Culture watch: No time for facts!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Was Troy Davis guilty: Troy Davis was executed on Wednesday night. This produced a great deal of cable discussion.

But was Troy Davis actually guilty? It depends on what paper you read.

If you read the Washington Post, you learned that Davis was guilty. Charles Lane produced this highly unintelligent column insisting that Davis was obviously guilty as charged.

Lane's overpowering sense of certainty stamps him (again) as strangely unintelligent. On the other hand, he did read the 174-page report by Chief Judge William Moore of the U.S. District Court in Savannah, the Clinton appointee who heard Davis' new evidence in June 2010 and found it severely wanting. (He even provides a link.)

Also in Friday's Post, Gene Robinson said Davis was "probably guilty." He cited the findings by judges like Moore down through the years.

But if you read the New York Times, you got a different story. The headline on Wednesday's editorial called the impending execution "a grievous wrong." Among other things, you read this:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial. Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis. The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime. There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis's guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.

Say what? The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime? And Davis was executed anyway?

What happened to the guy who confessed? The editors didn't say.

Lane's piece was defiantly unintelligent. The Times editorial wasn't much better. And guess what? Searching through the help of Nexis, we can find no news report in either newspaper which attempted to lay out the evidence. If anything, the work on cable was worse, a point we'll revisit next week.

So how about it:

Was Troy Davis innocent? Guilty? Our journalistic culture is very weak. In this much-debated case, our biggest news orgs made no real attempt to say.

Travel services: Amtrak along the Hudson!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

Always sit on the left going north: Amtrak runs a very nice route from New York City up to Albany, skirting the Hudson along its "right bank."

Today, we’ll be on that train. Why not stop by our private car and chat for a while with the analysts?

We may be posting over the weekend. One rarely knows, of course.

Mitt watch: In search of the real Mitt Romney!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

Somehow forgetting Seamus: How silly are the silly souls who report campaigns for the New York Times? Yesterday, we recommended this inane news report, in which Ashley Parker tries to figure if Candidate Romney is really a Joe Average guy.

Does Romney really have “down-to-earth tastes?” New York Times journalist Ashley Parker was desperate to find out:

PARKER (9/22/11): His effort, and the response to it, highlight a vexing problem for Mr. Romney. Although he is becoming increasingly confident and relaxed on the campaign trail, he still sometimes appears as if he is trying too hard to connect, straining to show that even his perfectly coifed hair can fall out of place. Sparring with voters at town-hall-style meetings, he can come off as a scolding crossing guard, and some of his efforts at humor—like the time he pretended that a waitress in a New Hampshire diner had pinched his bottom—have fallen notably flat.

But to aides and friends of Mr. Romney, the situation is more complicated. They say this—the Southwest flying, self-deprecating, penny-pinching guy—is the real Mitt, the one they know in private, and if anything, he just wants a little public credit for some of the “regular dude” things he has always done.

Ron Kaufman, a longtime Romney adviser, recalled a moment in the 2008 presidential campaign, after Mr. Romney had withdrawn from the race and was in his Boston headquarters, helping to wind down his campaign...

Zzzzzzzz! From there, Parker considered various stories, hoping to locate the real Mitt Romney. We were struck by the famous story she somehow arranged to forget.

How could anyone at the Times forget the Romney ur-story? It first appeared in a Boston Globe profile during Campaign 08. Since that time, the very highest Lady Collins has referred to this revealing incident in nineteen or twenty New York Times columns.

Collins wants us to remember. Carelessly, Parker forgets:

SWIDEY AND EBBERT (6/27/07): The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario.

As with most ventures in his life, he had left little to chance, mapping out the route and planning each stop. The destination for this journey in the summer of 1983 was his parents' cottage on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Romney would be returning to the place of his most cherished childhood memories.

[…]

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.

The ride was largely what you'd expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the "white whale."

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. "Dad!" he yelled. "Gross!" A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.

Is that a regular person or what? Chevy Chase should be paying him royalties! His five sons packed into the wagon for a 12-hour family forced march. The family dog was up on the roof, helped by a homemade windshield.

Dad could have had the brood flown in. But he took the road more travelled by.

Parker wants to know the real Mitt. Is Romney really a regular guy? But somehow, in her search for the truth, she has forgotten this relevant story.

Thanks to Collins, few Times readers will ever get that chance.

ABSENCE OF THE PROFESSORS: Next time, let’s name their names!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

EPILOGUE—PROFESSOR SPEAKS: In a nation crawling with professors, you'd think we’d read such work all the time.

Alas! As usual, the burden falls on Paul Krugman—though today’s column is one of his best.

Let’s get clear about one point Krugman makes. After that, let’s look ahead to the next step.

Krugman writes about the declining tax burden borne by society’s highest earners. Even as their incomes have massively grown, vastly outstripping income growth for the rubes, their tax rates have been dropping—a lot.

Yesterday, we linked you to the blog post which provides the background for this column. Today, Krugman summarizes his findings:

KRUGMAN (9/23/11): And one consequence of the shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work is the creation of many situations in which—just as Warren Buffett and Mr. Obama say—people with multimillion-dollar incomes, who typically derive much of that income from capital gains and other sources that face low taxes, end up paying a lower overall tax rate than middle-class workers. And we’re not talking about a few exceptional cases.

According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class.

Wow! A lot of people with very high incomes pay federal taxes at a very low rate. They pay 12.6 percent of their income in incomes taxes and payroll taxes combined! Or less.

Very few voters—left, right or center—have ever been told such facts. The beautiful minds of the career liberal world rarely stoop to such labors. But as he continues, Krugman describes the types of claims legions of voters do encounter, on a daily basis:

KRUGMAN (continuing directly): Now, I know how the right will respond to these facts: with misleading statistics and dubious moral claims.

On one side, we have the claim that the rising share of taxes paid by the rich shows that their burden is rising, not falling. To point out the obvious, the rich are paying more taxes because they’re much richer than they used to be. When middle-class incomes barely grow while the incomes of the wealthiest rise by a factor of six, how could the tax share of the rich not go up, even if their tax rate is falling?

Krugman is right. For decades, voters have heard about “the rising share of taxes paid by the rich.” Krugman is right about something else—this is a “misleading statistic.” Krugman only has 800 words, so he doesn’t provide examples. But let’s make sure we’re clear about the sort of thing he means.

What sorts of “misleading statistics” is Krugman talking about? To cite one near-example, he is discussing the work of David Brooks in Tuesday’s very strange column. American voters have been hearing crap like this for decades. This isn’t precisely the type of claim Krugman describes, but it’s in the same ball park:

BROOKS (9/20/11): [Obama] claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. …)

That highlighted claim is technically accurate—but it’s grossly misleading. As Timothy Noah quickly explained, that same ten percent of earners receives 50 percent of all income—and other taxes tend to erode the slight progressivity of the federal income tax. David Brooks—let’s say the name!—was pimping a "misleading statistic." But how strange! Brit Hume did the same damn thing on Special Report that night:

HUME (9/20/11): Say this for Warren Buffett—he knows how to make a big noise with a small point. A month ago, he argued in the New York Times that our tax code coddled the super-rich. He was talking, of course, about a small number of Americans with extremely high net worth whose income is mostly dividends and capital gains from their accumulated wealth.

Such income is taxed at about half the rate that is paid on the salaries that most Americans live on. True enough as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far. For one thing, it ignores the fact that most dividends and capital gains are the result of corporate profits, on which regular income taxes have already been paid. So such money is actually taxed twice.

Indeed, the latest data shows that the richest one percent of U.S. taxpayers paid 38 percent of the income tax burden, and the top 10 percent paid nearly 70 percent. None of this has stopped the president, with considerable sleight-of-hand, from citing Buffett in arguing for higher tax rates that would hit countless people who are neither millionaires or billionaires.

Ignore the foolishness about being “taxed twice.” (The tools of the disinformation are many.) Hume pimped the same misleading (and irrelevant) statistic about that top ten percent!

Voters have heard these “misleading statistics” on a daily basis for decades. There are many such statistics and claims; they are broadcast on talk radio, on Fox TV, in op-ed columns by the bow-tied brigades who are making sweet careers by making mincemeat of us rubes. At this site, we have yelled and screamed for at least a decade, asking when the liberal world planned to tell the average voter that he is being fooled by such steady disinformation.

Alas! Asking the career liberal world to act is like asking baboons to jump right over the moon.

Krugman makes a very key point today. After describing remarkable changes in inequality and tax policy, he says this: “I know how the right will respond to these facts: with misleading statistics.” He discusses one type of misleading statistic—but their number is many.

The top 10 percent pay 70 percent! The highest earners pay a rising share of taxes! Very powerful media players keep pimping strings of such misleading facts. Voters hear such claims all the time. They rarely see the liberal world explaining how they’re being misled.

We liberals find voters dirty and stupid. We don’t like to speak to such people. We prefer to insult them for their very bad views. See post directly below.

The beautiful minds of our beautiful children have spent many hours in la-la land. The whole job can’t all be left to Paul Krugman. The liberal world has to get off its ass and tell the voters two key things:

You are being misled by misleading claims.

And also this:

The people who are paid to mislead you have names—names like Brooks and Hume.

Few voters have ever heard such facts. The professors have been in France. The children have been adorably sleeping. When awake, they tell each other how brilliant and moral they are.

Liberal self-destruction watch: RNC wet-dream edition!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011

It isn’t that he’s wrong: A few months ago, Digby added David Atkins to the roster at Hullabaloo. It turns out that Atkins is thirty years old.

He’s also an RNC wet dream.

It isn’t that a person is “wrong” if he loathes the American people. We wouldn’t say that Atkins is “wrong” in the attitudes he displayed in yesterday’s fiery post.

It can’t be said that you are “wrong” for loathing people who are religious. For loathing supporters of capital punishment, a very strong predominant view among American voters. (We opposed to capital punishment oursleves. But to peruse some polls on this topic, just click here.)

It can’t be said that Atkins is “wrong.” But if a person has certain attitudes towards his fellow citizens, he won’t likely be real good at politics. Politics is largely about persuading other people—the voters. It’s hard to get people to see things your way if they know you loathe them.

“I never met a man I didn’t loathe.” Will Rogers didn’t say that!

For decades, the RNC has tried to claim that liberals really think this way. Until Atkins offered this post, no one ever believed them.

Noble Nestor watch: Listening to the fiery Atkins, who wouldn’t recall the sound advice Nestor gave to the headstrong Diomedes? We think Professor Fagles has it just about right as he renders the words of the seasoned charioteer.

For a quick refresher course, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/2/00.

Information watch: Where do we go for info?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Krugman brings in the load: How much of their income do very high earners pay in federal taxes? The question has been floating around all week. It has been driven along by Obama’s proposals, the AP’s incompetence, the ludicrous claims made on Fox.

For a bit of one-stop shopping, we recommend this blog post by Paul Krugman. At first glance, the table Krugman includes is a bit confusing. But he explains how to use it, and it’s quite intriguing.

Example: Among people who earn more than $1 million, twenty-five percent pay less than 12.6 percent in federal taxes. That’s federal income tax and payroll taxes combined.

After citing this example, Krugman offers the following summation. We call your attention to the highlighted statement:

KRUGMAN (9/22/11): This suggests that there are a lot of very-high-income guys paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

And that doesn’t even take into account state and local taxes, which are quite regressive.

Taken as a whole, the US tax system is probably somewhat progressive—but not as much as you might think, especially at the upper end, and very erratically. There are a lot of rich people basically free-riding on the system.

The system is somewhat progressive, “but not as much as you might think.” Here's our question:

Why are we required to “think” X, Y and Z about federal taxes? Why can’t we be allowed to know about such basic matters? Why isn’t there a digest of user-friendly information where voters can learn basic facts?

The conservative world has spent decades churning disinformation about tax issues—disinformation and misleading statements. When does the liberal world plan to create a digest of actual information—information a non-specialist can access and understand?

When does the liberal world plan to do something? Rubes! Must a sane person ask?

Cuffs-and-loafers watch: Defiantly low-IQ!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Shoes make the man: Due to the detail presented below, we’ll keep this item simple. But if you want to marvel at the culture of the New York Times, you should review today’s “news report” by the remarkable Ashley Parker.

Parker reports on Candidate Romney. Her report is blindingly low-IQ. In the hard-copy paper, the effect is greater, because the Times features a large photograph of Mitt Romney’s pants cuffs and shoes.

That’s it—just his pants cuffs and shoes!

This Times is obsessed with candidates’ shoes, with what they tell us about the hopefuls. It can’t get past this tragic obsession. Let’s revisit the blather of Bruni, offered years ago:

BRUNI (9/14/99): When Gov. George W. Bush of Texas first hit the Presidential campaign trail in June, he wore monogrammed cowboy boots, the perfect accessory for his folksy affability and casual self-assurance.

But when he visited New Hampshire early last week, he was shod in a pair of conservative, shiny black loafers that seemed to reflect more than the pants cuffs above them. They suggested an impulse by Mr. Bush to put at least a bit of a damper on his brash irreverence, which has earned him affection but is a less certain invitation for respect.

That fall, the press corps obsessed on Gore’s cowboy boots. (And his polo shirts. And his three-button suits, one of which was brown.) Because he served the New York Times, Bruni took things one step further.

Parker’s report seems designed to remind the world that Timespeople just aren’t real smart. The effect is heightened when we review Richard Oppel’s highly informative news report about Candidate Perry.

Parker reports from the coo-coo bin. Oppel’s report is quite informative. Needless to say, Parker’s report fills the top of page A18, fattened by that large photo of loafers. Oppel’s report gets second billing, down below Parker’s nonsense. And his report is shorter.

This morning, the road to Governor Perry's record leads through Mitt Romney's shoes.

Parker wrote this same low-IQ piece just a few short weeks ago (click here). The Times is defiantly unintelligent. Parker wants you to know.

THE ABSENCE OF THE PROFESSORS! Disinformation never sleeps!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

PART 4—NO WAY OUT: If you’re an American voter, it’s amazingly easy to get disinformed about Social Security.

The disinformation campaign has been under way for thirty years—and the campaign continues. Just consider the column by an economics professor in today's Baltimore Sun.

The professor in question is Peter Morici, one of the carnival barker-style professors who get big play on cable news—even on network news programs. Morici is from the University of Maryland; this makes him geographically convenient to cable bookers. And he sports a trademarked, bow-tie conservative look—the look that pre-announces a cable guest as a pseudo-conservative fraud.

When cable guests wear uniforms, viewers can watch the ensuing debates with the sound turned off!

Beyond that, Morici is skilled with his disinformation. This is the way his op-ed column starts in this morning’s Baltimore Sun. We’ll use the headline from our hard-copy paper:

MORICI (9/22/11): Yes, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme

When established in 1935, Social Security made its first payments to Americans age 65. These first recipients never contributed and were paid from contributions made by younger Americans. Those Americans and successive generations believed their contributions were investments, and that they would be paid at retirement by the earnings on those investments.

In fact, those younger Americans were paid by the contributions of successive generations of "investors," as the federal government spent their money to help finance operating deficits. With the ratio of retirees to contributors rising, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money by 2036, if not sooner.

Such a scheme could only continue if the working-age population grew more rapidly than the number of retirees, but it hasn't because Americans live longer and the birth rate has declined.

President Barack Obama's claims notwithstanding, Social Security is now a growing burden on federal finances, as the difference between the trust fund's income and what it pays out grows each year. As we approach 2036, either payments will have to be drastically curtailed or the government will have to shut down, on a massive basis, other activities.

Either Social Security fails, or the United States fails.

Let’s be fair. As noted, Morici is a full professor at a major university. For that reason, it’s possible he’s so goddamned dumb that he wrote this piece in good faith.

It’s possible, but we’d call it unlikely. Morici’s piece extends a disinformation campaign which has run for more than three decades. And sure enough! Through this morning’s column, Maryland voters will get disinformed again.

Will other professors speak up in protest? If the thought even enters your head, you must live on the far planet Zarkon. Except for hustlers like Morici and the occasional outlier like Paul Krugman, American professors sold you out a very long time ago.

The professors keep their big traps shut. They’re too busy screwing their graduate students or composing their latest thoughts on Jane Austen’s use of the colon. Other professors will not voice a challenge. That said, consider the standard disinformation Morici has spewed on the land:

“With the ratio of retirees to contributors rising, the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money by 2036, if not sooner.”

Based on current projections, that is an accurate statement. But such truncated presentations have been a key part of this scam over the past thirty years. After the trust fund runs out of money, Social Security will of course continue to function—but voters don’t understand that fact. Truncated sound-bites of this type are intended to keep the public confused on this point, building the sense of alarm.

“As we approach 2036, either payments will have to be drastically curtailed or the government will have to shut down, on a massive basis, other activities.”

It all depends on what the meaning of what “drastically” and “massive” are! Presumably, Morici has heard of numbers, a fairly well-known recent invention. In this matter, numbers can be used to flesh out this highly alarming statement. In fact, if we make no changes at all to the current system, Social Security will continue to pay perhaps 80 percent of promised benefits after the trust fund runs out. It would have been easy for Morici to include a number like that in his column. But how strange—he never does! The tyranny of disinformation requires its hacks to make imprecise, frightening claims.

We’ll have more to say about that second quotation below. It will have an Yglesias tie-in—but for now, understand this:

Nowhere in this op-ed column does Morici attempt to quantify the alarming terms “drastically/massive.” (On that basis alone, the editor who accepted that column would be on his way out the door in a true journalistic culture.) In a similar vein, Morici fails to tell readers how easy it would be to eliminate that projected shortfall through minor tax increases.

Duh! Kevin Drum explained how easy it is in this September 12 blog post. You may not choose to make the adjustments Drum describes, but if you don’t understand the facts Drum cites, you don’t understand this topic. Presumably, Morici does understand the numbers involved here. True to his role in a long campaign, he just doesn’t want to tell the public about them.

As he continues, Morici decides that private accounts won’t work. His solution to the Ponzi problem is presented in this, the thrilling conclusion to his column. By now, Morici is basically lying—with the acquiescence of an editor at the Sun:

MORICI: In the end, the only way to make the system work is to ask Americans to work longer. If Governor Perry or Mitt Romney wants to fix the system, instead of arguing over terminology, they must address the retirement age. It simply must be raised to something close to 70, with no exceptions but for the truly disabled.

Americans won't like that, but it beats what President Obama is offering. Characteristic to his thinking on economics, he prefers to believe what his liberal ideology, not the facts, require—and incorrectly insists the system is solvent.

Social Security, by the findings of Mr. Obama's own Social Security Administration, is insolvent and hence is indeed a Ponzi scheme. Americans seeking dignity in retirement would be better served by hearing the truth.

Social Security isn't “solvent?” That’s another scary locution—and of course it all depends of what the meaning of “solvent” is! But surely, this professor understands that he’s basically lying when he says this: “The only way to make the system work is to ask Americans to work longer.”

In fairness, that is one of the ways to erase that future shortfall. But plainly, it isn’t the only way. This music man understands that fact. (Presumably, so does the editor.) He is just determined to keep that fact from Maryland voters.

Con men like Morici have been at this game for the past thirty years. Morici has made himself rather famous playing this game in the past few years, even as he has worked to make the nation’s voters dumber. Let’s return to that earlier question:

Should you expect to see pushback from any other professors? Should you expect to see letters from other professors in the Baltimore Sun’s letters column? Should you expect to see other professors denouncing Morici by name on TV?

Will you read a column by some other professor explaining the fact that a disinformation campaign has been running for the past thirty years? That progressives and tea party members alike have been disinformed by this scheme?

Of course you won’t see such actions! The nation’s professors walked away from their obligations as citizens many decades ago. Graduate students have to be screwed—and someone must use that villa in France! You will not see such pushback in the next few weeks. Nor will your mewling career liberal journalists name the names of the horrible people who are running this evil campaign.

To understand the culture within which this campaign has flourished, let’s recall a few things we have looked at this week:

In the late 1990s, the New York Times asked an eminent economics if he wanted to write a twice-weekly column. Luckily, this professor said yes. But in a fascinating profile, Larissa McFarquhar described the reaction from this professor’s colleagues.

Robin Wells is Paul Krugman’s wife. She too is an economist:

MCFARQUHAR (3/1/10): When the Times approached him about writing a column, he was torn. “His friends said, ‘This is a waste of your time,’ ” Wells says. “We economists thought that we were doing substantive work and the rest of the world was dross.” Krugman cared about his academic reputation more than anything else. If he started writing for a newspaper, would his colleagues think he’d become a pseudo-economist, a former economist, a vapid policy entrepreneur like Lester Thurow? Lester Thurow had become known in certain circles as Less Than Thorough. It was hard to imagine what mean nickname could be made out of Paul Krugman, but what if someone came up with one? Could he take it?

Luckily, Krugman took the job. But McFarquhar suggests that the nation’s professors think they’re above such work. Let’s be honest—most of these people couldn’t explain how Social Security works if they tried. (Is the left hand borrowing from the right? They wouldn’t know how to unpack that!) But these professors aren't inclined to try; they don’t accept their duty as citizens. They seem to think it’s a waste of their time to speak to the nation’s rubes.

In 1996, this same professor betrayed a hint of this attitude. By his own account, Krugman was still “sleepwalking” at this point; he too wasn’t bothering himself with mere politics. Presumably, that explains why he wrote a bungled piece for the New York Times Sunday Book Review section, a piece he renounced three weeks later:

KRUGMAN (11/12/96): First of all, a mea culpa of my own. Ignore Galbraith's coyness: I was the economist who went overboard in supporting Pete Peterson's position on entitlements and demographics. Demographics play a smaller role in Peterson's forecasts, and debatable projections of medical costs a larger one, than I realized when I recently reviewed his book for the New York Times. I broke my own rule that you should always check an argument both with a back-of-the-envelope calculation and by consulting with the real experts, no matter how plausible and reasonable its author sounds. Do as I say and normally do, not as I unfortunately did in this case.

Oof! Still sleepwalking at this point, Krugman behaved like those other professors. Writing on a major topic for a very influential publication, he didn’t bother checking Pete Peterson’s argument. Reason? Peterson sounded so good!

Today, Krugman is our most valuable player. Back then, in that blithe response, he described irresponsible conflict—the type of conduct one can expect from the bulk of the nation’s professors. He also explained how a disinformation campaign has proven to be so successful.

Let’s mention Dean Baker, who wrote a letter to the Times in 1996 challenging Krugman’s review. In 1999, Baker and Weisbrot wrote a very important book, Social Security: The Phony Crisis. Unfortunately, the book is too technical for general use—and no professor, think tank or liberal journal has ever created a simplified, voter-friendly version of this essential information.

The professors are too lofty for such work. You can explain the sloth of the liberal journals any way you like. That said, let’s return to our first report in this series—to Matt Yglesias’ murky attempt to explain how Social Security works. Thirty years into this endless scam, this is the best description of Social Security our beautiful minds can manage:

YGLESIAS (9/16/11): So to review, roughly speaking we have two kinds of people in America. We have people who are paying Social Security taxes and we have people who are receiving Social Security benefits. For the past several decades, the quantity of tax revenue coming in has exceeded the quantity of benefits being paid out. That is projected to flip around, creating the need to either redirect some additional financial stream into the Social Security system in order to repay the rest of the government’s debt to Social Security or else to reduce Social Security benefits or else to increase Social Security taxes.

The choice among these options is what the Social Security debate is about, if the Social Security debate is about funding Social Security.

That highlighted passage is clear as mud. But thirty years into this endless scam, it’s the best our beautiful minds can produce. Steve Benen made a point of saying how clear that bafflegab was!

The professors have failed you; the children can’t function. That’s the state of the liberal project thirty years into this scam. But people! On Monday, we said the first part of Yglesias’ explanation echoes one of the newer talking-points which are used in this campaign. We said this new point is hard to search for. But we said we’d get back to you on it by the end of the week.

Luckily, Morici folds that talking-point into his scam-heavy column. When Social Security revenues no longer equal the benefits being paid out, will that somehow create the need to “redirect some additional financial stream into the Social Security system in order to repay the rest of the government’s debt to Social Security?” That bafflegab echoed a new talking-point. Here we see a version of same, Professor Morici-style:

MORICI: President Barack Obama's claims notwithstanding, Social Security is now a growing burden on federal finances, as the difference between the trust fund's income and what it pays out grows each year. As we approach 2036, either payments will have to be drastically curtailed or the government will have to shut down, on a massive basis, other activities.

Morici is speaking about the years before the trust fund is exhausted. As he has been instructed to do, he says we will have to shut down other activities, on a massive basis, to make up for the annual shortfalls. (More conventional hustlers add a second option: Or we will have to raise taxes!) That statement is grossly misleading, of course; in the years before the trust fund expires, the shortfall will be covered by the Social Security trust fund. Money borrowed from the trustees will be repaid, just as we’ll repay the money we’ve borrowed from banks in China. Morici is simply creating more confusion about this process, just as it has been written.

In the bafflegab we’ve highlighted, Yglesias seemed tangled up in that talking-point too. Such is the work of the liberal world’s most beautiful minds as this campaign keeps advancing.

The professors don’t care; the careerists can’t function. What should liberals do about this?

We will have to leave that question for another time.

Back to Hacker: For other mordant thoughts about the priorities of the professors, we again recommend the Andrew Hacker/Claudia Dreifus book, Higher Education. The authors write from deep inside the academy they have betrayed.

David Brooks watch: How can we get information!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

How do you fact-check a problem like David: David Brooks got whupped all over town for yesterday’s very strange column.

That said, let’s focus again on a few of Brooks’ factual claims. Question: How can the average citizen fact-check claims like the claims found in this passage?

BROOKS (9/20/11): [Obama] claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

Citizens encounter such claims all the time. But where can a citizen go to fact-check such claims?

Yesterday, Timothy Noah pushed back against Brooks on his new blog at TNR. Last fall, Noah authored this voluminous series at Slate concerning income inequality. Yesterday, he offered this reaction to the first of Brooks’ highlighted factual claims:

NOAH (9/20/11): David Brooks has indigestion because President Barack Obama, whom Brooks rather likes, wants to raise taxes on the rich. "He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries." Why is that a half-truth? Because "the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S."

Oh, please. The top 10 percent pays nearly 70 percent of all income taxes because the top 10 percent makes half the income—49.74 percent, including capital gains, before the recession and only slightly less now.

Yeah, but where did Noah get that? He explained: “My source is the World Top Incomes Database, a fantastic Web resource put together by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo and Tony Atkinson,” he wrote. To access that site, just click here.

Would the average reader know to go to that site? Once he got there, would he know how to proceed? As he continued, Noah reacted to Brooks’ second claim, citing a CBO source:

NOAH: The relevant statistic isn't what proportion of the nation's taxes comes from the rich. It's what proportion of the rich's income gets paid in taxes. Brooks cites a Congressional Budget Office report that says people in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government. Boo hoo. What he doesn't say is that back in 1979, on the eve of the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent paid 37 percent of their income in taxes to the federal government, even though its share of the nation's income was much lower than it is now (34 percent, including capital gains).

In fairness to Brooks, “Boo hoo” isn’t an argument. Nor is anyone required to care when they’re told that the tax rate in question was once six points higher. But to see that CBO report, just click here. Though even when you go to that report, you may still have a problem.

Go ahead—check over to that report. Its pair of headlines say this:

Effective Federal Tax Rates for All Households, by Comprehensive Household Income Quintile, 1979-2006
Total Effective Federal Tax Rate

Question: Does that include all federal taxes? Payroll taxes and income taxes? And what does “effective tax rate” mean? If the average reader scanned that report, do you think he or she would know?

Noah knows much more than the average bird about where to go for this kind of info. His series at Slate was superb. But it’s remarkably hard for average people to locate such information. Factual claims get thrown all around. They’re very hard to fact-check.

This is a long-term failure of the liberal world. More on this point to come.

Likability watch: Who is Candidate Perry!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

The dumbest reactions on earth: For better or worse, many voters will find a good deal to like about Rick Perry’s personal history.

In Monday’s New York Times, Deborah Sontag offered a standard candidate profile concerning Perry’s personal background. She wrote about the candidate’s upbringing in Paint Creek, Texas.

Sontag threw in one “Confederate” reference just to keep us happy. But trust us: Voters will find a lot to like in Candidate Perry’s smaller-than-small-town background.

Sontag’s profile appeared one day after a pair of New York Times columnists offered the dumbest possible reactions to Perry’s smaller-than-small background. Needless to say, the scribes in question were the twin regents, Collins and Dowd.

Lovers of irony will enjoy the idea that Maureen Dowd could devote a full column to the dumbness of others. But Dowd, dumbest scribe of the past thirty years, was on quite a tear this morning:

DOWD (9/16/11): Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

[…]

The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde.

Having grown up with a crush on William F. Buckley Jr. for his sesquipedalian facility, it’s hard for me to watch the right wing of the G.O.P. revel in anti-intellectualism and anti-science cant.

Sarah Palin, who got outraged at a “gotcha” question about what newspapers and magazines she read, is the mother of stupid conservatism. Another “Don’t Know Much About History” Tea Party heroine, Michele Bachmann, seems rather proud of not knowing anything, simply repeating nutty, inflammatory medical claims that somebody in the crowd tells her.

So we’re choosing between the overintellectualized professor and blockheads boasting about their vacuity?

The occupational hazard of democracy is know-nothing voters. It shouldn’t be know-nothing candidates.

After making that know-nothing, anti-science remark about our educational system, Dowd took after the rest of the nation. Everyone was stupid this day, including the nation’s students! She was mad at the know-nothing voters, of course—but also at the know-nothing candidates! But along the way, she offered these mots. Especially from a national journalist, this is a very dumb comment:

DOWD: Our education system is going to hell. Average SAT scores are falling, and America is slipping down the list of nations for college completion. And Rick Perry stands up with a smirk to talk to students about how you can get C’s, D’s and F’s and still run for president.

The Texas governor did help his former chief of staff who went to lobby for a pharmaceutical company that donated to Perry, so he at least knows the arithmetic of back scratching.

Perry told the students, “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” What does that even mean?

Darlings! Whatever could that awful man mean?

As several anti-Perry commenters noted, Dowd’s question was massively dumb. The concept of “broken people” seems to be quite common for many Christians, as a quick Google search shows. This rather obvious possibility didn’t even occur to Dowd, who couldn’t wait to play the role of sneering East Coast liberal.

“God uses broken people to reach a broken world?” That isn’t part of our own cultural framework. But Dowd couldn’t wait to show the voters how pathetically dumb she thinks they are—even as she rushed to showcase her own cultural know-nothingness.

It has been 39 years since Pauline Kael made her famous clueless remark about the inscrutable public. (As reported in the New York Times: “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”) Thirty-nine years later, people like Dowd can’t wait to announce that they themselves have no earthly idea about the outlooks, beliefs, culture and views of vast numbers of voters.

If Maureen Dowd didn’t exist, the RNC would have to invent her. But then, the high Lady Collins made a remark about Perry in Sunday’s Times that struck us as quite clueless too. Quite clueless, and politically dumb:

COLLINS (9/16/11): Rick Perry has never spent any serious time outside of Texas, except for a five-year stint in the military. Nobody sent him off to boarding school to expand his horizons. He grew up in Paint Creek, where he graduated third in a high school class of 13. He went to the most deeply Texas of all the state’s major institutions of higher learning. He was a terrible student, but won the prized post of yell leader, the most deeply Texas of all possible Aggie achievements. Then he joined the Air Force and flew transport planes out of Texas, Germany and the Middle East. “There was no telling what you were going to haul around on any given day, from high-value cargo like human beings to the colonel’s kitty litter,” he once told a reporter in Texas.

“Rick Perry has never spent any serious time outside of Texas, except for a five-year stint in the military.” Do you have any idea how dumb that will sound to a wide range of voters? A quick guess: Collins does not.

Dowd of course is a hopeless case; we remain puzzled by Collins. The ID line on her Sunday piece said this: “Gail Collins’s book on Texas will be published next year by W. W. Norton.” Uh-oh! Given the way Collins like to sneer at red states and the rubes within them, it’s entirely possible that her book will elect Perry all by itself!

We’re puzzled by Collins. She loves to sneer at folk in red states. But where in the world did she get the idea that this was the essence of her regency? Darlings! Collins grew up in St. Louis herself! And oh our god! She went to college in Milwaukee! But somewhere along the way, Collins adopted the idea that she exists to sneer at the rubes whose towns still have Dairy Queens.

This is stupid on the merits. Even worse, it’s politically dumb.

Just a guess: Voters will like Rick Perry’s small town background—especially once our side gets through with all the requisite comments.

THE ABSENCE OF THE PROFESSORS: Good grief—even Krugman!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

PART 3—THE AUTUMN OF 96: It’s amazingly easy to get disinformed concerning Social Security. Consider the plight of the poor shlub voters who watched last night’s Special Report.

In an early segment, correspondent Shannon Bream reviewed the things “Floridians are talking about ahead of Thursday night's [GOP] debate.” Bream had interviewed Justin Sayfie, whom she described as a “Florida political analyst.” She had also spoken with Jeff Niefeld, a Florida Democratic voter.

Before long, the 1.6 million people watching the show were being treated to this:

BREAM (9/20/11): There's also the issue of Social Security and a term used by Texas governor, Rick Perry.

NIEFELD: You can call it a Ponzi scheme implies that it's a criminal enterprise. Social Security is not criminal. It's not criminal. We all pay into it, and at the end of our time, allotted time, we can draw out of it.

BREAM: But attitudes are shifting here in Florida along with demographics. Nearly half the state's electorate is now under 50 and willing to acknowledge some hard truth about the solvency of Social Security.

SAYFIE: If you're a younger voter, if you're a voter between the ages of 18 and 30 and you're paying into the system and you don't have a reasonable belief that you're going to be paid, the term Ponzi scheme probably sounds about right.

The Democratic voter defended the system. But the political analyst told younger viewers that they shouldn’t expect any benefits from the Ponzi-like program.

Fox viewers were hearing this presentation for perhaps the ten millionth time. Bream offered no contradiction or challenge. Neither did Brett Baier, the program’s irresponsible anchor.

Alas! American voters have been disinformed in precisely this way for the past thirty years. Today, the liberal world is no longer completely asleep in the woods. Today, many liberals get the chance to hear analysts explain what's wrong with this rank disinformation.

But in earlier decades, the situation was worse. Consider what happened in 1996 when the New York Times reviewed Pete Peterson’s book, “Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old? How the Coming Social Security Crisis Threatens You, Your Family, and Your Country.”

Peterson was a well-known alarmist on Social Security; he had been for quite a few years. A well-known economist did the review—and he seemed to be buying the premise:

KRUGMAN (10/20/96): In this silly season politicians are once again promising that we can have it all—that we can cut taxes, spare every popular spending program from even the smallest cut and still balance the budget. Nobody really believes them; if the public is willing to indulge such fantasies, it is because it does not, when all is said and done, really take the budget deficit seriously. After all, we have run huge deficits year after year as far back as anyone except economists can remember, and the sky has not fallen. Where is the crisis?

Just over the horizon, that's where. Through a kind of sound-bite numerology, the political debate over deficits became fixated last year on the seven-year prospect; each party insists that its economic program will balance the budget in the year 2002. Neither will, but that is beside the point. Responsible adults are supposed to plan more than seven years ahead. Yet if you think even briefly about what the Federal budget will look like in 20 years, you immediately realize that we are drifting inexorably toward crisis; if you think 30 years ahead, you wonder whether the Republic can be saved.

Peter G. Peterson states the reason for this succinctly in his brief, scary new book, "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?"

Good grief! Could the republic be saved? Prospects weren’t looking real good.

The Times’ reviewer was in fact Paul Krugman, an eminent economist who wasn’t as well-known at that time as he is today. If you’re familiar with Krugman’s current work, you may be surprised to see the things he wrote in the autumn of 96.

(In this 1996 piece, Krugman also reviewed a book about the AARP. To read the review, click here.)

We haven’t read Peterson’s book, nor are we Peterson haters. But if you were an average shlub, it was very easy to get alarmed about the future during this era. As Krugman proceeded, he pretty much bought every part of Peterson’s thesis. For those who know Krugman’s work today, this passage will sound quite peculiar:

KRUGMAN: Generous benefits for the elderly are feasible as long as there are relatively few retirees compared with the number of taxpaying workers—which is the current situation, because the baby boomers swell the workforce. In 2010, however, the boomers will begin to retire. Every year thereafter, for the next quarter-century, several million 65-year-olds will leave the rolls of taxpayers and begin claiming their benefits.

The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension. Mr. Peterson, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, a private investment bank, informs us that "the combined Federal cost of Social Security and Medicare, expressed as a share of workers' taxable payroll, is officially projected to rise from the already burdensome 17 percent in 1995 to between 35 and 55 percent in 2040. And this figure does not include the many other costs—from nursing homes to civil service and military pensions—that are destined to grow along with the age wave.”

Does that sound like Krugman today? As he continued, Krugman even made it sound like those “trust funds” might be a big bag of air:

KRUGMAN (continuing directly): But aren't Social Security and Medicare basically pension funds, in which workers' contributions are invested to provide for their retirement? Hardly. A private pension fund that planned to pay the benefits these programs promise would be accumulating huge reserves. In fact, the so-called "trust funds" are making barely any provisions for the future. In another spectacular statistic, Mr. Peterson notes that if Medicare and Social Security had to obey the same rules that apply to private pensions, the reported Federal deficit this year would be not its official $150 billion, but roughly $1.5 trillion.

In short, the Federal Government, however solid its finances may currently appear, is in fact living utterly beyond its means. While the present generation of retirees is doing very nicely, the promises that are being made to those now working cannot be honored.

Gack! As Krugman closed, he pictured a semi-dystopia:

KRUGMAN: Both Mr. Morris and Mr. Peterson offer plans to avert the crisis ahead. The details differ, and Mr. Peterson's proposal is more completely fleshed out, but the general thrust is clear: slow the growth in benefit levels, gradually raise the retirement age, impose limits on expensive terminal medical care that prolongs life for only weeks or days and—last but not least—raise taxes moderately now, rather than massively later. We need not dwell on their sensible proposals, however, because there is not the slightest prospect that they will be put into effect—or indeed that we will do anything serious about the looming crisis until it is almost upon us.

Both books take comfort from the economist Herbert Stein's famous dictum that unsustainable trends tend not to be sustained. Something is bound to give—but what? Will retired boomers—who will have even more political clout than today's smallish population of retired voters—be willing to accept a sharply reduced standard of living? That is hard to imagine. Will younger voters be willing to accept huge increases in tax rates to support the boomers in the style they have been promised? That is equally hard to imagine. Or will the Government try to square the circle by simply printing the money it needs, creating runaway inflation? Surely that is inconceivable. Yet one or more of these unthinkable things will happen, because something must.

Something "unthinkable" was going to happen, Krugman said as he closed his review. For the average shlub, even the average liberal, it was very easy to get alarmed in the autumn of 96.

Was Krugman “wrong” in his assessments? In 2007, a flap blew up about his past statements on these subjects, including those in this review. At the time, Krugman seemed to say that the facts had changed since 1996; some defenders noted that he had lumped Social Security and Medicare together in his review. But that wasn’t the stance he took in real time concerning this review. In real time, Dean Baker wrote a letter to the Times, chiding Krugman for his assessments. (Baker: “It should not be necessary to explain simple concepts to an economist as distinguished as Paul Krugman.” Full text below.) By the late autumn of 96, Krugman was taking back what he had said in an exchange with Jamie Galbraith in Slate:

GALBRAITH (11/8/96): Is there a crisis of the Social Security system? The most recent issue of Challenge carries a fine assortment of views on this vexing question. Of these, the most persuasive argue that there is no crisis, that possible shortfalls in Social Security can be fixed by very modest adjustments, at most. Unfortunately, alarmists like the dedicated anti-Social Security campaigner Pete Peterson, an investment banker, are dominating this debate. It is regrettable that certain serious economists—it might disrupt present comity if I named a name—have recently stated their categorical support for the alarmist position.

KRUGMAN (11/12/96): First of all, a mea culpa of my own. Ignore Galbraith's coyness: I was the economist who went overboard in supporting Pete Peterson's position on entitlements and demographics. Demographics play a smaller role in Peterson's forecasts, and debatable projections of medical costs a larger one, than I realized when I recently reviewed his book for the New York Times. I broke my own rule that you should always check an argument both with a back-of-the-envelope calculation and by consulting with the real experts, no matter how plausible and reasonable its author sounds. Do as I say and normally do, not as I unfortunately did in this case.

Only three weeks had passed, but Krugman was bailing on his review. Remarkably, he seemed to say that he had failed to check Peterson’s arguments “by consulting with the real experts” before he wrote his review. He seemed to say that he’d gone with the flow because Peterson sounded so reasonable.

That was then, not now. Over the past dozen years, Krugman has become our most important, constructive, informative upper-end journalist. But in yesterday’s post, we took you through Larissa McFarquhar’s detailed review of Krugman’s career—which at one point was rather careerist, according to Krugman himself. In McFarquhar’s review, Krugman was quoted saying this: “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000.”

It’s hard to argue with that assessment if he was writing reviews for the nation’s most important newspaper without bothering to check the author’s argument—reviews concerning a major topic on which the public was being disinformed and had been for many years. (The piece appeared in the widely-read and influential Sunday “Book Review” section.)

Where have the professors been over the past thirty years? In large part, last night’s garbage still sells on Fox (and in other precincts) because of their thirty-year silence. After he took his post as a New York Times columnist, Krugman became the giant exception to this rule. But we’ll suggest that you read his review of Peterson’s scary book in conjunction with the McFarquhar profile, in which Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, describe the contempt the professors had in the late 1990s for people who would lower themselves to speak to the public, the rubes.

By Krugman’s own account, his life changed after 1999. But the public remains highly disinformed. In large part, the thanks for this can go to our sleeping professors.

At one time, professors were absent-minded. For the past thirty years, they’ve simple been absent. Over and over, this cohort has failed you.

Crackers! What should we do?

Tomorrow: What should we do?

Baker replied: Dean Baker responded to Krugman’s review. Here’s the full text of his letter:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (11/17/96): It should not be necessary to explain simple concepts to an economist as distinguished as Paul Krugman. Unfortunately, his review of two recent books on entitlement programs for the elderly (Oct. 20) shows he is as susceptible to prevailing misconceptions in this area as the rest of the nation's pundits.

Mr. Krugman comments approvingly on "Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?," by Peter G. Peterson, which purports to show that the elderly are going to bankrupt the nation. Mr. Krugman, like Mr. Peterson, lumps Social Security and Government health care programs for the elderly together. But the issues are completely different.

In the case of Social Security, according to the trustees' report, it will be possible to meet all scheduled benefit payments over the next 75 years with relatively minor tax increases (2.2 percent of payroll, if done tomorrow). These increases would allow future generations to enjoy substantially higher after-tax income than workers do at present. The main reason taxes will have to rise at all is not the retirement of the baby boom generation, but the fact that people are living longer.

The Medicare and Medicaid projections are indeed a nightmare, but this is because of underlying projections in the cost of health care more generally. The Health Care Financing Administration's projections show that private sector health care spending will be nearly $4,000 per person by the year 2005. This means that a family of four at the median income will be spending approximately 30 percent of its before-tax income on health care. That is a crisis, but it has nothing to do with entitlement programs for the elderly.

Dean Baker/Washington

Today, Baker’s easy-to-follow points are understood by many liberals. But in the fall of 96, it was still extremely easy for liberals to get disinformed.

Defiant silly-bill watch: Bruni and Brooks on the rampage!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

A deeply inane public culture: Just a fairly obvious guess! The New York Times added Frank Bruni to the team make its op-ed page even dumber.

This morning, the scribe is back from Milan—and he’s quite upset with one of those silly-bill pols! Throwing life-style in our faces, Paul Ryan has staged “a minor masterpiece of image calibration:”

BRUNI (9/20/11): Paul Ryan may not be running for president this time around, but if you have any doubt about his ambitions for a long, prominent future in government, just look at his comments in a Q. and A. published in Sunday’s Times. They’re a minor masterpiece of image calibration.

In the span of two dozen sentences, Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, mentioned the Bible, or rather a beginner’s version of it, which he said he was reading aloud to his 6-year-old son. He mentioned his truck and his appetite for hard rock, thus establishing automotive and musical affinities that balance his wonkier, number-crunching bona fides. He mentioned hunting—with a bow, no less.

Then came the capper. He mentioned his talent for what I’d like to call venison charcuterie, just because he so clearly wouldn’t. “I butcher my own deer, grind the meat, stuff it in casings and then smoke it,” he said, making clear that Sarah Palin in all her moose-eviscerating glory has nothing on him.

Bruni just can’t handle the phoniness of Ryan’s comments—his silly-bill musings about music and hunting. Bruni goes on to rage against the dying of the light. More specifically, he rages against the way those pols force us to listen to silly shit about their proletarian lifestyles.

“The relationship between lifestyle and political priorities is at best oblique,” the thoughtful fellow muses. “You really can’t judge how politicians will govern by whether they hunt or windsurf, frolic in the Texas brush or the Martha’s Vineyard sand, favor corn dogs or arugula.”

Bruni fails to note an obvious fact. In the case of Ryan, those were the silly-shit topics the New York Times asked him about! In the edited interview, he also notes that he watches CNBC—and that he is currently listening to “a series of provocative lectures by Professor J. Rufus Fears of the University of Oklahoma.”

Ryan didn’t seem to be kidding, but we don’t plan to google Professor Fears. “With the help of a Kindle, I’m reading John Mauldin’s ‘Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle,’” Ryan also throws in, though it doesn't make Bruni's column.

There’s no way to know how much dull shit got left on the cutting-room floor. Playing the fool, Bruni complainsabout what Ryan said "in the span of two dozen sentences." But the interview may have lasted for hours. It's edited. Let's say that again!

For ourselves, we recalled the hard-as-nails, just-the-facts approach Bruni brought to his own work as a campaign reporter. Here he was, following Candidate Bush on the New Hampshire trail:

BRUNI (9/14/99): When Gov. George W. Bush of Texas first hit the Presidential campaign trail in June, he wore monogrammed cowboy boots, the perfect accessory for his folksy affability and casual self-assurance.

But when he visited New Hampshire early last week, he was shod in a pair of conservative, shiny black loafers that seemed to reflect more than the pants cuffs above them. They suggested an impulse by Mr. Bush to put at least a bit of a damper on his brash irreverence, which has earned him affection but is a less certain invitation for respect.

That was the start of a lengthy “news report” during Campaign 2000. Two months later, on the front page, Bruni was still pursuing his defiant, hard-news approach:

BRUNI (11/27/99): As George W. Bush loped through the headquarters of the Timberland Company here, he might have been any candidate in the hunt for votes, any pol on the path toward the presidency. He tirelessly shook hands, dutifully took questions and let a multitude of promises bloom.

But there was something different about Governor Bush's approach, something jazzier and jauntier. It came out in the way he praised a 20-year-old man for his "articulate" remarks, then appended the high-minded compliment with a surprising term of endearment.

"Dude," Mr. Bush called his new acquaintance.

It emerged again when Mr. Bush crossed paths with an elderly employee, and she told him that he had her support.

"I'll seal it with a kiss!" Mr. Bush proposed and, wearing a vaguely naughty expression, swooped down on the captive seamstress.

Mr. Bush's arm curled tight around the shoulders of other voters; he arched his eyebrows and threw coquettish grins and conspiratorial glances their way. It was campaigning as facial calisthenics, and Mr. Bush was its Jack LaLanne.

He is frequently that way. When Mr. Bush is not reciting memorized lines in an official speech or rendering careful answers in a formal interview, he is physically expansive and verbally irreverent, folksy and feisty, a politician more playful than most of his peers.

Bruni may be a great food critic. But when it comes to politics and policy, he is one of the emptiest suits the Times has dredged up yet.

Then too, there’s David Brooks, self-flagellating today over the failed Obama. Brooks was so angry at his failed pal, he decided to play an old card:

BROOKS (9/20/11): It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.

You never forget your first narrative! At the Times, columnists write their own headlines. Today, this is Brooks’ boxed sub-head:

“Al Gore without the earth tones”

Through some sort of programming error, that just can’t get these themes out of their heads! For the record, Candidate Gore did not propose “tax increases for the rich.” But it feels good to pretend.

Brooks is playing the fool today. Here, he offers a rare attempt at making an actual argument:

BROOKS: [Obama] claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

“The top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes?” As almost anyone can see, that fact doesn’t refute the “half-truth” in question—and that fact is completely meaningless unless you include the percentage of income received by that top ten percent. (Even then, you have to be careful.) Of course, that next set of facts doesn’t refute Obama’s half-truth either.

For the record, a half-truth can contain a lot of truth. Brooks is semi-right about one thing today: Obama’s pledge to avoid raising taxes on the bottom 98 percent is a rather strange artifact. But in today’s New York Times editorial, the editors report that Obama’s proposed tax hikes on upper-end earners would produce $1.3 trillion over ten years.

Do Obama's tax proposals make sense? Brooks never quite finds time to say. He’s too busy flashing back on Candidate Gore's brown suit.

Today, Bruni forgets his own silly shit. Brooks flashes on his.

SAT score watch: Why are average scores down? Day 2!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

At the Post, you can take your choice between information and spin: In yesterday’s Washington Post, Michael Chandler did a follow-report about this year’s SAT scores. More specifically, he provided more information about the way the tests are being taken by a wider student population.

This wider participation might explain why average scores are slightly down this year. (For yesterday’s post on this topic, just click here.)

First, Chandler described a “technical shift,” a change to which he briefly alluded in his original front-page report. According to a College Board spokesperson, a change in reporting procedures this year may have lowered average scores:

CHANDLER (9/19/11): The College Board has traditionally calculated average SAT scores for graduating seniors through March of that year. For the Class of 2011, it began including scores from tests taken through June.

The switch added about 50,000 test-takers, or 3 percent of the total. Although not a huge number, these late entrants to the college process are more likely to be "VERY low performers," a College Board spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

For the first time, the last-minute Charlies and Charlenes were included. This may tend to lower the average.

Next, Chandler reported another possible factor in the lower average scores—“the growing popularity of the ACT, a rival college entrance exam.” How would that work? “Although the SAT is dominant in the Washington area,” Chandler writes, “more local seniors are trying both, rather than seeking to improve their SAT scores by retaking it.”

Presumably, if seniors don’t try to improve their SAT scores, this would tend to lower the average, though Chandler doesn’t check this logic with the College Board.

In a final point, Chandler noted another way the tested population is growing. Some states now require or enable all students to take the SAT:

CHANDLER: Increasingly, the SAT and the ACT are being used to encourage students to apply to college, not just to enable them. [sic]

Delaware has a new four-year contract with the College Board to administer the SAT to all high school juniors.

Texas offers all students vouchers to take the SAT or ACT for free, and Idaho is moving in the same direction. Seven states offer the ACT to all juniors: Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming.

"Obviously, not all these students go to college, but it helps to focus them on the idea of going to college," said Ed Colby, an ACT spokesman.

It isn’t clear that any of this would have affected this year’s average scores. But at least Chandler was trying!

Unheard of! In two reports on this topic, Chandler provided real information! But if it’s spin and partisan screeching you like, the Post had something for you as well! Right next to Chandler’s report, the Post published this information-averse analysis by Valerie Strauss. That was the place a reader could go to learn that it’s all Bush’s fault.

For years, we liberals slept in the woods. Now we’ve emerged, and we enjoy our silly spin too! Strauss’ “logic” is very weak—but it does let “liberals” feel good!

Strauss is sure it’s all Bush’s fault. This is about as close as she gets to making an actual argument:

STRAUSS (9/19/11): The College Board also noted that nearly 1.65 million students from the 2011 graduating class took the SAT and that it represented the most diverse class in history. Forty-four percent were minority students, 36 percent were first-generation college-goers and 27 percent do not speak English exclusively.

It further noted that “it is common for mean scores to decline slightly when the number of students taking an exam increases because more students of varied academic backgrounds are represented in the test-taking pool,” and it said that “there are more high-performing students among the class of 2011 than ever before.”

Who’s kidding whom? If there are more high-performing students, there must be more low-performing students, too, to bring down the average.

Sad. Strauss jumped on an upbeat claim by the College Board, thus ignoring the larger claim—the claim that wider student participation tends to bring average scores down. In fact, Strauss never even mentioned the fact that participation went from 47 percent in 2010 to “more than half” this past year. Why glaze the eyes with that?

Strauss then cherry-picked a datum or two and her work was done.

Why did average scores inch down this year? Like Strauss, we can’t tell you. But people like Strauss always know in advance! In truth, the world was a better place before pseudo-liberals joined pseudo-cons in pretending to reason like that.

THE ABSENCE OF THE PROFESSORS: Don’t do it, Krugman was told!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

PART 2—PLANET OF THE PROFESSORS: It’s very easy to be disinformed in this particular country.

In part, it’s easy to be disinformed because of the professors.

Has any group failed you more reliably over the past several decades? As more and more parts of our public discourse have been seized by disinformation, you could always count on the professors to stay away from the field of battle. No explanation or clarification was likely to come from their refined aeries! Just consider a few basic areas where the professors have failed to help:

Medicare cuts, mid-1990s: Was Newt Gingrich’s GOP proposing “cuts” to the Medicare program? Or were they proposing that we slow the rate at which the program would grow? For two years, this inane discussion dominated the political wars.

Al Franken explained the matter in his book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. But the nation’s “journalists” couldn’t. In their hands, the discussion ended up where every discussion did in this era—with the claim that Clinton was lying again, although rather plainly he wasn’t.

Which professors stepped forward during this era to clarify this gong-show discussion? Which health care experts? Which logicians? Keep searching for a name!

Campaign 2000: For twenty months, the national press corps worked very hard to make Candidate Gore a liar. (Just like President Clinton!) They did this by inventing a series of ludicrous paraphrases of innocuous things Gore had said. Rather, they adopted a series of paraphrases from the RNC, which was scripting the national press during that gruesome campaign.

(Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal! Except actually, no—he didn’t.)

Which professors stepped forward during this era to clarify this rolling gong-show? To explain how reasonable paraphrase works? Which “logicians” stepped up to the plate? Go ahead! Search for a name!

The future of Social Security: For three decades, a relentless disinformation campaign has surrounded the Social Security program. A string of deceptive talking-points has left the public deeply confused—disinformed—about the future prospects of this venerable program.

This problem was clear by the early 1994, when a survey showed that younger voters didn’t believe they would ever receive Social Security benefits. (Famously, they were more likely to believe in UFOs.) Which professors have ever stepped forward to clarify this decades-old gong-show? Go ahead! Name all their names!

The cost of American health care: Every American is getting ripped off by the costs of American health care. Most Americans don’t understand this fact. They certainly don’t know the reasons why we pay so much for health care.

In 2009, the nation spent a year pretending to discussing health care. Go ahead! Name the professors! (You can’t name Michael Moore.)

We could list other topics, but you get the general idea.

People! Where are all the professors? In theory, the country is crawling with learned folk who are expert in various disciplines. Why don’t they lend their expertise—if it exists—to the national discussion?

We’ve been asking this question for years. Last week, we read a profile of a well-known, very public professor. The profile seemed to shed some light on this matter.

The professor in question is Paul Krugman, who has thrown himself into the public discourse over the past dozen years. The profile appeared last year, in the New Yorker, although we don’t recall seeing it at the time.

In the profile, Larissa McFarquhar traced the route by which Krugman became involved in the public political discourse. As noted, Krugman has been deeply involved in the public debate over the past dozen years. But in her profile, McFarquhar described Krugman’s attitudes and beliefs before his somewhat belated political dawning.

It seemed to us that this profile may have answered some of our questions about the defiantly useless class from which Krugman emerged.

McFarquhar interviewed Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, for her detailed profile. (Wells is an economist.) In the following passage, Krugman describes his attitudes early in his career:

MACFARQUHAR (3/1/10: In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren’t especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focused mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn’t think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. “I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues,” he says. “I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned.” He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn’t get him thinking about politics. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he says. “I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn’t really have a sense of how deep the divide went.”

In the past twelve years, Krugman has played a major role in our public political discourse. But during the 1980s, he was “career-building,” he said. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he told McFarquhar.

Krugman has emerged from that dream. Other savants have not.

In the following passage, McFarquhar describes Krugman’s political horizon during the 1990s. In the argot of the 1960s, Krugman still hadn’t been politicized. We’ll offer a fairly large chunk:

MCFARQUHAR: When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren’t earning American wages and didn’t have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren’t the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation…suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990…have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right.

In writing his first popular book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations,” he became preoccupied by the way that inequality had vastly increased in the Reagan years…After the book was published, in 1990, various people denied that inequality had increased, and this really annoyed him. He began to get into fights. He was taken aback by the 1994 midterm elections, and during the impeachment hearings he began to think that the Republicans were getting pretty radical, but he still wasn’t angry about it. “Some of my friends tell me that I should spend more time attacking right-wingers,” he wrote in 1998. “The problem is finding things to say. Supply-siders never tire of proclaiming that taxes are the root of all evil, but reasonable people do get tired of explaining, over and over again, that they aren’t.”

Certainly until the Enron scandal, Krugman had no sense that there was any kind of problem in American corporate governance. (He consulted briefly for Enron before he went to the Times.) Occasionally, he received letters from people claiming that corporations were cooking the books, but he thought this sounded so implausible that he dismissed them. “I believed that the market was enforcing,” he says. “I believed in the S.E.C. I just never really thought about it. It seemed like a pretty sunny world in 1999, and, for all of my cynicism, I shared a lot of that. The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”

In McFarquhar’s account, Krugman was still largely distanced from partisan politics during this period.

In the late 1990s, the New York Times approached Krugman about writing a column. McFarquhar records a fascinating reaction from his professional colleagues:

MCFARQUHAR (continuing directly): When the Times approached him about writing a column, he was torn. “His friends said, ‘This is a waste of your time,’ ” Wells says. “We economists thought that we were doing substantive work and the rest of the world was dross.” Krugman cared about his academic reputation more than anything else. If he started writing for a newspaper, would his colleagues think he’d become a pseudo-economist, a former economist, a vapid policy entrepreneur like Lester Thurow? Lester Thurow had become known in certain circles as Less Than Thorough. It was hard to imagine what mean nickname could be made out of Paul Krugman, but what if someone came up with one? Could he take it?

Quoting Wells, McFarquhar records a fascinating reaction from the other professors. Frankly, ick! Why would any Serious Person want to write a mere newspaper column? Why would any serious person want to speak to the rubes?

According to Wells, the unseemliness of such conduct was impressed upon poor Krugman. Luckily, Krugman made the right decision. But that passage offers a fascinating look at the culture of the important people who have failed you so reliably, for so many years.

Darlings! It just isn’t done! Who would write a mere newspaper column? A column for the unwashed!

Finally, McFarquhar describes the process which produced the Krugman of the present day. He has become a fallen man. He gets upset about public lying—lying to average people:

MCFARQUHAR (continuing directly): It was the 2000 election campaign that finally radicalized him. He’d begun writing his column the year before, and although his mandate at the outset was economic and business matters, he began paying more attention to the world in general. During the campaign, he perceived the Bush people telling outright lies, and this shocked him. Reagan’s people had at least tried to justify their policies with economic models and rationalizations. Krugman hadn’t believed the models would work, but at least they were there.

After the election, he began to attack Bush’s policies in his column, and, as his outrage escalated, his attacks grew more venomous. Krugman felt that liberals were unwilling to confront or even to acknowledge the anger on the right with some of their own, so he was going to have to do it. “He saw that it had been very, very painful during the nineties to get American fiscal policy in order, and he saw all of that being thrown away callously and with very little thought,” Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at Berkeley, says. “And it turned out to be true that Alan Greenspan was going to meetings at the White House saying we’re going to regret this. Paul was simply six years behind those of us who had worked in the Clinton Administration, who found the collapse of reality-based Republicanism coming much earlier.”

As Hector said of Paris, "Silly man!"

For the record, the “outright lie” which played the largest role in this conversion seems to have been Candidate Bush’s repeated misstatements about the basic outlines of his own budget proposal. In the fall of 2000, Krugman devoted three columns to this topic (September 24, October 1, October 11). Needless to say, these columns were ignored by the rest of the press corps. The rest of the press corps was busy inventing several more “lies” by Gore:

Al Gore lied about the union lullaby!
Al Gore lied about the cost of his pet Labrador’s arthritis pills!
Al Gore went to those Texas fires with Unknown Person X, not with Unknown Person Y!

That’s what the “press corps” was yapping about as Krugman wrote those columns.

Back to our original question: Where have those lofty professors been? Relentlessly, this group has failed you. McFarquhar described the process by which Krugman left them behind.

Tomorrow, we’ll show you how bad things can get before a professor makes this break. It has been extremely easy to get disinformed about Social Security.

Krugman himself was a bit out to lunch before he abandoned Versailles.

Tomorrow: The autumn of 96

Tax update: Fox feels the pain of the rich!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

Fox & Friends fruitcake watch: Media Matters reports a striking exchange from this morning’s Fox & Friends. The gang was discussing the fact that upper-end earners pay a very low tax rate on their capital gains.

Warren Buffett has said that’s unfair. Brian and Gretchen were pretty sure that Buffett’s analysis is deceptive. Such judgments involve us in apples and oranges, the latter tool thoughtfully said:

KILMEADE (9/19/11): And then the biggest story, I think, is the Warren Buffett rule, which you're about to hear is somewhat deceptive. It is not that billionaires are paying less. It's just that—they're still paying their 35 percent. It's the capital gains is which their—

DOOCY: Right.

KILMEADE: —and the investment money, is which they're being taxed 15 percent on.

CARLSON: The analogy that Warren Buffet always makes is that, why should my secretary pay more taxes than I do? But that's not really a fair comparison. Because he's talking about what he pays—the tax on his capital gains. He makes most of his money on investment income. Right now that's at 15 percent. So really, it's comparing apples and oranges, not the income that you're going out and making on a daily basis when you go to work.

“It is not that billionaires are paying less,” Brian endearingly said, speaking about a situation in which billionaires are paying less.

This whole thing is apples and oranges, Gretchen mused. Later, she repeated her fruity analysis while chatting with Michelle Malkin.

Chelsea Rudman provided a service when she recorded this ludicrous chatter for Media Matters. We will disagree with Rudman on one basic point, however:

“The fact is, there is nothing ‘apples and oranges’ about comparing the two kinds of income,” Rudman writes. “They're both income, period.”

Not so fast, One World Breath! In our view, there is an obvious apples-to-oranges aspect to these two kinds of income. Even Carlson seems aware of this fact. To wit:

As even Carlson is able to note, people have to go out and work for their regular income. Police officers and firefighters risk their lives on a daily basis to receive those wages! In some cases, they may have to pay taxes at a higher rate than others pay on investment income—on income they acquire while sitting around doing nothing.

In that recent Washington Post editorial, the editors said all income should be taxed at the same rate (see item below). People can judge that opinion as they like. But as a simple matter of justice, it’s hard to see why you’d want to tax investment income at a lower rate, while you’re charging a higher rate on the labor-based income of policemen, teachers, firefighters.

There really are apples and oranges here. It’s just that Carlson, in her typical way, feels the pain of the idle rich while ignoring the labor and effort of people who are less wealthy.

Chelsea Rudman made a nice catch. But there really are different kinds of fruit in that federal tax barrel. Right now, federal law favors the rich pomegranate over those loathsome crabapples.

Taxwatch: The Washington Post gets it right!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

Rejecting tax breaks for the plutocrats: On the front page of last Monday’s Washington Post, Steven Mufson did a lengthy report about a key aspect of federal taxation.

On Nexis, the headline says this: “Tax policy feeds gap between rich, poor.”

Mufson’s report was long and strong. Early on, he said this:

MUFSON (9/12/11): For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift. As a result of a pair of rate cuts, first under President Bill Clinton and then under Bush, most of the richest Americans pay lower overall tax rates than middle-class Americans do. And this is one reason the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country is widening dramatically.

The rates on capital gains—which include profits from the sale of stocks, bonds and real estate—should be a key point in negotiations over how to shrink the budget deficit, some lawmakers say.

[…]

Most Americans depend on wages and salaries for their income, which is subject to a graduated tax so the big earners pay higher percentages. The capital gains tax turns that idea on its head, capping the rate at 15 percent for long-term investments. As a result, anyone making more than $34,500 a year in wages and salary is taxed at a higher rate than a billionaire is taxed on untold millions in capital gains.

Mufson’s report ran almost 2500 words. Before long, he was offering information which fleshed out this admittedly clunky observation: “How the wealthiest Americans managed to get Congress to treat money made from investments differently from salaries or wages involved a variety of lobbyists, economists and lawmakers.”

Mufson’s report deserved praise from progressives. But then, so did this editorial, which appeared in the August 24 Post.

In their informative piece, the editors supported Warren Buffett’s claim that the highest earners are getting indefensible tax breaks. On-line, their headline calls for “taxing the rich fairly.”

We thought the editors' piece was quite strong. Good lord! As they ended, they even took a shot at the “plutocrats:”

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (8/24/11): Preferential treatment for capital gains is a tenet of Republican economic orthodoxy that has, alas, been adopted by Democrats in recent years on specious pro-growth grounds. Even President Obama favored a temporary zero capital-gains rate for small businesses, ostensibly as a job-creation measure. In fact, taxing capital gains more lightly than income earned through other means—e.g., work—promotes wasteful tax shelters and breaks such as the $1.5 billion-a-year “carried interest” provision for investment managers.

The 1986 tax reform closed the gap between capital gains and ordinary income, taxing both at a top rate of 28 percent. But subsequent legislation under both Republican and Democratic administrations, culminating in the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, reopened it. This is one reason that the effective tax rate on the top 400 earners in the United States fell from 29.2 percent in 1992 to 21.5 percent in 2008, even as their income more than quintupled.

For Mr. Buffett, the solution is higher rates on both ordinary and investment income for all those earning $1 million a year, with an extra boost in rates for those making $10 million and up. That seems reasonable; but he isn’t precisely clear about how to do it. Unless you equalize the ordinary income and capital-gains rates, there would still be myriad ways for the rich to avoid taxes.

Congress should follow the precedent set by the 1986 reform: Tax all income at the same top rate. Wiping out other special breaks would yield even greater gains in revenue and equity. Indeed, expanding the tax base could yield more revenue at a relatively modest top rate. It might not have to be much more than the 29.2 percent top earners paid back in 1992. A fair, efficient system that raises more revenue than the current one is something all Americans—from plutocrats to the poverty-stricken—could support.

The editorial made a lot of strong points. Mufson’s front-page news report was highly informative.

We liberals have made little attempt, in the past thirty years, to inform the public about matters like these. In recent weeks, the Post has been doing some very good work.

Granted, this is all happening thirty years late. But shouldn’t we stand up and praise the Post's efforts? Beyond that, shouldn’t we brainstorm about the best ways to transfer all this news to “the folks?”

Sometimes, it seems like we liberals don't enjoy speaking to all those crude, unwashed people!