Last week, Alec MacGillis published his must-read report on his travels to Sewanee, Tenn., where he visited a clinic staged by Remote Area Medical, "a Knoxville-based organization that for two decades has been providing free medical, dental and vision care in underserved areas." There, he encountered an unusual phenomenon -- lots of people at the ragged end of the health care system who didn't know that there was this law called the Affordable Care Act that contained a multitude of benefits that applied to them:
As Robin Layman, a mother of two who has major health troubles but no insurance, arrived at a free clinic here, she had a big personal stake in the Supreme Court's imminent decision on the new national health care law.
Not that she realized that. "What new law?" she said. "I've not heard anything about that."
When it was a major story, however, most of the coverage focused on the politics of the bill rather than the substance of the legislation.
Oh, hey! How about that? If you watch and read the news, according to Pew, you'll learn that health care reform, like unemployment, is mainly something that impacts the electoral hopes of affluent politicians.
As is its wont, Pew released a graph that should finally make this clear:
Pew also analyzed the language used in the media, and found it "reveals that opponents of the reform won the so-called 'messaging war' in the coverage." This isn't altogether surprising. What remains sort of sad is that everyone would rather cover a "messaging war" than a nationwide health care crisis. One thing that the average citizen doesn't learn in coverage of a "messaging war" is information that has relevance to the lives of ordinary people.
In MacGillis' piece, we meet Terry Bailey, a Remote Area Medical clinic attendee who used to have employer-based coverage until it became unaffordable, leaving him uncovered when he experienced a knee injury. He was precisely the sort of person who could have used some basic information about the Affordable Care Act:
Under the law, Bailey could opt out of his employer's coverage if it costs more than 9.5 percent of his income - which it now does. In that case, he would receive subsidies to buy private coverage on his own and his employer would be assessed a $3,000 penalty. He said he could live with the insurance mandate, given the subsidies, which he hadn’t realized would apply to him before a reporter described the law. "As long as you get help, it ain't that bad" of an idea, Bailey said. "If you don't [have a mandate], you're going to have freeloaders."
We should maybe hire a bunch of these "reporters" and, I don't know, create some nation-wide infrastructure that they could use to disseminate factual information about these laws to ordinary citizens, using the television or the internet or something? This is just an idea I had.
The news is that we will wait until Thursday for the Supreme Court to rule on the Affordable Care Act, so if you are planning a Michael Jackson trial-style "dove release" to commemorate the occasion, you will have to keep those birds alive for another few days. Do they like to eat idle pundit speculations? If so, those doves shall dine like kings, and then probably contract colon cancer and die.
Of course, the big question that everyone is a-rasslin' with this week is what it will mean for President Barack Obama if the Affordable Care Act is gutted or overturned. The answer, of course, is that nothing will happen, because Obama and his family will never not be able to afford top-flight health care. For ordinary American humans, of course, your mileage may vary, but since very few reporters are interested in having access to ordinary American humans who have a large stake in whether they will be able to, say, purchase asthma medication in order to keep breathing, how the Supreme Court ruling impacts their lives is never broached.
Mark Halperin, in determining Obama's post-SCOTUS ruling fate on "Morning Joe," managed one of his perfect, Vitruvian Halperin pieces of analysis today when he determined that no matter what happens to health care, it will be bad for Obama, because what's even the point of American politics anymore? The only way to win is not to bother:
SCARBOROUGH: My opinion is kind of shifting now. I think a loss here this week on the healthcare law is bad news for the President, politically.
HALPERIN: I actually think that whatever the court rules is bad for the President. And that's not my opinion, that's based on a lot of reporting, including Democrats. If they uphold the law, which is unpopular, it's going to be a rallying cry for Republicans across the country. Even if the law is upheld, advertising and campaign rhetoric from Republicans will be all about healthcare. Democrats will largely hide from it. There's only a handful of Democrats in the country, including the President who will put health care front and center.
Right, okay. Mark Halperin has an opinion, which is not an opinion, but it is based on "a lot of reporting," which includes Democrats, who are "reporters," now? But, according to reports, Republicans are against health care reform, which is a phenomenon that nobody could have expected many years ago, when they opposed health care. Why did anyone even try to keep people alive, in America. That was just stupid.
Of course, this is sort of not Mark Halperin's fault. What if you had come to this planet on Saturday afternoon as a piece of sentient space fungus, on assignment from your space fungal overlords to provide a judgment free, unfiltered summation of all of yesterday's Sunday morning political chat show blather on the Affordable Care Act, based on your rudimentary understanding of American politics and the English language? Actually, this is a trick question: Sunday morning political chat shows kill invading space fungus dead. Why do you think we air these shows? ANSWER: To kill space fungus.
Anyway, it is perhaps for the best that Mark Halperin was not present at the founding of our nation.
Hello, everybody! It is Sunday morning, which must mean that I am awake and unhappy about having to watch all these horrific political chat shows, and pretty soon I'll have quaffed enough coffee to drown a family of voles. (Which admittedly, isn't very much coffee, but weights and measures were never really my thing.) Anyway, my name is Jason and this is your quickly hyped liveblog of the proceedings from these Sunday morning shows that I watch so that you do not have to.
Today, it looks like Darrell Issa is going full- or semi-full-Ginsburg today, because of this week's executive privilege declaration over documents related to the failed Fast and Furious "let's hand out some guns and hope for the best" anti-gunrunning operation, that none of us would have known about had it not been for the fact that strayed guns from that program ended up adjacent to a dead Border Patrol agent. Now the Obama administration has asserted executive privilege, we can head right into the part where everyone bounces up and down in the seat like Obama cut a hole in the undercarriage, and it's causing everyone tremendous pain.
John Cook has done the best job covering this new wrinkle in the story, in that he has the proper contempt for executive privilege -- which is an odious sort of refuge that just about every President we've had since all of us have been alive -- has taken, leading me to roll my eyes and say, "Gah, come on now, you awful coward." And then you realize that it's a classic example of a story where the hype runs away with itself, and you are like, "Oh, GUHHHHHHHH, come ON now, people in the media." By far, here is the important stuff to keep in mind, per Cook:
"What is the administration trying to hide and are they now admitting that in fact the President himself did have knowledge of the scandal when denied it in the past?" Sean Hannity asked on Wednesday. "For the President to precipitate a constitutional crisis like this, there had to be a political calculation. Whatever it is that they are using privilege for here was worse than precipitating a crisis."
Here's John Boehner: "What is the Obama administration hiding in Fast and Furious?"
Bullshit. Issa is investigating an operation that took place from November 2009, when it was launched, to January 2011, when the indictments it resulted in were unsealed. Obama only asserted privilege over "post-February 4, 2011 documents." Documents generated after Fast and Furious was shut down. He's not claiming any privilege over documents created while Fast and Furious was running (though Attorney General Eric Holder is attempting to withhold documents that could interfere with ongoing investigations). If any documents exist showing a connection between the White House and Fast and Furious while it was running—and Obama has claimed publicly that he only became aware of it after it was shut down—no one is claiming executive privilege over them.
And also this:
The reason February 4, 2011 is a relevant cut-off date is because that is the date that Holder sent a letter to Sen. Charles Grassley claiming, falsely, that Fast and Furious didn't involve letting guns cross the border. It was later withdrawn. The post-February 4 documents Issa wants presumably include records of how the Justice Department came to change its position and admit that Fast and Furious involved allowing guns over the border.
Conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow, on Fox News: "Here the Attorney General files a letter that's full of inaccuracies, incorrect information, false statement statements and he says, 'Whoops I'm sorry.' ... So, the Attorney General asked the President to assert a privilege to cover his own error. That is the real problem here and that is the fundamental mistake." To repeat: The privilege has been asserted on documents generated after Holder's false letter. Holder's false letter was the (attempted) cover-up. If any records exist showing that the White House was involved in conspiring with Holder to send that misleading letter to Sen. Grassley, no one is asserting executive privilege over them.
I'd also add that executive privilege is often asserted over documents that pertain to "advice" the president has received, legal and otherwise. And in this case, given that we're talking about stuff after Februaru 4, 2011, there's a good chance that what the White House doesn't want people to see are all those private occasions where he's acting like a cynical politician (what is our media strategy? what do polls say? how do we deal with this issue in a campaign year?) instead of the extra special President from the unicorn planet here to save us from the same-old/same-old that Team Obama Re-Elect would prefer to project.
As a general rule, when you are thinking about the "advice" that Presidents ask for and receive, do not think of this as fatherly advice, or the guidance of sage old hands, or of cutting edge political intelligence rendered to a preferred president to give them a policy or electoral edge. Think of "advice" as cynical, gutter-level, political crap that's just odious and vulgar to listen to, rendered by sad idiots playing cutthroat politics with the same set of dull blades, where if you hear enough of it in one place you just think, "Let's burn this country to the ground and start over." If that's what you spent a goodly portion of your day doing, you wouldn't want anyone to find out either. (If you find something out, though, please leak it to reporters!)
Anyway, executive privilege! That's what we'll get for three hours, and then we can turn off the teevee and get busy counting the days to our deaths, yay!
Programming note: There will be no Sunday Morning Liveblog on July 1, 2012. The Liveblog will return on July 8.
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
Let's get into the matter of the day, with Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings, yelling at each other.
Issa says that the House will vote Eric Holder in contempt of Congress this week, and that Democrats are likely to join in the "yes" vote on that. It makes you wonder -- the real disturbing stuff about this story aside -- is it manifestly bad to be held in contempt of Congress? I mean, I would actually like to be held in contempt of Congress, frankly? It would be awesome to be able to tell everyone that a group that is mostly hated by the entirely of America hates you for hating it. I think there are maybe a handful of people on Capitol Hill I don't have contempt for. I even basically assume that all of Congress' summer interns are culled from the next great class of clying a-holes that are currently coming up through high school.
This is why we have whole neighborhoods in Washington, DC that serve as refuges from these people, because we'd prefer to not see them in the good bars and restaurants.
Anyway, Issa says it's "regrettable" that we are here, and that we wouldn't be here if he got the documents he wants, which we recall are the ones "generated after February 4, 2011."
Wallace asks, "Give us an example of the kind of document that's all-that important." Which is sort of open-ended. But Issa surmises there is a letter that was sent by email from the head of the ATF saying that he had "concerns" and that "we want to see that." He testified about this on July 4, but they want to see the document, which seems superfluous, given the fact that this guy has already testified. (I guess the point is that the email went to Holder or something?) Anyway, one hopes for a smokinger gun, other than an email saying, "I'm worried about the contents of the documents you just gave Congress?"
Now Cummings will have a chance to yell about it. He says that everything is "extremely unfortunate" and "we don't need to be at this place." He criticizes Issa for sticking with the contention that Holder is to blame after two years of the evidence not pointing that way. He says that he is "calling on Speaker Boehner to come forth and show strong leadership," but if "showing strong leadership" doesn't mean "diving to the bottom of a bottle of Elijah Craig," that's not likely to happen.
Cummings says that Holder has "made it clear that he's willing to work with Congress," but only up to a point, right? Or else we wouldn't be doing this stuff? Anyway, Cummings says Holder is willing to "sit down and work with Congress on this issue."
Wallace wants to know what happens after Congress holds Holder in contempt. Again, given that Congress is synonymous these days with a "gang of toothless losers who deserve piles of scorn heaped on their head" it would ideal -- especially for those of us who aspire to be held in their contempt -- for nothing to happen. Nothing but laughter and perhaps a promise to chloroform the heads of all committees and drag them out into the woods, naked. But theoretically, Congress could hold some pointless lawsuits or ask the Sergeant-at-arms to go punch Holder in the face, or something.
Issa says that he will "continue his investigation" because he's doing it for Brian Terry, dead Border Patrol guy, who, as Cook points out, "Precisely the same weapons would have gone to precisely the same places if Fast and Furious had never been launched. Terry would still be dead." But, whatever, there's also the GSA scandal, which didn't result in as many people dying. There is a video of Terry's parents saying, "There's something they don't want you to know, something that they're trying to hide." What "they" don't want you to know is that the memory of your son is being desecrated for the purpose of scoring cheap political points.
Cummings, of course, buys into the melodrama, and has promised to bring Terry's killers to justice. Cummings says he has kept that promise, and will continue to keep that promise, and blah blah. "I see what guns can do," he says, referring to "killing people." He notes that the ongoing investigation has nothing to do with Brian Terry, which is objectively true. The investigation is about the ATF sending false documents, and in a way, this is a good analogue of the GSA scandal, where, outside or having evaded the purview of overseers, a far-off division of a major agency goes rogue.
Wallace explains the false letter that was sent and retracted, and chastises Issa for not holding public hearings over the ATF issues that Cummings just noted. Wallace also goes at the faultline Cook identified -- that the documents he's after now, while they make be politically embarrassing, doesn't have anything to do with the events that led to Terry's death or the gunwalking operation. Issa says that he needs to see the documents of after-the-fact discussions in order for his investigation to be properly informed. Okay...but, that's a lot like a prosecutor saying, "In order for me to have a good chance of winning, I'd like to know all about the defense team's strategy."
Wallace and Issa fall out over the latter's unwillingness to have public hearings of the people involved with the ATF. Issa says that the private hearings were sufficient, Cummings says they weren't. "I have asked [Issa] to bring the ATF director before us, he's refused to," Cummings says. He also says that all the documents they need to make their case can be obtained if everyone just calms down and stops pointing guns at Eric Holder's head.
Now we have a video of Nancy Pelosi alleging that all the focus on Holder is just a means by which the DoJ is hampered from investigating instances of voter suppression and voter caging, which they'd all but elevated to an art form in Florida until all of the people who were tasked with Governor Rick Scott's voter purge refused to work on it anymore. Still, Pelosi's accusation seems to have been shoehorned into this discussion to make it sound like a distraction.
Cumming is asked, "What is Nancy Pelosi talking about?" He says that there are people who look at the situation and wonder why Holder is the most uniquely picked on member of the Obama administration. Good question! He essentially comes from the same old clapped-out, Wall Street friendly culture as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner but OH MAN THERE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT HOLDER, I JUST CAN'T PUT MY FINGER ON IT???
Anyway, Cummings believes that with peace and love, we can all have our scandalous documents.
Does Issa have any evidence of a coverup? He says no, he just wants a bunch of documents that can't possibly contain the information he thinks they do, because of time being a linear process of events leading to events leading to events, but which probably contain a whole lot of "advisors" talking about "how to message on the Fast and Furious" issue and what focus groups say the most pleasing two-line explanation is, and other revelatory examples of our non-stop cynical politics. Hell, now I hope these documents come out! If you have them, just leak them to me!
Anyway, we'll have more of Issa being emo about documents in another hour or so. Now, here's T. Boone Pickens for some reason. (Maybe he is here to "stunt heavy on Drizzy.")
Anyway, this is for all the "Pickens Plan" nostalgics from back in 2008 when the world seemed new and and everyone was like, "OMG John Podesta is palling around with a Swift Boat Vets For Truth guttersnipe, and it means that magical faeries healed the world," when it really meant that America's aristocrats were just going to have their slap and tickle sessions in public, at the Democratic National Convention, in front of people from the Center for American Progress.
Anyway, Pickens is not into wind anymore, because it's not as cheap as it once was. But he's way into gas. And he lost a lot of money promoted wind, though it only sounds like a lot of money to us, but it's like a drop in the bucket to him. (It's like the money I lost on the Black and Decker coffeemaker that died two weeks ago. Don't worry, I bought a new Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and I have to say, it is one DEAD SEXY piece of kitchen machinery.)
"So now you're pushing natural gas, why?" asks Wallace, who apparently only learned who "T. Boone Pickens" was two or three minutes ago.
"We're going to go down as the dumbest generation..." says Pickens, before I cut him off, saying, "HA HA, too late!"
Wallace wants to know about Pickens' plan to convert the trucking fleet to natural gas, because he was apparently living in some remote yurt, as a hermit, for the past four years, in which the rest of us learned about this part of the Pickens plan, because it was relentlessly advertised to us.
Wallace points out that natural gas production doesn't really have the infrastructure to support it's distribution, all of which is likely to be ideally built upon land that Pickens owns, I'm guessing? His hoped-for infrastructure bill lost in the Senate. He says that he lost because "18-wheelers were deemed to be non-germane to highways" and also because of the filibuster. So he lost because the bill might have helped the economy, and the Senate superminority is trying to keep the economy from being helped. OK, got it.
Eric Cantor objected to it, because "Washington should not pick winners and losers." Pickens says, sure, or you can have this infrastructure "twice as fast and not have to pay anything for it." Pickens says that the Koch Brothers hate him, because they are oil importers and get huge kickbacks from the ethanol subsidy scam. I think we should settle this battle between elderly plutocrats by greasing them up with Wesson and forcing them to fight each other in some sort of Thunderdome.
Moving on to fracking, a popular way of obtaining natural gas in which you poison the water table forever with some toxic mix of chemicals that is apparently a trade secret, like the secret KFC recipe, only it turns your tap water into something you can set on fire. Pickens says "Give me an example" of anything bad ever happening, because of fracking!
"I've fracked over three-thousand wells myself," he says, pornographically.
Pickens says he is "in touch with a lot of people" and has made "hundreds of speeches," and again, it's sort of strange that Wallace seems to have never heard of this guy until today!
Is Pickens impressed with either Romney or Obama, and their energy plans? Pickens says that Obama has stopped talking about energy independence, and "now is the time to show up with a plan." He says Romney has "the skeleton of a plan" but he can't tell if it's one he likes or not. "This is an opportunity to rebuild our economy off the back of cheap energy," he says. Will he get involved in the race? He says he'll support the one "that has the energy plan for America." He figures that Romney will "show up with the plan," and doesn't think Obama will.
This was essentially the "proof of concept" meeting for a future Pickens Super PAC, basically.
Okay, let's panel with Brit Hume and Kirsten Powers and Nicolle Wallace and Jeff Zeleny.
Brit Hume says that the coming Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act is "huge." Awesome. Great talk, everybody. Hume thinks that if the court blows the law up, it will be to Obama's disadvantage, politically. If the Court doesn't blow it up, it will still be bad for Obama. Basically Obama made a fatal mistake, trying to keep poor people from dying all the time because of easily treatable ailments.
Powers agrees that the ruling is totally important, and if it gets struck down, it's bad for the president. But there are lots of popular components that will be hard to take away. The problem is that they are all knit together with the individual mandate, which keeps the "cost curve" bent away from the stratosphere. Wallace figures that this is an "opportunity" for the Romney campaign, because the GOP is good at "leading a philosophical discussion" on the matter. But he's also one of the few in the GOP who stopped having a philosophical discussion and actually did something about it. Unfortunately for Romney, and perhaps for lots of other people, what he did has gotten crazy unpopular, because craziness is now in vogue.
Zeleny reckons that the best case scenario for the White House is "just the mandate getting shut down." That's only because there are other ways the Court could rule that would set crazy new precedents, radically restricting the federal government from doing almost anything.
Zeleny adds that we should be open to the Supreme Court becoming an election-year theme, over the economy. Hume says, "Poo-poo face! Obama is always blaming people!" He also thinks Romney "should have a plan ready to go." (The plan will be the words "tort reform," written in crayon, on the American flag.)
Moving to the executive privilege story. Hume says that it's totally a big cover-up, and the documents being sought are clearly not the sort of "advisory" documents that are protected by the "strongest claims of privilege." Why does he think this? Ehh, no reason! He also figures that these documents are just Justice Department documents that don't involve the president, so why claim executive privilege over them. If you read John Cook's thing, you'll know he predicted this talking point!
In December 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote to George W. Bush asking him to invoke executive privilege over Department of Justice memos "containing advice and recommendations concerning whether or not particular criminal prosecutions should be brought." These were purely internal DOJ documents; there was no pretense that the president, his advisers, or anyone in the White House ever laid eyes on them. Bush complied with Ashcroft's request.
Wallace tries to explain the issue and the timing of the February 4, 2011 letter that spawned this whole mess. Wallace points out that the investigation into the gunwalking operation and the death of the border agent has already taken place. Hume says that Congress is entitled to know about DoJ processes (they are entitled to try to find out about them, anyway) and goes on and on about how this is all about the "aftermath" of Terry's death. It should be pointed out, of course, that the "aftermath" of his death still occurred long before February 4, 2011.
Powers makes the obvious point, "This is just about going after Holder." Hume is like, "What about the false letter?" Powers looks at him and points out that it came from the ATF, which is all stuff we learned about in the "aftermath of the death of a border patrol agent," which is not even a recent aftermath.
Nicolle Wallace is called upon to talk about the six times the Bush White House asserted executive privilege. She points out that when you invoke executive privilege, all you end up doing is bringing lots of attention to yourself. She also says that it exacerbates all the tension with Holder. But at this point, the summer humidity exacerbates that tension.
Wallace wants to know what the Romney campaign thinks about this, and Zeleny thinks that Romney is pretty chill with this, so long as there isn't a heap of blowback that keeps people from focusing on the economy.
By the way, maybe the White House invited this media crapstorm over executive privilege precisely because they know they're only hiding a nothing-burger and in a final analysis, this will look like precisely the obstructionist witch-hunt they want people to remember when they vote. This is, of course, the "eleventh dimensional chess" argument, and in my experience, everyone in politics that you think is playing "eleventh dimensional chess" is actually just playing checkers and is even more stupid about it than you could have possibly conceived.
But, you know, piss it...there's a first time for everything, including the possibility that someone in American politics is legitimately tactically brilliant.
THIS WEEK WITH PROBABLY GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, MAYBE
No, of course, it's not George Stephanopoulos, it's Jake Tapper. I almost don't know why Stephanopoulos is associated with this show, anymore? Am I just coincidentally picking the wrong weeks to watch this show.
People, I know, wonder about the whole system I have in picking the shows to watch. The system is I have no system. I watch Fox News Sunday because it's on at nine, and if I wait until ten to start writing this stuff, I don't finish until 3:30, and that's terrible. Then I pick two other shows, based upon the following criteria:
1. Oh, is that guy on? Probably that's important!
2. Oh, hey, the nice person from ABC/CBS/NBC sent me an embargoed transcript, so I can actually work on this Saturday afternoon, while I'm watching BBC America.
3. Look at that MEET THE PRESS line-up: where does it score on the "MAKES ME WANT TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE FACE" rating scale. (I want, to watch it on the 6-8 'sweet-spot' because I know readers enjoy it when I'm slightly miserable. I avoid it when I know it's a 9-10, because I will probably shoot myself in the face.)
4. Good lord, John McCain again? Tells TiVo to stop recording.
Now, lot's of you are all, "Why don't you watch Chris Hayes or Fareed Zakaria?" The answer, basically, is that I'm inclined to think that those shows are pretty good, and I'm here to summarize terrible shows, so you needn't do so yourself. Also, Chris' show is on at a time of day that I just find to be totally demented and out of step with my lifestyle, which is, "UGGGH the morning needs to DIE, in FIRE."
(The CNN people, who are all ridiculous, seem to think that it's a good thing for me to be watching their show, and that it's vitally important brand integration. I almost NEVER watch CNN's non-Zakaria offerings on Sunday (or ever, because it is an eternally-collapsing heap of human wreckage and idiocy). That includes their version of a Sunday news show, and that dumb Howie Kurtz show about media critics grabbing their nutsack in public and squealing.
Still, on the image that accompanies this article on the home page features CNN's Candy Crowley (I think?) because they begged me to include it. "Please don't leave us out of your liveblog, chronicling what awful people we are and the societal wreckage of our shows," the CNN P.R. department has told me, in quotes I am paraphrasing.
So, anyway, when the shows you like become relentlessly terrible, I'll start watching them, and you can take a break. Just let me know, okay!
(Anyway, sometimes THIS WEEK and FACE THE NATION are okay to watch, in that they are not MEET THE PRESS. Which is a lot like saying dislocating your kneecaps are better than a headwound, but anyway.)
Anyway, here's Darrel Issa again! For some reason, they are showing scenes from the Vin Diesel movie, "Fast and Furious?" Maybe THIS WEEK is now a satire on Sunday news shows, which would explain why Peggy Noonan is always on.
TAPPER: And that brings us to today. Congressman Issa, this is a mess. And Democrats say you are not negotiating in good faith. On Tuesday, when you met with the attorney general, he offered you documents, including some that are not covered by the subpoena, and a briefing, and he said this would satisfy the questions you have. You rejected the deal. Why?
ISSA: Well, Jake, it's regrettable that we're here. This is not a place I want to be.
Then there is a monologue about Brian Terry, and then:
ISSA: One of the problems is, last Tuesday, 11th hour, after an exchange of e-mails, they said, let's have the meeting. I had the meeting. They came with nothing, not even an offer in -- in the form of a piece of paper. What they said orally was, we will brief you, we will then give you the information we believe supports that briefing, but you have to first agree to dismiss your subpoenas and your contempt.
Issa then says you can't "play liars poker" when there is a dead person in the room. But that dead person would still be a dead person if there was no "Fast and Furious" program, or an ATF failure.
Tapper is all, aren't you just a huge partisan hack, and Issa is all, "Nuh-uh, no way, dude!" He continues: "But the point is, we're past that part of the discovery, relative to contempt. We know there's a lot of wrong things, and we want to get to fixing it. What we're talking about now is, when we get lied to, when the American people get lied to, there can't be oversight if there's lying, and there cannot -- the Supreme Court has held pretty clearly, there cannot be executive privilege over criminal cover-up or cover-up of a crime. Lying to Congress is a crime. We have every right to see documents that say, did you know, when did you know, what did you know, including even the president."
Issa is going to send a stern letter to the president, and he hopes that will lead to more documents being offered. Issa says, "If those documents say what Eric Holder says they say, we might, in fact, dismiss contempt in -- in either case." Well, the problem here is that IF those documents DO say what Holder says they say (and ONLY if they say what Holder says they say), then the White House is ABOSLUTELY going to wait until Issa is really red-faced and crazy and puffy and jumping up and down in a Cardinal Richielieu costume to release them, so that in releasing them, they extract the largest possible political punishment on the GOP.
Jake wants to know why it was okay for Bush to invoke executive privilege, but not now. Issa basically doesn't answer the question, other than to say that executive privilege is okay "if it's top executives speaking or preparing and -- to the president." Tapper cites the Supreme Court, who said that "the privilege recognizes the valid need for protection of communications between high government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties...so it wasn't just for presidential communications."
Issa circles back to brass tacks: "We're looking for how the American people were lied on February 4, 2011, and 10 months passed before the truth came out from the administration."
For hopefully the final time: any documents that read something like, "Hey, let's totally cover up this Fast and Furious thing together, love Barry!" were written prior to February 4, 2011, when whatever lying or error of human judgment resulted in the letter that went to Charles Grassley. What was probably written AFTER February 4th, are documents that read, "Holy effing poop on a Pop-Tart, Eric, this is totally embarrassing for me, you'd better tell me what I need to know to defuse this politically, xoxoxo BHO (PS i am super pissed at you, dude!)" All of which would be totally embarrassing, but it's not a crime to be a cynical political stooge.
(Can you imagine if it was? We'd be hanging so many people at all times that we'd turn to GAME OF THRONES for relief from all the barbarism!)
I'm guessing, anyway! I don't have HBO, because I am an awful American.
Jake finishes off by asking if Issa really believes the strange, paranoiac, NRA ghost story that he's been telling, that this failed program is a Trojan horse for a bunch of anti-gun laws that the Obama administration has never ever demonstrated even a slight desire to implement. Issa says, "We have e-mails from people involved in this that are talking about using what they're finding here to support the -- basically assault weapons ban or greater reporting."
Ha, well, those would be the sort of emails that you would invoke executive priviliege over, if that's your super secret gun control plans for the Illuminati! As they didn't, maybe everyone should not worry about it. (Let's also focus on the fact that apparently, if you are Darrell Issa, you are prepared to make goofy-ass hay out of anything you find in those documents, which is probably why you'd want to keep your cynical election-year calculations and messaging strategy under wraps.)
Okay, so now we'll have some paneling, with George Will and Hilary Rosen and Peggy Noonan (who is sitting there with her eyes closed in the permanent facial expression of the American Smell My Own Delicious Fart Smug-o-crat) and Xavier Becerra (whose name I shall now spell many different ways, because I am terrible) and also Major Garrett.
Will says that Obama has the right to claim privilege and that Issa has the right to be mad about it, and there is "a tension" here that goes all the way back to George Washington and the Battle of the Wabash, for some reason. "There is no clear doctrine," he says, "and this will be played out past November, after which everyone will have forgotten about it."
Rosen says that Holder closed down a dumb program and taken responsibility for it and this is just a Republican witch hunt that's taken up the House's time. (But isn't that a good thing? Would you want Boehner's House trying to legislate things?) Becerra agrees, however, saying this is "just a fishing expedition."
Noonan, however, thinks that the Obama administration "angered Congress" and that was a mistake because you know Congress! Totally accommodating up until the point they learned about the ATF doing stuff with guns!
Garrett says that people should be "responsive in a way that's respectful" to overseers. That is sort of like saying that we should burn Capitol Hill to the ground and start over, because who is ever responsive to the people who are supposed to be guarding our well-being? I've got a book of matches! Shall we meet, today, at four o'clock, outside the Senate Banking Committee, and get started?
George Will wants to say that this is all related to the White House passing immigration reform by fiat, and also all these foreign policy leaks, and what? Rosen says that it's actually about kneecapping Holder so that he can't investigate voter suppression. She and Will fight about that for a while, and Tapper eventually changes the subject, or at least forces his panel to listen to a bunch of Congresscritters blathering at each other.
Moving to the Supreme Court's pending decision on the Affordable Care Act. Becerra, not surprisingly, thinks that the court will not strike down the law, and the law is awesome, but hey, you never know because the Supreme Court is secretly awful and political because of the Citizens United ruling. Essentially, he sort of warns the Supreme Court that the law has saved many lives, and does the Court really want to undo that? (He is sort of wasting his breath at this point, as the Justices have long had their minds made up about that.)
Noonan thinks that if the law gets struck down, it will be "dreadful" for Obama. But it's dreadful for everyone, politically, as no one has a "plan B." She thinks that the ruling might prompt a "plan B," and that this time it will be "bipartisan," which is to laugh.
Garrett is comparing something to Red Bull, and whatever it was, I'm not going back to find out. Suffice it to say, Garrett would like people to "have wings," but based upon the taste he traditionally shows in libations, I'm guessing he would not want you to ruin perfectly good vodka, with super-caffeinated anti-freeze.
More paneling, moving to "the Latino vote," which is a topic you naturally want to hear from George Will on, because God knows the Will totally has the pulse of "La Raza." Will says that Obama took advantage with his DREAM Act-by-fiat, and Romney is stuck having to "unring the bell" of going way to the right on immigration during the debates. Will goes on to note that it's odd that Romney had a harsher stance on immigration as a Massachusetts governor than border staters like Bush, Perry, and McCain. (Though McCain got pretty harsh, when it turns out that his principles alone couldn't buy him a presidential nomination.)
Tapper notes that Latinos aren't single-issue voters, and Becerra says this is true -- the economy is much more important. But he just thinks that Romney's been particularly vicious to the Latino community that they are alienated from him in general. He goes on to claim that Obama is routinely better received in Miami than Romney and, well...I'd have to see that with my own eyes, actually.
Garrett says that the most interesting part of the GOP reaction was how quiet it was, and he speculates that the Romney campaign urged against a big internecine fight over the matter. That would be a smart move, but I'm not sure that Romney has the clout to dictate to Congressional Republicans yet. (I figure though, that the recognition that a lengthy session of intra-party agita over the issue was identified as something to avoid, though.)
Rosen thinks that Obama "has a leg up" on Romney with both the immigration issue, and with the way he speaks "aspirationally" about the economy.
Becerra says that Romney totally "threw Marco Rubio under the bus" by "not coming close to wanting to do what Rubio wanted to do on the DREAM Act." Becerra's logic is, if what Obama did was a "baby DREAM act" then Rubio was in favor of an even bigger, DREAMIER DREAM Act, and if Romney can't support the little version than Rubio's version must be even more terrifying. Okay! Except that Romney and Rubio clearly wanted to kick this can down the road and just suggest that something would be proposed and debated in the future, which contrasts the way Obama back-burnered the issue until it became politically advantageous to offer a half-measure.
Also, as Garrett just pointed out, the GOP didn't fall out all over each other over the matter, so...I think that's just Becerra wanting that to have happened.
It's pretty weird that Romney had to publicly promise that Marco Rubio was being vetted for the Vice Presidency. Here's a fun fact: lots of people who famously did not become Vice President were "vetted!" Picking someone you don't know anything about and hoping for the best is actually a recent "Fun-novation" introduced by the McCain campaign.
Rosen says that if Romney wants to win, he should pick Tim Pawlenty, because he is "experienced" but not "noisy." She says that Pawlenty and Romney have had a "bromance" that will be fully explored in the next season of "Downton Abbey." Noonan says that Romney should not choose Sarah Palin, and recommends Rob Portman, because he is also boring and experienced, and also he has "a great ability to debate," because he is always getting to play the Democrat in mock-debates.
Noonan has heard that Biden is "gaffe-prone!" She figures that maybe this year will be the year where the entire election comes down to the Vice-Presidential Debate, where Rob Portman throws his super-powered BEIGE SHADE on the ill-prepared Biden, who might accidentally come out in favor of gay marriage again, like some kind of idiot gaffe-head! Then the media will be like, "LOL, LOOK AT BIDEN! He's so into ordinary people having justice! GAFFE-DORK NYAHH NYAHH!"
Yep, that's pretty much what American politics is!
Now the panel is going to talk about the new Aaron Sorkin show? Oh, no no no no no. This is where I get off, thanks!
FACE THE NATION
Have you ever forgotten to buy your allergy medicine for one day, and then the next morning you woke up and sneezed seven hundred times as your eyes dripped stingy ooze for hours, because your allergies just will not give you a break, and you have to watch FACE THE NATION first before you can run out to the pharmacy and get some new allergy pills to eat? That's our topic for discussion today, hopefully. WHY WON'T DARRELL ISSA SUBPOENA MY HISTAMINES? I would describe my nasal passages as both fast and furious.
No, instead...Rick Perry is here? Uhm...okay. Rick Perry says that "Governor Romney is very focused on the issues that are important," and that Obama is terrible, because: stimulus, shut up! Meanwhile, Romney wants the private sector to "create jobs" but it's weird that there's a hold up, considering the private sector has been crazily profitable.
Schieffer changes the subject away from Perry just blandly reciting talking points, and wants Perry to account for his stance on immigration. He once referred to Romney -- and, well, everyone at the debates that was yelling at him, such hurty noises about immigration, make it stop, make it stop, OH NOW I FORGOT HOW TO COUNT! -- as "heartless," and Schieffer's all, "Where do you come off, sirrah?"
Perry says that he was talking about the economic impact that immigration has on the states and it's totally not the same thing as what Obama is doing with his mini-DREAM Act action. Romney was totally talking about securing the border, that's all! And that's what governors talk about, with each other! And anyway, FAST AND FURIOUS, Bob! Also, Obama is totally "Nixonian" with that Executive Privilege stuff, which also means that Obama is Reaganing, and Bushwhacked, and Ford-a-board, and Carterial.
Perry ends this strange rant, "Don't you agree with that?" COME ON BOB, DON'Y YOU AGREE? I really NEED this, Bob! I got to have something in my life that's good, Bob. OH JUST GIVE ME THIS!
Schieffer is kind of like, whatever, and asks Perry what he thinks should happen with Fast and Furious. Perry says that the Fast and Furious guns killed people, and Watergate was just a "second rate burglary." SO TRUE. It wasn't a COOL AS CAPER like in The Italian Job or Inside Man!
Actually, I have a really FIRST-RATE crime Congress can investigate! It's that hilarious little caper where people made synthetic derivatives out of predatory loans and other toxic junk and everyone stuffed their little piggie faces until they were massively overleveraged and the whole scheme collapsed, and a few billion dollars were taken from taxpayers to make the cock-ups all better again, and all these jobs went to employment heaven where they now dance with harps in the fields of Job Elysium forever.
Anyway, Rick Perry seems to think that the history of "executive privilege" goes from Nixon to Obama, and Nixon's was like "no big deal, dude."
He would also like the White House to be transparent, which is hilarious coming from a guy who avoided debating most of his life as a Texas politician, for reasons that are now, sadly, pretty obvious to everyone.
Schieffer wants to keep trying to drive a wedge between Perry and Romney, because shiny! He asks after Perry's insistence that Romney was a vulture capitalist, and Perry just says, "Well, that attack didn't work in the primary, so it won't work in the general." Okay! Good to know that you were just using the attack cynically, and you don't actually have an honest critique of "vulture capitalism." Perry's advice to Obama is for him to listen to his fellow Democrats who have whored themselves out to private equity interests.
Schieffer is sort of like, "So, that's all that criticism meant to you" and Perry is all: "Yes, I'm basically pretty awful."
Will Perry go out and campaign for Romney? Perry says he totally is! The Romney campaign is sending him to California, a state Romney has no chance of winning anyway. Go have fun, "campaigning" for us, Rick, says the Romney campaign.
Now Tim Pawlenty is here to talk about zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...he won't be Obama's vice president...he could best serve Romney in other ways...please don't ask me to be the vice-president...zzzzzzzzzzzzz...I was totally at this Romney retreat because I am part of a family of awesome Romney supporters...I like picnics...do you like this orange tie, because my wife is really weirded out by how bright it is...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...anyway, I am like, totally invited to hang out with Romney's best donors and it's swell...super PACs are totally allowed to coordinate, as long as it's not about the "expenditure of money"...will Romney have to get specific about his plans?...uhhhh, I don't know, hasn't he been specific?...I'm just going to say he's been specific, okay...back to sleep...this tie is really giving me strange dreams...last night I dreamed that I was in that old REM video with the golden people that was based on that Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel and it was really weird...ughhhhhhh...zzzzzzzzzzz...I don't want to have that dream again, anyway, Obama is terrible and where is his Medicaid reform proposal...what, you say it's the Affordable Care Act...I don't think so, but I will mow Bob Schieffer's lawn if I am wrong about that...Romney won't let me mow his lawn, even though I have repeatedly asked.
Bob Schieffer says he lives in am apartment. Pawlenty is like, "Oh, man! Seriously? That was my awesome line."
Now Antonio "Chillaraigosa" Villaraigosa is here, to talk about the Latino vote, and how terrible Romney is at earning it.
Schieffer says that Romney is speaking the truth about Obama doing nothing on immigration, because I guess Schieffer was on vacation during the lame duck session when the GOP Senators filibustered the DREAM Act, which Obama was ready to sign into law. Villaraigosa says that Romney has amnesia, because of precisely this reason. But Romney isn't the one who has "amnesia." Schieffer has amnesia. Romney is doing this thing known as "lying."
Anyway, Villaraigosa says that if "Romney wants to come clean about what he wants to do, he should do it." That would conflict with Romney's current strategy of "saying nothing specific about anything because it forces the Obama campaign to keep their attacks focused off the "choice" Romney represents. (Remember, Romney wants a "referendum" election, Obama wants a "choice" election. I want a "let's see if we can just do this in a month instead of two years of media silly season bullshit constantly being shot at my brain by people on teevee" election. I will be the election year's biggest loser, like always!)
Villaraigosa continues to surrogate his ass off, decrying Romney's Bain Capital job-killing and his Massachusetts debt-running up and his current "tax cuts for wealthy people that we don't pay for" ideating.
Does Villaraigosa want to talk about Marco Rubio? No, not really. Okay, everyone go home then!
Scheiffer, who still has to awkwardly give his editorial comment halfway through the show because some CBS affiliates haven't gotten with the program and given Face The Nation an hour of running time yet, says that now that the vice presidential speculation is heating up, everyone should remember that it's mostly nonsense, because inevitably the president chooses someone who either totally criticized him on the campaign trail...or Dick Cheney names himself...or someone picks Dan Quayle because why not? Schieffer says, Romney probably won't pick Sarah Palin. So, you know, that was useful.
Vice Presidential Speculation: Use It Responsibly!
Okay, so, I think we just have some panel discussion to get through and then I can go pulp a box of Chlor-Trimeton and shove it into my eyeballs.
Oh, great, this next part is Stephanie Cutter and Eric Fehrnstrom, yelling at each other. Schieffer points out that they have already yelled at each other on Twitter, so naturally, you want to snap them up and put them on teevee.
Ferhnstrom is like, wow, isn't it amazing that there was no Twitter the last time there was a campaign? Twitter launched in 2006. It just wasn't populated by douchebag campaign strategists until 2011. Those first five years of Twitter were awesome, mostly for that reason.
Stephanie Cutter agrees that Twitter "is another mode of communication that we didn't have four years ago." YES YOU DID HAVE IT FOUR YEARS AGO, YOU IDIOT.
"We didn't have Facebook eight years ago," Cutter says. Facebook launched in February of 2004. We had it, it just wasn't shot through with toxic political waste yet.
Cutter figures that Twitter is not a replacement for traditional campaign communication, which is good considering that Twitter is now just terrible campaign consultants like these two and jackass bloggers like me, throwing shade at one another 24 hours a day, waiting until we all get sent to Hell together for all eternity.
Cutter thinks that Obama is great and will win. Fehrnstrom thinks that Romney is great and will win. The only thing I care about is that Stephanie Cutter doesn't have any strange "H" in her last name that I have to remember, so she wins.
Ferhnhsthrhomh says that Romney is the person to get the economy moving again. Cutter wants to "make some points" about that, that include: Romney's 59-point economic plan sucks, Romney's corporate tax plan sucks, and outsourcing jobs suck. If we can say, then, that "things that suck" are intrinsically "sucky," what does that say about Obama's bold stance against all the things that people totally think suck! CHECKMATE, FHERHENSTHROHMMH.
Also, Cutter read a story about how terrible Romney was in the Washington Post, and she was all, "Wow! Look at Romney, being so brazenly awful, in my opinion, specifically the opinion I have been hired to have."
Fehehhrhrhrhrhhhehhenstrom says that Cutter is filled with lies and the newspapers are filled with lies, and that Romney is actually totally awesome, and hey -- why aren't we applauding the fact that there is a Coke plant in China! MAKE THOSE CHINESE PEOPLE DRINK OUT MALTED BATTERY ACID SOFT DRINKS.
Cutter is like, "WHATEVER, FEHRNSTROM, or should I say, 'FEH-STORM?' Because you are a storm of 'Feh.' FEH. FEH. FEH. And are you saying that Bain never sent a job overseas?"
FEHEHRHEHEHEHHHH says that Obama is the REAL outsourcing/offshoring Cloverfield Monster.
"Well, I'm sorry we have to end it there," says Schieffer, who is in all likelihood lying.
Here is the video for "The Cutter," by Echo And The Bunnymen, via YouTube, which Stephanie Cutter is probably like, "WE DIDN'T HAVE THIS IN 2008, BOB, DUH."
Now it's time for the roundtable daisychain, with Joe Klein and Dan Balz and Norah O'Donnell and John Dickerson.
Joe Klein talked to a guy with a fiddle, and learned all sorts of things about politics, from him. He has learned that voters on the campaign trail are "angry that nothing has gotten done." Oh, hey! You mean that great plan to send a bunch of liberals to Congress in 2008 and a bunch of Tea Partiers to Congress in 2010 has hit a snag somewhere, and now nothing is happening in Congress? Yeah, it really is an unexpected outcome!
Dan Balz says that people are angry, and disappointed on Obama, and Romney is a cipher, and the Obama campaign is trying to "disqualify" him, but if the economy doesn't improve, that could determine the winner, and then we'll just have our dusty memories of campaign consultants talking about Twitter to remember this election cycle by.
Dickerson says that the President would prefer to get into a debate with Romney over what Romney wants to do in the future, which is probably why Romney hasn't stipulated anything yet.
Norah O'Donnell thinks that maybe it would be a good thing, if Obama's health care reform got struck down by the Supreme Court. Because that's who health care reform impacts, just the President, no one else. Also: You are wrong, Norah O'Donnell.
Also, the media doesn't have to wait until the Supreme Court ruling to ask what Romney would replace Obamacare with. You can do this right now.
Joe Klein, by the way, is the worst human on the planet today. "The most amazing thing about [Obamacare] is that no one knows what's in the bill. I blame the President for that." Uhm...you know Joe Klein is the man who's job it is to tell people what's in ObamaCare. He literally has a column in Time magazine and goes on teevee, and he could easily dispense information to other humans, as per the conventional definition of journalism. The guy literally spent the last few months walking the dusty-ass byways of America, talking to fiddle-players, a trip that he wants people to give him a cookie for making, because HECK MAN, JOE KLEIN SACRIFICED, he had to spend time with people who make less than $80,000 and whatnot. He could have literally gone door-to-door, person to person, telling them all what was in Obamacare. So, screw it! I'm blaming Joe Klein.
Moving on to holding Eric Holder in contempt. Will the House do it? Dickerson says, "Their base loves this issue." So, yeah, they are going to hold Holder in contempt, but they will probably prefer to "hit it and move on," like a Newt Gingrich marriage, because if it absorbs too much attention it will be bad for them electorally.
Balz predicts that the argument will "go on for many months without a clear resolution," like a Newt Gingrich marriage.
Klein says that in Ohio and Michigan, the auto bailout has proven to be popular, and people aren't "wildly ecstatic" about Romney. He blames Barack Obama for that.
O'Donnell says that right now, there is a period of candidates, trying to define their opponents. Later, there will be conventions. Then there will be some debates. Eventually Election Day will come. A few weeks later, it will be Thanksgiving. People will eat turkey. Then there will be a Superbowl. Chances are good it will be won by a "football team."
Is there really more to talk about? No, Face The Nation is going to pad out the hour with a "Face The Nation" flashback, which is a total Betsy Fischer move, Face The Nation! Be careful.
Okay, well, I am off to send a team of nanobots into my nasal passages to destroy allergens with tiny, little nanoguns, or something. I hope you get to spend the rest of your Sunday in peaceful repose! Once again, we will be away from our desk next Sunday, so there will be no liveblog. Probably everyone will be OMGZing over the Supreme Court, so, I'm sorry about that. I promise that I'll be back on July 8, to comfort everyone.
Have a great week!
[The liveblog returns two Sundays from now. Until then, you can go to my Rebel Mouse page for lots of interesting Sunday reading diversions.]
For more than two weeks, the University of Virginia has been in an uproar over the abrupt resignation of school President Teresa Sullivan. Sullivan stepped down after just two years in office, citing "philosophical differences" with the institution's governing Board of Visitors.
The June 10 announcement shocked students and faculty, who had just finished graduation festivities and had begun settling in for a hot, quiet summer surrounded by the Charlottesville school's neoclassical columns and red brick architecture. Sullivan is highly regarded within the academic community, and her supporters have rallied to her defense, rocking the campus with massive protests demanding her reinstatement.
Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories, wanted the school to institute austerity measures and re-engineer its academic offerings around inexpensive, online education, the emails reveal. Led by Rector Helen Dragas, a real estate developer appointed six years ago, the board shared a guiding vision that the university could, and indeed should, be run like a Fortune 500 company.
The controversy, which threatens to seriously damage one of the country's oldest and most prestigious public universities, has implications beyond its own idyllic, academic refuge. For some, it is emblematic of how the cult of corporate expertise and private-sector savvy has corralled the upper reaches of university life, at the expense of academic freedom and "unprofitable" areas of study.
"There is this sort of shift in the zeitgeist," says Tal Brewer, chair of UVA's Philosophy Department. Brewer sees a new, heightened cultural "adoration of the business mind as capable of bringing clarity, organization and efficiency to any kind of institution...I just think that's a deep mistake."
In an era in which the best and the brightest financiers laid the groundwork for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the Supreme Court allowed corporate sponsors and wealthy donors to upend the political system with unlimited campaign contributions, Brewer says he sees the upheaval in Charlottesville as more of the same.
"What's happening at other kinds of institutions around the country is now coming home to roost in higher education," Brewer says.
'WE CAN'T AFFORD TO WAIT'
Sullivan spent most of her career rising through the ranks at the University of Texas and was a deeply respected provost at the University of Michigan before coming to the University of Virginia in 2010. As the first female president at a school that did not even admit women until 1971, Sullivan's appointment was a significant milestone.
Outwardly, her first two years appeared congenial and uncontroversial. Sullivan undertook initiatives to bolster the faculty’s ability to teach more intimately, cede greater budget discretion to the academic departments, and attempted to close what many acknowledge to be a "reputation gap" with graduate programs. Pushing for more budget control and better quality programs won Sullivan strong allies within the student body and faculty, according to faculty members interviewed by HuffPost.
The board never formally evaluated Sullivan's performance. But the emails obtained by the the Cavalier Daily demonstrate that Dragas worked closely with her vice rector, Mark Kington, planning Sullivan’s ouster -- while shielding their machinations from students and professors.
The rationale for the leadership change is as strange as the secrecy. Dragas and Kington appear to have built their case against Sullivan from just a few media articles that offer vague praise for the use of Internet technology in higher education, according to the emails.
Dragas displayed particular esteem for a David Brooks column in an email to Kington, in which the New York Times columnist touts the sort of online education initiatives undertaken by the for-profit University of Phoenix. "What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web," Brooks wrote.
"Don't dismiss the for-profit colleges and universities, either," proclaimed John Chubb and Terry Moe in a Wall Street Journal editorial. "Institutions such as the University of Phoenix -- and it is hardly alone -- have embraced technology aggressively."
Dragas, who sent this article to Kington, included a reminder in one of the emails obtained by the Cavalier that this was, apparently, "Why we can't afford to wait."
This emphasis on the for-profit education sector has been particularly dismaying to UVA faculty, especially within the context of the budget cuts Dragas reportedly sought in programs including the Classics and German departments. For-profit schools are not well-regarded in the academic community, and have been embroiled in scandals in the past few years for exploitive practices that include recruiting students eligible for federal loans and grants, but graduating fewer than half the enrollees.
A Chronicle of Higher Education article, which Dragas also sent Kington, characterized the traditional pursuit of academic excellence as something that “strangled” innovation, and argued that "the pace of change is stuck somewhere between sluggish and glacial."
"College leaders need to move beyond talking about transformation before it's too late," the article urged.
"Good article," Dragas commented to Kington in her email.
None of the emails between Dragas and Kington suggest that either read serious studies on technological opportunities in the classroom, or considered how UVA's current programs could be adapted to new Internet-based techniques. They did not appoint a commission to make recommendations or conduct a study of their own.
"Reading a few op-eds and articles in the Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Chronicle of Higher Ed does not qualify you to make definitive judgments about hugely complex issues such as the promise and perils of online learning," says John Arras, director of the UVA Bioethics Program. "We are dealing here for the most part with a bunch of amateurs who think they know everything, but really know very little about the academic culture and what makes us tick."
The board never held a formal vote on ousting Sullivan. Instead, according to the Washington Post, Dragas and Kington told Sullivan they had rounded up the votes necessary to remove her, and told her to resign or face being formally fired. Sullivan's resignation was announced two days later.
"The board believes this environment calls for a much faster pace of change in administrative structure, in governance, in financial resource development and in resource prioritization and allocation," Dragas told a meeting of university vice presidents and deans on June 10. "We do not believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of incremental, marginal change. The world is simply moving too fast."
Dragas, Kington, and Sullivan did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite her affection for cost-cutting, Dragas hired Hill+Knowlton Strategies, a crisis management public relations firm. According to The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly magazine, the bill for those services will run from $50,000 to $100,000, and will be paid by the University of Virginia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that administers the school’s economic assets.
But the pricey PR has failed to quell the uproar. Much of the furor has been fueled by the board's continued refusal to publicly explain why its members felt Sullivan had fallen short.
Calls for Sullivan to be reinstated have reached a fever pitch. A board-appointed interim president from the undergraduate business school, Carl Zeithaml, wrote an email to faculty members on Friday morning saying he would step aside, given the "enormous groundswell of support" for Sullivan.
Zeithaml's refusal to accept the office puts the board in a difficult position, making it hard to see who, if anyone would be willing to replace Sullivan amid the turmoil.
'STRATEGIC DYNAMISM'
Dragas' obsession with rapid change is part of a corporate management philosophy called "strategic dynamism" also advocated by some of her top allies.
After Sullivan's resignation was announced, Peter Kiernan, a former Goldman Sachs partner and wealthy hedge fund manager, sent an email to his colleagues on the board of UVA's acclaimed Darden School of business supporting the ouster.
"Several weeks ago I was contacted by two important Virginia alums about working with Helen Dragas on this project, particularly from the standpoint of the search process and the strategic dynamism effort," Kiernan wrote, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
"The decision of the Board of Visitors to move in another direction stems from their concern that the governance of the university was not sufficiently tuned to the dramatic changes we all face: funding, Internet, technology advances, the new economic model," Kiernan wrote, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, a UVA professor and writer for Slate, who obtained a copy of the email. "These are matters for strategic dynamism rather than strategic planning.
"You should be comforted by the fact that both the Rector and Vice Rector, Helen Dragas and Mark Kington, are Darden alums," Kiernan wrote. "Trust me, Helen has things well in hand."
Kiernan denies having any direct role in Sullivan's ouster and told HuffPost he resigned from the Darden board after his email became public, "out of love for the school."
Protesters pushing back against the board have bonded in mutual mockery over this term, featuring the slogan disparagingly on signs, passing around satires of the philosophy, comparing it to narcissism.
And that's the core of the crisis at UVA. The board is not simply more attuned to corporate interests and ideas than those of higher education professionals -- the board quite literally is a cadre of corporate elites.
The 16-member UVA Board of Visitors is appointed by the governor. Former Gov. Tim Kaine (D) named half the current members, and Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) brought on the other half. In addition to Dragas, board members include a coal company magnate, a Wall Street professional, a top lawyer for General Electric, a nursing home executive, a beer distribution entrepreneur, the son of conservative televangelist Pat Robertson and other business elites.
Many are UVA alumni, but only a few have any professional experience in higher education. The UVA board differs sharply in that respect from some other top-notch schools, private and public. Harvard, for instance, features 10 academics.
The current slate of board members have given over $2.1 million to Republican and Democratic political endeavors in recent years, according to a HuffPost analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Virginia Public Access Project. The donations cover every corner of the political spectrum, from obscure House races to the presidency to the Karl Rove-linked super PAC American Crossroads. They include roughly $1.2 million given to political action committees run by Kaine and McDonnell. Companies owned by board members or that employ board members have given still more.
Only one member of the board, non-voting student representative Hillary Hurd, has not given money to political campaigns.
This heavy preference for politically connected elites over academic professionals in Virginia public higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon, according to John Casteen III, who served as president of UVA for the 20 years prior to Sullivan. As the state secretary of education from 1982 until 1985, Casteen was involved in selecting UVA board members.
"Political contributions to our governors have become more important factors in the selection of our board members," Casteen told HuffPost. "The question of whether or not people who are political allies and are identified popularly as having been donors to campaigns, that issue never came up back when I was serving on the governor's staff."
Casteen's dissatisfaction with the UVA board is especially noteworthy in light of his own professional background. He served on the board of Wachovia Bank while he was president of UVA and joined the board of tobacco giant Altria after leaving the university.
Virginia's governor offered a cautious defense of the board in a statement last week, celebrating its members' financial wherewithal.
"The members of the Board of Visitors are almost all alumni," Gov. McDonnell said. "They are people who are highly successful and deeply committed and have great love for the University of Virginia. Many have given sacrificially of their money and their time over the years."
Fetishizing corporate expertise has become a common in politics. Mitt Romney has made his business experience a tenet of his presidential campaign. Republicans on Capitol Hill recite the mantra about private-sector "job creators" being the keys to economic growth.
The belief in the universal prowess of corporate elites is not limited to Republicans. Democrats -- including former President Bill Clinton, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker -- also have attacked President Barack Obama's efforts to portray Romney and the private equity industry as disconnected from the concerns of everyday citizens.
With bipartisan support for the idea that the accumulation of piles of money connotes expertise, analysts say they now fear that universities will become beholden to the same mindset.
"I don't think necessarily the Boards of Visitors in the Virginia public institutions are the worst example," says Robert Kreiser of the American Association of University Professors. "Texas is the place where this has gone to the extreme, where first [George] Bush and now [Rick] Perry have been filling the boards with political appointees who are favorably disposed to a view of higher education, which is very corporatist and not understanding of what the academic mission should be about."
The professors' group has called for Sullivan's reinstatement and Dragas' resignation.
"The performance of the UVA Board was less than what we need from governing boards in American higher education," says Richard Legon, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. "The UVA board missed a sensitivity to the broader community and engaged in what I call top-down management, which they have the authority to do, but which is not consistent with an inclusive approach valued in higher education."
The crisis is now reaching what may be its most critical moment. In the face of heavy criticism over his handling of the situation, McDonnell wrote a sternly worded letter to the board, warning that he would request the resignations of every member if the situation is not resolved by Tuesday's board meeting. Dragas responded with similar aggression.
"We alone are appointed to make these decisions on behalf of the university, free of influence from outside political, personal or media pressure," Dragas said in a statement.
The school's faculty continues to challenge the legal legitimacy of Sullivan's dismissal, on the grounds that faculty members were excluded from the decision. On Wednesday, faculty members participated in the second of two major rallies for Sullivan on UVA's Lawn. Another protest is scheduled for Sunday afternoon.
"Making a lot of money does not demonstrate that you are very smart," says Arras, the Bioethics Program professor. "And even if you are very clever, there are different types of intelligence. A successful real estate empire is not at all like a university. These people are talking about cutting classics -- Greeks and Romans, the foundations of Western thought -- because it's not profitable enough."
Good morning, one and all, and welcome to another edition of your Sunday Morning liveblog of the demented political chat shows. My name is Jason, and I think this tweet basically sums up this week.
So a bunch of senators testified before Jamie Dimon today bit.ly/LX1vs4
Yes, this was the kind of week where you really got a feel the future of America -- Jamie Dimon will be regularly holding taxpayers to accounts for their failure to serve his interests as your public servant use emergency collagen injections to plump up their tongues so they do not lose their softness as they bathe Dimon's backside, while Sheldon Adelson skips around the room in a harlequin costume setting his own money on fire. That sounds about right to me.
Against that horoscope, watching these shows seems like an eminently tolerable thing to do. And last week, I was pleasantly surprised by the way they delved into the national security leak story when I thought it would be too much for them. I'm guessing that was an outlier, but we'll see. I live in hope. I also live inside the Beltway. So I know from hopelessness. (This week, MEET THE PRESS is airing what I am assuming is a MEET THE PRESS parody, because the guests include John McCain, Mark Halperin, and Harold Ford, Jr. We will not be watching that. That's a lot of human wreckage on one show.)
As usual, folks, you are welcome to join one another in the comments. You may also drop me a line if you like, or follow me on Twitter if that's your thing. Over at my Rebel Mouse page, I've taken some of my favorite stories of the week and marked them as "SUNDAY READS," so if you get bored of these shows or my liveblog and want to read something cool just so you can have a different sort of conversation this morning, please feel free.
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
More on leaky leaks, with David Plouffe and Joe Lieberman and General Michael Hayden, plus paneling, is what's on store for today. By the way, your week of leaks continued this week, with a document from the White House's trade negotiations. It's pretty certain that this won't be discussed on any of these shows today, so be sure to read about it, if you haven't already.
We begin with David Plouffe, which is sort of not the person I'd have expected to represent the White House on this, but, okay. Did the President declassify any of the information that appeared in the "kill list" artice or the story on the cyberwar campaign against Iran? Plouffe says that President Obama has "zero tolerance" for the leaks and has committed to an investigation through the Justice Department, who has assigned two investigators to the matter (one of whom, Plouffe emphasizes is a Bush appointee), and we get the assurances that "no one in the White House provided this information." Wallace immediately interrupts and says, nope, sorry: "David Sanger said he did talk to top White House officials...he says it wasn't leaks, but he did talk to people in the White House." Plouffe says that there will be an investigation.
Wallace's question didn't get an answer though, and so he circles back to whether any of the information declassified the material. I think Plouffe gets in a teeny-tiny "no," at the beginning of his response, but his response is essentially an empty calorie filibuster. Wallace tries a third time, and finally Plouffe says, "Of course he didn't," as if Wallace could have surmised that from the outset without help.
Moving on. Wallace goes over the brief bullet points on what was leaked, and the named individuals in the articles, which include key White House officials. "The President really has no ideal who divulged these secrets?" Wallace asks. Plouffe says that all key White House advisors have done is discuss the broad strokes of the national security agenda with reporters, not classified information. Plouffe and Wallace go back and forth a little bit, and Plouffe suddenly veers into what amounts to an accusation that Republicans in Congress just want to have a bunch of ongoing investigations of the White House during an election year.
That is not where I would have taken this defense! Sure, there's some truth to that, but everyone's OBVIOUS interest in these matters stems from the appearance of these articles -- all of which, in an election year, did a lot to burnish the President's national security cred. The Iran cyberattack story helps Obama in numerous ways -- it shows that he's teaming with Israel and on the offensive against the Iranian regime. He might have otherwise had to spend the entire election season without a material defense to the charges that he's given that a low priority.
Plouffe says that there will be an investigation, and that will serve to eliminate the "distraction" of these leaks. He goes on to say that Congressional GOP have declared publicly that they won't be doing anything on the economy until after the election, lest the economy suddenly get healthy. Again, that's a good point, but it's a pretty obviously forced attempt at changing the subject.
Has Obama ordered his staff to come forward with information about who leaked this material? Plouffe says that there's an investigation. "Everyone is going to participate in the investigation." Wallace wants to know if Obama will be interrogated by the investigators, citing the precedent of the Valerie Plame investigation, which he says included "thorough interrogations of President Bush," but I seem to recall these interrogations were not under oath. Plouffe says, "I'm not going to get into that right now." He says, after a fashion, that Obama will cooperate fully with that investigation.
Meanwhile, why not an independent prosecutor? In the past, Obama has voiced support for such things. Plouffe says, blah blah investigation very serious two investigators one is a Bush appointee it's proceeding let's let it proceed blah blah.
Moving on to the new immigration policy change. Wallace points out that a year ago, Obama was telling the National Council of La Raza that he could not make a change to immigration policy without using Congress, but now, he's going to bypass Congress and begin halting the deportation of young undocumented immigrants and get them permits to work in the United States.
So, what's changed? Plouffe says that nothing has changed, including the fact that the underlying law is not fixed. As Plouffe explains, this is Obama using the leeway he is (presumably) entitled to under the concept of prosecutorial discretion -- the idea being that the Department of Homeland Security prioritizes the enforcement of certain undocumented immigrants over others, and those priorities are set by the White House. Plouffe says that all that's being offered here are two-year work permits. He notes that Romney has announced that he would veto the immigration reform that Obama has proposed -- a mix of immigration reform and DREAM act enaction.
Moving on to the economy, and the President's speech on the same this week. Is the President's total agenda going to be constant calls for his Jobs Act to be passed? Plouffe says that Obama will keep on trying to implement an agenda of infrastructure improvement, higher education, and tax fairness, while the GOP blocks it. Plouffe says that the President's plan is the "fair and balanced" one. Wallace quips, "I like that you're calling it that."
Plouffe reminds everyone that Romney's policies are reminiscent of the pre-crash White House policies and that he wasn't any great shakes as the Governor of Massachusetts (except for, presumably, that time Romney came up with the Affordable Care Act).
Moving on to messaging, and the various Democrats who either have suggestions about it, or the Democrats who are doomsaying bedwetters who anonymously tell reporters that everything is going to hell and that someone had better hire them. Wallace wants to know if they'll take the advice of Carville/Greenberg and start "talking about a new agenda," and stop talking about progress. Plouffe says that there's no daylight between what they are doing and what these Democrats are suggesting, but he ends up his soliloquy by talking about the progress that has been made.
Wallace says that the economic trajectory has not been terrific. Plouffe says it's better than before. He insists that this is the choice: a return to the pre-crash economy. Basically, we have the answer to this question -- it won't be a year of a "new agenda," it will be a "don't change horses" campaign that emphasizes the pre-crash conditions.
Will Plouffe leave the White House and return to Chicago to run the campaign? Plouffe says that the campaign is being ably run by Jim Messina and David Axelrod. He goes on to emphasize that Obama is raising money, and not through Super PACs, like Romney. Wallace says that Romney's raised more money than Obama even without Super PACs. Plouffe concedes that "Romney had a good month raising money," but insists that Obama is doing better on the "grassroots level."
Eventually, Wallace has to end the segment. "I have to let the panel talk." No you don't! We won't miss the panel. We don't actually ever have to have a panel!
Now here is Joe Lieberman and former CIA director General Michael Hayden, to talk about leaks leaks leaks.
Lieberman says that the leaks have caused "an enormous amount of damage" to our national security. He is especially upset about the Iranian cyberwarfare leak, because it exposed methodology and "could legitimize a cyberwarfare attack on us." He is also concerned that future collaborations with foreign intelligence agencies and agents will be had to come by, as helpful folks worry that assisting the United States could result in their death or imprisonment.
Hayden says that the leaks "do not need to be true to be harmful," and that true or false, it makes a response legitimate.
Hayden says that he did not confirm the leak, when he noted that the cyberwar attack "crossed the Rubicon" of a physical attack on foreign infrastructure during peacetime.
Lieberman says that he "does not have any thoughts" about who the leakers were, just that there needs to be an investigation. Leaks are "nothing new," he says, but these leaks were the worst in a while and there needs to be "accountability" for leakers. And he's not happy with the 1917 Espionage Act and all its wiggle room. He just wants leaking classified information to be a crime, period.
Hayden says that the sort of information that ended up in the article is definitely "closely held" information and the leaks pertained to "covert action," which is self-explanatory.
Were the leaks intended as a means of shining up the president during an election year? Hayden says that he's reluctant to pass judgement, and on the Sanger piece, he thinks it's clear that was the result of very good reporting, not the stenography of a campaign year PR campaign.
Lieberman says that Obama should order his staff to come forward if they have information. He says that the administration "should do whatever it can to eliminate any appearance that his White House had anything to do with this," including sitting down and talking to the investigators assigned to this matter. Finally, he says that a special counsel is needed, for the preservation of independence in the investigation. He adds that he "has no reason to distrust" either of the prosectors who have been appointed to the investigation by AG Eric Holder -- but the Democrat who was assigned is an Obama campaign contributor, so there will be a cloud of doubt over his conclusions, unfair or not.
"Frankly, I think the attorney general would do himself, and the President, a favor by appointing a special counsel," he says.
And now, it's panel time with Bill Kristol and Joe Trippi and Karl Rove and Juan Williams.
We begin with the immigration policy change that was announced this week. Kristol says that the change is "sensible policy" that should be the "law of the land." Obama is, he says, "pushing the edges of prosecutorial discretion" by doing it in this way, but in his opinion, it's "the right thing to do." Trippi agrees that the policy is "the right one," and that the deportations now get much more targeted and sensible as well.
Rove says that the Bush administration concluded that they could not take the statutory authority to do this, and isn't sure the Obama White House has or can make this case. (This has to be one of the two three things Rover and the Bush administration actually surmised that they could not legally do from the Executive Branch.)
"The DREAM Act is significantly different from this," Rove says. And that's true. It's actually pretty important to understand that while this change in policy impacts the sorts of people who'd be eligible for benefit under the DREAM Act, the decision itself is not a substitute for it, nor is it really fair to call it "DREAM Act lite." ("DREAM Act curious," we'll allow.)
Williams says that the obstacle to comprehensive immigration reform are GOP congresscritters and certain talk-show hosts, and that the big obstacle now remains the same -- GOP lawmakers who have "distorted the marketplace" on this issue.
Will the action win him Hispanic voters? Trippi says that he's already largely got that cohort won, this just solidifies it. He says that more importantly, you get a start to seeing the way Obama's policymaking gets articulated in the contest, and this is an issue in which he draws a contrast with Romney. Can Romney counter this move, perhaps peel back some Hispanic voters? Rove would rather talk about the Obama administration's failure to advance comprehensive immigration reform. (Of course, this is largely because he can't get things passed in Congress anymore.)
Regardless, Rove says that this issue gets "overridden by jobs and the economy" and that's true. Nevertheless, Wallace wants his question answered, so he turns to Kristol and asks of Romney goes all in for an embrace of Marco Rubio's version of the DREAM Act. Kristol says that it pressures Romney to both come behind Rubio's plan, and perhaps even name him to the V.P. slot. Kristol says that he'd have liked Rubio to have gone ahead with his bill, but "not every Republican was on board."
Kristol says that he disagrees with Rove, and that this is a "big problem for Romney."
Moving to the economy and this week's duelling speeches from Romney and Obama. Wallace wants to know if the two candidates are going to be able to simply keep having a philosophical debate about the economy for the rest of the election season. Rove says that won't be enough. At the moment, voters are looking at the "general arc of the argument" but will eventually want "more meat" in the argument.
Trippi says that the Obama campaign is starting to make an argument about what Romney is all about, and that what Romney stands for will remind voters of why "they went to Obama in the first place." Wallace notes that in 2010, the argument did not work. Trippi really doesn't have a great answer for that, other than to say that it's a choice now between a future with the Obama administration or "a guy from Bain Capitol."
Kristol agrees up to a point: there will be a debate about the path forward, and that Obama did start to articulate that path forward. "It didn't convince me," he says, "But you can't beat something with nothing and Mitt Romney needs to lay out his plan" better sooner than later. "Romney has to have a forward-looking vision," he says, or he won't be competitive.
Williams goes on a long pro-Obama jag, affording Fox the opportunity to use the "gritting on Juan Williams" camera shot, with Rove giving Williams the head-shake and the side-eye.
And now Rove and Williams are fighting with each other. Boring.
THE CHRIS MATTHEWS SHOW
Today at the genius bar, we are talking about corrupt money and the kooky political discourse and Watergate, I think? And the 2012 horsey race. And probably Matthews will show a video he thinks is funny. Today's panel is our own Howard Fineman, Liz Marlantes of the Christian Science Monitor, NBC News' Kelly O'Donnell, and David Ignatius. Let's commence the blah-blah!
Matthews says that the shadow of Watergate extends over the horsey race today, because way back when, there was a movie where Deep Throat said, "Follow the money," and today you cannot follow that money because it's all secret and funding Super PACs and what not. Also, Watergate made everyone really love investigating people, and it made everyone very distrustful of politicians. Another thing Watergate did was make it so you now have to add the word "gate" to everything that even sniffs of scandal, to the point that I am sure one day someone will shorthand "The Teapot Dome Scandal" to "TeapotDomeGate."
The only way to break the cycle is for someone else in politics to commit a crime at the Watergate and then try to cover it up, which will hopefully lead to someone trying to call that Watergategate and thus force it all to stop. So, please, someone, break into the Watergate and jack that place up, real good.
Anyway, Chris Matthews is gonna set it straight, this Watergate, and determine the way those memories illuminate "today in politics." Fineman says that there was "an era before Nixon in which people believed in government out of necessity." "Vietnam and Watergate broke that consensus," he says. This inevitably put Sally Quinn on a path to self-torture and the existential crisis that she and her husband, Ben Bradlee (Washington DC's answer to Bruce Jenner), endured at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Fineman goes on to explain what a shocking thing it was to learn that your president valued ruthlessness and the sowing of division -- this is something that Woodward and Bernstein said last week was still surprising them, years later, as they listened to Nixon's famous recordings.
Matthews notes, however, that Congress is terribly hated as well. O'Donnell says that Congress' self-awareness of this is "pervasive" on Capitol Hill, and it manifests itself in the "wary" way Congresscritters engage with the press. (So: Congress is very self-aware of their myriad problems, and stand foursquare and united to not doing anything about it other than eluding the press -- and the inevitable -- for as long as they can. Bring back the stocks, please.)
Matthews says that everyone thought, post-Watergate, that the corruption of money in Washington had been totally cleaned out. Oh, look, my TiVo just sent me a pop-up message on the screen that reads, "Would you like to pause to laugh at that, for like, 20 minutes?" Sure thing, TiVo! Thank you!
Matthews is pretty sure that the people who are giving millions of dollars to campaigns "want stuff." I mean: I'm guessing? They probably want whores, mainly?
Marlantes points out that the puzzling thing is that rich liberals seem to be declining to participate in the Super PAC frenzy. (This is because there aren't many of them, and they find this process distasteful, at least for the moment. Eventually, however, they too will realize that they "want stuff.")
Fineman says that we're back to the era of "naked exchanges." What? Okay! That sounds like something -- "...naked exchanges of money." Oh. Disappoint.
Marlantes wants to make one more point! "We're talking about Sheldon Adelson because of disclosure." Sure, but I have the feeling that Adelson is one of those nutters who wouldn't be able to abide people not knowing that his cash was purchasing exclusive access to Romney's short-hairs.
Matthews says, "Everything good that came out of Watergate has been blown away." OMG, Matthews is really having a sad over this today! Ignatius says, "Sometimes it seems that the ghost of four years ago is re-enveloping us" and that every new generation needs to re-leard the lesson that their leaders are lying fartfaces with terrible combovers and the morals of a demon-lamprey suckling at the teats of Asmodeus that they wouldn't thing twice about shunning socially if they didn't hold some sort of powerful office. (Ignatius does not use those terms specifically, he mostly just murmurs and stammers.) He big ups Ben Bradlee, for his Watergate-era work. (This is why I compare him to Bruce Jenner, who also used to not be a shambling wreck of his former self, haunting the community like a sad wraith.)
Ignatius says that maybe the media should not always get all bouncy-bounce-jackass-hammer-shiny-shiny-eyepop-wow over every piddly little piece of political nonsense.
Fineman says that Nixon "corrupted the idea of leadership," and that corruption has spread like a toxin.
Now everyone is remembering the post-Watergate unity that spread throughout the land like a holy note sounded by the lute of the angel Gabriel, lo and there did go forth a spirit of healing! Yes, it's almost as if people should suspend their debates on the long-term policy trajectory to deal with terrible crises.
Fineman says that "one way the coverage for Romney will improve is that he has a better chance of being President." That scenario actually went in reverse for John McCain, who the media LOVED until they realized that they had to start taking him seriously. But what the press corps won't be able to do is keep reporting on the GOP in disarray -- slowly, they are coming to terms with Romney, and so the constant frustration with Romney is fading.
Ignatius says he hopes that the media will hold Romney to accounts. Gosh, if only Ignatius knew some journalists he could talk to/is a journalist himself!
Now for some reason, a long clip from Forrest Gump.
Meanwhile, June: it has not been the best month to be Barack Obama, especially if we forget that he's a fantastically affluent political figure who is going to live well and die happy no matter what happens. June has been bad because of a disastrous job number (again, this was worse for just about everybody not named "Barack Obama"), and losing the Wisconsin recall, and the uproar over leaks, and the "private sector is fine" gaffe. Just terrible!
Meanwhile, Ol' Mittens. He's just cold criss-crossing the country straight up ignoring reporters, who want to ask him dumb questions. "They can ride out the clock for a little while, during this spring period," O'Donnell explains, which makes you wonder why the press just doesn't let Romney and Obama have the summer. They can all go to places like central Ohio or California's Inland Empire or south Florida or coal country or the Western ranch states and find out how ordinary people are living, and then come back in the fall with no end of well-informed inquiries about the country to put to the candidates.
Or we can just have the "Mitt Romney gets weird when someone gives him a doughnut" story every week until we die.
"I think the whole lens through which everything is being viewed is that jobs report," says Marlantes, who adds that if the jobs report had been better, it would have been treated as great news for Obama. What does that tell you, though, Liz? The jobs report would have still "reported" that the country is in a perilous unemployment crisis, in any event. What does it say that it could have been graded as "great," in some way?
How will Obama "up his game?" Fineman figures that he'll have to explain the way the economic recovery has not been perfect. "I see him improving his performance between now and November because he's facing the possibility of defeat," he says. (I mean, he could get inspired to do a better job because his constituents aren't doing well at the moment?)
Here are some things that Matthews doesn't know: that the Virginia Senate race is going to be "the pivotal thing" because it's a big Tim Kaine/George Allen tilt, and because it meshes so well with the national race; if the SCOTUS strikes down Obamacare there will be a silver lining because the "politics will be defused" and because small businesses might start hiring and thus improve the economy (also lots of people will sicken and die); the Romney campaign doesn't know if they'll announce their V.P. pick before or after the Olympics; and in Cairo, everyone is anxious about the whole nation going crackers again after the election.
Can Obama win re-election without giving voters a clear idea what his second-term plans will be? Everyone says no. The general consensus is that a "vision" is what's necessary, Marlantes says (accurately, in my opinion) that the more specifics you mention, the more you open yourself up to criticism. (Also, "specifics" require the support of Congress.)
FACE THE NATION
Bob Schieffer managed to get Mitt Romney to appear on his show today, so we'll watch.
Schieffer is out with Romney on his current bus tour, which is definitely an improvement over the last regional political celebrity bus tour, which muddied the historical record over Paul Revere's derring-do.
Schieffer starts off with the Presidents recent change in immigration policy, and asks if Romney would repeal this order if he was elected. Romney begins by dodging the question: "First of all, we have to secure the border, we need to have an employment verification system, to make sure that those that are working here in this country are here legally...And then, with regards to these kids who were brought in by their parents through no fault of their own, there needs to be a long-term solution so they know what their status is."
Romney goes on to talk about how Marco Rubio was TOTALLY going to do something, you know, immigrationish, but the President was like, "Intercepted!" (There are political lessons to be drawn from Choom Gang etiquette after all.)
Schieffer winds up, and tries it again: "What would you do about it?" Romney just keeps talking about Obama and the opportunities he supposedly had to try to pass comprehensive immigration reform. (This would have led to Obama being able to say he tried, but nothing getting actually done, because Congress, Waterloo, etc.)
One more time. Schieffer is all "Aguywhohasnotansweredmyfirstquestionaboutwhetheryouwouldrepealthisorder says what?"
Romney says that it "would be overtaken by events," specifically, "my putting in a long-term solution' with legislation which creates law that relates to these individuals such that they know what their setting is going to be, not just for the term of a president but on a permanent basis."
Well, it's good to know that Romney grasps the important details, like the fact that "legislation creates law." Essentially, though, he does not want to answer the question, other than to say that "stuff" would be passively "overtaken" by "other stuff" and then hey, sit back and watch the nebulous swirls of vague in the sky! Whoa-hoo-whee! What happens to the immigrants affected by the policy? SOMETHING! Maybe something cool! Maybe something terrible! Maybe they all become swans?
Schieffer is going to try one...more...time...for...the...love...of...God. "Would you leave this in place, while you worked out a long term solution?" Romney says, "We'll look at that setting as we reach that, but my anticipation is I'd come into office and say we need to get this done, on a long-term basis, not this kind of stop-gap measure."
So basically, Romney is pretty sure that at some point in the future, some stuff will happen. He anticipates the happening of stuff. He won't admit to having any agency, that might personally cause some stuff to happen, only that he is pretty sure that he will continue to exist and during that period of existence there will be things that happen, and he will "look at that."
"The President should have worked on these things years ago," he says, and Romney has been working on being President for many years. "The timing is pretty clear," Romney says, referring to the fact that Obama probably did this in a cynical attempt to "win" the "election," which is not fair.
Moving to health care. The SCOTUS ruling on the Affordable Care Act is imminent, and the law may get thrown out. If that happens, what will Romney do? I am guessing wait for a future in which stuff happens? "I will continue to describe the plan that I would provide," says Romney, not referring to the plan he actually did once provide, to Massachusetts, but a second, magical plan, in which people don't lose their insurance because of pre-existing conditions (without a mandate, this is a tough lift). Also there will be a "race to the bottom" as every state sells out to have the cheapest and most worthless health insurance. And there will be block grants to the states, which the state governments will do what they typically do. (Mismanage the money badly.)
Anyway, Romney promises less healthcare, more tenther crackpot wisdom, and tiny American flags for everyone not currently immortal and inpervious to injury and disease.
What should we be doing about the European economy right now to protect us against their coming crisis? Romney don't know! He just figured that the past three and a half years have been a period where we aren't on a strong footing, economically. Cool, okay, but what about Europe? "I'd strengthen the basis of America's economic might." Schieffer asks, "How would you do that?" The better question is, "What are you talking about?" Unless of course, the "basis of America's economic might" is "giving constant voice to glib platitudes about America's economic might."
Romney would "take advantage of our energy resources," by fracking the bejeezus out of your neighborhood. Schieffer is all, can that help us right now? "That's going to take a while." (And remember, his question was about insulating ourselves from Europe's pending woes.) Schieffer tries again to get a question answered, again. This time Romney says, "Well we are not going to send checks to Europe," unless he said, "we are not going to send Czechs to Europe," unless he said, "We are not going to send Chex to Europe." I mention all of these possibilities, because Romney is the sort of Eddie Haskell-type of guy who might become President, bail out the Eurozone, and when you call him on it, have him say, "You misheard me. I distinctly recall saying that I would, under no circumstances, send the Europeans any of our delicious snack mixes."
Instead, we will be "poised to support our economy" and Romney is "very much in favor of the fundamental things one does to strengthen the economic footings of a nation."
So, specifically, Romney is totally in favor of the stuff that makes other good stuff happen, and if he's elected, he will totally be "poised to support" that good stuff. Well, you know, if Romney could just show some courage and come out against the stuff that everyone hates and is totally bad, I'll be totally convinced!
Now Romney is saying that "our banks are much stronger now" than they were during the economic crisis and they have rebuilt "their capital base and their equity base." Now, I do not believe any of that is true -- banks are still marking their toxic assets to fantasy, so the illusion of solvency literally rests on the ability of everyone to pretend that things are going to have more future value than they inevitably will -- but if Romney really believes that, that undercuts his point that Obama's policies have led to a shaky economy.
What does Romney think about further quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve? Not much about it! He is worried about inflation, like everyone is. He is aware that this is the sort of thing that politicians do to boost themselves in an election year.
Romney goes on a lengthy monologue of aggregate demand crisis denialism.
Romney is against America "exposing themselves to the vagaries of the European banking crisis." He knows we're actually sort of way past that, right?
Romney signed the Grover Norquist pledge, Schieffer reminds Romney. Does Romney still feel inclined toward being a total anti-revenue crackpot? Sure does! Romney compares the federal fiscal situation to California, and that's pretty inapt -- California's status as "well-and-rightly-fracked" has more to do with their insane citizens referenda system and the way they have, over time, systematically hamstrung their state government into this tortured place where theye have all sorts of demands but no real agency to act on them. (California needs to get rid of those citizens referenda, but you'd probably need an effing citizens referenda to do it.)
Romney goes on to say that he thinks he can get revenue from getting rid of loopholes and exemptions. All of which exist because of powerful lobbies. And that plan violates the Norquist pledge. Romney also says something about the Simpson-Bowles plan, which smart and regular readers understand is not a thing that actually exists -- Simpson-Bowles never agrees to a plan. The titular chairment did release a "Chairman's Mark," and if Romney is citing that as a guidestar then he needs to understand that it also increased taxes and would violate the Norquist pledge.
Just to be sure, Romney says that the wealthy will continue to be taxed at historically low rates, only he says this in a way that makes it sound like he's extending some great burden upon them: "I think it's important to say, look, I'm not looking to reduce the burden paid by the wealthiest. I'm looking to keep the burden paid by the wealthiest the same share as it is today." Good thing he clarified this!
Bill Kristol, as per usual, thinks it's time for us to start bombing Iran. Romney says Kristol is right and we should do some stuff to make Iran recognize that we are willing to take military action against them. See, this is the sort of stuff that unauthorized leak defuses! I can't help but notice that damaging their infrastructure with computer viruses basically sends that message. (Because of the leak, we may not be able to continue doing so, of course.)
Still, Romney's "everything is on the table" is the same stuff that everyone says, and everyone's objections to everyone else is just over the relative quality of the metaphoric stuff that it on this theoretical table.
Romney caps things off with a monologue of campaign platitudes, which Schieffer interrupts because he wants to know what Romney thinks he can do to bring people together. Romney says that he can do it -- by not having a political career. Huh? "I don't care about re-election." What? He's...not...an incumbent to anything, so...
And then, more platitudes and campaign talking points. First question dodged, last question dodged.
"We have got to have people who are willing to put aside the partisanship," Romney says, referring to none of the people who have endorsed or funded his presidency.
Oh, now Romney and Schieffer are riding around on the bus. Schieffer has more really tough questions, like, "Do you love your dad?" Romney says "yes." This goes on, sentimentally, for a few hundred million hours of our time. They also talk about the horse they have in the Olympics, but he's got a campaign to tend to, and won't be able to spend too much time thinking about this up-from-nowhere middle class success story.
And now, Howard Dean is here, to yell at and be yelled at by Lindsey Graham. Hey, that means that with McCain being on Meet The Press, and Lieberman getting on Fox, that the old Senate warmongerin' crew notched another Sunday trifecta, in a pretty good example of what being easy to book and totally predictable will get you in Washington.
Howard Dean literally looks like the just stapled another man's hairstyle to his head three minutes ago.
Oh well! Dean says, of Romney, "Same old, same old." Romney doesn't say what he's going to do, and Dean thinks he won't win. Dean is enthusiastic about Obama making this move on immigration, because it leaves Romney "holding the bag." And in that bag? Snakes! Probably!
"This is the end of the road for Romney on the Latino front," says Dean, "unless he puts a Latino on the ticket." In which case, keep going strong, on the "Latino front."
"Waaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh," Graham says, for what seems like forty minutes.
Schieffer asks Graham if Obama helped his party and hurt the GOP, and Graham just says that he hurt the country, and did nothing good for anyone, and there's no way that the Hispanic community that was already going to vote for him is going to continue to vote for him, just because he did something relatively humane for that community.
Dean says he thinks it is hilarious to hear the "Senator who had a hand in killing immigration reform" doing all of this complaining. And it is hilarious. Maybe not "Ha ha" hilarious, but a jaded sort of "early Woody Allen" hilarious. But yes, like Pareene said:
Say you support immigration reform and comprehensive climate legislation. If you’re Lindsey Graham, you announce that you will un-support the climate bill you helped craft with your good friend Joe Lieberman, because:
“What I have withdrawn from is a bill that basically restricts drilling in a way that is never going to happen in the future,” Graham said. “I wanted it to safely occur in the future; I don’t want to take it off the table.”
But of course the real reason Graham withdrew from the climate bill was because Reid announced his intention to make immigration reform a priority, and Graham wanted to do climate first. Doing things in the wrong order is one of Lindsey Graham’s biggest turnoffs.
Of course, three months earlier, Graham was peeved that the White House and Democrats weren’t leading the charge to craft immigration legislation. “At the end of the day, the president needs to step it up a little bit,” he told Politico.
But apparently Harry Reid was not supposed to do the stepping — and that’s why eventually Graham came out against the DREAM Act, a far-from-comprehensive bill that would’ve provided a path to citizenship solely for children who spend a decade or more on their very best behavior.
Where some saw the bill as a small, painfully gradual step toward a just outcome for people who came to this country as children and have never known another home, Graham saw “a silly, stupid game.”
[...]
Legislation is entirely about feelings and deal-making for Graham. He’ll join in apparently good-faith efforts to craft pragmatic solutions to complex problems, but the second anyone looks at him the wrong way he’ll dive off the bandwagon and accuse everyone else of ruining the compromise by not following some bizarre script that exists solely in Lindsey Graham’s head to the letter.
Graham’s personal rules of order are a magnitude more insane and complex than “Riddick’s Senate Procedure” could ever hope to be. Almost every senator makes obnoxious “process” arguments when they cast votes against things they ostensibly support (Oh, I want to give homeless orphans hot Thanksgiving meals, sure, but unless my colleague Senator Inhofe is allowed to attach an amendment excluding orphans who don’t speak English — an amendment that will fail and that I will not actually vote for — I simply can’t vote for cloture at this time), but Graham’s made it an art. If you can call narcissism an art.
This is why I actually don't mind Graham being on these Sunday shows, because while he's occupied, other Americans have a fighting chance to unconstipate America. I am working on some way of tricking Graham into believing there are Sunday shows on everyday, but so far no luck.
Anyway, Dean still thinks this idea is great. So much so that he calls it an "idee-yer." He also praises Graham for going against Grover Norquist. Grahan says, "You're killing me, Howard."
Schieffer takes up the matter of the pledge, because Jeb Bush has criticized it as well. Graham believes that there is a connection between the Simpson-Bowles Commission and the "Gang of Six" and the "Supercommittee." Total widespread failure? Yes. But in addition to that, Graham sees a "formula" of revenue and cuts that makes sense. Graham is confident that Romney would embrace that.
Dean says that he agrees, mostly, with Graham's idea to get rid of most tax exemptions and raise revenue in exchange for entitlement cuts, with the exception that Dean would use a greater share of the revenue to pay down the debt. (The difference between the two men is obviously unstated here -- Graham wouldn't pay as much of the debt because he needs that overhang to make huge slashes to the safety net. Dean would pay more of the debt off through tax reform because the smaller overhang would not lead to as much widespread impoverishment.)
Okay, a little bit of paneling and we can all get on with our lives. Today, FTN has Peggy Noonan and Rich Lowry and John Dickerson and Jan Crawford. (This is one of those "reporters versus conservative pundits" panels that frequently passes for "balanced.")
Anyway, Dickerson points out that what didn't come out of the Romney interview was that he had pretty well defined himself as an immigration hardliner (to the right of Rick Perry), who believed in self-deportation (creating conditions that would inspire undocumented immigrants to leave) and was against policies that could serve as a "magnet." So, "primary Romney" is pretty fully against this change to policy, and has also promised to veto the DREAM Act (sorry Marco Rubio), but post-primary Romney needs to keep that under wraps or otherwise shoved in the direction of the memory hole.
Noonan, who once saw a Mexican, says there are a "bunch of ironies here." Like the one where we tune in to the television to have Peggy Noonan explain irony to us. Noonan goes on to say that this is very "Obamaesque" in that it is "crassly political." Is there someone in politics today who isn't engaged in crassness? Point them out to me -- I will make a sweater from their fur.
Crawford says that Obama doesn't want to talk about today's economy, today. And Romney doesn't want to talk about tomorrow's policy specifics, today. So, we should all probably stop covering this election for a few months. Take up a hobby, maybe. Meet new and interesting people. Do bath salts. Try to figure out what was going on with the character of David in Prometheus.
Rich Lowry figures that eventually, Romney will have to endorse Rubio's plan in lieu of calling for a repeal of this popular thing Obama has done. (Rubio will have to stop pretending to be working on a plan and actually deliver a plan, for that to work.)
Schieffer is pretty baffled with Romney's responses to the European crisis. "Basically, he says we just have to stand here and hope nothing bad happens." Peggy says that she doesn't "know what's right" but if you're "going for president right now" and "Europe is trying to get its house in order" you have to tell Europe not to look to us for help. (So, there is some level of self-interested political "crassness" that Noonan is willing to tolerate.)
Dickerson says that you "can't be in favor of a bailout" and be in the GOP at the same time. On the economy, Romney has to cross his fingers and hope that things work out. Dickerson adds, "Businessman Romney would never go for a deal as vague as the one candidate Romney is making, trust me to make loophole closures." And Dickerson notes what we've already noted: that having signed the Norquist pledge, the plans that Romney sort of elucidated today aren't things he can follow through on, without breaking that promise.
(And Norquist, let's recall, expects Romney to keep that promise. He expects Romney to check his brain and his autonomy at the door to the Oval Office, and render unto Norquist but the movements of his signing hand.)
Lowry adds that Romney has a "great allergy to specifics and details," a lesson learned from his unsuccessful run against Ted Kennedy. He credits Romney for plotting a direction, but adds, "it is extremely vague."
Crawford points out that Herman Cain at least had the 9-9-9 Plan, which people "responded to," despite the fact that it was "bonkers." (It was not developed by the Rich Lowry who is on this panel, by the way.)
Now Noonan is criticizing people using applause lines in speeches, as well as speeches that are long and verbose. The lack of self-awareness here could power the solar system.
Lowry notes that the difficult bind Obama is in is that he can neither praise the economy, nor disparage it, without it being a reflection on his Presidency. Now can he be too "full-throated" about further Keynesian efforts to spur the economy out of its hole.
Crawford thinks that Romney will pick someone safe for Vice President. Dickerson adds that Terry Branstad wants Romney to position himself as the "candidate who fixes stuff," and he needs a teammate that goes along with this. Noonan likes Thune. Lowry likes Portman and Pawlenty, and figures Rubio isn't quite there yet.
Are we not done yet? No, John Dickerson hosted a Google Hangout. So there is a few minutes of grainy footage of people in blank rooms wearing headphones, and proving that the next generation of bland political hacks are apparently being trained in "Google Hangouts." It is about as exciting as it sounds.
Yeah, well, that's another Sunday of our political culture, distilled to it's sour and unfeeling essence. Next week, we will return, of course, but here is an IMPORTANT PROGRAMMING ANNOUNCEMENT: your Sunday Morning Liveblog will be taking the week of July 1, 2012 off. We will return -- tanned, rested, fearful -- on July 8. Have a great week, all of you!
[Your Sunday morning liveblog will be back next week. But, as noted above, while you wait for that day to come, your reading pleasure continues with my Rebel Mouse page's "Sunday Reads."]
As longtime readers may know, one of my favorite parts of Matt Taibbi's book "Griftopia" is the part where he describes how it came to pass that Chicago's parking meters ended up in the hands of foreign investors and ruined everyone's lives just a little bit more.
The short version of the story goes like this: Chicago had a budget hole to fill, Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, decided the best course of action was to lease a public asset (municipal parking meters) to Morgan Stanley for $1,156,500,000 for 75 years, Morgan Stanley turned to a gaggle of foreign investors to pony up the money, those investors contracted the on-the-ground work to a parking enforcement company, and the whole kit and caboodle was jammed it through the legislative process as quickly as Daley could, lest anyone pause and consider whether it was a good idea.
As it turns out, it was a terrible idea.
To start with something simple, it changed some basic traditions of local Chicago politics. Aldermen who used to have the power to close streets for fairs and festivals or change meter schedules now cannot -- or if they do, they have to compensate Chicago Parking Meters LLC for its loss of revenue.
So, for example, when the new ownership told Alderman Scott Waguespack that it wanted to change the meter schedule from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week, the alderman balked and said he'd rather keep the old schedule, at least for 270 of his meters. Chicago Parking Meters then informed him that if he wanted to do that, he would have to pay the company $608,000 over three years.
The bigger problem was that Chicago sold out way too cheap. Daley and Co. got roughly $1.2 billion for seventy-five years' worth of revenue from 36,000 parking meters. But by hook or crook various aldermen began to find out that Daley had vastly undervalued the meter revenue.
And what about filling the budget shortfall with that quick injection of foreign capital? As Taibbi notes: "It was the grand plan of [Chicago CFO Paul] Volpe to patch the budget hole with the interest earned on that big pile of cash. But interest rates stayed in the tank, and so the city was forced to raid the actual principal."
Tough break for Chicago. But, you know, it's a cautionary tale and an important lesson learned. Now, your mayor would have to be either a complete moron or a grifter heel to repeat Daley's mistake -- oh, hey, what's this I see over at Taibbi's blog today?
Hizzoner Michael Bloomberg in New York has decided to do his own version of the Chicago infrastructure bake sale; the city announced that it is putting up nearly 90,000 parking meters for lease. They're expecting to get over $11 billion in upfront money from the deal, which is great news if you're Mike Bloomberg, who gets to use that money to patch current budget holes instead of making tough cuts or raising taxes. The news is less awesome for the next half-dozen New York City mayors, or for the citizens of New York, who now will get to spend most of the 21st century grappling with its increasingly monstrous deficits with a major tributary from the city's revenue stream shut off.
A Bloomberg spokeswoman tells Bloomberg News that Bloomberg's plan is to "avoid mistakes others have made." But Chicago's mistake is quantifiable. In Chicago, meter users are projected to pay the Morgan Stanley investment group "at least $11.6 billion to park at city meters over the next 75 years, 10 times what former Mayor Richard Daley got when he leased the system in 2008."
We are also given this further assurance:
New York would retain "full control" of rates and violations enforcement, she said.
This really doesn't mean anything, though! Nobody seriously expects the heads of big sovereign wealth funds to hump around Midtown handing out tickets. The key question is whether "rates" will fund New York City or private investors, and whether New York City will be "enforcing" the rules for the betterment of the city or in defense of someone else's profit margin.
Per Bloomberg spokeswoman Julie Wood: "We're seeking private-sector expertise on innovative ways to enhance the efficiency and quality of parking services." Here are the words I challenge her to account for: "expertise," "innovative," "enhance," "efficiency," and "quality."
Just when you thought it wasn't possible to have any further thoughts on the Wisconsin recall election, here are some more, courtesy of the Washington Post's Rachel Weiner, who notes that all of the past week's michegas -- and doesn't it seem like it happened so much longer ago? -- was, perhaps, avoidable. In the end, however, it seems like national labor organizations just didn't have the heart or the wherewithal to extinguish the flames that were fanned on the local, grassroots level. And some are saying that this is precisely what they would have liked to have done:
Some national labor officials say they tried to dissuade Wisconsin unions and activists from going ahead with the recall campaign and simply could not.
“There’s this notion out there that unions are hierarchical,” said one labor official. "Labor has its own culture, and its extremely democratic." If the national labor union had tried to stop the recall, added the source, "it would have been a bloodbath."
Added a spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees: "With apologies to the arm-chair quarterbacks in DC, we didn’t have the opportunity to run the passion of over 100,000 grassroots protesters through a DC focus group. Wisconsin was and remains a grassroots movement. Anyone who second guesses what happened doesn’t understand that crucial fact."
Of course, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was one of the less half-hearted national organizations in the effort. As Andy Kroll reported back in March, AFSCME spent large amounts of money bankrolling the Wisconsin For Falk PAC, in support of Democratic primary candidate Kathleen Falk, which -- when you consider all of the critics of the outside money that bankrolled Scott Walker -- muddied the water considerably.
Weiner points out that the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka offered this to reporters on a post-recall conference call last week: "We didn’t decide on this recall. It was the workers in Wisconsin and the voters in Wisconsin who did." A bit of handwashing? Weiner notes that Trumka made a similar statement "over a year ago." And last month, Trumka suggested that a moral victory in the recall would be enough: "He would be a debilitated governor for the next two years in office, and he would be finished the next time he runs."
Ultimately, if the recall election dissuades further anti-labor actions from state governments, then the grassroots activists who pushed for the recall can happily shrug off the actual electoral loss. But an argument can be made that following the advice to stop short of the recall attempt might have been the better course of action. Had Walker been ousted, it was pretty clear that recall mania would not have subsided -- as Abe Sauer noted, by the end of February, the domains "RecallFalk.com" and "RecallTomBarrett.com" had been registered. And foregoing the recall attempt might have done more to leave Walker's reign in a cloud of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.
Instead, Walker's been gifted with a beneficial -- and quantifiable -- electoral result, which could very well embolden other labor opponents. And if anyone wants to follow in Walker's footsteps, they know that they'll be gambling with the Koch Brothers' money. Which means it isn't a gamble at all.
Ultimately, the Wisconsinites who pressed for the recall may simply shrug off the concerns of the national organizations that advised caution. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong." Of course, Emerson also said, "When you strike at a king, you must kill him."
Hello everybody, and welcome to your weekly ad-hoc, fast-typed, snaply judged, prickly thorn, but sweetly worn liveblog of Sunday morning political grunting and yelling. My name is Jason, and this is one of the best Sundays of the year, if not THE best (except for maybe some of you Wisconsinites) of the year because this is the one day each year that NBC does not show MEET THE PRESS and instead shows the French Open at the Stade Roland Garros in Paris. Bravo, you brave clay court specialists. Thank you, and of course, "Hello."
I am also very excited to share this Sunday with you today for another reason -- today is going to be one of those great acid-test weekends for the media. As you know, most Sundays, the people who put these shows together...well, you get the feeling that they are doing their utmost to talk about painfully trivial crap, when they could be doing something valuable with this time. This week we're going to see how serious these shows can be, by seeing how they cover a news conference that happened this past Friday.
As you know, President Obama gave one of those very rare press availabilities, where he took questions from the White House Press Corps. Now, I was watching the presser with an eye toward something interesting and substantive. The way I experienced the presser basically went like this -- there was a long and generic part where there were inquiries about the economy, and a bunch of seriously generic answers that were given in response.
And then, someone asked Obama about the recent national security stories -- the "kill list" story and the Stuxnet virus story -- and the leaks that enabled that enabled them. And suddenly things got interesting -- Obama did one of those "let me make a long series of disconnected phrases while I figure out what I'm going to say about this" moves, and a lot of long pausing, and finally, he talked at great length about how no one in the White House authorized anyone to be the sources of those stories and of course, no one had any idea who leaked them, no no! And it was total transparent crap, and fascinating, because he probably met with the leaker that morning, and they were probably all, "Hey man, nice leak!" And someone on twitter -- I forget who, probably one of those conscientious foreign policy guys like Joshua Foust -- tweeted something to the effect that Obama's response to the leak question was going to totally be "THE" story, post-presser. And I peeped the tweet and nodded and though, "Frack, yes, it will." And then David Wood and I had a brief little conversation about the leak question that was basically:
ME: Seriously, Obama?
WOOD: I mean.
Only it was a little bit smarter. (I mean, Dave was smart, anyway.)
Anyway, I was totally wrong. In just a few minutes, everyone was squawking about Obama's "remarks on the private sector." And I was totally confused. Obama had said very little about the private sector, only that it was doing better than the public sector, which is one of the most objectively true things in the world. Record profits don't exactly suck!. Here are charts that document what I'm talking about. What had I missed? OH MY! He used the word "fine," not "better." Oy. Didn't catch that. "Here we go," I thought.
It's pretty amazing how that story took off, and became more important than the part where Obama was pretty transparently BSing the press about the leaks. Because you know what, no amount of inquiry or analysis or discussion or opinion or examination or criticism of something someone says about the economy is going to affect the economy or impact anyone's lives. The economy is on its course now, probably headed in the direction of short-to-medium-term sucking, for a lot of people that never get to be on the news. Someone went off message though! Chanced upon the wrong word! SO SHINY. Must talk all day long about it, or else our brains might start working again.
On the other hand, there's actualy WORK the media can do on the whole leak story. Questions can be asked, sourced run to ground, a timeline established, logic applied. It's a serious and substantive discussion that can be had, you can bring real discomfort to powerful people, you can perhaps save lives -- but OH MY GOD it would take so much effort! Better to discuss how a permanently affluent political celebrity ruined his horse-race news-cycle news for a week because he used the wrong word.
I've often talked about how the media stays studiously disengaged from the lives of normal people, and almost always chooses the path of overhyped, arm-up-to-the-elbow alimentary canal-plumbing over doing even a tiny shred of good for our poor, bruised world. Today, I am guessing that we're going to hear a whole lot about how the way the word "fine" was used this week is a total embarrassment to a guy who'll never want for anything a day in his life, and not so much about how the same guy probably leaked a bunch of war-on-terror glory stories to a friendly press to burnish his cred for an election year at the possible expense of those secret programs' continued success.
We'll see, I guess!
Sunday! It makes our cynicism fun, and then we get sad, and then we go see "The Avengers" or something, and learn to hug again. Anyway, this is the part where I recommend that you all comfort one another in the comments and to feel free to drop me a line. As always, you can also follow me on Twitter, but I'll also recommend that you might prefer to follow me on RebelMouse -- the new social sharing tool developed by our pal, Paul Berry. Twitter, let's face it, gets a little bit silly at times. But if you go to \my Rebel Mouse page, you'll get the best of what I'm doing on Twitter and a big share of news stories that I've read and enjoyed. It's the perfect thing for those times you are waiting, in boredom, for this liveblog to refresh. So give it a try, if you want. If you don't want, don't do it! It's your life! I'm lucky to have you even reading this! Thank you, actually, for doing that!
You're great.
FOX NEWS SUNDAY
Fox has Mitch Daniels and Dennis Van Roekel (of the NEA) and Thea Lee (of the AFL-CIO) to talk about labor unions. And, let's credit Fox New Sunday right off the bat -- they make no mention of "the private sector is fine" but they DO preview their panel discussion by noting that they are going to talk about the leak story. So it looks like we'll have one potential acid-test pass today.
Meanwhile, labor unions are having a no good very bad week, after they failed to oust Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Tom Barrett, of course, didn't really seem like the ideal candidate to carry a torch for public sector union employees (in fact, the things Walker did in Wisconsin helped Barrett balance his budget in Milwaukee). In my Friday piece, I recommended that people take in what Doug Henwood had to say about the matter. Here's how he bottom-lined it:
Most labor people, including some fairly radical ones, detest Bob Fitch’s analysis of labor’s torpor. By all means, read his book Solidarity for Sale for the full analysis. But a taste of it can be gotten here, from his interview with Michael Yates of Monthly Review. A choice excerpt:
Essentially, the American labor movement consists of 20,000 semi-autonomous local unions. Like feudal vassals, local leaders get their exclusive jurisdiction from a higher level organization and pass on a share of their dues. The ordinary members are like the serfs who pay compulsory dues and come with the territory. The union bosses control jobs—staff jobs or hiring hall jobs—the coin of the political realm. Those who get the jobs—the clients—give back their unconditional loyalty. The politics of loyalty produces, systematically, poles of corruption and apathy. The privileged minority who turn the union into their personal business. And the vast majority who ignore the union as none of their business.
Bob thought that the whole model of American unionism, in which unions were given exclusive rights to bargain over contracts in closed shops, was a major long-term source of weakness. I find it persuasive; many don’t. But whatever you think of that analysis of the past is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Collective bargaining has mostly disappeared in the private sector, and now looks doomed in the public sector. There are something like 23 states with Republican governors and legislative majorities ready to imitate Walker who will be emboldened by his victory. And there are a lot of Dems ready to do a Walker Lite. If they don’t disappear, public sector unions will soon become powerless.
That means that if unions ever want to turn things around—and I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that we’ll never have a better society without a reborn labor movement—they have to learn to operate in this new reality. Which means learning to act politically, to agitate on behalf of the entire working class and not just a privileged subset with membership cards.
Fox has Mitch Daniels and Dennis Van Roekel (of the NEA) and Thea Lee (of the AFL-CIO) to talk about labor unions. And, let's credit Fox New Sunday right off the bat -- they make no mention of "the private sector is fine" but they DO preview their panel discussion by noting that they are going to talk about the leak story. So it looks like we'll have one potential acid-test pass today.
Meanwhile, labor unions are having a no good very bad week, after they failed to oust Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Tom Barrett, of course, didn't really seem like the ideal candidate to carry a torch for public sector union employees (in fact, the things Walker did in Wisconsin helped Barrett balance his budget in Milwaukee). In my Friday piece, I recommended that people take in what Doug Henwood had to say about the matter. Here's how he bottom-lined it:
Most labor people, including some fairly radical ones, detest Bob Fitch’s analysis of labor’s torpor. By all means, read his book Solidarity for Sale for the full analysis. But a taste of it can be gotten here, from his interview with Michael Yates of Monthly Review. A choice excerpt:
Essentially, the American labor movement consists of 20,000 semi-autonomous local unions. Like feudal vassals, local leaders get their exclusive jurisdiction from a higher level organization and pass on a share of their dues. The ordinary members are like the serfs who pay compulsory dues and come with the territory. The union bosses control jobs—staff jobs or hiring hall jobs—the coin of the political realm. Those who get the jobs—the clients—give back their unconditional loyalty. The politics of loyalty produces, systematically, poles of corruption and apathy. The privileged minority who turn the union into their personal business. And the vast majority who ignore the union as none of their business.
Bob thought that the whole model of American unionism, in which unions were given exclusive rights to bargain over contracts in closed shops, was a major long-term source of weakness. I find it persuasive; many don’t. But whatever you think of that analysis of the past is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Collective bargaining has mostly disappeared in the private sector, and now looks doomed in the public sector. There are something like 23 states with Republican governors and legislative majorities ready to imitate Walker who will be emboldened by his victory. And there are a lot of Dems ready to do a Walker Lite. If they don’t disappear, public sector unions will soon become powerless.
That means that if unions ever want to turn things around—and I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that we’ll never have a better society without a reborn labor movement—they have to learn to operate in this new reality. Which means learning to act politically, to agitate on behalf of the entire working class and not just a privileged subset with membership cards.
First up, Mitch Daniels says that it's fundamentally unfair for government unions to essentially sit on both sides of the table, and then gets to the whole divide and conquer part, where he reminds one group of have-nots that teachers and policemen all earn really high salaries that they don't, and wouldn't you like to see those people impoverished, like you?
Are voters giving governors a green light to "go after unions?" Daniels says, "I hope that nobody sees it that way," which is weird, because he just saw it that way himself. He says that unions aren't a bad idea in the private sector, not that he's particularly interested in private sector unions doing any better. He would prefer there be no public sector unions at any time, and insists that services are being delivered in Indiana without collective bargaining. Wallace asks for examples, and Daniels says that tax refunds are coming back faster, and "state parks" are in "dramatically better shape" and their DMVs are awesome.
Wallace says that Daniels' actions "looks like a pretty concerted effort to break public and private sector unions." Daniels says he "doesn't see it that way." "We're not going after anybody," he insists. Nevertheless, Wallace points out that government workers in Indiana "have taken a hit" -- the state ranks 46th in gross salaries and pay more for health care. Daniels says it isn't true -- apparently they get compensated in "praise," and who knows, maybe area landlords and grocers have a program where rent and food get paid for by Mitch Daniels saying nice things.
Wallace is all, "what about the figures I gave you?" Daniels is like, "I dunno?" He says, "We believe we have an effective state government" and "we believe we have a strong health care plan." So, keep all your statistics, Wallace. Because Mitch Daniels BELIEVES.
"We're not really believing that we've done anything other than improve the lives of Indiana's employees," says Daniels, who is now, somehow a "we." Indiana public employees -- greater impoverishment has made their lives better -- BELIEVE IT!
Wallace asks, "Don't unions simply have a place in this country, to ensure that management doesn't run roughshod over them?" Daniels says, "We differentiate between the two sectors." Daniels is apparently cool with some people being run roughshod over. Daniels adds that unions haven't changed much, or kept up with the times, and that, I think is true. And he's also right when he says that unions have had worse problems, long before Scott Walker came around.
Is there a danger for the GOP, becoming known as the enemy of working people? Daniels says he's concluded that Obama "doesn't understand where jobs come from." I know! Stupid Obama! He probably thinks that jobs are created when businesses become profitable and they need to add personnel to continue expanding on profits, when really jobs are created on very magical, special days where rich people wake up feeling super-awesome and think, "I am going to hire fifteen people today, to do some random stuff, for no reason! I am Willy Wonka! Come swim in my waterfall of nougat!"
Anyway, government is terrible, says Daniels, who runs a government, and usually wants credit for it.
Wallace points out that Walker critiqued Romney for not offering a plan of his own, of reform. Daniels agrees that Romney has to offer some sort of agenda, and use his candidacy to build a consensus. "It would be a mistake for Republicans to misread Wisconsin as some sort of harbinger. I don't see it that way at all," Daniels says.
This is a pretty special Mitch Daniels appearance, in that nobody asks him if he wants to be president or vice president.
Drat! My coffee maker is suddenly not working, like, ever again. That's a tremendous disappointment to me. I will have to light matches and gently sear my fingertips to stay awake during the rest of this.
So, now we have Dennis Van Roekel (of the NEA) and Thea Lee (of the AFL-CIO) to talk about things.
Is the recall vote sending a message? Van Roekel points out that the balance of power changed in the Senate in Wisconsin. It is now Democrat-controlled. It is also now out-of-session for the year. He also says that the election sends a message about unlimited corporate donations in the political arena. Lee adds that these are tough times for people who are rightly tightening their budgets, but doesn't see how balance cannot be struck at the bargaining table. "We have to figure out how to fund [pay and pensions] and make them viable," she says, but she doesn't think that the solutions isn't something the American people oppose.
Wallace notes that public workers have greater access to pensions, health benefits, and higher wages than private sector workers. He asks why private sector workers should pay taxes to fund these things that they, themselves are not getting. The better question, of course, is why aren't private sector workers getting these things.
Lee is reading my mind: "I think we have to turn that question around." Rather than take people's pensions away, everyone should have a decent pension. Of course, this gets to what was discussed by Henwood, above. If you believe that, you have to work for it beyond your own membership. Wallace just wants to know if she agrees with the figures. If I had my druthers, we'd be talking about how private sector employees restrain benefits and worker rights through all sorts of tricks and traps. The use of "temporary workers," for example. Read anythingthat Mac McClellandhas writtenabout this stuff.
Lee is attempting to explain to Wallace that "salary" and "benefits" put together forms something called "compensation." It's not going well!
Van Roekel adds that what's left out of the equation are the qualifications/accreditation that are required for the job. Wallace notes that a teaching degree isn't too marketable in the wider private sector. Van Roekel points out that the employees pay into these pensions, they are not free rides, and in some cases, the workers aren't even getting the money they paid in returned to them.
Union households, of course, went 1 in 3 for Walker. As Henwood noted: Union households =/= Union votes. But this seeming contradiction happens every day. How many union members buy their household goods at Walmart?
The basic conclusion Van Roekel is sort of arriving at is that getting involved in a recall election was not the most productive uses of their time and money. In Ohio, where there was a broader campaign of citizen outreach, unions (public and private) prevailed. In the recall election, they did not. Promoting public policy, as it turns out, is a more productive project than ousting an errant government official. Insert something here about the false promise of quck fixes.
What's more important to the NEA, Wallace asks, securing pay for teachers or providing services to students. This is what is known as a "false choice." Van Roekel points out that the teachers in Wisconsin volunteered to pay more of their own pensions, to save the state money. It wasn't deemed good enough. Wallace thinks that this means students prevailed. It really means that highly skilled teachers will leave, or not come to, places like Madison, Wisconsin, and the quality of that school system will deteriorate via brain drain.
Lee: "I think it's a false choice." She is like, totally reading my mind today! She also correctly notes that Wisconsin did not have all these terrible budget shortfalls until Walker created them by giving away taxpayer money to his private sector patrons.
(Eventually, all Wisconsin students will be able to do is take a single multiple choice test, and theri college instructors will be left to wonder why none of them can write or form ideas."
Wallace insists there isn't enough money to go around. Lee says, well, it's going to downgrade America's overall competitiveness. If you want to have a strong and capable workforce, you have to pay for it, it isn't free and it doesn't come about through magic. If you don't want to pay for it, awesome, but don't whine years down the road when people can no longer pave roads.
Wallace doesn't consider this an answer to his question. Lee says that when you lack revenues, you find new ones. "We could raise taxes," says lee, saying the most obvious thing in the world that is also complete un-American anathema in some circles, for some reason.
Is Lee disappointed that Obama didn't show up? Lee lets him off the hook. "I'm not going to second guess the President." Well, of course not! The standard Democratic Party way of doing things is coming out in favor of stuff they are certain to win, and staying away from anywhere they might lose, because long ago they decided that any sort of "losing" is bad -- bad enough that when it matters most, they don't actually stand for anything at all. What is the point of being "for" something, if it doesn't "win?" Right? PROFILES IN COURAGE-LIKE SUBSTANCE!
Panel time, with Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney and Charles Lane and Mara Liasson. Let's get our leak discussion on!
Kristol says that the leaks are "very damaging" just like Senator Dianne Feinstein says, and the bipartisan outrage over this matter is "startling" and "beyond simple politics." Wallace notes that the New York Times, two weeks in a row, got richly-detailed stories that were obviously very well sourced about classified "war on terror" matters.
Lane says that "as a journalist" he's "of two minds about it," and that there is stuff in those reports that the public should know. But one thing the public should know is whether or not the Obama administration "pushed back" on the disclosure of these matters. Let me add, of course, that I am VERY PRO-LEAK. Please leak away, everyone! (Whistleblowers: I know this is crazy, but email me maybe, okay?) But no one should ignore the possibility that leaks are made because somebody wants to get re-elected. And we can still make note of the fact that a leak of classified information may materially compromise something or someone. And journalists should be judicious in the balancing of interests. But I'd rather they be judicious with all kinds of information leaked to them, than no information.
Cheney says she'd like to know if the President authorized his aides to leak this information. She and her dad are going to have a lot of hearty laughs about that answer!
Liasson says that she cannot "even imagine" what the NYT "held back" about the Stuxnet story.
Will the White House appoint a special counsel? Kristol says that would perhaps clarify the legal ramifications, but it won't answer the question of the public interest. Kristol surmises, through Sanger's reporting on SEC DEF Bob Gates' agitation with Charles Donilon, that the leaks came from the National Security Adviser's office. (At the same time, Kristol notes that it's very out of character for Gates to use words like, "Shut the f--k up.")
I wonder who would leak information to Fox News Sunday? And under what circumstances would they report that information?
Wallace asks Cheney about that little old leak that led to Valerie Plame's career ending. Would she like to see a repeat of the independent counsel? She says she'd prefer an "independent investigation" into the matter. Wallace doesn't understand what she means by that. She doesn't go on to explain the concept any better. It is a distinction without a difference. But, she offers that the public has the right to know if Obama authorized someone to spell out these classified stories to reporters, and that is very much true.
Now FNS will spoil all the goodwill they might have accumulated talking about this matter with a panel discussion on the horsey-race implications of the "private sector is fine" comment.
The lead question is: one a scale of 1 to 10, how big a blunder is this. Liasson's answer basically demonstrates how worthless the discussion is through her answer, which I'll diagram.
1. It is a six out of ten.
2. It is terrible!
3. (Only a six out of ten, though?)
4. But it won't matter.
5. And it will, at the same time, matter.
6. Though not.
7. Romney also has gaffes.
8. They will matter and not matter.
9. And ultimately, the economy is bad, and isn't affected by this.
10. But this thing that won't ultimately impact the economy is still "a pretty big deal."
I mean, folks, that is some free-range, grass-fed artisanal high-proof blather, right there.
More blather continues, everyone's rather intelligent wrestling with the leak question is buried in it.
Lane notes that Walker didn't lay anyone off, so it's weird that the President is touting his layoff saving measures as an alternative. But this is part of the brilliance of Walker's plan. He didn't lay anyone off, he just made it pretty clear that the jobs would suck out loud from now on. This is similar to Romney's immigration plan -- encouraging self-deportation. Why, these Wisconsinites will simply lay themselves off!
Wallace asks a question of Cheney, despite knowing that he already knows what her answer will be. Why ask then?
Now, Wallace is asking, "Let's forget about the policy side of this, let's talk about the political side." You haven't been talking about the policy side of this, though! You've just been talking about the horsey-race, news-cycle, shiny shiny spinning lights side of this.
Brief question about the Eurozone crisis, how much of a drag will it be on the U.S. economy, and does Obama have the clout to do something about it. Kristol insists that Europe's problems have had zero effect on the United States' economy. Okay, then!
THIS WEEK WITH GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS
Okay, my problem with household appliances continues! My internet just went out for like, twenty minutes, and somehow or another, my TiVo did not record the first thirteen minutes of this show. So, I'm getting the last part of Rick Santorum's interview, where GSteph is asking him if he wants to be vice president, to which Santorum says, "-----." Yes, I'm going to leave you in suspense, because why not? Anyway, to recap, David Axelrod and Rick Santorum were apparently on this show this morning. I'm an guessing that David Axelrod was very pro-Obama, and Rick Santorum was, perhaps, not. I'm geniunely uncurious about what I missed. I'm sure I've captured it correctly.
Ha, and now the show is going to have a panel discussion that I am sure will be very daffy, because it will feature Mike Huckabee, Ed Rendell, Van Jones, and the comic stylings of Ann Coulter.
"How do you watch these shows, without shooting yourself repeatedly in the eyes?" is the question I most often get from people. It is a tough question to face, frankly.
Anyway, Mike Huckabee doesn't think the private sector is fine, and that we'll see that line in campaign ads over and over again. Van Jones says that there will be ads that feature the dumb things that Romney says, too.
Jones says that Wisconsin should be a wake up call to progressives, because OMG, progressives! Y'all do not have a lot of money.
Ann Coulter is...kind of trembling all over as she speaks? Maybe this isn't the actual live-action Ann Coulter, but an animated character created by those people who made "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist?" Anyway, she would like to be able to fire the people who work for Expedia, or something. She wants public schoolteachers to know that they are bad people who should feel bad.
Rendell points out all of the "Republican ideas" that Obama has proposed that the Congress will not pass, probably because they would prefer to pass them under a Republican.
Now, Mike Huckabee and Ann Coulter are yelling at Rendell. Actually, Huckabee is "patiently discussing" things. Van Jones says that he was taught to look up to public sector employees and not treat them as threats. He goes on to note that the GOP won't pass their own bills, because they want "more pain." Stephanopoulos briefly questions this contention, but Rendell grabs the conch instead (yes, I am now getting to the point where I am imagining these people on a remote desert island) and says something generic about how awesome policemen and firefighters are.
Ann Coulter picks it up and has a pretty addled discussion about the stimulus package, and how money for firemen end up paying for "diversity coordinators," and Ed Rendell is all, "So you want less firemen? So you want less firemen?" and Mike Huckabee is all, "I thought states did that stuff" and I'm like, you ran for President and you aren't sure about the role the federal government plays in assisting states in a down economy? And now everyone is sort of talking past each other.
Next topic: the Bain attacks. Are they working? The Beltway consensus is that they don't. Polls of actual human Americans say differently. But lets give a bunch of Sunday morning pundits another stab at this.
Rendell says, "Oh well, these new commercials are working, I was talking about the old commercials." His objection is that some normal person who Rendell's never met called Romney a vampire, and I guess you should never call people names. Unless you are Ed Rendell, and you just put out a book that calls people names. Ed Rendell! Kind of a dolt!
Mike Huckabee says that he was not talking about Mitt Romney when he made that crack about how "I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.” He says, "I was just talking about sometimes an opponent."
Everyone laughs! Because har-dee-har, no one has actual convictions about anything and it's hilarious! Glory to Panem!
Coulter insists that Romney has had a "Midas Touch" with everything. EVERYTHING. You must have ridiculous expectations about Mitt Romney, at all times. (She does not want to discuss RomneyCare though.)
We go to commercial. I go to the medicine cabinet, hoping to find some Klonopin.
Now it's time to talk about Bill Clinton and how wildly off message he gets! Whoa! Roller coaster ride with that guy! So out of control. Whoo! Loop-de-loops all over the place when he gets going. The great thing about Clinton is that even if he doesn't go off-message, everyone has agreed that they will just report he said totally different things than he actually said.
It's all a fun game of shiny lights and narratives about people and their characters that were decided on long ago. Joe Biden believes in justice for the LGBT community, but the words that come out of his mouth, we have decided, are "gaffes," and so Biden doesn't get credit for winning an argument, he just has a terrible mistake that falls upward.
Huckabee says Clinton was an awesome president, and that Republicans miss him so much! (If you don't recall the "Clinton administration," I was there, and it featured all sorts of howling derangement about Clinton running a drug ring in Arkansas and killing Vince Foster and nonsense like that.)
Ed Rendell says that the GOP is terrible and keep obstructing Obama's attempts to improve the economy. He says that Clinton will be an awesome surrogate for Obama in October, he promises! Watch him in October! Bill Clinton is the October Surprise of words!
Jones and Coulter fall out over everyone Waterlooing everyone else, and she just wants people to cut taxes. She also remembers Clinton as a "moderate," which is not the case she ever made while he was actually in office.
I am pretty sure we did not learn anything new about America's fiscal situation, except for the fact that Bill Clinton sure provided the punditocracy with some laughs.
Mike Huckabee will not be Romney's vice president. He is sure that the eventual vice presidential pick will be awesome! "One thing I admire about Mitt Romney is that he is not impetuous...he's methodical." That's a fancy way of saying, "Romney probably won't pick a flashy, charismatic moron, like John McCain did."
"Whoever he selects will be the product of a very thoughtful process," Huckabee says. Coulter agrees that it will be totally thoughtful and methodical! She thinks that he'll methodically choose Chris Christie because Christie will do all of Romney's yelling, and also has "ethnic appeal." (With what ethnicity?)
Rendell says that nobody votes based upon who becomes vice-president. And the best possible person for no one to base their vote on is Rob Portman, who inspires so much non-wonder everywhere he goes.
Now, we're actually going to get to the story-leak leak-story!
Huckabee notes that the NYT had three dozen sources for the articles, and that Democratic Senators are just as concerned as anyone else. Charitably (perhaps too charitably!), he says that he doesn't believe that Obama had anything, personally, to do with the leaks, and he believes Obama has a right to be angry. (GSteph has sort of made it a given that Obama's anger over the leak was expressed sincerely.)
Jones says there is a "grab-bag of hypocrisy" here because many of the same GOP critics weren't too critical of similar leaks during the Bush administration, and anyway, why isn't anyone talking about "the facts we learned from the leaks themselves," which is that the President has granted himself the authority kill people in 120 foreign countries. "We should be concerned about that," he says, and it's more important than "who leaked what to who."
"If the President, without oversight, has a kill list," Jones says, "that is what we should talk about." GSteph says, "but the administration would argue that there is oversight." Sure, they would ARGUE that! "We'll just police ourselves," say all Too Big To Fail banks.
GSteph says that there is "due process." There is like, due process-like substance, maybe!
Coulter makes the point I would make, that there is actually no reason to believe that Obama doesn't have anything to do with these stories' existence. "It is not so obvious he had nothing to do with them." True! GSteph just sort of decided that this was an immutable ground rule for the discussion. She then berates people for criticizing Bush's detention policy and shrugging off Obama's extrajudicial killing. "Now, it's all 'we're at war,' where were you then?" Well, Ed Rendell, who now approves of Obama being able to cap whoever he likes, was somewhere probably being a dolt.
Van Jones is all, "Hey, I'm right here, I believe in human rights and junk!" But Jones also says he really doubts Obama "engineered" these stories. Why would a President who has no problem deciding what people live and die (on "Terror Tuesdays," which sounds like something you print on a high-school cafeteria menu!) get suddenly all pearl-clutchy at the thought of setting up a glorifying story in the paper when he's running for re-election?
(It wasn't immediately clear that Jones was actually talking about "engineering" the stories. Coulter had been talking about the "kill list," in and of itself. This caused some momentary confusion, as every wondered if Jones had missed the fact that Obama actually did have this extensive process of extra-judicial "miltant" killing.)
Now there is a discussion about the Supreme Court. Jones points out that the big story is that a Heritage Foundation/Mitt Romney plan that Obama signed onto instead of a single-payer/public option program favored by progressives is now, bizarrely, considered "socialism." Everyone yells, Stephanopoulos mercifully brings this to an end.
FACE THE NATION
Just when I'm wondering if I should make some sort of cough syrup/Fernet-Branca concoction to take the pain away, the show ends, and we're on to FACE THE NATION, where we will have Scott Walker and Martin O'Malley. By the way, the last time we watched this show, I wondered by Bob Schieffer's editorial comment was coming in the middle of the show, it was pointed out to me that FTN, in its new hour-long format, hasn't been picked up for the entire hour everywhere yet. So that's why that happened.
Face The Nation is making it something of an open question as to what story there are going to take more seriously -- the "private sector fine" story or the national security leak story. Schieffer is talking about the latter with more gravitas and good guests, here at the top of the show, but the show seems to have done some preparation around the former story.
I'm hopeful! So far, I'll give Fox New Sunday credit for the right proportional mix and This Week the side-eye.
First up, however, we have Scott Walker. Schieffer asks about the "private sector is fine" remark. Romney said some stuff in retaliation, and namechecked Wisconsin. "So there you have it Governor, is that the message?" Is that the question? Sorry, I mean, is that a question? I guess we're pretending it is.
Anyway, Walker says that the voters said that they wanted people to "take on the tough issues." For the time being, be pro-impoverishment of people is "tough." So that's a relief, I guess! Walker says that Romney will have to prove that the "R next to his name" stands for "reformer."
Is Romney talking about getting rid of the public sector, Walker says no, and insists that he "protected" public sector workers, by making them poorer and more subject to budgetary manipulation. And, of course, anytime you depose citizens of their share in the democratic process, that totally protects them! We don't need people thinking all sorts of crazy things, like they possess political power.
Once everyone has a private sector job in an Amazon shipping warehouse, they won't miss having political power at all.
Schieffer notes that Walker doesn't seem to be all that confident in Romney's ability to hew to the sort of politics that Walker prefers. Walker says that "he's got the capacity to do it" he just hopes he does what Reagan did and "lay out a clear plan." This is, by the way, the new face of GOP establishment worry about Romney -- they aren't worried that his past precludes him from winning, but they are wondering when he will identify his priorities and make plans.
Walker says it again: Romney must clearly identify a "reform agenda." Of course, Team Obama Re-Elect is hoping that Romney will define himself, too, because they'd like to mount attacks on Romney's tangible plans, and turn the election into a "choice election." Romney, by not putting his neck out there, keeps this a "referendum election." His own party may force the issue.
Will Romney win Wisconsin? Walker has already said the Romney is the underdog in Wisconsin but that it's surely not outside the realm of possibility that it will be competitive. So, why Schieffer is asking him again is beyond me. He gives, in essence, the same answer, wrapped in more of this concern-trolling over Romney's plans.
Walker clearly understands that he is the captain of the team right now. Who'd have thought, when he beat Tom Barrett in 2010, that he's one day be dictating terms to his party's Presidential candidate? In terms of political "heroball," Romney has a long way to go before he gets to be the party's Kevin Durant.
Now we will have Martin O'Malley and Richard Trumka respond to all of this.
Trumka tries to bright-side this: Walker had to spend money! He lost control of the state Senate! The problem here is that Walker's backers can raise all that money several times over tomorrow, if they want or need to. It isn't even a big deal. As for the now Democrat controlled state Senate, they are out of session unless Walker or the GOP-led State Assembly call them back into session. So...he hasn't exactly lost control of it yet.
Trumka's on better ground criticizing Walker's job creation record, which is not good. "We wish he'd have the best job creation record in the country, and we wish he'd let us help him get there."
O'Malley says that he thinks that Democrats in Wisconsin weren't all that in to using the recall mechanism for something that wasn't de facto legal wrongdoing, and to a significant extent, that's true. He goes on to say that the private sector, compared to the public sector, is doing fine, and this is causing a "drag on the economy." (The "drag" is called "insufficient aggregate demand.")
Schieffer says that the traditional union efforts didn't work in Wisconsin this time. Trumka says, "I disagree with you completely." Oh, really? Do tell, because I read a lot of newspapers on Wednesday morning that said Walker won? Trumka says that the "money edge is really dangerous to democracy," which means he doesn't have the money edge over corporations. He says that now, they can mobilize workers of all kinds, all year round. (Except on Tuesday, June 5 of this year, I guess!)
Is it a wake up call? "Not just that," he says. So, things aren't all peaches and cream.
Now, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are here because this is the 40th anniversary of Watergate, and Richard Nixon is still bad. or something?
Are they really excited about having a co-byline in the paper again? Woodward says yes. Bernstein says yes. Schieffer says he enjoyed reading it. Everyone totally loves the fact that two guys who had a newspaper story that one time, now have another newspaper story another time. Schieffer says his takeaway is that "it's worse than we thought it was," which is funny, because the two guys to co-authored a book titled, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks" -- Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein -- have had tremendous trouble getting booked on Sunday shows (MSNBC's Chris Hayes brought an end to the blackout), because Mann and Ornstein have said that the biggest problem in Washington is that the GOP has taken complete leave of their senses, and that is too HOT FOR WASHINGTON, where "both sides" must ever be equally to blame for everything.
Nixon was bad, says Woodward, author of a famous story about how bad Nixon was. Bernstein says that their whole point, forty years later, is that they want to remind people that Nixon's crimes really were worse than Nixon's cover-up, and that the Nixon White House was a "criminal enterprise."
Schieffer shows them a video of Mark Felt denying he was "Deep Throat," and they think it's really neat, but there's a lot of de-mythologizing to do -- Felt was a critical help at critical times, Woodward says, but there were a lot of other sources and the two of them did a lot of additional reporting.
Now, because of the aforementioned problem I mentioned with the way FACE THE NATION's new hour-long format has not been widely embraced, Schieffer has to bisect his discussion with Woodward and Bernstein in order to do his editorial comment. He says that when Watergate broke, he bolted town because ironically enough, he didn't want to end up assigned to the story after achieving his dream of getting to anchor the convention coverage. He recalls that he couldn't figure out why anyone would break into a campaign headquarters. In retrospect, however, he says he now understands that he "made the worst decision a reporter can make: I just assumed it wouldn't amount to anything." And, naturally, it did.
We return to the Woodward and Bernstein story. Bernstein says that they realized they were on to something important very early on -- they surmised quickly that what they had was a bunch of impeachable offenses. Bernstein says that they kept themselves from using the word "impeach" though, because it would immediately cause them to be labelled as "agenda-havers."
"We just wanted to find out what happened," Woodward says, "we were as empirical as can be." What would have happened to the Washington Post if they'd been wrong? Bernstein says, "It would have been awful." He points out that it took a long time before people actually believed what they were writing -- their own colleagues doubted them -- and it was Walter Cronkite who finally gave them some backing by taking the story to CBS.
Woodward points out that we can all listen to the famous tapes of Nixon railing against the Post and his enemies and, as Schieffer points out, Jewish people in generally. Bernstein points out that yeah, he really hated them! He tried to break in to Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. (We don't get into Nixon's famous "Jew counter," Fred Malek, which is unforttunate because Malek is apparently still allowed to have a career working for supposedly respectable politicians.)
What continues to surprise them, forty years later? Both agree that the famous tapes are always astounding to listen to -- Woodward notes that Nixon doesn't spend much time on those tapes talking about ways to move the country forward: "It was always 'let's screw someone,'" says Woodward. Bernstein adds that it was as if Nixon had no political strategies at all, other than criminal ones.
What about Ford's pardon? Woodward says that Ford said he did it to bring the country back together, having decided that it served the national interest. And it cost Ford greatly. But that's the contrast, I guess, with a guy who never actually considered the country during the time he was president. Charles Ferguson's great new book, Predator Nation, gets around to talking about how all the incentives run the wrong way in America -- the despicable get big payouts and honest men become history's patsies. You can sort of see the beginnings of that with Watergate. It was maybe the last time the head of a powerful institution failed to "get away with it." Now game protects game.
What do they think about today's leaks -- ones that the White House probably did want reporters to have? Bernstein says that one danger is that it creates an environment where a witch hunt against sources and reporters is acceptable. Woodward agrees, saying that it's always a challenge for journalists to modulate between getting the truth before the public while avoiding a greater harm to the public at the same time. It's something that takes "great delicacy," in a time where few others demonstrate an appreciation for delicacy.
"Journalists are actually quite good at not revealing genuine national security secrets," Bernstein says. "Think about the things in your head, Bob!" Now I want to know, though!
Woodward says it's sort of amazing that Nixon could go out on a note of not letting "hate" get to him, when there are hours of tape that recorded his hatred for people at great length. He compares it to comments he'd make in public, during his late-in-life battle to restore some of his repuation -- an example is his claim that he "never authorized hush money." As Woodward points out, there were twelve separate examples on publicly available recordings of Nixon offering hush money. "Did he not think anyone would check?" Woodward asks. I think it's safe to say that Nixon was a complete sociopath.
Staying on the leak story now, with Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Mike Rogers, who chair the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, respectively.
Is it enough that the DOJ has appointed investigators in this case? "Hopefully," she says. She notes that we're in a very different situation now then we were during Watergate. These are matters of dealing with enemies -- in her estimation, the "war on terror" aspect makes an investigation, if not a "witch hunt" appropriate. Rogers says he agrees with Feinstein, and that both were concerned about the "parade of leaks" that formed the basis of these stories. He notes that some of the sources placed themselves at various times in the Situation Room, which means that we're talking about a "small but powerful" cohort of people. Rogers says that Justice's response was "a good start," but want more assurances of independence.
Schieffer points out that Rogers has held that this matter is "one hundred times more serious than the Valerie Plame case." Rogers stands by that, and that's why he wants at least the same consideration given to this investigation. He tells Schieffer that he's had people from various agencies come to Intelligence Committee hearings profess to him that these leaks have really hurt them do their jobs.
Both Rogers and Feinstein profess that they want a non-partisan investigation, though I'm guessing that only Feinstein, for the time being is willing to take Obama's professions of anger over the leaks at "face value," as she says today. Nevertheless, Feinstein already has some serious things to say about the potential fall-out from these leaks. She noted that in Yemen, terrorists have created a bomb that is "non-metallic and can go through magnetometers" that would take a "very invasive body search" to detect. Our intelligence agencies got a jump on this development, and the news of it was supposed to be "very closely held." But the news leaked, "and now the person who helped us" is in danger for his life.
Schieffer asks Rogers if his interest in this isn't at least a little bit tied to the notion that these leaks led to stories that made Obama look strong on defense. Rogers insists again, that it has no bearing: "I hope that ideology and politics don't settle into this...if you want to get to the bottom of this...don't go in with a conclusion, follow your leads."
Well, what can I say? Sunday morning teevee, for once, I misjudged you. By and large, you all made attempts to cover what I thought was the big story from the Obama news conference, and Fox and CBS actually attached a real, discernible preponderance of importance to the leak story, instead of the horse-race frivolity. I was wrong, today, and I'm actually very delighted about that!
Of course, maybe this just goes to demonstrate how badly MEET THE PRESS is dragging down our average expectations. Kudos to you French Open, for making out political discourse slightly better than usual!
Have a great week, everybody! (I am off to buy a new coffeemaker or three.)
[The Sunday morning liveblog returns next week. Like I said, check out my RebelMouse page, for good stuff to read.]
I mean, those articles that placed the BlackBerry as a fixture of the Capitol Hill scene just seem like the sort of thing we were reading 10 years ago. It was a time we remember through those misty watercolors. Mark Halperin was still writing The Note. Lauriol Plaza was the inexplicable dining destination of the up-and-comers in D.C.'s power set. People raised the debt ceiling without succumbing to brutal lunacy. And everywhere you looked, bros were slinging BlackBerrys to denote their status as important people that needed to always be reachable.
Makes sense for Politico to write a story premised on the notion that BlackBerrys are actually engaged in some epic "battle for Washington," then, right? At any rate, here are all the things I've learned about BlackBerrys today, from this article:
President Barack Obama ushered in a new era when he insisted on taking his BlackBerry to the White House.
Yeah, when you think "Barack Obama" and "new era," you think BlackBerry. All those people who wrote articles about the nation's "first black president" really buried the lede on that one.
The BlackBerry has long been the smartphone of choice in D.C. Data from the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer last November show House staffers use an estimated 10,600 smartphones provided by the government, of which about 1,500 were iPhones and 100 were Androids. The remaining 9,000 were BlackBerrys.
This tends to indicate that BlackBerrys aren't so much the "smartphone of choice" as they are the smartphone that penny-pinching federal agencies stick you with when they absolutely have to give you a mobile phone.
But federal employees are increasingly passing over BlackBerrys for iPhones and Android devices.
QUICK! Slash federal employee compensation!
Obama, too, has relied on more than just his BlackBerry — the president has been spotted using an iPhone and an iPad.
Another messaging failure from Barack Obama.
"The BlackBerry anecdotes are a huge part of Obama’s brand reputation," Fran Kelly, now vice chairman of advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, told the [New York] Times in 2009.
Without Googling, can you name a single Barack Obama "BlackBerry anecdote?" No points for "Barack Obama has a special BlackBerry, I hear." Bonus points if you can think of one that came after 2009.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s BlackBerry habit has helped humanize her, too. Texts From Hillary, the now-dormant Tumblr page created by Stacy Lambe, recently hired as an editor at BuzzFeed, and Adam Smith, communications director at nonprofit Public Campaign, paired a photo of Clinton looking at her BlackBerry with photos of celebrities or other pols preoccupied by their own mobile devices along with funny captions imagining what the two parties were texting to each other.
I think it's a stretch to say that it was the BlackBerry that "helped humanize" Hillary Clinton. Seems to me that it was the photograph of a devil-may-care Clinton, set in the quirky context that the Lambe/Smith tumblr page established, that worked all of that viral alchemical magic. Had she been holding a Samsung Galaxy, the effect would have been the same. (Except that this Politico article would not be padded out with this information.)
Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), a lecturer at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs...told POLITICO on Monday: “My problem was not with constituents having greater access [to officials] — which would be a good thing — but with members being bombarded with emails and text messages from the most partisan and those with the narrowest agendas."
Congresscritters being bombarded with text messages that express partisanship and narrow agendas is a lot like snow falling on a snowman, no?
Jo Schuda, a spokeswoman for Veterans Affairs, told POLITICO that the smartphone’s mobility has “created an expectation among midlevel employees and management that being always willing to respond to issues, questions and requests outside of business hours is normal and, in some cases, required.”
QUICK! Slash federal employee compensation!
Research In Motion, meanwhile, is banking on what senior vice president Scott Totzke has called its “core strength”: Washington.
Ladies and gentlemen, we present Research In Motion, the last people on Earth who see "banking on Washington" as some sort of viable plan.
Last week, the people behind GOOD -- a media organization dedicated to covering philanthropy and the people who work at "moving the world forward" -- laid off most of the staff that had been editing and creating content for the organization's eponymous magazine.
Now, print media layoffs are a fairly common (and depressing!) occurrence these days, but what was most striking about how GOOD handled the matter is that they seemed to be trying to set some sort of land-speed record for dickery.
The announcement that most of the staff -- including the magazine's much-heralded executive editor, Ann Friedman -- were being cashiered came the day after the same staff celebrated a launch party for their most recent issue, which did make it to newsstands. Later, the organization sent out a tweet, professing sadness that they had "lost great people." Sure. They weren't so much disposed of as they were tragically misplaced. From there, GOOD celebrated having notched their 200,000th Facebook friend by producing a video which contained testimonials from their staff -- including some of the people they'd kicked to the curb only days before.
So if the short-term goal was to sow a ton of ill will in as short a time as possible, then mission accomplished. We must never forget, however, that all of this tactlessness was done for a good cause -- GOOD says that they are taking a different path now, and want to become a "Reddit for social good."
Now, I do not know precisely what that means. And I have to imagine there are a number of Redditors who think that the "Reddit for social good" is Reddit. But the consensus speculation on the matter is that GOOD is scaling back on all this effort to publish a magazine in order to move to some new, off-the-shelf social media platform that harvests the good intentions of its network of supporters for cheap content to sell ads against. In so doing, GOOD will allow big brand names the chance to burnish their reputation by being associated with people who are "moving the world forward."
But if the treatment of their former colleagues gives one pause about whether GOOD is in this for the "good," consider the story of the one person from the magazine who was not cut adrift at the end of last week. Alysia Santo of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote:
The only editorial employee left now is the education page editor, Liz Dwyer. The education portal on GOOD says that the “page is sponsored by University of Phoenix,” so one could easily infer that’s why she was the one spared, though this could not be confirmed. Interview requests to upper management went unanswered.
In short, this isn't a brand with whom anyone sincerely interested in "social good" would want to be associated. But if you want to shine up the University of Phoenix's turd in exchange for cash money, that's a totally different story.
At any rate, it's going to be awesome to see what GOOD does next with their social platform, their Facebook pals and their commitment to better serving the needs of high-toned private education confidence men. Maybe next week, GOOD will create an awesome Pinterest page about all the ways the world is "moving forward" after the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services, Education and Related Agencies slashes IDEA Part C and IDEA Part B special education funding.
"Bellyaching over the arrival of an irritating new neighbor is a suburban cliché," Barbaro writes, before proceeding to go on for over 1,700 more words about it, instead of doing what most people would do in this situation, which is to type "CTRL-A" and "DELETE."
If we recall from previous reports, Romney's La Jolla home is the one where he is famously installing a "car garage." (He does have a lot of these homes, so it's useful to know about this, if only to keep track of Romney's widely sprawled domestic empire.) This story, titled "The Candidate Next Door," seems to be an attempt to take a third or fourth bite of the "car garage" story -- which, by the way, was broken by Politico's Reid Epstein, to the great consternation of the Romney camp. (You might notice that Epstein isn't doing much Romney coverage lately, which brings us right back around to Politico's ongoing attempts to "make nice" with the Romney campaign.)
Okay, well, what's to be learned about Romney's neighbors? Well, for one thing, he doesn't quite fit in -- see, the people in Romney's neighborhood "[evoke] 'Modern Family' far more than 'All in the Family.'" Har-dee-har.
Barbaro talks to a a pair of gay couples from the neighborhood, who he treats as intriguing, exotic novelties, and who each fantasize about having some sort of extremely passive-aggressive confrontation with the candidate. Romney is also accused of harshing the locals' mellow: "A young man in town recalled that Mr. Romney confronted him as he smoked marijuana and drank on the beach last summer, demanding that he stop." Well, once upon a time he probably would have gone at this young beach hippie with a pair of scissors, so maybe Romney is actually meeting his neighbors halfway?
For a while, the piece sort of strives to keep this "Modern Family" idea alive -- Romney is a conservative celebrity living alongside a collection of typical California liberals! It is slightly undercut by the demographic breakdown the article includes: "The La Jolla of 2012 is as purple a precinct as they come, with 7,764 registered Republicans and 7,024 Democrats." So when, in the very next line, a resident muses, “It’s odd that this is where Romney picked [this] place [to live] — it’s so progressive," you think, "Is it though? Because I can add."
Eventually, however, it really shifts into gear, and you learn that the more important takeaway is Romney has apparently moved in alongside a gaggle of affluent, backbiting NIMBYs who are just mad that he is threatening their property values -- through both the extensive, ongoing renovations to his home and ... well, by just being around, and having a large group of security personnel traveling in his wake. They are sad that their road is blocked up, and their "ocean views are in jeopardy," and their favorite "dog walking routes" have been "disrupted."
It truly is a collection of first world problems. And one thing that reading this story offers is the chance to imagine the other, more politically relevant stories that could have been written. Sure, it's not exactly news that Romney is titanically wealthy and routinely indifferent to those of lesser station. But that indifference would be better set off by California's ongoing foreclosure crisis, relief for which Romney opposes.
And at another point in the piece, one of Romney's neighbors tells Barbaro that if it were President Barack Obama causing all this neighborhood disruption, "I'd probably be fine with it." You could say the same thing about Obama supporters' reactions to the president's "kill list," only that would have been a more interesting story.
At any rate, way to make Politico look prophetic, New York Times. Great job. Good effort.
Dylan Byers today channels the pain of everyone trying to watch cable news reports on the Wisconsin recall last night, in a post titled "The worst night on cable news." How acute was this pain felt? The first instant message I received this morning read as follows: "Should I watch cable news right now? This is a real question I am asking myself."
Byers quickly notes the rather aggressively partisan tone taken by Fox, who stopped just short of wheeling out champagne and strippers to celebrate the Walker win, and MSNBC, who had Ed Schultz -- essentially a Tom Barrett surrogate -- anchor the evening. I had some misgivings about the lead role Schultz was taking going into the night. Sure, he's well-sourced within the activist community that inspired the lion's share of the anti-Walker sentiment, but as it was pretty clear going into the night that Walker would prevail, having Schultz anchor the coverage was like watching a small child receive a lump of coal from Santa in slow motion.
But Byers showers the most contempt on CNN -- naturally! -- for spending the evening rerunning its coverage of Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee. Byers doesn't dally with any delicate knife twisting: He just shows what the three networks were doing when the call for Walker came in and notes that Wolf Blitzer was eight minutes late to the story. (Call me crazy, but I sort of think being merely eight minutes behind is a Wolf Blitzer personal best.)
But you know what? Screw it. I am actually feeling pretty good about CNN's decision. I know that some time ago, my colleague Elyse Siegel and I went all upside CNN's head, pointing out all the floats in its parade of horribles and suggesting that CNN should do something to fix itself. But what we didn't consider was that it always had another option. It could always do what it does best, and just give up.
As Byers notes, "CNN has no obligation to cover the Wisconsin recall, and one could argue that CNN doesn't need to break that political news, or spend the 10 o'clock hour speculating on the potential political ramifications of the various outcomes."
When I read that, it forced me to imagine what it might have been like if CNN had not chosen to stick with the Queen's Jubilee. And in all likelihood, it would have been a repeat of its previous attempts to "cover politics," which always seems to be the same -- it puts a bunch of people in a room together, gives them a bunch of toys, and asks them to run around doing stuff.
That appears to be CNN's entire strategy where covering political outcomes is concerned: everyone run around the room like a bunch of pissed-off chimps on salvia, doing stuff, doing it harder, doing it faster, doing it until everyone drops dead of exhaustion or secures a note from a therapist, excusing them from the activity. I'm pretty sure it will be revealed that CNN's political coverage will be the reason that the big bad guys in the movie "Prometheus" are coming to wipe out humanity.
If the end result of an evening spent watching CNN "do" politics is just the depressing feeling you get watching all that human wreckage frenetically destroying its own dignity, then I say, give me the Queen! Give me Piers Morgan, randomly exulting at the sight of barges on the Thames. Let these poor CNN people numb themselves forever, in slack-jawed appreciation of the royal family's collection of fascinators and epaulets. Let CNN play to its strengths. Let's save the human race from the "Prometheus" monsters.
Via Twitter, here is what I gather is Governor Scott Walker's "closing argument:"
As a retweeter points out, this is the same Ronald Reagan who said, "Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost," so it's not a particularly convincing argument, as it turns out.
Back when Mitt Romney was campaigning in Michigan, he had this weird phrase about his one-time home state that he kept robotically repeating: "The trees are the right height." Well, I can't say for sure what "the right height" is to Mitt Romney. And Michiganders -- who, yes, were polled as to their trees' height -- came back with mixed reviews on how their trees measure up. But as it turns out, the height of trees -- and how many of them you can see from space -- reveals a lot about the health and wealth of an urban community. And when the trees are wrong, that's actually an indicator of a larger problem.
Over at Per Square Mile, Tim de Chant has done yeoman's work in studying the trees and what they mean, and he's found that if you want to measure income inquality in an urban neighborhood, you should look for the available shade:
Research published a few years ago shows a tight relationship between per capita income and forest cover. The study’s authors tallied total forest cover for 210 cities over 100,000 people in the contiguous United States using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s natural resource inventory and satellite imagery. They also gathered economic data, including income, land prices, and disposable income.
They found that for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent. That’s a pretty tight correlation. The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees.
De Chant subsequently found that this phenomenon comes to life when you look at various communities using Google Earth. A fine example is seen in comparing Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood (predominantly African American, with median income of about $13,000) to the more tony Hyde Park, just to the north (more racially diverse, with median income about $44,000):
According to de Chant, trees provide unsung benefits to urbanites: "They shade houses in the summer, reducing cooling bills. They scrub the air of pollution, especially of the particulate variety, which in many poor neighborhoods is responsible for increased asthma rates and other health problems." He also noted that the trees-to-affluence ratio correlates to economic conditions all over the world.
Huffington Post | Jason Linkins | June 25, 2012 4:13 PM ET