How liberals get played by people like Walsh!

MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2014

Refuses to tell you the truth: This is a very good day to learn an important point.

It’s a good day to see how the liberal world gets played by the likes of Joan Walsh.

Walsh is now paid by MSNBC, a branch of NBC News. Her patron there is Chris Matthews.

Walsh refused to describe his repellent behavior all through the Clinton/Gore years, and then in the years which followed. Today, she is refusing to tell you what her colleague and corporate-mate David Gregory did on yesterday’s Meet the Press.

People, it just isn’t done.

As we noted in this earlier post, Gregory went a million miles out of his way yesterday to ask Rand Paul to comment on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. (Hard to believe, but true.)

Reading Walsh, you’d have no idea that Gregory did that. This is the start of her account of what happened:

WALSH (1/27/14): Paul’s performance was most interesting for the window it gave us into his character, as the indulged but slightly dim scion of an eccentric political family whose every utterance, all his life, has been treated as important. At some points in interviews with the freshman senator, including this one, you can see the wheels turning in his head, maybe a little slowly, as he winds up to deliver what he thinks is a political hum-dinger. It’s the oily crazy of Rand Paul being adorably Rand Paul: saying what he thinks is brave and leader-like, but that thing turns out to be simply nutty.

Then the media collectively scrunches its forehead and tries to decide if he’s brave or nutty.

So it was with “Meet the Press” Sunday. Paul obviously set out to say cleverly what Mike Huckabee said stupidly: Republicans aren’t going to take the Democrats’ “war on women” rhetoric lying down, especially if they’re facing a Democratic woman running for president in 2016. You can almost see behind his eyes as he thinks to himself: “I’ve got it: I’ll throw a haymaker at Hillary Clinton for something stupid her husband did almost 20 years ago!”

From that account, would anyone guess that Paul was almost finished with the interview when Gregory introduced the question of Miss Lewinsky? Reading Walsh, you’re never told how this ridiculous topic came up.

Joan is paid by NBC News. That means David cannot be said to have done this.

A few paragraphs later, Walsh continues making the argument against Paul, the argument she ought to be making against Gregory. Note the way she directly claims that it was Paul who raised this ridiculous topic:

WALSH: It’s not defending President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky to marvel at Paul’s raising it all again. Forget the fact that the issue was litigated 15 years ago, and every time Republicans went at Clinton, his public approval numbers went higher. Also forget that Paul’s claim that “the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this” is demonstrably false and idiotic. The man was impeached, and an awful lot of mainstream journalists shamed themselves by being stenographers for Kenneth Starr.

Exactly! The issue was litigated long ago, with Clinton getting impeached and George Bush reaching the White House in the strength of the backwash, a backwash Walsh refused to oppose. That’s why it was so pathetic when Gregory raised the topic all over again.

But Joan is being paid by NBC now. She will never, ever tell you how yesterday’s nonsense occurred. She knows that if she yells about Paul we'll go home barefoot and happy.

The backlash which sent Bush to the White House was led by Matthews, whose conduct from March 1999 forward was just this side of criminal. Joan refused to oppose him in real time, then spent several years kissing his ring and his keister.

In today’s piece, she reprises the role which made her famous. She refuses to tell you that it was actually Gregory who “raised President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky again.”

As in 1999 and 2000, so again today—the horrible Walsh won’t discuss the conduct of the powerful players within her own guild. Simple story:

Mammon is riding high in the saddle. The Walshes won’t tell you the truth.

Things go better with Candy: At one point, Walsh makes a glancing reference to Paul’s appearance with Candy Crowley on yesterday’s State of the Union. This is what she fails to mention:

Miss Lewinksy wasn’t mentioned on yesterday’s State of the Union. David Gregory wasn’t there to bring the topic up.

When Gregory welcomed Chertoff back!

MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2014

The things which don’t get discussed: Yesterday morning, on Meet the Press, David Gregory went a million miles out of his way to reprise Miss Lewinsky, the intern who wasn’t an intern and who has been getting younger.

We were also struck by the way he introduced Michael Chertoff.

In the segment in question, Gregory was discussing Edward Snowden’s situation in Moscow. First, he spoke with one of Snowden’s legal advisers.

After that, he brought Chertoff on, in very casual fashion:

GREGORY (1/26/14): All right, Jesselyn Radack in Moscow for us today. Thank you very much for being here. I appreciate your time.

Michael Chertoff, who’s here as well, former head of Homeland Security and also head of the criminal division under President Bush, which is particularly relevant here. So it's good to see you. Welcome back.

CHERTOFF: Good to be back.

GREGORY: So how would you handle this question? You heard the attorney general. What do you do to get Edward Snowden back?

“It's good to see you,” Gregory said. “Welcome back.”

“Good to be back,” said Chertoff.

Should Gregory have said something more? Not necessarily, no. But we were struck by that casual exchange, which gave the impression that the fellows were just two ships passing in the night.

That isn’t or wasn’t the case. Way back when, we were struck by this passage in a profile of Gregory by Howard Kurtz, then of the Washington Post:

KURTZ (3/14/06): In his personal life, Gregory also rubs shoulders with newsmakers. At a baby shower for his wife before their son Max, now 3, was born, Michael Chertoff, then an assistant attorney general, disappeared into another room with a Justice Department colleague while Gregory tried to figure out what was going on. It turned out they were finalizing a plea agreement with John Walker Lindh, the American captured while fighting for the Taliban. Wilkinson last month became general counsel of Fannie Mae, and the couple now have 8-month-old twins as well.

Say what? Why was Chertoff, a heavy hitter and a one-time major partisan, at Gregory’s baby shower?

Kurtz didn’t explain, so we continued clicking. For a fairly full account of the background, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/26/07.

The nugget: Chertoff had very close professional ties to Gregory’s wife, who was a very heavy hitter and a very large earner of money. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course—unless there somehow is.

On TV, everyone plays it straight. Out in TV land, we the rubes are never told about the wealth of our TV stars—about their massive wealth, or about the major players who may drift in and out of the room at their baby showers.

That intro struck us as very casual. Who knows? The fellows may have come to the set straight from a baby shower!

THE STATE OF THE UNION IS: Dumb!

MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2014

Part 1—David Gregory and the even younger intern: “The state of the union is dumb.”

We’d love to see Obama say it, right at the start of tomorrow night’s address.

In our mind’s eye, members would shift about in their seats. Starting in the gallery, the applause would start to spread.

Helpful suggestion! As a performance hook, the president might want to borrow from Foxworthy, repeatedly saying this:

“The state of the union may be dumb if...”

He could then produce his examples. His point would of course be the same.

Good God, but the state of the union is dumb, especially at the top of the millionaire press corps food chain! Just consider what actually happened on yesterday’s Meet the Press.

It was January 26, 2014. (Concerning the year, we felt forced to double-check.)

Despite the year at the end of that date, Gregory built a chunk of his opening segment around Hillary Clinton’s chance to get elected president—in November 2016!

You’re right—Clinton hasn’t even announced that she’s running for president. If she does, the election in question is 34 months away.

But Gregory had Carolyn Ryan sitting there as part of his all-star panel. Ryan is the new Washington bureau chief of the New York Times.

In yesterday’s editions, the Times was wasting everyone’s time with an inane magazine cover story about the problems facing Clinton in the White House run she hasn’t yet announced. After an extremely brief mini-discussion of Obama’s impending address, Gregory tossed his first question to Ryan.

The state of the union may be dumb if— If this is the mentality at a large nation’s “paper of record:”

GREGORY (1/26/14): Pure politics here: This is also a chance for [Obama] to say, "This is what Democrats are for—you know, income inequality, raising the minimum wage—and we're much different than the Republicans." He's going to be thinking about helping Democrats.

RYAN: Absolutely. He's thinking about the Senate midterms. You know, the outcome of those races is far more important than the speech. But just to take a little bit of issue with the idea that— The question is, does Obama still really command the stage? And you have at least some people in the political world, including in his own party, who seem to be moving beyond the Obama era.

You have this kind of remarkable stampede of people who are signing up to be part of the 2016 Hillary Clinton election campaign, and the president has three years left. So the question is, is he still relevant? Can he command the stage? Can he move the country?

The state of the union may be dumb if— If that person sits at the head of the New York Times’ Washington bureau.

In that deft reconstruction, Ryan abandoned any talk of what Obama might say tomorrow night concerning matters of substance. She even moved us past the elections which happen later this year.

According to Ryan, the midterm elections are more important than the president’s address. And the 2016 election seems to be more important than the midterms are!

Ryan moved where We Irish have longed to be over the past twenty-two years. She asked us to forget matters of substance and think about Hillary Clinton.

People like Ryan actually have “moved beyond the Obama era.” They simply haven’t been able to move beyond the Clinton years!

As we’ve noted for many years now, they’ve moved beyond the tedious place where people talk about matters of substance. Instead, they talk about what might happen to Clinton at some future date.

Please discuss the Clintons, Ryan said, to the tune of Please Come to Boston. And good God! Instantly, her host introduced Rand Paul—and Gregory was soon saying this:

GREGORY: Final political question for you. Whoever the Republican nominee is, there's a good chance, as we look at it now, that one candidate on the Democratic side who'll have a lot of momentum, whether she gets the nomination or not we don't know, is Hillary Clinton. And an interesting profile in Vogue magazine, including this analysis:

"While her husband jokes," meaning you, "that his gut feeling is that Hillary Clinton will not run for president is good a thing since all the polls show her trouncing any opponent, Kelley, the wife of Senator Rand Paul practically cuts him off to say that, 'Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky should complicate his return to the White House, even as first spouse. I would say his behavior was predatory, offensive to women,' she tells me." Are these issues something that you really think will be fair game and an appropriate part of a campaign, should she be the nominee?

Ryan had begged for some good Clinton talk. In response, Gregory dragged Miss Lewinsky out, citing a comment made by Paul’s wife in “an interesting profile in Vogue.”

The state of the union is very dumb when people like Gregory do this.

How desperate was Gregory for Miss Lewinsky? This desperate:

That “interesting profile in Vogue” is more than four months old. It appeared in mid-September 2013. You can bore yourself with it here.

In hard-copy form, its pages are yellowing. That said, how interesting did people think that profile was in real time?

Not very interesting! In particular, that comment by Paul’s wife created no interest at all. According to Nexis, the thrilling comment about Miss Lewinsky was barely mentioned last fall.

Here’s the rundown:

The explosive comment by Mrs. Paul rated 26 words in Politico. (“Speaking about Hillary Clinton's possible run for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Paul's wife, Kelley, was critical of former President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”)

Beyond that, it generated a 288-word report in the Huffington Post—and nothing at all beyond that. (To read that piece, click here.)

According to Nexis, no one else mentioned Mrs. Paul’s comment. Speaking on his cable “news” program, Lawrence managed to extract the real news from the intriguing profile:

O’DONNELL (9/18/13): The junior senator from Kentucky is suddenly a fashion star. There he is in a new Vogue magazine spread. Vogue informs us that his pants are from Brooks Brothers and his shirt, the shirt he is wearing right there, is of course, Polo, Ralph Lauren.

The accompanying article is entitled, “Could Republican Senator Rand Paul Win the White House?” My answer to that question is absolutely not and I will explain why next in the rewrite.

Lawrence went on to praise Paul for comments he’d made that day about “the way the war on drugs visits disproportional suffering on black men.” (Lawrence: “Senator Rand Paul showed just astonishing political courage today and we will show you what he said.”)

Elsewhere, “journalists” noted that Vogue was accusing Senator Paul of wearing “Dad jeans.” But no one gave a flying fig about that spousal remark.

As you’ve noticed, this silly piddle is now more than four months old. In real time, no one thought the profile was interesting. Virtually no attention was paid to the comment about that woman.

Yesterday, Gregory went a million miles out of his way to refluff the thrilling topic. He spoke as if the profile was current, as if the comment mattered.

Repeat—Rand Paul didn’t raise this topic on yesterday’s Meet the Press. That said, he created a new chapter in the history of “the 21-year-old intern” who wasn’t 21 at the time and also wasn’t an intern.

In response to Gregory's pitiful question, this is what he said:

PAUL (continuing directly): Well, you know, I mean, the Democrats, one of their big issues is they have concocted and said Republicans are committing a war on women. One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn't prey on young interns in their office.

And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and that is predatory behavior, and it should be something we shouldn't want to associate with people who would take advantage of a young girl in his office.

Almost twenty years later, the intern who wasn’t 21 was bumped back to 20 years old! She has even become “a young girl!”

In fact, Miss Lewinsky was 22-and-a-half when she first met The Big He. Our “journalists” reduced her age to make the story sound better.

(On TV, Jay Leno cited her actual age. Big stars like Mark Shields did not.)

Yesterday, Gregory revived the excitement. The state of the union is massively dumb when people like this are paid millions of dollars to peddle this pluperfect piddle almost twenty years after the fact.

The state of the union is very dumb. The assist goes to Carolyn Ryan.

Tomorrow: The state of the union is atomized

The Times’ reporting has been Wildsteinesque!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2014

So too with Maddow’s performance: Kevin Drum says there’s no chance that David Wildstein was conducting a “legitimate” traffic study when he closed two traffic lanes leading out of Fort Lee. Click here for the analysts' favorite.

We don’t completely agree with Drum’s post, for reasons we’ll offer below. It wouldn’t be our first bet that Wildstein was acting in good faith. But on a journalistic basis, we would say that possibility hasn’t yet been disproved.

That, of course, doesn’t speak to the question of the New York Times’ reporting of the Fort Lee affair. We’d say that reporting has been Wildsteinesque from Day One right up to the present.

But first:

Consider something Rachel Maddow said last night. We’d have to say the highlighted statement is rather Wildsteinesque too:

MADDOW (1/24/14): David Wildstein, who arranged the shutdown of those lanes and gridlocked Fort Lee, New Jersey back in September, apparently on orders from Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff, he was a guy who was already and understandably getting lots and lots of lawyering, right? We can see that from his appearance thus far before the assembly committee investigating the matter. He’s already getting lots of lawyering. And lawyering is never cheap.

But as of today, the Port Authority, his employer when he did all this stuff, says, “We are not helping with any of that. You are paying for all of that yourself.” And the Port Authority also indicated today that that may also be the fate of Bill Baroni, the other Chris Christie ally at the Port Authority, the deputy executive director of the agency who was appointed directly by Chris Christie, and who we now know lied to the state legislature about the fake traffic study cover story for what they did to Fort Lee.

Watching last night, we had no idea what that highlighted statement meant.

Granted, it was a compound statement. As we watched, we didn’t understand what Maddow meant by any of its basic parts.

Is the first part of that statement true? Do we “now know” that Baroni “lied to the legislature” when he testified in November?

Watching last night, we had no idea what Maddow meant.

Baroni testified on November 25. We’re sorry to say that we’ve read the full transcript, in which Baroni recites endless statistics about traffic flow on I-95 and legislators emit a seemingly endless array of snarky rejoinders.

For the full transcript, click here.

Having read the testimony, we had no idea was Maddow meant last night. For starters, what did Baroni lie about? We had to refresh our recollection, reviewing the presentation Maddow made last Friday.

On that evening, Maddow offered viewers the large pile of piddle which started as shown below. We discussed this obvious crap in real time.

We’d call this Wildsteinesque:

MADDOW (1/17/14): November—so after the shutdown, after the election, right? This is when the press was pushing really hard to figure out what had happened with the [traffic lanes] shutdown. The legislature was starting to sniff around, to try to figure out what happened with the shutdown.

But at this time in late November, Governor Chris Christie was still mocking this story, telling everybody it was nothing. In late November, Bill Baroni testified to the legislature about what happened on that bridge. And he appears to have not told the truth in that testimony, really, at all, really egregiously.

For example—

BARONI (videotape): At all times during the week of the study, the Port Authority Police Department monitored traffic on the George Washington Bridge. They were alert for any emergency vehicles in the area and prepared to further alter traffic patterns—excuse me—in the event of an emergency.

MADDOW: That is not true. Emergency vehicles had a ton of trouble, actually, because of the bridge lane shutdown.

Maddow raged against the dying of day that night. Eventually, she described that statement by Baroni as “a lie.”

Her analysis didn’t make any sense, and it still doesn’t today. In the clip Maddow played, Baroni didn’t claim that emergency vehicles didn’t experience any delays during the lane closings.

That simply isn’t what he said, as you can see in what we’ve posted. Beyond that, no legislators showed any sign of thinking Baroni had said that.

The assembly members complained throughout Baroni’s testimony. For obvious reasons, no one complained about that.

As of November 25, everyone knew that emergency vehicles had experienced some delays during the lane closings. (The most widely discussed such event was a delay of three minutes.)

If you can read the English language, you can see that Baroni didn’t deny that fact in that statement—and that was Maddow’s only example of the way he had “egregiously” “lied.”

Maddow’s presentation last Friday was Wildsteinesque. Here’s what we mean by that:

Wildstein conducted a “traffic study” which, if it was done in good faith, was clownish in its planning and execution. As Drum notes, he failed to employ the standard good practices of the traffic planning profession.

(Not being a traffic planner, he may not have known that.)

That said, Wildsteinism is widely observed in our modern culture. It prevails at the New York Times, as has been true for decades. It runs through much of Maddow’s work, especially when she surrenders herself to the thrill of scandal reporting.

Did Baroni lie at that hearing? It’s certainly possible that he did, but he certainly didn’t lie in Maddow’s pathetic example. Meanwhile, what did Maddow mean last night when she referred to “the fake traffic study cover story?”

We’re not sure what that meant either. It could mean several different things, none of which have been proven.

Did Baroni lie at that hearing? It’s possible, but Maddow was being Wildsteinesque when she made that assertion.

That said, Wildsteinism is everywhere in modern press culture. Wildsteinism is hardly restricted to the works of political henchmen.

If Wildstein was acting in good faith, he ran a ridiculous study. According to testimony, he ignored various warnings about the mess which would inevitably result. As Drum notes, he blew right past professional norms for the conduct of such studies.

That’s pretty much what Maddow did when she made last night’s thrilling assertion.

Wildsteinism is everywhere in the modern world! The New York Times has engaged in the practice since the day it began its Fort Lee reporting. If you want to see Wildsteinism in action, we suggest that you reread the Times reporting on this matter, starting with Kate Zernike’s initial report on December 10.

From that day forward, the Times has blown past normal professional standards, ignoring the safeguards which are lodged in conventional journalistic practice.

Forget the problem Zernike had counting the number of lanes Wildstein closed (two). The Times has misreported basic facts, sometimes in egregious ways.

The Times has invented other facts. (The motive has been revealed!) And it has omitted large blocks of facts about what happened that week.

In these very familiar ways, the Times has created a simplified story about the traffic lane closings. If it’s Wildsteinism you seek, you should just read the New York Times—or watch Maddow’s program.

In closing, let’s discuss the current theories about the reason those lanes were shut down. None of these theories seem to make sense in the world as we know it.

If Wildstein wanted to punish the mayor, or the state senator, why would he do so in a way which would be right out in the open? According to testimony, he was warned that the lane closings would be a highly visible public event—that everyone was going to notice, that “it wouldn't turn out well.”

In the modern political world, that isn’t the way retribution is done. Retribution is normally done in secret, in a way which won’t bring public opprobrium down on the aggressor’s head.

That leaves the billion dollar development as the third possible motive. In that case, it might make a type of sense to stage a public fiasco.

According to that theory, such as it is, Wildstein wanted to undermine the progress of the development. He wanted to queer the deal in some way, perhaps to get a piece of the action.

Perhaps to make the deal collapse, so The Rockefeller Group could step in?

We have no idea if something like that was the motive. But if it was, you might want your conduct to be highly public.

You’d want the developers, and their financiers, to see the developing threat to the project. You might be willing to take the risk involved in the kind of craziness The Wildstein Group unloosed.

Is that what happened in Fort Lee? We have no idea. Even that makes little sense, given the the giant risk involved in the chaos Wildstein created. But good grief! Even when Patrick Foye ordered the lane closings stopped, The Wildstein Group raged against his conduct in their emails.

They wanted to continue the closings! How long did these lunatics think this ridiculous thing could go on?

None of these scenarios seem to make much sense. For that reason, we crack the door for another possibility—the possibility that Wildstein is simply crazy, or deeply stupid, or maybe just on drugs.

Some people are actually mentally ill. We wouldn’t rule that out.

There’s a lot of The Crazy about in the world, and a lot of the semi-crazy. If you doubt that, just watch Maddow conduct her scandal reporting.

Last night, she continued to dream about the ruin and the destruction of the people she opposes. When you see someone employing this language, we suggest you approach them with care:

MADDOW (1/24/14): As David Wildstein gets cut loose, as he gets his lifeline hacked off the mother ship and he drifts into space, to not just be blamed for what happened here but to be potentially bankrupted by this disaster that he had this role in, and as Bill Baroni twists at the end of his line, not knowing whether he’s going to get cut off too but it looks like he might, he`s already been blamed, is he also going to be bankrupted and ruined too?

As those guys see their lives destroyed, as those guys not only get blamed for this scandal but potentially destroyed by it, Chris Christie’s other top guy at the agency, his top appointee at the agency, he`s apparently still fine. Still has his job. He’s still running the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and its budget that’s bigger than nine U.S. states and its 7,000 employees who get paid apparently an average of well into the six figures.

Wow! At times like this, Maddow reliably drifts toward images of ruin and destruction. When she pictures Baroni “twisting at the end of his line,” does she know she’s talking like Nixon’s henchmen, not like the people who brought them down?

Is that a reference to Gravity? Is that what she’s longing to see? What makes a person with millions of dollars and barrels of fame speak in public like that?

None of the proffered scenarios seem to make sense at this point. In part for that reason, Wildsteinesque figures in the press corps have invented simpler stories. They pretend that they have discovered lies when they actually haven’t. They pretend, in front-page reports, that the motive has been “revealed.”

They baldly misstate elementary facts. They omit large sets of facts about what happened that week.

Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, Tom Joad said he would be there. Whenever you turn on cable or thumb the Times, there’s a good chance Wildstein is there.

It’s another form of brotherly love!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2014

The cheating spreads to Philly: Stop reading if you’ve heard this one before. But today's report in the New York Times took us back quite a few years.

The report by Motoko Rich concerns the latest cheating on standardized tests. This time, it happened in Philly.

Here’s how the report started:

RICH (1/24/14): The first sign that something was wrong appeared more than two years ago when a company grading student tests from Philadelphia noticed that erasures from wrong to right answers showed what investigators delicately called “statistical evidence of improbable results.”

Pennsylvania began an investigation, eventually instructing the school district to look into improprieties at 19 schools. Over the course of a year, the district found disturbing patterns in parts of the system that resulted in three principals being fired last week for test cheating in one of the largest such scandals in the country.

Those damn erasure patterns again! Our thoughts went drifting way back.

At some time around 1980, we began a telephone correspondence with the top person at one of the leading standardized test companies of the day. Back then, school systems tended to administer one of the national, “norm-referenced” standardized test batteries—The Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, the California Achievement Tests and the like.

We don’t recall the process by which we started having hour-long phone conversations with the top person at one of these entities. Most likely, it was related to this column we wrote in the Baltimore Sun, in which we noted impossible scoring patterns at certain local schools.

Whatever! We don’t know why the person in question spoke to us on the phone so much for the next year or so. But among the things we learned from this person, this was the first time we learned about those doggone erasure patterns.

We also learned this—even then, the big test companies offered a service designed to combat this form of cheating. If a school system paid a fee, they would scan the system’s answer sheets for improbable erasure patterns

We were surprised to hear that cheating of that type occurred at all, let alone that it was so common that the companies offered that service.

That would have been the early 1980s. Here’s our point—it took the press corps and the “educational experts” about thirty years to catch up with this situation. It was only in the last few years that this sort of thing burst out into view.

We are a very low-IQ culture. Our press corps and our expert cadres are like something out of a primitive land.

And now for the rest of the story: Our telephone correspondence ended in a remarkable way. The last thing we were told by our friend was the most striking by far.

We can’t vouch for the accuracy of what we were told. In fact, our correspondent was only reporting a strong suspicion. But based on an observable nationwide trend, it had the ring of truth.

The cheating thing has been big for some time, perhaps in ways you’ve never heard described. The “educational expert” community is always the last to speak.

These professors today just keep letting us down!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2014

Is Richard Sherman a thug: Is Richard Sherman a thug?

We’re the wrong people to ask. As far as we know, we’ve never called anyone a thug. And if we were going to start, we certainly wouldn’t start with Sherman, a former Pacific-10 great.

We support all former Pacific-10 greats around here, especially those from Stanford. Not to brag, but we took an official recruiting trip to The Farm at one time ourselves.

This is the game we officially saw. We even sat in the card section holding up cards. If Richard Sherman is a thug, that basically makes us one too.

We have Sherman’s back around here, except perhaps in an overreaction contest. That said, our hearts were broken by another professor last night.

For us, it’s a process which started in the fall of 1965, one year after that Southern Cal game. We refer to those disappointing lectures in our Phil 3 class, “Problems in Philosophy.”

“Who are these problems problems for,” we found ourselves incomparably wondering. To this day, no one has ever been able to tell us!

Last night, it was Professor Cobb who let us down—again! He joined Chris Hayes for some talking points. We felt this just had to be wrong:

HAYES (1/23/14): Joining me now is Jelani Cobb, associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. This is something—that word has just driven me crazy when directed at black men for a long time and I`m really coming out saying what is true.

COBB: It’s interesting because you didn’t hear people call Richie Incognito a thug. If a behavior that was much closer to that—

HAYES: Richie Incognito was an offensive lineman for the Miami Dolphins, a big guy, accused of bullying another teammate.

COBB: So that behavior is much closer to the dictionary definition of a thug than you would get a bit of rant trash talking after a game, a really intensely fought game.

As you may have noticed, the suits have told Chris to discuss his feelings more—or perhaps to make a few up.

That process has been clear for some time. Last night, though, it was the professor who gave us that old sinking feeling.

“You didn’t hear people call Incognito a thug?” Mostly, we’d say they called him a bully and a racist. But we felt fairly sure that the professor’s statement had to be wrong.

We anguished in the garden a while, experiencing flashbacks and extreme cold. Back in 1965, you see, our teaching assistant wouldn’t accept our answer to one of the “problems” we were studying.

This is what the “problem” was:

“How do you know that 7 plus 5 equals 12?”

No, really. That was the problem!

How did we know that 7 plus 5 equaled 12? We fashioned a straight-talking answer: Miss Cummings told us, in second grade! It happened at the now-defunct Mystic School, just a few miles away!

Our pal, little Charlotte Dennett, was present when Miss Cummings did that! Her brother is Daniel Dennett!

Sorry. This is what our teaching assistant rather archly replied:

“No, no, students. You don’t understand my question. How do you know that 7 plus 5 equals 12?”

Same answer, we thoughtfully grumbled. This time, though, we knew we had to keep our thoughts to ourselves.

Let's summarize. Some people want to make the world a bit more complex than it actually is. Others, like Professor Cobb, may try to make it simpler.

Last night, after our Gethsemane, we fired up the Nexis. And the professor was wrong, just so wrong! Two major stars had called Richie a thug just in the Washington Post!

Sally Jenkins, 11/5/13: The thug named Richie Incognito needs to be out of the NFL for a long time, maybe even permanently.

Thomas Boswell, 11/7/13: The NFL is the league of thug bullies such as suspended Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito...

Boswell even dropped a “thug bully!” Do not call our Pac-10 folk that.

For us, this started a long time ago. You want to believe these professors today, but they just keep letting you down.

THE NEW SAM-AND-COKIES: What in the world is a traffic study?

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2014

Part 4—The Times on the head of a pin: Is it even possible?

Is it possible that David Wildstein was trying to conduct a traffic study when he closed two access lanes from the town of Fort Lee?

That wouldn’t be our first guess. That said, guesswork is massively overrated—and everything is possible! In this case, that possibility hasn’t yet been disproven.

That wouldn’t be our first guess! But whatever Wildstein was trying to do, he went to a lot of trouble to do it—and he burned the time and energy of quite a few state employees in the process.

You’d never know it from reading the New York Times, whose front-page “news reports” have reeked of novelization. But Wildstein did the following things on and before the week of September 9, when the lanes were shut down:

*According to the Bergen Record, he caused traffic engineers to predict what would happen in Fort Lee if the lanes were closed.

*According to sworn testimony by two bridge officials, he caused the Port Authority’s staff to gather traffic data all during that fateful week.

*Those traffic data were analyzed. According to the testimony of those officials, a slight improvement had occurred in northbound traffic flow on I-95.

*As can be seen in the emails which have been released, Wildstein discussed this change in northbound traffic flow with his Christie teammates in real time that week.

Does that mean that Wildstein was trying to conduct a real traffic study? Not necessarily, no! He may have been defrauding the state, robbing it of those employees’ time as he staged an elaborate hoax.

But none of the conduct we have listed has even been reported in the lengthy, front-page reports presented by the New York Times, which seems to have taken a series of shortcuts to a novelized story it likes.

At this point, we might include an interesting bit of testimony from the legislative hearings held on December 9.

For the full transcript of the hearing, click here.

Bridge director Cedrick Fulton testified first. At one point, he introduced am unwelcome fact which complicates the tale:

WISNIEWSKI (12/9/13): Was this the first discussion that you had had with Mr. Wildstein about the three lanes?

FULTON: No.

WISNIEWSKI: Was there a prior discussion?

FULTON: He had made references to it in the past, just in passing, just to comment, “What about the three lanes? How long have the three lanes been in effect?” To which I would answer, “As long as I’ve been cognizant of Fort Lee and its relationship to the George Washington Bridge, those three lanes have been there.”

[…]

WISNIEWSKI: You had said in passing he had mentioned it previously.

FULTON: Correct.

WISNIEWSKI: Can you tell me when that was? Can you specify a date or specify a month?

FULTON: I really can’t because I didn’t focus on it, because it was just a comment, an observation that he had made to me. It may have been late 2010, 2011—just a comment and observation.

Say what? Wildstein had inquired about the three access lanes several years before?

Sometimes, such unwelcome facts complicate preferred tales. But wouldn’t you know it? In his own sworn testimony, bridge general manager Robert Durando said the same darn thing:

DURANDO (12/9/13): Mr. Fulton had made reference to a remark that Wildstein had made to him back in 2010 or 2011 with regard to traffic lanes being dedicated to Fort Lee. I, too, am unclear on the exact time frame, but it was probably a couple of years ago when Mr. Wildstein was at the bridge. And he asked about why those three lanes were dedicated to Fort Lee. And we actually walked out to the upper-level plaza and he remarked to me that, “There are a lot of New York plates coming through those lanes, Bob.”

WISNIEWSKI: A lot of New York plates coming through the so-called Fort Lee lanes?

DURANDO: The dedicated Fort Lee lanes, right.

WISNIEWSKI: So that was the first conversation you ever had with Mr. Wildstein about this issue?

DURANDO: Yes.

Manifestly, this doesn’t mean that Wildstein was acting in good faith on August 21, 2013, when he told Fulton that the lane closings may lie ahead. That said, these facts complicate a preferred, simple tale, and so they’ve never been mentioned at all.

That said, the fact that Wildstein alerted Fulton on that date has also gone unreported. In the Times, the fact that planners were directed to create those predictions has also gone unmentioned.

The collection of traffic data that week has not been mentioned by the Times, even as it fills its front pages with silly, tabloidized “news reports” stretching to 2800 words—“news reports” which are larded with various inaccurate statements.

What kinds of inaccurate statements? Below, you see what Kate Zernike reported about Fulton and Durando on December 14.

In this report, she failed to name or number the officials in question, of whom there were two; she described them as “Port Authority workers.” From context, it’s clear that she is referring to Fulton and Durando in this passage and to no one else:

ZERNIKE (12/14/13): Mr. Wildstein, the workers said, told them not to tell anyone about the closings, and had not followed procedure for such significant changes to traffic patterns—75,000 cars use those lanes each day. The Port Authority workers said they had gone along with the plan despite warning it would “not end well”; they said they had feared for their jobs, because Mr. Wildstein worked for Mr. Baroni, and Mr. Baroni worked for the governor.

Given five days to get her facts straight, that’s what Zernike reported.

Did the “workers” say they feared for their jobs, for the reason stated? Below, you can see what Durando actually said in response to a direct question:

ASSEMBLYMAN WISNIEWSKI (12/9/13): He currently still works for the Port Authority. Does Mr. Wildstein have the ability to terminate your employment?

DURANDO: I suspect he does.

WISNIEWSKI: So would it be fair to say that you did have a concern about your continued employment if you went outside of his direction?

DURANDO: I honestly don’t know how to answer you.

WISNIEWSKI: Well, either you did or you didn’t.

DURANDO: Well, I was not fearful that I was going to get fired.

Oops. Also this, a bit later:

ASSEMBLYWOMAN STENDER (12/9/13): When I questioned you before, you said [in response to leading questions] that Mr. Wildstein reports to Mr. Baroni and Bill Baroni reports to the governor.

Clearly, David Wildstein, in my opinion, based on what we’ve heard today, acted with impunity with this whole study and they— Not wanting to tempt the fate— Did you believe that when it [the order to close the lanes] was coming from Wildstein that, in fact, this was coming down through the chain of command from the governor?

DURANDO: I have given that no thought whatsoever.

STENDER: Thank you.

Without question, Wildstein did behave with impunity; his motive and conduct may have been much worse. But we’re talking about our journalists here, and people need to watch their wallets when “journalists” like Zernike start typing these familiar embellished tales.

(During the hearing, Fulton was also encouraged to say that he had feared getting fired. Whatever the actual truth may be, he too declined to make the preferred statement. In her subsequent news reports, Zernike simply made the statement for him, creating a more pleasing tale. By failing to name or even number the “workers” who said they feared for their jobs, Zernike reduced the likelihood that anyone would correct her.)

Starting on December 10, the news reporting by the Times has been a familiar mess. It took Zernike almost a month just to get clear on the number of lanes which were closed in Fort Lee that week (two). Along the way, she made an array of outright misstatements, while introducing inane tabloid elements to her reports and omitting basic facts.

On January 13, N.R. Kleinfield’s 2800-word front-page overview was, if anything, worse. Whatever this clownish pair was doing, it wasn’t news reporting.

Please note: Some of the facts these clowns disappeared may make this story even worse for Wildstein. If Wildstein wasn’t conducting a good faith study, it only makes his conduct worse to see him wasting the time of traffic engineers in the ten days before the lane closures and during the entire week of September 9.

If Wildstein was conducting a scam, he wasted the time of a lot of state employees as he carried it out. Was the traffic study a scam? Quite possibly, it was. But manifestly, it wasn’t a story he dreamed up after the fact—unless you’re reading the New York Times, which often gave that impression as it omitted key facts.

As noted, Wildstein ordered traffic projections, collected traffic data, subjected the data to analysis. This is a basic part of what he did, but these actions have not been reported in any of the New York Times’ lengthy front-page reports.

What has this conduct disappeared? We’ll take a guess: reporters were crafting a simpler, more pleasing, more elegant story. Below, you see the hapless way Zernike began her 1600-word front-page report on January 9, when the Fort Lee fiasco reached a new level of coverage:

ZERNIKE (1/9/14): The mystery of who closed two lanes onto the George Washington Bridge—turning the borough of Fort Lee, N.J., into a parking lot for four days in September—exploded into a full-bore political scandal for Gov. Chris Christie on Wednesday. Emails and texts revealed that a top aide had ordered the closings to punish the town's mayor after he did not endorse the governor for re-election.

''Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,'' Bridget Anne Kelly, a deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, emailed David Wildstein, a high school friend of the governor who worked at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the bridge.

Later text messages mocked concerns that school buses filled with students were stuck in gridlock: ''They are the children of Buono voters,'' Mr. Wildstein wrote, referring to Mr. Christie's opponent Barbara Buono.

The emails are striking in their political maneuvering, showing Christie aides gleeful about some of the chaos that resulted. Emergency vehicles were delayed in responding to three people with heart problems and a missing toddler, and commuters were left fuming. One of the governor's associates refers to the mayor of Fort Lee as ''this little Serbian,'' and Ms. Kelly exchanges messages about the plan while she is in line to pay her respects at a wake.

Mr. Christie denied knowledge of the emails and said his staff was to blame. The growing scandal threatens to tarnish him at the moment he assumes an even larger position on the national stage, as chairman of the Republican Governors Association and an all-but-certain candidate for his party's presidential nomination in 2016.

While the emails do not establish that the governor himself called for the lane closings, they show his staff was intimately involved, contrary to Mr. Christie's repeated avowals that no one in his office or campaign knew about them. In fact, the emails show, several staff members and appointees worked to cover up the scheme under the ruse that it was a traffic study.

The full report ran 1642 words. Let us count the problems just in those first six grafs:

First, those emails did not “reveal” the motive for the lane closings, a point that even our major journalists seem to have realized by now. Zernike continued to make this claim over the next several days.

Wildstein was not “a high school friend of the governor.” In the past week, that popular claim has at last been dropped all through the mainstream press.

The fact that Kelly sent an email from a wake has nothing to do with anything. Zernike placed that piffle in paragraph 4 to heighten the tabloid excitement.

Finally, we reach the ur-passage. According to Zernike, several staffers and appointees “worked to cover up the scheme under the ruse that it was a traffic study.”

The word “ruse” entered the Times reporting that day, creating a lot of confusion. To this day, many people think this “cover story” was dreamed up after the fact, in the weeks after the lane closings. That is plainly untrue, but in thousands of words of reporting, the Times has made no attempt to present the fuller picture of what Wildstein actually did.

Did Wildstein conduct a traffic study that week? For various reasons, it’s hard to say. But alas! In that December 9 hearing, a semantic conundrum took form concerning the term “traffic study.”

There was never any doubt that traffic data were collected and analyzed that week. If Wildstein was engaged in a hoax, this conduct only deepens the extent of his misconduct.

That said, some assembly members seemed eager to create certain talking points. One example: Rather plainly, they wanted Fulton and Durando to say they’d feared getting fired.

They also wanted the “workers” to say there had been no traffic study. This created pointless ruminations about the essence of same:

Durando had testified, at some length, about the stated rationale for the project—a project he himself had described as a traffic study. In some detail, he had described the collection of data, and the process by which the data were analyzed.

He even described the findings, which were worse than underwhelming. “By the end of the week, they had made a determination that there was a slight improvement on the main line flow,” he said. That slight improvement on I-95 had been purchased at the cost of chaos in Fort Lee.

(In Durando’s full statement, “they” referred to “the traffic folk”/“the planners”—the people whose valuable time Wildstein was quite likely wasting.)

Data were collected and analyzed; this had produced a rather pitiful finding. That said, some assembly members seemed to want a talking point.

They seemed willing to work to create it.

No written report had been prepared in the aftermath of the lane closings. In that rather specialized sense, there had been no “study.” Recalling Socrates in The Republic, an assembly member led her own Glaucon toward a preferred conclusion:

ASSEMBLYWOMAN STENDER (12/9/13): So this traffic—so-called traffic study. You said that they were gathering data. Has there been a traffic study presented anywhere as a result of that closure that week?

DURANDO: I have not seen anything, no.

STENDER: So has anything been done with the data that would substantiate the premise that there was a traffic study going on?

DURANDO: Other than a verbal with regard to the slight improvement to main line traffic flow, I have seen no report.

STENDER: So it really calls into question whether there was, in fact, any traffic study done, when they were just gathering data.

DURANDO: One could reach that conclusion.

STENDER: Because a traffic study would mean that all of that data would have been sent out for additional, further study to speak to this issue of whether these lanes should exist or not.

DURANDO: Studies should result in a conclusion, yes.

STENDER: And there were none.

Durando had seen no “report.” To Stender, this meant there was no “traffic study;” they were “just gathering data!”

Angels were dancing on heads of pins as this discussion proceeded. It’s easy to state the basic facts here—traffic data were collected and analyzed, but no report was written. But here’s the simplified way the hapless Zernike reported these facts the next day:

ZERNIKE (12/10/13): [Christie’s] chief appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, insisted that the lane closings were simply part of a traffic study.

But on Friday, the man who ordered the closings—a high school friend of the governor's who was a small-town mayor and the founder of an anonymous political blog before Mr. Christie's appointee created a job for him at the Port Authority—resigned, saying the issue had become ''a distraction.''

And testifying under subpoena in Trenton on Monday, bridge workers described Mr. Christie's associates' ordering the closings, and called the different maneuvers “unprecedented,” “odd” and “wrong.” There was, they said, no study.

If you read the New York Times, Fulton and Durando said they had feared for their jobs. They also said that there was no traffic study. Full stop!

We would call the first statement false, the second absurdly misleading.

Zernike never mentioned the data collection which proceeded all week. She never mentioned the data analysis or the pitiful finding.

Instead, she created the world’s simplest story, a story her readers were asked to enjoy: Christie’s man said there was a traffic study. Bridge workers said that was false!

Later in that same report, Zernike described the week’s events in a bit more detail. Note the way she described the rationale for the lane closings:

ZERNIKE (12/10/13): About 70,000 cars from all over northern New Jersey travel along the three access lanes each day, and on the first day of what would be four days of the shutdown, cars stalled the streets of Fort Lee. Cedric [sic] Fulton, the director of tunnels and bridges at the Port Authority, testified on Monday that he had repeatedly told Mr. Wildstein that it would cause a traffic disaster. ''My exact words were, 'This will not end well,' '' he said.

When Mr. Fulton asked Mr. Wildstein whether he had informed Fort Lee officials and its police, or Mr. Foye, or the media, Mr. Wildstein replied, he testified: ''Don't worry about that. We will take care of it.''

Mr. Wildstein told the bridge workers that the study was to determine how traffic would be affected if local lanes were shut down.

Please. That highlighted statement is technically accurate, but clownishly truncated.

It was easy to state the rationale. According to testimony, Wildstein told the two “bridge workers” that he wanted to determine if traffic flow on I-95 could be improved if Fort Lee’s lanes were reduced.

(Fulton: “The question was, if there was only one lane as opposed to three, could the overall throughput through the George Washington Bridge be improved? That was the fundamental question that he was asking, for which I didn’t have an answer.”)

Wildstein said the study “was to determine how traffic would be affected if local lanes were shut down?” Yes, if you're in third grade! If that represents Zernike’s best effort, she should be given desk duties right now.

If that isn’t her best effort, why was it in the Times?

Can we talk? As a journalist, Zernike strongly resembles Wildstein as a traffic planner. At best, her work is clownishly bad. Presumably, it’s less than honest.

At any rate, this is the way the world was told that there was no traffic study. The data collection simply wasn’t reported at all; a ridiculous rationale was concocted; readers were told that “bridge workers” said there was no study at all. Given the length of the Times’ reports, that would be a harlequin’s account of what actually happened that week.

That said, the Times has crafted our nation’s stories in this manner for a long time. These practices date to the days when the Times invented the Whitewater scandal. They date to the days when the New York Times reinvented Al Gore as a liar.

Earlier this month, these same practices prevailed when the Times continued to misparaphrase and even misquote Susan Rice. Kate Zernike may be a clown, but she belongs to a troupe.

On the bright side, we keep getting handed our simple-ass tales, the ones which are easy to read in the morning.

Sometimes these silly novelized tales cut in “our” direction. Quite often, they’ve they cut the other way.

It’s stunning to see the way the we liberals continue accepting this practice. But that's just what we do.

Success in the afternoon: After the two “bridge workers” testified, Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye took his time on the stage.

It was Foye who ordered the lanes reopened on September 13. In his testimony, he spoke quite favorably of Bill Baroni, quite harshly about David Wildstein.

He also gave assembly members a talking point they had been seeking all day:

ASSEMBLYWOMAN STENDER (12/9/13): Okay. You said you’ve had a number of conversations with Mr. Baroni regarding this incident.

FOYE: Yes.

STENDER: Did he, at any time during those conversations, explain why this decision was made on the part of Wildstein to do these lane closures?

FOYE: Traffic study.

STENDER: And that was the best he could give you, or gave you, in terms of rationale for causing all of this?

FOYE: That was the rationale.

STENDER: Okay. You know there’s been a lot of speculation that these lane closures were done for political purpose because of the issues with the mayor in Fort Lee. And when you’ve had these conversations with Wildstein, did he make any reference to his decision having to have political purpose?

FOYE: So, Vice Chair, just to be clear, I’ve had no conversations with Wildstein. I’ve spoken with Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni. And the answer to your question is no.

STENDER: So you accepted their statement, their rationale that they put people at risk, and spent money, and created tremendous upheaval solely for the purpose of a traffic study?

FOYE: I don’t.

STENDER: You don’t. Why do you think they did it?

FOYE: I’m not aware of any traffic study. I don’t know why it was done.

STENDER: Thank you.

“Thank you,” the assemblywoman said. We’ll guess she really meant it.

On several occasions, Foyre repeated his point; he “wasn’t aware of a traffic study.” No one asked him what he meant by that statement.

Did he mean there had been no written report? Was he disputing what Fulton and Durando said about the data collection? Was he saying the data collection had just been a hoax, a beard designed to hide Wildstein's real motive?

No one asked him what he meant. We’d say the reason was fairly obvious. Foye had stated the desired point. Why ruin a good thing by asking him what he meant?

In similar ways, folk like Zernike took their dictation from John McCain in September 2012.

According to McCain, Ambassador Rice had said all kinds of things about Benghazi, things she hadn’t actually said. But in that case, the “press corps” took their story lines from McCain. Rice was hurled to her death.

This is the way the process works. In that earlier case, folk like Zernike bowed to McCain. In this case, they bowed to assembly Dems, even transmitting the bogus claim about the high school friendship.

In each case, you’re handed a silly, simplified tale. You’re handed a prefab novel, the sort of simplified story these simple, empty heads like.

A lot of those stories have hurt liberals badly, but we just keep lapping them up. We leave the Zernikes in charge.

You know what they say about men with big feet!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2014

Can Salon repeat: Early this morning, we clicked to Salon. This was the excitable site’s featured news report:

BIGFOOT EROTICA EXPERT SPEAKS
Salon talks with Virginia Wade, author of highly popular sasquatch smut, about the appeal of "monster porn"
TRACY CLARK-FLORY

At the start of the month, we made the announcement: Salon’s deliberate, spectacular dumbnification had been the media event of 2013.

Somewhere in the great northwest, big ol' Sasquatch is strutting his stuff. In Las Vegas, smart money says the gang at Salon may repeat.

Ben Ginsberg surrenders some billable hours!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2014

Gets praised by the nation’s top liberal: We really felt sorry for poor Jackie Calmes this morning.

Calmes strikes us as the sanest person at the New York Times. Through absolutely no fault of her own, she had to report the recommendations from Obama’s blue-ribbon panel about the best ways to reduce voting delays.

In the real world, this is what you call pap. Remember, these are just recommendations—nonbinding recommendations:

CALMES (1/23/14): Among the commission’s recommendations:

*All citizens should be allowed to register to vote or update their registrations online, to reduce time-consuming confusion at polling places.

*States should exchange data from their voter and motor-vehicle lists with other states to keep voters rolls current as many Americans move.

*All states should expand alternatives to Election Day voting, like in-person early voting and mail-in ballots. The panel did not recommend a time period for early voting; in some states Republicans have sought to restrict it.

*Schools should continue to be used as polling places, and local officials should make Election Day a day off for teachers and students where security is a concern.

*To address the impending shortage of usable voting machines, and hold down costs, the process of setting standards and certifying machines should be overhauled to allow local officials to adopt widely available technologies, such as iPads.

Let’s see if we can keep track of that wave of reform:

Schools should be used as polling places. Also, iPads are OK!

(Adding to the air of fatuity, Calmes reported that the commission “offered no recommendations about voter ID cards.” The two parties couldn’t agree!)

For some reason, Rachel Maddow interviewed the panel’s co-commissioners on her TV program last night. But first, consider one reaction to the indictment of Ultrasound and his wife for having escaped with those golf shirts.

On All In last night, then again in today’s New York Times, a common reaction was voiced. When politicians get elected to office, they may suddenly find themselves surrounded by very rich people. They may lose their values as they try to keep up with a new set of Joneses, folk who may be billionaires.

People who make it big in TV may confront similar challenges.

Last night, Maddow ran a pointless segment about these pointless recommendations. We’re not sure why she did the segment at all. But here’s the strange way she signed off:

MADDOW (1/22/14): All right. Ben Ginsberg, Bob Bauer, co-chairs of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Thank you very much for your time tonight and talking to us. But I also have to say, you guys are busy guys who bill a lot for your time, and your devotion to do this for the country and to spend a year working on this in a totally nonpartisan way is really an honorable thing for you both to have done. So thank you for doing it.

GINSBERG: Thank you.

BAUER: Thank you very much.

MADDOW: Thank you.

Did she really say that?

Good God! Ginsberg and Bauer are both major machers in big money Washington. Ginsberg played key roles in the chase after President Clinton, in the 2000 Florida recount, and then in the pursuit of Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

That’s some fairly imperfect stuff. But to Maddow, the fact that he bills at such a high rate made his service on the commission an especially wonderful thing.

We’re sure that Maddow is a nice person among her family and friends. It’s not a good sign when people long to see others ruined in the way Maddow does. That said, we all have our points of imperfection. And she could be an excellent journalist if she were being supervised.

That said, she isn’t being supervised, and she’s making a big Swift boatload of money. No, that sign-off last night didn’t matter. But the analysts came right out of their chairs when TV’s truest-believing liberal said that weird strange bizarre thing.

Scriptwatch: Now they’ve even got Merrow!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2014

With respect to the public schools, it’s novels all the way down: According to the leading authority on his life, John Merrow “is a broadcast journalist who has reported on education issues for more than three decades. He serves as the education correspondent for the PBS NewsHour program.”

We’ve seen Merrow do sober work on the NewsHour. That’s why we were disappointed by this recent post on his blog.

Deeply disappointed. Gack!

Merrow critiques a recent piece in which John Buntin compared and contrasted Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch. We were amazed and disappointed by this passage:

MERROW (1/21/14): While “Rhee vs. Ravitch” is a compelling headline and a sexy feature, it’s a roadblock to understanding American education. Ravitch is a passionate advocate who argues from facts. In contrast, Rhee’s policies were tried, and they failed. By almost every conceivable measure, the DC schools are no better than before her tenure. In key areas of student attendance, graduation rates, and principal and teacher turnover, they are worse. Central offices in abutting districts have shrunk, but DCPS’ has grown considerably. Even DC’s most recent gains on NAEP, which began 12-15 years BEFORE Rhee’s tenure, seem to have been fueled by an influx of better-educated families (gentrification) and quality pre-school. Here’s a summary:

At that point, Merrow links to this post from last year.

Merrow seems extremely sober and competent. For that reason, we were amazed by the highlighted passage.

Our main point of amazement is the following statement about Rhee: “By almost every conceivable measure, the DC schools are no better than before her tenure.”

It’s odd, and depressing, to read that assessment even after D.C.’s recent gains in NAEP scores. It’s true that D.C. has been gaining on the NAEP since well before Rhee’s arrival. But Merrow’s subsequent comments seem to reflect the kind of tribal true belief which makes the modern public discourse so unintelligent and depressing.

D.C. test scores are hard to assess because of the rapid growth in charter schools, and because of the gentrification to which Merrow refers. That said, here are Grade 8 math scores for low-income black kids in D.C.—for low-income black kids who don’t attend charter schools:

Average NAEP scores, Grade 8 math
Low-income black students, non-charter schools
2013: 249
2007: 235

On its face, that represents a very substantial score gain. It occurred despite the increase in charter enrollment, which may be draining more ambitious kids away from the non-charter schools.

Because that gain was recorded by low-income black kids, it presumably isn’t the result of gentrification. That said, Merrow gives himself one last route of escape in the passage we’ve posted:

Such score gains must be the result of quality pre-school! Michelle Rhee didn’t do that!

We’re fairly sure that we were Rhee’s very first D.C. critics. As soon as she arrived in D.C., we challenged the ridiculous claims she was making about her own brilliant teaching career.

We can’t explain the recent score gains in the D.C. schools. We don’t assert that they were (or weren’t) caused by the things Rhee did. We can’t guarantee that last year’s high scores won’t turn out to be statistical flukes.

But Merrow’s claim about D.C. schools seems absurd on its face. Why would someone want to assert that D.C. schools “are no better by almost every conceivable measure” when they plainly seem to better by the most basic measure we use?

And by the way: When Merrow links to that earlier post, he links to a post where he made this claim:

“Six years after Michelle Rhee rode into town, the public schools seem to be worse off by almost every conceivable measure” (our italics). Since Merrow has now abandoned that claim, why does he link Buntin to it?

Merrow’s statement about Ravitch seems highly fanciful too. Without any question, Ravitch is “a passionate advocate.” She touches on many important topics in her new book, Reign of Error.

That said, Ravitch’s use of facts tends to be very willful. A sober reporter from PBS should have seen that by now.

We live in highly tribal times. Almost everything is recited from script. Merrow’s screed is disappointing and strange.

Truly, within our current discourse, it’s novels all the way down.

THE NEW SAM-AND-COKIES: In search of a possible traffic study!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2014

Part 3—Real conduct which did occur: Last night, at the start of his cable program, one of the era’s biggest con men offered an overview of the Fort Lee fiasco:

MATTHEWS (1/22/14): Good evening. I’m Chris Matthews in San Francisco. Let me start tonight with this:

Like barnacles on a boat, suspicious matters now cling to the New Jersey governor’s office in Trenton. It began with an e-mail from Governor Christie`s office setting the clock for “traffic problems in Fort Lee.”

Who struck up that conspiracy which led a deputy chief of staff to simply alert David Wildstein of the bridge authority it was time for that jam-up to occur? Who masterminded the scheme to disrupt traffic holding on—heading into the George Washington Bridge the first day of school? Who scripted the cover-up that the bridge tie-up was the result of a traffic survey?

For the record, Matthews refers to massive traffic jams in Fort Lee, traffic jams involving thousands of cars trying to get to the bridge.

According to Matthews, the claim that this mess was the result of a traffic survey was a “cover-up.” It isn’t clear what Matthews meant by this statement, but factual claims are rarely clear on this cable program.

Did Matthews mean that no traffic study ever took place—that Wildstein closed the access lanes, then concocted a cover story at some later point?

Did Matthews mean that there actually was a traffic study, or something resembling a traffic study, but that it was simply a ruse—an excuse to close the access lanes and throw Fort Lee into chaos?

Whatever! Matthews rarely feels the need to be clear on his cable news program—or even to know his basic facts. As he continued, he said this:

MATTHEWS (continuing directly): Did the governor himself finally step in to shut down the noise level by calling Governor Cuomo of New York to get him to cool down the investigation into the traffic problems in Fort Lee? And how does anyone in the governor’s circle account for the entry in the journal of Hoboken mayor Dawn Zimmer that the lieutenant governor had put the squeeze on her, saying the governor put her up to it, to back a development project favored by Christie’s associates, or else forfeit state disaster funds?

In the highlighted statement, Matthews continues advancing the claim that Christie phoned Cuomo to complain. Both governors have said that isn’t true, but Matthews keeps advancing the claim without including that fact.

In fairness, the chances are slim that Matthews knows what Cuomo said last month about that alleged complaint from Christie. Hardball runs on story line, not on actual facts.

But Matthews is hardly alone in his hazy account of the alleged “cover up” surrounding the alleged traffic study. In its lengthy front-page reporting, the New York Times has worked very hard to avoid reporting basic facts behind that alleged traffic study.

Confusion has resulted. Today, we thought we’d show you some of the things you haven’t learned from the Times, in a succession of front-page reports which have been as long as 2800 words.

A great deal of speculation has swirled about those traffic lane closings. Why did Wildstein order them closed? What was his actual motive?

Just yesterday, we articulated a very unpleasant possible theory concerning a billion-dollar development. If something like that theory turns out to be true, then the traffic study was essentially a hoax, a feint designed to shake money loose from a very fat money tree.

Did David Wildstein conduct a hoax connected to that development? We can't tell you that! At this point, there is no dispositive evidence concerning the motives behind his actions.

The alleged traffic study may have been a hoax, a ruse. It may have been designed to hide the actual motive for the lane closings.

That may be what happened. Today, though, we ask a different question:

Is it possible that David Wildstein actually was conducting, or attempting to conduct, a good-faith traffic study? In our view, it hasn’t been yet shown that this wasn’t the case.

Why was Matthews blustering about “the cover-up?” In part, he did so because he knows that’s the story favored on his network. We’ll also assume that he has done little research about what happened that week.

And alas! For people reading the New York Times, many events from that week have essentially disappeared. Tomorrow, we’ll show you the way the Times has reported on the alleged traffic study. For today, let’s run through some of information from last month’s public hearings that the paper has failed to report or discuss.

The Times’ first news report on this topic appeared on December 10. The day before, three bridge officials testified about those events before a New Jersey legislative committee.

On December 10, the Times reported, or pretended to report, the substance of that day-long hearing. Below, we’ll show you some of the things the Times has never reported.

The collection of data

Did a traffic study actually take place that week? Within the reporting which has occurred, that has largely been a matter of semantics.

But as we noted yesterday, there is no doubt that large amounts of traffic data were being collected that week. During the December 9 hearing, Robert Durando, general manager of the bridge, described part of the effort.

For the full transcript, click here:

ASSEMBYLAN WISNIEWSKI (12/9/13): At any time on Monday [September 9] did you talk to your traffic experts or engineers within the Port Authority and say, “Hey guys, what do you think?”

DURANDO: We had talked about gathering data, which certainly takes some time to do. Over the ensuing days—the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—data was provided that indicated, from their perspective, that there was a slight improvement in the main line, as we’ve discussed earlier—in main line travel through the upper level of the George Washington Bridge.

WISNIEWSKI: You said, “We.” Who is the “we?”

DURANDO: The traffic folks that Cedrick [Fulton] mentioned earlier who work within Tunnels, Bridges, and Terminals who download and analyze that data.

WISNIEWSKI: And so on Monday they were downloading data?

DURANDO: As it became available. It’s tolls data, so it’s people driving through toll lanes. As toll collectors hit different buttons, it counts those vehicles. So it takes them time to compile it. It’s real-time, so—I mean, it started at 6 in the morning. It would take 24 hours, obviously, to get 24-hour data.

WISNIEWSKI: So on Tuesday you had Monday’s data.

DURANDO: We did.

WISNIEWSKI: And that was submitted to your internal traffic department?

DURANDO: Those were the folks who were gathering the data and looking at it to provide some sort of an analysis…

WISNIEWSKI: So that was provided on a daily basis or obtained on a daily basis by your traffic department?

DURANDO: It was obtained. So for Monday, data was not available until Tuesday. The traffic folks who Mr. Fulton talked about—the planners who would collect the data collected Tuesday’s data, looked at it, analyzed it, did the same thing with Tuesday’s data. By the end of the week, they had made a determination that there was a slight improvement on the main line flow.

This is a basic part of what happened this week. In a succession of front-page reports, one of which ran almost 3000 words, the New York Times has never reported the fact that this data collection occurred.

That data collection may have been part of a hoax. But the data collection did occur. It’s astounding to see the New York Times disappear this basic fact.

The stated rationale for the closings

Whatever actually happened that week, the traffic study was not a “cover story” invented after the fact. Data collection occurred all week. For details, see below.

Earlier, a rationale for the data collection had been given.

In this testimony, Durando described Wildstein’s first notice about the impending action, which occurred on August 21. He then described Wildstein’s first statement about the reason for the lane closings:

“The reason I was given was, to conduct a traffic study.”

Durando was told the lanes would be closed as part of a traffic study. What was the stated rationale for this alleged traffic study?

Durando wasn’t asked that question during the September 9 hearings. Earlier in the day, his boss, Cedrick Fulton, had spoken to that question.

Fulton is director of the George Washington Bridge. In this passage, he described a conversation with Durando:

WISNIEWSKI (12/9/13): And what was your conversation with Mr. Durando on Friday, September 6?

FULTON: That we needed to do everything that we could to make this operation work—given the directive that we had received. And to be prepared to revert the operation, if necessary.

WISNIEWSKI: And in your conversation with him, did he at any time raise to you, “Mr. Fulton, what are we doing? Why are we doing this?”

FULTON: We talked about the question that was presented to us—which was, Would the main line work better? And neither one of us had an answer to that question. We could only say that maybe, if there were more lanes dedicated to the main line. But neither one of us could produce the information which would say it for a certainty either way—that not doing it wouldn’t have a significant improvement on the main line.

Mr. Wildstein’s question was, and his directive was one to understand how much better throughput would get, could get on the main line, if we reduced the number of lanes out of Fort Lee?

There you see the rationale for the alleged traffic study. The question was this: Would traffic on I-95 (“throughput”) move faster if the two access lanes from Fort Lee were closed?

That’s a somewhat underwhelming question. Presumably, if traffic onto the bridge was reduced from Fort Lee, pre-existing northbound traffic would automatically move along better.

Still, that was the stated rationale. As such, it’s a basic part of the story.

In another part of his testimony, Fulton described the basic question again, saying he couldn’t answer it at the time it was posed:

FULTON (12/9/13): When he directed that the lanes be reduced, his supposition—and again, we didn’t have this conversation directly, so I’m giving you the best answer that I can.

ASSEMBLYWOMAN CARIDE: And I appreciate that.

FULTON: The question was, if there was only one lane as opposed to three, could the overall throughput through the George Washington Bridge be improved? That was the fundamental question that he was asking, for which I didn’t have an answer.

Later, Fulton explained it again:

ASSEMBLYMAN JOHNSON (12/9/13): When you were directed, or you were advised, I guess, that the bridge was going to be closed, you were told that was for a study?

FULTON: An understanding of what would happen if Fort Lee didn’t have those three lanes.

JOHNSON: And that was for a study?

FULTON: I’m not sure he used the word “study” with me. But it was clearly a desire to understand what would happen if Fort Lee did not have those three lanes.

In testimony on November 25, Bill Baroni had already described this rationale in obsessive detail. In the December 9 hearing, Fulton testified that the rationale had been stated in real time.

As best we can tell, this rationale has never been coherently described in the New York Times. Tomorrow, we’ll show you the way Kate Zernike did describe it in her initial report about this December 9 hearing.

For the record, Wildstein seemed adamant about the need for the study. In this testimony, Fulton again described the stated rationale:

FULTON (12/9/13): After the initial call [on September 6], I called him back again. It was basically the same conversation again—just to restate what I wanted him to understand about the importance of communicating to the Executive Director, recognizing that this would likely become a media event at some point so they needed to be involved.

WISNIEWSKI: Why would it become a media event?

FULTON: Well, it would be highly visible. My exact words were, “This will not end well.”

[...]

WISNIEWSKI: Okay. And his response to this was?

FULTON: That the three lanes had been in place for a long—I forget the exact number of years—but that no one, including myself, were able to produce any documentation as to why. And that it was appropriate for him to be able to have a test to understand what the benefits to the main line could be if the lanes were reduced from three to one.

According to Fulton, Wildstein wanted “a test to understand what the benefits to the main line could be if the lanes were reduced from three to one.”

This rationale was clearly explained at the hearing. It certainly isn’t hard to state—unless you’re a front-page reporter for the New York Times.

The findings, such as they were

It seems like a fairly safe bet! If you slow bridge traffic from Fort Lee, pre-existing northbound traffic will be able to cross the bridge faster. That said, data collection proceeded that week, with modest findings observed.

In the first passage posted above, Durando testified to that set of findings: “By the end of the week, [traffic planners] had made a determination that there was a slight improvement on the main line flow.”

In its lengthy, front-page reports, the New York Times has completely skipped this type of information. In smaller, less famous newspapers, real reporting has occurred.

Here’s Shawn Boburg, reporting in the Bergen Country Record:

BOBURG (12/10/13): Internal documents obtained by The Record show that planning for the study began a week-and-a-half before the Sept. 9 lane shift was ordered by Wildstein. They also show that Port Authority traffic engineers predicted that narrowing Fort Lee's dedicated access lanes from three to one would result in 600-vehicle backups on local streets that would not clear until noon each weekday. Wildstein ordered the study anyway, agency officials testified Monday, saying he wanted to see if it would speed up non-local traffic approaching the bridge on Route 95.

[...]

At just after 5 p.m. on Thursday, Daniel Jacobs, a manager in the department that oversees tunnels and bridges, emailed Mark Muriello, another high-ranking employee within the department, a document entitled, "Reallocation of Toll Lanes at the GWB: An EARLY assessment of the benefits of the trial."

The report said the lane shift shaved off an average of five minutes for Route 95 drivers over the four days. But the combined delays experienced by motorists from the Fort Lee entrance eclipsed the time saved by other drivers.

The Fort Lee traffic waited a combined additional 2,800 hours during the four busiest morning commuting hours, while Route 95 traffic saved a total of only 966 combined hours over that time. The report referenced the predictions made prior to the test.

Oof! Initial results were extremely poor, as had been predicted.

That said, this reporting cuts several ways. It shows Wildstein blundering ahead into the face of predicted disaster. It also helps us discern a basic point:

Whatever the actual motive for the lane closings may have been, the alleged traffic study was not a “cover story” dreamed up after the fact. For whatever reason, data had been collected and analyzed all week long, producing bad results.

We started with a basic question: Is it possible Wildstein could have undertaken this action in good faith? Is it possible that he was actually trying to conduct a traffic study or test?

Is it possible he was actually looking for a way to improve traffic flow? If so, he seems to have proceeded very stupidly. But stupidity is widely observed all over our world, as you know if you’ve watched cable news in the past fifteen years.

Is it possible that Wildstein conducted this action in something resembling good faith? That this was a work of monumental stupidity ahead of anything else?

We’d have to say that remains a possibility, although other, deeply nefarious motives are entirely possible too. Sensible people will wait for investigations to puzzle such matters out.

That said, if you read the New York Times, there is no need to wait. The Times has already reported, on its front page, that the motive has been “revealed:” Wildstein was trying to punish Fort Lee’s mayor because he didn’t endorse Chris Christie for re-election.

Plainly, that motive hasn’t been established, unless you’re reading the Times. And the real motive may be much worse.

That said, the Times has offered a wide array of bad reporting about the Fort Lee mess, starting with its failed attempts to count two traffic lanes. It has grossly misstated some of the testimony offered by Durando and Fulton—and in a succession of front-page reports, it has said nothing about the data collection which occurred that week.

When Kate Zernike pretended to describe the rationale for the alleged traffic study, she produced an absurd account, as we’ll see tomorrow.

What was Wildstein’s actual motive for these disastrous lane closings? Someday, we may even find out. No explanation seems to make sense. Investigations proceed.

Tomorrow, though, we’ll review what the Times has reported about that alleged traffic study. In our view, the paper’s reporting of this event has allegedly been very poor.

Tomorrow: Semantics is us! How many angels can dance on the head of an alleged traffic study?

The very large problem with scandal culture!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2014

A genuine crackpot gets off: Governor Ultrasound was indicted yesterday. So was his wife.

Personally, we’re pretty much sorry they were. We don’t root for people to get their lives turned upside down in these ways.

Their conduct seems to have been ridiculous, but it seems that little harm was done. Little harm, or perhaps none.

There’s a problem with the scandal culture which has lurked about since the Watergate days. Last night, Rachel Maddow—a genuine nutcase in this area—helped the world see what it is.

McDonnell is a minor figure at this point. His career was already pretty much shot due to his ridiculous, money-grubbing behavior—the type of conduct which should seem familiar to a cable “news” host.

McDonnell simply doesn’t matter. But to a genuine nut like Maddow, he matters very much. Nothing else really does.

Maddow devoted the first two segments of last night’s program to McDonnell’s indictment. Given the length of her opening segment, roughly sixty percent of her program was devoted to this topic.

When the McDonnell scandal coverage ended, she turned to the Christie scandal coverage. Nothing got discussed all night except the thrill of scandal.

Rachel loves it when The Others get in trouble. Stroking herself and seeming to groan, she started off like this:

MADDOW (1/21/14): When it rains, it pours. Former Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia and his wife, the first lady of Virginia, Maureen McDonnell, have today been indicted by federal prosecutors on more than a dozen felony charges. If they are convicted of those charges and they face the maximum penalties allowed by law, they could be looking at decades in jail and fines of over $1 million.

Exactly! To anyone even slightly sane, the highlighted passage is the obvious problem here. But in matters like this, it never enters Maddow’s head that prosecutors can sometimes perhaps get carried away, just as governors can.

Maddow devoted a 23-minute opening segment to her joy at this news. And when she returned from commercial break, good God! She started all over again!

How crazy is Maddow in these affairs? Below, you see the lunacy with which she started her second segment.

“One of the things about a criminal indictment is that you get a lot of specifics,” this full-blown crackpot said. After that, she proved her point.

Remember, she had already spent 23 minutes on this topic. Then this:

MADDOW: One of the things about a criminal indictment is that you get a lot of specifics. So for example, in the Bob McDonnell corruption scandal in Virginia, there’s been a lot of reporting over the last nine months or so about the kinds of gifts that the governor and his family took from the CEO of the Virginia company who figured in the scandal.

Before today, though, before the actual indictment came out, including this forfeiture list of items that Governor McDonnell and his wife will be expected to hand over if they are convicted, this forfeiture list, we’ve never had this kind of detail about what they took.

But now we know, if convicted, they will have to hand over the sum of not less than $140,805.46.

Also:

Black Rebecca Minkoff shoes, a black Louis Vuitton shoes, white Louis Vuitton shoes, a cream Louis Vuitton purse, a cream Louis Vuitton wallet, a silver Rolex watch, engraved with "71st governor of Virginia," a yellow Peter Som dress, a blue Armani jacket, and two matching dresses, two gold Oscar de la Renta dresses, a black Louis Vuitton raincoat, a gold Oscar de la Renta sweater, one pair of Emilio Rose earrings, one Gear sweatshirt, two pairs of Footjoy golf shoes, one button down Ralph Lauren shirt, one white Peter Miller golf shirt, one baby blue striped Peter Miller golf shirt, one royal blue Peter Miller golf shirt, one aqua fairway green tech golf shirt, one white striped Ralph Lauren golf shirt, one ping University of Virginia golf bag, one ping Kinloch golf bag, one Sun Mountain Notre Dame golf bag, two sets of golf clubs, one Heather McKenzie watercolor and frame, two iPhones, and 30 boxes of Anatabloc.

All of which the governor and his wife and family reportedly took as gifts from the CEO of the company that makes Anatabloc.

Not since Hephaestus forged Achilles' shield have we heard such an endless narration. Start at graf 478.

This was the start of Maddow’s second segment on this topic. On and on and on she went, stroking herself and reading the list, not failing to mention the one white Peter Miller golf shirt and the several golf bags.

If Governor Ultrasound is convicted, all must be given back!

After this, Maddow spoke with Kendall Coffey about how “very, very detailed” the indictment is. After Coffey slithered away, Maddow returned to her abundant self-stroking.

She told us how she’d spent the day. She told us what would be next:

MADDOW: I will say, just because I have been marinating in this indictment since it came out this afternoon, I’ve got to say, “bribery” does appear. Counts 2 through 4, “defendants, Robert F. McDonnell, Maureen McDonnell, and others, known and unknown to the grand jury, knowingly and intentionally, having devised and intended to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud the citizens of Virginia of their right to the honest services of the governor of Virginia through bribery.”

Also, the word "extortion" is in there two pages later.

This is absolutely—this has been a scandalous story from the beginning, but the detail that is in this indictment is, I’ve got to admit, even for just a layman, it’s almost mind bending. I almost can’t believe this isn’t a movie.

All right. Also, today was Governor Chris Christie’s inauguration day in New Jersey. And lots of activity surrounding that governor’s bridge scandal managed to transpire today, despite this other scandal and despite the inauguration and despite the huge snowstorm that is socking the East Coast in the face as I speak.

Lots ahead. Stay with us.

Maddow’s entire program was about scandal. This is one of the obvious problems with the scandal culture and the love of same.

Beyond that, we were struck by an obvious point. Throughout last evening’s marathon, we were struck by the resemblance between the McDonnells and the people who work in cable news.

Can we talk? Bob McDonnell and his wife behaved extremely foolishly. That said, they took a very tiny pittance compared to the millions that flow to certain clowning hosts on cable news channels.

Those people have defrauded the public much more than the McDonnells seem to have done in the case of the free golf bags.

According to Coffey, the indictment says “there was an ongoing scheme to extract all kinds of personal benefits, in effect, close to $140,000 in largely cash items—the rather intriguing list of consumer items that you just detailed—in order to get favorable treatment from the governor’s office.” That’s peanuts compared to the millions of dollars people like Maddow take for their clowning and their dissembling and their acts against the public.

Good God! By the time of the Bush-Gore election, Chris Matthews was being paid $5 million per year by Jack Welch to send Bush to the White House. He earned that bribe in the most heinous ways, as Maddow of course understands.

Last October, she referred to this fraudster as “my beloved colleague and pal, Chris Matthews.” If you have a strong stomach today, you can just click here.

The McDonnells behaved very foolishly. The conduct of others is worse; their paydays are much larger.

Always include the kids: Yesterday, we mentioned the way Rachel likes to drag the children into stories of this kind.

As always, your Daily Howler was right. This is the way Maddow started last evening’s bill of attainder:

MADDOW: And if you want to know where it started, it started with the chicken dinner. The catered chicken dinner at the wedding for one of Governor Bob McDonnell’s daughters, which was hosted at the governor’s mansion back in June of 2011.

A June wedding is always a nice thing. A June wedding of the governor’s daughter is the kind of thing people love to hear about. And when the wedding is hosted at the absolutely lovely governor’s mansion in Richmond, Virginia, that is the kind of thing that’s going to get a lot of adoring attention.

The story goes on and on from there. We’ll suggest that you go to her site and watch a real crackpot at work.

When people wish harm on others this much, we sometimes wonder what steers them.

Tomorrow: Was that a real correction?