How many insinuations can dance on the head of a meeting?

FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2017

The nature of the chase: Let's start with a clear-cut fact:

Last September, Jeff Sessions, then a United States senator, did in fact have a meeting with Sergey Kislyak, the rotund Russkie ambassador.

On March 2, the Washington Post described this event, which plainly was a meeting. The Post's 1645-word news report started off like this:

ENTOUS, NAKASHIMA AND MILLER (3/2/17): Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia's ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump's campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions's confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator's office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia's alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump's associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.

When Sessions spoke with Kislyak in July and September, the senator was a senior member of the influential Armed Services Committee as well as one of Trump's top foreign policy advisers. Sessions played a prominent role supporting Trump on the stump after formally joining the campaign in February 2016.

Last September, Sessions and Kislyak met in Sessions' office. No one denies that this event occurred. By the rules of conventional English, it plainly was a "meeting."

That said, you'll note that Entous, Nakashima and Miller seemed to say, in that report, that Sessions had had two meetings with Kislyak last year.

In paragraph 2, they described the September meeting—an actual, unambiguous "meeting" which plainly did occur. Later, they seemed to refer to an earlier "meeting," one held back in July.

At this point, things became rather fuzzy in this Post report. We'll suggest this might help you see what can happen, within our upper-end press corps, when a chase is on.

Wow! Did Sessions have two meetings with Kislyak last year? Curiously, you had to read deep into this lengthy report to encounter a description of that first "meeting," the one which occurred in July.

All the way down in paragraphs 32 and 33 [sic], the reporters finally described that earlier meeting. In our view, you should be wary of anything you're ever told by people who perform this way, especially when a chase is on:

ENTOUS, NAKASHIMA AND MILLER: Two months before the September meeting, Sessions attended a Heritage Foundation event in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention that was attended by about 50 ambassadors. When the event was over, a small group of ambassadors approached Sessions as he was leaving the podium, and Kislyak was among them, the Justice Department official said.

Sessions then spoke individually to some of the ambassadors, including Kislyak, the official said. In the informal exchanges, the ambassadors expressed appreciation for his remarks and some of them invited him to events they were sponsoring, said the official, citing a former Sessions staffer who was at the event.

You had to read to paragraph 32 (sic) to encounter that account. You'll note that this account was attributed to a single anonymous source, who was describing something he'd been told by another unnamed person.

On its face, that account was barely coherent. Beyond that, it was hardly clear that a "meeting" was being described.

Let's start with the coherence factor. According to that account, did Sessions deliver some sort of speech at this event? That seems to be what the reporters said, but their account wasn't entirely clear.

Our second question is philosophical. Ignoring the murkiness of their account, did the reporters, in that account, actually describe a "meeting?"

Consider:

Person X delivers "remarks" at a public event. After his remarks are done, Persons A, B, C and D approach him and "express appreciation for his remarks."

Question:

In that situation, has Person X "had a meeting" with each of those additional people? Plainly, the answer is this:

Yes! Person X has had a "meeting" with each of those people—if a chase is on.

We revisit this point for a reason. In the last few days, this particular chase has been expanded. Excited hustlers on "cable news" are now excitedly claiming and/or suggesting that Sessions may have had three "meetings" with Kislyak last year.

Lawrence was frothing and foaming last night behind this renewed excitement. We'll remind you that Lawrence isn't hugely reliable when a chase is on.

(To his credit, NBC's Ken Dilanian corrected some of Lawrence's overstatements last night. As usual, the laziest of all cable networks hasn't produced transcripts yet.)

Did that initial Post report really describe two "meetings?" In our view, the description of that July event was extremely shaky. Beyond that, we'd have to say it was a stretch to call that event a "meeting."

That said, a major chase is on, and people are very excited. Among other things, a chase of this type is very good for business. eyeball attraction-wise.

As citizens, we each get to decide how much we want to be conned by people of this slippery, excitable type. That said, they've performed these excited group cons in the past, frequently to ill effect. People are dead all over the world because they play it this way.

Lawrence at prayer: Lawrence has been praying for a third "meeting." To watch last night's segment, you can just click here.

HEALTH CARE $$$$: Rose and his guests manufacture consent!

FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 2017

Part 4—Disappeared all the way down: Ever so briefly, permit yourself to become a conspiracy theorist.

Imagine that a potent cabal is scripting American journalism. In service to powerful interests, they mandate what our major journalists will, and will not, say.

In theory, we don't live in that world. But if we did, very little would have changed on last Thursday's Charlie Rose program.

We refer to the nine-minute segment in which Rose and two well-informed guests discussed, or seemed to discuss, the question of health care spending. More specifically, they discussed, or seemed to discuss, the very high level of health care spending in these United States.

To appearances, our nation's level of health care spending isn't just high; it's crazily high. Back in 2005, Paul Krugman tried to create awareness of this problem in a series of columns in the New York Times, a well-known American newspaper.

Uh-oh! As if guided by an invisible hand, our journalists all seemed to know that they mustn't follow Krugman's lead in this area. From that day to this, remarkable data like these have persistently been disappeared:

Per capita spending, health care, 2015:
United States: $9451
Canada: $4608
France: $4407
Japan: $4150
United Kingdom: $4003
Finland: $3984

It's often said that "those French" have the world's best health care system. But how odd:

According to those OECD data, we spend more than twice as much on health care, per person, as the high-flying French! As compared with the French, $5000 per person per year disappears into the maws of our "health care system."

Amazingly, that's $5000 per person. That missing money accounts for the problem we've long had in providing universal health coverage. It also accounts, all by itself, for our annual federal deficits!

And yet, as if by the work of an invisible hand, remarkable data like those are persistently disappeared by our major news orgs and the people they employ. The American public is kept from seeing those startling figures.

With that in mind, why not take The Conspiracy Theorist Challenge? Ever so briefly, permit yourself to be a conspiracy theorist. You'll feel fairly sure that last Thursday's discussion just couldn't have been on the level.

Rose spoke with Ezra Klein and Peter Orszag, a pair of well-positioned, major insiders who know what they're talking about. And yet, their nine-minute discussion of health care spending had the sweet smell of a con.

(To watch the entire segment, click here. The discussion of health care costs starts at the 12-minute mark.)

As the conversation started, Klein said that our health care system is the worst in the world. He and Orszag quickly agreed on two other points:

Our health care prices are too damn high! And that's because, unlike every other developed nation, our government doesn't establish prices for health care procedures and products.

It took roughly ninety seconds for these basic points to be made. From that point on, an invisible hand seemed to control what was said.

For starters, Rose himself never posted or cited the data we've posted above. In turn, Orszag and Klein made no attempt to report the remarkable size of our overspending.

In that way, PBS viewers were treated like rubes concerning the remarkable size of this state of affairs. As is required by Hard Pundit Law, those remarkable basic data were ruthlessly disappeared.

Things got worse from there. Consider what else the boys said:

Uh-oh! As they continued, Klein and Orszag agreed on another remarkable claim. According to Orszag and Klein, the rest of the developed world is freeloading off our remarkable rate of spending.

Everyone else is freeloading on us! Fighting through one of Charlie's interruptions, Klein made this basic point first:

KLEIN (5/25/17): There is a more honest debate we could have be having in this country. There is a consistent, coherent and in some ways persuasive, I think, conservative case on this, that if you regulate prices, particularly in America, where we are the single largest market for health services, for pharmaceuticals, for medical devices, all of it—

ROSE: And the single largest sector of our economy, right?

KLEIN: —that you would hurt innovation badly. And no matter whether it be cheaper, it wouldn't be worth hurting innovation.

That is a fair argument. But what it implies is that the direction you are going is just more expensive health care. That America, in order to have this world-leading innovation, in order for the rest of the world to be able to free-ride off our innovation, which they do—conservatives are right about that—that conservatives need to be willing to put more money into the American health care system in order to be able to keep this going. It just costs more to do what we're doing.

Say what? According to Klein, the rest of the world is "free-riding" (freeloading) off our medical innovation. He seemed to say that our overspending is connected to this search for innovation, and that innovation would be harmed if we regulated prices, the way all others do.

Is everyone else freeloading off us? Orszag soon agreed:

ORSZAG: We do subsidize medical innovation for the rest of the world. The issue is how, and what kind of innovation. Because we have historically just paid for whatever comes along and so we paid for even very minor improvements. On average, the innovation has been miraculous. But there is plenty of stuff, high-cost, that doesn't really do very much.

Everyone's freeloading on us. Apparently, this explains, or helps explain, our very high medical spending.

That said, neither Orszag nor Klein suggested that we should take steps to end this freeloading—to distribute the costs of innovation across the developed world. Instead, Klein offered a familiar but highly misleading statistic—a statistic which tended to disguise the size of our overspending.

Orszag, in turn, played Pollyanna. Cheerfully, he described the best of all future worlds.

What statistic did Klein provide? Cheerfully, he said this to the people who can best be describes as "the rubes of PBS:"

KLEIN: I do not think American health care is going to be as cheap as in our competitor nations in any near-term time frame—

ROSE: Because of the absence of regulation.

KLEIN: No. Because of the absence of regulation, but even if you put it in today, path dependence is a very powerful thing. You would have a tremendous amount of disruption in the health care system if you tried to cut cost by 20 percent or 30 percent that quickly. So I would like to believe we could get it further down, and I think we can do a much better job than we are.

Good God! Our health care won't be as cheap as everyone else's in any near-term time frame. But over time, we might be able to lower costs by 20 or 30 percent!

Over time, we might be able to cut our costs that much! To the rubes of PBS, that may have sounded like a promising projection. But because they hadn't been shown the basic data, they didn't know that a 25 percent reduction, magically backloaded, would have left us looking like this back in 2015:

Per capita spending, health care, 2015 (with United States spending reduced):
United States: $7088
Canada: $4608
France: $4407
Japan: $4150
United Kingdom: $4003
Finland: $3984

We'd still be getting looted badly compared to everyone else! Because they'd been deprived of basic data, the misused "rubes of PBS" had no way to know this.

Klein had envisioned a magic trombone which didn't exactly blow. Up jumped Orszag, cheerfully casting himself in the Pollyanna role, as he'd also done earlier:

ORSZAG: I'm an optimist here. I think in ten years, we are going to have a health care system that is much more digitized, it's much more personalized, in the sense of not just something works on average, but works for you, Mr. Rose, or works for you, Mr. Klein, in which scheduling and billing is not as annoying and tedious as it is today.

And the good part of all the inefficiency that exists in health care today is that we can slow the growth rate, or even maybe reduce costs, but at least slow the growth rate of costs without harming the quality of the health care that people get by wringing those inefficiencies out. So I'm a big optimist here.

ROSE: Thank you. Thank you, Ezra. Thank you for joining us.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! We can slow the growth rate of costs—and not only that! In ten years, scheduling and billing won't be as annoying as they are today!

So ended a striking discussion.

We can slow the growth rate of health care costs? All through this nine-minute discussion, an invisible hand had kept us rubes from seeing the baseline from which that slower growth rate would emerge.

Here's how our spending looks today as compared to the world's best system. In the face of this craziness, we rubes were told that our growth rate can slow!

Per capita spending, health care, 2015:
United States: $9451
France: $4407

As is decreed by Hard Pundit Law, Rose never let his viewers see those remarkable data. They drifted to sleep, unaware of the way they'd been conned.

In closing, let's make one key point. It's silly to think that our overspending is all caused by innovation. But that was the only explanation offered to Charlie's angels. The massive looting involved in this ludicrous scam went unmentioned, as always.

Beyond that, though, lies the larger problem—the problem of disappeared data. Pretending to be a conspiracy theorist, you might end up thinking this:

Chomsky describes this puzzling process as "manufactured consent." For whatever reason, elites present certain frameworks and facts while disappearing all others. Through this selective presentation, we the rubes are skillfully led to the desired conclusions.

In the realm of health care spending, our consent is manufactured through the startling data we never get shown. Those basic data, which are truly remarkable, get disappeared all the way down.

This lets the remarkable looting continue. As part of this important process, our PBS viewers get conned.

Soon, a doo-wop tape is playing, and they're asked for donations.

Tomorrow: Some comic relief

Weightless worms confronted Great Satan!

THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 2017

The Times continues to help: On its reimagined page A3, the New York Times continues to help. This morning's Here to Help feature (hard copy only) appears beneath this heading:

Here to Help
HOW TO SET UP A CHARCOAL GRILL

At least they didn't try to tell us how to be mindful while grilling.

Today's Spotlight feature (ADDITIONAL REPORTAGE AND REPARTEE FROM OUR JOURNALISTS) does a masterful job misconstruing some informative work (by Nate Cohn) on last year's presidential polling.

Meanwhile, in the Of Interest feature, this is one of this morning's "NOTEWORTHY FACTS:"

In 2013, as part of its burgeoning space program, Iran claims to have launched a monkey more than 70 miles into the edge of space and retrieved it alive. The animal's name was Pishgam, Persian for "pioneer."

In the report from which that noteworthy fact was drawn, we learn that Iran retrieved live worms from a trip into space before attempting the trick with Pishgam. Hollywood later reworked the idea, creating Snakes on a Plane.

The editors managed to work the word "bras" into this morning's "Quote of the Day." We'd say the reimagined page A3 is actualizing its motto:

You are the dumbest people on earth
We at the Times want to serve you

Do you wonder how we ever managed to reach our degraded cultural state? Go our and buy the hard-copy Times. Turn to A2 and A3.

Michael Tomasky and Ed Kilgore!

THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 2017

Can't anyone here play this game: For what it's worth, we're inclined to agree with Michael Tomasky, who we met once or twice a long time ago and the cut of whose jib we like.

These headlines sit atop his New Republic piece. We're inclined to agree with this:

Elitism Is Liberalism’s Biggest Problem
There are plenty of non-deplorables in middle America. The Democrats need to learn how to embrace them.

Is "elitism" really our biggest problem? At present, we'd put it up there with the current excesses of so-called "identity politics," which recently had black assistant professors telling people not to vote for Candidate Clinton because, on one occasion twenty years in the past, she used a term which was in wide use at the time.

That advice struck us as very dumb and yes, it helped elect Trump. That said, our liberal team is full of people from various sectors offering such advice. Our team can be very, very dumb. How did you like Kathy Griffin with the shrunken head?

In his piece for the New Republic, Tomasky talks about the problem of "elitism"—of liberal disdain for the people of "middle America." It seems to us that that's a very large problem, politically, intellectually, morally.

Alas! As is the custom among the career class. Tomasky doesn't name any names as he alleged this problem. Because we're always eager to help out, we'll go ahead and name one, although there are many more:

We'd have to say that Paul Krugman is on a jihad which is driven by such condescension. We think his recent work has been very dumb, and that such work drives votes away.

(In fairness, he has posed with no severed heads.)

This sort of thing has gone on forever—until you read Ed Kilgore. At New York magazine, Kilgore wrote a rebuttal to Tomasky's piece. It appeared beneath this headline:

Do Coastal Liberals Hate Middle America?

Let's face it, that question is basically dumb. Presumably, the answer is plain:

Some coastal liberals pretty much do, and then again quite a few others don't. We're not sure what makes this hard.

Plainly, though, this is hard. At various points in his piece, Tomasky seems to be new to the simplest points of logic. How in the world could anyone, let alone a major journalist, compose a passage like this?

TOMASKY (5/30/17): This glass-half-empty mindset must change, and it must change most dramatically with respect to how elite liberals view the rest of the country. There are plenty of liberals out there in middle America, and plenty of liberalish moderates, and plenty of people who lean conservative but who aren’t consumed by rage and who think Barack Obama is a pretty cool guy and who might even have voted for him. These people are potential allies. But before the alliance can be struck, elite liberals need to recognize a fundamental truth: All of these people in middle America, even the actual liberals, have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts.

"All of those people in middle America have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts?"

Obviously, that statement has to be false. It's hard to imagine how a journalist could compose such a puzzling sentence—and Kilgore proceeds to misrepresent it, if only a tad, as he shoots it down.

That said, Kilgore is busy playing Pollyanna as he responds to Tomasky's critique. On what planet was this passage typed?

KILGORE (5/31/17): [W]hile you can always find professional or armchair liberal observers who have the attitudes Tomasky condemns, they are not really found that often among people in the business of running for office—you know, the liberal politicians Middle America is presumed to hate. I can’t recall ever hearing a Democratic politician spit contempt at people for being religious. Democrats have gone far out of their way to express support for the Second Amendment, and now regularly talk about “gun safety” rather than gun control. And conspicuous displays of patriotism and of respect for the military were as common at the coastal-elite-dominated 2016 Democratic National Convention as at the aggressively Middle American GOP confab.

The problem isn't so bad, Kilgore says, because Democratic candidates don't "often" display the attitudes Tomasky describes.

In that passage, Kilgore is setting the bar rather low. He goes on to say that he can't recall ever hearing a Democratic politician "spit contempt at people for being religious."

That sets the bar under the ground.

Beyond that, maybe it all depends on what the meaning of "spit contempt" is! Quite famously, our candidate in 2008 said that Those People "cling to their guns and their religion," thus making them hard to reach. Our next candidate, eight years later, quite famously said that half the people who favored the other guy were from a "basket of deplorables."

It was one of the most appalling, tone deaf, ridiculous statements a candidate has ever made. Does our team perhaps tend to look down on The Others? That comment might tend to say yes.

Kilgore is cast in the role of Candide in this debate; he looks around, seeing no evil. Tomasky describes a general problem, but he fails to cite a single example of this allegedly widespread tribal problem, and he makes weirdly sweeping statements about what Those People are like. Meanwhile, might we ask this:

Did someone decree that racism had to be one of Tomasky's (only two) reasons explaining The Others' votes?

On balance, we tend to agree with Tomasky. In our view, low-IQ "liberal" condescension has been a political (and moral) problem for decades. In the age of targeted tribal news, it has become a gigantic political flaw.

(Remember when Rachel spent two weeks dropping dick jokes on The Others' heads? We can pretty much assure you that The Others do.)

Still and all, we'd have to say that we were struck by the careless work done by both these writers in debating this deeply important point. Is this really the best our self-impressed liberal team can do? Again and again, our liberals sites and our liberal orgs have been providing an answer to this question.

Is this really the best we can do? We keep hearing this answer:

Yes.

HEALTH CARE $$$$: Charlie Rose viewers, misused and misled!

THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 2017

Part 3—Nothing should change, they are told: Let's imagine a situation which could never exist.

Briefly, imagine this:

On average, Americans are paying $30,000 for mid-sized four-door sedans. Through BREAKING NEWS on some "cable news" channel, we learn that consumers elsewhere in the developed world are paying $10,000 to $14,000 for the very same set of cars!

The channel reports that the over-payments in this country have been caused by a previously undisclosed set of surcharges. The looted money has been doled out to a range of high-income elites.

You're right! That situation could never occur. No "cable news" channel would blow the whistle on a scam like that! Dearest darlings, use your heads! It simply isn't done!

It's also true that this situation could never develop to begin with. Word would spread that U.S. consumers were getting screwed compared, let's say, to their neighbors in Canada. People would hear about his scam and they'd be plenty mad.

The situation we've imagined could pretty much never exist. That said, a similar situation seems to obtain in the realm of health care.

To all intents and purposes, American citizens are never told about the size of this massive scam. The size of the scam is captured in the following data—in this remarkable data set, which is constantly disappeared by our "mainstream press:"

Our most persistently disappeared data:
Per capita spending, health care, 2015
United States: $9451
Canada: $4608
Australia: $4420
France: $4407
Japan: $4150
United Kingdom: $4003
Finland: $3984
Italy: $3272
Spain: $3153
South Korea: $2488

Performing as real journalists would, we've omitted Germany, the only large developed nation which spent even half as much, per person, as we did Over Here. For fuller data, click here.

The Germans spent $5267 per person that year. We're including little Finland for the obvious reason:

Over the past fifteen years, we've been told to emulate the miraculous Finns—but only when doing so serves the interests, and supports the policy outlooks, of major U.S. elites.

We aren't encouraged to notice the fact that the Finns spent 42% as much as we did on health care in 2015. In fact, very few Americans have ever been exposed to that or to any similar fact. Within the mainstream American press, it simply isn't done!

This situation isn't a perfect match for our imagined situation involving those overpriced cars. These data show total spending on health care, not the price which is being paid for some specific product.

Still, the effect is largely the same. For unknown reasons, Americans spend massively more for health care than anyone else on the face of the earth. And uh-oh! As we noted on Tuesday, this overspending explains two major public policy problems which we pretend to discuss:

That massive overspending on health care explains why it has been so hard to achieve universal health coverage in this country. It also explains our annual federal deficits, which we've pretended to discuss for the past forty years.

As far as we know, Americans don't pay more than twice as much for the typical four-door sedan. We do spend more than twice as much as everyone else for a year of health care!

You'd almost think that American journalists would want to examine that startling fact. But if you thought that, you would of course be completely and majorly wrong.

We Americans spend more than twice as much as everyone else for health care! The data which illustrate this fact have been posted above—but those utterly remarkable data never appear in the mainstream press.

By apparent force of law, these utterly remarkable data are constantly disappeared.

All our journalistic elites know that these data mustn't be proffered. For a prime illustration of this practice, you should review the discussion which transpired last Thursday night on the Charlie Rose show.

Right there on PBS!

Rose spoke with Ezra Klein and Peter Orszag, two people who actually know what they're talking about. Within the first ninety seconds of the discussion, Klein had said that no one else does health coverage as poorly as we do.

"You could almost not do it worse than we do it," Klein cold-bloodedly said. He proceeded to say, as others have done, that France most likely does it best. (For links to the tape, see below.)

Klein said nobody does it worse—and he proceeded from there! After Klein announced that we're the worst, he and Orszag quickly agreed on the reason for our inflated health care spending:

Unlike the governments of all other developed nations, our government doesn't establish fixed prices for medical procedures and products. That's why we're the worst in the world, or so Klein and Orszag both said.

Already, just ninety seconds in, this was a very unusual discussion. We don't think we've ever seen a high-profile discussion in which the cause of our inflated medical spending was pinpointed in such a definitive way.

Were Orszag and Klein actually right in their shared assessment? We aren't even judging that! We're saying that, within the realm of the upper-end press, discussions of this type are rarely allowed to exist.

At any rate, we'd been told that we are the worst, and that France is the best. We'd also been told that we spend too much because our government has failed to perform a function which all others perform.

The discussion seemed to be cooking with gas. Then the collapse occurred.

Instantly, Orszag made the statement shown below. It followed directly on the material we quoted in yesterday's report.

Ezra is right, the gentleman said. Also, we can assume that nothing will ever be done!

KLEIN (6/25/17): The thing that every one of these countries has in common, every single one, is that in one way or another, in one way or another, they set prices centrally. Every single country that is a developed democracy—just a developed country, except for the United States, the—

ROSE: They set prices on—

KLEIN: The government says, "Here is how much, here is how much an MRI is going to cost. Here is how much a Xanax is going to cost." No matter how they do it—and that is the key thing that makes all of them cheaper. And when it's cheaper, then you have a lot more room how you design insurance.

[...]

ORSZAG: First of all, Ezra is absolutely right. The reason that U.S. health care costs more than other countries, it's not, as is often repeated, that we do more here. It's that what we do, the prices are much higher.

And so, if we take for granted that we're not going to intervene directly in some big way just to set the prices because we have a different history and what have you, there is still so much we can do to try to get more efficiency out of health care that we're not doing.

Say what? Just like that, we were told that we can "take for granted" that our government isn't going to do what everyone else has done. According to Orszag, we can take that for granted "because we have a different history and what have you."

Just like that, Orszag announced this decree. Through the rest of the nine-minute discussion, his assumption was never challenged, examined, critiqued, perused, poked at or discussed.

As if that decree wasn't striking enough, the discussion moved downhill from there. Before they were done, Klein and Orszag had agreed that every other developed nation is "free-riding" (translation: "freeloading") off the medical innovation we pay for through our over-spending.

Consumers in every other nation are "free-riding" off our inflated spending! But so what? The pair were in agreement again—this massive American over-spending is the way things should be done!

The fellows agreed that nothing (much) will change; they even seemed to agree that nothing (much) should change. And do we have to tell you this:

No one made the slightest attempt to define the size of our overspending! No one posted, described or mentioned the remarkable data we've posted above. As if by rule of Hard Pundit Law, those data were disappeared.

Tomorrow, we'll run you through the steps we've just outlined. We'll see Rose's PBS viewers told that nothing major is going to change, even that nothing major should change. We'll also see them kept from knowing the size of this ludicrous problem.

By the time this discussion was done, our youthful analysts were moaning and tearing their hair. This was upper-end discourse at its worst. Skillfully, Charlie enabled.

The data we've shown you were of course disappeared last Thursday night. Even worse: at one point, Klein cited a familiar statistic—a statistic which massively seems to understate the size of our overspending.

Orszag kept saying how "optimistic" he is about the attempt to control health care spending. But wouldn't you know it? He never told those PBS viewers how massive the problem is.

By law, "news consumers" can't be told about the size of the looting which assails us in the realm of health care. Last Thursday night, three major insiders adhered to this well-known law.

Tomorrow: Seduced, misled, abandoned, left clueless

Tale of the tape: To watch the videotape of this discussion, you can just click here.

The full segment ran 21 minutes. The discussion of our health care spending starts at the 12-minute mark.

Post's Ron Charles spots President Lear!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2017

Dangerously, this is apt: Ron Charles is the editor of the Washington Post's Book World.

In Monday morning's paper, he said that he had spotted our own version of Lear:

CHARLES (5/29/17): By now it should be clear that the Trump administration is nothing like the ruling power of Orwell's Oceania or—another common claim—like Margaret Atwood's Gilead in "The Handmaid's Tale." The repressive governments of those imagined hellscapes are marked, primarily, not by their vast deception but by their absolute order. Flawless message control and meticulous image manipulation are the foundations of their sovereignty. Nothing could be further from the continuous upheaval that Trump wreaks.

For literary precedent, we should skip over the dystopian novels of the 20th century, which were predicated on terrifyingly invasive management. The most prominent characteristic of our era is not the monolithic power of one party, but the erratic personality of one man. Every morning, all sides of the political establishment—his family and friends, along with "the haters and losers"—must contend with Trump's zigzagging proclamations, his grandiose promises, his spasmodic attachments.

Consequently, the best literary precedent for what we're enduring now is not the static image of Big Brother but the turbulent eruptions of King Lear. In Shakespeare's immortal tragedy, composed around 1605, we see a kingdom entirely in thrall to the fitful mentality of its leader with his "unconstant starts."

As we've noted before, we think this comparison is apt.

To our fitful ear, Charles treats this as maybe a bit of a lark. We're more strongly inclined to see the danger here.

Speculation v. information!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2017

In search of Jared's motives: Why did Jared Kushner propose that secret secure and private Russkie back channel? Assuming he actually did.

Like you, we'd like to know. Then too, there's also this:

This morning, at TPM, we saw Josh's latest post. It carried an allegedly eye-popping headline, which we include below. Along the way, the founder confessed to being declarative:

MARSHALL (5/31/17): Sorry. On Kushner, There’s No Innocent Explanation

The title of this post is, I confess, rather dramatic and declarative. I’ve written elsewhere about possible ‘innocent explanations’ of the Trump/Russia story, particularly Donald Trump’s role in it. I will leave that all-encompassing question aside for the moment. Here I’m talking about Jared Kushner’s attempt to set up a secure line of communication to Moscow, as well as meeting with the head of that government-backed Russian bank.

[...]

The idea that Kushner and Flynn would use Russian secure communications facilities to set up a secure channel to Moscow is so inexplicable and beyond the pale that it almost beggars the imagination. Critically, this key part of the story has not been disputed by the White House. The only possible explanation of this effort is that Flynn and Kushner (perhaps others, but at least them) wanted to discuss topics that would not only be hidden from Obama administration political appointees but from everyone in the US government–people who would continue to make up the government long after the Obama team was gone.

There’s simply no innocent explanation for that...

The sleuth was on the case. That said, Michael Flynn seems to be crazy, and Kushner may be a complete and total incompetent. (Or not.) We're also inclined to assume that he's a giant grifter.

That said, it's hard to mind-read the motives of the clueless and the crazy. "Flynn and Kushner among the Russkies" could be novelized, in at least one form, as a spy caper conducted by a less sympathetic version of Laurel and Hardy.

Between the craziness, the sheer incompetence, the senility and the grifting, almost anything could be true about the latest caper we've been fed by the unnamed persons behind the screen. (Like Dickens before them, they dribble it out in installments.) This includes the possibility that Donald J. Trump is owned by the Russians and is selling the western alliance away.

Although then again maybe not.

On "cable news," the entertainers are pleasuring us each night, speculating about motive for hours as they seek stronger Q ratings. Marshall included, the people you see performing this way are the people who have failed you over the past thirty years. (There's still some grifting in this world which isn't performed by the Trumps.)

As these cable-and-pundit entertainments continue, might we note two random passages from a recent New York Times report?
Yesterday morning, it was the featured front-page report in the hard-copy Times.

As usual, Kushner's motives were being guessed at. But right there in paragraph 6, three Times reporters also offered the highlighted point about one of his secretish meetings:

ROSENBERG, MAZZETTI AND HABERMAN (5/30/17): The meeting came as Mr. Trump was openly feuding with American intelligence agencies and their conclusion that Russia had tried to disrupt the presidential election and turn it in his favor.

The Senate Intelligence Committee notified the White House in March that it planned to question Mr. Kushner about the meeting.

More than two months ago, the Senate committee said it planned to question Kushner about the point now being subjected to round-the-clock speculation! Ten paragraphs later, the same reporters recorded this additional fact:

ROSENBERG, MAZZETTI AND HABERMAN: In a statement on Monday, [White House spokeswoman Hope] Hicks said that “Mr. Kushner was acting in his capacity as a transition official” in meeting with the Russians. Mr. Kushner has agreed to be interviewed by congressional investigators about the meetings, she said.

Kushner has said he's willing "to be interviewed" about the meeting in question!

Kushner has said he's ready to spill. The committee said they planned to interview him more than two months back. This leaves us asking ourselves this question:

When is this freaking committee going to interview Kushner? You can watch cable chatter for many hours without seeing this question asked.

If Kushner testifies about these matters, the state of play will rapidly advance. We see no one inquiring about the possible timeline for this. Instead, speculation is all. It kills oodles of time each night.

In fairness, this fandango makes a good mystery tale. It also makes for lousy journalism. By the way—has Mr. Kushner "agreed to be interviewed" in public? Amidst all the speculation, the Times neglected to say.

As we watch this endless waste of time, our thoughts keep returning to the Republican National Convention. More specifically, we recall the way the three cable news channels lionized those great Trump kids during those long, pointless hours.

We think we recall the way Brian and Rachel gushed about the greatness of Donald Trump Junior, who surely should run for governor. If we're remembering correctly, they were reciting the same talking points which were being churned on CNN and Fox. The stars were doing what they were told. Careers hung in the balance!

(We're forced to rely on memory here for a rather typical reason. For unknown reasons, MSNBC failed to produce transcripts of its convention coverage, nor have we been able to find videotape of the channel's programs on those nights. For these reasons, we haven't been able to go back and review what the various cable stars said. Unless our memory is deceiving us, we were struck, in real time, by the way all three cables were churning the same completely ridiculous points about those fantastic Trump kids.)

In fact, it seems to us that the Trumps are a world-class collection of grifters. Beyond that, the patriarch seems to be disturbed and somewhat senile. His son-in-law has virtually never uttered a word in public.

It takes no insight and no skill to assume the worst about their motives and conduct. Then too, endless blather in such directions isn't "journalism." It represents a tribal entertainment function.

On cable, the speculation grinds on and on, then on and on some more. This seems to yield highly profitable cable product. It's also the kind of low-IQ work which, spread over thirty years, paved the way for the craziness of Trump. "I have nothing against him," Rachel said, after he had spent four years parading as birther king.

Cable runs on speculation and spin, not on information. We'd love to see these questions reported:

When will Kushner testify? What's holding this gong-show up?

HEALTH CARE $$$$: Charlie Rose turned to Ezra Klein first!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2017

Part 2—No one could do it worse: "Nobody does it better?"

That's what Carly Simon once sang. It was part of a gigantic hit devoted to 007.

Last Thursday night, on the Charlie Rose Show, Ezra Klein authored a bit of a spin-off. It came when Klein was asked to comment on the American health care system.

Rose was midway through a 21-minute segment about American health care. He spoke with Vox's Klein and with Peter Orszag, former head of both the CBO (under President Bush) and the OMB (under President Obama).

Toto, we weren't on CNN any more! Rose wasn't handling a panel of six. He wasn't asking a string of guests to speculate about the motives behind an exciting act which may or may not have occurred.

This was PBS. Rose was speaking with only two guests—and each could be assumed to know what he was talking about. They were discussing a major policy matter—a policy matter concerning which there are oodles of real information.

For the first twelve minutes of the segment, Rose asked his guests about the GOP's latest health care proposal. Also, about the strengths and weaknesses of Obamacare.

At that point, Rose expanded his field of review. Twelve minutes into his discussion, he threw an expansive question to Klein and received an expansive reply.

To watch the whole segment, click here:

ROSE (5/25/17): Is there a place where they have perfected health insurance?

KLEIN: You could almost not do it worse than we do it. I will start there.

ROSE: Go ahead.

"No one does it better?" That's what Simon once sang. Concerning our American health care system, Klein authored a striking counter claim:

No one could do it worse!

Let's repeat one basic point. Klein and Orszag aren't a pair of cable news time-killers. They tend to know whereof they speak.

In that sense, Klein had made a remarkable claim about our health care system. Responding to Rose's guiding hand, he quickly proceeded from there:

KLEIN (continuing directly): There are a lot of interesting models out there. And different people like different ones.

So I think the model most people think is the highest performing is France, where you get a basic level of insurance and then the state gives some people supplementary insurance and other people buy it themselves.

Conservatives like Singapore, a lot, and Singapore is kind of interesting. They have a supercharge in individual mandate where they force you to save a large percentage of your paycheck to cover health bills, and then they have a sort of universal catastrophic plan, not quite universal but most people buy into it.

No one does it as poorly as we do, Klein had originally said. France most likely does it best, he now alleged.

Also, conservatives like the way they do it in Singapore! You'd almost think that these would be seen as intriguing, important statements.

Something else was interesting as Klein continued to speak. As he continued, he instantly turned to the question of health care costs.

No one does it worse than us? Instantly, Klein seemed to say that we're spending too much, and that this central problem involves the setting of prices. Orszag jumped in to agree:

KLEIN (continuing directly): But the thing that every one of these countries has in common, every single one, is that in one way or another, in one way or another, they set prices centrally. Every single country that is a developed democracy—just a developed country, except for the United States, the—

ROSE: They set prices on—

KLEIN: The government says, "Here is how much, here is how much an MRI is going to cost. Here is how much a Xanax is going to cost." No matter how they do it—and that is the key thing that makes all of them cheaper. And when it's cheaper, then you have a lot more room how you design insurance.

ROSE: But we just had [Nebraska senator] Ben Sasse in this taping, taping at this table, saying what the Republicans were horrified by is the idea of government setting the prices.

ORSZAG: Right. And first of all, Ezra is absolutely right. The reason that U.S. health care costs more than other countries, it's not, as is often repeated, that we do more here. It's that what we do, the prices are much higher.

Let's note several points:

After saying that no one does it worse, Klein moved directly to the question of costs. He seemed to say that our problem involves the cost of health care, not the quality of the care that is available and/or provided.

Klein seemed to say it's the matter of cost which makes France so much better. He then attributed our nation's high health care costs to a single central problem—to our failure to "set prices centrally."

At this point, Orszag jumped in to say that Klein was right. He didn't explicitly second the claim that no one does it as poorly as us. But he agreed that health care costs more in this country because the prices are higher.

Health care costs more because prices are higher? It almost sounds like something Chance the Gardener would say. But Orszag was making this completely coherent point:

We don't spend more on health care because we provide more services, Orszag said. We spend more because we charge more for those services.

Wow! At this point, we were only 90 seconds into this part of Rose's discussion. Already, though, very large claims had been made about a very big policy area.

Klein had said that our health care system is the worst in the world. Throughout the rest of the discussion, Orszag never disagreed with that.

The pair had then quickly focused on costs. They said our health care costs were high because, unlike every other developed nation, our government doesn't set health care prices.

No one does it worse than us? Most likely, France does it best? The problem revolves around health care costs?

Charlie's guests were trashing our health system hard. If our journalistic system was better, these extremely basic data might have appeared at some point:

Per capita spending, health care, 2015
United States: $9451
France: $4407

Wow! In a slightly more rational world, jaws would have dropped as PBS viewers gazed on the size of the problem. We spend more than twice as much, on a per person basis, as highly-regarded France!

No one does it better than France, and no one does it as poorly as us. Theoretically, those remarkable data help us ponder the remarkable size of this problem.

That said, we think you know the rules! Long ago, the gods who rule our public discourse issued a major decree. The American people must never be shown the size of this ludicrous problem.

Those data come from the OECD. Within the world of American discourse, they've long since been disappeared.

Klein and Orszag continued to speak, but those data were never mentioned and never appeared. Even worse, the discussion by Rose's guests now took a peculiar turn.

Rose's viewers were never shown how vast our over-spending is. Instead, they were quickly told that nothing ever will or even should change around here!

Tomorrow: "If we take it for granted..."

Concerning Singapore's spending: Singapore is a small, high-income city-state which isn't part of the OECD. For that reason, we can't give you OECD data on their health care spending.

Data from the World Health Organization seem to show Singapore spending substantially less than France. We haven't worked with these data before, but you can give them a shot.

Charlie Rose viewers saw zero data last Thursday night. Within our journalistic system, those remarkable data about health care spending are routinely, by law, disappeared.

Press rejects Rich murder claims!

TUESDAY, MAY 30, 2017

Several decades too late: On July 10, 2016, a young man named Seth Rich was murdered in the streets of Washington, D.C.

As if that wasn't bad enough, Seth Rich was voter-expansion data director at the Democratic National Committee. For that reason, the crazies got busy, inventing ugly conspiracy theories about his unfortunate death.

(For New York Magazine's account of these horrid events, you can just click here.)

At the upper end of this pig pile, Sean Hannity has been deeply invested in pimping these stupid, ugly stories about Rich's death. Amazingly, Newt Gingrich recently jumped on the pile.

That said, another amazing event has occurred:

Now that it's several decades too late, the mainstream press corps has started pushing back. Hannity has been forced to back off from his appalling behavior, at least for the time being.

Why do we say that this is happening "several decades too late?" Because crackpot murder conspiracy claims became a standard part of our crackpot political discourse during the early 1990s, with the mainstream press corps' participation and blessing.

Those crackpot murder claims were, of course, aimed at the Clintons. For that reason, to a man, to a woman, the mainstream press corps acted like this was OK.

This crazy conduct continued for decades. In the 1990s, the press corps acted like it was OK when a major figure like Jerry Falwell paraded around selling The Clinton Chronicles, a videotape about the Clintons' many murders. (There was no real Internet then.)

They acted like it was OK when Rush Limbaugh insinuated, suggested, hinted and claimed that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was up to her ears in the (suicide) death of Vince Foster.

In August 1999, the appalling Gennifer Flowers guested on Hardball for a full half-hour. Showered with praise by her paramour host, she spent a good chunk of her time pimping those crackpot murder claims.

As we noted long ago, the nation's "media reporters" didn't say boo about this astounding event. Because her claims were so crazy and vile, Flowers was then granted a full hour on Hannity & Colmes to push this bullshit further.

As recently as last September, the New York Times, in a front-page report, set out to reinstate Flowers as a credible person. They lovedlovedloved her highly implausible sexual claims, which were now being used against Hillary Clinton. For that reason, they were willing to disappear the craziness of the many other claims she had made down through the years.

Amazing! Very late in the Trump-Clinton race, the Times reinvented Gennifer Flowers as a credible accuser. (After that, Comey jumped in!)

In these ways, the craziness of our Trump-era public discourse was being created, largely through the permissiveness of the mainstream press. Now that Donald J. Trump is in office, the mainstream press has finally decided that it's time to push back.

They tolerated Falwell and his film. They tolerated Rush's insinuations. By 1998, they were standing in line to pretend that Flowers was a highly credible figure. Starting in 1999, they spent two years inventing crazy claims which Candidate Gore had supposedly made. Plus, he wore earth tones!

In these and a million other ways, they invented the crackpot world in which we now reside—a world in which an influential figure like Alex Jones makes Trump look like a voice of sanity and moderation. Have you heard? Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of that pizza joint! Also, nobody died at Newtown!

The terrible conduct involving Seth Rich coincided, in the past week, with a JFK anniversary. If you want to ponder the role the mainstream press played in the invention of modern Trump Culture, you might want to read a fascinating historical reminiscence from yesterday's Washington Post.

Ian Shapira's reminiscence concerns President Kennedy's booze-and-sex drenched 46th birthday party on the presidential yacht. How were unfortunate murders treated back then? Early on, Shapira recalls one such event:

SHAPIRA (5/29/17): The powerful and the privileged were in attendance: Kennedy’s brothers, Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.); Ben Bradlee, the future editor of The Washington Post who worked as Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, along with his then-wife, Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot Bradlee; and R. Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps, and his wife, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

The party, organized by first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, also included one of Kennedy’s on-again-off-again paramours, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Tony Bradlee’s sister who was fatally shot a year later in Georgetown in a still unsolved murder, and Enud Sztanko, a young Georgetown foreign language instructor who later told a Kennedy biographer that she resisted the president’s sexual advances.

Chances are you've never heard of the unsolved murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. If any such event were to happen today, you'd hear on Fox that JFK came back from the grave to perform the killing himself.

(Over the course of several years, Greta would calmly debate the question with Trump. Later, Rachel would tell us how amazingly great Greta is.)

That was a murder; Shapira's report is longer on the sex. President Kennedy's sexual behavior in the White House was little short of astounding, but it went undiscussed. Thirty-five years later, for better or worse, President Clinton's intermittent relationship with a 22-24-year-old federal employee (not with a "21-year-old intern," the novelized figure the press corps invented) had our upper-end mainstream "press corps" pleasuring themselves for years.

Last September, the New York Times worked very hard to bring all those stories back. Your favorite stars on MSNBC politely averted their gaze. Dearest darlings, use your heads! The children do not push back!

In the last month, the mainstream press has finally started pushing back against crackpot murder conspiracy claims. Inevitably, they've only decided to take this approach now that it's much too late.

In these and a million other ways, the mainstream press corps, including its liberal inhabitants, helped create the world of Donald J. Trump. The Crazy had started defining our discourse long before the birther king threw his hat in the ring.

Your favorite multimillionaire TV stars have been deeply complicit in this. The people you see chasing Trump each night, often in lazy and careless ways, are the same folk who created the world which made his ascension possible.

Quite correctly, people are pushing back in the case of Seth Rich. Unfortunately, they've only decided to function this way now that it's much too late.

The work of Rachel's dear friend: This was Chris Matthews, though only in part, speaking to Gennifer Flowers on that ludicrous Hardball show in August 1999:

"I gotta pay a little tribute here. You're a very beautiful woman, and I—and I have to tell you, he knows that, you know that, and everybody watching knows that. Hillary Clinton knows that. How can a woman put up with a relationship between her husband and somebody, anybody, but especially somebody like you that's a knockout?...It's an objective statement, Gennifer. I'm not flirting."

For the record, there was never any serious evidence that Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers had a "relationship" or an "affair." On this particular night, the utterly ridiculous Flowers was crazily pushing the murder claims against the Clintons. Seventeen years later, out on page one, the New York Times fought to bring her credibility back.

Your favorite stars won't tell you these things. Careers hang in the balance!

HEALTH CARE $$$$: Charlie Rose forgets to speak!

TUESDAY, MAY 30, 2017

Part 1—Those same old disappeared data: We're going to start this week's report with those same old disappeared data.

They constitute the most eye-catching data set of which we are aware. But alas! Despite the remarkable nature of these data, you will almost never see them, or even hear them described, within our "public discourse."

For reasons at which we're forced to guess, these remarkable data don't seem fit for human consumption within the rules of modern political culture.

Who knows? Maybe data have been judged to be too boring in general. Perhaps it's been judged that we news consumers wouldn't be sufficiently entertained by data of this type.

We can't explain the wholesale disappearance of these remarkable data. But these data, while quite amazing, will rarely intrude on your gaze.

We've cited them a million times. You'll see them nowhere else!

Per capita spending, health care, 2015
United States: $9451
Germany: $5267
Canada: $4608
Australia: $4420
France: $4407
Japan: $4150
United Kingdom: $4003
Finland: $3984
Italy: $3272
Spain: $3153
South Korea: $2488

Those data come from the OECD; we'll provide the links below. In accord with our theme for the week, they're hard to find on one's own.

What makes those data so remarkable? Formally, you rarely see a set of data in which one number stands out so glaringly from all the rest.

(We refer to the spending figure for the U.S., not to the spending figure for South Korea.)

Formally, those data simply look odd. Substantively, they account for two of the biggest political problems of our time.

Those data explain why this country has had so much trouble achieving full health care coverage. Obviously, it's much harder to provide health care at $9451 a head than at France's much more manageable number.

Those data explain a second problem which is endlessly pseudo-discussed. As economist Dean Baker has often noted, those data, in and of themselves, account for the annual federal deficits we constantly pretend to discuss.

A large portion of health care spending is done by the federal government. If you could wave a magic wand and bring our health care spending down to the level of spending in France, our annual deficits would be gone. Big problem disappeared!

Those remarkable data are amazing in all those ways. Despite this fact, they're virtually never presented, let alone discussed, within the American press corps.

Americans almost never see those data. As if by some widespread group agreement, those data are disappeared.

With that in mind, we'll focus, in the next three days, on a recent Charlie Rose broadcast. The broadcast occurred last Thursday night. It included a discussion of health care costs, a discussion we found quite amazing.

In a 21-minute segment, Rose discussed health care policy with Ezra Klein, "editor in chief of Vox," and Peter Orszag, "vice chairman of Investment Banking and global co-head of health care at Lazard, another investment banking house."

In an earlier life, Orszag was director of the CBO under George W. Bush, and director of the OMB under Barack Obama. He focused on health care spending during his tenure at each of these posts.

Programming note: it's safe to say that Orszag and Klein both know what they're talking about. Such situations almost never occur, let's say, in "cable news" discussions.

Rose spent the last nine minutes of Thursday night's segment with discussing health care spending. The discussion was remarkable for at least three reasons:

First, Klein and Orszag agreed on the general reason for the remarkable size of American health care spending. Despite Rose's incessant interruptions, their analysis, while rudimentary, was quite clear.

In that sense, Klein and Orszag explained the reason for those remarkable data! That said, something else which occurred that night which struck us as remarkable too.

You see, Klein and Orszag agreed on something else. They agreed that Americans will always spend much more for health care than people in comparable nations. They even agreed on the reason for this unfortunate state of affairs.

Amazingly, they seemed to feel this point was so obvious that it wasn't even worth debating. The situation will ever be thus!

Might we note a third key point about last Thursday's discussion? We think this may be the most remarkable fact of them all:

At no point did Charlie Rose present those disappeared data! Millions of people were watching his show, but at no point were they allowed to see the remarkable size of the problem Rose and his guests were discussing.

Those data, which come from the OECD, are astounding and also quite basic. That said, a group agreement seems to exist:

We, the pathetic American proles, must never see those data.

For ourselves, we'd posted those data that very same Thursday, reacting to a puzzling post by Kevin Drum in which they failed to appear. That night, those data failed to appear again in the course of Rose's discussion. Hence our current report.

For the next few days, we're going to show you what Klein and Orszag said last Thursday night. Spoiler alert:

They seemed to agree. You will always pay much more for health care then do people in France.

During the course of this striking discussion, no one made any effort to define the size of the disproportion which was being discussed. At one point, Klein even offered a standard figure—a standard figure which, alas, massively seems to understate the size of the disproportion.

At no point in Rose's program did those remarkable data appear. Krugman discussed them in a series of columns way back in 2005. Ever since then, in almost all settings, those data get disappeared.

(For his part, Krugman had moved on to a new jihad, in which he batters working-class "whites" for their failure to understand everything he understands, and for failing to frog-march in to say he was right all along. He doesn't batter the lofty elites who keep our discourse data-free, thus keeping us barefoot and clueless.)

Last Thursday's discussion was fascinating. As has been decreed by the gods, those key data never appeared!

Tomorrow: "You could almost not do it worse than we do it. I will start there."

In search of those disappeared data: Those data come from the OECD. To peruse them, just click here.

To peruse them in a simplified fashion, you can just click this.

To watch Rose's discussion with Klein and Orszag, you can just click here. The first twelve minutes of the segment largely concern the current GOP health care bill. From the 12-minute mark to the end of the tape, Klein and Orszag discuss health care spending.

That instructive discussion runs nine minutes. As has been decreed by the gods, those data never appear.

The battle of the elite professors!

MONDAY, MAY 29, 2017

Williams, pleading with Krugman: Professor Williams offered good sound advice in yesterday's New York Times. Her piece appeared beneath am eye-grabbing headline in the Sunday Review:

"The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension"

Our liberal elites are engaged in dumb politics! That's what her headline said!

Given the long-standing rules of the game, are ranking professors like Williams allowed to say such things? Is she allowed to say such sensible things as this?

WILLIAMS (5/28/17): Two changes are required for Democrats to diminish the 39-point margin by which whites without college degrees voted for Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton.

This first concerns social honor. Too often in otherwise polite society, elites (progressives emphatically included) unselfconsciously belittle working-class whites. We hear talk of “trailer trash” in “flyover states” afflicted by “plumber’s butt”—open class insults that pass for wit. This condescension affects political campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s comment about “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s about people who “cling to guns or religion.”

“My biggest boneheaded move,” Mr. Obama mused. He was right. Democrats should stop insulting people. The high cost of doing so is dramatized by “I’m deplorable” T-shirts and Inaugural DeploraBalls.

There’s no need to accept racism, sexism or homophobia from working-class whites or anyone else. Just live up to our progressive ideals by acknowledging social disadvantage more consistently. If class-based insults were as politically incorrect as racial or homophobic slurs, Rush Limbaugh’s rants against P.C. elites might hold less appeal. Mr. Limbaugh, like Mr. Trump, feeds off class resentment. Let’s stop making their jobs easier.

"Democrats should stop insulting people?" Is Williams allowed to say that? Is she allowed to say that class condescension helps explains how liberals and Democrats lose?

Just so you'll know, Professor Williams graduated from Yale; got a master's degree from MIT; then graduated from Harvard Law School. Today, she's a Distinguished Professor at Hastings College, the University of California's law school.

"Democrats should stop insulting people?" Progressive elites should stop "belittling working-class whites?" Given her pedigree, is Williams permitted to say that?

Apparently, she is! With compliments to the New York Times for putting her sound advice in print, we'll suggest that Professor Williams should wing her way east to speak with Professor Krugman.

On Friday, Krugman did it again, for perhaps the ten millionth time. For perhaps the twenty millionth time, he wrote a column accusing [white] West Virginians of being a gang of racists.

Krugman won't stop writing this column. Let's place this situation in context:

For several decades, Krugman has been the liberal world's most valuable player in the realm of policy discussion. In the realm of politics, he increasingly displays a tin ear and a "cold, cold heart."

(We're quoting a different Williams.)

Krugman can't seem to stop writing the column he wrote again on Friday. Remarkably, the column was flat unintelligent. In a different cultural realm, people might even drop a B-bomb or two on our MVP's head.

There he (and we) went again! For perhaps the thirty millionth time, Krugman explained why (white) West Virginians cast so many votes for Candidate Trump last year.

In this lengthy chunk of Krugman's column, you see the kind of generalization which we were taught, as freshmen in high school, that journalists should avoid:

KRUGMAN (5/26/17): [L]et’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?

They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.

Beyond that, more than 4 percent of the population, the highest share in the nation, receives Social Security disability payments, partly because of the legacy of unhealthy working conditions, partly because a high fraction of the population consists of people who suffer from chronic diseases, like diabetics—whom Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, thinks we shouldn’t take care of because it’s their own fault for eating poorly.

And just to be clear, we’re talking about white people here: At 93 percent white, West Virginia is one of the most minority- and immigrant-free states in America.

So what did the state’s residents think they were voting for? Partly, presumably, they supported Trump because he promised—falsely, of course—that he could bring back the well-paying coal-mining jobs of yore.

But they also believed that he was a different kind of Republican. Maybe he would take benefits away from Those People, but he would protect the programs white working-class voters, in West Virginia and elsewhere, depend on.

What they got instead was the mother of all sucker punches.

We think that's very unwise. We also think it's the kind of thing Williams is talking about when she says, at the end of her column, that "Democrats need to...stop sleepwalking our way to the next electoral defeat."

For the record, hundreds of thousands of West Virginians voted for Candidate Trump last year—489,371 to be exact. As Professor Krugman is eager to note, the vast majority of those people were "white."

Professor Krugman can think of two reasons why all those people voted for Trump. He uses the world's most dangerous four-letter word, "they," as he generalizes about Them.

Partly, Krugman says that "they" got fooled by Trump's promises about coal. And certainly, some undetermined percentage of those voters were responding to Candidate Trump's improbable claims in that area.

Krugman also says that Those People are racists—and yes, that's basically what he's saying in the passage posted above Why did "they" vote for Trump in such numbers? These are the only two reasons he's able to imagine!

Over the course of the past few months, Krugman has rarely stopped offering some form of this "analysis." Not only does he offer sweeping claims about why these ofays voted the way they did. In several columns, he has complained about the way journalists have been asking voters like these to explain their votes for Trump.

As Professor Williams suggests, Democrats should be searching hard for the answer(s) to that question. Incredibly, Professor Krugman keeps complaining when the question get asked!

Professor Krugman's incessant conduct takes him remarkably close to the traditional lair of the bigot. He hasn't gone to West Virginia to ask people why they voted for Trump. Instead, he sits on his tuffet in "elite" "progressive" society and drops his bombs on the white working class, much as Williams describes.

Why did West Virginians vote for Trump? We can think of many possible reasons—and no, we don't think that Those People are all alike, as Krugman rather plainly does.

Why did ("white") West Virginians vote for Candidate Trump? We can think of such reasons as these:

Coal: Krugman has heard about this.

Guns: On the presidential level, West Virginia moved from blue to red in the 2000 election. That flip was widely attributed to guns. On the presidential level, West Virginia has gotten redder and redder from there.

Health care: We're going to guess that West Virginia voters had heard all kinds of things about Obamacare. Beyond that, we're going to guess that they'd had all kinds of experiences. (They'd also heard all kinds of stupid claims by Candidate Trump.)

Last December, Sarah Kliff actually went to Kentucky coal country to ask Obamacare recipients why they voted for Trump. On the ground, speaking to people, Kliff heard about, then described, some very sad states of affairs. In his seat on the Acela, Krugman speeds past such thoughts.

The relentlessly demonized Clinton: Hillary Clinton has been demonized, on a national basis, since 1992. Many people who voted for Trump were actually voting against the demon Clinton.

As of last November, West Virginia voters had heard 24 years of crazy claims about Clinton. Starting in 1992, people at Krugman's own newspaper played a persistent role in this demonization; liberal elites politely sat by and watched. Last July, the Maddow Show cheered James B. Comey on when he jumped into the fray, guest host Kornacki presiding. (Upon her return from vacation, Maddow didn't even mention Comey until the last week in October.)

Krugman rarely discusses this demonization when he's bashing the white working-class. Instead, he kicks down, lobbing his "elite liberal" bombs in much the way Williams describes.

Above, we noted the headline atop Professor Williams' column:

"The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension"

Professor Krugman's column carried a striking headline too:

"It’s All About Trump’s Contempt"

Krugman's headline refers to the contempt Trump has shown for his own working-class supporters. Ironically, Krugman keeps displaying contempt for those "white" voters too. Contempt—and condescension!

Our question:

Could someone fly Williams to the east coast so she can stage an intervention? From his seat on the Acela, our long-standing most valuable player may be teaching us how to kick future elections away.

Let them come to Berlin: Last fall, while the campaign was still on, The New Yorker's Larissa McFarquhar got off her aspic and journeyed to deepest West Virginia.

She spoke to (some) Trump voters in great detail. For what it's worth, click here.

Cable excitement at its best!

SATURDAY, MAY 27, 2017

Though we'll add what the New York Times said: Last evening's cable news excitement was excitement at its best.

At the appointed hour, the Washington Post had posted its latest blockbuster/bombshell. On CNN and MSNBC, everyone knew what to do.

Needless to say, this latest bombshell had come from unnamed sources behind a screen—from the unnamed people who now dole out our nightly dollops of "news."

In this morning's Washington Post, these unnamed people are described as "U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports." Increasingly, these unnamed people decide what tiny blips of alleged information we proles are allowed to hear.

On CNN and MSNBC, everyone knew what to do. A chase is on, and these highly unreliable cable savants stood in line to say the things we liberals were longing to hear.

More specifically, they spent the evening suggesting that Jared Kushner may be on his way to jail. They avoided all discussion of the the substance which lay behind the latest cable thrill.

Is Jared Kushner in legal trouble? Like all the hacks you saw last night, we have no idea.

We do know this. The Washington Post's exciting report was amazingly short on information, amazingly long on filler. This is the way it began:

NAKASHIMA, ENTOUS AND MILLER (5/27/17): Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on Dec. 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.

The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

The White House disclosed the meeting only in March, playing down its significance. But people familiar with the matter say the FBI now considers the encounter, as well as another meeting Kushner had with a Russian banker, to be of investigative interest.

That's pretty much all the Post had. The rest of the report is filler.

All last night, teams of pundits went to town on this blockbuster/bombshell report. Unfortunately, last night's excited discussions were about as fuzzy as any we've ever seen on cable. It was often quite hard to know what was being discussed.

In part, that was because the Post's report was so thin on content. Kushner wanted to set up a "secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin," the report alleged. The content ended there.

Did Kushner really propose such a thing? We have no idea. We're all relying on the good faith of the faceless people behind that screen—the unnamed people who now dole out our daily dollops of "news" in this peculiar fashion.

That said, we saw few attempts to discuss the possible reasons why Kushner (and Flynn) might have wanted to do some such thing. This brings us to the wonderfully ridiculous way Brian Williams ended last evening's Eleventh Hour program.

In his closing segment, Williams spoke with historian Jon Meacham about "backchannel" diplomacy of the past. Meacham praised a few such enterprises, then said, rather vaguely, that this effort was nothing like those.

It was what we all wanted to hear! Williams responded with this:

"No one is accusing this of having anything to do with diplomacy, at least at this early hour."

In fairness, Brian was almost right. As he spoke, it was a few minutes short of midnight. We'd seen no one discussing any possible "diplomatic" reasons for this apparent attempt at backchannel work, except to the extent that speculations could be launched about Kushner going to jail.

Then, this morning, we read the New York Times. Its opening paragraphs put Brian's snark in context.

As with the Post, this topic topped the Times front page. But the Times' report started like this:

HABERMAN, MAZZETTI AND APUZZO (5/27/17): Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, spoke in December with Russia’s ambassador to the United States about establishing a secret communications channel between the Trump transition team and Moscow to discuss strategy in Syria and other policy issues, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.

The conversation between Mr. Kushner and the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, took place during a meeting at Trump Tower that Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team did not acknowledge at the time. Also present at the meeting was Michael T. Flynn, the retired general who would become Mr. Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, the three people said.

It is unclear who first proposed the communications channel, but the people familiar with the meeting said the idea was to have Mr. Flynn speak directly with a senior military official in Moscow to discuss Syria and other security issues. The communications channel was never set up, the people said.

As with the Post, so too with the Times. There was no way to identify the nameless people doling out these claims.

That said, these nameless, faceless people presented a motive for Kushner's alleged request. Williams' scripted snark notwithstanding, this effort did have something to do with diplomacy, these nameless people had said.

According to these nameless people, Kushner had been seeking a way to discuss "Syria and other security issues" with the Russkies. Last night, we heard no one advancing such speculations. Williams closed the evening haughtily saying that no one had.

Sad! Even as Brian spoke, there was the Times on-line report, saying something quite different. But this is the way corporate "newsmen" like Brian perform when a chase is on.

(In 1999 and 2000, no one was more upset by Candidate Gore's troubling clothes. At the time, Brian's owner was Jack Welch. It made that owner proud.)

Why might Kushner, Flynn and them have wanted to do something like this? Let's return to the topic of Michael Flynn's geopolitical views.

Remember the bromide we recently coined? "Crazy people get to be overpaid lobbyists too?"

Wellsir, crazy people also get to pursue diplomacy! That's especially true after thirty years of press corps misconduct have helped put Trump where he is.

The ineffectual people who helped place him there were prattling hard last night. They were pursuing an insider war they've already manged to lose through their relentless past misconduct.

They discussed little except the possibility that Kushner might end up in jail. That's the only way they know how to play. Their haplessness helps explain why Donald J. Trump's where he is.

By way of background, we thought you might want to understand the worldview behind this affair. Two days ago, the New York Times provided a bit of that background in a front-page news report.

For better or worse, crazy people get to have geopolitical views! Flynn strikes us as semi-crazy, but this is a taste of the worldview which was banging around in the Trump transition effort:

ROSENBERG, GOLDMAN AND APUZZO (5/25/17): Mr. Flynn's ties to Russian officials stretch back to his time at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he led from 2012 to 2014. There, he began pressing for the United States to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight against Islamist militants, and even spent a day in Moscow at the headquarters of the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, in 2013.

He continued to insist that Russia could be an ally even after Moscow's seizure of Crimea the following year, and Obama administration officials have said that contributed to their decision to push him out of the D.I.A.

By all accounts, Flynn favored a global realignment in which the United States and Russia became allies in a north-versus-south battle against various parts of the Islamic world.

You may think that worldview is crazy. We liberals should have thought of that before we did three hundred things in the past few years to help get Trump elected.

At any rate, the Times expounded further on Flynn's outlook and behavior. In our view, this passage suggests that The Semi-Crazy isn't just found Over There:

ROSENBERG, GOLDMAN AND APUZZO: American officials have also said there were multiple telephone calls between Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, on Dec. 29, beginning shortly after Mr. Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 people suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions.

American intelligence agencies routinely tap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office, officials have said.

That's what officials have said! At any rate, let's try to understand the strangeness of that passage.

We liberals have spent the past several months complaining about the fact that Flynn allegedly urged the Russians not to retaliate against the U.S. after those sanctions were imposed! We haven't quite been able to see how strange it may sound to register such a complaint.

Instead, we've pleasured ourselves with dreams of the Logan Act. Flynn might have to go to jail for urging the Russkies not to respond!

At any rate, we liberals have spent the past thirty years paving the way for Trump. The gentleman is now in the White House. He and his associates have certain irregular views.

By all accounts, Flynn and Bannon were strongly inclined to the view that future diplomacy should ally the United States with Russia against the Islamic world. In a report it first posted last evening, the New York Times suggested that Kushner wanted to discuss such possibilities through the backchannel he allegedly sought.

Last night, we saw no one discuss or raise any such possibility. Instead, a gang of hacks swarmed two cable channels, making the statement we long to hear: The Others are going to jail!

Inevitably, it fell to Williams to make the perfect gong-show summation. No one is talking about diplomacy, he said, sending us happily off to bed at an hour when the New York Times was doing that very thing right in its opening paragraphs.

Crazy people get to pursue backchannel diplomacy too! In a related fact, Williams worked quite hard, down through the years, paving the way for Trump.

Our team still sits dumbly around refusing to discuss the real world. On cable last night, they skillfully restricted the things we were allowed to hear.

They were dumbing it way way down. Do we actually like such dumbed-down cable porridge?

Concerning that gong show from Maddow: Rachel Maddow's latest gong show was delivered on Thursday night. For background, see yesterday's post.

The sheer pomposity of her performance was a thing to behold. As usual, MSNBC is ten days behind on posting transcripts, so we can't link you to a printed record of her endless report.

You can watch the interminable segment here. You'll be watching a classic high-pomposity effort from Our Own Cable News Clown.

Cable host reports mystery solved!

FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2017

News orgs succumbed to "Telephone," cable host declares: It started with this dramatic tease midway through last night's program:

MADDOW (5/25/17): On top of that, though, there is one mystery about James Comey's firing and the question of whether or not that was the president trying to obstruct justice in the Trump-Russia investigation.

There's one piece of that that we think we've solved tonight. We've got that exclusive, next, right after this break.

The Maddow Show had solved a mystery concerning James Comey's firing! Maddow was going to have that exclusive right after the break!

After a commercial break, Maddow began an interminable, 15-minute segment with this nugget statement:

MADDOW: So we've got some new information in the Trump-Russia investigation. It is not a blockbuster revelation, but I think it's important and clarifying. It's about a key part of the behavior of the Trump administration with regard to the FBI since Trump has been in office. So, not during the campaign, but since the inauguration.

And I think what is widely believed to have happened, what is widely believed to have—actually, widely reported to have happened at this key point in time—what we think we know about it I think is wrong. And I think we can correct that record tonight.

So just settle in for a second and follow this through with me.

In fact, we would have to settle in for almost fifteen minutes. But if we just settled in in for those many minutes, Maddow was going to correct the record on something which had been widely reported!

The analysts were catatonic by the time she was done.

We've just been informed that this is a holiday weekend, so we're going to wait until tomorrow to lay the whole thing out. But Maddow went on to tell the world that, based upon her program's reporting, she now believes that James B. Comey did not request more resources for the Russia probe shortly before he was fired.

Based upon her staff's reporting, she now believes that congressional sources engaged in a game of "Telephone," which ended up with people making misstatements about what Comey had actually done.

You're right! We specifically warned you about this possibility in real time. We didn't have to do any "reporting." We simply read the Washington Post and the New York Times, noting the weakness of their sourcing on the morning of May 11, the morning when this exciting report produced a banner headline across the front page of the Post.

(The exciting report topped the Times' front page too. Over the subsequent two days, it seemed to us that the Washington Post was walking its banner claim back.)

We discussed this report in detail, warning you that this is the sort of thing which happens when a chase is on. Last night, Maddow spent fifteen minutes telling us that her staff's reporting had broken this case wide open.

She forgot to say that she herself was one of the people who had "widely reported" the claim she now believes to have been mistaken. She did that because she chose to report this pleasing claim on Wednesday night, May 10, about ten minutes after it hit the web.

That's what happen when people rush, at times when a chase is on, to feed us the stories we'll like.

Wednesday evening, May 10! That was also the night when Maddow spent twenty minutes telling us that Andrew McCabe had "joined the Trump disinformation campaign" last February. Where did she get that explosive report, which she has never mentioned again? For unknown and unreported reasons, Maddow was accepting the word of Reince Priebus for this otherwise unsupported but highly dramatic claim.

Just for the record, Maddow produced no particular new "reporting" during last night's segment. She merely said that her staff had received a new statement from the Justice Department, in which the spokesperson we cited two weeks ago vehemently denied the claim in question again.

The analysts were catatonic by the time Maddow finished last night. Tomorrow, we'll show you the text of what she eventually said, after roughly ten minutes of laborious, trademark time-wasting.

For now, you can observe an instance of high pomposity in the service to strange ascot-covering! To do so, just click here. You'll be observing the sort of thing which happens when the press is conducting a chase.

"EXCLUSIVE: NEW REPORTING ON CIRCUMSTANCES OF FBI DIRECTOR'S FIRING"

Somewhat comically, that's what the signage behind the cable host said.