More evidence of Romney's domination...

... comes in this morning's NY Times. And you don't even need to read the editorial, as their position, and Romney's triumph, is made clear by the title - An Unhelpful Presidential Debate.

The first debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, so long anticipated, quickly sunk into an unenlightening recitation of tired talking points and mendacity. With few sparks and little clarity on the immense gulf that truly separates the two men and their policies, Wednesday’s encounter provided little guidance for voters still trying to understand the choice in next month’s election...Mr. Obama chose to be polite and professorial, as if hoping that strings of details could hold up against blatant nonsense. Viewers were not helped by a series of pedestrian questions from the moderator, Jim Lehrer of PBS, who never jumped in to challenge either candidate on the facts.

If it were possible to spin last night as a good night for Barack Obama, the Times would not consider the debate to have been "unhelpful."

The amusing thing is that, despite the highlighted contention that the debate "provided little guidance," the contrast between the candidates is both clear and stark, and it showed last night.  One of the memes making the rounds on the left this morning is how ineffective Jim Lehrer was, and in a sense, that's true.  He did not control the debate.  But that actually left us with the two candidates sharing their positions, criticizing and explaining their positions, and enlightening viewers on policy positions, philosophy and communication and leadership style.

Of course the editors of the Times did not like what they saw last night - they are Obama partisans.

Of course they think the debate was "unhelpful" - they are Obama partisans.

Of course they think Romney's was speaking "blatant nonsense" - they are Obama partisans.

Of course they think viewers were not well served by Jim Lehrer - they are Obama partisans.

For those who are not Obama partisans, for those interested in the differences between the two men and their positions, for those seeking to determine which is the better choice to lead the country for the next year, this debate was indeed helpful.  And the Times' petulant reaction is just further confirmation of how helpful it was for the candidacy of Mitt Romney...

Times Ombusdman: "Yeah, we're pretty much shills for the left..."

Like we didn't already know it.

Arthur Brisbane, in his last column as "public editor" (ombudsman) of the New York Times:

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

No conspiracy, though. Whew, that's a relief!


OK, this is not a revelation. I've said it before.

But there's another way that bias manifests itself, and we don't always notice it as clearly. That is selection bias, covering as news issues or events that really aren't, just because it can make one party (say, the Democrats) look good or one party (for example, the Republicans) look bad.

That's just the way it is. But it's nice of Mr. Brisbane to acknowledge it...

Slippery-Slope Logic vs. Health Care Law

While I'm on the subject of the Times, there was a very silly Op-Ed piece on Sunday, and it's illustrative of one of the key problems in the current American body politic.

Slippery-Slope Logic vs. Health Care Law - Economic View - NYTimes.com

The Times gave its real estate to Richard Thaler, "a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago," and he used it to debunk an argument that no one on the right is making.

Thaler starts off by talking about slippery-slope arguments in general, and correctly notes that it can be a form of logical fallacy.

There is a DirecTV ad that humorously illustrates the basic form of the slippery-slope argument. A foreboding announcer intones a list of syllogisms that are enacted on screen: “When your cable company puts you on hold, you get angry. When you get angry, you go blow off steam. When you go blow off steam, accidents happen.” Later, we reach the finale: “You wake up in a roadside ditch. Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch.” Although this ad is intended to be funny, arguments that make no more sense can and do affect public policy. The idea is that while Policy X may be acceptable, it will inevitably lead to the terrible Outcome Y, so it is vital that we prevent Policy X from ever being enacted. The problem is that such arguments are often made without any evidence that doing X makes Y more likely, much less inevitable. What percentage of people who are left on hold on the telephone end up in a roadside ditch?

And that's fine, as far as it goes. He's right - it's very easy to put together a slippery-slope argument that makes assumptions about the likelihood of future possibilities and ends up somewhere very scary, or seductive, or exciting, and has no logical validity. But then he goes ahead and applies the idea to the debate over Obamacare that was recently held at the Supreme Court, accusing those who are opposed to the idea of the individual mandate of using slippery slope arguments that end with Congressional broccoli mandates.

It's true, of course, that many people have argued, or, more accurately, asked, "if Congress can mandate the purchase of health insurance, could they mandate the purchase of broccoli?" But that is not, as he as characterized it, a slippery-slope argument against the mandate. Rather, it was an inquiry into the fundamental constitutional limits of Congressional power.

Consider these now-famous comments about broccoli from Justice Antonin G. Scalia during the oral arguments. “Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food,” he said. “Therefore, everybody is in the market. Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.” Showing remarkable restraint, he did not mention anything about ending up in a roadside ditch.

Justice Scalia is arguing that if the court lets Congress create a mandate to buy health insurance, nothing could stop Congress from passing laws requiring everyone to buy broccoli and to join a gym. He and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. were asking the solicitor general to explain what the principle would be to stop the government from going so far. If the law stands, Justice Roberts suggested, “it seems to me that we can’t say there are limitations on what Congress can do under its commerce power.” He added, “Given the significant deference we accord to Congress in this area, all bets are off, and you could regulate that market in any rational way.”

Please stop! The very fact that a slippery slope is being cited as grounds for declaring the law unconstitutional — despite that “significant deference” usually given to laws passed by Congress — tells you all that you need to know about the argument’s validity. Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law, much less the court allowing it to take effect?

It's difficult to tell whether Thaler does not understand the discussion or is intentionally misrepresenting it, but he is fundamentally mis-characterizing the argument. No one is making a "slippery slope" argument in this case. The slippery-slope argument is of the form "if A happens then B is much more likely to happen, and will almost inevitably lead to C." No one has ever suggested that the individual mandate will make mandatory broccoli purchases likely, so it is not a slippery slope argument. What it is, rather, is an inquiry into the inherent limits of Congressional power, and people suggest a broccoli-mandate not as a likely consequence but as an obviously ludicrous example of something that would not happen but is just as constitutional under the logic of the case being made for the individual mandate. In other words, what we could term the "broccoli argument" is not a slippery slope argument - it's a reductio ad absurdum.

He says that "Justice Scalia is arguing that if the court lets Congress create a mandate to buy health insurance, nothing could stop Congress from passing laws requiring everyone to buy broccoli and to join a gym." On its face, that's a slippery slope argument. But that's not the argument being made. By using the term "nothing" in that statement, he's demonstrating either a lack of understanding or a lack of honesty. There are many things that might stop Congress from passing laws, first among those being the will of the voters that sent them to Washington and will, in the hopes of the members of Congress, keep them there. No one is arguing that "nothing could stop Congress" if the individual mandate is deemed constitutional. What people are arguing is that if the Constitution cannot stop Congress from mandating health insurance coverage, then the Constitution cannot stop Congress from mandating broccoli. That's a far cry from the argument that Thaler has portrayed. In his mockery of the slippery slope argument that no one is making, he's confirming the power and logic of the reduction ad absurdum argument that's actually being made.

So when he plaintively asks, "Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law," the answer is obviously, "no." So far, so good. Everyone is in agreement. But then he actually touches, and ignores, the relevant question in that same sentence, when he asks, "much less the court allowing it to take effect?" Well, if the court is going to exercise that "significant deference to Congress" that we've spoken of, on what grounds could a court not allow it to take effect if Congress enacted it? And how would those grounds differ from the grounds for not allowing the individual mandate to take effect? The court is supposed to rule on the Constitutional permissibility of the law in question. If you cannot articulate a theory of law in which the law being examined differs in a relevant way from an obviously unconstitutional theoretical law, and no one on the pro-mandate side has successfully done so, then you're conceding that the law being examined is not constitutional.

"Round and round and round in the circle game..."

In which the NY Times reveals itself, yet again, to be a simple, partisan rag...

In 2005, the Republicans in the United States Senate were frustrated by the Democrats' use of the filibuster to thwart Presidential nominations to the Federal judiciary, and were particularly concerned with the threat of a filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, which had never previously happened. Because of this, they contemplated a rule change to eliminate, or significantly limit, the filibuster, a change that was termed the "nuclear option." The mainstream press, as represented here by the New York Times, was appalled. This despite the fact that, with Democrats in the White House and control of the Senate, they had favored filibuster reform. No, they were just wrong earlier, and their new, more fully matured position, was the right one. Clearly, the filibuster was wrong. A problem.

March 29, 2005 - Walking in the Opposition's Shoes

While the filibuster has not traditionally been used to stop judicial confirmations, it seems to us this is a matter in which it's most important that a large minority of senators has a limited right of veto. Once confirmed, judges can serve for life and will remain on the bench long after Mr. Bush leaves the White House. And there are few responsibilities given to the executive and the legislature that are more important than choosing the members of the third co-equal branch of government. The Senate has an obligation to do everything in its power to ensure the integrity of the process.

A decade ago, this page expressed support for tactics that would have gone even further than the "nuclear option" in eliminating the power of the filibuster. At the time, we had vivid memories of the difficulty that Senate Republicans had given much of Bill Clinton's early agenda. But we were still wrong. To see the filibuster fully, it's obviously a good idea to have to live on both sides of it. We hope acknowledging our own error may remind some wavering Republican senators that someday they, too, will be on the other side and in need of all the protections the Senate rules can provide.

On May 5, 2005, a little over a month later, they provided space on their editorial page to former Senator George Mitchell to make the same case against filibuster reform. Clearly, when the Democrats were in the minority, the filibuster was a vitally important tool for stopping the depredations of a Republican President and Senate. They recognized, at this time, the folly of their earlier position, that the filibuster was an archaic, anti-democratic nuisance, allowing Republicans to prevent the noble Democrats in the Senate and White House from getting done the vital work of the nation.

So, what goes around comes around. Again. As the editorial board has decided, again, that the principled (certainly not partisan or biased, but principled) position on the filibuster is that it must be reformed.

Fed up and rueful, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, made a startling admission on Thursday: he should have reined in the filibuster rule last year, when he had a chance...If Mr. Reid helped enact the proposal of [Senators Udall and Merkley], he would instantly make Congress more efficient and more democratic...We have supported eliminating the filibuster for judicial and executive nominees. Making other filibusters harder would be good for both parties. If Mr. Reid remains majority leader in January, he should lead the reform.

And, of course, they're not actually lying when they say that they "have supported eliminating the filibuster for judicial and executive nominees" - they're just conveniently omitting the fact that, when it was their guys doing the filibustering and not the other guys, it was A-OK with them.

Because it's not about principle. Never has been, never will be. The Times, despite its pretense to being a non-partisan purveyor of the news, is a partisan political actor. They are pro-Democrat, anti-Republican, leftist progressives and, to the extent that there's ever a "principle" behind their positions, that's the extent of it.

And it's been really obvious for a really long time. This was not hard to see coming, as this piece from 2006, during the "nuclear option" debate and the Alito nomination, demonstrates...

[I]f the Republicans don't change the rules, the Democrats will, as soon as it becomes in their best interest to do so. Is there any chance that a President Hillary Clinton nomination to the Supreme Court, a nominee with majority support in the Senate, could be kept off the court by a Republican minority with impunity? That a majority supported nominee could be filibustered without hysterical screeching from the legacy media? Of course not. The New York Times would compose frothy rants encouraging the Democrats to, for the good of the country, change the rules to overcome the obstructionists, so that they could back to the work of the American People...

Democrats AP sees minefield in Dems' links to Occupy protests

Ah, the Associated Press, like the rest of the leftist US media, is nothing if not predictable. When something looks helpful to Democrats, it's promoted or praises - when something looks helpful to Republicans, it's forgotten or vilified. Remember how vitally important Cindy Sheehan was until she started criticizing Democrats? And then, "whoosh," right down the memory hole. Cindy Who?

You can clearly see the media's dawning comprehension of the typical American's feelings about the "Occupy" mobs in this Associated Press piece.

Democrats see minefield in Occupy protests

The Republican Party and the tea party seemed to be a natural political pairing. But what may have seemed like another politically beneficial alliance — Democrats and Occupy Wall Street — hasn't happened.

Although both Democrats and the Occupy protesters have similar views on economic inequality and corporate responsibility, each holds the other at arm's length. There's little benefit to Democrats in opening their arms wide to a scruffy group that has erupted in violence, defied police and shown evidence of drug use while camping in public parks across the country — much as the prospect of such a pairing delights Republicans.

Many protesters, in turn, are contemptuous of Democrats, arguing that both political parties are equally beholden to corporate interests and responsible for enacting policies that have hurt the middle class.

Here's Democratic Senatorial Candidate, and current pin-up girl for leftists worldwide, Elizabeth Warren, in October, keeping the Occupiers "at arm's length."

"Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren claims much of the credit for the Occupy Wall Street protests sweeping the nation.

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,” the Harvard Law School professor and former Obama administration consumer advocate told Samuel P. Jacobs of The Daily Beast. “I support what they do.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee certainly kept the Occupy movement "at arm's length."

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) — the campaign arm of the House Democrats — sent out an email Monday morning urging readers to sign a petition supporting the growing “Occupy Wall Street” protests.

And then there's the leader of the Democrats in the House, Nancy Pelosi, resisting the urge to form a "politically beneficial alliance..."

House Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she supports the growing nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement, which began on the streets of downtown New York City in mid-September.

"I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest, that change has to happen," said Pelosi in an exclusive interview with ABC News "This Week" anchor Christiane Amanpour. "We cannot continue in a way this is not relevant to their lives."

Back in October, the New York Times noted that

Leading Democratic figures, including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama, are embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment see the movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.

For two months, the media was enchanted by the possibility that the Occupiers would prove a political windfall for the Democrats. Now that it's clear that owning the movement would be a major political liability, the Emily Litella ("never mind") media re-appears...



H/T - John Nolte, at Brietbart's Big Journalism site, pointed out this story, and also did some more extensive deconstruction...

NY Times: "Yes, everything we ever said about bipartisanship was a lie."

Over at the New York Times this morning, there's an astounding editorial.

As soon as he proposed to pay for his $447 billion jobs plan with tax increases, President Obama knew he was going to do battle with Republicans. But he is also being challenged by Democrats because they cannot face another big pre-election fight or are thinking more about campaign contributors than the country’s best interests.

Is that it? Those are the only two choices? The Democrats are scared of a fight or are putting campaign contributions ahead of the country's best interests? (And let's face it, that's only one choice - political interests are trumping national interests.) And that's the only thing that the Times could come up with? How an idea, Mr. Big-shot New York Times Editorial Writer. Maybe the Democrats, along with the Republicans, recognize the President's "plan" for what it is - a nakedly partisan, cynically political attempt to improve his own public standing at the expense of Congress', a "plan" that contains nothing but a re-hash of all the things he's already done that haven't worked, a "plan" that would do nothing to increase the economic well-being of the country but would, instead, continue to increase the already staggering debt without creating a single job in the process.

What's funniest about the whole thing, though, is the sheer chutzpah of the Times, one of the foremost "bipartisanship" fetishists, whining about what they normally cry out for. This is prima facie evidence that what they want isn't bipartisanship - it's liberal policies. This editorial renders every future cry they make for bipartisanship even more farcical than the ones they've made in the past. "Bipartisanship," like "civil discourse," is a political weapon to use against Republicans, not an actual trait that they really give a damn about, and this editorial is proof of that. Keep that in mind the next time Republicans refuse to agree with Democrats and the inevitable plaintive cries of longing for "bipartisanship" rise from the offices of the Times' editorial staff.

There's more "good stuff" in the piece, too.

Some Democrats oppose the jobs bill for its apparent connection to the stimulus law from 2009, which Republicans lambasted on their way to victories in the midterm elections in 2010. The problem with the stimulus bill is not that it did not work. [LB: There are others, too, of course, but yeah, the big problem obviously is that it did not work.] The problem is that neither the administration nor Congressional Democrats ever persuasively used the evidence of its positive effect on jobs, as documented by the Congressional Budget Office and in private economic analyses.

The reason that they never "persuasively used the evidence" is that there isn't any. Or, rather, that the evidence that exists is so weak that it cannot possibly be used "persuasively" to convince someone who didn't already wholeheartedly believe it without the evidence. The CBO report¹ that showed the stimulus working started with the model that they used to design the stimulus, the model that showed "if you do x, y will happen," and used the model to say "look, we did x, therefore y happened - the model proves it!" The Times' own pet Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman, has spent the last two years telling us that it didn't work (because it wasn't big enough). The idea that it was a colossal success that the administration is being too modest to take the credit for is well beyond silly, rapidly approaching insane.

Economists have estimated that Mr. Obama’s plan, if fully adopted, could create 1.3 million to 1.9 million jobs next year.

Yes, and what did those same economists estimate would happen with Mr. Obama's first plan? That it would prevent unemployment from topping 8%.

Here's the President's economic adviser Cristina Romer, on her way out the door a year ago:

What the Act hasn’t done is prevent unemployment from going above 8 percent, something else that Jared and I projected it would do.

And

Precisely because such severe financial shocks have been rare, there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact. To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did, and why they cut labor so much more than they normally would, given the decline in output.

So obviously, there's no way they could be over-estimating the impact of doing more of the same thing that worked so well last time, right?

The Republicans will not support the jobs bill, if only because Mr. Obama wants it. Americans need Democrats to step up now, and for Mr. Obama to lead them.

Again, can they not see any other possible reason? Is it really beyond the realm of comprehension that someone might look at that "plan" and think, "you know, that's really not a very good idea"?

Apparently not.

It would be comical if it weren't so damaging...





¹ - Congressional Budget Office report:

Estimating the law’s overall effects on employment requires a more comprehensive analysis than can be achieved by using the recipients’ reports. Therefore, looking at recorded spending to date along with estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy.

More from Romer:

The reason that prediction was so far off is implicit in much of what I have been saying this afternoon. An estimate of what the economy will look like if a policy is adopted contains two components: a forecast of what would happen in the absence of the policy, and an estimate of the effect of the policy. As I’ve described, our estimates of the impact of the Recovery Act have proven quite accurate. But we, like virtually every other forecaster, failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be in the absence of policy, and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP and unemployment would break down.

How do we know that the estimates have "proven quite accurate"? Well, our models suggest that that's what happens. Despite that, as noted above, and in her own words, "there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact" of "such severe financial shocks."

Gosh, why didn't we think of that before?

A piece in the Sunday New York Times from Emory University psychology Professor Drew Westen is generating some buzz in the blogosphere. I linked it here, but I don't recommend reading it. It's largely a self-serving crybaby rant about how evil Wall Street and the conservatives are, and how the liberal left's dreams have been dashed by the reality of Obama. It's a singularly unimpressive piece (though par for the course for the pages of the Times).

But this is a telling passage.

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues...Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

You mean, maybe someone should have been actually vetted before being elected to the Presidency? What a concept! Too bad that no one said anything about it at the time, huh?

More civil discourse

If we all think back eight months, to those grim January days that followed the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the foremost political virtue that anyone on the left could name was "civil discourse." The media immediately and publicly linked the shooting to a map of "targeted districts" on Sarah Palin's facebook page, and began a drumbeat, echoed and amplified by Democratic officials, on the dangers of "political violence" resulting from "violent rhetoric." The fact that there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the shooter, a clearly mentally disturbed individual whose antipathy to Giffords long predated Palin's map, was even aware of Palin, her map, or anything else related to electoral politics, made no difference. The story line was the rhetoric of the right.

Some of us pointed out, at the time, that this cry for civility was both one-sided and hypocritical.

I noted that

I'm also tired of [political incivility] becoming an issue only when those on the right do it. I'd take the complaints of liberals a lot more seriously if there were a demonstrated consistency in their opposition to crude political discourse, not just using it as another partisan tool to bash conservatives.

And

In actuality, the objection to "legislating morality" turns out to be, much like the current call for "civil discourse," not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right.

So now, having lost (or at least having the perception that they've lost) another political battle, what are we seeing and hearing from the left?

Elected Democrats:

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

The New York Times' Joe Nocera:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

The New York Times' Maureen Dowd:

Tea Party budget-slashers didn’t sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night...the Tea Party slashers roaming the corridors of the Capitol have feasted without resistance on delicious victims and will only grow bolder.

The New York Times' Thomas Friedman:

If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

(Friedman, if you recall, is the one that laments the fact that Obama doesn't have the same powers in America as the "reasonably enlightened" Chinese dictators do in China...)

Anyway, it's all par for the course. I'm going to let Jonah Goldberg finish this one up...

The Today Show even had Debbie Wasserman Schultz on this morning for five minutes talking about Giffords. No one thought to ask her what she thought of Biden’s comments? It’s not like she’s the Democratic party’s national spokesperson or anything. Oh, wait. She is!

Instead, after the full ten minutes on Giffords, we get an update about the debt-limit situation (which is supposedly an Armageddon-level issue) and Kelly O’Donnell basically carries water for Biden on the issue by completely muddying whether he said anything of the sort at all. (His office says, no, no the vice president didn’t call them terrorists, he just politely agreed with all the Democratic congressmen in the room that they “acted like terrorists.” Ah, this is a distinction a team of a million Jesuits working around the clock would have a hard time slicing.)

And yet you know the next time there’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing’s rhetoric.

Well, go to Hell. All of you.

More of the same

At the Hill blog, Rick Manning, the communications director of Americans for Limited Government, has called my attention to this NY Times editorial from Sunday on the current economic situation. The Times editors think that

Republican lawmakers have responded to renewed signs of weakness with a jobs plan that prescribes more of the same “fixes” that Republicans always recommend no matter the problem: mainly high-end tax cuts, deregulation, more domestic oil drilling and federal spending cuts.

The White House has offered sounder ideas, including job retraining, plans to boost educational achievement and tax increases to help cover needed spending. But its economic team is mainly focused on negotiations to raise the debt limit, presumably parrying Republican demands for deep spending cuts that could weaken the economy further while still reaching an agreement on the necessary increase.

Manning notes that

In just a few lines, the Times managed to encapsulate the left’s complete lack of understanding of why jobs are created.

To be clear, jobs get created in private enterprise when additional labor is required to produce goods or services that will increase the profit of the enterprise.

Jobs don’t get created:

A: because people are trained to do them.

B: because people have higher educational attainment.

C: by raising taxes on those who we hope will create the jobs.

Which is, of course, absolutely correct.

But I'm a little more interested, today, in the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that the Times is using here, and the unstated assumptions that go into it.

Republican lawmakers have responded ... with a jobs plan that prescribes more of the same “fixes” that Republicans always recommend no matter the problem: ... The White House has offered sounder ideas

So, while both parties are, in this instance, absolutely true to their undergirding philosophies and the wishes of their supporters, the Republicans are offering "more of the same" while the White House has "sounder ideas." The evidence that these ideas are "sounder" is assumed to be true, or left as an exercise for the reader. No doubt the typical Times reader shares those assumptions, so it would be a waste of time to actually make the case. But both parties are offering "more of the same." The Republicans are, in fact, offering "tax cuts, deregulation, more domestic oil drilling and federal spending cuts." Those are the policies that Republicans always tend to favor. The Democrats, on the other hand, when they can be bothered to offer anything, offer things like "job retraining, plans to boost educational achievement and tax increases to help cover needed spending." It's quite a trick to condemn one party for offering "more of the same" while at the same time praising the other party for offering "more of the same," but that's what they've done here.

Note that there's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing one set of ideas while supporting the other. There's nothing dishonest about it. But "more of the same" is a fundamentally dishonest criticism.

And what, exactly, are those "sounder ideas" of the Democrats?

job retraining

That sounds good, doesn't it? "Job retraining." Helping people help themselves. Out-of-work pastry chefs learn how to fill the critical gaps in our power-supply infrastructure capabilites or traffic control. Who wouldn't want to increase his or her job skills?

But here's the problem with that lovely sounding idea - currently, there are millions of Americans out of work who want jobs. Where, exactly, are the millions of jobs that they would fill if they were "retrained"? If we train all of our out-of-work coal miners to run Microsoft Word and Excel, does that fix the unemployment problem? Shall we re-train all of our out-of-work auto workers as nuclear physicists? How, by what mechanism, does "job retraining" create a single new job, never mind the millions that are missing from the economy as a result of the disruptions of the past few years? (OK, so you get a hundred thousand government-paid "retrainers" hired by the Federal government, and a couple of thousand bureaucrats to administer the program. How do you create any jobs beyond those?)

The Times has, of course, no answer for those questions, if they ever considered them, which is profoundly unlikely.

plans to boost educational achievement

"Plans to boost educational achievement." Oh, they've got "plans to boost educational achievement" - that'll generate millions of jobs!

How, exactly? I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for an answer.

tax increases to help cover needed spending

Because apparently, the government isn't spending enough already.

To do them justice, one could see unemployment dropping if the government spent more. Yes, the first stimulus was a disaster, but there's always room for the old Keynsian classic, "hire two million people to dig holes and two million more to fill them in." That'll address the unemployment rate, at least in the short term, and it's not like it would significantly change the debt situation - we've already got no chance of staying solvent without massive tax increases, so what's a little more?

So maybe the Times is one-for-three on this section. Or maybe they just think that "sounder" means "sounds nicer to us."

But its economic team is mainly focused on negotiations to raise the debt limit, presumably parrying Republican demands for deep spending cuts that could weaken the economy further while still reaching an agreement on the necessary increase.

"Parrying Rebublican demands for deep spending cuts that could weaken the economy..." As with everything else that they've written, the question comes again - "HOW?" What is the mechanism by which "spending cuts...weaken the economy"? What is the mechanism by which the Federal Government is increasing the economic productivity of the country? Even assuming that there is some mechanism or mechanisms by which government spending increases economic output, where's a single shred of evidence to suggest that there's still room for more economic productivity to be had by raising taxes and spending? The government has been on a wild spending spree for the past four years now (thanks, Nancy and Harry and Barack!) and the economy doesn't seem, at least to my untrained eyes, to have gotten better. What can they offer to support the Democrats "more of the same"?

Nothing. And they don't bother trying. It's just "more of the same" from the New York Times...

What do marginal rates mean?

Greg Mankiw - Higher Taxes Mean I’ll Work Less

Reasonable people can disagree about whether and how much the government should redistribute income. And, to be sure, the looming budget deficits require hard choices about spending and taxes. But don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden.

Excellent piece here, read it all. The only mystery here is, how did this end up in the New York Times?

More Republican Lies!

In the pages of that purveyor of conservative agitprop known as the ... er ...New York Times...

The Principal Financial Group announced on Thursday that it planned to stop selling health insurance, another sign of upheaval emerging among insurers as the new federal health law starts to take effect.

The company, based in Iowa, provides coverage to about 840,000 people who receive their insurance through an employer.

Principal’s decision closely tracks moves by other insurers that have indicated in recent weeks that they plan to drop out of certain segments of the market, like the business of selling child-only policies. State regulators say some insurance companies are already threatening to leave particular markets because of the new law. And some regulators in states like Maine and Iowa have asked the Obama administration to give insurers more time to comply with some of the new rules.

I know this must be a lie, because President Obama said, over and over again, repeatedly and forcefully, that "if you have insurance you like, you'll be able to keep that insurance."

Well, maybe this isn't a Republican lie. Maybe nobody actually liked their Principal Financial Group insurance...

Of course, we already knew this...

James Taranto:

Back then, the [NY] Times favored disregarding the law in order to "give New Jersey's voters a competitive race." Today, the Times complains about a cynical but perfectly legal maneuver whose effect will be to give New York voters a competitive race. Is there any way to reconcile these positions other than by concluding that the Times is a cynically partisan institution?

Since the Times is obviously a cynically partisan institution, the question doesn't require much analysis.  The answer, of course, is "No." 

NY Times to Democrats - Do it now!

New York Times lead editorial:

That means it’s up to Congressional Democrats to move legislation forward — or throw away a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix this country’s broken health care system.

Compelling, I suppose, as long as you agree with the unsupported assumptions that a) the system is currently broken and b) the plan under consideration would "fix" it.

If, like me, you believe neither, it doesn't have much power...

Spirituality vs. Religion

Perceptive comment from Instapundit on a NY Times story.

YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.

All the news that fits...

Walter Russell Mead offers a public service for those still getting their news from the New York Times.

Readers of The New York Times learned something this morning that millions of people in the UK have known for some time, not to mention of the millions of Americans following the story on the web. But they didn’t learn much about it, or learn enough to begin to think through the consequences for American politics and global policy.

A page one story by Elisabeth Rosenthal under the headline “U.N. Climate Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility” gently informed the sensitive readers of The New York Times that all is not well in the world of the climate change movement.

...

The dwindling band who depend on The New York Times for their news don’t know that their world has changed in some important ways. They deserve to know and they need to know; I hope that the paper will find a way to tell them.

He provides an excellent short summary of Climate-gate and the recently acknowledged issues that render the IPCC utterly untrustworthy as a source of information. Unfortunately, those who still get their information from the Times are probably never going to see this piece...

"Going down this road would destroy constitutional rights for just about everyone..."

Another Citizen's United post - Ilya Somin is addressing many of the same things that I did yesterday, albeit more formally and with far, far more legal training. The conclusions are similar.

If you define “state-created entity” narrowly, then it won’t include most corporations. But if you define it broadly as any legally defined status that carries government-granted rights or privileges, then pretty much every important private organization is a state-created entity. Individual citizens may be “state-created entities” as well, and naturalized citizens certainly are. Going down this road would destroy constitutional rights for just about everyone. That may be why even the liberal justices most enthusiastic about campaign finance regulation have been unwilling to really bite this particular bullet. True, Justice Stevens’ dissent does note that “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.” Yet even Stevens stops short of stating that this by itself proves that corporations don’t have free speech rights. I doubt that Stevens and the other liberal justices are willing to really follow that logic. For example, they’re not going to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan or conclude that the government has the power to search corporate property unconstrained by the Fourth Amendment. Yet that is where the “creature of law” argument inexorably leads. The better approach is the common sense conclusion that people are entitled to full constitutional rights whenever they use their privately owned resources to exercise them, whether those resources are legally assigned to “state-created entities” or not.

Bottom line - there are satifying (to some) emotional rants which can be made about the decision, but there's no real legal justification for them, and the majority decision is clearly correct.

Is this what the Times was concerned about?

One of the things that New York Times hyperventilated about on the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling was the idea that it enabled "special interests" to "corrupt" the political process.

If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

So one expects that they'll run an indignant and ferocious editorial decrying this:

SEIU chief Andy Stern took a hard shot at Dem leaders just now for considering a scaled-down health care bill, strongly hinting that labor might not work as hard for Dem candidates in 2010 if they failed to deliver real and comprehensive reform.

“It’s gonna be incredibly difficult to stay focused on national politics if by the end of 2010 we have minimal health care and minimal changes on what’s important to our members,” he said in an interview, ridiculing the emerging Dem approach as “fear masquerading as a strategy.”

My advice for all those awaiting the Times to demonstrate intellectual consistency and condemn this threat: Don't hold your breath.



(H/T: Daniel Foster)

Citizen's United vs. The New York Times

The New York Times doesn't agree with the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. "Doesn't agree" being, in this case, synonomous with acting like a proper Victorian lady getting the vapours at the sight of some unseemly display of a bared calf.

The Court’s Blow to Democracy

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century.

It's good to start with some dispassionate rationality, isn't it?

Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment,

According to the OED, "disingenuous" means "lacking in candour or frankness, insincere, morally fraudulent." How the majority's references to the First Amendment, which is, after all, the key to understanding and resolving this issue, is "insincere" or "morally fraudulent" is apparently so obvious that they don't need to explain it. In any event, the assumption of insincerity is made with no explanation forthcoming. One suspects that they would struggle to find a justifiable reason for using that particular adverb, but it's good and nasty and pejorative, so in it goes.

the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Corporations like, say, the New York Times Corporation? Oh, wait. They could already do that. In fact, they've spent much of the 150 years of their existence attempting to do exactly that.

Hmm...

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

What form, exactly, does this "strike at the heart of democracy" take? Are they taking away the vote from citizens? Changing the rules about who wins and loses elections? No, they're saying that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." That doesn't sound like much of a "strike at the heart of democracy" to me.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates.

Corporations like the New York Times?

If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

Which never, ever happens now. No sirree. The NRA or NARAL or the SEIU or the UAW or the Sierra Club or the NAACP or PFAW never, ever exert influence over political candidates. And the New York Times and Washington Post and CBS and NBC, corporations all, never attempt to influence the results of elections either.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics.

It doesn't just reverse the law, it "radically" reverses it. They don't just object to this decision, they "strenuously object."

(The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

Really? "Far less money?" Do all unions have "far less money" than all corporations? If not, should wealthy unions, say the Major League Baseball Playerrs Association, also be banned from speaking as a group about electoral issues?

And if this ruling frees them up to spend, what were they doing previously? Is the New York Times seriously arguing here that labor unions haven't advertised in the past in the attempt to affect elections? If I had a nickel for every ad that the Massachusetts Teachers Association had run over the past five years, I'd be a much, much wealthier man.

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence.

This is the kind of comment that would be interesting to see them try to justify with citations. I don't remember any warnings of the dangers of corporate influence from the founders, but I haven't read everything they wrote, either. In any event, none of those warnings were written into the constitution as restrictions on corporations.

The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

True. It also doesn't mention universities, teacher's unions, glee clubs, professional sports leagues, church choirs and garden clubs. Does that mean that that Congress can establish laws abridging freedom of speech for those groups, too?

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

True. True. And True.

So what? Congress also enacted fugitive slave laws which were reaffirmed by the courts. Just because someone made a mistake in the past isn't a reason for repeating the mistake.

This issue should never have been before the court.

Absolutely true.

The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign.

No, it shouldn't have been before the court, because the laws shouldn't have been passed in the first place, and they shouldn't have been signed into law by past Presidents. The first amendment (if I may refer to it in a hopefully non-disingenuous fashion) says that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." What exactly is the law that was struck down if not a law abridging the freedom of speech?

The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

How unreasonable of them. It isn't like there's a major biannual election cycle starting in, oh, right about now, for which people need to understand the rules.

Oh, wait. Yes, there is.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

This is just embarassing. How is it not "call[ing] balls and strikes" to look at a law and determine that, yes, this law is not allowed by the text and meaning of the constitution? They didn't make anything up. They didn't create a new right out of "emanations and penumbras." They looked at the constitution, saw that "congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech," they looked at the law, saw that it, in fact, "abridg[ed] freedom of speech," and said, "hey, that's not constitutional." The only possible definition of "overreach" under which this would qualify is "decision with which the New York Times does not agree."

And the Chief Justice's opinion does nothing whatsoever to "excuse...shameless judicial overreaching." It does, however, explain very clearly and concisely precisely why this decision represents no such thing.

It should go without saying, however, that we cannot embrace a narrow ground of decision simply because it is narrow; it must also be right. Thus while it is true that “[i]f it is not necessary to decide more, it is necessary not to decide more,” sometimes it is necessary to decide more. There is a difference between judicial restraint and judicial abdication. When constitutional questions are “indispensably necessary” to resolving the case at hand, “the court must meet and decide them.”

Citizens United has standing—it is being injured by the Government’s enforcement of the Act. Citizens United has a constitutional claim—the Act violates the First Amendment, because it prohibits political speech. The Government has a defense—the Act may be enforced, consistent with the First Amendment, against corporations. Whether the claim or the defense prevails is the question before us.

Any further questions? Any of that sound tortured or sophistic or difficult?

Yeah, I thought not.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law.

Argument by assertion. If you're going to say something like that, you need to specify how, exactly, the majority is "deeply wrong on the law." Lamentably for those of us they hope to educate, such specificity fails to appear.

Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

And here's the nub of the argument, the place where the New York Times is most deeply, fundamentally wrong.

The Constitution does not exist to grant rights to anyone. It exists to limit the power of the government. The first amendments does not say, "Congress shall protect the right of people to engage in freedom of speech" - it says "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech."

Period.

It is inarguable that this law, which the Supreme Court has correctly overturned, abridged freedom of speech. Even the Times isn't arguing that it doesn't - they're arguing that corporations have no right to freedom of speech. (Well, they're arguing that some corporations have no right to freedom of speech. They're quite happy excersizing their own, and one can just imagine the editorials were Congress to extend the ban on corporate speech to media companies issuing editorials.)

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

Wall Street bankers can already do that. But they hide the fact by doing it through bundled contributions and political action committees with pretty names. It's hard to imagine that out in the open politicking would result in a system more corrupt than the one which we've currently got.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

And I'm troubled by the extreme contempt for the constitution that Senator McCain demonstrates every time this topic comes up.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”

Still waiting for an explanation of how this "threatens democracy?" Yup, me too.

History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

Evidence came there none. Except yet another piece of evidence that the editorial board of the New York Times lives in a fantasy world, where evil corporations ally with evil Republicans to the detriment of everyone else. For an elite that prides themselves on nuance and decries the black-and-white world of George W. Bush, this is a pretty strong us-vs.-them attitude on display.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join.

Mobilize how, exactly? Pass another law to re-implement the same restrictions that the Court has just determined to be unconstitutional? Amend the constitution? Kill one of the five so the President can change the balance? What's the end-game here?

Congress should repair the presidential public finance system

With the help of the same President that promised to abide by it last time and then changed his mind when he saw that it was advantageous?

and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns.

Because, as Senator-elect Brown knows, there's no way for ordinary Americans to contribute now.

Or not.

It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

I'll have to think on that. Despite the fact that it's coming from the Times editorial board, it's not obviously insane. But the source suggests that it may be. This requires carefull consideration.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned.

Because, Supreme Court precendents, so vital and precious and important five paragraphs back, should definitely be overturned if we don't like them.

The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.

This threat to democracy which is so apparent to them continues to escape me. It would have been nice, I think, if they'd devoted a couple of words to why this is a threat to democracy, or why this is an incorrect decision. I don't see either of those things, just a paranoid temper tantrum that someone's taken away their monopoly on corporations influencing elections.

Quote of the day (so far)

Steyn:

Pity the poor Democrats. It's so easy to "misjudge" [the electorate] when you read The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

And the hits just keep on coming...

And the slander storm aimed at Scott Brown continues in the pages of the New York Times. Former Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat, is quoted as saying, of Brown,

If he’s running against 60 votes and wins, that is not good. It says that in Massachusetts, they are willing to elect a guy who doesn’t believe in evolution just to keep the Democrats from having 60 votes.

Has Scott Brown ever said that he doesn't believe in evolution? Has he ever suggested he doesn't believe in evolution? Has Scott Brown ever said or done anything that even hints that he doesn't believe in evolution?

The answer to all of those is, "no."

So Bob Kerry's slandering Scott Brown. And the New York Times is just uncritically passing it on.