I Argue With Elizabeth Warren

Had an e-mail yesterday from the wonderful Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.  She says,

"I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.
But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating"

She was putting out the current Democratic line, about how much the Tea Party/GOP Shutdown cost the economy -

"According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt."

Fair enough. The Shutdown was stupid and pointless, like most of these Washington meltdowns that politicians and the Media love so much. And the Tea Party are a bunch of no-nothing thugs and ignoramuses. And it's a total mystery that anyone votes Republican unless they're multi-millionaires.

But I don't buy the inflated numbers. As a "crazy liberal" in our past, Mark Twain, complained, there are "lies, damned lies and statistics".

[A propos of nothing, there's an amusing video here, in which Sebastian Wernicke addresses a TED Conference - Technology, Entertainment, Design - smart people listening to even smarter people, politics not recommended as a topic - on how to prepare the perfect Talk, based on statistics.]

Worthless statistics are particularly on display when it comes to (allegedly) measuring Public Opinion.  As I point out in my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s",

"... the media bombard the public day after day with a doctored view of some current “event” – terrorism, a candidate’s sex life, a drug scare, crime. Then - they conduct an Opinion Poll, asking people what they think about that event.

All they are really doing is measuring how successful their propaganda has been.

This is especially true during elections, with disastrous results for the notion of rational choices being made by informed voters.

By the same token, those who decide our agenda can stifle a topic that ought to be a major election issue – in the 2010 midterm election, the United States was fighting at least two “hot wars”, yet they were barely mentioned in the course of the campaign. There was nowhere for a citizen who wanted to vote his concern about these million-dollar-per-soldier-per-year exercises, to turn."

Have a nice day!

Call The Media On Its Failure to Cover Politics Properly

I just received this - not sure if it's too late for you to sign the Petition.

However, I strongly urge you to click on the link** below, for an excellent summary of the failings of the Media coverage of the Shut-Down.  Important for anyone who follows Media and its role in democracy.

(Sorry, the link doesn't want to let me copy it into this Blog directly.)

Enjoy!

"Thank you so much for signing my petition telling TV networks to accurately report the fact that Republicans are solely responsible for the government shutdown. More than 150,000 people signed the petition, which will send a strong message to reporters and journalists that they need to do a better job covering the government shutdown.

I'll be delivering the petition signatures later today to CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS.

Before I deliver the signatures, can you help amplify the campaign by sharing it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, or by email?

**Click here for a share page that makes it easy to spread the word about the petition.

With the Republicans' shutdown shenanigans continuing in full swing we need to keep building pressure on the media to accurately report on what got us into this mess in the first place.

Thanks again for joining this campaign.

Digby

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com"

Shutdown Coverage Fails Americans

A short and accurate Commentary from Al Jazeera; read the original piece, complete with links, here.

Shutdown Coverage Fails Americans

Commentary: We need journalists to hold politicians accountable for extremist actions, not to enable them

"U.S. news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.
When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?
The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)
And holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.
But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.
What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more important, we rely on the press to hold the powerful accountable.
That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.
In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

---

Journalists have been suckered into embracing 'balance' and 'neutrality' at all costs.

---

But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.
The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices, who is risking serious damage to the nation, whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.
Instead journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.
One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of plague-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican Party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."
But as Mann explained in an interview last year, "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."
Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.
Media critics — and members of the public — have long decried this kind of he-said-she-said reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "view from nowhere."
Blaming everyone — Congress, both sides, Washington — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.
But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.
So, no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.
We need a more fearless media."

It's Time We Had Some Fun....

... and very soon I'll be bringing you  "Topless and Literary in NYC".

In the meantime, though - just cos it's on my mind - let's talk about  COINTELPRO.

This is from my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s":

"On a night in March 1971 when much of the country was watching the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing-match, a group of activists broke into the two-man FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, with a crowbar, and emptied the file cabinets of more than a thousand documents.

They called themselves The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, and the papers revealed years of systematic wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation designed to suppress any challenge to the status quo.

16 days later, over the Government's objections, the “Washington Post” revealed that it had received an envelope with 14 FBI documents, detailing how the bureau had enlisted a local police chief, mail carriers and a switchboard operator at nearby Swarthmore College to spy on campus and black activist groups in the Philadelphia area.

The “burglars” were never identified; and the American public heard for the first time a sinister new word,: "COINTELPRO". Short for the FBI's "secret counterintelligence program," this was created to investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the U.S. Under these programs, beginning in 1956, the bureau worked to "enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles," as one COINTELPRO memo put it, "to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

It wasn't until 1975-76 that the Senate mounted a full-scale investigation, known as the Church Committee after its chair, Sen. Church of Idaho. They found that the FBI, working with local Police forces, ignored the law and the Constitution....

“Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

Along with the Anti-War Movement, and even occasionally the Ku Klux Klan, the prime target of Cointelpro was the Black Panthers."

More about the Black Panthers another time....

What The F**k Department....

This is what our tax dollars pay for, while the morons who rule us are busy cutting Health Care and Pensions?