Days had just been reissued by Simon & Schuster. And they just happened to be owned by CBS. Gee, I wonder why the guys weren’t over talking to George Stephanopoulos?

Shieffer starts with a really stupid observation that people found Watergate so hard to believe because it was so stupid. But the whole scandal was never really about the Watergate break-in. That was simply want led to the plumbers and the CCREEP slush fund and all the stuff that did matter. The real reason people found Watergate so hard to believe is that most people are a bunch of sheep who never want to think that the power elite would act so badly. The president couldn’t possibly be doing this kind of stuff because he was the right kind of person. (For the record conservatives: there is a big difference between being open to malfeasance by the president and just assuming it whenever the other party is in power. Bill Clinton had Vince Foster killed? Really?!)

Some of the interview is rather good. But it’s strange. Woodward says that the piston of the Nixon administration was hate. But later, when talking in more depth, it is clear that this isn’t true. Paranoia and resentment is more what drove him. Later, Woodward talks about how the Republicans put nation over party. That’s not true at all. And that’s what gets to the core of Watergate: if it hadn’t been for the tapes, Nixon wouldn’t have been forced to resign. It was only because there was a smoking gun that the Republicans turned on him.

But what I most hate about this is how self-congratulatory the whole thing is. I don’t mean that about any of the participants especially, but about journalism itself. The truth is that what Woodward and Bernstein did was great work. But can you imagine the Washington Post allowing reporters that kind of latitude today? And look at the work that Woodward does today: he’s just a Republican hack, although admittedly, a careful one because he actually has a reputation to protect.

Shieffer’s last question is whether it could happen again. A better question is whether the corporate controlled media would ever allow it again. As we see today, Glenn Greenwald is hated by most establishment journalists. And if the journalists are like that, you can imagine what their employers think. I believe that if there hadn’t been the tapes, Shieffer wouldn’t have had the segment today. There would have been 40 years of Republican disinformation to convince everyone that Nixon was totally innocent. And Shieffer wouldn’t be certain.

So yeah, now 40 years later, CBS runs a segment talking about the great success of journalism. Shieffer is there to say, “Go team!” But when it comes Edward Snowden who has provided us such important information about what the government is doing to its own people, Shieffer has been incredibly harsh. When it has come to NSA spying generally, he has been nothing short of an apologist. But looking back 40 years, sure: fight the power!

I don’t often get a chance to say that Paul Krugman is wrong, so I’ll use italics: Paul Krugman is wrong. Okay, technically speaking, he is right in a blog post today, Meanwhile, in Europe. In it, he noted that inflation in Europe is dropping fast. Core inflation is below 1% and it does indeed seem to be headed for deflation: negative inflation. But Krugman is wrong to imply that this is a big deal.

Dean Baker is generally right on top of this stuff, and if I had to bet, I’d put some money on his writing about it in the next day. The problem is that inflation is just a measure of the prices of a basket of goods. So to really simplify, if inflation were 0% it would indicate that roughly half of the goods had gone up in price and half had gone down. This also means that when inflation is low, there is a bit more upward pressure on prices than downward pressure. When deflation is low, it is simply flipped. In other words, nothing magical happens at 0% inflation.

Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that deflation is just fine. I’m saying quite the opposite. Deflation is very bad. But I’m also saying that low inflation is bad. In fact, it is bad in the exact same way that deflation is bad, just not to as big an extent. This is important, because some people (most notably libertarians) claim that deflation is not a problem, and may actually be good. The argument is, “So what if the value of cash in your wallet goes up over time? Would you mind that?” Well, no; all else being equal, I wouldn’t mind that at all!

The problem is that all else is never equal and it is especially so in this case. If people can depend upon the value of their cash going up, they have a real incentive to hang onto it. This results in demand for stuff going down, and that leads to economic stagnation and increased unemployment. So if you are like most people, you depend upon a job to continue filling your wallet with cash. But if you already have all the cash you want, then deflation is super cool. This is why the rich tend to be obsessed with inflation, although I think it is shortsighted for them as well.

My main interest is in people having jobs. Thus, deflation and low inflation are bad things. And I think it is dangerous to make a big deal out deflation, as though the only real harm from low inflation is that it might lead to deflation. Of course, Paul Krugman is far more aware of this than I will ever be. He was just being careless. But I think it’s an important issue.