THE SILOS: First the trenches, then the camps!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

This war is fought from the silos: As we recollected on Monday, the so-called Great War was fought from the trenches. 

The war which followed was marked by the existence of the camps. 

We refer to the extermination camps maintained by the madness of the Third Reich. They coexisted with the vicious forced labor camps which, when they're discussed at all, are known by the common term Gulag.

Along the way, a well-known writer issued a well-known phrase—"the banality of evil." 

We wouldn't recommend the use of the more loaded term to describe the great civil war in which we're now engaged, but the era's banality is defined by the widely-ignored existence of the silos.

Our current war, the war of the silos, was well underway as of 6:06 this morning. At that time, on Fox & Friends, the highly telegenic Ainsley Earhardt recited, for the ten millionth time, her channel's BizzaroWorld account of the way "the president" went to Ukraine in 2016 and fired Viktor Shokin.

In this account, Shokin is described as an idealistic prosecutor, one who was threatening the corrupt arrangements of the Biden Crime Family. Earhardt failed to explain how Joe Biden, who was actually vice president at the time, could have arranged to force such a firing when he still held that junior position.

Earhardt told the preferred story for perhaps the ten millionth time. In this morning's New York Times, David French quickly tells the story as it's told from within the blue silo:

FRENCH (9/14/23): Some Republicans are pointing all the way back to the long-debunked claim that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in part because the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was paying Hunter a lavish monthly consulting fee. (In reality, firing Shokin was a priority for both the Obama administration and its Western allies, and they wanted him terminated because he was ineffective at combating corruption, not because he was diligently pursuing Burisma.)

As far as we know, that actually is "the reality" of this particular incident. But people who live within the red silo have never heard the story told that way.

They've heard the story as Earhardt told it, and they've heard it ten million times. They don't know that basic facts are being omitted. Because Earhardt is one of their cable news "friends," they assume that her story is accurate.

(Anthropologically, our deeply flawed species is like that.)

At any rate, so goes in the ongoing war conducted from within dueling silos. Our own blue tribe hears from our own friends. The red tribe hears from theirs. 

For people living within the red silo, that includes the ranting Mark Levin, a.k.a. "The Great One." It includes the four members of The Five who recently took turns talking over their program's lone liberal, Jessica Tarlov, as she attempted to tell the fuller story about the firing of Shokin.

This is the way a war is waged when it's waged from within dueling silos. Until recently, the rules of engagement were different.

In Monday's report, we recalled the shape of the prior regime. In the years before Jon Stewart struck, the red tribe's friends and the blue tribe's friends were forced to confront each other every single weekday night on the cable show Crossfire.

Viewers heard from the red tribe, then heard from the blue. There were no silos then.

Now, denizens of the dueling tribes hear from their own friends, and they hear from no one else. Here are the wages of this sick arrangement:

The people who watched Ainsley Earhardt this morning didn't know that they were hearing a highly selective tale.

Just last week, TV's Bill Maher authored a rather strange claim. He seemed to say that a certain amount of crazy was coming at denizens of the blue silo, from our own blue tribe's friends.

In fairness to Bill, he rejected the claim of equivalence all through his interview with TV's Ari Melber. But he said there's a fair amount of "crazy" over here in the blue silo too!

Is there any way that could be accurate? We'd have to say that the answer is yes—and that we're sometimes drawn to that conclusion by watching reports on Fox & Friends. 

We know of no reason to go any further with this. In our view, the die has been cast.

The tribes have agreed that there must be a war. Under current arrangements, our political wars are now conducted within two dueling silos.

We don't know who will win next year's election, but it's harder and harder for us to believe that President Biden can win. Abnormal psychology being quite normal, there's no point in attempting to argue any particular part of this case. The hounds of hell within our blue silo will rise up to shout and yell.

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof takes us all the way back to 1965, to the time when these tribal divisions began to take form. As he starts, he offers "a shower of caveats" concerning an issue he thinks we should discuss. 

"Yet this is still so wrenching to discuss," he correctly says. "[E]ven today there is a deep discomfort in liberal circles about acknowledging these realities"—about acknowledging the alleged realities he says we need to discuss.

In our view, our own blue tribe is deeply involved in such flights from reality. Beyond that, we have little idea how we look to other people when we let our Storylines be created by the people who now commandeer our "liberal circles."

We've moved from the trenches and the camps over to the silos. Organs like the New York Times largely ignore this change in the rules of the game. 

Red silo denizens have their treasured friends. Are our own blue tribe's friends actually that much better?

Tomorrow: Norman O. Brown meets Mitt Romney

The Washington Post visits Mississippi!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Errors wherever you look: Finally, the Washington Post editorial board has weighed in on the Mississippi miracle.

Our own semi-apology follows. First, this is the way yesterday's featured editorial began:

Holding kids back can’t explain Mississippi’s education ‘miracle’

The so-called Mississippi miracle in education really isn’t one. The state’s surge in student achievement results not from divine intervention but from careful policy applied by committed human beings. One of these policies has received extra attention: the decision to hold back third-graders who don’t meet state reading standards. But by focusing too much on this rule alone, reformers risk missing what makes the broader program successful.

Local officials all over the country are attempting to unspool the story of Mississippi’s journey from worst in the nation in test scores to the middle of the pack. Schools everywhere are struggling to catch up students after learning loss from the pandemic. Most states have been unable to match pre-2020 levels of achievement. Mississippi, however, set a personal record in reading this year, and its gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exceed every one of its peers’. 

Does anyone actually care about this general topic? Those first two paragraphs feature factual bungles as far as the eye can see. 

How many errors have the editors made? Let us count the ways:

For starters, no one did anything on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep)  "this year." 

The Naep was last administered in 2022. That would actually be last year.

That can be viewed as a minor error. A larger misstatement is this:

The state of Mississippi did not "set a personal record in reading" on the 2022 Naep. Also, the state didn't "match [its] pre-2020 level of achievement" on those first post-pandemic tests.

In fact, Mississippi "set a personal record in reading" on the 2019 Naep. As in almost every state, its statewide reading scores dropped in 2022.

Adding to the factual chaos, the editors link to this report as they say that Mississippi "set a personal record in reading this year, and its gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exceed every one of its peers’." 

So the editors said, and so the editors linked! But as you can see by clicking that link, the report to which they link is a report from 2019 about Mississippi's gains on the Naep as of that earlier year.

Everyone can and does make mistakes. That said, the editors seem to have no idea what they're talking about as this editorial begins. 

We've told you for years that no one in the mainstream press corps actually cares about any of this. In our view, the gong-show performance in this editorial tends to support that claim, which is built from long experience.

Now for our own apology:

A few weeks back, we (unwisely) set out to finish our earlier discussion of these Mississippi test scores. We haven't continued with that (extremely complex) task.

There are several reasons for that. In part, it involves the complexity of Kevin Drum's two posts on this topic, in the second of which he reversed himself on what he had said in the first.

In this July 3 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik referred to the first of those two posts, and to our own work on this topic. (We underwent surgery on July 5 and didn't see Hiltzik's piece.)

For ourselves, we've never understood either of Kevin's posts on this topic. That includes his initial post, the post to which Hiltzik referred, in which Kevin declared that we had been right about this topic all along.

For the record, we still don't know what we think about Mississippi's improved scores. We do think this delicate thought should probably be floated:

It's routinely said—correctly, as far as we know—that teachers and principals have no reason or incentive to cheat on the Naep. As far as we know, teachers and principals wouldn't even have a way to cheat on the Naep if they wanted to do so.

An additional impression would be this:

It's our impression that state superintendents could conceivably put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to the administration of the Naep within their individual states. 

We aren't sure if that is true, and you can be sure that no American newspaper will ever bother to report it out. But we suspect that it may be the case.

In this brave new era, state superintendents do have an incentive to drive up statewide Naep scores—and, for better or worse, there is a direct tie between Mississippi's statewide administration in the past decade and the gruesome test score cheating debacle which occurred in the D.C. Public Schools during the tenure of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. 

(For the record, Rhee had achieved that lofty position on the basis of long-standing test score claims which were transparently, clownishly phony.)

We've often said that no one ever went broke doubting miraculous test scores in the public schools. Nor is there any reason to think that our journalistic or academic elites would ever go to the trouble of conducting a full exploration of surprising test scores of this type, or of the pleasing Storylines which emanate from such scores.

Are Mississippi's kids really outperforming their peers across the nation by the substantial margins we've described in the past? In our view, it's a possibility, but we'd be inclined to recommend a good healthy dosage of doubt.

Meanwhile, there's the embarrassing, error-riddled presentation by the editorial board of the Washington Post. Recommended translation:

No one actually cares about any of this, and no one ever has. 

An anthropology lesson is lurking here. It remains forever unlearned.

THE SILOS: Aymann Ismail scans banned book!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Is surprised by his own reaction: Long ago and far away, we ourselves were able to witness a public school "book ban."

At issue was the Hemingway short story, Up in Michigan. Experts who have read the story summarize its content as shown:

Jim Gilmore, a blacksmith, comes to Hortons Bay and buys the blacksmith shop. Liz Coates, who has a crush on Jim, is a young woman who works as a waitress for the Smiths. Jim, D. J. Smith, and Charley Wyman go on a deer-hunting trip. When the hunters return, they have a few drinks to celebrate their kill. After supper and a few more drinks, Jim goes into the kitchen and fondles Liz, and says, "Come on for a walk." They go to the end of the dock where Jim's hands explore Liz's body. She is frightened and begs him to stop. He forces himself upon her and passes out on top of her. She gets out from under him and tries to awaken him, and covers him with her coat.

Due to its undisguised content, this early Hemingway story was always controversial. Decades later, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled the way he'd been reproached by Gertrude Stein for writing material that no one would be willing to publish.

Around that same time, we high school students at Aragon High were handed copies of a collection of Hemingway stories. Up in Michigan had been razorcut out of each copy.

Even then, in a liberal-leaning suburban San Francisco high school, someone had decided that this one particular story was inappropriate for us high school kids. Our teacher, the late Jim Price, called our attention to this action—and, if memory serves, he strongly disapproved of this particular "ban."

Longer story shorter: 

Rightly or wrongly, people have always felt that certain types of material would be inappropriate for distribution in public schools. Almost surely, there are books that most modern liberals would be disinclined to present to public school students, even today.

What sorts of material are age- or grade-appropriate for use in public schools? Inevitably, such questions will involve matters of judgment. That said, two victims of modern "book bans" are apparently ready to go to the mattresses over the ongoing bans.

We refer to the authors of And Tango Makes Three, a book we've never read. Their letter appears in today's New York Times. We include its text in full:

Civil Disobedience Against Book Bans?

To the Editor:

Re “This Summer, I Became the Book-Banning Monster of Iowa,” by Bridgette Exman (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 3):

The writer is clearly no monster, and we appreciate how hurtful it must have been for her to be harshly criticized for removing books from school libraries. But as banned authors, we sympathize more deeply with Iowa’s children, who deserve better from school officials than their dutiful execution (however reluctant) of laws that violate fundamental human rights.

Those rights, including freedom of speech, depend on the actions of courageous citizens willing to take risks to defend them. Countless Americans—teachers, librarians and superintendents among them—are working bravely and creatively to resist the regressive tide of book banning today, and we owe them our deepest thanks.

Sharing in The Times that her actions pained her does little for Ms. Exman’s students or the authors whose books she removed, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker among them. Of course, it is human to protect one’s livelihood by following orders even when they violate one’s principles and the rights of others.

But it is not good enough. Children and authors, and the freedoms they rely on, need heroes.

Peter Parnell, Justin Richardson
New York
The writers are the authors of “And Tango Makes Three” and recently filed suit in Florida over the banning and restriction of their book in school libraries.

You're right! These authors haven't exactly advocated "civil disobedience" in reaction to these Florida "book bans." The headline seems to refer to a recommendation found in the third letter published by the Times on this topic today.

Is there anything about And Tango Makes Three which makes it inappropriate for use in a public school? More broadly, is any book ever inappropriate for such placement?

Needless to say, those are matters of judgment. Today, we call your attention to Aymann Ismail's account of what happened when he decided to peruse one of today's "banned books."

Ismail is a staff writer at Slate, a site which has increasingly moved toward sex-based "advice columns" pretty much all the time. The dumbing down of this particular site may serve as a warning to us within our blue silo, where we're strongly inclined to overstate how brilliant we actually are.

Ismail is a 34-year-old father of two. He graduated from Rutgers in 2011. You can read his new essay here. As of yesterday, it was summarized on Slate's front page in the manner shown:

I documenteded “book bans.” I thought they were hysteria. Then I opened one of the most controversial books.

Uh-oh! Long story short, Ismail had been in line with the tribal claim that modern-day "book bans" were just the latest form of hysteria on the part of those in the red tribe silo.

Then he persued one of the books which has most commonly been "banned." In this passage, he starts to describe his reaction to the book. Below, we'll call attention to one amusing point:

ISMAIL (9/11/23): There is no shortage of books being used to panic parents into protesting their local schools or libraries. Concerns over books like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson are easy to shrug off, given how challengers contort themselves to argue that scenes involving sex are simultaneously promoting promiscuity. And it’s hard to believe that a child would accidentally stumble on certain hand-picked selections from novels that are hundreds of pages long.

It’s Perfectly Normal is harder to shrug away. It’s not difficult to see why this book has been an effective cudgel, both in recent years and practically since it was published: Its images are particularly blunt and graphic. That articles and social media posts about parents’ concerns over those cartoons have often blurred them out serves to prove their point. Earlier this year, a pastor in Asheville, North Carolina, made headlines after his mic was cut off during a school board meeting. “If you don’t want to hear it in a school board meeting, why should children be able to check it out of the school system?” he reportedly shouted...

I felt sure that as a 34-year-old father of two there would be nothing in there that would offend my sensibilities. I’d heard nothing but glowing reviews from sex-ed pros about the child-friendly language in the book. But flipping through the book’s pages finally, I was a little shocked...

Ismail goes on to describe his reactions to this frequently "banned" book. Along the way, he touches on an amusing point:

Often, newspapers which defend such books against blue tribe "bans" refuse to publish the parts of the books which have produced the complaints. This may "serve to prove [the book-banners'] point," Ismail wryly muses.

Summarizing, Ismail was surprised by his own reactions to It's Perfectly Normal, given his general prior stance concerning the "banning" of books. His sensibilities rose up to offend him in a way he hadn't expected.

A shocking possibility may lurk in this essay by Ismail. As we noted yesterday, that shocking possibility was recently voiced by Bill Maher, in the following way:

 [Trump supporters] see him as the one thing that is standing between them and something even crazier. And there is a lot of Crazy on the left.

Those of us within our blue silo have railed at the Others with their incessant "book bans." But when Ismail perused this particular book, he found that he himself wasn't sure how he felt about its graphic contents.

Should this book be on the shelves of libraries in our public schools? We have no idea how to answer that question, but we'll make this suggestion:

In an age of cultural segregation—in an age when we the people frequently live in separate silos—it's easy denounce the Others for their racist / homophobic / transphobic ways.

(Or for being "Marxists," an assessment commonly tossed around on the comically awful Fox & Friends.)

Our blue tribe does that sort of thing all the time. Whatever we may end up deciding about some particular policy or book, it may be harder to consider the possibility that the Others may not be quite as crazy or evil or subhuman as we have instinctively claimed.

Bill Maher told Ari Melber that there's even a lot of crazy over here on the left! When people have started living in silos, that can sounds like a crazy idea in itself.

That said, we've seen a lot of backsliding by blue tribe members in recent days. Have some of the notions we have framed as we live in our own blue silo possibly been a bit overwrought? Is it possible that Maher was a tiny bit right?

Long ago and far way, someone razorcut Up in Michigan out of our public school textbook. 

On balance, that decision may have been unwise. 

That said, is it possible that residents of our own blue silo can overreact to such behaviors? Is it possible that we ourselves can end up being unhelpful, self-defeating? Can we end up being unwise in spite of our ballyhooed brilliance?

Tomorrow: Some liberals say they (almost) agree with DeSantis!

We humans believe the darnedest things!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

An anthropology lesson: Reading between the lines, we sense Kevin Drum's frustration:

What Republicans believe, 2023 edition

What false things do Republicans routinely believe these days? I'm not talking about wild-ass conspiracy theories like QAnon, or matters of opinion, like whether tax cuts produce higher revenue or CRT is wrecking our schools. No, I'm talking about simple, factual matters that are 100% contrary to expert opinion but are accepted routinely by most Republicans. Here are a few:

• Trump won the election.
• COVID came from a lab leak.
• Climate change is a hoax.
• Joe Biden took bribes from Hunter's clients.
• Masks don't affect COVID transmission.
• The FBI is engaged in a partisan war against Republicans.

Anything else?

It's true! Many Republican voters do believe those things. Anthropologically, one reason is this:

Such voters have heard those claims again and again—then again and again and again and again—from the "news sources" they've come to trust. Because they trust the sources in question, they assume that their statements are accurate.

Also, given the way our "news" is now delivered, many of those Republican voters have never heard a serious attempt to challenge such factual claims. 

They only hear the claims which come from within the silo of the red tribe. The old Crossfire model, in which factual claims were delivered in pairs, is long since dead and gone.

For the record, widespread belief in unlikely claims predated the age of the silo. Back in the 1980s, many people believed an array of highly improbable claims claim about sexual abuse of children in various preschools. 

As of 2002, many people believed the claim that 9/11 was an inside job.

We liberals are inclined to think that only the Others believe bogus claims. Also, why won't the Others listen to us? We're often inclined to voice some basic theories about that basic question. 

We're often inclined to believe that the Others won't listen to us because the Others are racists (sexists / misogynists / homophobes / transphobes). Our question:

Could that be one of the darnedest things we humans are inclined to believe?

THE SILOS: "A lot of Crazy on the left?"

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2023

Is our own blue bayou a swamp? According to experts, life on the cable show Fox & Friends is a daily anthropology lesson.

The propaganda flow is endless. Quite routinely, the deeply dangerous flow of propaganda is just plain comically awful. This teaches an anthropology lesson—a lesson in how far we humans will often be willing to go in support of Storyline, in fealty to Tribe.

The comically awful Fox & Friends is broadcast from within the red tribe's silo. In this morning's New York Times, Bret Stephens offers an instructive remark about the cable news shows which are broadcast from the fetid bayous which constitute our own blue tribe's blue silo.

For the record, Stephens has been aggressively anti-Trump dating to 2016. In this morning's "Conversation" with Gail Collins, he says that he'll probably vote for Joe Biden next year, "barring the miracle of a Nikki Haley or Chris Christie candidacy on the Republican line."

For ourselves, we'll definitely be voting for Biden next year, or for whoever else may appear on the Democratic line. That said, we think Stephens made an important point about life inside our own blue tribe when he cited this possible threat to Biden's re-election:

STEPHENS (9/12 23): Assuming the president wants to get re-elected, while preserving the possibility of immigration reform sometime in the next, oh, 100 years, he has to get control of the border. Right now. ...

[W]e’ve had a 30-month crisis that too many Democrats downplayed until it became a blue-state problem...[I]f Biden doesn’t get control of the border, it will become Donald Trump’s signature—and possibly winning— issue in next year’s campaign.

Could the border become Donald J. Trump's winning issue next year? We'd say that it certainly could!

Increasingly, we have a hard time believing that President Biden can get re-elected at all. For today, we'll only suggest that you take note of Stephens' remark about the way "too many Democrats downplayed [the border issue] until it became a blue-state problem."

Alas! The Crazy emerges from the red tribe's silo all day long. That said, the major stars within our own blue silo have almost wholly avoided discussing the border—until black Democratic mayors recently began to scream and complain about the failures of immigration policy.

The Crazy is endless from within the red silo. But whenever we flip over to reports from within the blue silo, we find a group of screaming Mimis who can only discuss one topic:

Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail!

For members of our own blue tribe, the notion that Trump is going to jail is pleasing comfort food. When our tribunes discuss that topic and virtually nothing else, they almost seem to be engaged in a form of moral and mental illness—and they may be ensuring Biden's defeat, much as Stephens suggests.

Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail! Starting at 4 p.m. each day, our corporate tribunes serve us bowls of that pleasing gruel and they offer us little else.

This strikes us as a form of madness by avoidance. That said, and in total fairness, Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail is a blue silo product which sells.

The friends at Fox broadcast their wares starting at 5 a.m. But under our current form of news by silo, they're never forced to interact with the tribunes of our own blue tribe. 

By the same token, the nattering tribunes of our own tribe are never forced to interact with them! So it goes in a culture of news by silo—in a culture where news and opinion are segregated by viewpoint.

Tales of immigration disaster have been spreading from the blue tribe's silo all along.  Full disclosure:

Some of these broadcasts have even been basically accurate! 

By way of contrast, corporate tribunes within our own tribe have helped us cover our ears and shutter our minds. To our own ear, the refusal to address this problem has been a form of madness by omission. 

That said, Bill Maher made a shocking statement—a statement of a different type—to MSNBC's Ari Melber last week.

In part, Bill's remark was triggered by something Melber said. Tomorrow, we'll show you what Melber said—but for today, this was part of Bill's reply:

MAHER (9/7/23): [Trump supporters] see him as the one thing that is standing between them and something even crazier. And there is a lot of Crazy on the left.

Say what? There's a lot of Crazy on the left? Is Bill allowed to say that?

More to the point, could his statement perhaps be accurate in some tiny way? Is there any chance that what he said bears a germ of truth?

As you may know, we go back with Bill all the way to the Richmond Comedy Club days. Our six appearances on his initial program, Politically Incorrect, are some sort of unassailable industry record.

We don't always agree with Bill's pronouncements. But we thought his statement to Melber had the ring of truth.

To our ear, the love of Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail has become a form of moral and intellectual illness. In fairness, this theme is incessantly broadcast from within our blue silo because it's good for profits.

Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail? We love love love to hear it! 

In our view, it has become a dangerous form of crazy by omission. But is there possibly something more to what Bill said? Is there some sort of "crazy on the left" by commission which could end up defeating Biden next year?

Roy Orbison sang of a certain blue bayou. Awful as The Others may be, is our own blue silo a swamp?

Tomorrow: Like Augustine, we confess

STARTING TOMORROW: The Silos!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

Jon Stewart murders sleep: An earlier war—the so-called Great War—was fought from within the trenches.

Lucky for us, none of us were there. For one poet's recollection, you can just click here.

By way of contrast, the dangerous war we're currently fighting is being fought from within the silos. It's going to be very hard to find a route of escape.

When did we the American people officially enter the silos? Construction had been underway for some time, but the crowning blow may have come when Jon Stewart murdered sleep.

You may recall Stewart's attack. In fairness, it seemed like a good idea at the time—but according to the leading authority on the topic, here's how the well-intentioned comedian destroyed the existing regime: 

Jon Stewart's 2004 appearance on Crossfire

On October 15, 2004, the American comedian Jon Stewart appeared on CNN's Crossfire, hosted by the media commentators Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. The Daily Show, a satirical talk show hosted by Stewart, had released America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction earlier that year; in theory, Stewart's appearance on Crossfire, a show that featured debate between left- and right-wing personalities, was intended to boost sales of the book. 

Instead, Stewart heavily criticized Crossfire on air; as he saw it, the show lacked nuance and was instead an outlet for partisan hackery. Both hosts pushed back on Stewart's criticisms, but Carlson in particular traded more personal blows with him, with the two insulting each other on air while Begala attempted to steer the show back on track. After the segment, Stewart went backstage with Begala to continue the conversation in a calmer manner.

The tape and transcript of the segment broke into wide circulation, impacting all three men involved. Three months after the appearance, Crossfire was cancelled...

To be fair, Tucker Carlson hadn't yet emerged as the full-blown modern-day Carlson. (In June 2005, Rachel Maddow began her cable career as one of his regular sidekicks on his nightly MSNBC show.) 

Tucker Carlson wasn't yet the fully deranged modern-day Tucker Carlson! Beyond that, Begala has always struck us as one of the sanest and brightest partisan pundits found on cable news air. 

That said, Crossfire actually was a TV program which tended to run on "partisan hackery." Nineteen years after its demise, we'd have to say this:

Crossfire ran on the rocket fuel known as "partisan hackery." Still, that system was vastly superior to the system of "news by silo" which has emerged as the successor to the "partisan shoutfest" model.

(Full disclosure! We ourselves made one appearance on Crossfire, in June 2003. Robert Novak was the conservative host. Begala fought on our side.)

Back in the day, Crossfire was a nightly, high-profile example of the partisan shoutfest model. That model dated all the way back to the invention of modern TV punditry, including the early shoutfests on PBS and the Point Counterpoint segments on 60 Minutes which were later satirized on Saturday Night Live.

TV punditry had always worked from the partisan shoutfest model. On October 15, 2004, Stewart came along and robbed us of this cultural gift.

Today we're engaged in a great civil war, a war which is being fought from within giant partisan silos. The sheer stupidity which has resulted dwarfs the flaws of the unmistakable partisan hackery concerning which Stewart complained.

Was Stewart merely a stalking-horse sent to enable Trump's later campaigns? We know of no reason to think so.

But as it turns out, the hackish system Stewart destroyed was vastly superior to the uber-hackish system with which it has now been replaced.

Today, the downsides of this silo war can be seen all around us. Indeed, the downsides of living life inside one of these silos are routinely vast. 

All this week, we'll consider this vastly dangerous state of affairs. And yes, the voices which emerge from our own blue silo can be unhelpfully hackish too.

Stewart destroyed an ancient regime—murdered a type of sleep. Erection of our modern-day partisan silos proceeded directly from there.

This silo war is very big business. Given the way our brains tend to work, can silos be survived?

Tomorrow: It can get this bad

What does the Stop W.O.K.E. Act actually say?

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2023

The pleasures of paraphrase: Friend, what should American children be taught in our public schools?

Also, what should students never be taught? Just last year, one well-known state passed a widely-discussed new law addressing such basic questions.

That well-known state is Florida. Just last year, Florida's legislature passed the childishly-named "Stop W.O.K.E. Act."

We still know of no way to access a clean, proofread version of this widely paraphrased law. But in this post from Thursday, Kevin Drum listed some of the things that Florida students must never be taught, according to the Florida law.

What must public school teachers teach in the Sunshine State? What must they never teach? Here's the start of the chunk of the law Drum quoted in his post:

Instruction and supporting materials on the topics enumerated in this section must be consistent with the following principles of individual freedom:

No person is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex.

No race is inherently superior to another race.

No person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, disability, or sex.

That language about "principles of individual freedom" strikes us as fairly silly. That said, we'd have to agree with the general thrust of what that passage says:

Should children ever be taught that one "race" "is inherently superior to some other "race?"

Public school kids should never be taught that, the Stop W.O.K.E. Act plainly says. That directive strikes us as perfectly obvious. 

Moving right along, tell us this:

Should kids be taught that a person should ever be "discriminated against" solely or partly on the basis of race or national origin?

Public school kids should never be taught such a thing, the Stop W.O.K.E. Act plainly says. On its face, we'd agree with that directive—though it may all depend on what the meaning of "discriminated against" is.

(Is an Asian American kid being "discriminated against" if some selective college is looking for ways to create a student population with a wider array of ethnicities? We'll guess that opinions will differ on a semantic question like that.)

Also, the Stop W.O.K.E. Act plainly says that students should never be taught that a person is ever "inherently racist [or] sexist...solely by virtue of his or her race or sex."

That seems like a fairly obvious directive. Would you really want some teacher in some public school telling kids that white girls are inherently racist, or that black boys are inherently sexist? Would you really want to let a bunch of public school teachers, however well-intentioned you may take them to be, head down that treacherous road?

Just for the record, it's hard to enforce directives like these for a very large state. 

On occasion, public school teachers will say and do the darnedest things. At such times, it may be hard to establish what has been said—but it's hard to believe that liberals would disagree with the general thrust of the directives we've listed.

In Thursday's post, Kevin continued on from there, quoting more of the text of the Florida law. Eventually, he reached the directive shown below.

Personally, we think this directive makes obvious sense. But what does this directive actually say and mean?

Instruction and supporting materials on the topics enumerated in this section must be consistent with the following principles of individual freedom:

[...]

A person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.

Personally, we think that directive makes sense. We don't think that some teacher should be telling a bunch of public school kids that they should—indeed, that they "must"—feel guilt for the reprehensible actions of the benighted, homicidal people who have come before them.

There are many such people in human history. For example, should kids be told that they "must feel guilt" because of what Adolph Hitler did? 

That strikes us as a weird idea. Would you really want a public school teacher heading down some such road?

To the extent that it can be quoted, we've quoted some chunks of The Stop W.O.K.E. Act. To the extent that such legislation can ever be enforced, we think that these provisions make sense.

We don't think that kids should be taught that one "race" is superior to some other "race." We don't think that kids should be taught that they should or must feel guilt for what miscreants in the past have done.

That said, the human heart wants what it wants. More specifically, the human heart often wants The Others to be morally and intellectually wrong in every possible way.

In our view, so it went when Adam Serwer recently paraphrased that provision about anguish and guilt. And so it went, to our surprise, when Drum, our favorite blogger, offered his own paraphrase.

It seems to us that Serwer's account of what that provision says and means is just plainly wrong (though it's also very familiar.) That said, his paraphrase serves a basic pleasure principle, in which we blues are encouraged to believe that The Others are always stupid and evil and wrong.

We were surprised to see Drum go there too! In our view, his subsequent paraphrase of that directive is also weirdly inaccurate.

(Paraphrase can be like that! We noted that fact long ago.)

We may have more on this topic next week. There's a lot to be said about what should (and shouldn't) be taught in the nation's public schools. 

An important discussion could emerge from that question. That said, our failing discourse doesn't run on the fuel of careful discussion. 

Over and over and over and over, our discourse now runs on the rocket fuel of pleasing tribal attacks. Quite plainly, nothing is going to change that fact. According to major future historians, Alea iacta est!

For the record: Alea iacta est? 

According to the leading authority, "Caesar was said to have borrowed the phrase from Menander, the famous Greek writer of comedy, whom he appreciated more than the Roman playwright Terence."

The Washington Post fact-checks Trump!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

The wages of separation:  In print editions, the report appears atop the front page of this morning's Washington Post. 

In his report, Isaac Arnsdorf performs a very basic journalistic function. The hard-copy headlines say this:

Trump escalates false claims about Biden
On the trail, he plays up unfounded allegations about business dealings

We'll note that there's a basic difference between "unfounded" and "false." That said, Arnsdorf is executing a basic journalistic function. He's fact-checking a series of claims made about President Biden.

In theory, this is an important journalistic function. That said, we'll note a few problems with Arnsdorf's report, some of which can't be solved in any obvious way by the Washington Post.

As the Post's headlines suggest, Arnsdorf is limiting himself to false or unfounded claims made by Donald J. Trump. One problem:

As we noted in this morning's report, other such claims are being made, on a nightly basis, by major players on the Fox News Channel. 

The Post should be complimented for fact-checking claims by a political candidate like Trump. But, for whatever reason, news orgs are often much more reluctant to fact-check influential bogus claims made by partisan "journalists."

Here's a second possible problem with Arnsdorf's report. Some of his corrections of Trump may leave a certain bad taste in the reader's mouth:

ARNSDORF (9/8/23): In a campaign video posted to social media in August, Trump falsely claimed, “It is now 100% proven that the Biden Crime Family received more than $20 million from foreign countries while Crooked Joe was vice president.” That allegation comes from a House Oversight Committee Republican staff report detailing payments from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to Hunter Biden and his associates. Only about $7 million of the total was attributable to Hunter Biden, and none to Joe Biden, according to an analysis in The Washington Post by The Fact Checker.

Elsewhere, Trump falsely alleged that “at least nine Biden family members were paid vast sums of money through 20 different shell companies for no legitimate reason at all.” The source of the claim is another House Oversight Republican staff report, which found payments to Hunter Biden and two relatives, not nine family members and not including Joe Biden. The companies were operating businesses, not shells, The Fact Checker found.

Oof! Those corrections seem like a type of first cousin to the apocryphal "left-handed compliment." To wit:

Did nine members of "the Biden Crime Family" receive payments from foreign countries? Actually, it was only three members!

Also, did the Crime Family receive twenty million dollars in payments? Actually, Hunter Biden received only seven million!

(How much money may have gone to other family members? That question isn't addressed.)

We're going to guess that Candidate Trump might be pleased with such "corrections." That said, the largest problem with reports of this type would be extremely hard to correct.

A newspaper like the Washington Post could compose a perfect fact-check of some inaccurate or unfounded claim about President Biden. It could place that perfect fact-check right at the top of page A1, as it does today. 

It could even perform a careful fact-check of the claim that Vice President Biden helped fire Viktor Shokin for the reason which is described every night on the Fox News Channel, generally as part of a highly selective partisan rant.

The Post could engage in such admirable conduct. The problem would be this:

No one watching the Fox News Channel would ever hear a word about it! There is no obvious way to address the type of journalistic Babel in which we all currently live.

It's hard to address our ongoing Babel. At present, the promulgation of tribal misinformation and propaganda is an extremely big business.

Tons of money are being made as we the people consume such dueling porridges. Can a large, diverse nation really function this way?

Our answer would be no.

Why do people believe those claims about Biden?

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

You can't run a nation this way:  We've often described Kevin Drum as our favorite blogger.

That doesn't mean that he's always right, although it's always possible that he actually is. We'd especially recommend his years of work on the apparent effects of (worldwide) lead abatement—work which formed the backbone of this cover report in the January 2013 Mother Jones.

It's fascinating work. That doesn't mean that its author is always right, and we think that Kevin has wandered way off the track in yesterday's post about Florida's Stop W.O.K.E. Act.

At issue is the power of paraphrase. Also, at issue is the difficulty involved in that essential analytical task. 

Are we humans really able to conduct a rational discourse? It seems to us that the question is raised by Kevin's discussion of that topic, and by much of what appears in the comments to his post. 

Almost surely, we'll focus on that post in next week's reports. For today, let's consider an earlier post by Drum—the post which carried this headline:

Polling about Hunter Biden is off-the-charts insane

At issue was this recent CNN survey. That said, the results which Kevin called "insane" were mainly about Joe Biden. 

For now, let's stick with the headline game. Here's the headline which sits atop CNN's report:

A majority of Americans believe Joe Biden, as VP, was involved with son’s business dealings

Say what? A majority of Americans believe that Joe Biden was involved with Hunter Biden’s business dealings? 

In Kevin's view, such results are insane. Headline included once again, here's how the report begins:

A majority of Americans believe Joe Biden, as VP, was involved with son’s business dealings

Most Americans say they think President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings with Ukraine and China while he served as vice president under Barack Obama, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

A majority, 61%, say they think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with 42% saying they think he acted illegally, and 18% saying that his actions were unethical but not illegal...

A 55% majority of the public says the president has acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter Biden over potential crimes, while 44% say that he has acted appropriately.

According to the survey, something like 60 percent of respondents think that Joe Biden behaved illegally, or perhaps just unethically, with respect to his son's business dealings. 

"It's almost impossible to overstate how completely nuts this is," Kevin says. "There is literally zero evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter's business affairs. There is, if anything, less than zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal."

We can't say we completely agree with Kevin's assessments. We're more inclined to agree with one of Kevin's commenters, whose text we'll present below.

That said, 23 percent of Democrats—and 39 percent of independents—think Joe Biden did something illegal with respect to his son's business ventures!

Kevin thinks this view is insane—and obviously, it's very bad news for people who want to see Biden defeat Trump again next year. 

Needless to say, we're one of those people. For today, we'd like to focus on where such views have come from.

Last night, we saw it happen again. We saw Sean Hannity lay out the claim that Vice President Biden went to Ukraine in 2016 and fired an idealistic prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because Shokin was jeopardizing Hunter Biden's business interests with the Burisma company.

The story has been told in a very different way by many mainstream news orgs. That said, the story is told the Hannity way night after night after night after night on the Fox News Channel.

Millions of people were watching Hannity tell his story last night. No one was present to challenge his factual claims, which seem to come from a version of BizarroWorld.

That said, this story is told "the Hannity way" night after night on Fox. Last week, we watched an episode of the popular Fox News program, The Five, in which this topic was discussed. 

Predictably, here's what happened:

The panel's (well informed) token liberal, Jessica Tarlov, attempted to challenge the factual claims of resident termagant Greg Gutfeld. When she did, the four "conservative" members of the panel took turns interrupting and talking over everything she tried to say.

Tarlov was interrupted again and again, then again and again. This is the way the "news" is now delivered on the Fox News Channel. 

At one time, the late Alan Colmes was present at Fox every night to challenge Sean Hannity's claims. During that era, CNN presented Crossfire every weeknight, with tribunes of the two major parties instantly challenging each other's claims for everyone to see.

That said, Fox abandoned that format long ago—except, for the most part, on The Five. On that program, one token liberal appears each night, only to be shouted down by "the other four" when Mandated Red Tribe Storylines are challenged.

This is what "the news" looks like when "the news" is segregated by viewpoint. Social media takes it from there. Simply put, you can't run a major modern nation in this grotesquely disinformative way.

People who watch the Fox News Channel hear the story about Joe Biden and Viktor Shokin night after night after night. They hear "the great one," Mark Levin, as he rants out the mandated story. They hear Sean Hannity tell the same tale—and they see Tarlov shouted down when she tries to challenge the channel's standard claims.

Most Fox viewers have no idea that a different set of claims about the firing of Shokin exists. Simply put, you can't run a very large nation this way without creating a Babel. 

For ourselves, we're less impressed with Joe Biden's role in this matter than Kevin seems to be. We're inclined to agree with the observations made by one of Drum's commenters:

COMMENTER: I am a Democrat and I almost fully agree...with "There is literally zero evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter's business affairs. There is, if anything, less than zero evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal. "

Where I leave Kevin's line of argument is as follows. Biden knew, or should have known, Hunter was robustly using his last name to his economic benefit. Joe should have taken more active public steps to distance himself from Hunter. For example,

—Tell Hunter NOT to call him when with business associates 

—Not take Hunter on formal governmental trips 

—Not share his official schedule with Hunter: his son only needs to know when his father is available, but not who the VP is meeting with etc/

I believe Joe messed up on the perception side of his relationship with Hunter.

We're inclined to agree with thar. We think Joe Biden was way too permissive concerning the behavior of his wayward son, but also concerning the behavior of his own somewhat slippery brother, James Biden.

In the larger sense, it seems to us that Joe Biden has always had a weird idea about the people he refers to as "the Bidens." 

He seems to think that this family is one of our royal political families, like the Kennedys or the Roosevelts. It would be better if we had no royal political families at all, but the idea that "the Bidens" are some such group strikes us as a bit delusional. 

Joe Biden's personal family story seems drawn from the wellsprings of myth. He had the one perfect son—the late Beau Biden. 

He also had the vastly disordered, ne'er-do-well son, the destructive Hunter Biden.

At some point, it seems to us that he should have reined in his dysfunctional son. On the brighter side, we now apparently know who told Maureen Dowd about Beau Biden's (allegedly) last few dying words, generating the poisonous column, and the subsequent poisonous front-page report, which helped hand the White House to Donald J. Trump back in 2016.

In our view, Joe Biden should have told his son and his brother to knock it off—to quit. It seems he never did that, right up to the point where he has said, this very year, that Hunter Biden has done nothing wrong.

That said, the larger story here involves "segregated news." That story goes like this:

People who watch the Fox News Channel hear the Joe Biden/Viktor Shokin story night after night after night.

Social media takes it from there. A large modern nation can't function this way. Go ahead! Take a good look around!

A large, diverse nation can't function this way!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

Headlines in the Post: Grumpily waiting to see our favorite surgeon, we scanned the front-page headlines in today's Washington Post.

We're speaking of the print edition of the Post, which is still a traditional newspaper. Above the fold, the front-page headlines this morning said this:

Climate-linked ills threaten humanity
Pakistan is the epicenter of a wave of health threats from global warming, a Post analysis finds

Biden to block oil drilling in Arctic
Ban would cover more than 10 million acres of 'irreplaceable' lands

Those reports appeared on page A1, above the fold. Below the fold, the front-page headlines said this:

Resistance on repeat to masking at schools
Response to virus uptick draws educators into a political battle

In Kyiv, Blinken pledges $1B in additional aid
Visit comes as doubts swirl around Ukraine's halting counteroffensive

For Santos, a life in Brazil at odds with GOP politics

For the record, that last report was a "human interest" throw-away regarding an insignificant Republican member of Congress. 

All in all, we were struck by the minor role these topics play in the realm of blue tribe "cable news." If you watch blue tribe cable tonight, you won't be hearing about oil drilling in the Arctic, or about the way a wave of health threats are threatening humanity.

You won't be hearing about public schools in the low-income state of Mississippi. You won't be hearing about Mayor Adams and immigration, or about Mayor Breed.

(To hear about Mayors Adams and Breed, you'll gave to tune in to Fox.)

What will you hear about instead on our own tribe's corporate channel? For the Post's reports on those topics, we had to turn to pages A2 and A3, where these headlines appeared:

Prosecutors say they plan to indict Hunter Biden this month
Filing suggests special counsel will seek gun charge in Delaware

Ga. prosecutors predict four-month trial in Trump case
Judge remains skeptical of timeline as attorneys attempt to separate cases

Trump accuser Carroll wins liability claims in next New York civil case

Included there are the topics our blue tribe panels discuss You see, blue tribe cable has almost wholly disappeared into the silo marked Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail.

Few topics are allowed to intrude on the pleasures provided by that cable food product. Our porridge is served by a circle of friends who pleasure us with hours of speculations about the rolling legal minutia involved in a welter of trials. 

They seem to care about nothing else. In this way, they hold a spotlight up to our tribe's ongoing retreat from the world.

Also, sadly, this:

Last night, we saw the apparent plan to indict Hunter Biden discussed on MSNBC and on the Fox News Channel. That said, an increasingly familiar pattern emerged:

Remember how, in the old TV shows, the names had been changed to protect the innocent? In last night's reports, only the names remained the same! Viewers of our nation's dueling "news channels" were offered completely different sets of claims about this deeply dangerous topic.

Long ago and far away, it was a simpler American world. 

For the most part, we were a two-identity society (black and white). We had a potent external enemy (the shoe-banging Soviet Union) imposing a type of unity on us. 

Most important, we had Walter and David and not too much else. It was hard to get exposed to crackpot accounts of the news.

Today, our own blue tribe is serviced by a gang of highly paid corporate hirelings. (You aren't allowed, or even encouraged, to know how much they're paid.)

Within the realm of corporate profits, Trump Trump Jail is a top-selling product. Our tribunes talk about little else. The most important rule is this:

Our tribunes never speak to Others! They only speak to collections of their favorites and friends.

If you turn to the Fox News Channel, the propaganda which starts at 5 o'clock each morning would merely be comically awful in a different world. In this world, that clowning, and our own tribe's studied cluelessness, defines an existential crisis—and let this also be said:

Watching Fox, you will sometimes see discussions of actual topics and actual problems which our own tribunes disappear!

Long ago, Little Red Riding Hood took a stroll through a very dangerous wood.

Under the guidance of Lawrence and his stunningly landlocked friends, we blue tribe true believers are now the ones who are taking that dangerous stroll. 

For extra credit only: Back in early 2016, why in the world did Vice President Biden move to get rid of Viktor Shokin?

Last night, we saw "the great one," the ranting Mark Levin, provide a ranting account of that matter to Sean Hannity's viewers. No one was present to challenge his claims—and over on our own tribal channel, a similar separation prevails.

A large, diverse nation can't function this way. If you doubt that, take Springsteen's advice:

"Son, take a good look around."

Watching the rational animal work!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

Cancer deaths, quotations:  Long ago and far away, we advanced a major pronouncement:

It's all anthropology now!

By that, we basically meant that the die has been cast. It's all over but the shouting. That's pretty much what we meant,

We meant that it's much too late to expect a good outcome to our ongoing national nightmare. The best we can do is review the hard-wired human shortcomings which have us in this mess.

Like love, anthropology hurts! That's even true on the level of high-end mainstream journalism. Consider two current examples:

The rise in worldwide cancer deaths:

This first example comes from this post by Kevin Drum. Drum cites a report in The Guardian which state that worldwide cancer deaths among adults who are under 50 have risen by 27% since 1990. 

That sounds like a piece of terrible news, and that's how The Guardian plays it.

Sighing audibly, Drum notes that the report in question fails to note an essential fact—the world's population has grown by roughly 50% over that same stretch of time. "That puts a wee bit different spin on this," Drum drily notes. 

Death rates are down, but so what—deaths are up! So works the rational animal.

The text of the Stop WOKE Act:

This second example comes from this report in The Atlantic. Adam Serwer offers this account of Florida's Stop WOKE Act:

SERWER (9/5/23): ...[Governor Ron] DeSantis has spent much of his time in office cracking down on “wokeness,” to the delight of his conservative fans. The state has passed laws censoring classroom instruction that might lead students to conclude that racial discrimination, against Black Americans in particular, persists into the present, even as it engages in such discrimination in broad daylight.

One of those laws is the Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits any instruction that, as the Miami Herald reported, “could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, ethnicity, sex or national origin.”...

What does the Stop WOKE Act say or do? Instead of quoting the actual text of the actual law, Serwer quotes the Miami Herald's account of what the law says and does—an account which may perhaps seem to be inaccurate.

On its face, this is peculiar journalism. Serwer offers a link to a Miami Herald report, but he never offers a link to the actual text of the Stop WOKE Act itself.

In fairness to Serwer, the authors of that Herald report didn't link to the text of the law either. They offered their own account of what the law said and they let it go at that.

We now ask the obvious question:

Is it true? Does the infamous Stop WOKE Act actually prohibit any instruction which “could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, ethnicity, sex or national origin?"

For reasons we've discussed in the past, it's a little bit hard to say. We've never been able to find a clean, proofread version of the famous law's actual text in our lengthy online searches. 

That said, clicking through additional links from that Herald report, we ended up at this version of the law. And no, that version of the law doesn't seem to say what the Herald, and now Serwer, have said that it says. 

The Stop WOKE Act doesn't prohibit any instruction which “could prompt students to feel discomfort about a historical event because of their race, ethnicity, sex or national origin?" You can check that out for yourself, but we've learned one thing in the past quarter century:

It's pointless to offer explanations about a matter like this. At any particular point in time, we rational animals want to believe certain things, and we simply won't be shown that we might be wrong.

Once we've said it, it's true forever! It's just how we animals act.

What does the Stop WOKE Act actually say? Due to the way we rational animals work, major journalists have never complained about the apparent lack of a finished online text. We prefer to work from our own accounts of whatever it is that we want to say that the infamous law must have said.

Also, cancer deaths have gone up! So has the size of our daft human race, but why should we bother with that?

We keep hearing from Cassandra!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

Gloomily, Bret Stephens speaks:  We keep hearing from Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, brother of immortal Hector and the "strange man" Paris. 

History teaches us this:

Cassandra was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her elder brother was Hector, the hero of the Greek-Trojan war. ...[S]he was admired by the god Apollo, who sought to win her love by means of the gift of seeing the future. According to Aeschylus, she promised him her favours, but after receiving the gift, she went back on her word. As the enraged Apollo could not revoke a divine power, he added to it the curse that nobody would believe her prophecies...

Gloomily, Cassandra is now prophesying that Candidate Biden won't be able to win next year. Or at least, we think we're speaking about Cassandra. We're working from these accounts:

Cassandra was described by the chronicler Malalas in his account of the Chronography as "shortish, round-faced, white, mannish figure, good nose, good eyes, dark pupils, blondish, curly, good neck, bulky breasts, small feet, calm, noble, priestly, an accurate prophet foreseeing everything, practicing hard, virgin." Meanwhile, in the account of Dares the Phrygian, she was illustrated as ". . .of moderate stature, round-mouthed, and auburn-haired. Her eyes flashed. She knew the future."

Whatever.

Bret Stephens has apparently been hearing from Cassandra too. In this morning's New York Times, he tries to explain, to our blue tribe, why Biden is polling so poorly:

Why So Many Americans Are So Down on Biden

That's the headline on the column. He mentions some things that get discussed on Fox but get disappeared on our own tribe's channels. Also, he mentioned this:

STEPHENS (9/6/23): Easy to see is that the president is not young for his age. The stiff gait and the occasional falls. The apparent dozing off. The times he draws a blank or struggles to complete a thought. Yet the same people yelling #ResignFeinstein or #ResignMcConnell don’t appear to be especially vocal when it comes to the president’s fitness, as if noting the obvious risks repeating a Republican talking point.

Oof. On the other hand, we can't quite call that inaccurate.

This very morning, on Morning Joe, the pundits conducted a long discussion of this and several related matters. A few pundits tried to connect to basic reality. Others seemed to be whistling along in the dark.

Trump is just three years younger, they cry. That said, Trump spills over with crazy energy. That just doesn't seem to be true when it comes to the older guy.

Especially with respect to tribal loathing, the Morning Joe chat was well worth discussing. The lack of transcripts makes that hard, but we may give it a shot.

We'll always have Paris, Cassandra would say. And then, out of nowhere, they didn't!

Alabama has seven House members!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

How many should be black? When is a gerrymander really a gerrymander? When is a gerrymander racist?

When is something resembling a gerrymander actually required by federal law? Also, how many of Alabama's seven House members should be black?

These questions are raised by the ongoing battle over Alabama's proposed redistricting of its seven House seats. In this new report for Mother Jones, Ari Berman describes the mathematical background to this ongoing dispute:

BERMAN (9/5/23): In early 2022, a three-judge panel that included two appointees of Donald Trump found that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by failing to draw a second majority-Black congressional district in the state. Alabama has a Black population of 27 percent, but just one of the state’s seven congressional districts was likely to elect a candidate favored by Black voters under the maps drawn by Alabama Republicans. In June, the Supreme Court, in a surprise victory for voting rights, affirmed the lower court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan, paving the way for Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district.

But over the summer, Alabama Republicans flagrantly defied the orders of the federal district court and the US Supreme Court. Instead of drawing a new majority-Black district, the state legislature in July drew a seat that was only 40 percent Black and would have been easily carried by Trump, while lowering the Black population in the state’s lone majority-minority district...

There you see the mathematical background to this continuing dispute. In short:

Alabama has a black population of 27 percent. But under the state's original redistricting map, it's likely that the state would have elected only one black House member.

One House member out of seven is only 14.3 percent. The courts ordered the state to create a map which would likely have resulted in the election of two black House members (28.6 percent), and the state failed to comply.

That's the mathematical background to this matter. Here's a bit of the logical background:

As a general matter, there's nothing that says that some group is entitled to proportional representation in a state's House delegation. For example:

Suppose that some state is 27% Republican. Also, suppose that this imaginary state has seven House seats. 

There is no guarantee that the state's delegation should include two Republicans! Indeed, if the Republican population is evenly distributed throughout the state, and if the state legislature creates seven compact and contiguous congressional districts, the odds are good that the state delegation will have no Republicans at all.

(We live in state of that general type. In presidential elections, Maryland is roughly one-third Republican—but Republicans hold only one of Maryland's eight House seats. In Massachusetts, Republicans hold none of the state's nine House seats, even though the state is roughly one-third Republican.)

Why then are the federal courts ordering Alabama to create a legislative map with two majority black congressional districts? This takes us into provisions of the Voting Rights Act—and into the kinds of political warfare which helps define the state of our dysfunctional present-day politics.

For the record, we all have a general idea of what a gerrymandered congressional district looks like. As a general matter, we tend to picture a district with an extremely weird-looking, non-compact and non-contiguous shape—a weird shape which has been engineered to produce a desired political outcome.

That said, consider this:

Over the course of recent history, some of the weirdest looking congressional districts have been drawn to ensure the likelihood of black representation. In effect, such districts have been gerrymandered to produce a court-ordered end.

We close with a welter of questions:

Alabama is 27 percent black. In your view, does that mean that the state should have two black members of Congress, instead of perhaps only one?

In this new post, Kevin Drum describes Alabama's original proposal as an example of "racist gerrymandering." Our blue tribe is strongly inclined to throw bombs of this type, but is it politically wise?

Also this:

How well do you understand the legal requirements which lie behind the court orders in this ongoing matter? How well does anyone you know understand these matters?

Those legal requirements are designed to increase black representation in Congress. Do you think that's a good idea? Also, and very important:

Are you able to imagine the possibility that someone might not agree?

MISSISSIPPI MEH: Does anyone give a flying fark...

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

...about our nation's kids? Long ago and far away, the Associated Press offered a lengthy news report about an important topic.

Quickly, let's amend that statement:

The topic of the AP report is very important as a matter of theory. In practice, it isn't clear than anyone actually cares about the topic in question. Also, it isn't clear that anyone is prepared to offer a competent analysis of the claims under review.

With those corrections in place, let's move quickly ahead. 

The report was written by the AP's Sharon Lurye. The report appeared on May 17. The AP's headline said this:

‘Mississippi miracle': Kids’ reading scores have soared in Deep South states

According to the lengthy AP report, "reading scores have soared" in recent years in three Gulf Coast states. In Mississippi, the test score gains have been so large that a pleasing term has been getting thrown around, in that AP headline and elsewhere:

LURIE (5/17/23): [T]he country has taken notice of what some have called the Mississippi miracle. Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Virginia are among the states that have recently adopted some of the same policies. As Mississippi climbed [in] the rankings, the Barksdale Institute, an influential organization in literacy policy in the state, got phone calls from about two dozen states.

The institute’s CEO, Kelly Butler, said she tells them there’s no secret to the strategy.

“We know how to teach reading,” she said. “We just have to do it everywhere.”

"All three states have trained thousands of teachers in the so-called science of reading," Lurye went on to say. To Lurye's credit, the term "so-called" was hers.

Alabama and Louisiana were cited in the AP report, but the state of Mississippi was the obvious star.  In Mississippi, reading scores have soared to the point where a certain M-bomb is being tossed around. 

As we noted in the weeks preceding a recent surgery, black fourth graders in Mississippi now seem to be outperforming their counterparts from around the nation in reading by upwards of one whole academic year. Ditto for Mississippi's lower income fourth graders, of whatever race.

Mississippi is a high-poverty, low social services state. As everyone knows, the state occupies a spot at the very heart of this nation's racial history, a history both brutal and tragic.

Now, Mississippi has reportedly found the way to produce an educational miracle among its deserving black (and lower income) kids. By any rational assessment, this counts as an important claim about a very important topic.

That AP report appeared in the middle of May. Before that recent surgery, we spent a great deal of time examining the data upon which its claims are based.

As a matter of theory and widespread pretense, the AP's various claims are extremely important. But in the months which have passed since the AP report appeared, we Americans have had a chance to assess how much we actually care about the topic under review in that AP report.

It has now been almost four months since that AP report appeared. In the months which have passed, we can find no sign that the New York Times has ever produced a news report about this allegedly important topic.

We find no sign of any such report by the Washington Post. In fact, we're able to find no sign of any news report on this topic by any major American newspaper. 

As for the "favorite reporters and friends" who serve as our tribunes on MSNBC, we know of no time when that AP report has ever been mentioned at all.

Does anyone give a flying felafel about the nation's black kids? Does anyone within our own blue tribe care about such kids?

Our own blue tribe has been striking that pose for at least the past sixty years. By now, does anyone care about those kids, or about anything else?

Tomorrow: Out in the city of angels, Michael Hiltzik speaks

SEGREGATION NOW: We watch "for hours and hours and hours!"

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

Comfort from "dear, dear friends:" Given a second bite of the apple, the late Roger Ailes caught on.

At MSNBC, it took a great deal longer. Believe it nor not, the channel started like this:

MSNBC was launched on July 15, 1996. The first show was anchored by Jodi Applegate and included news, interviews, and commentary. During the day, rolling news coverage continued with The Contributors, a show that featured Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, as well as interactive programming coordinated by Applegate, John Gibson, and John Seigenthaler. 

MSNBC gradually increased its emphasis on politics. After completing its seven-year survey of cable channels, the Project for Excellence in Journalism said in 2007 that "MSNBC is moving to make politics a brand, with a large dose of opinion and personality."

In January 2001, Mike Barnicle's MSNBC show started, but it was canceled in June 2001 because of high production costs. In June, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer said that he would not have started MSNBC had he foreseen the difficulty of attracting viewers.

[...]

In the aftermath of September 11, MSNBC began calling itself "America's NewsChannel" and hired opinionated hosts like Alan Keyes, Phil Donahue, Pat Buchanan, and Tucker Carlson. This branding makeover, however, was followed by declining ratings.

Indeed, the channel had started "under a partnership between Microsoft and General Electric's NBC unit." At that time, General Electric was being run by CEO Jack Welch, the conservative near-billionaire. 

Presumably, Welch's political orientation helps explain the way the channel conducted its years of war against Clinton, Clinton and Gore—years of war our blue tribe's journalistic and academic friends have never agreed to discuss. At any rate:

As you can see from that early lineup of personalities, MSNBC wasn't designed, at its inception, to supply liberal viewers with a reliable cadre of imaginary TV friends.

The channel wandered in the desert for several decades. Today, though, it relies on the presence of an imaginary friendship cadre as no TV channel has done since the day when The Mickey Mouse Club finally went off the air.

Under current branding arrangements, the channel's hosts all agree to pretend that they and the channel's many contributors are a group of close personal friends. 

We first mentioned this drift years ago, with respect to certain types of silly programming on The Rachel Maddow Show. That said, it was Nicole Wallace who memorialized this childish behavioral construct with the standard introduction she employs on her highly popular weekday afternoon program.

Here she is, at the start of yesterday's two-hour program:

WALLACE (9/1/23): What has become totally normal for Donald Trump and his closest allies under increasing legal scrutiny is where we begin today with some of our favorite reporters and friends... 

Wallace went on to introduce the trio of favorites and/or friends who constituted her first panel. On this occasion, she didn't employ the gruesome "Lucky for us" tagline, in which we viewer are assured that we're amazingly lucky to have such luminaries under contract as our official friends.

The claim that everyone is each other's friend, "dear friend," or "dear, dear friend" is now a standard part of MSNBC branding. In such ways, the channel's massively overpaid corporate employees talk down to the channel's remarkably tolerant viewers—and we viewers have shown our gratitude by tuning in in record numbers to visit each day with our friends.

The Michel Mouse Club began each show with a roll call of our (9-year-old) friends. The Fox News Channel adopted that format as of February 1998. 

Unlucky for us, MSNBC eventually followed suit.

You'd almost think that the childishness of this friendship branding would speak for itself. Given the way we liberals have traditionally described ourselves, you'd almost think that we'd be turned off by being condescended to in such transparently fraudulent ways.

Reality has turned out to be different! According to experts, at times of significant turmoil, we humans are hard-wired to seek the comforts of the tribe. We seek the reassurances of friends—of friends who say the things we want to hear and tell us nothing else. 

On MSNBC, the friends have agreed to discuss one topic:

Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail

The friends discuss that topic and virtually nothing else. The dumbness of this selective behavior rivals the comedic awfulness put on daily display by the friends at the Fox News Channel, starting at 5 a.m. every weekday morning.

According to major anthropologists, we humans are built to seek epistemic comfort and reassurance at turbulent times such as these. During Donald J. Trump's first year in the White House, the late Janet Malcolm unwittingly described this psychic tie in a lengthy profile of the Maddow Show in the New Yorker.

Malcolm had a long career as a very major journalist and author. In the passage show below, she described the way she herself had bonded with Maddow's "performance of the Rachel figure" during this very bad time for our tribe:

MALCOLM (10/2/17): Maddow is widely praised for the atmosphere of cheerful civility and accessible braininess that surrounds her stage persona. She is onstage, certainly, and makes no bones about being so. She regularly reminds us of the singularity of her show (“You will hear this nowhere else”; “Very important interview coming up, stay with us”; “Big show coming up tonight”). Like a carnival barker, she leads us on with tantalizing hints about what is inside the tent.

As I write this, I think of something that subliminally puzzles me as I watch the show. Why do I stay and dumbly watch the commercials instead of getting up to finish washing the dishes? By now, I know every one of the commercials as well as I know the national anthem: the Cialis ad with curtains blowing as the lovers phonily embrace, the ad with the guy who has opioid-induced . . . constipation (I love the delicacy-induced pause), the ad for Liberty Mutual Insurance in which the woman jeers at the coverage offered by a rival company: “What are you supposed to do, drive three-quarters of a car?” I sit there mesmerized because Maddow has already mesmerized me. Her performance and those of the actors in the commercials merge into one delicious experience of TV. “The Rachel Maddow Show” is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest. It permits liberals to enjoy themselves during what may be the most thoroughly unenjoyable time of their political lives.

It may sound like this passage was part of a criticism of Maddow's mesmerizing performance.

In truth, the profile was anything but. Donald J. Trump was now in the White Houe, and Malcolm seemed to be deeply grateful for the delicious comfort food she received each evening from this TV friend.

As it turns out, we liberals enjoy being talked down to every but as much at the less intelligent Others who tune in to Fox. 

We may not realize how many topics are going undiscussed as our imaginary TV friends stick to the one topic we love:

Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail. 

We may not realize how shaky the reassurances are as we keep getting told that Robert Mueller (or Jack Smith; or Fani Willie) is only moments away from frog-marching Trump off to jail. As we continue to tune in, we seem to want that bedtime story and we display no signs of wanting anything else.

Public schools? Health care costs? Procedures at the border? There's no sign that we want to know about such topics. We want Trump-in-jail and little else.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but a nation can't survive this way. To appearances, the corporate owners of MSNBC aren't about to try something different.

Presumably, Rashida Jones is a very capable person. She succeeded Phil Griffin as head of the channel in February 2021. Right at the end of a profile in the Washington Post, she revealed her basic interest:

BARR (5/24/21): MSNBC still commands an unusual devotion from its fans. During the first three months of 2021, committed MSNBC viewers watched the network for an average of 433 minutes per week, compared to 325 minutes for comparable Fox viewers and 291 minutes for CNN viewers, according to Nielsen data.

“We have audiences that will sit there and watch for hours and hours and hours,” Jones said. “So, how do we get more people into that camp?”

Not that there's anything wrong with it! But we sit and watch for hours and hours and hours. Lucky for us, we get to feel safe among our cadre of imaginary dear, dear friends. 

We ignore the topics flogged by the imaginary friends on Fox. But some of those topics are real.

"Segregation now," George Wallace once said. This is a pseudo-journalistic version of that destructive instinct.

As crazy as Wisconsin's 47th!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2023

The five percent solution: In yesterday's post, we offered an example of how crazy gerrymandering has become in the Badger State.

Ron Burgum's "campaign contributions" may be even nuttier. Burgum is the little-known governor of North Dakota. He's also a billionaire who wanted to be a candidate for the White House, or who at least wanted to be listed as a candidate.

To be included in the first Republican debate, he had to have at least 40,000 "campaign contributors," or at least he had to seem to.

Burgum decided that he would shoot for 50,000 "campaign contributors."  At New York magazine, Ed Kilgore describes the nutty way he went about it:

KILGORE (9/1/23): Seven Republican presidential candidates have already qualified for the second Republican National Committee–sanctioned debate on September 27 in Simi Valley, California. One of them, Donald Trump, hasn’t definitively indicated if he’ll show up, but it’s unlikely. Two candidates who were at the first event on August 23, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, have not qualified for the stage at the Ronald Reagan Library. Hutchinson is definitely going to struggle to get there. But Burgum has an asset Hutchinson does not possess: an obscenely fat wallet.

The former tech entrepreneur raised a lot of eyebrows by taking a novel approach to the donor requirement set up by the RNC for participating in the debate in Milwaukee: He went out and bought them. That’s right: Every $1 donor to Burgum’s campaign (up to his 50,000 goal) received a $20 gift card. It was an approach the RNC allowed, even though it made a mockery of the underlying idea that candidates should show financial support beyond their own bank accounts.

In effect, Burgum said he'd give people twenty dollars. They had to kick back one of those dollars. Arithmetically, that works out to five percent. 

The RNC allowed that one dollar kickback to count as a "campaign contribution." That's the way Burgum "qualified" for the first debate.

As we showed you yesterday, Wisconsin's 47th assembly district makes a mockery of legislative districting. Burgum's approach to "fund-raising" makes a mockery of everything else.

We live in fictitious times, Michael Moore once sagaciously said. Our systems are drenched in so much BS that bullroar like this barely counts!

How bad are Wisconsin's gerrymanders?

THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 2023

In one case, this bad: Yesterday, Kevin Drum sounded off about Wisconsin's "egregiously gerrymandered legislative map."

When people talk about the gerrymanders of Wisconsin, they're generally talking about the way the state's Republicans have gerrymandered districts for the state legislature, not necessarily for Wisconsin's eight seats in the U.S. House. 

So it was with Drum, who correctly said that Wisconsin's "state Senate districts are wildly gerrymandered."

That said, how wildly gerrymandered are they? How crazy does it actually get—for example, in The Gerrymanders of Dane County?

For the start of an answer, just click here to examine the gerrymandering involved in Wisconsin's 47th Assembly district. 

(Full disclosure: The district has been gerrymandered to assure that a Democrat will win the seat with a gigantic boatload of "wasted votes." This helps Republicans win elsewhere.)

Go ahead! Just click on that Wikipedia map to see how crazy our world has become. We'll quote this statement from that leading authority:

In its current boundaries, the 47th district is one of several districts which violate the Wisconsin Constitution's requirement for districts to "consist of contiguous territory."

Go ahead—examine that map! The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but some Badger State districts, a bit like our nation, have come almost wholly undone!

SEGREGATION NOW: On Fox, the friends were quite active today!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 31, 2023

Comically propagandistic: What could the late Roger Ailes have been thinking when he created the comically awful cable news channel, America's Talking?

As we noted yesterday, the unwatchable channel came and went within the space of two years. Lost to the world was such unwatchable daily fare as this:

Am I Nuts? (later named State of Mind): Hosted by psychologist Bernie Katz and behavioral therapist Cynthia Richmond.

What's New?: The latest hot gadgets, hosted by Mike Jerrick and later Brian Tracey.

Have a Heart: A talk/news show discussing the brighter side of the news and show-arranged charitable situations, hosted by Lu Hanessian.

Pork: A political talk show focusing on government waste hosted by John David Klein. The executive producers were Robin Gellman and Dennis Sullivan.

Bugged!: A comedic look at what bugs people, hosted by Brian O'Connor with Bill Gulino.

No more hours devoted to gadgets. No more "show-arranged charitable situations," a throwback to the ghastly late-50s hit, Queen for A Day.

No more Bugged!, "a comedic look at what bugs people." That said, though the program called Pork was now dead and gone, it pointed the way towards the Fox News Channel, the network where Ailes would hit it big by assembling a gaggle of propagandists disguised as one tribe's TV "friends."

As we chronicled on Tuesday, Fox debuted in October 1996. Within sixteen months, Ailes had come up with a winning formula:

Fox & Friends is an American daily morning news and talk program that airs on Fox News. It premiered on February 1, 1998, and is currently hosted by Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on weekdays. Will Cain, Rachel Campos-Duffy and Pete Hegseth host on weekends.

[...]

Fox & Friends evolved from Fox X-press, Fox News Channel's original morning news program.

Gone was the remarkably unfriendly name, Fox X-press. In its place, viewers were given a title which promised them happy hours of access to friends.

Today, the friends consume the first four hours of air time on Fox each weekday. (Fox & Friends airs at 6 a.m., preceded by an hour of Fox & Friends First.) 

On weekend mornings, Fox cracks the whip. Viewers are restricted to three hours of TV time with their good friends.

This morning, the friends were deeply engaged in a standard type of pseudo-journalistic practice. In a time which was less politically fraught, we might call it "comically awful undisguised propagandization." 

Under modern pseudo-journalistic arrangements, the role of the friend has been transformed. To wit:

At one time, it was accepted that friends don't let friends drive drunk. In contemporary pseudo-journalism, friends don't let friends encounter epistemic or cultural discomfort.

With that in mind, the friends were busy early this morning, flogging standard red tribe topics. Their producers had spanned the globe in search of places where someone of a liberal bent had perhaps showed possible signs of somewhat limited judgment.

Fill disclosure! In a nation of 330 million people, someone is showing some form of bad judgment pretty much all the time every day. In a nation which has split into tribes, it will generally be easy to find someone from the other tribe who has behaved in such ways, or who may seem to have done so.

That doesn't mean that the friends on Fox might not discuss some actual serious topics. And so it went on this morning's show when they took us to California's little-known Spreckels Union School District, which describes itself this way:

About Us

Located three miles south of Salinas, the town of Spreckels was established in 1899 by Claus Spreckels to house workers for his Spreckels Sugar Factory. Rich agricultural land serves as Spreckels’ four boundaries and many community members work in ag-related businesses. The town of Spreckels was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flats and used in 1955 in the filming of East of Eden. 

Spreckels Union School District (SUSD) remained a one-school district until the opening of Buena Vista Middle School in 1996. Currently, SUSD is made up of two schools, Spreckels Elementary (K-5) and Buena Vista Middle School (6-8).  SUSD serves the children from the communities of Spreckels, Las Palmas, the Highway 68 Corridor, Indian Springs, Pine Canyon, Creekside, Serra Village and Toro Sunshine.

Click here to learn more about the town of Spreckels.

When we clicked the proffered link, we were taken here.

At any rate, the district in question operates exactly two (2) schools. In one of its schools, some of its employees may have exercised limited judgment with respect to an 11-year-old student in the year before Covid—and as of this week, the district has agreed to pay $100,000 to the mother of that child, without admitting wrongdoing.

What were the cable news viewers known as The Others hearing about this morning? For an NBC News report about this particular matter, you can now click here.

In our view, this matter involves some serious questions about the way school systems should function. That said, you'll hear more about such incidents on Fox, very little on our own blue channel.

The friends on Fox were pushing buttons all through today's early hours. As is often the case, they talked about some topics which won't be discussed in any way on our own blue tribe's cable channel—and not everything they said was blatantly crazy or wrong!

Still and all, we increasingly live within a news culture best characterized by the unfriendly term, "Segregation now." 

The friends on Fox serve gruel to one herd. But what do our friends do?

Tomorrow: Almost never the twain