There Are Reasons Elite Media Journalists Attack Bernie-- Starting With Who They Are

Yesterday, I tried to emphasize, when writing about that cheesy Martin/Ember analysis of the fight over the 2020 Democratic nomination, that the MSM speaks for the establishment and will always opt for the status quo or a status quo ante. A friend reminded me of Thomas Frank's Swat Team-- The Media’s Extermination Of Bernie Sanders And Real Reform from Nov. 2016 in Harper's. If you you're seeking immunization from MSM’s predictable distortions, Frank's piece is a great reminder of how much the "journalists" from the esteemed Washington Post and NY Times put establishment knives into Bernie with Hillary talking points, and are already getting those same knives out of the drawers hoping to nip Bernie's nascent campaign in the bud. Who could doubt Bezos is waiting in the wings, smiling and looking for payback for Bernie calling out Amazon’s wages and working conditions?

Frank said he was attempting to review the media’s attitude toward Bernie in order "to rescue a number of worthwhile facts about the press’s attitude toward Sanders. Just as crucially, however, I intend to raise some larger questions about the politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers." He began by reminding his readers that Bernie "ran for the nomination on a platform of New Deal–style economic interventions such as single-payer health insurance, a regulatory war on big banks, and free tuition at public universities. Sanders was well to the left of where modern Democratic presidential candidates ordinarily stand, and in most elections, he would have been dismissed as a marginal figure, more petrified wood than presidential timber. But 2016 was different. It was a volcanic year, with the middle class erupting over a recovery that didn’t include them and the obvious indifference of Washington, D.C., toward the economic suffering in vast reaches of the country. For once, a politician like Sanders seemed to have a chance with the public."

He wrote that he was "shocked" when he noticed that writers for the Post and the Times "take sides" like he had never seen before, "openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval." He wrote that he "felt like the news stories went out of their way to mock Sanders or to twist his words, while the op-ed pages, which of course don’t pretend to be balanced, seemed to be of one voice in denouncing" Bernie. He wrote that "what befell the Vermont senator at the hands of the Post should be of interest to all of us" and he asks that we take "into account who the media are in these rapidly changing times... for the sort of people who write and edit the opinion pages of the Post, there was something deeply threatening about Sanders and his political views. He seems to have represented something horrifying, something that could not be spoken of directly but that clearly needed to be suppressed.

Who are those people? Let us think of them in the following way. The Washington Post, with its constant calls for civility, with its seemingly genetic predisposition for bipartisanship and consensus, is more than the paper of record for the capital-- it is the house organ of a meritocratic elite, which views the federal city as the arena of its professional practice. Many of its leading personalities hail from a fairly exalted socioeconomic background (as is the case at most important American dailies). Its pundits are not workaday chroniclers of high-school football games or city-council meetings. They are professionals in the full sense of the word, well educated and well connected, often flaunting insider credentials of one sort or another. They are, of course, a comfortable bunch. And when they look around at the comfortable, well-educated folks who work in government, academia, Wall Street, medicine, and Silicon Valley, they see their peers.

Now, consider the recent history of the Democratic Party. Beginning in the 1970s, it has increasingly become an organ of this same class. Affluent white-collar professionals are today the voting bloc that Democrats represent most faithfully, and they are the people whom Democrats see as the rightful winners in our economic order. Hillary Clinton, with her fantastic résumé and her life of striving and her much-commented-on qualifications, represents the aspirations of this class almost perfectly. An accomplished lawyer, she is also in with the foreign-policy in crowd; she has the respect of leading economists; she is a familiar face to sophisticated financiers. She knows how things work in the capital. To Washington Democrats, and possibly to many Republicans, she is not just a candidate but a colleague, the living embodiment of their professional worldview.

In Bernie Sanders and his “political revolution,” on the other hand, I believe these same people saw something kind of horrifying: a throwback to the low-rent Democratic politics of many decades ago. Sanders may refer to himself as a progressive, but to the affluent white-collar class, what he represented was atavism, a regression to a time when demagogues in rumpled jackets pandered to vulgar public prejudices against banks and capitalists and foreign factory owners. Ugh.

...After reading through some two hundred Post editorials and op-eds about Sanders, I found a very basic disparity. Of the Post stories that could be said to take an obvious stand, the negative outnumbered the positive roughly five to one. (Opinion pieces about Hillary Clinton, by comparison, came much closer to a fifty-fifty split.)

...[T]he Post’s pundit platoon just seemed to despise Bernie Sanders. The rolling barrage against him began during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses, when it first dawned on Washington that the Vermonter might have a chance of winning. And so a January 20 editorial headlined level with us, mr. sanders decried his “lack of political realism” and noted with a certain amount of fury that Sanders had no plans for “deficit reduction” or for dealing with Social Security spending-- standard Post signifiers for seriousness. That same day, Catherine Rampell insisted that the repeal of Glass–Steagall “had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crisis,” and that those populists who pined for the old system of bank regulation were just revealing “the depths of their ignorance.”

The next morning, Charles Lane piled on with an essay ridiculing Sanders’s idea that there was a “billionaire class” that supported conservative causes. Many billionaires, Lane pointed out, are actually pretty liberal on social issues. “Reviewing this history,” he harrumphed, “you could almost get the impression billionaires have done more to advance progressive causes than Bernie Sanders has.”

On January 27, with the Iowa caucuses just days away, Dana Milbank nailed it with a headline: nominating sanders would be insane. After promising that he adored the Vermont senator, he cautioned his readers that “socialists don’t win national elections in the United States.” The next day, the paper’s editorial board chimed in with a campaign full of fiction, in which they branded Sanders as a kind of flimflam artist: “Mr. Sanders is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it.”

Stung by the Post’s trolling, Bernie Sanders fired back-- which in turn allowed no fewer than three of the paper’s writers to report on the conflict between the candidate and their employer as a bona fide news item. Sensing weakness, the editorial board came back the next morning with yet another kidney punch, this one headlined the real problem with mr. sanders. By now, you can guess what that problem was: his ideas weren’t practical, and besides, he still had “no plausible plan for plugging looming deficits as the population ages.”

Actually, that was only one of two editorials to appear on January 29 berating Sanders. The other sideswiped the senator in the course of settling a question of history, evidently one of the paper’s regular duties. After the previous week’s lesson about Glass–Steagall, the editorial board now instructed politicians to stop reviling tarp-- i.e., the Wall Street bailouts with which the Bush and Obama Administrations tried to halt the financial crisis. The bailouts had been controversial, the paper acknowledged, but they were also bipartisan, and opposing or questioning them in the Sanders manner was hereby declared anathema. After all, the editorial board intoned:

Contrary to much rhetoric, Wall Street banks and bankers still took losses and suffered upheaval, despite the bailout—but TARP helped limit the collateral damage that Main Street suffered from all of that. If not for the ingenuity of the executive branch officials who designed and carried out the program, and the responsibility of the legislators who approved it, the United States would be in much worse shape economically.

As a brief history of the financial crisis and the bailout, this is absurd. It is true that bailing out Wall Street was probably better than doing absolutely nothing, but saying this ignores the many other options that were available to public officials had they shown any real ingenuity in holding institutions accountable. All the Wall Street banks that existed at the time of TARP are flourishing to this day, since the government moved heaven and earth to spare them the consequences of the toxic securities they had issued and the lousy mortgage bets they made. The big banks were “made whole,” as the saying goes. Main Street banks, meanwhile, died off by the hundreds in 2009 and 2010. And average home owners, of course, got no comparable bailout. Instead, Main Street America saw trillions in household wealth disappear; it entered into a prolonged recession, with towering unemployment, increasing inequality, and other effects that linger to this day. There has never been a TARP for the rest of us.

Charles Krauthammer went into action on January 29, too, cautioning the Democrats that they “would be risking a November electoral disaster of historic dimensions” should they nominate Sanders—cynical advice that seems even more poisonous today, as scandal after scandal engulfs the Democratic candidate that so many Post pundits favored. Ruth Marcus brought the hammer down two days later, marveling at the folly of voters who thought the Vermont senator could achieve any of the things he aimed for. Had they forgotten “Obama’s excruciating experience with congressional Republicans”? The Iowa caucuses came the next day, and Stephen Stromberg was at the keyboard to identify the “three delusions” that supposedly animated the campaigns of Sanders and the Republican Ted Cruz alike. Namely: they had abandoned the “center,” they believed that things were bad in the United States, and they perceived an epidemic of corruption-- in Sanders’s case, corruption via billionaires and campaign contributions. Delusions all.

...On and on it went, for month after month, a steady drumbeat of denunciation. The paper hit every possible anti-Sanders note, from the driest kind of math-based policy reproach to the lowest sort of nerd-shaming-- from his inexcusable failure to embrace taxes on soda pop to his awkward gesticulating during a debate with Hillary Clinton (“an unrelenting hand jive,” wrote Post dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman, “that was missing only an upright bass and a plunky piano”).

The paper’s piling-up of the senator’s faults grew increasingly long and complicated. Soon after Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, the editorial board denounced him and Trump both as “unacceptable leaders” who proposed “simple-sounding” solutions. Sanders used the plutocracy as a “convenient scapegoat.” He was hostile to nuclear power. He didn’t have a specific recipe for breaking up the big banks. He attacked trade deals with “bogus numbers that defy the overwhelming consensus among economists.” This last charge was a particular favorite of Post pundits: David Ignatius and Charles Lane both scolded the candidate for putting prosperity at risk by threatening our trade deals. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer grew so despondent over the meager 2016 options that he actually pined for the lost days of the Bill Clinton presidency, when America was tough on crime, when welfare was being reformed, and when free trade was accorded its proper respect.

Ah, but none of this was to imply that Bernie Sanders, flouter of economic consensus, was a friend to the working class. Here too he was written off as a failure. Instead of encouraging the lowly to work hard and get “prepared for the new economy,” moaned Michael Gerson, the senator was merely offering them goodies-- free health care and college-- in the manner of outmoded “20th century liberalism.” Others took offense at Sanders’s health-care plan because it envisioned something beyond Obamacare, which had been won at such great cost.

...Then there was Sanders’s supposed tin ear for racial issues. Jonathan Capehart (a blogger, op-ed writer, and member of the paper’s editorial board) described the senator as a candidate with limited appeal among black voters, who had trouble talking “about issues of race outside of the confines of class and poverty” and was certainly no heir to Barack Obama. Sanders was conducting a “magic-wand campaign,” Capehart insisted on another occasion, since his voting-reform proposals would never be carried out. Even the inspiring story of the senator’s salad days in the civil-rights movement turned out to be tainted once Capehart started sleuthing. In February, the columnist examined a famous photograph from a 1962 protest and declared that the person in the picture wasn’t Sanders at all. Even when the photographer who took the image told Capehart that it was indeed Sanders, the Post grandee refused to apologize, fudging the issue with bromides: “This is a story where memory and historical certitude clash.” Clearly Sanders is someone to whom the ordinary courtesies of journalism do not apply.

...What can we learn from reviewing one newspaper’s lopsided editorial treatment of a left-wing presidential candidate?

For one thing, we learn that the Washington Post, that gallant defender of a free press, that bold bringer-down of presidents, has a real problem with some types of political advocacy. Certain ideas, when voiced by certain people, are not merely debatable or incorrect or misguided, in the paper’s view: they are inadmissible. The ideas themselves might seem healthy, they might have a long and distinguished history, they might be commonplace in other lands. Nevertheless, when voiced by the people in question, they become damaging.

We hear a lot these days about the dangers to speech posed by political correctness, about those insane left-wing college students who demand to be shielded from uncomfortable ideas. What I am describing here is something similar, but far more consequential. It is the machinery by which the boundaries of the Washington consensus are enforced.

...Perhaps you have noticed that the paper’s two great ideas, combined in this way, do not really make sense. Let’s say that it’s true, as the Post asserts, that the American system won’t allow a president to achieve high-flown goals-- that such accomplishments are simply off-limits, even to a golden-tongued orator or an LBJ-style political animal. Okay. But what’s wrong with a candidate who talks about those goals? By the paper’s own definition, there’s no chance of them ever becoming law. The only person to be penalized for making such grand, hollow promises will be the politician herself, whose followers will be disappointed with her after she foolishly demands a hundred percent of everything (“purity, not compromise”) and is inevitably defeated by the system. Too bad for her, we will say. That was a really dumb way to play it. But why should we care what happens to her?

Indeed, this logic, applied across the board, would require us to condemn even the most pragmatic leaders. What are we to make, for example, of a politician who says we ought to enact some sort of gun control? Everyone knows that there is virtually no way such a measure will get through Congress, and even if it did, there’s the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment to contend with. How about a politician who goes to China and bravely proclaims that “women’s rights are human rights,” when all the wised-up observers know the Chinese system is organized to ensure that such an ideal will not be realized there anytime soon? And shouldn’t the Post be frothing with vituperation at the lèse-majesté of a candidate who once confronted a respected U.S. senator with the suggestion that politics ought to be the “art of making what appears to be impossible possible”?

The reason the Post pundits embrace these tidy sophistries is simple enough. Knee-jerk incrementalism is, after all, a nifty substitute for actually thinking difficult issues through. Bernie Sanders ran for the presidency by proposing reforms that these prestigious commentators, for whatever reason, found distasteful. Rather than grapple with his ideas, however, they simply blew the whistle and ruled them out of bounds. Plans that were impractical, proposals that would never pass Congress-- these things are off the table, and they are staying off.

Clinging to this so-called pragmatism is also professionally self-serving. If “realism” is recognized as the ultimate trump card in American politics, it automatically prioritizes the thoughts and observations of the realism experts-- also known as the Washington Post and its brother institutions of insider knowledge and professional policy practicality. Realism is what these organizations deal in; if you want it, you must come to them. Legitimacy is quite literally their property. They dole it out as they see fit.

Anyway, strap yourself in for the ride and get ready to expect much more of it-- much, much more. And if you want to contribute to the 2020 Bernie campaign... that's what the thermometer on the right is for.

Stop the presses! What shade(s) of orange do you suppose extraterrestrial Donald Trumps might be?

"Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don't, whatever we find will be super interesting."

-- University of Liège "exoplanet researcher" Michaël Gillon

by Ken

So here I was, wrestling with a post that would take off from a cluster of one upcoming and two just-forgotten birthdays, and last night's Real O'Neals and The Middle, so good that you have to wonder how they survived interference by the Disney-ABC network suits, and the whole consuming business of "fitting in" or not.

That combined with -- as an afterthought or maybe overthought -- a piece by Nathaniel Rich in the March 7 NYRB, "Joan Didion in the Deep South" (copyright by the author, curiously; note that the full piece is available only to subscribers or purchasers) about Joan Didion's about-to-be-published book South and West, which apparently consists of her actual notes for never-written pieces gathered during a month traveling the Gulf Coast in summer 1970 and a 1976 visit to San Francisco (in, of course, her native California) covering Patty Hearst's trial for Rolling Stone.

I'd already decided that probably it would have been split into two sure-to-be-riveting posts, when whap!, along comes this breaking news, and naturally all that other stuff has to be put on hold. I know that these seven planets aren't in our solar system, or anywhere near (note that the description of Trappist-1 as an "ultracool dwarf" isn't a value judgment but a description of the 39-light-years-distant star's temperature and size), but still, seven "Earthlike" planets? Get out of here! Just think, somewhere out there in space there could be seven officially extraterrestrial Donald Trumps! Do you suppose they would all come in the same shade(s) of orange?

Speaking of Science
Scientists discover 7 ‘Earthlike’ planets orbiting a nearby star

By Sarah Kaplan | February 22 at 1:00 PM

[SEE VIDEO CLIP ABOVE]
Three planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass, and the energy they receive from their star. (Reuters)

A newfound solar system just 39 light-years away contains seven warm, rocky, Earthlike planets, scientists say.

The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have ever detected so many terrestrial planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying distant worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth.

“Before this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,” said lead author Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium. “Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don't, whatever we find will be super interesting.”

The newly discovered solar system resembles a scaled-down version of our own. The star at its center, an ultracool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is less than a tenth the size of the sun and about a quarter as warm. Its planets circle tightly around it; the closest takes just a day and a half to complete an orbit, the most distant takes about 20 days. If these planets orbited a larger, brighter star they'd be fried to a crisp. But TRAPPIST-1 is so cool that all seven of the bodies are bathed in just the right amount of warmth to hold liquid water. And three of them receive the same amount of heat as Venus, Earth and Mars, putting them in “the habitable zone,” that Goldilocks region where it's thought life can thrive.

Still, “Earthlike” is a generous term to describe these worlds. Though the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass, and the energy they receive from their star, there's a lot that makes our planet livable beside being a warm rock. Further observation is required to figure out what the TRAPPIST-1 planets are made of, if they have atmospheres, and whether they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide — the molecules that scientists consider “biosignatures,” or signs of life.

“You can bet people will be rushing to take those measurements,” said Elisabeth Adams, an exoplanet researcher at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved in the study. “That's going to be fascinating to see.”


An artist's conception of the view from the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) [Note: Click to enlarge. -- Ed.]

Whatever secrets it may harbor, the TRAPPIST-1 system will surely be a sight to behold. Though the star is small, its nearness to the planets means that, from their perspective, it appears about three times as large as our sun. The outermost planets enjoy the daily spectacle of their neighbors passing across the sky and in front of their shared sun, each world a large dark spot silhouetted against the salmon-colored star. Its dim glow, which skews toward the red and infrared end of the light spectrum, bathes the planets in warmth and paints their skies with the crimson hues of a perpetual sunset.

[There's more, ohsomuch more, which all you astronomy nerds out there can read onsite. -- Ed.]

WHEW! HOW EXCITING IS THIS?

Now, maybe Friday we can get back to the business originally plann for today.

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So who will fill Merrick Garland's Supreme Court seat?

by Ken

There's a good chance, as we knew all through the 2016 presidential derby, that the Supreme Court we now think of as the "Roberts Court" is going to be transformed over the next few years into the "Trump Court."

For now, President Trump has one vacancy to fill, the one that remains because Republicans took one of their more outrageous dumps on the Constitution by refusing to consider former President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill the seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. By now you'd figure that all the Republican senators who committed this consitutional outrage would be on Death Row pending appeals of their treason convictions.

And while no one hopes for even the most minimal level of competence or decency in the Trump pick for this seat, which we're told now will be announced February 2 ("We have outstanding candidates. We'll pick a truly great Supreme Court justice"), it changes the High Court only in the sense that it returns it to its status before Scalia's death, as a more or less reliable -- usually depending on the judicial vagaries of Justice "Slow Anthony" Kennedy -- right-wing death machine. Of course this represents a big change from the 4-4 deadlock that has existed on the shrunken court.

According to the sources consuilted by the Washington Post's Supreme Court reporter, Robert Barnes, the hot prospects on the administration's current short list of candidates are judges from four circuits of the federal Court of Appeals. Here are Barnes's backgrounders on the fearsome foursome:

WILLIAM PRYOR, 11th Circuit (Atlanta)

One candidate on the shortlist that probably would not meet [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer’s test ["It's hard for me to imagine a nominee that Donald Trump would choose that would get Republican support that we could support"] is the one Trump has specifically mentioned.

That is Pryor, 54, a protege of Trump’s choice for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions. Pryor followed Sessions as Alabama’s attorney general and had a contentious Senate confirmation after President George W. Bush nominated him to the bench. Bush eventually made him a rare recess appointment in 2004, and he was finally confirmed by the Senate as part of a compromise deal.

Pryor thrilled supporters at his hearing by not backing away from a previous observation that the Roe v. Wade decision was a constitutional “abomination.” His past comments on gay rights and stalwart support of the death penalty have made him the nominee that liberal groups say they would most fiercely oppose.

He has long been considered the front-runner for the job but lately has drawn fire from some staunch conservatives. Several groups have objected to a decision he joined that upheld the right of a transgender woman to sue over being fired. The appeals court panel based its decision on Supreme Court precedent, but conservative groups said Pryor’s decision was unwarranted.

John G. Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation, one of the groups that supplied Trump with names of potential nominees, defended Pryor in the National Review. Criticism of the judge from the left was expected, Malcolm wrote, but the attack from the right “is a strange development.”

NEIL GORSUCH, 10th Circuit (Denver)

Gorsuch, 49, would not bring the outsider credentials represented by others on Trump’s list. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan, and he was raised in Washington. His résumé includes Columbia University, Oxford and Harvard Law.

He is seen as a reliable conservative, with a reputation for clear and lucid writing. His law clerks regularly move on to the Supreme Court — not just for conservative justices but also for liberals such as Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Gorsuch is an originalist, like Scalia, meaning he attempts to interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written. He is protective of religious rights and found that they could be infringed by requirements of the Affordable Care Act requiring employers to provide contraceptive services.

THOMAS HARDIMAN, 3rd Circuit (Philadelphia)

Hardiman, 51, has more of the backstory Trump might find appealing. He was the first in his family to go to college, and for a time, he drove a taxi to finance his education at Notre Dame and Georgetown University Law Center. He is a lifelong Republican who married into a Pennsylvania family with prominent Democratic roots.

Hardiman serves on the 3rd Circuit with Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry. Conservatives praise his record on gun rights — he dissented from a decision that upheld New Jersey’s restrictive law on who may receive a permit to carry a gun. The Supreme Court declined to review the decision.

But the justices on a 5-to-4 vote upheld one of his decisions that said jails were justified in strip searches for those being committed, no matter the seriousness of the charge.

RAYMOND KETHLEDGE, 6th Circuit (Cincinnati)

Kethledge, 50, is less well-known than the others but is said to have support among senators. He is a University of Michigan graduate who, like Gorsuch, clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. His nomination was opposed by Michigan’s Democratic senators, but he was confirmed in 2008 as a result of a compromise deal in the Senate.

A Wall Street Journal editorial bestowed “opinion of the year” on a 2014 ruling against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The agency had brought an action against Kaplan Higher Education Corp. alleging discrimination, but Kethledge shot down the testimony of an expert the EEOC had relied upon.

He also ruled for a group called the NorCal Tea Party Patriots in a class-action case the group had filed against the Internal Revenue Service alleging that conservative groups had been targeted.

WATCH FOR A FAMILIAR COMEDY TO PLAY OUT
IN THE NOMINEEE'S CONFIRMATION HEARINGS

Is it really worth pondering which of these picks would be the "least worst"? Meanwhile, the Plum Line's Paul Waldman is looking ahead to the eventual nominee's confirmation hearings.

"By many accounts," Paul writes, "it was the prospect of a Democrat filling that seat that persuaded conservative evangelicals to support Donald Trump en masse, when they might have decided to stay home rather than back a philandering, amoral candidate whose efforts to pander to them were as transparently phony as a $3 bill." That support, Paul says, "according to exit polls," ran to 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted. And now, on this first Trump Supreme Court nomination, they have every reason to think they're going to get what they paid for with those votes.

"There are many issues to be concerned about when the Senate takes up this nomination," Paul writes,

but let’s be honest: We all know that most of the debate is going to be about abortion, specifically whether Roe v. Wade will be overturned. And I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen.

Okay, Paul, we'll bite. Tell us exactly what's going to happen.

Here’s how it will go: Despite the fact that the president has insisted that he will appoint a justice who will vote to overturn Roe, and despite the fact that every conservative interest group will insist that his choice must be a vote to overturn Roe, and despite the fact that it’s in the Republican Party platform to overturn Roe, and despite the fact that nearly every Republican politician wants to overturn Roe, and despite the fact that the nominee will have been chosen only because all those people feel sure he’ll be a vote to overturn Roe, the nominee will go before the Senate and the country and pretend that he has no opinion on whether Roe should be overturned. But he’ll hint that he might vote to uphold it, because it’s a precedent and he has deep respect for precedent, and he has an open mind, so who knows. This will be a lie, but it’s what he’ll say.

And how does Paul know? "Because it’s what Republican Supreme Court nominees always do in their confirmation hearings."

Its most extreme version was embodied by Clarence Thomas, who began with the maybe-I’ll-uphold-it claim. “I believe the Constitution protects the right to privacy,” he said. “And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue or to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion, which is a difficult issue.” But then he went even further, saying in response to a question that not only had he not made up his mind about Roe, but he had never in his life even had a conversation about the most controversial legal issue of our age: “Senator, your question to me was did I debate the contents of Roe v. Wade, the outcome in Roe v. Wade, do I have this day an opinion, a personal opinion on the outcome in Roe v. Wade; and my answer to you is that I do not.” There could not have been a single person in America, liberal or conservative, who thought Thomas wasn’t lying.

But it's unusual, Paul says, for a right-wing Supreme Court nominee to go this far.

In its slightly less laughable version, the denial is usually a combination of the following assertions: I don’t want to prejudge any case that might come before the court. Precedent is important. Nothing I said before now applies, because the role of a justice is so unique. My personal views, if I should happen to have any, which I probably don’t, would never enter into my rulings.

Not only Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts but even the late Justice Scalia shuffled through their versions of what Paul describes as "this absurd charade," which he notes predictably drives Democratic Senate questioners batty,

since everyone knows how full of it the nominee is. So the senators try to ask the question a dozen different ways to see if they can come up with a key that will unlock the truth, and they inevitably fail.

Which particular version of the denial charade can we look forward to? "As it happens," Paul writes, "among the finalists for Trump’s pick, there is one judge, William Pryor, who has an unusually clear record of statements on abortion in general and Roe in particular."

He has been such an outspoken critic of the decision, calling it the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law,” that it would be almost impossible for him to claim that he might uphold it. Does that mean that he won’t be nominated? To know the answer to that question you’d have to get into Trump’s mind, and who knows what’s going on in there. What we do know is that whoever gets the nomination, he’ll be a vote to overturn Roe. No matter how much he tries to deny it.

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TrumpWorld shows its true military colors: Let them eat (copycat) styrofoam cake

Or, when is what looks like a cake not a cake?


WaPo caption: President Trump, left, and Vice President Pence are helped by Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew Babot as they cut a cake at the armed services ball. A slightly more accurate caption: This poor petty officer has been suckered into pretending to help cut a cake that isn't a cake, for the greater glory of a pair of raging sociopaths who may never in their entire miserable existences have told the truth about anything.

by Ken

This is such a grubby story that you know it must have to do with the brand-new Trump administration, which even as it's birthing is radiating out waves of grubbiness -- Making America Great Trump-style seems to require folks to soil themselves.

Given the particular electoral math of the 2016 presidential election, it's possible to look at a dozen or more contributing factors and declare any one of them "the one" that (circle one) hoisted-The-Donald-over-the-top-slash-sank-Hillary. And one of those, surely, is the attitude of the American military community,, which has gotten it into its collective head that Obama was anti-military and Trump is a military person's wet dream. In this story, though, a segment of the Trump "brain" trust unwittingly provided a far truer perspective on the new administration's likely attitude toward the military. (The "unwittingly" part may not be so accidental. By and large the only way we find out what's really on these people's minds is when they're being "unwitting.")

Which brings us to the story of "The Rip-Off of Duff's Cake."



Now Duff subsequently walked his pique back (see below), but in my book he was right (and then some) the first time: He should have been seriously ticked off by the blithe rip-off of his 2013 cake -- and maybe all the more so considering that the alleged Trumpcake isn't in fact a cake. As you can see from the photo up top, the inaugural fraudsters were pretending it was a cake, even suckering that poor Coast Guard petty officer into playing "cake"-cutter with our new president and vice president, two princes of phonyworld.

At this point, let's let the Washington Post's Amy B Wang and Tim Carman tell the story.

Amid the glitz of President Trump’s inaugural festivities, one item stood out in particular late Friday night: a spectacular nine-tier cake that the new president and Vice President Pence cut into with a sword.

To pastry chef Duff Goldman, the cake seemed a little too familiar — because it looked almost exactly like one he had made years earlier for Barack Obama’s second inauguration as president.

Just after midnight, the Food Network personality posted a side-by-side comparison of two cakes on his Twitter account.

On the left, Goldman wrote in the caption, was the cake he had created for the “Commander-in-Chief” inaugural ball in 2013. The one on the right was the cake that had just appeared at Trump’s “Salute to Our Armed Services” ball.

It appeared nearly identical to Goldman’s cake from four years ago, right down to the colors, the patriotic bunting, and the placement of several small silver stars and seals.

“I didn’t make it,” Goldman wrote about Trump’s cake, adding a suspicious thinking-face emoji at the end.

This is followed by a journalistically obligatory note: "Neither Goldman nor representatives from Trump’s transition and inauguration teams responded to requests for comment Saturday morning."

However, someone else was available for comment.

Tiffany MacIsaac, owner of Washington’s Buttercream Bakeshop, stepped forward to say she had been the one to create the much-talked-about cake.

She said that the order came in while she was out of town, and that the client had brought in a photo of the cake from Obama’s inauguration asking her to re-create it.

“They came to us a couple of weeks ago, which is pretty last minute, and said ‘We have a photo that we would like to replicate,’ ” MacIsaac told The Washington Post by phone. Her bakery tried to encourage the client to use the photo as “inspiration,” as they do with many others, she said.

“They said, ‘Nope, they want this exact cake. It’s perfect.’ And we said, great,” MacIsaac said. Neither she nor her spokeswoman revealed who placed the order. The “Salute to Our Troops” ball was one of three official presidential inaugural balls held Friday and open by invitation only to members of the military, veterans, first responders and their families.

Now you or I might wonder about the propriety of a cake-maker replicating somebody else's cake -- a cake that has been declared so "perfect" that the cake being asked for must be an "exact" replica. We'll come back to this in a moment. Let's note first that Tiffany MacIsaac views herself here as a businessperson of principle.

MacIsaac did not want to state her political affiliation, but said her bakery began planning how it would donate its proceeds from the Trump inaugural cake to charity. The baker and her staff chose the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit group that advocates for equal treatment of the LGBT community — and that has declared Trump “unfit for the presidency.”

“I’m a small-business owner and one of the things I’m very, very proud about is that I don’t discriminate,” MacIsaac said. “I would never turn someone away based on their age, their sex, their sexual orientation, their political views. It’s just not the way we operate.”

Well sure, why should the political affiliation of the cake-ripper-offers affect one's willingness to perform this commercial transaction? If, that is, one is a truly equal-opportunity fraudster.

Now comes the wrinkle, though:

MacIsaac said the attention caught her by surprise partly because, per the order, the Trump cake was intended to be more of a prop: All but a three-inch slice at the bottom was inedible. [Emphasis added. -- Ed.]

“It’s just a Stryofoam cake. It’s not for eating,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting it to be seen on TV.”

Ooh, oh my. Well, I suppose this explains why Ms. MacIsaac was willing to replicate somebody else's cake. She was thinking, I guess, that it's not really a cake. So it's not really cake theft, I guess. And it's above Ms. MacIsaac's pay grade, I guess, to worry about whether the replica cake is going to be properly identified as what it is: an inedible replica of a cake designed and created as an actual cake by Duff Goldman and Charm City Cakes for the 2013 Obama inaugural festivities. No, she's just sticking to her principle of "never turn[ing] someone away based on their age, their sex, their sexual orientation, their political views." Because that's "just not the way we operate."

“Obviously, my intention was definitely not to upset him in any way,” MacIsaac said of Goldman, whom she does not know personally. “I just wish that it had not been presented the way that it was.”

At this point, for the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with Duff, let's continue with the Post-ies' gloss:

Goldman, who founded Charm City Cakes in Baltimore and Los Angeles, is known for his showstopping cake creations. From 2006 to 2011, the Food Network reality show “Ace of Cakes” followed Goldman as he ran his bakery and pulled out all the stops to construct elaborate cakes. These days, the celebrity pastry chef is better known to pint-size bakers as “Chef Duff” as one of the judges on the network’s “Kids Baking Championship.”

Now, as noted above, Duff subsequently walked his pique back, presumably once he realized that the ripped-off cake wasn't actually a cake.



Except, again, that while Duff's cake was appreciated enough to be required to be duplicated exactly, except for, you know, the cake aspect, it wasn't appreciated enough to be credited as what it was: a photo-op rip-off of his cake created for an administration that showed a good deal more respect for the military than these new fraudsters.

Happily, the journalistic ethos of the Post-ies prompts them to dig into the archives, a dig that's made easier by the fact that half of our 2017 Post team was on the job in 2013.

In 2013, Goldman told The Post’s Tim Carman he wanted Obama’s inaugural cake to be perfect.

“When you’re doing a cake like this, you know that everybody is going to be looking at it,” Goldman said. “It’s a lot of pressure. The more recognition you get for something that you do, the greater the pressure becomes, because more people are looking for a mistake. So you really gotta make sure your work is top-notch.”

Goldman described his cake for Obama to The Post in great detail then: The 5-foot-tall, 50-pound cake was meant to pay special homage to the nation’s armed forces, with seals of the five branches military. The different tiers would each be of different flavors, from red velvet to pumpkin-chocolate chip.

Though he expressed some anxiety about pulling off the cake in 2013, Goldman ultimately delivered on his vision.

“It was our honor to create this cake for last night’s Commander-in-Chief Ball — an experience we will never forget,” the Charm City Cakes Facebook page noted with a picture of the cake the day after Obama’s 2013 inauguration. (For the record, Obama has said he is more of a pie person.)

The 2017 Post-ies proceed with a riff on the theme: "Allegations of plagiarism are not new in Trump's nascent administration." No indeed, and if you're not instantly filling in the blank for yourself, by all means take this stroll down Recent Memory Lane with Amy and Tim.

However, it occurs to me that "plagiarism" isn't the operation being performed by the Trumpsters. In TrumpUniverse, after all, everything in the universe exists above all for its potential to contribute to The Donald's (a) enrichment and (b) glorification. Why, therefore, shouldn't Duff's 2013 cake be pressed into service? There's probably some extra chuckleworthiness in the fact that the actual cake was actually ordered and created to carry the message of the Obama administration's solidarity with our armed forces.

Hey, fuck those fuckers!

And I expect that the military people who imagine that the new president is their guy are also on the long list of fuckers to be fucked. Oh, it's looking like they're going to get their military buildup, meaning that while our scam-fighting, cutting-costs-to-the-bone president will actually target some unlucky recipients of U.S. military graft, in the process of making the country not one whit safer, lots of money will be pouring from taxpayers' pockets into fat-cat contractor coffers, it will be done POTUS's way -- with money flowing to the right people, the ones who know how to play this business president's game.

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Wash Post Promotes Shadowy Website That Accuses 200 Publications of Being Russian Propaganda Plants

Blacklists, that is.

by Gaius Publius

Russia is an enemy of freedom, as is China. So too is the globalized wealth regime, which wants every dime on the planet for its own. It's a three-handed bloody game played by the giants among us for wealth, power and prizes.

The rest of us, the non-giants — you, me, Assange, al-Assad, Ghaddafi; all the suffering angry in Ferguson, Yemen, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam; the soon-to-be-drowned or driven-out Pacific Islanders and Bangladeshi; the refugee poor and middle class everywhere in the world — are simply caught in the net, either as prey, as collateral victims, or both.

The outrage over "fake news" has exploded in an interesting way. First it was about "fake" sites — well-funded sites carrying entirely false stories, designed to game the Facebook algorithm to drive traffic and also, sometimes, political agendas. Did those with political agendas drive them effectively? The jury is still out.

But if you combine that element with the current Clintonist-driven hysteria about Russians hacking/interfering with the U.S. election (debunked here), you get an anti-Kremlin-cum-"protect our elections from fake news" amalgam that just begs for censorship lists.

The Washington Post has now "blessed" a censorship list put together by an entirely opaque, formerly unknown site called PropOrNot. Interesting that a site that strives for transparency is opaque — as you'll read, it won't name its director, its "researchers" on which its blacklist is based, or provide much about its quite fuzzy, easily finagled methodology. All of which makes the site itself highly suspect. Is its stated agenda its real agenda? I can't say yes to that.

In addition, by grandly promoting the blacklist-creating site, the Washington Post — which also will not reveal the sites director, identify its "researchers," or clarify the site's methodology — is itself part of that opacity. All of which leads one to suspect that the Post itself has an agenda, which it too is not revealing.

"The List"

An indication of those agendas, however, can be gleaned from the following. Here are several of the sites identified as "fake news" and "Russian propaganda" by PropOrNot and by extension, the Washington Post:

Truthout
Truthdig
Naked Capitalism
Counterpunch
Black Agenda Report
Antiwar.com
The Ron Paul Institute
Wikileaks
Before It's News (an aggregator)
Zero Hedge
Consortium News (Robert Parry's site)
Drudge Report (him too)
David Stockman's Contra Corner
Jack Pine Radicals (pro-Sanders site)
Liberty Blitzkrieg (sometimes thoughtful RW site)
Moon of Alabama
Nutrition Facts (really)
OpEd News (progressive aggregator)
Washington's Blog (progressive aggregator)
Paul Craig Roberts

The full list ("The List") is here.

Who Is PropOrNot?

No one knows who's behind PropOrNot, outside of the Post perhaps, which isn't telling. From Max Blumenthal (my emphasis throughout):

A shady website that claims “Russia is Manipulating US Opinion Through Online Propaganda” has compiled a blacklist of websites its anonymous authors accuse of pushing fake news and Russian propaganda. The blacklist includes over 200 outlets, from the right-wing Drudge Report and Russian government-funded Russia Today, to Wikileaks and an array of marginal conspiracy and far-right sites. The blacklist also includes some of the flagship publications of the progressive left, including Truthdig, Counterpunch, Truthout, Naked Capitalism, and the Black Agenda Report, a leftist African-American opinion hub that is critical of the liberal black political establishment.

Called PropOrNot, the blacklisting organization was described by the Washington Post’s Craig Timberg as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” The Washington Post agreed to preserve the anonymity of the group’s director on the grounds that exposure could result in their being targeted by “Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.” The Post failed to explain what methods PropOrNot relied on to conclude that “stories planted or promoted by the Russian disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.”

As you can see, the group behind this site entirely hides itself. Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald:

In casting the group behind this website as “experts,” the Post described PropOrNot simply as “a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.” Not one individual at the organization is named. The executive director is quoted, but only on the condition of anonymity, which the Post said it was providing the group “to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

In other words, the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda — even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage — while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual names to the blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.”

The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify, as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself. The Intercept contacted PropOrNot and asked numerous questions about its team, but received only this reply: “We’re getting a lot of requests for comment and can get back to you today =) [smiley face emoticon].” The group added: “We’re over 30 people, organized into teams, and we cannot confirm or deny anyone’s involvement.”

Thus far, they have provided no additional information beyond that.

Some of the sites on "The List" are indeed Russia-connected, such as Sputnik News, while others — most of the rest, in fact — are not. What's going on with PropOrNot? And what's going on with the Washington Post?

The PropOrNot Agenda

I want to make a few suggestions about the agendas of these two groups, PropOrNot and the U.S. press that's praising it, then send you to Blumenthal, and to Norton and Greenwald, for the rest.

First, about PropOrNot's agenda. On the surface, it's blatantly anti-Russian. It's stated goal is "identifying and combatting Russian online propaganda." But note this, from Blumenthal:

Among the criteria PropOrNot identifies as clear signs of Russian propaganda are, “Support for policies like Brexit, and the breakup of the EU and Eurozone” and, “Opposition to Ukrainian resistance to Russia and Syrian resistance to Assad.”

By these standards, any outlet that raises the alarm about the considerable presence of extreme right-wing elements among the post-Maidan Ukrainian government or that questions the Western- and Saudi-funded campaign for regime change in Syria can be designated a Russia dupe or a paid agent of the FSB. Indeed, while admitting that they have no idea whether any of the outlets they blacklisted are being paid by Russian intelligence or are even aware they are spreading Russian propaganda, PropOrNot’s authors concluded that any outlets that have met their highly politicized criteria “have effectively become tools of the Russian intelligence services, and are worthy of further investigation.”

So, is PropOrNot set up to oppose something, or to support something? In other words, are the site's proprietors as anti-Russia as they say, or are they anti-Russia as a way of being broadly pro-Western globalism (i.e., the globalist neoliberal project)?

If I were in the Pentagon, for example, and I wanted to propagandize for globalist Western corporate expansion through all of Europe and the Middle East — again, that's the global neoliberal project — I would publicly name the enemy as Russia (they are definitely anti-Western expansion), and then press hard to tar any publication that questions neoliberalism as a "pro-Kremlin fellow traveler." Norton and Greenwald point out:

Who exactly is behind PropOrNot, where it gets its funding, and whether or not it is tied to any governments is a complete mystery.

I'll cite three indications that all may not be as it seems regarding PropOrNot's real agenda, then move on:

• Their excessive concern with sites supporting "popular [populist] anti-establishment" policies like Brexit and, from their mission statement, "Isolationism/anti-interventionism" and "anti-GMO" movements

• The extraordinarily broad list of sites they blacklist — far more anti-Establishment sites than pro-Russian ones

• The complete anonymity of the site's personnel, which makes it impossible to vet their motives or see their history, or see their funding

In light of the above, I'm more than suspicious. Someone — not necessarily someone in the U.S. government, but someone — is paying these people to tar anti-imperialist sites with a very broad, very black, very McCarthyite brush.

The Agenda of the U.S. Press

Now for the U.S. press that's promoting this site. The list of promoting publications isn't limited to the Post. Blumenthal again:

Though the supposed experts behind PropOrNot remain unknown, the site has been granted a veneer of credibility thanks to the Washington Post, and journalists from the New York Times, including deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weissman to former Obama senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer, are hailing Timberg’s story as Pulitzer-level journalism. “Russia appears to have successfully hacked American democracy,” declared Sahil Kapur, the senior political reporter for Bloomberg. The dead-enders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president have also seized on PropOrNot’s claims as proof that the election was rigged, with Clinton confidant and Center For American Progress president Neera Tanden declaring, “Wake up people,” as she blasted out the Washington Post article on Russian black ops.

It's not just the Post that loves this site. It's the New York Times and its deputy Washington editor; it's Dan Pfeiffer, late of the Obama administration; it's Bloomberg's political staff; it's the Center for American Progress and its president, Neera Tanden.

What interest could these groups and people have — other than the promotion of global neoliberalism and the Establishment "austerity for everyone else" agenda — in hyping the "Russia hacked our election" meme? Perhaps the phrase "Clinton dead-enders" captures it.

Now tie the two groups-with-agendas together, in a kind of Dick Cheney–Judith Miller way? Was PropOrNot created by the same people who promoted it to our mainstream press? Was it created just so it could be promoted by the U.S. mainstream press?

We have no answers ... either way.

Will This Be a Blip?

One final thought. Will this be a kind of blip story that comes and goes, that dies after one cycle? I don't think so.

First, the globalist push to advantage the rich at the expense of the rest of us will shift into high gear in the face of the current anti-Establishment, anti-austerity, populist pushback against it. Put simply, in the face of, frankly, the start of a global rebellion, our "betters" will not go down without a furious fight. 

In other words, given the world-wide signs of rebellion against the global rich — Brexit, the Sanders campaign, the Trump campaign (or what it sold itself as), all the anti-"free trade" movements in Europe and the U.S. — the worldwide owners of wealth are certain to dig in their heels, even if it means sparking what looks like a very messy and confused civil war.

Frankly, that rebellion has already starting to look like a war, if you look at events like national, coordinated police raids against Occupy, or militarized state violence against the DAPL water-protectors in North Dakota. (Consider, by the way, how that violence will escalate under Donald Trump. Again, looks much like the start of a war.)

Second, it looks like PropOrNot, discredited as it now is, seems to be growing. It now offers a Chrome Extension that flags its blacklisted sites for you. I'm almost certain Twitter and Facebook apps will soon follow. Whoever is funding them seems to have thought through the next several steps, not just the first one that seeds glorifying stories like those in publications like the Post.

Bottom Line

Yes, Russia is an enemy of freedom (as is China). But yes, so too is the globalized wealth regime, which wants every dime on the planet for its own. That global regime, by the way, includes the wealthy and powerful in both Russia and China. It's a three-handed bloody game played by the giants among us for wealth, power and prizes.

The rest of us, the non-giants — you, me, Assange, al-Assad, Ghaddafi; all the suffering angry in Ferguson, Yemen, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam; the soon-to-be-drowned or driven-out Pacific Islanders and Bangladeshi; the refugee poor and middle class everywhere in the world — are simply caught in the net, either as prey, as collateral victims, or both.

What's going on with PropOrNot? Seen in this light, the battle among global giants for the wealth and labor of the rest of us, it almost doesn't matter. The people behind the site are playing a role in service to one of them — likely the Western giants — if not several.

Regardless of whose friend they are, PropOrNot isn't ours. We don't need a wealth-serving, wealth-created enemies list. We can make our own.

GP
   

It's not hard to find cracks in the system in need of fixing -- like this Secret Service security gap

by Ken

Sure, I'm still processing, even though I think I was reasonably well prepared intellectually for an election outcome similar to what actually happened. My first thought: Now we know who will appoint -- subject to confirmation by a still-Republican-controlled Senate -- at least two new Supreme Court justices: replacements not just for Antonin Scalia but for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and possibly for Anthony Kennedy and/or Stephen Breyer as well. (Yes, I'm steamed that "Miss Mitch" McConnell and Company won their extra-constitutional gamble in refusing to consider the Garland nomination. Now, alas, there's nothing for it but to hope that this gambit can be made to come back and bite their smelly butts.)

But for now, I don't want to go there. I'm going to try to think, well, not optimistically, but (let's say) within the realm of possibility. Let's say that President Trump really means to begin repairing our broken system. The Washington Post's Joe Davidson, whose "Federal Insider" beat is the seamy underbelly of the federal government, sensibly had one such instance ready to roll today regardless of the election outcome, under the headline "Secret Service IT management slammed following Chaffetz breach" (links onsite):

Now that the votes are in and the presidential campaign is done, the Secret Service can close an incredibly busy election season.

Perhaps it can turn some of that energy to protecting its computer systems, which suffer from neglect, ignorance and bad management, according to a watchdog’s report.

The report by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Homeland Security is related to the agency’s breach and leak of personal information belonging to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) last year. That was another in a string of embarrassments for a law enforcement agency that has had such a proud tradition.

A 2015 OIG investigation found that 45 employees got into Chaffetz’s 2003 Secret Service job application. Only four had a legitimate need, leaving the rest in violation of the Privacy Act and agency policies. The file snooping began minutes after Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, opened a hearing into allegations of agents’ misconduct.

Chaffetz said the current report, issued last month, shows that “despite past warnings, USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is still unable to assure us their IT systems are safe.” In a letter to Inspector General John Roth, Chaffetz also said the discipline for some agents in his case “is not adequate to deter similar behavior in the future” and asked Roth to continue his investigation.

The October report goes well beyond the Chaffetz case and dissects the agency’s information technology operation in scathing particulars.

Summing up the report, the inspector general’s office offered this mouthful: The “audit uncovers a myriad of problems with Secret Service’s IT management including inadequate system security plans, systems with expired authorities to operate, inadequate access and audit controls, noncompliance with logical access requirements, inadequate privacy protections, and over-retention of records. The OIG concluded that Secret Service’s IT management was ineffective because Secret Service has historically not given it priority. The Secret Service CIO’s [Chief Information Officer] Office lacked authority, inadequate attention was given to updating IT policies, and Secret Service personnel were not given adequate training regarding IT security and privacy.”

The Secret Service agreed with the report’s 11 recommendations, even though officials believe it does not reflect the agency’s recent IT progress. In a memorandum responding to the report, Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy noted last year’s hiring of retired Marine Brig. Gen. Kevin Nally as CIO and “the sweeping and unprecedented improvements” under his leadership.

THERE'S ONE OBVIOUS CAVEAT TO THE ABOVE

Of course the "Chaffetz breach" became an issue, to the extent that it became an issue, almost entirely because in this instance the victim of governmental abuse was not just a right-winger but a far-far-right-winger and the loudest of loudmouths (maybe somebody out there can help? I'm racking my brain for a kinder and gentler term than "crackpot") as well. I think it's safe to say that such instances have been overwhelmingly the exception even in a Democratic administration. Projecting ahead to a federal government staffed with Trump appointees . . . well, you can finish that sentence for yourself. And with a Republican Congress still in charge -- and overseen by people we know only too well -- it's hard to imagine much impulse to reforms that would clamp down on all governmental abuses.

Then again, maybe the president-elect is serious about fixing our broken system. (Did I hear somebody laugh? Or was that crying?)


COMING UP FRIDAY --

For my next post, I promise one with (almost) no reference at all to the election or the present political mess. It's something I had in mind for today, but I thought we needed to do a smidge of transitioning.

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Oliver Sacks (1933-2015)

"Oliver Sacks, the world-renowned neurologist and author who chronicled maladies and ennobled the afflicted in books that were regarded as masterpieces of medical literature, died Aug. 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 82."

-- the lead of Emily Langer's Washington Post obituary

"You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born."

-- an observation made to Olliver Sacks, quoted by Emily Langer

by Ken

The death of Oliver Sacks can't have surprised anyone, least of all Oliver Sacks himself, since he had gone as public as a person can (writing in the New York Times) with the news that he had terminal cancer. But that doesn't make it any less earth-shaking. For a lot of us, an overwhelming amount of what we've come to learn about the workings (and nonworkings) of the human brain, and even the human mind (i.e., the brain in working context) have come through his prolific and deeply felt writings.

In August 2010, for example, I wrote -- in some awe -- a post called "Oliver Sacks opens a window, personally, on the condition of 'face-blindness,'" about Sack's just-appeared New Yorker piece about prosopagnosia, whose sufferers are unable to recognize faces. In the piece he made me see how this goes to the heart of the way we perceive and make sense of the world around us -- and also startled me with the revelation that his knowledge of the condition began at first hand.

Here's a bit more of Emily Langer's WaPo obit:

An Englishman who made his life in America, Dr. Sacks devoted his career to patients with rare, seemingly hopeless conditions of the nervous system. He distinguished himself both in the clinic and on the printed page and was often called a “poet laureate” of modern medicine.

His books, many of which were bestsellers, generally took the form of clinical anecdotes. A man who mistakes his wife for a hat, an artist who can no longer see in color, a hospital full of patients gloriously, but fleetingly, “awakened” from years-long catatonia: In each case, Dr. Sacks sought to uncover some wisdom, medical or moral.

Not surprisingly, the obit is mostly admiring, but Emily does cite two general, quite harsh criticisms. The one I've quoted above is buried pretty deep in the piece; we'll come back to it. Here's the other:

Dr. Sacks discomfited some readers, who maintained that he capitalized on his patients’ suffering to form handy parables. Tom Shakespeare, a British disability rights activist, called him “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career.”

Now I haven't read the source, and I don't especially care to seek it out. It's possible that in context Tom Shakespeare isn't a total nincompoop and is conjuring a trap that the kind of writing Oliver Sacks did has to guard against. It doesn't sound like that's what he meant, but let's entertain the possibility that he's not the total nincompoop this quote would make him out to be. If you were to make up a list of writers -- neurological professionals or otherwise -- who had the largest positive impact on understanding of and care for the neurologically impaired, my guess is that Oliver Sacks would occupy the top 50 positions, at a conservative estimate.

For a fuller appreciation, we're going to turn to his longtime New Yorker and medical colleague Jerome Groopman, the magazine's great writer on medical subjects. So let's turn back to the other judgment rendered about Sacks, which as it happens came from the subject's mother. Now when a man has been called "an abomination" by his mother, who further expressed the wish that he had never been born, you would think it might have a certain, um, piquancy, a certain resonance, in his life's story.

Even if you didn't know what might have produced such a judgment, I'm guessing you wouldn't have much difficulty guessing. Here's the quote again, with a bit more context:

Oliver Wolf Sacks, one of four sons in an observant Jewish family with many scientists, was born in London on July 9, 1933.

Both his parents, he said, were “medical storytellers.” He went on house calls with his father, a Yiddish-speaking family doctor, and studied anatomy with his mother, a surgeon who sought to instill in her son a love of anatomy by performing dissections with him.

She also instilled in him what he described as a sense of shame about his sexuality.

“You are an abomination,” she told him, Dr. Sacks recalled, when she learned of her son’s homosexual leanings. “I wish you had never been born.”

Dr. Sacks reflected on the exchange years later in “On the Move,” a memoir that would be his last volume published in his lifetime.

“We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times,” he wrote. “My mother did not mean to be cruel, to wish me dead. She was suddenly overwhelmed, I now realize, and she probably regretted her words or perhaps partitioned them off in a closeted part of her mind. But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.”

Now, as promised, here's the beautiful piece Jerome Groopman put up this afternoon on the New Yorker website:

Oliver Sacks, a dear colleague of mine at The New Yorker and in the world of medicine, was an inspiration to me and to countless physicians. A great deal will be said in the coming days about Oliver’s unique literary output -- masterful books including “An Anthropologist on Mars,” “Awakenings,” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” But we should remember that he also embodied in his medical practice a kind of ideal approach -- creative, sensitive, and large-hearted -- to his many patients. He was an extraordinary and exemplary doctor.

Neurology is often depicted as a discipline of great detachment. Sacks, who was eighty-two when he died, trained in the field before the advent of the CT scan and the MRI. He learned to observe his patients in extreme detail, calling on his professional training and uncanny perception to make meticulous analyses of motor strength, reflexes, sensation, and mental status; in doing so, he arrived at a diagnosis that might locate a lesion within the anatomy of the brain or spinal cord. And yet, because medical technology had only gone so far in those days, once this intellectual exercise was completed, there was often very little that could be done to ameliorate most neurological maladies.

Sacks showed that it was possible to overcome this limited perspective. He questioned absolutist categories of normal and abnormal, healthy and debilitated. He did not ignore or romanticize the suffering of the individual. He sought to locate not just the affliction but a core of creative possibility and a reservoir of potential that was untapped in the patient. There was case history, for instance, of a color-blind painter who lost all perception of color discovered he could capture the nuances of forms and shapes in hues of black and grey with great mastery.

As both a physician and as a writer, Oliver’s two great themes were identity and adaptation. Illness, he made plain, need not rob us of our essential selves -- and this was something he exemplified in his final months, as a he continued to write remarkable essays even as cancer began to sap his strength and overwhelm him. Sacks understood our frequent ability to adapt, and emphasized that the capacity for someone to adapt to a particular condition -- amnesia, blindness, deafness, migraines, phantom-limb syndrome, Asperger’s syndrome, and countless other conditions -- cannot be known from the outset. These concepts grew from his study of zoology and evolution at Oxford. He similarly saw in medicine a great diversity among individual patients, and the inherent uncertainty of the outcome of a particular disorder. These unknowns gave hope to patients guided by the right doctor -- a hope he captured in his description, in “Awakenings,” of catatonic-seeming encephalitis patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, in the Bronx, who had been written off as “locked in” and then revived, at least provisionally, by drugs like L-Dopa.

Sacks was a contrarian who refused to compromise this approach to the sick and the suffering. He resisted the powerful current of modern practice that seeks the generic. He rejected a monolithic mindset, and retrieved the individual from the obscuring blanket of statistics. This put him outside of the academy, exiled to chronic-care institutions. Through his writing, Sacks ultimately received recognition for advancing a unique form of clinical scholarship that was largely abandoned: the study of the single person within the context of his own life. Ever the acute observer, his case histories confirmed that under a single diagnostic term was a spectrum of human biology. No two patients are ever the same, he emphasized. When examining patients on the autistic spectrum, for example, he highlighted, and informed the public about, individuals with the capacity to draw precisely from memory, the capacity to make calculations nearly at the speed of a computer, or the ability to listen to a piece of music and reproduce it on the piano.

Sacks made house calls, not only in California and New York where he practiced, but globally, visiting Dr. “Bennet,” a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome in rural Canada or the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire on a tour of Europe. In these visits, he practiced what might be called the medicine of friendship, showing genuine interest and respect to people who are often shunned. This was the therapeutic intervention when neurology lacked effective pills or procedures.

This did not mean Sacks was a Luddite. He was an avid reader of scientific journals, fascinated by scientific advancements in imaging the nervous system at work. He engaged in dialogue with Nobel laureates and lab scientists about the nature of consciousness, providing what they lacked -- the insights of a naturalist, a field worker.

Sacks also embodied an attribute that can be lost after people become famous: a boundless generosity of spirit. He encouraged young doctors and scientists to record their experiences and communicate them in prose, celebrating their endeavors rather than seeing them as a form of competition or threat. I believe his intense curiosity and boundless energy moved him to want to learn from the succeeding generation, as great teachers do.

Over the past years, Oliver revealed a part of his life that was once considered a debility and disorder -- his sexual orientation. The demeaning of this part of his person, he believed, was the cause for his descent into amphetamine abuse. Drugs may well have killed him decades ago, before his contributions to medicine and writing. It was clinical work, caring for others with competence and compassion, that proved therapeutic for the doctor, giving him the strength to break the powerful grip of drug use. After decades of celibacy, Oliver shared the last eight years of his life with the writer Billy Hayes.

In May, after I had reviewed “On the Move: A Life,” his autobiography, he sent me a letter about what he wanted to accomplish in the time left to him. “In whatever time remains,” he aimed to “pull together another book of case histories–some large … some small, even miniature.” Every dimension of the patient was meaningful in his thinking.

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Let's not deprive the NRA of credit for the near-certainly that we won't have any serious debate about gun control

[Click to enlarge.]

by Ken

I don't suppose there are champagne corks popping today at NRA HQ. They're too modest. But even though today's incident notched only two more casualties, the fact that it happened on live TV was a big win for gun nuttery. Just like the upcoming presidential election seems finally have to have been hijacked by the reality-substitute unreality of "reality TV," so now have the gun nuts invaded the tube.

I have no interest in looking at, and certainly no intention of reproducing, any images from this morning events. So instead I've given you the "title graph" from Georgetown poli sci Assoc. Prof. Danny Hayes's washingtonpost.com post this afternoon, "Why it's so hard to pass gun control (in one graph)."

Personally, I hate this whole miserable genre of "such-and-such explained in one graph" posts, because not only do they hardly ever explain such-and-such, they usually manage to obfuscate what we knew before their "one graph." So while what Professor Hayes has to say is all true enough, and I certainly agree with his conclusion that today's incident isn't likely to lead to any serious push for sanity in our gun policies, what's missing from his piece pretty well disqualifies his undertaking as a serious effort to "explain" why it's so hard to pass gun-control laws.

I'm sure you'll spot what's missing too (lots more links onsite):

With another shooting capturing the headlines today, the debate over gun control will once again make its way back into the news.

Indeed, within hours of the on-air killing of two Roanoke television journalists, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe issued a call for stronger gun regulations. “We’ve got, in America, we’ve got to come together,” McAuliffe said. “There’s too much gun violence in the United States of America.”

Will this be the incident that leads to reforms that gun control advocates have for years pushed for? Will public support for tighter regulations translate into meaningful legislation this time?

Recent history says we should be doubtful. Not only do numerous political interests make it difficult to enact gun control legislation, but without major efforts by politicians themselves, the gun debate is likely to fade quickly from public view.

That’s because of what’s known as the “issue attention cycle.” Mass shootings often generate significant media coverage immediately after they occur. But as time goes by, journalists move on to other stories, leading the public to grow less concerned with gun control.

This is what happened in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. As the graph below shows, news coverage of gun control in the nation’s newspapers surged in the shooting’s aftermath, but declined quickly through 2013.

It was only executive action by President Obama and the U.S. Senate debate over a background check bill that kept the story in the news. Once politicians in Washington quit fighting, media coverage of the issue mostly disappeared. Not even a national tour by former representative Gabby Giffords or the Navy Yard shooting in Washington managed to hold the media’s attention.

This recent history – a pattern also evident in other mass shootings – suggests that a sustained debate over gun control after today’s shooting in Franklin County, Va., is likely only if McAuliffe or other politicians decide to take up the cause. Otherwise, the media and the public will turn their attention to other issues.

MISSING, OF COURSE, IS MENTION OF THE NRA

Technically, the NRA isn't entirely missing. It is, in fact, in the one link that I included -- the one where Professor Hayes remarks in passing that "numerous political interests make it difficult to enact gun control legislation." If you didn't follow that link, you may be surprised to learn that it's to another of those goddamn "such-and-such explained in one graph" posts -- a Sunlight Foundation post by Lee Drutman ("prepared in collaboration with Alexander Furnas and Amy Cesal") from Dec. 17, 2012 (three days after the Sandy Hook school gun massacre), "Explaining the power of the National Rifle Association, in one graph."

A quick graph count doesn't bolster the post's credibility. It came, not with "one graph," but with two bar charts, comparing "Election Spending" and "Lobbying Expenditures" by the NRA and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The accompanying estimate was that the NRA has spent 73 times what the Brady Campaign has.

Nevertheless, Lee Drutman had his target squarely in sight. Here's how he began:

In the wake of the tragic shooting in Newtown, one of the emerging debates is whether there will even be a debate. Past mass shootings have come and gone without any action. Many argue that the reason for this inaction is simple:  politicians have been afraid to take on the National Rifle Association, the large and influential pro-gun lobby that spent at least $18.6 million this past election cycle - $11.1 million through its Political Victory Fund, plus $7.5 million through its affiliated Institute for Legislative Action.

As CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer put it,  “Congress is literally afraid to take on the National Rifle Association because they know that if they make any kind of statement [that] even suggests some sort of limits on gun control, the NRA is going to pour, literally, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a campaign to defeat them."

(Read about the 51 percent of lawmakers in the 113th Congress who have received campaign contributions from the NRA)

Here are the data: The NRA has spent 73 times what the leading pro-gun control advocacy organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, has spent on lobbying in the 112th Congress ($4.4 million to $60,000, through the second quarter of 2012), and 3,199 times what the Brady Campaign spent on the 2012 election ($18.6 million to $5,816). (One caveat on the data is that the NRA itself does a very poor job of accurately reporting its spending, and we must rely on its self-reports.)

Note that the parenthetical link about "the 51 percent of lawmakers in the 113th Congress who have received campaign contributions from the NRA" was to a follow-up post that Lee wrote -- "in collaboration with Alexander Furnas and Amy Cesai" -- on December 18: "NRA's allegiances reach deep into Congress."

Note too that Lee himself saw a limitation in the explanatory power of the two bar charts.

What these numbers don't capture is that the NRA boasts a grassroots  list of millions of voters and the resources to mobilize these voters at even the slightest threat of gun control laws. Gun control advocates have nothing that comes close. In 2012, the NRA spent at least $682,595 on communication costs, that is, political messages to its own members.

When it comes to the debate on gun policy, Congress is only hearing from one side.

Lee also wrote that it's "important to note that the NRA is not the sole pro-gun group," and added numbers from the Gun Owners of America and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which continued to dwarf the amount spent by "the only other explicitly pro-gun-control group we can find, Mayors Against Guns."

What's more, important as the money obviously is, it's still not the whole story of the gun lobby's power, which includes a mind meld with a sizable chunk of the American public, whose impact seems to me to carry well beyond the merely monetary. (Did I just say "merely monetary"? Actually, yes.)

And speaking of Sandy Hook, my takeaway from the utterly predictable political non-epilogue to those horrific shootings is that not only does the gun lobby no longer fear the possible public impact of such incidents, especially given their long experience at jumping in with instant spin, but they've learned that such incidents can be turned to their advantage with fund-raising campaigns about the supposedly looming threat to their supporters' gun "rights." Not to mention the propaganda campaign claiming that the real tragedy was lack of guns -- that Sandy Hook should, for example, have been overflowing with guns to prevent such an attack. (No, not in the hands of students. But teachers? You bet.)


ARE GOP POWER-BROKERS SMART ENOUGH TO FEAR
PEOPLE EXERCISING THEIR GUN "RIGHTS"? YES!

By sheer coincidence, just yesterday Scott Keyes compiled a terrific piece for ThinkProgress Justice: "Republicans Say You Should Be Able To Carry Guns Everywhere. This Proves They Don’t Mean It." Scott began:

“Get rid of gun free zones,” Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted after a gunman massacred five in Chattanooga last month. “Gun-free zones an easy target for killers” an opinion headline on Fox News read after a white supremacist shot up a black South Carolina church and killed nine. Conservative sites also blamed gun-free zones after massacres at multiple movie theaters and other shootings.

If conservatives are so convinced that gun-free zones attract killers, then why do so many conservative places and events ban guns?

Across the country, from conservative confabs to Republican presidential libraries and even to gun shows, loaded weapons are frequently prohibited. When an explanation is given, the reason is invariably for the safety of visitors.

And he proceeded to offer an annotated "list of some of these conservative places that ban loaded guns" (again, they're all discussed onsite):

Gun Shows
Political Conferences
George W. Bush Presidential Library
Republican Conventions
Trump Hotels And Golf Courses
NRA Events
Town Halls
Presidential Campaign Stops
GOP Debates
Congress

"Of course," Scott concluded, "there’s a good reason why many conservatives don’t actually want to have guns in their own areas or events."

Contrary [to] the NRA’s claims, the vast majority of mass shootings don’t happen in gun-free zones. There’s also no evidence that a mass shooter ever chose his target because it prohibited firearms.

Instead, study after study has shown that more guns leads to more killings. In addition, even armed civilian bystanders with good intentions of stopping a shooter can wind up exacerbating already violent situations, as nearly happened in the Giffords shooting. [Links onsite.]

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