GOP Crazy and Media Practices

Plum Line

How the media has helped normalize GOP crazy

By Paul Waldman October 10  Washington Post

The victim of this morning’s pile-on is Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who was asked in an editorial board meeting whether she had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Grimes hemmed and hawed a bit, obviously scared to say Yes. That isn’t too surprising — when you run as a Democrat in a red state (just as when you run as a Republican in a blue state), you spend a lot of your time explaining why you aren’t like the national party and its leaders. But some people are outraged, including Chuck Todd, who said on Morning Joe (with a look of profound disgust): “Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?…I think she disqualified herself. I really do, I think she disqualified herself.”

No question, Grimes botched this badly, and she should be able to answer a question as simple as this one. But this affair gets at the odd set of unspoken rules that dictate what gets designated a “gaffe” or a serious mistake, and what doesn’t.

The problem isn’t that one party gets treated more harshly than the other does. There are plenty of Republican candidates who have gotten pummeled for their “gaffes.” Rather, the problem is the standard that reporters  use, probably unconsciously, to decide which gaffes are worthy of extended discussion and which ones merit only a passing mention, a standard that often lets GOP candidates get away with some appalling stuff.

For instance, when Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst flirted with the “Agenda 21″ conspiracy theory — a favorite of Glenn Beck, in which the U.S. government and the United Nations are supposedly conspiring to force rural people in Iowa and elsewhere to leave their homes and be relocated to urban centers — national pundits didn’t see it as disqualifying. Nor did they when it was revealed that Ernst believes not only that states can “nullify” federal laws they don’t like (they can’t); and, even crazier, that local sheriffs ought to arrest federal officials implementing the Affordable Care Act, which is quite literally a call for insurrection against the federal government. I guess those are just colorful ideas.

National observers also didn’t find it disqualifying when Tom Cotton, who is favored to become the next U.S. senator from Arkansas, expressed his belief that ISIS is now working with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate America over our southern border.

Why do candidates like Cotton and Ernst get away with stuff like that, while Grimes gets raked over the coals for not wanting to reveal her vote and someone like Todd Akin can lose a race over his ruminations on “legitimate rape”? It’s because the standard being employed isn’t “Does this statement reveal something genuinely disturbing about this candidate?” but rather, “Is this going to be politically damaging?” Grimes’ chief area of political vulnerability is that she’s a Democrat in Kentucky, where Barack Obama’s approval ratings are low, so whenever the question of Obama comes up, reporters are watching closely to see how deftly she handles it; if she stumbles, they pounce. Akin got hammered for “legitimate rape” not so much because of how bogus and vile the idea is, but because reporters knew it could have serious consequences among women voters, given both the GOP’s constant struggles with women and the fact that Akin’s opponent was a woman.

Of course, these judgments by reporters end up being self-fulfilling prophecies: if they decide that a “gaffe” is going to have serious political effects, they give it lots of attention, which creates serious political effects.

And in the last few years, there’s a baseline of crazy from the right that the press has simply come to expect and accept, so the latest conspiracy theorizing or far-out idea from a candidate no longer strikes them as exceptional. Sure, there are exceptions: For instance, Republicans Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell both saw their candidacies derailed by their crazy or outsized statements. But their utterances were truly, deeply bizarre or comical, so they broke through.

But during this cycle, Republican crazy just hasn’t broken through at all. It’s almost as if the national press has just come to accept as normal the degree to which the GOP has moved dramatically to the right. At this point so many prominent Republicans have said insane things that after a while they go by with barely a notice. This is an era when a prominent Republican governor who wants to be president can muse about the possibility that his state might secede from the union, when the most popular radio host in the country suggests that liberals like Barack Obama want Ebola to come to America to punish us for slavery, and when the President of the United States had to show his birth certificate to prove that he isn’t a foreigner.

So ideological extremism and insane conspiracy theories from the right have been normalized. Which means that when another Republican candidate says something deranged, as long as it doesn’t offend a key swing constituency, reporters don’t think it’s disqualifying. And so it isn’t.

War: we used to be more ruthless

Harper's Index, Oct. 2014 issue

Percentage of U.S. Republicans who say they could not live on the minimum wage : 69

Who support raising it : 37

Minimum number of times since 2011 that members of Congress have accidentally cast the wrong vote : 120

Amount the federal government has budgeted this year for IT maintenance : $58,400,000,000

Percentage of federal agencies whose servers have failed in the past twelve months : 94

Value of a cloud-computing contract awarded by the CIA to Amazon last year : $600,000,000

Estimated number of customers whose data was stolen from Amazon subsidiary Zappos in 2012 : 24,000,000

Number of attempted cyberattacks the average global company experienced in 2013 : 16,856

Amount by which spending on mobile ads is projected to exceed that on newspaper ads this year : $1,000,000,000

Chance that a U.S. newspaper has a statehouse reporter : 1 in 3

Estimated amount of taxes and fees that Colorado has collected from the marijuana industry since legalization : $34,800,000

That Texas collects from undocumented workers each year : $1,608,534,000

Amount Texas has allocated for a three-month deployment of National Guard officers to the border : $38,000,000

Percentage of U.S. counties in which the proportion of racial minorities has grown since 2010 : 94

Percentage change in the proportion of racial minorities in Washington, D.C., since then : –0.8

Percentage of Newark, New Jersey, residents who are black : 54

Of pedestrians stopped by Newark police who are : 81

Portion of Newark police stops that are “legally unjustified” according to a Department of Justice study : 3/4

Percentage by which a black drug-misdemeanor defendant in Manhattan is more likely than a white one to be sent to prison : 15

Factor by which a person in Nevada is more likely than one in Massachusetts to be the target of a federal wiretap : 30

Percentage of Americans who said they were satisfied with their freedom to choose what to do with their lives in 2006 : 91

Percentage who say so today : 79

Number of U.S. states in which workers are not guaranteed paid parental leave : 47

Number of the world’s twenty other wealthiest nations in which they are not : 0

Age at which a female worker in Britain reaches peak earning power : 34

At which a male worker does : 50

Estimated number of women worldwide who were married before the age of 15 : 250,000,000

Number of countries that require their rulers to belong to a particular religion : 30

Percentage by which Americans overreport their religious attendance when asked over telephone rather than online : 13

Portion of Mormon missionaries expected to travel with specially configured iPads by 2015 : 1/3

Minimum number of churches in China demolished or given demolition notices by government order since February : 163

Estimated number of people executed by all countries other than China in 2012 : 682

By China : 3,000

Estimated portion of the past 100 executed U.S. prisoners who suffered from intellectual disabilties : 1/3

Minimum amount paid by the Museum of Death in Hollywood for Jack Kevorkian’s Thanatron suicide device : $25,000

Estimated height in feet of a memorial tree planted for George Harrison that died in July after an attack by beetles : 15

Estimated annual cost of invasive animal, plant, and microbe species to the U.S. economy : $120,000,000,000

Amount Americans spent last year on UNICEF donations to trick-or-treaters : $3,731,057

On Halloween costumes for their pets : $330,000,000

Figures cited are the latest available as of August 2014.

“Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

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October Index Sources

1,2 Public Policy Polling (Raleigh, N.C.)
3 New York Times/Harper’s research
4 Office of Management and Budget (Washington)
5 MeriTalk (Alexandria, Va.)
6 U.S. Government Accountability Office
7 Zappos.com (Las Vegas)
8 IBM Security Systems Division (Waltham, Mass.)
9 eMarketer Inc. (N.Y.C.)
10 Pew Research Center (Washington)
11 Colorado Department of Revenue (Denver)
12 Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Washington)
13 Texas Comptroller’s Office (Austin)
14,15 Pew Charitable Trusts (Washington)
16–18 U.S. Department of Justice
19 Vera Institute of Justice (N.Y.C.)
20 Harper’s research
21,22 Gallup (Washington)
23 National Conference of State Legislatures (Denver)
24 International Labour Organization (Geneva)
25,26 Office for National Statistics (London)
27 UNICEF (N.Y.C.)
28 Pew Research Center (Washington)
29 Public Religion Research Institute (Washington)
30 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City)
31 China Aid (Midland, Tex.)
32 Amnesty International (London)
33 Dui Hua Foundation (San Francisco)
34 Rob Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
35 Gallerie Sparta (West Hollywood, Calif.)
36 Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation
37 David Pimentel, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.)
38 UNICEF (N.Y.C.)
39 National Retail Federation (Washington)

Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium (1,981,000 gallons of water)

Janet Yellen profile by Michael Hirsh

The Mystery Woman Who Runs Our Economy

Janet Yellen is changing the Fed in profound ways. Sure wish we knew what she had in mind.

By MICHAEL HIRSH

August 24, 2014  /  Politico

A diminutive woman with a pixie haircut is deciding the future of the world’s biggest economy, and we don’t know what she’s really thinking.

It’s not that Janet Yellen is mysterious by nature. She’s a regular person from Brooklyn. She has an open face and a warm smile and, as her predecessor Ben Bernanke told me recently, “more of the common touch than I did.” She also has a decade-long pedigree serving in various jobs at the U.S. Federal Reserve. (“If you were dreaming up a training school for Fed chairmen, it would be her life story,” her old colleague, Alan Blinder, once joked.) Yet there are so many unknowns about where Yellen is taking the newly empowered Fed that she’s making Alan Greenspan look plain-spoken by comparison. Seven months into her tenure, her favorite locution so far appears to be some form of “we don’t know.”

I’m not just talking about Yellen’s something-for-everybody speech Friday at the annual Jackson Hole meeting for central bankers – when she said that the labor market has “yet to fully recover” (pleasing inflation “doves”), but that neither do we know how imminent inflation is (assuaging hawks). She is also being cagey about how much she intends to fulfill the Fed’s broad new role as stern overseer of the U.S. economy—and master of Wall Street.

As has been written, Yellen is clearly passionate about the employment problem. It was no accident that the theme of this year’s Jackson Hole meeting was “labor market dynamics,” and the AFL-CIO’s chief economist, Bill Spriggs, was invited while Wall Street economists were not. (“The Fed organizers wanted to keep the focus on labor,” Spriggs told me. “Their fear was the Wall Street economists would just want to get into the minutiae of Fed policy.”) But she won’t say precisely how she’s measuring unemployment. Bernanke’s Fed had used a 6.5 percent unemployment rate threshold for guidance on when to begin worrying about inflation. When the rate dropped to that level, Yellen came up with an important innovation: Rather than simply setting a new metric, she announced that the Fed would now assess the labor market more qualitatively, roaming across a range of no fewer than 19 different indicators under a “Labor Market Conditions Index.”

All of which only gave her even more latitude to say, “We don’t know.”

Some accounts have painted Yellen as a full-throated progressive –a pro-labor throwback to the pull-out-all-the-stops Keynesians of the pre-Reagan era—but her main sponsor for the Fed job, Bernanke, disagrees. “I think that, philosophically, Janet is very much within contemporary mainstream economics. She is appropriately concerned about jobs, as I was, but she has also shown that she is committed to maintaining price stability,” the former Fed chief, now at Brookings, said in an interview this month.

But Yellen is overturning the traditional ways of looking at the labor markets, talking of pragmatic responses and dispensing with traditional macroeconomic formulas. Using her new index, she is disaggregating the unemployment rate in ways Fed chiefs haven’t done before, and she’s become as much a psychologist as a numbers person—wondering openly whether all those despairing dropouts and part-timers can be lured back into the workforce. Yellen is also very cagey about whether that’s happening or not: She’s playing her own private game of chicken with inflation, indicating that she wants to see more wage growth for workers (another thing that’s hard to track ahead of time) before she raises rates. Beneath the careful analysis and the caveat-freighted sentences, the bottom line seems to be: “We’re making this up as we go along.”

Another big change in the Yellen era is that for most of Bernanke's tenure, the Fed played a regulatory role in banking, but possessed no statutory responsibility to oversee the systemic stability of the entire economy. Now it does. There’s much greater sense, not just from the changes under the Dodd-Frank law but also in the Fed’s internal thinking, that the Federal Reserve’s biggest job of all in some ways is this one: to monitor overall stability. It has greatly increased resources for doing that, and Yellen has called for even more “macro-prudential”—the voguish term that means the Fed’s new task is to watch the behavior of the nation's financial sector, especially Wall Street, very closely—tools that respond to specific threats, like the way British regulators put new restrictions on mortgage lending. Earlier this month, the Fed and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. rejected the banks’ “living wills”—in other words, their plans for an orderly bankruptcy if they get into trouble –as unrealistic. That’s basically the Fed’s way of saying the banks still have a lot of restructuring to do to make themselves more stable, or else the Fed and FDIC can decide to dismember them.

In this way too there is a quiet and little-understood revolution going on beneath our noses—Yellen called it a “work in progress” at Jackson Hole—and the only question is how aggressively she’ll wield her new power. Again, we just can’t say. Remember back in the Greenspan era, when all the talk was of asset bubbles and whether or not the Fed should burst them by jacking up rates? No one then saw the financial system itself as a source of risk. Now, post-crisis, Yellen is turning all that around, saying that getting macro-prudential policy right should by itself take care of fretting about most asset bubbles: If finance is tightly leashed, then asset bubbles can’t do that much damage to the economy. Yellen is saying, in other words, that she intends to resurrect the lost art of regulation with a vengeance—and during the Greenspan era of bank self-determination, regulation truly did become a relic—and that in turn should change the way we think about monetary policy, too.

Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/janet-yellen-mystery-woman-110302.html#ixzz3BNB8cqf9

Anger in Ferguson

New Yorker:


The Anger in Ferguson
BY JELANI COBB    AUGUST 13, 2014


The hazard of engaging with the history of race in the United States is the difficulty of distinguishing the past from the news of the day. On Saturday afternoon, under hazy circumstances, an eighteen-year-old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Brown was unarmed. Police have confirmed that he was shot “more than just a couple of times.” The story that witnesses tell is disturbing not only in its details but in the ways in which those details blur into a longer narrative. It’s one we’re all familiar with if we have paid even passive attention, and yet, despite its redundancy, we have yet to grasp its moral. A trivial incident sparks a confrontation, followed by a disproportionate response, then the tableau of grieving parents struggling to maintain composure and the social-media verdicts rendered in absentia, many asking about the culpability of the deceased. Invariably, some self-ordained truth teller will stand up to quote non sequiturs about black-on-black violence.

The details are still emerging, but there seem to be two irreconcilable versions of events. Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson tells of a police officer, who has yet to be named, confronting the two of them for the offense of walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk, and then starting a fight with Brown, who held his hands up in compliance, before shooting him dead in the street. The police have said that Brown was shot in response to a struggle for the officer’s gun. The police department, citing threats made through social media, has steadfastly refused to release the name of the officer involved in the shooting.  The F.B.I. has announced a federal investigation. On Tuesday, the White House released a statement of condolence to Brown’s family.

Brown’s death has served, at least for the crowds in Ferguson, as evidence that the deaths of innocents are not simply something glimpsed in other countries. People in Ferguson drifted out of their homes to witness the macabre spectacle of Brown’s body on the street, a dismal stream of blood winding its way across the asphalt. The ensuing vigil tipped over into bedlam as some in those crowds, joined by others, broke into sporadic vandalism and looting on Sunday night. Then, after dark on Monday, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. The ironies of race and policing were readily apparent: law enforcement using force to suppress outrage at law enforcement’s indiscriminate use of force.

Ferguson, with twenty-two per cent of its population below the poverty line, is likely a community well versed in these ironies. On Monday night, I spoke to a number of acquaintances in the surrounding area by phone. Most spoke skeptically about the police statement that Brown had attempted to seize the officer’s weapon. “Nobody believes that young man tried to get the officer’s gun,” M. K. Stallings, a longtime St. Louis resident who coordinates community programming for the Missouri Historical Museum, told me. “There’s an idea that the police in this area are not from that community and don’t have any real connections to that community. That’s not necessarily uncommon, but it’s part of the equation here.”

Brown’s death carried a particular resonance in a community that is sixty-seven per cent African-American, with nearly thirty per cent of the population under the age of eighteen. A local bar owner explained to me that older patrons weren’t aware of the groundswell of activity that the case inspired, but it was at the front of the minds of younger people. “A teen-age cashier in my supermarket asked me before I checked out whether I’d be at the vigil Sunday night,” she said. “Until that point, I hadn’t even heard about it, but she explained everything that was happening in response to Brown’s death.”

Three weeks ago, Eric Garner died as the result of N.Y.P.D. officers placing him in a choke hold, a banned tactic, following a confrontation over selling loose cigarettes. His death echoed that of Renisha McBride, the nineteen-year-old who was killed when she knocked on a stranger’s door following a car accident, which in turn conjured memories of Jonathan Ferrell, who was shot ten times and killed by officers in North Carolina soon after the death, in Florida, of Jordan Davis, shot by a man who wanted him to turn down his music, which in turn paralleled the circumstances of Trayvon Martin’s demise. For those who have no choice but to remember these matters, those names have been inducted into a grim roll call that includes Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, and Eleanor Bumpurs. These are all distinct incidents that took place under particular circumstances in differing locales. Yet what happened on Staten Island and in Dearborn Heights, Charlotte, Jacksonville, and Sanford have culminated, again, in the specific timbre of familial grief, a familiar strain of outrage, and an accompanying body of commentary straining to find a novel angle to the recurring tragedy.

Despite all the variables, there’s a numbing constant. The conventions are so familiar that, on Sunday, the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown began circulating on Twitter, with thousands of tweets pointing to the ways in which incidents such as these play out. Many tweets were accompanied by the sort of pictures that could be used to tar even staid black professionals as intimidating. Brown was a large eighteen-year-old—six feet four inches, according to his mother—and, in the image that circulated in the media immediately following the shooting, his size is highlighted. He flashes a peace symbol that, in conjunction with his imposing stature, could predictably be assailed as a gang sign. The hashtag was an overt riff on the way a jury, for example, might decide that a slight teen-ager like Trayvon Martin could be justifiably seen as a threat to George Zimmerman, a man with a gun. Imagery counts as a kind of unspoken forensics, with the power to render someone an innocent victim or a terrifying menace. Implicit is a question: Would you be afraid of this person, too?

The truth is that you’ve read this story so often that the race-tinged death story has become a genre itself, the details plugged into a grim template of social conflict. The genre is defined by its tendency toward an unsatisfactory resolution of the central problems. Two years ago, I visited St. Louis to give a talk at a museum. My visit fell in the wake of a rally in which hundreds of local residents turned out to demand an arrest in Martin’s death. (Brown’s family has now retained Benjamin Crump, the attorney who represented Martin’s family.) Martin was killed nearly a thousand miles away, but when I spoke to people about the rally they conveyed the sense that what had happened to him could happen anywhere in the country, even in their own back yards. For those people in Ferguson pressed against the yellow police tape separating them from Brown’s remains, the overwhelming sentiment is that it already has.

Paul Krugman on Libertarians

Libertarian Fantasies

 AUGUST 9, 2014 9:09 AM   Paul Krugman   / New York Times

Robert Draper’s long magazine piece about the possibility of a “libertarian moment” has drawn a fair bit of commentary; much of it involves questioning the supposed polling evidence. As Jonathan Chait points out, independent polling — as opposed to surveys conducted by libertarians seeking to boost their own profile — suggests that young Americans are actually much more pro-government than their elders. They may look relatively kindly on anti-war libertarians, but they really don’t support the policy agenda.

But there’s what I would consider an even bigger problem: when it comes to substance, libertarians are living in a fantasy world. Often that’s quite literally true: Paul Ryan thinks that we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel. More to the point, however, the libertarian vision of the society we actually have bears little resemblance to reality.

Mike Konczal takes on a specific example: the currently trendy idea among libertarians that we can make things much better by replacing the welfare state with a basic guaranteed income. As Mike says, this notion rests on the belief that the welfare state is a crazily complicated mess of inefficient programs, and that simplification would save enough money to pay for universal grants that are neither means-tested nor conditional on misfortune. But the reality is nothing like that. The great bulk of welfare-state spending comes from a handful of major programs, and these programs are fairly efficient, with low administrative costs.

Actually, the cost of bureaucracy is in general vastly overestimated. Compensation of workers accounts for only around 6 percent of non defense federal spending, and only a fraction of that compensation goes to people you could reasonably call bureaucrats.

And what Konczal says about welfare is also true, although harder to quantify, for regulation. For sure there are wasteful and unnecessary government regulations — but not nearly as many as libertarians want to believe. When, for example, meddling bureaucrats tell you what you can and can’t have in your dishwashing detergent, it turns out that there’s a very good reason. America in 2014 is not India under the License Raj.

In other words, libertarianism is a crusade against problems we don’t have, or at least not to the extent the libertarians want to imagine. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of monetary policy, where many libertarians are determined to stop the Fed from irresponsible money-printing — which is not, in fact, something it’s doing.

And what all this means in turn is that libertarianism does not offer a workable policy agenda. I don’t mean that I dislike the agenda, which is a separate issue; I mean that if we should somehow end up with libertarian government, it would quickly find itself unable to fulfill any of its promises.

So no, we aren’t about to have a libertarian moment. And that’s a good thing.