"We wanted people to learn that [domestic violence] is not just a woman's issue" (Ali Torre)

Last Thursday and Friday on MetroFocus (the nightly news-features show produced by the three Metro New York public TV entities, NYC's WNET13, Long Ialand's WLIW21, and NJN, the New Jersey Network), Billy Crystal talked to Joe and Ali Torre about the Torres' Safe At Home Foundation. Watch Part 1 of the interview here, and Part 2 here.

"What we wanted people to learn about the issue [domestic violence] is that it's not just a woman's issue, that for every woman that goes into a shelter there are two to three children that go with her."

-- Ali Torre, in the interview with Billy Crystal

"When I was growing up, I never shared this with anybody. When I used to go to my friend's house, waiting for my dad to go to work, I just went there. I didn't say I didn't want to go home 'cause my dad was there. So when we started our Safe At Home Foundation, friends who were very close to me had no clue, because I just was embarrassed, what was going on in my home, and I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood that had this going on."

-- Joe Torre, in the interview

by Ken

I've told this story before, but I'm going to tell it again. One day during my time at Howie's and my alma mater, James Madison High School in Brooklyn, a portion of the student body found ourselves in the auditorium where two guests came onstage. The younger guy was readily recognizable to most Brooklynites, because Joe Torre, a Brooklyn boy, had in just a few years with the Milwaukee Braves established himself as a baseball star.

I wasn't a Brooklyn kid, though. I was a transplant (most recently) from Milwaukee, so I recognized the older guy as Joe's brother Frank, whom I'd seen play a major role in the Braves' winning two NL pennants and a World Series. In fact, I remembered the spring when Frank showed up at camp with his chubby little brother, a catcher, in tow. It may have been mostly as a favor to Frank, but the Braves wound up signing Joe to a contract, which turned out to be one heckuva smart move. Because he turned out to be a great player (and later a great manager).

In fact, that day at the James Madison HS assembly, Joe was a ringer. Frank Torre was indeed a Madison alum, but Joe as the coddled baby among five siblings (in the interview, he reminds us that he's eight and a half years younger than his next-youngest sibling), went to private school -- Catholic high school, of course.

Maybe you had to be there at the time to appreciate how good a player Joe Torre was, playing with a quiet competence and day-in, day-out consistency that fit perfectly with the "image" of unflappable self-confidence -- as Billy Crystal notes in the MetroFocus interview with Joe and his wife, Ali -- that Joe seemed to exude throughout his baseball career. But as Joe reveals in the interview, most of his life he was anything but confident. He reminds us that his freshman year in high school he didn't even go out for the baseball team, feeling he wasn't good enough. He was almost pathologically shy, always reluctant to speak, often feeling ashamed.

One thing he was most unlikely to do was speak in front of a group. Which makes what happened one day in November or December of 1995 (when he was 55), at a four-day seminar in Cincinnati, Ali's hometown, where she and Joe had moved after he was fired as manager of the Saint Louis Cardinals. (Interestingly, he doesn't mention until later that he had in fact just been named manager of the New York Yankees.) Ali had persuaded him to attend this Life Success seminar, where they were assigned to separate groups.

About day two or three, after this one speaker, saying a lot of things that hit home with me, I wind up standing up, in front of the whole group, and I was crying, because I realized, instead of being born with the low self-esteem, instead of being born with the nervousness that I thought . . . I was sort of embarrassed about it. I didn't want to share with anybody that I had these insecurities. I realized that what was going on in my home, where my dad was abusing my mom -- physically abusing her, and of course emotionally abusing her -- that that was what caused it.

Joe doesn't remember what exactly he said, and in the interview he forgets that Ali can't tell us because she wasn't there. But she remembers the effect it had on him, and remembers in particular that that night when they got home, he called one of his sisters and asked, "Did Dad hit Mom?"

-- from the Safe At Home Foundation website

Since that day obviously Joe has talked about his family history a lot, and now everybody knows the story: how as the baby among the five Torre children (including brothers Frank and Rocco and sisters Rae and Marguerite), he was protected by his older siblings, and especially by his sisters, from the violence of their home, and how eventually it was Frank and Rocco who confronted their father, a police detective well known and admired in their Marine Park neighborhood, and forced him to move out of the house.

But I had no idea until now that Joe, traumatized though he was by the atmosphere created in his house by his father's raging temper (if Joe Sr. didn't like what his wife served him for lunch, young Joe could hear the plate crashing against the wall), never knew his father was physically abusing his mother. (He does tell a fairly hair-raising story, though, about an incident he did witness, when Rae took knife in hand to protect their mother, Margaret, from their father on one of his rampages. Dad proceeded to fetch his detective's revolver, whereupon the youngest Torre walked over and took the knife out of his sister's hand.) In good part Joe's obliviousness resulted from his brothers' and sisters' efforts to protect him, which had its ironic side. With all the whispering young Joe witnessed going on among all the rest of his family, he assumed that what was going on must be his fault.

And he kept it all to himself. Until that fateful day in Cincinnati, he didn't even talk about what went on in his home to Ali, who knew only that the home environment was seriously troubled and his parents divorced when Joe was 11 or 12.

When I was growing up, I never shared this with anybody. When I used to go to my friend's house, waiting for my dad to go to work, I just went there. I didn't say I didn't want to go home 'cause my dad was there. So when we started our Safe At Home Foundation, friends who were very close to me had no clue, because i just was embarrassed, what was going on in my home, and I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood that had this going on.

Which is why a crucial part of the work of Joe and Ali's Safe At Home Foundation is concerned with education, including programs in schools where, as Joe says, they try to communicate two messages: "You're not the only one," and "It's not your fault." Billly Crystal, who has attended a lot of those sessions, reports that he has often heard kids who've gotten the messages say they're not afraid to go home anymore.

After watching the first part of Joe and Ali's interview with Billy Crystal, I knew I wanted to get something about it on the record. My original idea was to do a post combining that and the latest developments in the scandal of the hellishly abusive environment created by Roger Ailes at Fox Noise, since that too was widely thought of as a "woman's issue" when it was just Gretchen Carlson filing suit against the giant rat bastard, at least until other women at the network, past and present, began telling their stories. Even now, the fall of Roger Ailes is surely regarded as a lesser side story to the story of what he built at Fox Noise -- an engine for turning the country into the hell of his diseased mind.

Eventually the scope of the Fox Noise horror crowded the other story out, and took precedence news-wise. But still in my mind the two stories, of sexual harassment at Fox Noise and of epidemic domestic violence, are still related. The crowning irony is that they take place in a society that pretends to be built on "family values." The eerie reality is that quite possibly our society truly is built on the "family values" we actually practice. Can this possibly not have a major role in defining who and what we are?



By all accounts Joe's doting sisters Rae and Marguerite played a major role in the upbringing of their baby brother. As seen above, they became household figures to Yankee fans during his time as manager, and both were in Cooperstown when he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame as a manager in 2014; Rae died the following February, at 89.

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In the end, even Rupert Murdoch was made to understand that horror show Roger Ailes had to go

In his article in the Sept. 5 NYM, Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman argued that nobody, least of all Rupert Murdoch, should have been surprised by Big Ratso's behavior at the fake-news empire he was hired to create -- it was a pattern that had kept him from being employed for more than a few years at his previous jobs.

by Ken

On Friday Digby served up a post, "The Ailes chronicles. OMG" thusly:

Pull up a chair and read the most amazing story you will read all year, and that's including the story of the Trump campaign. This is the big one by Gabriel Sherman about the most influential right wing propagandist of the past half century Roger Ailes.

After offering "just a tiny excerpt that she made clear "isn't even the worst of it," she concluded:

Grab a drink or a cup of coffee and read the whole thing. Then ask yourself what it means that this man has been the single most influential right wing strategist and media figure of the past 40 years.

Oh, and yeah, it's important to mention that he's working closely with Donald Trump. Does anyone have a problem with that?

It was hard to resist a gentle suggestion like that, and I didn't. I devoured the piece by New York magazine national affairs editor Gabriel Sherman (author of the 2014 biography The Loudest Voice in the Room, and newly announced as an NBC and MSNBC contributor), "The Revenge of Roger's Angels," which was posted online Friday and appeared in the NYM issue of Sept. 5. (And by the way, also check out his online coverage before and since.)

So Tuesday Fox Noise parent company 21st Century Fox stepped in, announcing settlements with Gretchen Carlson and some others of the women who have told their stories of their own accounts of sexual harassment in Big Ratso's Fox Noise Horror Show and offering compensation -- $20 million in Carlson's case. Fox Noise wasn't actually party to Carlson's lawsuit, which was against Noisemaker-in-chief Ailes, and people around the giant rat bastard make clear that he isn't contributing a red cent to the payoff. The story is all lies, he says. Of course he's lying, unless his brain is so addled that he really doesn't know what reality is.

Then again, why should Big Ratso contribute? According to Sherman, big-time hush-money payoffs to people who knew too much were a regular feature of his Fox Noise reign of horror, and that money always came out of the Fox till, seemingly without a lot of questions asked, in keeping with the free hand, not subject to other corporate oversight, granted Ratso by his lone corporate overseer, corporate emperor Rupert Murdoch, in recognition of the obscene profits Fox Noise contributed to the New Corp. empire.

Says Sherman, "Murdoch knew Ailes was a risky hire when he brought him in to start Fox News in 1996."

Ailes had just been forced out as president of CNBC under circumstances that would foreshadow his problems at Fox.

While his volcanic temper, paranoia, and ruthlessness were part of what made Ailes among the best television producers and political operatives of his generation, those same attributes prevented him from functioning in a corporate environment. He hadn’t lasted in a job for more than a few years. “I have been through about 12 train wrecks in my career. Somehow, I always walk away,” he told an NBC executive.

By all accounts, Ailes had been a management disaster from the moment he arrived at NBC in 1993. But by 1995, things had reached a breaking point. In October of that year, NBC hired the law firm Proskauer Rose to conduct an internal investigation after then–NBC executive David Zaslav told human resources that Ailes had called him a “little fucking Jew prick” in front of a witness.

Zaslav told Proskauer investigators he feared for his safety. “I view Ailes as a very, very dangerous man. I take his threats to do physical harm to me very, very seriously … I feel endangered both at work and at home,” he said, according to NBC documents, which I first published in my 2014 biography of Ailes. CNBC executive Andy Friendly also filed complaints. “I along with several of my most talented colleagues have and continue to feel emotional and even physical fear dealing with this man every day,” he wrote. The Proskauer report chronicled Ailes’s “history of abusive, offensive, and intimidating statements/threats and personal attacks.” Ailes left NBC less than three months later.

What NBC considered fireable offenses, Murdoch saw as competitive advantages. He hired Ailes to help achieve a goal that had eluded Murdoch for a decade: busting CNN’s cable news monopoly. Back in the mid-’90s, no one thought it could be done.

Of course Big Ratso did it, by "recogniz[ing] how key wedge issues — race, religion, class — could turn conservative voters into loyal viewers," and "by January 2002, Fox News had surpassed CNN as the highest-rated cable news channel."

But Ailes’s success went beyond ratings: The rise of Fox News provided Murdoch with the political influence in the United States that he already wielded in Australia and the United Kingdom. And by merging news, politics, and entertainment in such an overt way, Ailes was able to personally shape the national conversation and political fortunes as no one ever had before. It is not a stretch to argue that Ailes is largely responsible for, among other things, the selling of the Iraq War, the Swift-boating of John Kerry, the rise of the tea party, the sticking power of a host of Clinton scandals, and the purported illegitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Ailes became untouchable. At News Corp., he behaved just as he had at NBC, but Murdoch tolerated Ailes’s abusiveness because he was pleased with the results.

That "abusiveness" included "us[ing] Fox’s payroll as a patronage tool, doling out jobs to Republican politicians, friends, and political operatives," "position[ing] his former secretaries in key departments where he could make use of their loyalty to him," and in general "rul[ing] Fox News like a surveillance state," encasing himself in an impregnable fortress of secrecy while creating a climate of terror for anyone in the company who might be tempted to act in any way that he might deem disloyal (meaning anything he didn't like), making clear to one and all that anyone who did so that punishment would be severe.

It's pointed out as well that the amount Fox is paying Carlson is half the $40 million the company is supposed to have agreed to pay Big Ratso in July to get him to go the fuck away, though it may be as little as a third if we credit reports that place the Ratman's "Oh Yeah? Just Try and Make Me Go" haul at $60 mil. According to Sherman, as the Carlson lawsuit began exploding, Rupert Murdoch's first instinct was to try to protect his old ratpal, but he was persuaded that the situation was untenable, not least by his sons James and Lachlan, who are wielding increasing influence at Fox and are not fans of the hulk. Among other things, they persuaded their 85-year-old father to have the law firm of Paul Weiss perform the independent investigation that sealed Ratso's doom as more and more present and former women came forward to tell their stories.

When it came to getting Ratso out:

James had wanted Ailes to be fired for cause, according to a person close to the Murdochs, but after reviewing his contract, Rupert decided to pay him $40 million and retain him as an “adviser.” Ailes, in turn, agreed to a multiyear noncompete clause that prevents him from going to a rival network (but, notably, not to a political campaign). Murdoch assured Ailes that, as acting CEO of Fox News, he would protect the channel’s conservative voice. “I’m here, and I’m in charge,” Murdoch told Fox staffers later that afternoon with Lachlan at his side (James had gone to Europe on a business trip).

Now we hear noise that a chunk of Big Ratso's exit haul will be devoted to bullying Gabriel Sherman and New York by hiring lawyer Charles Harder, who pursued and won the suit on behalf of Hulk Hogan which led to the collapse of Gawker. To be sure, Big Ratso knows more than a thing or two about bullying; it's who he is and what he's does. Still, NYM isn't Gawker, and wouldn't you think that everything Gabriel Sherman has written about him, both online and in the magazine, has been vetted by squadrons of lawyers, and considering that the Paul Weiss investigation presumably verified the claims, not just of Carlson, but of the growing number of other women who have gotten the courage to put their histories with Big Ratso and his henchmen and henchwomen on the record (and several others of whom have also received settlements from Fox), it's nice to imagine that the whole thing may blow up in his loathsome face.

One point worth noting is that, effective as the Paul Weiss investigation may have been in establishing Big Ratso's culpability, it managed to confine itself solely to that issue, leaving untouched the larger issues of the culture he created at Fox Noise which made it all possible and how far beyond the big guy the practice of sexual harassment flourished. This omission hardly seems accidental. There's a larger and perhaps more important reckoning that so far at least has been deftly bypassed.

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Yes, let's give thanks to Pope Francis for trumping Chuanpu,* at least for a while, in the 24/7 news cycle

*Chuanpu = Trump, "as he is known in Mandarin," according to The New Yorker's Evan Osnos in a Sept. 28 "Comment" piece, "Dinner Talk," on the state visit of People's Republic of China President Xi Jinping

If you'd like to "continue reading," click here.

"If you read the speech in its entirety -- as I did after watching it being delivered -- you will find something more coherent and substantial: a polite but firm request for the United States to stand up for, and live by, some of the things it claims to represent and, at times, has actually represented."

-- John Cassidy, in a newyorker.com post a few hours
ago, "Pope Francis's Timely Message to Congress"

by Ken

Even a few days of low-trumpery would be a blessing. When last heard from, The Donald was screeching his stinking guts out like a diseased, wounded hyena over -- among other things -- the "foul language" uesed by National Review editor and Fox Noisemaker telling fellow Noisemaker Megyn Kelly that Carly Fiorina had cut The Donald's balls off. The Donald is demanding that the FCC fine Fox Noise -- which he is of course famously boycotting in the latest phase of his feud with the Noisybunch.

Really?

Now if I say that The Donald is a giant stinking pile of shit, I know that that's foul language. I might risk it anyway since calling him a giant stinking pile of doody or feces doesn't give the full measure of his turditude. However, I'm not sure where the "foul language" is in saying that someone's had his balls cut off, especially when you consider the volume of filth that has come out of The Donald's campaign since he announced it.

(If the objection is that Rich Lowry is a moron, and that saying Carly had cut The Donald's balls off was moronic, I'd say that's two for two. But once we go down that lane, most of what comes out of The Donald's maw is moronic too, and most of the gibberish spewed on Fox Noise by the legion of Noisemaking morons. Fortunately, though, from a First Amendment-wise standpoint, the FCC has no jurisdiction over morons or moronitude.

But to return to The Donald's cut-off balls, is the idea here that "balls" is foul language? Really? So, like, baseball announcers now have to give hitting counts as, say, "three uh-uhs and two strikes," or else The Donald will demand that the FCC fine them?

Oh, you're saying that if "balls" refers to the male sex organs it's foul language? So it would be okay if Rich had told Megyn that Carly cut The Donald's testicles off?


WELL, THE POPE IS HERE IN THE BIG APPLE NOW

And we New Yorkers are keeping track of his itinerary by monitoring the zillions of street closings and bus reroutings (or is it vice versa?). I know he's got a  tight schedule, so there doesn't seem much point in my suggesting some spots for him to hit. (At least those spots won't become temporarily inaccessible to the rest of us.)

There's a lot of good will toward the pope here, as witness this photo taken by a reader of the Brooklyn blog Brownstoner on Brooklyn's Court Street on Tuesday afternoon, the day of the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most holy day in the Jewish calendar -- when the traditional greeting is "Good yom tov" (or "yontif"), "yom tov" meaning literally "good day," or holiday.

Brownstoner asks: "Is it kosher? Or should
Peter Shelsky atone for this joke?"

AS FOR THE POPE'S ADVENTURES IN WASHINGTON --

Here's the start of John Cassidy's newyorker.com post, "Pope Francis's Timely Message to Congress":

If you watched Pope Francis’s historic address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, and judged it by the standards of contemporary politics and discourse, it perhaps seemed a bit disappointing. The Pope spoke slowly and in a thick accent. He ranged widely, making it tricky to discern a common thread. Some of his language was elliptical; some of his rebukes were implied. Soundbites and applause lines were few and far between.

But if you read the speech in its entirety—as I did after watching it being delivered—you will find something more coherent and substantial: a polite but firm request for the United States to stand up for, and live by, some of the things it claims to represent and, at times, has actually represented. Speaking in a legislature dominated by a party that is increasingly held hostage to the doctrines and interests of individualism and free enterprise, the visitor from the Holy See delivered a timely defense of communal values and solidarity with the poor and dispossessed. While he was at pains not to appear partisan or to give offense to his hosts, there was a reason why some Republicans were nervous about what the Pope might say. Between the follower of Saint Francis of Assisi and the leadership of the G.O.P. lies a gulf that no politesse can disguise.

To the delight of the assembled, the Pope began by saying that he was grateful for the opportunity to speak “in the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But he quickly made clear that his concept of liberty and freedom doesn’t jibe with the one promoted by the Republican Study Committee or the Club for Growth. Citing Abraham Lincoln’s call for “a new birth of freedom,” he said, “Building a future of freedom requires love of the common good and coöperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity.” The “common good” isn’t a concept that gets discussed often in Washington these days, but Pope Francis invoked it several times. And in reminding the senators and representatives sitting before him of their obligation to pursue this goal, he said that they had a particular obligation to protect “those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.”

It was perhaps predictable that Francis would bring up Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., two Americans who have achieved secular canonization, and to whom politicians across the political spectrum pay lip service. But the other two Americans he cited as inspirations were both figures of the left: Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Thomas Merton, a Catholic theologian and mystic, whose enthusiastic support for the civil-rights movement and participation in protests against the Vietnam War attracted criticism from some conservative clergy. . . .

THERE'S A PROBLEM, THOUGH -- THE SEX-ABUSE VICTIMS

When I saw the link to this piece, my first response was, oh, some people always have to find a dark side. Then I started reading, and it wasn't hard to see why there are people who are upset. Note that in the set of remarks referenced here, Pope Francis was speaking not to Congress as the head of the Catholic Church but to his middle-management team as chief executive of the company -- and getting applause for a line he's going to hear a lot more about.

Here's the start of the piece:

Why advocates for clergy sex abuse victims call Pope Francis’s remarks a ‘slap in the face’

By Abby Ohlheiser, Michelle Boorstein and Terrence McCoy | September 23 at 9:15 PM


In a midday prayer at Saint Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, Pope Francis said that sex crimes must "never repeat themselves." [Watch video at the link.]

Speculation began almost as soon as Pope Francis’s first visit to the United States was announced months ago.

Would the popular pontiff – who has spoken boldly on so many controversial topics – address the clergy sexual abuse scandals that have caused many American Catholics to fall away from the church and detracted from his optimistic message of renewal? Would he take time to meet with survivors?

In his address to U.S. bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, he at least partially answered that question.

Francis lauded the bishops for their “courage” in the face of what he called “self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice.”

“I realize how much the pain of recent years has weighed upon you and I have supported your generous commitment to bring healing to victims – in the knowledge that in healing we, too, are healed – and to work to ensure that such crimes will never be repeated,” Francis said.

But it wasn’t the answer that many victims’ advocates had hoped to hear. They criticized Francis for offering comfort and
sympathy to the bishops and praising their bravery while saying little to address the suffering of clergy sex abuse survivors.

“To characterize the response of American Bishops to clergy abuse victims as ‘generous’ and ‘courageous’ is bizarre,” said John Salveson, president of the Philadelphia-based Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse and a survivor of clergy sex abuse.

“In reality, the American church hierarchy has treated clergy sex abuse victims as adversaries and enemies for decades,” he said. “His concern about how the abuse crisis has weighed on the bishops’ spirits, and his hope that all of their good deeds will help them heal from the crisis, reflects a profound misunderstanding of the role the church has played in this self-inflicted crisis.”

Barbara Dorris, victims outreach director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, called Francis’s remarks “a slap in the face to all the victims, that we’re going to worry about how the poor bishop feels.”

“You’re the ones who created it, and now we’re going to feel sorry for what you created?” Dorris said.

It is not yet clear whether Francis will address the scandal again, or meet with survivors during his visit, which will also include stops in New York City and Philadelphia, where he will address a global meeting on family issues in a city that has been rocked over the last decade by abuse allegations.

Several top U.S. church officials said that the pope would meet with survivors, but have been reluctant to give specifics.

A Vatican spokesman declined comment on the pope’s remarks at the cathedral, which were met with lengthy applause by the bishops. . . .

FINALLY, LOOKING AHEAD TO THE END OF THE PAPAL
VISIT: "POPE FRANCIS AFTER ONE WEEK IN THE USA"

Daily Kos Comics' Lalo Alcaraz writes:

Pope Francis is the "Pope of the People" and arrived this week to his first ever visit to the USA. I hope he had a good time, and I'm sure he adapted well to American culture. This is how I see El Papa after five long days in our fabulous country.

NOTE: HOWIE WILL HAVE LOTS MORE TO
SAY ABOUT THE POPE'S SPEECH TODAY --

with extended excerpts and a team of guest commenters, in his post at 9pm PT/12am ET.

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As Brian Williams takes his medicine at NBC, do Fox Noisemakers ever wonder what could happen to them if their outfit became a news network?

It's official -- Lester Holt's got the Nightly News anchor job.

"I'm sorry. I said things that weren't true. I let down my NBC colleagues and our viewers, and I'm determined to earn back their trust. I will greatly miss working with the team on Nightly News, but I know the broadcast will be in excellent hands with Lester Holt as anchor. I will support him 100% as he has always supported me. I am grateful for the chance to return to covering the news. My new role will allow me to focus on important issues and events in our country and around the world, and I look forward to it."

-- a statement by Brian Williams released today by NBC News

by Ken

I know it's like putting two and two together and getting the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but I read the news from NBC News high command concerning the future of suspended ex-Nightly News anchor Brian Williams with my head still infused with my colleague Gaius Publius's report earlier today on the demotion of Fox Noise supremo Roger Ailes in the new order that takes hold at 21st Century Fox on July 1, with Mini-Murdochs James 'n' Lachlan Murdoch taking over operations and Big Roger reporting to them instead of Dear Old Dad. (You should read GP's account if only for the hilarious unmasking of Roger's attempt to suppress this fact, which went as far as forcing on-air people to read a statement in which he had inserted a lie.)

And so I couldn't help wondering if any of the Fox Noisemakers are having momentary flashes of what could happen to them come July 1, in the admittedly improbable event that James 'n' Lachlan should get it in their heads to convert Fox Noise from a 24/7 propaganda mill to something resembling an actual news operation. What would happen to them if News Corp scalphunters were to subject their video records to the kind of scrutiny that NBC's applied to come up with those 11 specimens of Brian Williams' highly stretchy view of reality?

To back up, the mighty moguls of NBC News, no doubt closely watched if not kibbitzed by their nervous corporate superiors, have decided that Brian can stay at NBC, ruling that while his 11 on-air exaggerated claims disqualify him for the anchor chair at NBC's Nightly News, they're no problem over at MSNBC, where he will now anchor special reports.

Here's the start of Washington Post media maven Paul Farhi's report:

NBC News made it official Thursday afternoon: the network will bring back suspended anchor Brian Williams, but he will no longer be the face of “NBC Nightly News.”

Instead, Williams will become an anchor of news reports at MSNBC, the network’s cable news channel, NBC said.

Williams was suspended by the network for six months in February for a series of exaggerated statements he made in TV appearances over the years, particularly his tale of coming under rocket attack during the early days of the Iraq War in 2003.

Lester Holt, who has substituted for Williams during his suspension, will be his permanent successor, NBC said.

Williams’s continued employment at NBC has been in doubt since numerous instances of embellishment by the anchor came to light in media accounts. In an internal review of his work, NBC found at least 11 instances in which he gave distorted accounts of his reporting exploits, damaging his credibility as a journalist. The network compiled a video of his statements, a damning document that was critical in his removal as anchor of the program he has been the face of for more than a decade.

Williams’s sudden fall brought down the most popular news figure on television; with Williams in the anchor chair, “Nightly News” led the audience ratings among network newscasts for more than five years.

With Williams on hiatus and Holt as anchor, NBC’s streak ended in late March when ABC’s “World News Tonight” briefly surged ahead in the Nielsen ratings. However, Holt — the first African American to anchor a network newscast solo — has kept NBC competitive with ABC, a major factor in NBC’s decision to keep Holt. . . .

NOW, AS TO THE FOX NOISEMAKERS --

I'm not saying it's likely to happen, just that it maybe could, and the TV mini-world isn't known as one of the world's stablest. Isn't it possible that people who have found their way into employment at the Noise Machine may have at least fleeting moments when this new version of reality makes them wonder.

Take Sean Hannity. (Please.) Is it possible that our Sean has already put himself in the professional hands of a mental-health practitioner who will be preparted to attest, if and when the time comes, that Sean can't be held liable for transgressions against the truth on the medical ground that he is developmentally incapable of distinguishing between truth and fiction?

And what of poor Bill O'Reilly, the man who confidently wields Jesus's loofah? Why, poor Billo is probably lucky if he can keep his whopper count down to 11 for a single broadcast. Yes, Billo loves to proclaim that he's a "journalist." I know, I know. But I think of this as being like the suburban householder who has only one joke, which he tells at each and every neighborhood barbecue, feeling no need to try to come up with a second as long as the first always gets a laugh. Billo proclaims, "I am a journalist," and brings the house down every time.

The there's the whole corps of muddle-brained Noisemaking ideologues (please don't ask me their names; I can't tell them apart) who make their living pooping on the truth. Not to mention all those pretty-haired boys and girls whose only connection to the news is the "News" that presumably appears on their paychecks in the jocular corporate name "Fox News." Probably nobody has even told them that the "news" is supposed to be as close as you can get to being true.

Do those folks have dark moments when they fantasize the "11 whoppers and you're out" ax descending on them? Of course, the 11 whoppers only get you exiled to cable, where they already are. But still . . . .

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"White House gives Fox accurate place cards at SOTU lunch" (HuffPost's Calvino Partigiani)

by Ken

Credit poor Shep Smith with keeping his cool as he notes how, at the White House SOTU lunch, he and Fox Noise colleague Bret Baier had place cards that identified their affiliation as just "FOX," unlike such nearby colleagues as Brian Williams of "NBC NEWS" and Scott Pelley of "CBS NEWS" and David Muir of "ABC NEWS." He says he thinks he and Bret will go with "News."

If only it were their choice. Unfortunately for them, the decision as to what goes out on their network was decided from the inception by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, and in the years since, they've only doubled down on their original inspiration. Clearly HuffPost's Calivno Partigiani got it right in saying that the White House had given the Noisy Network's guys "accurate place cards."

Do you suppose Shep thought his viewers would be outraged rather than bemused at the White House's evident slight? Personally, I'm going to go with bemused.

#

And speaking of Governor Booby: Having established that he's a boob, is he trying now to show that he's thuggier than Fox Noise?

Fox Noise has backed off the "no-go zones," but not our Booby.

by Ken

Boy, all of today's stories seem to just tie together! Earlier today we were talking about the, er, distinguished roster of orators who have made their name in the Village by delivering responses to the president's State of the Union address, especially in the Age of Obama -- a list that will now and forever be headed by the biggest boob of them all, Louisiana Gov. Booby Jindal. Who can forget the shock of discovery that night in 2009 when most of us got our first glimpse of this latest GOP rising star, the policy genius?

Well, for better or worse, Governor Booby hasn't gone away. And perhaps sensing that this moment on the calendar is "his" time, he's plunged himself into the news, telling Britain and Europe generally about their "no-go zones," where non-Muslims fear to tread and police stay away.

For a while after the Charlie Hebdo murders the "no-go zones" were apparently part of the Right-Wing Talking Points Packet, and got a lot of play on Fox Noise (where else?). But then a funny thing happened. Fox Noise not only backtracked but started apologizing. I'd still love to know why, of all the made-up stuff the Fox Noisemakers spew 24/7 into the mediasphere, this produced such a response chez Roger Ailes. I mean, if the Noisers actually cared about the factual record, they'd probably have to start a separate Fox Noise Apology channel.

But there we had it: the Noisers apologizing for stuff they said without factual basis. But there too was Governor Booby, standing by his story! Leaving us with another question: Just as puzzling as why Fox Noise backed off the "story" is why our Booby didn't.

Luckily, washingtonpost.com Fix-master Chris Cillizza is on the case. And when it comes to explicating life forms particular to the Village like right-wing oh-so-slowly-rising stars, Chris C is the man, am I right? The gist seems to be, if I may paraphrase, that Booby is now timing his rise to coincide with the 2016 GOP presidential nominating derby, and while he's amply demonstrated his credentials as a genuine right-wing boob (the "Rick Perry factor"), for harder-core right-wing constituencies he still needs to establish his thug potential -- i.e., can he show that he's as tough as, say, Willard Romney?

Take it away, Chris! (Links onsite.)

The Fix
Bobby Jindal won’t back down on ‘no go’ zones. Why?

By Chris Cillizza

In a speech Monday in London, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who is running for president in 2016 (this is a decidedly relevant piece of information) said there were places in Europe in which Islamic law was enforced and where non-Muslims were afraid to go. He called these places, appropriately, "no-go zones," and insisted that a willingness to allow communities like these to exist within countries was at part of the world's problem with Islamist extremists.

While Jindal's comments drew criticism, he was unbowed, insisting in an interview with CNN that he was speaking truth to power.

That interview shows what Jindal's underlying motives here may well be. In the space of 74 seconds, Jindal makes two references to "the left" -- despite the fact that the interviewer isn't asking questions about "no-go zones" in the context of politics. "The radical left wants to pretend like this problem isn't here," Jindal says at one point. "I know the left wants to make this an attack on religion ... and that's not what this is," he says at another.

Here's what Jindal is up to: He is struggling for political oxygen in a Republican field that includes (or might include) the likes of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. So, how do you solve that problem? Throw red meat to the Republican base while simultaneously trolling the left.

It worked.

Conservatives leaped to Jindal's defense. Erick Erickson at Red State pointed out that CNN had done a report on these so-called "no-go zones." And, when Arsalan Iftikhar said on MSNBC that Jindal's comments amounted to him "trying to rub some of the brown off his skin" (Jindal is Indian American), the right responded with fury. (MSNBC said it would not have Iftikhar on as a guest again.)

Disgusting --> MSNBC Guest: Bobby Jindal ‘Trying to Scrub Some of the Brown Off His Skin’ http://t.co/OKbcSlm6Y3 pic.twitter.com/sw5PaQ1RHT
— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) January 19, 2015

"It's embarrassing for MSNBC to give voice to such shallow foolishness," Jindal told the conservative Washington Examiner on Tuesday. "Much like Michael Moore denigrating our military servicemen, these comments deserve no comment." Curt Anderson, a consultant to Jindal, was more blunt in an e-mail to me: "Liberals hate to hear what Jindal is saying. They cannot in public argue the main points of what he is saying, so they are trying to make hay out of noting the obvious -- that 'no-go zones' are not official or part of the law. Duh."

Regardless of Jindal's motives, here's what he's accomplished: In the eyes of the random Republican activist, he's gone from the guy they vaguely remember giving a widely panned State of the Union response to the guy who is willing to stand up not only to radical Islam but also to the political left.

Thanks, Chris, and shesh! When the Right-Wing Bullies 'n' Noisemakers start slinging muck at one another, it's wisest to just jump back and try to stay out of the line of fire.


FURTHER NOTE: DID CNN "LIE"
ABOUT THE "NO-GO ZONES"?

Among the right-wing fans of European "no-go zones," there has been righteous indignation directed at CNN for hounding Governor Booby when, they say, a 2013 report on CNN itself established their existence. But washingtonpost.com's Erik Wemple Blog looked at the claim yesterday ("Bobby Jindal remarks: Does two-year-old CNN report prove existence of 'no-go zones'?") and came away, er, unpersuaded:

Commentators Erick Erickson on Red State and John Nolte on Breitbart cite a February 2013 report by CNN correspondent Dan Rivers as evidence that the network is questioning a phenomenon that it already knows to be true. “JINDAL NONTROVERSY: CNN CAUGHT LYING ABOUT MUSLIM ‘NO GO ZONES,” notes the headline on Notle’s piece.

The CNN report in question, by correspondent Dan Rivers, provides a profile of … well, here’s how it was described in a teaser: “Sharia law in the heart of London, details of Muslim vigilantes harassing women, gays, people just out for a drink.” Rivers walked the streets of Whitechapel with the so-called Muslim patrol — yes, vigilantes who were out to harass people and make them follow their rules. “You cannot dress like that in Muslim area,” said one of the patrolmen to a woman dressed in a skirt.

Evidence, indeed, of Jindal’s comment that there are some Muslims trying “to carry out as much of Sharia law as they can…”

Yet the 2013 CNN report also deflates this whole “no-go” thing. First of all, Rivers reports that “only a handful of men are involved in the self-styled patrols.” Second, Rivers reports that five people had been arrested “on suspicion of harassment.” Third, Rivers reports that the “vast majority of Muslim people living in this part of East London want nothing to do with vigilantes whatsoever.” Fourth, Rivers reports that “police patrols have been stepped up as the authorities take a tough line.” Arrests, heightened police presence — not exactly the hallmarks of what we’ve come to know in recent weeks as a “no-go zone.”

You have to especially love the Nolte "CNN CAUGHT LYING" headline. It's fun when people who wouldn't or maybe just couldn't tell the truth about anything if their lives depended on it call other people liars.

#

It's a tough moment for right-wing fake-news media -- time to change the subject?

"We think just a look at a few of this week’s health-care related headlines provides the best summary: the ACA is working." This is the "bottom line" in this evening's ThinkProgress report, "The Thing Is Working." (For working linnks, you'll have to visit the site.)

by Ken

In a "Progress Report" post this evening, "This Thing Is Working," the crew in the CAP War Room reports: "A Slew Of Good Health Care News Has Conservatives On Their Heels," with news like "19 Million Americans Covered," "Exchanges Working And Costs Down," and "Conservatives On Defense."

On the latter front, the post notes:

As millions of people experience real, and not just theoretical, benefits of the law, Americans are getting more and more tired of the political battles to repeal it. A recent Kaiser survey found that 59 percent of Americans want keep the law in place or improve it, while only 29 percent want get rid of it. Pew reports that even a “majority of ACA opponents – representing 30% of the public overall – want politicians to do what they can to make the law work as well as possible, compared with 19% of the public that wants elected officials to do what they can to make it fail.”

And constituents are showing their frustration with their conservative elected officials’ fixation on repeal. Without any alternative to point to, and an increasingly frustrated public, these politicians have nobody to blame but themselves.

The post even offers the sampling checklist of upbeat ACA-related headlines at the top of this post.


ALL OF WHICH IS A SERIOUS DOWNER
FOR THE RIGHT-WING NOISEMAKERS

As we were discussing last night ("Instead of apologizing for their lies, the lying liars of Fox Noise simply tell . . . new lies!"), with regard to the incredibly silly Fox Noise "report" about the great "surprise": that people who didn't sign up for Obamacare by March 31 -- meaning, among others, people who listened to the constant stream of end-of-the-world pronouncements from Fox Noisemakers and got the obvious message that they shouldn't sign up -- now can't sign up until, well, some terribly distant time like, you know, fall or something.

Of course there was nothing in the least "surprising" about this, since everyone knew that after the March 31 deadline insurance wouldn't be obtainable via the exchanges until the next registration period -- everyone, that is except, apparently, for the Right-Wing Noisemakers, who don't seem even to have wondered what that "deadline" might be the deadline for. And of course the logic of fixed enrollment periods is thoroughly well established in the insurance world, so that people can't simply wait till the day they decide they actually need coverage to sign up.

This was all known to everyone who even dabbled in the ACA signup story -- except, again, the right-wing noisemakers who are either too stupid or too dishonest to do the simplest basic job of actual reporters. As in this head you may recall from last night:




I had actually thought about making some little joke, wishing poor Jim Angle good luck in his next career, whatever it may be, since he obviously isn't cut out for reporting. It got a little confusing, though, because I would have wanted to make clear that I don't think his job is actual reporting, but that this is even a lousy job of fake-news reporting. It has the necessary virtue of touching the kinds of buttons Right-Wing Noisemakers love to touch among news-challenged viewers, and usually do so successfully. But this story collapses so completely in even the dimmest light of reality, and that's not really good enough for good fake-news.

Really the only solution the Right-Wing Noise Machine has come up with for when reality turns against them this cruelly is the extreme one: ignore it. I think we may be seeing some big-time news-ignoring in the days and weeks to come, and some big-time efforts of subject-changing.

#

Instead of apologizing for their lies, the lying liars of Fox Noise simply tell . . . new lies!

Fox Noise

What? Ya mean we wuz supposeta sign up for evil, liberty-destroying Obamacare? Who knew? And now this terrible surprise creeps up on us. (Even though people who were in even occasional contact with reality knew about it . . . well, from the start. Apparently nobody told poor Jim Angle, or his editors.)

by Ken

Thanks to HuffPost's Joan McCarter ("Fox News outraged that all the people it told not to buy insurance can't get insurance until fall") for calling attention to Brian Beutler's newrepublic.com post "The Right's New Scam: Feigning Anger on Behalf of People They Encouraged to Skip Obamacare."

Unbelievable.

Or at least it would be if we weren't talkling about Fox Noisemakers. I keep imagining (dreaming?) that at some point the Lying Liars of the Right will be held accountable in some fashion for their lifetimes of spreading lies and delusions. This in spite of the overwhelming evidence that no, it's not going to happen.

True, a major part of the Right-Wing Noise Machine infrastructure is made up of mental primitives -- affectionately known as "hannities" -- who show no evidence of any mental capacity for learning or reasoning (possibly the necessary circuitry is present in their brains but is merely permanently set ion the "off" position) and may therefore be sincerely unaware that the incessant screeching that comes out of their mouths is all lies and delusions, and it might be argued that they shouldn't be subject to the appropriate penalties for their actions, by reason of mental defect. Which leaves plenty of right-wing blowhards who know, or have no excuse for not knowing, that they're full of it.

These are the very people, as you can't possibly have forgotten, who from the time the Affordable Care Act was signed into law have been screeching nonstop at the top of their lungs that it is:

* the greatest evil perpetrated in the history of the human race

* the death of liberty, and probably of Truth, Justice, and the American Way

* on the verge of repeal, if there's any decency left in the world

There was an idea behind the Right-Wing Noisemakers' "variety of efforts (both subtle and explicit) to discourage people, particularly young people, from enrolling in ACA-compliant health plans." That idea, says, Brian,

was to deny state-based insurance markets critical mass, and sound risk pools, and send them into actuarial death spirals. In almost every instance, conservatives were appealing to strangers to undertake considerable personal risk in service of dubious ideological principles.

Now the Noisemakers may not have achieved "the larger goal," Brian says, "but they almost certainly succeeded at convincing some people to skip Obamacare."

And when confronted about the recklessness of their strategy, the most unscrupulous conservatives would say, No biggie! Obamacare allows people to enroll after they get sick or injured. So there's no risk at all.

"This was a lie," Brian says.

And if it weren't such a dangerous lie, I'd be amused to find that conservatives now want you to be outraged about the fact that the Affordable Care Act creates limited open-enrollment periods each year to prohibit precisely that kind of free riding.

And Jim quotes from Jim Angle's Fox Noise blitherama:

There is yet another ObamaCare surprise waiting for consumers: from now until the next open enrollment at the end of this year, most people will simply not be able to buy any health insurance at all, even outside the exchanges.

"It's all closed down. You cannot buy a policy that is a qualified policy for the purpose of the ACA (the Affordable Care Act) until next year on January 1," says John DiVito, president of Flexbenefit which has 2,500 brokers.

John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas adds, "People are not going to be able to buy individual and family policies, and that's part of ObamaCare. And what makes it so surprising is the whole point of ObamaCare was to encourage people to get insurance, and now the market has been completely closed down for the next seven months."

That means that with few exceptions, tens of millions of people will be locked out of the health insurance market for the rest of this year.

Joan McCarter points out in her HuffPost post that the shocking Fox Noise surprise is "not really news."

The practice of enrollment periods, embraced by the law, was designed specifically to address those "free-riders" Fox News would in any other circumstance hate -- the people who would wait until they needed health insurance to get it. The difference now, though, is that if those people get sick while they're uninsured, they don't have to worry about that preventing them from getting insurance once open enrollment kicks in again. (There are some exceptions: people who qualify can enroll in Medicaid or enroll their kids in SCHIP programs at any time, and people who have "qualifying life events" or other special circumstances as detailed here can sign up.)

"But of course," Joan adds,

Fox News doesn't really care about all the people it told not to sign up who didn't sign up and now don't have care. Nor do they care that they're showing their rank hypocrisy in pushing this story. Just as long as they have some Obamacare outrage story.

You know, come to think of it, this could just be yet another example of the Rupert Murdoch school of TV salesmanship. As my friend Peter loved to point out, on the Fox Network first they hyped their coverage of the great alien autopsy. Then without skipping a beat they hyped they coverage of the great alien-autopsy hoax story.

This might not be the ideal business model if you were running, say, a TV news network. But if you're really wrangling a herd of Noisemakers, well, send in the clowns.

#

Maybe we won't have the Bachmann to kick around anymore, but is there any known cure for what E. J. Dionne Jr. calls "Bachmannism"?

"Bachmannism is far from finished. The Minnesota right-winger . . . perfected a tactic well-suited to the current media environment: continually toss out outlandish, baseless charges, and, eventually, some of them will enter the mainstream media . . . .

"You don’t have to bat 1.000 or even .350 in this game. Get just a handful of your accusations and strange takes on reality into the political bloodstream and you've won.

"Bachmann's method is now common currency."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column
"GOP needs more Doles and fewer Bachmanns"

by Ken

I mentioned the other day that I thought something needed to be said about the Bachmann's announcement that we won't have it to kick around anymore. My first thought was that there are no winners here -- that the Bachmann having done so much to pollute the national political discourse, there is no remedy for or rescue from the damage it has done. You can't, to put it another way, merely shovel the doody into the cesspool.

Of course I was being naive. Of course there are winners: Republicans who no longer have to sweat out whether they need to inject an occasional word of demurral in response to the constant flow of fecal matter she dumped into the political ecosphere. Not that any of them are bothered by the "substance" of what she's had to say, which has consistently been innocent of even the slightest grain of truth or connection to reality, any more than any of them had any substantive problem with the psychotic blithering that came out of the mouths of GOP Senate candidates like the unspeakable Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

No, it's just that at a certain point the psychosis and delusion become so conspicuous as to be potentially embarrassing to such specimens' fellow party members. As Howie and I pointed out repeatedly, it's hard to find any position articulated by the likes of Akin and Mourdock that isn't also a core belief of a respected Republican like rising star Paul Ryan. Specimens like Ryan are just more skilled at soft-pedaling their delusions when speaking to nondelusional audiences.

Finally I had to go along with much of what Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank had to say about who won in his column on the subject. After noting that the Bachmann's announcement came 72 hours after Bob Dole's much-publicized interview with Fox Noisemaker Chris Wallace which included his proposal that Republicans put up a "closed for repairs" sign, he noted an "error" in her announcement, when she announced that "the mainstream liberal media" would "put a detrimental spin on my decision."
"Detrimental?" Dana wrote. "Um, no. It's hard to see the mothballing of Bachmann as anything but unalloyed good news, for the party and the country."

Certainly, the media and late-night TV hosts will greatly miss the woman who declared that the American Revolution began in Concord, N.H., instead of Concord, Mass.; that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation; that certain members of Congress are "anti-America"; that John Wayne came from her birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa (she confused him with serial killer John Wayne Gacy); that God created an earthquake and a hurricane to protest federal spending; that the U.S. government is plotting death panels, re-education camps and an IRS database of Americans' medical records; and that the feds could use census data to put people in internment camps.

Whether she was calling President Obama a socialist, misplacing John Quincy Adams in history as a "Founding Father," or wishing Elvis Presley a "happy birthday" on the anniversary of his death, Bachmann frequently furnished evidence for her claim that God had called her to run for president -- if only to provide comic relief.

But for all her entertainment value, Bachmann has done more than any other elected official to inject false information into the national debate, contributing to a culture in which many conservatives detach themselves from reality. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs this week based on data from PolitiFact.com found that Republicans' claims in recent months are three times more likely to be false than those of Democrats. The Post's fact checker, Glenn Kessler, discovered that Bachmann told a higher percentage of whoppers than any other lawmaker.

Dana also noted:

Bachmann also has been one of the most prominent practitioners of the obstinacy Dole was talking about in his interview with Chris Wallace. "It seems to be almost unreal that we can't get together on a budget or legislation," the elder statesman said. Arguing that even Ronald Reagan would be unwelcome in today's GOP, Dole warned that "the country is going to suffer" from the party's refusal to compromise.

The one point in Dana's column I'm not so sure about is that "voters appear to be tiring of this approach." I think his Post colleague E. J. Dionne Jr. got it right when he wrote:

On the surface, Republicans will be happy that they won't have to answer for her exquisitely inflammatory statements anymore. Democrats will be disappointed to lose a face that launched thousands of contributions their way. You might say her departure is a small repair for the GOP's image.

In fact, Bachmannism is far from finished. The Minnesota right-winger deserves to be memorialized with an "ism" because she perfected a tactic well-suited to the current media environment: continually toss out outlandish, baseless charges, and, eventually, some of them will enter the mainstream media -- if, at first, only in the form of "coverage" of what conservative radio shows, Web sites or Fox News are talking about.

You don’t have to bat 1.000 or even .350 in this game. Get just a handful of your accusations and strange takes on reality into the political bloodstream and you've won.

Bachmann's method is now common currency. And here’s the beautiful thing: Even as the regular media does some of your work for you, you lambaste the very same media. This only creates more pressure on them to cover you.

I think this is exactly right. The curse of the Bachmann isn't her own miserable existence, but the entrenched scourge of "Bachmannism," as E.J. puts it.

The Bachmann didn't, of course, invent the concept of political discourse that's all lies, all the time. The GOP had that strategy hammered in place well before the 2000 political season, which Young Johnny McCranky and the country's roster of GOP candidates got through without uttering a word of truth. And for decades now the GOP lie machine has been shadowed if not actually inspired by that bedrock of media lies, Fox Noise.

But the Bachmann made a steady diet of lies of the most outrageous and preposterous sort the basic medium of discourse for the "mainstream" of Republicanism, and perhaps for the media generally. "My nomination for the ultimate in Bachmannism," E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote, "was her slander against the program encouraging citizens to serve the nation and each other."

Opposing a bill to expand AmeriCorps, she warned that "there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums." Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge is just around the corner.

Of course this was all made up in the demented mind of the Bachmann, with perhaps some reference to a kind of program that people of her political persuasion may dream of putting into effect against their enemies.

I have another nomination, which I more or less stumbled across. In fact, I almost read right through it.

My friend Paul put together and circulated a compendium of bizarreries from the Bachmann. It's the one that eventually led to its confusion of John Quincy Adams with his father, John Adams. "We also know," quoth the B, "that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." This is clearly some sort of grudging acknowledgment of the reality that the U.S. Constitution institutionalized slavery. No doubt people like the Bachmann, whose now sole criterion for "reality" is "does this make me feel better?," at the same time feel entitled to any ameliorative fake-reality they can concoct.

I mean, did you hear that? The "founders . . . worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States." What??? Where would one begin to sort out the layers of lies and delusions so casually embedded therein.

"Bachmann's retirement," wrote E. J. Dionne Jr., "should foster some soul-searching about the nature of our political discourse and how easy it is for falsehood and innuendo to get treated as just one more element in the conversation -- no more or less legitimate than any other."

Yes, it should, E.J., but I'm not holding my breath.

#

In crazy times, is it any wonder that the craziness numbers soar sky-high?

"Weak Constitution": Jon Stewart reviews Fox Noisemakers' 
post-Boston gang rape of the defenseless U.S. Constitution

As the living-dead Noisemakers wonder, for example, whether dastardly terrorists should be read their Miranda rights, Jon Stewart is left to point out: "First of all, not reading someone their Miranda rights doesn't mean they don't have Miranda rights." (The link again.)

by Ken

I pointed out recently that one unorthodox way of measuring the time I was out of commission for planned-surgical reasons was by Nurse Jackie episodes. The season premiere happened the night before I set out the A and L trains for my adventure, knowing that, barring unforeseen developments, I would be back home in time for Episode 2.

Fate provided another measuring tool. As the anesthesia wore off Monday afternoon, one of the first things I hear was someone in the recovery area asking someone else if they'd heard about what happened in Boston, then proceeding to fill in the blanks. By Friday night, the night before I returned home, I was spending the second of two nights in a hotel room (being watched over by a compassionate friend), glued to the TV through the exceedingly strange man hunt that ended almost inadvertently in the capture of the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Along the way two always-interesting questions had been raised. During the early part of the week, with clues to the identity and nature of the perpetrators seemingly beyond reach, and the net being cast wider for possibly informative video footage, there was occasional mention of the increasingly pointed question of how much privacy and personal freedom we're prepared to give up in the interest of enhanced security. And as the week wore on, with so little news to report but a gapingly gigantic news hole to fill, there was the increasingly pointed question of how the 24/7 news media are supposed to handle such a situation, when there's a screaming demand for news and little or no news to feed it.

The good news is that at least under these harrowing circumstances these questions get raised, because there sure aren't any other circumstances under which this is likely to happen. The bad news is that such circumstances are singularly unconducive to sensible discussion.

For example, at such times the media are going to respond to the demand for information now by putting out most any factoid they don't actually know to be false. You like to think the infotainment noozers have gotten a shade more sophisticated about filtering some of the more arrantly unsourced bilge that always circulates in such circumstances. I think they really have gotten better about it, but even so, an awful lot of awful nonsense found its way into circulation.

As for the delicate balance between rights and security, in such a climate of fear and anger large numbers of Americans don't even want to hear about "rights," and we're assuredly better off not having any discussion than having the kind we're apt to get. Which is why I've had it in mind to make sure everyone has seen this dazzling Daily Show clip showcasing a passle of Fox Noise mental defectives who really ought to be under institutional care.

And while we're on this territory, I want to be sure everyone has seen the ThinkProgress War Room's ProgressReport on The Week in Right-Wing Craziness (links onsite).

That Happened: 10 Crazy Things the Right Did This Week

May 3, 2013 | By ThinkProgress War Room

The right wing rarely rests and this week has been no exception. Here's ten stories from just this week illustrating just how extreme, out of touch, and just plain offensive that conservatives can be.

1. The incoming NRA president refers to the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression." He also called President Obama a "fake president" and said Attorney General Eric Holder is "rabidly un-American."

2. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) said she voted against equal pay for women because we already have enough laws. The embattled Granite Stater said the laws we already have are sufficient even though women still only make 77 cents on the dollar.

3. Retired Supreme Court Justice now regrets Bush v. Gore. Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who herself cast the deciding vote to install George W. Bush as president, said this week that she regrets that the High Court even took up the case in the first place.

4. Former Bush press secretary praises the Nazis' respect for the laws of war. Former Bush flack Ari Fleischer defended keeping the prison at Guantanamo Bay open by praising the Nazis' respect for the laws of war compared to the terrorists we are fighting today.

5. State legislator attacks hero victim of Boston bombing in order to advance conspiracy theory. New Hampshire State Rep. Stella Tremblay (R-NH) said that Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs and heroically identified the bombers after he awoke in the hospital, looked too calm to be in shock, which she claims is proof that the government is behind the bombing. You can take a look at this photo of Bauman and see if you think he's part of a government conspiracy (warning: it's extremely gruesome).

6. Wisconsin church cancels speech by former NFL player because he is too supportive of gay people. A Wisconsin church this week canceled a speech by LeRoy Butler, a former Green Bay Packers safety, simply because he tweeted his support for NBA player Jason Collins, who became the first male major league athlete to come out.

7. Ohio Republicans want to punish colleges for helping students vote. Ohio Republicans floated a plan to punish any state university that helps students register to vote in Ohio (simply by providing a form) by refusing to allow them to charge those students out-of-state tuition. This comes despite the fact that a 1979 Supreme Court case reaffirmed the right of students to register and vote where they attend school.

8. Mysterious conservative group launches dirty tricks in South Carolina special election. A mysterious outside group launched a push poll targeting Elizbeth Colbert Busch, the Democrat running against former Gov. Mark Sanford in next Tuesday's special election for South Carolina's first Congressional district. The push poll calls suggested that she had had an abortion, been in jail, and racked up massive debts, among other things.

9. Tea Party Congressman says the Attorney General is on the side of the Boston bombers. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said Attorney General Eric Holder "spent more of his legal career helping terrorists than defending the country" and was thus biased toward the bombers. He also remarked that "political correctness" had stopped the FBI from preventing the bombings.

10. Governor blames unemployment rate on drugs. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R), one of the most unpopular governors in the country, blamed his poor job creation record on drugs by claiming that most unemployed people are on drugs.

BONUS: A group founded and funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used both its left-wing and right-wing subsidiaries to launch ads in favor of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In an introductory column launching the group, Zuckerberg said that the group would be dedicated to "building the knowledge economy," which he contrasts to "the economy of the last century… primarily based on natural resources." Zuckerberg added, "there are only so many oil fields, and there is only so much wealth that can be created from them for society."

#

If Fox Noise has turned against "Slimy Dick" Morris, it must mean he's crossed some kind of line, right?

No, of course I didn't watch the clip of "Slimy Dick." What're you, nuts? But you can watch it if you like. You'll find it in actual clip form here.

by Ken

Oh please, let me not blow the punchline on this one.

It always fascinates me when the Far Right turns on one of its own. Why? Because it means, presumably, that this one of its own has Gone Too Far, which fascinates me on the simplest level as a demonstration that even among the most deluded and deluding, there actually is such a thing as "too far."

Howie and I have both been all over "Cockroach Eric" Cantor's bizarre "rebranding" campaign, in which the brutish dunce is apparently trying his best to show us a kinder, gentler Eric. (My contribution yesterday was the post "Now we know who should have played the title role in The Eric Cantor Story." I won't say anything more except to note that the post was accompanied by a blurry clip of Judy Garland singing, "Get Happy.") I say "apparently" because the Cockroach's "best" isn't good for anything except blunt frontal assaults on people whose toes he isn't fit to lick. But you'd have to guess that this is what he thing he's doing, and doing such a dreadful job of it. Let's recall Dana Milbank's WaPo characterization of his performance at his new coming out, delivering his Tuesday speech to the pack at the American Enterprise Institute:

His delivery was forced and, as he read his text, he seemed to be reminding himself to grin. As a result, he scowled for much of the speech and sounded as though he were spitting out his words. Smiles formed at inopportune times, such as when he described a boy’s failure in public school.

No, Cockroach, you can smile about the public school kid's failure when you're securely alone among your psychotic soulmates, but in public . . . er, not so much.

But do you see what's happening? The Cockroach has turned on himself! In some cobwebby corner of its brain, it has apparently admitted the idea that somewhere, somehow he and his crackpot cronies have just possibly gone too far, some way or other.

Which brings us to our Right-Wing Crazy of the Day Who Has Gone Too Far. Ladies and germs, I give you the infinitly odious Dick Morris. (Take him, please.) In case you hadn't heard, Slimy Dick has been given by the heave-ho, which instantly creates the presumption that he has -- you guessed it! -- gone too far.

And Washington Post media mauler Erik Wemple is on the case. Yesterday he reported ("Fox News drops Dick Morris: Hooray"):

No more Fox News contributor Dick Morris. His contract to spout republic-damaging nonsense on Fox airwaves has expired, and the network isn’t renewing it.

Taken together with the news that Sarah Palin will no longer be contributing, the Morris development is strong evidence that Fox News has glimpsed the underside of allowing charlatans to brand its coverage. Palin was a roboto-contributor, who responded to everything with a little crack on the lamestream media and a reference President Obama’s socialist heart.

As for Morris’s misdeeds, well, everyone knows what they are. That’s because Fox News presented them so prominently in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. In his prime-time, pre-election appearances, Morris was among the few pundits who wouldn’t hedge his bets; who wouldn’t triangulate his way through the polling numbers; who wouldn’t rummage through scenario after scenario in his analysis.

No, Dick Morris was predicting a Mitt Romney landslide. Fox News fell for it, and surely millions of Americans did as well. After all, in the same breath that he was predicting landslides, he was citing his own expertise:

It’s not a question of being smarter than anybody else. It’s that I’ve done this for a living and there are very few people on television who talk about politics who’ve ever made a living doing it, and most of them are partisan and echoing a point of view, but when you get down to it, a guy like Karl Rove or Pat Caddell or me or even Joe Trippi, we make a living doing this and I’ve made a living doing it for 40 years.

Vast arrogance and loose, poorly substantiated facts: a great combination for a cable-news contributor in these modern times. . . .

But Erik, are "vast arrogance and loose, poorly substantiated facts" really enough to get you booted from Fox Noise? If so, wouldn't the place be, like, a deserted warehouse? This really isn't much help to me in figuring out where the line is that Slimy Dick crossed.

Evidently Erik himself accepts that he didn't have the last word on the story yesterday, since he's returned today to the subject of "Why Fox News booted Dick Morris."

Erik starts by getting a dig in:

Last night wasn’t a good one for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. That's because in the closing moments of his interview on CNN with Piers Morgan, failed pundit Dick Morris was asked whom he'd like to see lead the Republican Party come 2016.

"Scott Walker," came the response from Morris. Surely he'd win in a landslide.

Erik proceeds to tell us again that Slimy Dick "was just abandoned by Fox news because of his faulty 2012 election predictions."

If you hadn’t heard Morris’s well-worn excuses for erring on his Mitt Romney-blowout prediction of last fall—that an unexpected demographic thing happened, that Superstorm Sandy interrupted the campaign, etc.—this Morgan-Morris interview is for you.
Credit Morgan, however, for prying this bit of news out of his interlocutor:

MORGAN: What people are asking is why FOX is not interested now on your views or whether Republicans want you to go?

MORRIS: Hey, I don’t — I don’t know what FOX is interested in or not.

(Crosstalk)

MORGAN: But they must have told you, isn’t it?

MORRIS: Well, I had a wonderful talk with Roger Ailes, who I really respect, a week ago. And he said in this business, you’re up, you’re down, nothing is final or fatal.

MORGAN: But why are you down now as far as –

MORRIS: Because I was wrong, and I was wrong at the top of my lungs. [Emphasis added.]

Right there: Evidence of honest-to-goodness editorial standards at Fox News, something for which the Erik Wemple Blog is always scanning the horizon.

Did you get that? In Slimy Dick's telling, he was shitcanned by the Noisemakers for being "wrong at the top of my lungs." I'm not absolutely sure that this decisively separates him from people who are still on the Fox Noise payroll. But if someone's got some noise-measuring apparatus to apply to the job, maybe we can get an actual decibel measurement of the exact degree of Slimy Dick's top-of-his-lungs wrongness, and we'll be a step closer to pinpointing the line that he crossed, the step he took that was One Step Too Far even for the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

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"How much more humiliation can Rupert Murdoch take?" Never enough, say I, but I also say, why don't we find out?

Not fit to run a major company. It is a damning judgment on Rupert Murdoch, a threat to his British assets — and a headache for Britain's government.

The majority verdict by a divided committee of British lawmakers brings more scrutiny of Murdoch's holding in British Sky Broadcasting — already under investigation by the U.K.'s broadcast regulator — and could increase calls for the breakup of his British media empire.

"How much more humiliation can Rupert Murdoch take?" asked commentator Roy Greenslade in Wednesday's Evening Standard newspaper.

And if Murdoch is unfit, what does that say about Prime Minister David Cameron and other politicians who courted the media baron for his newspapers' election-swinging power and, until revelations of tabloid phone hacking exploded, were poised to let Murdoch have full control of one of the country's most powerful broadcasters?

-- the start of an an AP report today carried by Fox Noise (yes, Fox Noise!) as "Murdoch, politicians under pressure after report"

by Ken

It's the question being echoed 'round the world: "How much more humiliation can Rupert Murdoch take?" And if at first it sounds as if it's being asked sympathetically, as in "Really now, how much more should the poor bloke, I should point out that the head on the London Evening Standard "media analysis" by Roy Greenslade (a professor of journalism at City University London and Guardian blogger) which leads off with this question is: "Murdoch has been humiliated but much worse is yet to come."

Now you have to give Fox Noise a grudging amount of credit for not ignoring the story, even if its AP coverage focuses on the joint culpability of our Rupert the master coopter and corrupter with the people he worked so hard to coopt and corrupt. to the suggestion that David Cameron is just as unfit to govern the U.K. as Rupert is to run a major media company, I would just say, "Welecome to the party."

Media Analysis: Murdoch has been humiliated but much worse is yet to come

Roy Greenslade
02 May 2012

How much more humiliation can Rupert Murdoch take?

Yesterday, when the Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee said in conclusion to its investigation into News International that he “exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on at his company”, it was yet another day of abasement in a sequence going back to July last year when he visited the parents of murdered girl Milly Dowler to apologise for his journalists’ activities.

Ever since the revelation News of the World hacked into her mobile phone to listen to her voicemail messages, Murdoch has been on the back foot.

Every attempt to regain the initiative has failed. He closed the News of the World, accepted the “resignations” of senior executives and set up a special internal committee at News International to work with the police.

The result was to stoke further the fires of speculation. At the same time, he lost the confidence of politicians. Negative mentions of his name on TV and radio suggest public sentiment is against him too. And his televised public performances — in front of both the Select Committee and the Leveson Inquiry — did nothing to assuage the widespread hostility.

But the real crisis for Murdoch, on either side of the Atlantic, is altogether more troubling. Here, Ofcom is investigating whether BSkyB is a fit and proper company to hold a broadcast licence while in the States, shareholders will be wondering whether Rupert Murdoch should continue to be both chairman and chief executive of News Corp. Similarly, should his son James be a board director and chief operating officer?

I don’t believe the Ofcom inquiry is as problematic as concerns raised in America. I cannot imagine for a moment that the broadcaster faces any real threat to its future.

But in America, the reputational damage to the Murdochs and, by implication, to News Corp is hugely significant. Pressures on Rupert to sell off News International will grow, though the papers can’t be offloaded until all the inquiries and litigation have concluded. Who would bid for a company with so many financial liabilities? In the short term, what cannot be ignored by concerned News Corp shareholders is that their company is irreparably tainted by the hacking scandal.

What the MPs have said, in effect, is that senior executives at the company’s UK division — whether knowingly or not — failed to act appropriately when confronted by the discovery of illegal and unethical activities.

Nothing can absolve the Murdochs from their responsibilities. The buck stops with them. They might take heart from the split among MPs on the Select Committee, which resulted in the Conservative members refusing to sign up to the line about Rupert not being “a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”.

But it is hardly a matter for celebration. There is no getting away from the fact that the majority verdict was damning. And anyone reading between the lines will surely judge that both Murdochs were heading a company that allowed a culture of unethical journalism to flourish and then, when the culprits were found out, failed to realise a cover-up was occurring despite allegations published in the Guardian, the Independent and the New York Times, and broadcast on the BBC and Channel 4.

Sure, these were rival media organisations. But did the Murdochs really fail to realise the import of those allegations? Did they not suspect there was more to it than mere rivalry?

Even if they did not, they cannot escape blame. Note the words of the select committee’s majority: the culture of the company’s newspapers “permeated from the top” and “speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International”.

As we know, Murdoch Sr quickly took steps to seal himself off from any possible personal involvement in what he realised had been a cover-up by letting certain key figures depart.

During his Leveson questioning, he did not name former News International chief Les Hinton but his references to him and to former News of the World editor Colin Myler, and the paper’s legal manager, Tom Crone, meant their identities were never in doubt.

All three were heavily criticised by MPs and may yet receive a formal parliamentary rebuke for having been economical with the truth when giving evidence to the Select Committee. They shouldn’t, however, take the rap alone.

I would just add one point. I don't think our Rupert's perception of his position with regard to the law is as mysterious as Roy seems to think. At different times and under different circumstances I think Rupert believes:

* Yes indeed, he's above the law.

* At this point in time, in many jurisdictions he more or less is the law.

* And at the very least, he owns the law -- and has paid top dollar (and pound) for his ownership stake.


UPDATE: IS OUR RUPERT GOING TO WALK?

In the Comments, our friend me raises the always-pertinent question of what actual price Rupert M has paid or will ultimately pay. I've thrown out some thoughts there in response.

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