Supplemental: Intellectual disorder is on wide display!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2015

Is Candidate Carson nuts: On this morning's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough aggressively, loudly assailed Ben Carson as a liar.

For ourselves, we'd start with a more elementary question--is Candidate Carson crazy? The story about the Yale psych class is a powerful case in point.

Journalists have been having a hard time summarizing the story. As told in Carson's book, Gifted Hands, the story contains several elements. When journalists offer a quick summary, some part of this highly improbable story inevitably gets left out.

Some part of this highly improbable story? We'd say that's putting it mildly!

If you want to read the full story, it's found in Chapter 9 of Carson's book, all of which appears at this link. Don't miss the three-part tale of the ten-dollar bill, which surfaces for the third time in Carson's psych class triumph.

(A ten-dollar bill also plays a role in Chapter 8, though it seems unrelated to the drama of which runs through Chapter 9.)

Did that story actually happen? Did a Yale professor actually stage a hoax make-up exam in some sort of effort to identify The One Honest Student in her psychology class?

Did she have a photographer on hand to photograph her one Cordelia--who was, of course, Carson himself? Did she then give Carson a ten-dollar bill, thus completing the miracle story which forms the framework of Chapter 9's account of Carson's college years?

There's more! Did the photograph of Carson as The One Honest Student really appear in the Yale Daily News?

To state the obvious, it's hard to believe that anything like these alleged events ever occurred on the earth. And by the way:

If that photograph of Carson really appeared in the Yale Daily News, where's the accompanying photograph of the professor? Presumably, she would have been fired for being batshit crazy and totally out of her head.

That overall story seems utterly crazy, more like some kind of dream fugue. That said, Carson is now presenting evidence designed to show that the story is true. His presentation of this "evidence" is almost as crazy as the story itself.

Carson's evidence seems to suggest that something slightly strange or offbeat actually did occur during his Yale years. According to a report in the Yale Daily News, the campus humor magazine did in fact announce a hoax make-up exam for a psychology class.

According to the news report, this "false exam...was attended by several students not aware that the replacement exam was a hoax." For Kevin Drum's post, click here.

We can think of few people more likely to fall for a hoax than the teen-aged Carson. That said, the report in the Yale Daily News says nothing about a professor pretending to choose The One Honest Student in Her Whole Psych Class as part of this humor mag scam.

Nor has Carson presented the alleged photograph of himself as The One Honest Student, the photograph which supposedly appeared in the Yale Daily News. The claim that Carson was so honored was the whole point of the highly improbable story in his book.

This original story sounds almost completely crazy. Almost as crazy is Carson's post about this "evidence" which he's produced in support of his claim:

CARSON (11/8/15): On Saturday a reporter with the Wall Street Journal published a story that my account of being the victim of a hoax at Yale where students were led to believe the exams they had just taken were destroyed and we needed to retake the exam was false. The reporter claimed that no evidence existed to back up my story. Even went so far as to say the class didn't exist.

Well here is the student newspaper account of the incident that occurred on January 14, 1970.

Will an apology be coming. I doubt it.

To see Carson's post, click here.

You'll note that Carson has omitted the key element in the original story--the improbable-seeming claim that he was honored as The One Honest Student in the Whole Class, with his photograph triumphantly appearing in the student paper.

Needless to say, he's also misstating what the Wall Street Journal actually said. Still unexplained is the ten-dollar bill, the strangest part of the tale!

Citizens, can we talk?

At one time, we had societal gatekeepers. As part of this undemocratic procedure, crazy people weren't allowed to have their own radio or TV shows.

That ended with Imus, Howard Stern and Rush. Today, it's hard to get a major talk radio or cable news show unless you're abler to prove to the bosses that you're at least halfway nuts and/or that you're highly compliant.

Within the two major parties, gatekeepers used to play a second role. They refused to let crazy people become presidential contenders.

Today, the gatekeepers are basically gone, and The Crazy is ascendant. Just yesterday, the Washington Post ran some good solid Semi-Crazy in its Outlook section.

We expect to discuss the pieces by Havrilesky and Tankersley at some point. It's very hard to get that dumb; increasingly, though, the nation's journalists are finding ways to do it. For Kevin Drum's mild-mannered, sane reaction, you can just click here.

With the gatekeepers gone, The Crazy's ascendant. It's surprising to see what we humans are actually like, once the gatekeepers trundle away and leave us here on our own.

Way back in 1992, the highly clairvoyant Katherine Boo warned the world about "Creeping Dowdism." She'd only spotted one part of the beast. Increasingly, The Basic Crazy and its kin are pretty much all around.

MAY LOOK LIKE PLUTOCRAT BIAS: Tax cuts si, haircuts no!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2015

Part 1—May look like billionaire bias: In this morning's New York Times, a delusional column appears.

The column was written by Patrick Stewart, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas. He quickly describes his hallucinations, speaking in praise of the "gotcha questions" at the October 28 GOP debate.

Professor Stewart seems to need help. This is what he thinks he saw when he watched that two-hour evasion of substance:

STEWART (11/9/15): You would think people running for office would be happy to get all that free media attention. Yet many Republicans have condemned the debates, especially what they call “gotcha” questions. In a letter to NBC News after the recent CNBC debate, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote that moderators had “engaged in a series of ‘gotcha’ questions, petty and meanspirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates.”

Yes, some viewers tune in to compare policy positions and review candidates’ experience. But many more tune in for the spectacle of “presidential survivor” in which the most quick-witted, social-media-savvy candidate moves to center stage. More important, the probing questions and the frenzied media coverage they drive are good for democracy. By knocking candidates off their talking points, these questions make the endless cycle of debates worth watching for citizens—and possibly even revelatory.

The gotcha questions—the Republican candidates define that term very loosely to include challenges on experience, policy positions and the ability to do elementary (but not Common Core) arithmetic—are in the mind of the beholder. More accurately, they are often in the excuses of the unprepared or poorly performing candidate.

Based on that passage, we think we can say the following things about the professor's delusions:

Professor Stewart seems to think he saw "probing questions" at that debate. He seems to think those probing questions extended to the candidates' "policy positions," even to their "ability to do elementary arithmetic."

Based on the questioning at the debate, the professor apparently thinks the challenge concerning basic math involved the candidates' budget proposals. He seems to think he saw the candidates "knocked off their talking points" by the moderators' probing questions.

The hallucinations continue. The professor seems to think that those probing questions have produced "frenzied media coverage" in the twelve days since that debate. As part of this delusional package, he thinks the moderators' questions "make the endless cycle of debates worth watching for citizens—and possibly even revelatory."

Question: Did anything like that actually happen concerning those budget proposals? That question is highly significant for an obvious reason.

The candidates who stood on that stage have brought forth the craziest set of budget proposals in the nation's long history. One day before the October 28 debate, one of the candidates, Candidate Kasich, said exactly that, in a highly unusual, impassioned press event.

"Crazy," Kasich repeatedly said, referring to the budget proposals of Candidates Carson and Trump. And make no mistake:

Judged by any normal standard, crazy is exactly what those budget proposals are. This leads us to our questions about the professor's health.

The professor thinks he saw probing questions about policy matters at that recent debate. He thinks those questions knocked the candidates off their talking points. He seems to think that this has have led to frenzied media coverage.

Did anything like that actually happen with respect to those "crazy" budget proposals? Has anything like that actually happened in the twelve days since the debate?

In our view, nothing like that actually happened, in the debate or since, concerning those budget proposals. Consider:

At the debate, Candidate Rubio was asked about the distributional benefits of his tax cuts—tax cuts which total an astonishing $6.1 trillion over ten years. In response, Rubio dissembled in an embarrassing way, after which he was thanked by moderator John Harwood.

Since the debate, how much discussion have you seen of Rubio's blatant dissembling? We've seen zero discussion of that, or of the trillions he would distribute in tax cuts. We've seen much more discussion of the $133 he once spent at an upscale barbershop.

Also, consider this:

Candidate Carson offered the gibberish shown below during that strange debate. It was part of his apparent claim that federal revenues wouldn't be reduced by a single tax rate of 15 percent:

CARSON (10/28/15): Let me just say, if you're talking about an $18 trillion economy, you're talking about a 15 percent tax on your gross domestic product. You're talking about $2.7 trillion.

We have a budget closer to $3.5 trillion. But if you also apply that same 15 percent to several other things, including corporate taxes, and including the capital gains taxes, you make that amount up pretty quickly. So that is not by any stretch a pie in the sky.

Do you have any idea what that means? Frankly, we do not.

Last Tuesday, Josh Barro actually addressed that gibberish in the New York Times, or at least he tried or pretended to do so. We've seen no one else make the attempt.

Good for Barro! For our money, he worked a bit too hard to avoid describing that bafflegab (which he quoted) as simple gibberish. But in the process, he noted another problem with Carson's policy presentations that night:

BARRO (11/3/15): Becky Quick, one of the moderators, asked how [Carson] planned to finance the government with a 10 percent tax based on tithing, even though that would bring in less than half as much revenue as the federal government collects today.

Mr. Carson disclaimed that idea. “Well, first of all, I didn’t say that the rate would be 10 percent,” he told Ms. Quick.

Well, actually, he did. At the first Republican debate, he described the plan as follows: “You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one.” But anyway, Mr. Carson now doesn’t think a 10 percent rate is workable, and said the rate would have to be closer to 15 percent.

Rather plainly, Carson did seem to have prescribed a single, 10 percent tax rate. He seemed to do so at the first GOP debate! And it was on TV!

That said, with what "probing question" was Carson confronted when he denied that he'd said such a thing? "I understand that," Quick instantly said, affirming his bogus statement.

Candidate Carson's budget gibberish bordered on the less-than-sane at that recent debate. But if you think you saw him challenged by the moderators that night, you're as delusional as the professor seems to be.

Nor has Carson been challenged on his bafflegab or his budget nonsense in the twelve days since that debate. Our journalists have been talking about who he did and didn't attempt to stab in the 1960s, not about his crazy budget proposal or his budget bafflegab.

Can we talk? Those candidates have offered the craziest budget proposals in the history of the republic. Meanwhile, that debate was staged by CNBC, a cable channel which is alleged to specialize in financial/business/budget affairs.

The stage was set for a major battle, even an Armageddon. But despite the professor's column, that battle never occurred.

All this week, we'll look at the way those moderators, and the rest of the press, have avoided discussing the craziness of those budget proposals. And uh-oh! Because the craziness of those plans concerns their giveaways to the massively wealthy, we'd have to say that this silence may start to look like an expression of plutocrat bias.

Our journalists discuss the hundreds of dollars spent at a barbershop. They avoid the trillions handed to millionaire and billionaires in those budget plans!

Those plans are "crazy," Kasich said. The numbers strongly support that claim. When journalists refuse to discuss this particular version of The Crazy, a cynic will say that they may be expressing a tilt toward plutocrat bias.

Tax cuts si, haircuts no? What explains that puzzling tilt? We'll puzzle about that all week long. But the tilt is pernicious, widespread.

Tomorrow: The refusal to focus, challenge, confront

MAY LOOK LIKE LIBERAL BIAS: Rubio's evasion succeeds!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2015

Part 5—May look like plutocrat bias: In the second hour of last Wednesday's debate, an embarrassing moment occurred.

John Harwood asked a question about Candidate Rubio's tax plan.

Rubio misunderstood the question. Either that, or he chose to dissemble:

HARWOOD (10/28/15): Senator Rubio, 30 seconds to you.

The Tax Foundation, which was alluded to earlier, scored your tax plan and concluded that you give nearly twice as much of a gain in after-tax income to the top one percent as to people in the middle of the income scale.

Since you're the champion of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, don't you have that backward?

RUBIO: No, that's— You're wrong. In fact, the largest after-tax gains is for the people at the lower end of the tax spectrum under my plan. And there's a bunch of things my tax plan does to help them...

Oops. Harwood asked about the way Rubio's plan treats middle-income earners.

In his response, Rubio inaccurately said that Harwood's statement was wrong. He then discussed the way his plan (allegedly) affects those with the lowest incomes.

To his credit, Harwood didn't give up. He restated his question, which compared treatment of the top one percent to treatment of those in the middle class. At this point, Candidate Rubio began to flounder and evade in a deeply embarrassing way:

HARWOOD: The Tax Foundation— Just to be clear, they said the—

[...]

Senator, the Tax Foundation said after-tax income for the top one percent under your plan would go up 27.9 percent. And people in the middle of the income spectrum, about 15 percent.

RUBIO: Yeah, but that— Because the math is, if you— Five percent of a million is a lot more than five percent of a thousand. So yeah—

HARWOOD: But this is in percentage terms.

RUBIO: —someone who makes more money, numerically, it's gonna be higher. But the greatest gains, percentage-wise, for people, are gonna be at the lower end of our plan...

"But this is in percentage terms," Harwood interjected. No use!

Rubio continued to ignore the question Harwood had asked. Most embarrassingly, he threw gorilla dust all around through his conflation of dollar amounts with percentages. This allowed Rubio to discuss what was happening "numerically!"

It's hard to assume good faith on Rubio's part in that exchange. Assuming even minimal competence, it seems he simply looked for ways to avoid Harwood's question.

Candidate Rubio's non-answer answers were, at best, embarrassing. That said, he successfully avoided Hardwood's question.

Rubio's performance was an embarrassment. But in several ways, Harwood's performance was less than optimal too. This helps explain why Rubio was able to escape.

For unknown reasons, Harwood waited until late in a scattershot debate to raise this very basic question. Beyond that, note the horrible way he began the exchange:

"Senator Rubio, 30 seconds to you."

All through the evening, Harwood and his two to five fellow moderators kept doling their precious seconds in teaspoons as they hurried ahead to their next scattershot question. In this instance, this allowed a dissembling candidate to evade a sensible question.

Who should be blamed for the fact that Rubio escaped? Beyond that, why was he asked that question midway through the evening's second hour as part of a scattershot, grab-bag debate in which the moderators made little attempt to create a steely focus on basic budget questions?

To a cynic, that behavior by the moderators may look like something we'd describe as "plutocrat bias." That cynic might claim that Quintanilla, Harwood and Quick had no intention of zeroing in on the craziness of the budget plans those candidates have proposed.

Those budget proposals pander to the one percent in ways which seem utterly crazy. Indeed, Candidate Kasich had used that term one day before, assailing the "crazy" budget plans of Candidates Carson and Trump.

A cynic would say that those moderators deliberately avoided confronting The Crazy. That cynic would say that the moderators displayed a type of plutocrat bias—that they refused to examine the ludicrous ways those candidates are trying to serve the interests and the bottom lines of the one percent.

(More accurately, the interests and the bottom lines of the top one-tenth of the one percent.)

Were those moderators working from some form of plutocrat bias? If so, did they do that deliberately?

We can't answer the second question. We think the first question should be examined in detail, especially with the next Republican debate coming up on Tuesday.

That debate will be run by the Fox Business Channel. Our guess? They'll avoid confronting those strange budget plans, just like Harwood, Quick and Quintanilla before them.

To a cynic, last Wednesday's debate might look like a groaning example of plutocrat bias. It's a flat disgrace to see leading liberals praising the conduct of such an unfocused, scattershot effort.

The conduct of those moderators may look like plutocrat bias! We'll examine that pregnant theme all next week.

Supplemental: New York Times discovers the earth is round!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2015

"New report" about public schools produces major "surprise:" As best we can tell, every word in David Leonhardt's news report is accurate.

That shouldn't be surprising. The 42-year-old Yale grad was the paper's Washington bureau chief until 2013. Today, he's managing editor of The Upshot, the super-brainy, analytical blog for subscribers who are eggheads.

In theory, Leonhardt is on the brighter end of the New York Times spectrum. That's what makes last week's report remarkable and bizarre and deeply revealing about the state of our press elite.

When we read Leonhardt's report last Tuesday, we thought it might be the dumbest report we've
ever read. That may not be true, but let's make this key point again:

In its giant cluelessness, it's among the most revealing.

The embarrassment began with the headlines. On page A3 of the hard-copy Times, the headlines read like this:

Raw Scores Give Misleading Idea of School Progress
A new report takes states' demographics into account.

A new report seemed to be straightening everything out! It had taken demographics into account! It sounded like trail-blazing stuff!

On line, the headlines are worse. "Surprise," the embarrassing headline says. "Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores."

In his report, Leonhardt refers to "the new results" which emerged from "a report released Monday by the Urban Institute." Earth to Leonhardt and the rest of the Times:

There was absolutely nothing "new" in that "new report." There was nothing resembling a "surprise," unless you're completely clueless, and completely uncaring, about the nation's public schools and the millions of kids who attend them.

As we've told you for many years, it's abundantly clear that the New York Times actually is that clueless.

What did Leonhardt report last week? This is what he reported:

The state of Texas seems to produce fairly ordinary scores in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's one reliable public school testing program. But if you "disaggregate" the state's test scores—if you look at the average scores for each of the state's major demographic groups—you'll find that each of those groups scores quite well when compared to their peers around the nation.

Texas produces mediocre overall scores because its student population is heavily black and Hispanic. As everyone but the New York Times knows, black and Hispanic kids still tend to score less well in reading and math than the nation's white kids.

Texas has lots of black and Hispanic kids! This tends to hold down the state's overall average scores. But Texas students in all three groups tend to outscore their peers from around the nation. Black kids in Texas outscore their peers from around the nation. So do the state's many Hispanic kids.

(As we've noted many times, white kids in Texas tend to outscore other states' white kids too. It's amazingly easy to explore the data for every state. You start by clicking right here.)

As everyone but the New York Times knows, reviewing test scores in this manner is known as "disaggregation." And good lord! When you review Texas' scores this way, Texas turns out to be the third best-performing state in the nation! That's the surprising new result from the new report last week!

Prisoners of hapless elites, can we talk?

If you've read this site down through the years, you'll know that there is nothing "new" or "surprising" about these "new results." In various contexts, we've noted such facts about states like Texas year after year after year.

If you know anything about public schools, you already understand this matter. Through the auspices of the federal Department of Education, voluminous data have been available for lo, these many years.

Once again, you can just click here. That said, we've often noted a disgraceful fact:

No matter how much data the DOE posts; no matter how user-friendly they make their data; no matter how many times these basic facts get discussed at sites like this; you simply can't make the nation's journalists review those voluminous data or grasp these basic points.

Last Tuesday, Leonhardt proved our point. His report is a public disgrace. So is Leonhardt himself, along with all the creeps at the Times who have made his cluelessness possible.

Leonhardt's report may be the dumbest we've ever read. It comes from a highly privileged Yale graduate who's high up in the New York Times order—a highly privileged, clueless disgrace who doesn't give a flying fig about the nation's black kids.

How little do New York Times journalists know about our public schools? Consider the ignorance they've put on display just in the past few months:

They didn't know why you can't use SAT scores to compare academic achievement between the states.

They didn't know that over half of the nation's black kids attend public schools in the South.

As of this week, they still don't seem to know that American students take part in two international test batteries, the TIMSS and the PISA, not just one.

Until this week, they apparently didn't know that American schools face demographic challenges that aren't faced by schools in Finland. For background, see yesterday's post.

And now, the absolute kicker:

Last week, the New York Times was surprised to learn that you have to "disaggregate" test scores to get a sensible idea of how well a state, school system or school seems to be doing. The New York Times was surprised to learn that a state with a lot of white kids is likely to outscore a state with a lot of minority kids, or a state with a lot of poverty.

The New York Times didn't know that! At the Times, this was a "surprise." These findings were rushed to the public, hailed as "new results!"

It's hard to show sufficient contempt for the people who work at the Times. Their work has long been a public disgrace. Given the newspaper's skill at branding, it's hard for most people to grasp that.

Leonhardt prepped at the Horace Mann School, then moved on to Yale. Today, at the age of 42, he joins his colleagues in not knowing squat or squadoosh about the nation's black kids.

His ignorance, and that of the Times as a whole, is an ugly rolling disgrace. Enabled by uncaring liberals, they've played it this way for a very long time. As we've told you again and again, their ignorance is astounding.

Nothing is ever going to change this. When it comes to the lives and the needs of the nation's black kids, the uncaring Maddow is worse.

Disaggregation nation: Back in 2012, Gail Collins made a fool of herself concerning this very topic.

On the brighter side, she made some money on her book tour, and the people who came to see her didn't know that she was utterly clueless.

These people are some of the worst on the earth. To read our report, start here.

MAY LOOK LIKE LIBERAL BIAS: Crazy, Candidate Kasich said!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2015

Part 4—Prelude to last week's debate: In this morning's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer shares one conservative's view of last week's presidential debate.

In Krauthammer's view, the moderators of the debate were obnoxious and incompetent. On the whole, we're inclined to agree.

He says the moderators handed the GOP a gift. We're inclined to see it that way too.

How did Krauthammer view the debate? We think it's worth recording his outlook in some detail:

KRAUTHAMMER (11/6/15): The CNBC debate was a gift for the GOP, so unadorned a demonstration of liberal condescension, hostility and arrogance that the rest of the media—their ideological cover exposed—were forced to denounce and ridicule their ham-handed colleagues.

[...]

The party is demanding there be no repetition of the CNBC debate. Why, for God’s sake? That debate was the best thing to happen to the GOP since Michael Dukakis.

[...]

John Harwood’s obnoxiousness and Becky Quick’s incompetence earned most of the opprobrium heaped on the moderators’ performance. But it was Carl Quintanilla who demonstrated just how unmoored liberal delusions about conservatives have become. He asked Ben Carson how, as an opponent of same-sex marriage, he could remain on the board of a company that is known for its generous treatment of gay employees. Quintanilla seemed genuinely unable to fathom that one can oppose the most radical change in the structure of marriage in human history—as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all did just a few years ago—without wanting to see gay people persecuted and denied decent treatment by their employers.

"CNBC produced the best night of the entire campaign season for the GOP," Krauthammer said as he continued.

Krauthammer states a second view in his column. He thinks the GOP undermined this gift from CNBC by complaining too much post-debate.

"Within a week they so overplayed their hand as to dissipate whatever sympathetic advantage they gained," Krauthammer says. He says the GOP's excessive complaining "allowed the liberal media to turn the tables and play defenders of journalistic independence against GOP bullies."

There's no doubt that some liberal pundits adopted that heroic stance, edging away from initial criticisms of the CNBC panel. We'll consider that pundit behavior tomorrow. For today, we'll focus on the journalistic performance of the debate's moderators, whose number ranged from three to six depending on how you count.

In fairness, the moderators faced a daunting task. Ten different candidates stood before them on a wide debate stage. Meanwhile, CNBC had assembled a starting lineup which featured three different moderators.

Traffic-wise, this could produce a mess. The inherent confusion only grew as three additional CNBC stars took brief turns asking questions.

These relief pitchers included Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli, perhaps to convince Republican viewers that the channel's leading crazies weren't being completely avoided.

At any rate, ten candidates faced six moderators! What could possibly go wrong?

Answer: A lot could go wrong! Indeed, we tend to agree with some of Krauthammer's assessments.

We think Harwood actually was a bit obnoxious and that Quick really did seem a bit incompetent. Or was she simply kissing ascot at times? We haven't seen a preface to a question like this since the press corps fawned to Saint McCain during Campaign 2000, endlessly reciting the fact that he was a straight-shooting straight-talker straight from The Straight Talk Express:

QUICK (10/28/15): Governor Christie, I'd like to come to you with a question. Actually, I have a question for you.

In your tell-it-like-it-is campaign, you've said a lot of tough things. You've said that we need to raise the retirement age for Social Security. You think that we need to cut benefits for people who make over $80,000 and eliminate them entirely for seniors who are making over $200,000...

Journalistically speaking, you probably shouldn't recite a candidate's slogans for him as you deliver his very first question! Assuming good faith, that highlighted statement represents astounding journalistic cluelessness. That said, it plainly doesn't stem from some deep pool of liberal bias.

Were the moderators hobbled by "unmoored liberal delusions?" Krauthammer makes a reasonable point about that gopher ball from Quintanilla, which Carson quickly knocked out of the park.

On the whole, though, the moderators didn't necessarily seem to be working from liberal bias. They also didn't stage a substantive debate, despite what liberal apologists and potential colleagues would soon be claiming.

To the contrary! On the whole, we'd say the moderators worked from a form of "plutocrat bias" in the basic way they proceeded. We'd also say it's astounding that liberals like Ezra Klein and even Kevin Drum were somehow unable to see that fact, or were unwilling to say it.

Did CNBC's gang of corporate hirelings produce a substantive evening? Crackers, please! We'd say they conducted a flight from substance as they fumbled their way, scattershot-style, through their two-hour program.

Consider the way the evening began. Consider the way the moderators refused to structure the task before them.

Good God! On the stage stood a collection of candidates who have offered the craziest set of budget proposals in the nation's long history. Indeed, one of the candidates, Candidate Kasich, had made that very point, exactly one day earlier.

Candidate Kasich had seen enough! Setting the stage for the big debate, this is what he said:

KASICH (10/27/15): Do you know how crazy this election is?

Let me tell you something, I've about had it with these people. And let me tell you why.

We got one candidate that says that we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard of anything so crazy as that? Telling our people in this country who are seniors, or about to be seniors, that we're going to abolish Medicaid and Medicare?

We've got one person saying we ought to have a 10 percent flat tax that will drive up the deficit in this country by trillions of dollars that my daughters will spend the rest of their lives having to pay off.

You know, what I say to them is, Why don't we have no taxes? Just get rid of them all, and then a chicken in every pot on top of it?

[...]

That is just crazy. We got people proposing health care reform that's going to leave, I believe, millions of people without adequate health insurance.

For the record, Kasich also said it's "crazy" to say "we ought to take 10 million or 11 million people" and remove them from the country.

Set Candidate Trump's immigration proposal to the side. Just for now, forget about Medicare and Medicaid and health care "reform" in general.

For now, let's consider those tax cut proposals, which Kasich described as "crazy." Let's start with a basic point:

On their face, those proposals do seem to be crazy! But how lucky! In theory, they fit right into CNBC's wheelhouse since the channel specializes in business, economics, finance.

What makes those tax cut proposals seem, on their face, to be crazy? Crackers! In Campaign 2000, Candidate Bush ran on what was taken to be a very large tax cut proposal. As proposed, it would have reduced federal taxes by $1.6 trillion over its first ten years of operation (2002 through 2011).

That plan was considered gigantic. But according to standard tax analysis, Candidate Trump's crazy-seeming proposal would reduce federal taxes by as much as $11 trillion! That's six to seven times as large as Bush's very large plan!

On its face, that tax cut proposal seems to be utterly crazy, basically stark raving mad. Other proposals seem at least as strange, including Candidate Carson's original plan for a single ten percent tax rate, based on Biblical tithing!

(For more about the tax cut proposals, see Josh Barro's preview of the debate for the New York Times.)

On their face, the budget proposals of these candidates seem to be stark raving mad. Luckily, there stood the CNBC Three or Six, fearless representatives of a financial news channel!

Surely, the CNBC Three or Six would seek to bring clarity out of this mess! Surely, they would examine those very strange tax cut proposals before moving on to the candidates' tell-it-like-it-is proposals for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In fact, the moderators did no such thing that night. Tomorrow, we'll review what they actually did, and we'll ask you how any serious liberal could have called their work "substantive."

Kasich railed against Carson and Trump. We'll suggest you should do the same with respect to your tribe's leading pundits, none of whom have deigned to tell you what CNBC actually did.

Tomorrow: What "plutocrat bias" looks like

Supplemental: Worms are still eating the brains of elites!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2015

New York Times meets the public schools: We've often asked if some sort of worm is eating the brains of our press corps elites.

Today, we ask that question again. At issue are two recent reports in the New York Times concerning U.S. public schools.

Each report describes the findings of a "new study." In each case, the studies have essentially revealed that the sky is blue, the ocean is wet and grass is occasionally green.

At the Times, major journalists seem to be stunned by basic facts which have long been blindingly obvious. It's hard to grasp how major scribes can be so totally clueless.

Let's start with Eduardo Porter's "Economic Scene" column from yesterday's Business Day section. Because Porter is substantially sharper than most Times scribes, his piece seemed especially odd and reduced our staff to tears.

Porter began in the mandated way, cherry-picking information about how little U.S. kids know compared to the rest of the world. This is the passage in question:

PORTER (11/4/15): The perennial debate about the state of public education starts with a single, seemingly unassailable fact. American students sorely lag their peers in other rich nations and even measure up poorly compared with students in some less advanced countries.

Americans scored more than halfway down from the top in the last round of the so-called PISA standardized tests in math, administered in 2012 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 15-year-olds in about 60 countries. They scored about a third of the way down in reading and almost halfway down in science.

Is that true? Do Americans students "sorely lag their peers in other rich nations?" Do they "even measure up poorly compared with students in some less advanced countries?"

Not exactly, no. Let's start with those cherry-picked data.

As any informed reporter would know, the developed nations participate in two major international test batteries—the PISA and the TIMSS. American students have done better on the TIMSS, less well on the PISA.

For that reason, it's a journalistic mandate! Like everyone else, Porter mentions only the PISA, disappearing the TIMSS. Beyond that, he stresses the PISA math test, on which our kids do least well, while banishing reading and science to supporting roles.

We've described this standard cherry-picking many times in the past. Here you see it applied once again.

In fact, American students outperform their peers in many rich nations, especially on the TIMSS. Porter creates an "unassailable fact" by disappearing the major test battery which tends to assail his claim.

After stating his gloomy, unassailable fact, Porter starts to brighten. He describes the study which has informed him that the sky is blue:

PORTER: In a report released last week, Martin Carnoy from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, Emma García from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and Tatiana Khavenson from the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, suggest that socioeconomic deficits impose a particularly heavy burden on American schools.

“Once we adjust for social status, we are doing much better than we think,” Professor Carnoy told me. “We underrate our progress.”

No Shick razor, Sherlock! In essence, here's what that means:

Over at least the past ten years, it has become tres chic to compare the performance of American kids to the performance of students from Finland. Finland's higher scores are then used to indict American teachers and schools and to heighten the demand for privatization, the destruction of teachers unions and other types of "reform."

There's a major problem with this type of comparison. Finland is a small, middle-class country whose schools are full of middle-class kids. There are virtually no immigrant kids, and there's little poverty.

Let's cite another factor. To its credit, Finland never spent hundreds of years trying to eliminate literacy among a brutalized minority population, as our benighted ancestors did. Our schools are still challenged by the cultural remnants of that brutal history. Finland's schools are not.

Duh. Because of our brutal racial history and because of our immigration practices, American schools face types of challenges which Finnish schools do not. One example:

Our schools are full of beautiful kids who may have arrived in the country last week, not speaking English and lacking the benefits of pre-existing literacy and schooling. Finland's schools are full of middle-class Finnish kids who grew up being read to in Finnish by their middle-class, literate parents.

These demographic differences create challenges in American schools which basically can't be found in Finland. For these reasons, it's hardly surprising if average scores in the U.S. lag those of middle-class Finland.

It's silly—it's also ugly—to observe those differences in average scores and blame our allegedly ratty teachers with their infernal unions. Still, in a country which marches to the beat of the billionaires' drum, this is persistently done.

In the report which was released last week, Carnoy, García and Khavenson "suggest that socioeconomic deficits impose a particularly heavy burden on American schools." It's stunning to think that a major Times journalist needed an academic report to clue him to this rather obvious possibility.

The full story is more complex than this. That said, we were struck by the apparent cluelessness Porter brought to this column.

Things only got worse as the column progressed and Porter interviewed Andreas Schleicher, developer of the PISA and one of the world's biggest blowhards. Porter reaches a pitiful low point when he quotes Schleicher complaining that "65 percent of principals in American schools say at least 30 percent of their students come from disadvantaged families, the most among nations participating in the PISA tests." The paragraph from which that passage is taken is just monumentally dumb.

Do American schools face types of challenges which may not exist elsewhere? If you need an academic report to suggest this possibility, worms may have been eating your brains.

A few weeks ago, the Times ran a news report about a new study whose findings were even more obvious than these. That new study concerned test scores from the state of Texas. To the excitement of Timesman David Leonhardt, the study "revealed" some blindingly obvious facts, facts we've been noting for years.

To Leonhardt, these facts were a major "surprise." We'll look at that piece tomorrow.

For today, let's note one final point concerning Porter's "unassailable fact." We'll work from this paragraph in his piece:

PORTER: The researchers started by comparing test scores in the United States with those in France, Germany, Britain, Canada, Finland, South Korea, Poland and Ireland. On average, students in all those countries do better than American children.

Is that true? On average, do students in all those countries do better than American kids?

How did students in those countries do on the most recent TIMSS for which scores are available? Below, you see the scores in Grade 4 math.

France didn't participate in these tests. Canada took part, but just in the three provinces shown:

Average scores, Grade 4 math, TIMSS 2011
South Korea: 605
Finland: 545
Britain: 542
United States: 541
Canada/Quebec: 533
Germany: 528
Ireland: 527
Canada/Ontario: 518
Canada/Alberta: 507
Poland: 481

Despite those "socioeconomic deficits," American kids outperformed or matched their peers in all the countries Porter mentioned, except the one Asian tiger.

For this reason, "reform" propagandists never discuss results from the TIMSS. They mention only the PISA.

Why would a journalist follow suit? Will anyone argue from worms?

MAY LOOK LIKE LIBERAL BIAS: Opening questions to Candidate Trump!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2015

Part 3—Derision, snark and denial: To conservative voters, many acts by the mainstream press may look like acts of liberal bias.

In some cases, it would be hard to say that their perception is wrong. As one example, consider the ludicrous editorial which appeared in last Friday's New York Times.

The editorial carried this headline: "Gov. Christie, Time to Go Home." The editors argued that Candidate Christie should quit the current White House campaign and return to his work in New Jersey.

That wasn't the ludicrous part. The ludicrous part is shown below. To conservatives voters, this peculiar passage may seem to reflect liberal bias:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (10/30/15): It must have been rough for those who re-elected [Christie] to see him hold forth Wednesday in a debate that centered on the national economy, when he’s been a net failure on the New Jersey economy...Mr. Christie’s promises, from fixing the state’s pensions shortfall to its infrastructure, have come to less than nothing. More galling still is that he was not the only such politician on the dais. Since when does shortchanging your home state—looking at you, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal—qualify a public servant to be president?

According to the Times editorial board, Senator Rubio and Senator Cruz are "shortchanging their home states" by running for president. The editors offer no evidence or argument in support of this claim.

If you're a conservative voter, some questions will almost surely come to mind:

Is Senator Sanders shortchanging Vermont in his bid for the White House? Was Senator Clinton shortchanging New York in the 2008 campaign?

Did a certain solon shortchange Illinois when he successfully sought the White House in 2007 and 2008? Did the Times ever run editorials which snarkily suggested that these senators should quit their respective campaigns?

To conservative voters, the snarky bombast of that editorial will look like liberal bias. It's hard to say that this perception is wrong.

But then, in the age of Andrew Rosenthal, the Times has published many such editorials. It's hard to say that a type of bias, expressed in double standards, doesn't routinely appear.

The Rosenthal gang took a shot at Candidates Rubio and Cruz. Any conservative worth his salt would suspect he saw the glaring presence of a double standard.

How strange! Two nights earlier, in the latest Republican debate, Candidate Rubio found himself confronting similar questions. Below, you see the first prepared question for this candidate, along with its follow-up question.

Just for the record, these questions weren't about matters of substance. They represented the end of a brief discussion of a major matter of substance.

Twelve minutes into the real debate, these questions marked an important departure. They signaled the end of any attempt by CNBC to conduct a serious examination of the ludicrous budget plans these candidates have proposed:

QUINTANILLA (10/28/15): This one is for Senator Rubio. You've been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s. You've had a big accomplishment in the Senate, an immigration bill providing a path to citizenship the conservatives in your party hate, and even you don't support anymore. Now, you're skipping more votes than any senator to run for president. Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or at least finish what you start?

[...]

QUINTANILLA: So when the Sun-Sentinel says Rubio should resign, not rip us off; when they say Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job; when they say you act like you hate your job, do you?

Twelve minutes into this debate, this candidate was being asked if he shouldn't perhaps 1) drop out of the White House race, or 2) resign from the senate.

To us, those seem like unusual questions. We don't think we've ever seen a moderator ask a question which was quite as insolent as that first question—and no, those questions didn't concern policy matters.

The candidate claimed a double standard on the part of the Sun-Sentinel, describing the way they've covered other candidates who missed a lot of senate votes while they were out on the trail. Did the Sun-Sentinel apply a double standard? We have no idea.

For ourselves, the larger meaning of those questions involves a fact the moderators were signaling—the fact that they had no intention of examining the crazy budget plans these candidates have proposed. This may suggest that these moderators were actually working from within the sphere of influence of our billionaire elites.

Still, to many conservative voters, that rather insolent pair of questions may look like liberal bias. So may the second question for this candidate, which extended Quintanilla's oddly disparaging theme:

QUICK (10/28/15): Senator Rubio, you yourself have said that you've had issues. You have a lack of bookkeeping skills. You accidentally inter-mingled campaign money with your personal money. You faced foreclosure on a second home that you bought. And just last year, you liquidated a $68,000 retirement fund. That's something that cost you thousands of dollars in taxes and penalties. In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this $17 trillion economy. What do you say?

Despite the porridge you've been fed by apologists like Ezra Klein, William Saletan and even Kevin Drum, Becky Quick had no intention of probing the ludicrous budget plans those candidates have proposed. Instead, she wondered if the fact that Rubio liquidated a retirement fund means that he's too immature to be president.

To conservative voters, those questions will almost surely seem to carry the odor of liberal bias. We wouldn't make that assumption ourselves, for the reasons we've suggested.

We would say that those questions are examples of very strange "journalism." But for whatever reason, the moderators of last week's debate posed such questions right from the start.

Half an hour into the evening, Candidate Cruz attacked the moderators for the tone of their questions. In our view, he had a decent point. For today, let's consider the opening pair of actual questions, directed to Candidate Trump.

As the debate began, six minutes were burned as the candidates were asked to discuss their greatest weakness. Then, the actual questions began.

John Harwood started like this, addressing Candidate Trump:

HARWOOD (10/28/15): Mr. Trump, you've done very well in this campaign so far by promising to build a wall and make another country pay for it.

TRUMP: Right.

HARWOOD: Send 11 million people out of the country. Cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit.

TRUMP: Right.

HARWOOD: And make Americans better off because your greatness would replace the stupidity and incompetence of others.

TRUMP: That's right.

(LAUGHTER)

HARWOOD: Let's be honest. Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?

TRUMP: No, not a comic book, and it's not a very nicely asked question the way you say that...

Let's understand what Harwood did. He asked Trump about a range of campaign promises—about the promise to build a giant wall; about the promise to make Mexico pay for the wall; about the promise to deport everyone who's in the country without authorization; the promise of a major tax cut, which will produce increased prosperity without increasing the deficit.

He then gave Candidate Trump sixty seconds to discuss this range of topics! As a kicker, he asked if Trump was running "a comic book version" of a White House campaign.

We're not sure we've ever seen a moderator ask a question like that. In his follow-up question, Harwood went down that same snarky road:

HARWOOD: We're at the 60 seconds. We're at the sixty seconds. We're at 60 seconds, but I gotta ask you, you talked about your tax plan.

You say that it would not increase the deficit because you'd cut taxes $10 trillion and the economy would take off like—

(CROSSTALK)

HARWOOD: Hold on, hold on. The economy would take off like a rocket ship.

TRUMP: Right. Dynamically.

HARWOOD: I talked to economic advisers who have served presidents of both parties. They said that you have as much chance of cutting taxes that much without increasing the deficit as you would of flying away from that podium by flapping your arms.

We're not sure we've ever seen a question like that one either. In each of his questions, Harwood used colorful imagery which was openly derisive/insulting/dismissive, or which came rather close.

Might we offer a speculation? Harwood seemed to be placing provocation, attitude and snark ahead of sound journalistic practice.

In this age of cable snark and snide, it may be that Harwood's corporate owners had directed him to do this. He may have been following orders! But in the course of doing so, Harwood helped trigger an angry rejoinder by Cruz which constituted a giant distraction from the substance of the debate, to the extent that there was any.

He also asked a pair of dumb-assed questions.

In that follow-up question, Harwood could have quoted respected budget authorities who have challenged Trump's ludicrous claims directly, on the record. Instead, he treated the world to his masterful wit and his worthless snark, triggering the ten millionth pointless debate about alleged liberal bias.

As the post-debate discussion unfolded, apologists would jump up to swear that Harwood, Quintanilla and Quick had staged a substantive debate. How silly did these claims get? Tomorrow, we'll even show you Ezra Klein, seeming to claim that he doesn't know why Harwood's "comic book" reference should be seen as derisive or unusual.

"I’m a comic book nerd," Klein writes, "and even I don’t know what it means to ask if something is a 'comic book presidential campaign.' "

Trust us. Conservative voters do know what it means to ask a question like that. To them, Harwood's language will seem like an obvious marker of liberal bias.

We wouldn't make that assumption ourselves. That said, we also know what it means to talk about a candidate's "comic book campaign." Ezra Klein was willing to say that he doesn't know what that means!

He also said that he thinks the debate was unusually substantive. Tomorrow, we'll ask two important questions:

Do you believe a word of that? And how did we get to this point?

Tomorrow: The abject refusal to challenge or question those ludicrous budget plans

Supplemental: The incoherence of Chairman Ben!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2015

Ruth Marcus gets it right: Last Wednesday's GOP debate began with human history's dumbest known question.

Carl Quintanilla tossed it out, then let each hopeful expound:

QUINTANILLA (10/28/15): A lot to get to tonight. So let's get started. This first is an open question.

This series of debates is essentially a job interview with the American people. And in any job interview, you know this: you get asked, "what's your biggest weakness?"

So in 30 seconds, without telling us that you try too hard or that you're a perfectionist, what is your biggest weakness and what are you doing to address it? We'll go left to right. Governor Kasich, 30 seconds.

A few of the candidates almost pretended to answer the question as asked. Most of them simply delivered the opening statements the debate format hadn't allowed.

Eight minutes were burned in this fashion. Inevitably, Candidate Carson made the strangest statement. Here's what he actually said:

CARSON: Probably in terms of the applying for the job of president, a weakness would be not really seeing myself in that position until hundreds of thousands of people began to tell me that I needed to do it...

His biggest weakness? He hadn't realized he was the world's greatest man until hundreds of thousands of people told him! That was right before he swam the Yellow River.

Candidate Carson is strange. If it turns out that he's a doubletalk expert running some kind of weird experiment, will anyone who has followed this race really be surprised?

By some measures, Carson is leading the GOP race. By other measures, he routinely seems to have no idea what he's talking about.

Has there ever been a major candidate who was anywhere near this incoherent? We thought Ruth Marcus got it right in her column this Sunday:

MARCUS (11/1/15): Where Trump craves attention, Carson, curiously, seems to flinch from it. Even when pitched softballs, he veers quickly from substance to off-topic platitudes.

[...]

Consider this answer about drug companies profiteering on life-saving medicines, reproduced here in its incoherent entirety:

“Well, there is no question that some people go overboard when it comes to trying to make profits, and they don’t take into consideration the American people. What we have to start thinking about, as leaders, particularly in government, is what can we do for the average American? And you think about the reasons that we’re having such difficulty right now with our job market.

“Well, the average small manufacturer, whatever they’re manufacturing, drugs or anything, if they have less than 50 employees, the average cost in terms of regulations is $34,000 per employee. Makes it a whole lot easier for them to want to go somewhere else.

“So what we’re going to have to start doing instead of, you know, picking on this group or this group, is we’re going to have to have a major reduction in the regulatory influence that is going on. The government is not supposed to be in every part of our lives, and that is what is causing the problem.”

Paging Dr. Carson, the question was about pharmaceutical companies charging astronomical prices for medications. That’s the government’s fault?

That wouldn't be our top example of Candidate Carson's incoherence. But judging from that answer, when drug companies "profiteer" by "dramatically raising the price of life-saving drugs," that means we have too much regulation.

"Thank you, Dr. Carson," CNBC's Jim Cramer said.

Marcus is on the right path discussing Carson's "incoherence." Last Wednesday night, the moderators kept thanking Carson as he finished his peregrinations. At some point, pundits need to ask the obvious question and ask it directly:

Does this person have any idea what he's talking about?

CNBC's three moderators, along with their three guest moderators, kept looking away from the chaos last week. Carson is highly incoherent. Within this astonishing GOP field, the problem spreads out from there.

Other examples of weakness: Candidate Cruz's biggest weakness is the fact that he's a fighter.

Still, next to Candidate Carson, we thought Candidate Rubio easily had the most ridiculous weakness:

RUBIO (10/28/15): Thank you for that question. I would begin by saying that I'm not sure it's a weakness, but I do believe that I share a sense of optimism for America's future that, today, is eroding from too many of our people.

His optimism may be a weakness! Frankly, he isn't sure.

Supplemental: Goldberg's Law travels to Bluegrass State!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2015

Dueling tales about Bevin's wild ride: The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure!

The famous old joke is called Goldberg's Law. It has now arrived in the Bluegrass State, thanks to yesterday's gubernatorial election.

At issue is the nature of Governor-elect Matt Bevin's ride. In this morning's editions, the New York Times and the Washington Post offer dueling descriptions.

In the Post, Aaron Blake told the story like this:

BLAKE (11/4/15): Bevin traveled the state in a gold Cadillac Escalade and ran as a self-funding businessman who couldn't be bought off. For these reasons and more, he drew repeated comparisons to Trump, one of the GOP presidential front-runners.

We would have believed every word! Unfortunately, we had already read Sheryl Gay Stolberg's report in the Times:

STOLBERG (11/4/15): [Bevin] is an aggressive retail campaigner, and in recent weeks traveled Kentucky in a 2001 Chevrolet Suburban with more than 200,000 miles on it; on Tuesday, he turned up at two Chick-fil-A restaurants here in Louisville, shaking hands in a last-minute bid for votes.

Whatever! In modern journalism, story is all! Why not watch Rachel Maddow tonight? You'll be able to learn about Candidate Bush's bird noises!

MAY LOOK LIKE LIBERAL BIAS: The candidate "wasn't completely honest!"

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2015

Part 2—Ironically, so says Charles Blow: Within two days of last Wednesday's debate, we liberals had received the talking points we would proceed to recite.

According to our talking points, Candidate Carson had lied about his connection to a company named Mannatech.

How did we know that Carson had lied? Because PolitiFact said!

We had other points to recite. We knew the GOP was bellyaching about the moderators of the debate. Because we knew the GOP was wrong, we also found ourselves saying that CNBC's moderators had actually done a good job!

Plainly, that wasn't the case.

As of yesterday, we had one more point to recite. President Obama had offered a quip about standing up to Putin as opposed to Quintanilla, Harwood and Quick.

Obama's delivery is very good—much better than that of most liberals. But we were now empowered to recite that talking point too.

In our view, the moderators did a terrible job at last Wednesday's debate. Before them stood a collection of goons who were offering the craziest set of budget proposals in the republic's long history.

It got worse! The party's front-runner, that same Candidate Carson, had offered a shifting plan for Medicare he couldn't begin to explain. It had also become fairly clear that he had no earthly idea what the instrument known as the "debt limit" or "debt ceiling" is.

Unfortunately, the debt limit is a very important part of our current political warfare. Candidate Carson seems to have no idea what it is.

It wasn't just Candidate Carson! As the debate proceeded, other contenders were eager to offer budget proposals which seemed to have been assembled by teams of baboons. Meanwhile, the moderators were representing a major news org which focuses on business, economics and finance!

In even a slightly rational world, the moderators would have staged a bracing two-hour event, in which the candidates' incoherence came under sharp review. In our world, the moderators did no such thing, despite our team's pathetic attempts to pretend that they actually did.

Good God, our standards are low! As we've watched our tribe settle for our pitiful talking points, we've thought of Earl Butz's pathetic/sad joke from 1976 about the unambitious fellow who only wanted "loose shoes and a warm place to poop," among other alleged desirables.

Because the joke was obscene and racist, it got Butz fired from President Ford's cabinet. Thirty-nine years later, its spirit seems to capture the way our tribe is willing to settle for a pitiful few talking points, in which we agree to pretend that a bunch of corporate hacks from a corporate "news org" staged a sharp debate.

Manifestly, they didn't. But we're prepared to pretend they did, as long as we also get to say that Candidate Carson lied! All we seem to want is a pair of loose shoes and a chance to recite that claim.

Starting tomorrow, we'll look at the lazy, incompetent way CNBC's assembly of hacks failed to challenge the assortment of goons concerning their crazy budget proposals. When we see people like Drum and Klein defending the work of those corporate hacks, we know our republic's not long for this world.

For today, let's spend one more day on the claim that Candidate Carson lied. In the process, we may learn what "liberal bias" looks like, not without reason, to those in The Other Tribe.

Last Friday, Paul Krugman claimed that Carson lied; it was perhaps the only awful column Krugman has ever written. He also claimed that Carson's a "grifter," a designation he also dropped, without explanation, on Candidates Trump and Cruz.

Did Carson lie about Mannatech? The questioning of Carson on that topic was so brief and so imprecise—was so unskilled; was so unintelligent—that we definitely wouldn't say that.

But so what? This was one of our tribal points! On Monday morning, Charles Blow was still plowing this ground in that same New York Times.

Let's be fair! In Monday's column, Blow didn't say that Candidate Carson lied. He said Carson "wasn't completely honest" in his "answer" about Mannatech, which PolitiFact "ruled" to be false.

Carson wasn't completely honest? "Look who's talking," our analysts cried, after reviewing Blow's column.

Readers, can we talk? Assuming minimal competency, Blow's column didn't seem especially honest to us, especially since he had had five days to consider what he was claiming.

Blow's column was rather slippery. Does the New York Times still have editors? If so, it's hard to know why this column was permitted to run in the form that appeared.

Blow was working from tribal points. This meant the GOP candidates were disingenuous in their complaints about the moderators' alleged "gotcha questions" last Wednesday.

In the middle of his column, Blow wasted a lot of time reviewing the history of that rather vague term. But early on, Blow criticized Candidate Carson's statement[s] about Mannatech.

This is his full account:

BLOW (11/2/15): After being asked at last week’s debate about his ties to the shady nutritional supplement company Mannatech and saying “I didn’t have an involvement with them” and dismissing claims of a connection as “total propaganda,” Ben Carson called Thursday for an overhaul of Republican debate formats.

[...]

I think the question was a fair one, and I’m not alone. Carson’s business manager, Armstrong Williams, said Thursday on CNN that the question wasn’t a gotcha one but an “absolutely” fair one.

And on the credibility of Carson’s denial, PolitiFact ruled:

“As far as we can tell, Carson was not a paid employee or official endorser of the product. However, his claim suggests he has no ties to Mannatech whatsoever. In reality, he got paid to deliver speeches to Mannatech and appeared in promotional videos, and he consistently delivered glowing reviews of the nutritional supplements. As a world-renowned surgeon, Carson’s opinion on health issues carries weight, and Mannatech has used Carson’s endorsement to its advantage.

“We rate Carson’s claim False.”

In that passage, Blow quotes the way PolitiFact "ruled." He seemed to treat the ruling as gospel.

In reality, he was quoting the work of a young journalist who's just one year out of college. The passage he quotes is greatly misleading, a fact he had several days to discover.

In what way is that passage misleading? Consider this:

“Carson's claim suggests he has no ties to Mannatech whatsoever. In reality, he got paid to deliver speeches to Mannatech and appeared in promotional videos, and he consistently delivered glowing reviews of the nutritional supplements."

At the debate, Carson directly stated, in his first brief answer, that he had delivered paid speeches for Mannatech. Reading Blow, you'd think this was some hidden fact PolitiFact caught Carson withholding, or even denying.

That is a highly misleading construction. Where was Charles Blow's editor when this was waved into print?

"In reality, he appeared in promotional videos?...Mannatech has used Carson's endorsement to its advantage?"

At the debate, Carson said he didn't know that Mannatech had been using his image in certain ways. In the sixty seconds he seemed to have budgeted for this potentially harmful discussion, moderator Carl Quintanilla didn't challenge the accuracy of that statement, and he didn't ask Carson about promotional videos.

"He consistently delivered glowing reviews of the nutritional supplements?"

Carson did the same thing right at the debate! "Do I take the product?" he said. "Yes. I think it's a good product."

(Mannatech wasn't told to stop selling its products. It was told not to make certain types of medical claims.)

Let's talk:

At PolitiFact, a kid reporter seemed to get herself tangled in a semantic judgment. In her view, you have an "involvement" with a company when they pay you to make speeches.

Carson seemed to be saying something different. He seemed to be saying that he had no "involvement" or "relationship" with the company beyond the (thoroughly normal) practice of receiving pay for speeches. Below, you see the few tiny things Carson said on this topic before Quintanilla raced ahead, scattershot, toward this evening's next bungled topic:

CARSON (10/28/15): Well, that's easy to answer. I didn't have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.

I did a couple of speeches for them. I do speeches for other people. They were paid speeches. It is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of a relationship with them.

Do I take the product? Yes. I think it's a good product.

QUINTANILLA: To be fair, you were on the homepage of their website with the logo over your shoulder—

CARSON: If somebody put me on their homepage, they did it without my permission.

Crackers, that was it! At this point, Quintanilla authored the world's most pitiful third question. The audience booed at this point, as well they might have:

QUINTANILLA (continuing directly): Does that not speak to your vetting process or judgment in any way?

CARSON: No, it speaks to the fact that I don't know those—

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

See? They know.

(APPLAUSE)

QUINTANILLA: Apparently. We will take a break. We'll be back in Boulder in just a minute.

For the full transcript, click here.

Crackers, please! Carson said a company had used his image without his permission. Turning to silliest gotcha mode, Quintanilla thought this might speak poorly of Carson's judgment!

What is the truth about Carson's history with Mannatech? We have no real idea. But then, we have a perfect excuse—we watched Quintanilla hurry through this potentially damaging topic on his way to commercial break.

Did Carson "lie" about his history with Mannatech? It's possible, but we have no idea why someone would say so based on this fleeting discussion. The discussion was much too brief, and was poorly handed. It did have a slight gotcha feel, perhaps through mere incompetence.

Actually, we think we do know why people rushed to say Carson lied! Looking for a warm place to poop, we liberals were grateful for the chance to recite that point.

Krugman took things one step further, saying that Carson's a "grifter." In fairness, Krugman knew these things because a college kid said!

Conservatives will look at the columns by Krugman and Blow and think they see liberal bias. In the case of Blow's column, they'll remember that Carson specifically cited his paid speeches when they see a plain suggestion that Carson hid this fact.

Conservative voters will see this as liberal bias. We see it as terrible journalism, performed by a columnist who routinely has his thumbs on the scale.

Looking at Quintanilla, we see something else. We see a corporate flyweight hurrying through a topic which needed substantially more time if he wanted to sift it fairly—a topic he didn't seem to have researched especially well.

This hurried treatment led to serious claims about Candidate Carson, and to the booing of Quintanilla. Last Friday, Krugman misstated the chronology of the booing to make his attacks work best.

Conservatives will attribute that "error" to liberal bias. It's hard to say they're wrong.

We think the booing was justified when Quintanilla asked that silly third question. But good lord! The liberal world should have been booing, extremely loudly, during the bulk of this hopelessly bungled debate.

Those moderators were simply awful, despite what Ezra and others have said. This is why we say that:

Those Republican candidates' budget plans are the craziest in American history. What explains Ezra's support for the trio of flyweights who utterly failed to examine that state of affairs?

Tomorrow: This is what haplessness looks like

Supplemental: The craziness of those crazy tax plans!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2015

Krugman clues Chris Hayes: How crazy are the budget plans of the current Republican candidates?

Last night, Paul Krugman appeared with Chris Hayes on The One True Liberal Channel. At one point, he compared those candidates' current budget proposals to the proposal of Candidate Bush back in Campaign 2000.

He said the current tax plans are just massively crazier. Hayes seemed surprised by that. Here's how their discussion began:

HAYES (11/2/15): One of the reasons I was excited to have you on tonight is, lost in the sort of reaction to the CNBC debate is the fact that the idea behind the CNBC debate is that it would be the debate focused on economic issues.

KRUGMAN: And they had little of that—

HAYES: And it strikes me that essentially the central domestic policy plank of the Republican Party now is the same as when George W. Bush ran in 2000, which is lots of tax cuts, which will distributionally benefit the wealthiest the most. Is that a fair characterization?

KRUGMAN: Sure. Except the difference now is that the tax cuts are bigger, they're less responsible, and the claims being made for them are even more extravagant. So, you know, Bush looks cautious and statesmanlike compared with the current crop.

HAYES: Really?

KRUGMAN: Yeah! No, it's amazing, actually. We are— I'm starting to look back and I said, "Boy, that was a sane party in the Bush years, by comparison." I mean, this is crazy.

To watch the whole segment, click here.

You can watch the tape to decide of Hayes was surprised by what Krugman said. To our ear, the cable host sounds quite surprised when he says, "Really?"

At any rate, Krugman said that Candidate Bush 2000 "looks cautious and statesman-like compared with the current crop." He said the current budget proposals are "crazy"—that Bush's budget proposal in Campaign 2000 seems sane in comparison.

Plainly, that assessment is true. Unfortunately, CNBC's hapless moderators barely touched on these points last Wednesday night. Instead, they wandered the countryside, throwing out scattershot questions from which they would quickly move on.

All too often, they did so in a snarky, insulting way. Their tone seemed to have been designed in heaven to reinforce GOP talking-points about the press corps' liberal bias.

How hapless were those moderators? We'll examine the question all week. Today, let's recall the size of Candidate Bush's tax cut proposal in Campaign 2000.

You could report the size of Bush's tax cut proposal in several different ways. In part, it depended on whether you included the year 2001, in which the proposed tax cuts wouldn't yet have taken effect. It also depended on whether you included the increased interest costs which would accrue to the federal government after the proposed tax cuts lowered federal revenues.

By the time of the first Bush-Gore debate, the two candidates had long been using different numbers to describe the size of the plan. In that fateful debate, Bush said he would be returning $1.3 trillion to the people through his tax cuts in his first ten years (starting in 2001).

Candidate Gore started counting in the year 2002, when the proposed tax cuts would go into effect. In that fateful first debate, he said Candidate Bush had proposed "a $1.9 trillion tax cut, almost half of which goes to the wealthy."

You can pick the accounting method you like. However you choose to slice it, that was the range within which the debate occurred during Campaign 2000. According to Candidate Bush, he had proposed $1.3 trillion in tax cuts over ten years. According to Candidate Gore, Bush had proposed a $1.9 trillion hit to the federal treasury.

Something else should be said about Bush's proposal in Campaign 2000; we'll note that point below. For now, consider what Krugman meant when he said that Bush's proposal in Campaign 2000 looks cautious, statesmanlike and sane when compared with the current "crazy" proposals.

As Krugman and Hayes continued talking last night, Krugman cited a number. Readers, be forewarned! This is just the start of the current lunacy:

KRUGMAN (continuing directly): No, it's amazing, actually. We are— I'm starting to look back and I said, "Boy, that was a sane party in the Bush years, by comparison." I mean, this is crazy.

You know, Marco Rubio, who is now sort of emerging as the establishment candidate, $6 trillion of unfunded tax cuts. Which he claims will pay for themselves, which is deep voodoo. And that's amazing, that a major party has gone that far down the crazy path.

Depending on how you did the accounting, Candidate Bush proposed $1.3 trillion-$1.9 trillion in tax cuts in Campaign 2000. By way of contrast, Candidate Rubio's plan involves $6 trillion in tax cuts, and that's just the start of The Crazy.

Other plans by the leading contenders are much more extensive. Candidate Trump's exercise in lunacy has been scored at $11 trillion, to offer one example.

That's what Krugman had in mind when he said that Bush was relatively sane in Campaign 2000 while the current players are crazy. In a typical manifestation, Hayes didn't seem to know what Krugman meant. He never asked Krugman to state the numbers from Campaign 2000, which are dwarfed by the current numbers.

This brings us back to the haplessness of last Wednesday's debate. CNBC had assembled a trio of made-for-TV cable players who seemed to have little desire or ability to examine the way such budget matters works.

As Hayes noted, "the idea behind the CNBC debate is that it would be the debate focused on economic issues." As it turned out, CNBC's trio of players simply weren't up to this task.

Occasionally, they tried to discuss a few of the candidates' budget plans. Later this week, we'll look at the ways they proceeded.

More often, they flailed about, asking silly questions about polls or about "relationships" involving dietary supplements. Their incompetence was gross, astounding, relentless, routine.

The liberal world couldn't see this. Just like that, our intellectual leaders began insisting that these corporate dopes had actually done a good job.

Just for one brief shining moment, can we talk real talk? CNBC's Three Musketeers were not on the air because they're highly competent.

They were on the air for other reasons. They were on the air because they're telegenic, and because they provided the appropriate demographic mix. One moderator was on the air because he's a legacy player, just like Mika and Willie, his fellow incompetents.

Quintanilla was handsome and Hispanic; Quick and pretty and strawberry blonde; Harwood was handsome and second generation. The fact that they had the combined skill level of a sleeping galoot didn't seem to have occurred to their corporate bosses—and we liberals quickly began to pretend that they'd actually done a good job.

Who's dumber—CNBC's Three Musketeers or us? We'll examine their performance all week. But their work was sad, quite poor.

Those budget proposals are manifestly crazy. As the week proceeds, we'll marvel at the hapless way the moderators approached that remarkable fact.

One more point about Candidate Bush in 2000: In last Friday's column, Krugman snarked a bit about Candidate Bush 2000. We thought this passage was misleading, perhaps a bit deceptive:

KRUGMAN (10/30/15): Consider Mr. Rubio, who has emerged as the leading conventional candidate thanks to Jeb Bush’s utter haplessness. There was a time when Mr. Rubio’s insistence that $6 trillion in tax cuts would somehow pay for themselves would have marked him as deeply unserious, especially given the way his party has been harping on the evils of budget deficits. Even George W. Bush, during the 2000 campaign, at least pretended to be engaged in conventional budgeting, handing back part of a projected budget surplus.

In Campaign 2000, did Candidate Bush pretend "to be engaged in conventional budgeting, handing back part of a projected budget surplus?"

In fact, he did hand back part of a projected budget surplus. Those were very different times. Even after his tax cuts passed in 2001, the OMB and the CBO were still projecting future surpluses!

Once again, let's talk:

Bush proposed less than $2 trillion in tax cuts at a time of large surpluses. At a time of projected deficits, Rubio is proposing $6 trillion in tax cuts; Trump is near $11 trillion.

Hayes didn't seem to know about this. Last week, CNBC's moderators didn't even seem to know where their pitiful factoids had come from.

As liberals, we never stop accepting this level of performance. By late last week, we were grateful just for the chance to claim that Carson had lied!

MAY LOOK LIKE LIBERAL BIAS: Krugman had a list of names!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2015

Part 1—Candidate Carson's lie: Instantly, they became points of pseudoliberal dogma:

Candidate Carson lied at last Wednesday's debate! And how do we know that Carson lied? Because PolitiFact said!

For ourselves, we wouldn't say that Carson lied, although that could still be demonstrated. We would say this:

The liberal world reacted in an unintelligent, childish way to last Wednesday night's debate. Having said that, we'd also say this:

The moderators from CNBC were unskilled, pitiful, unintelligent, not real serious, clueless. Their hap[less journalistic conduct was a gift to the GOP.

To people in the conservative world, those moderators' hapless performance will look like a famous old demon—media liberal bias. The reaction of pundits like the New York Times' Charles Blow actually is liberal bias.

We'll look at Blow's column tomorrow. Assuming even minimal competence, Blow and his editor agreed to deceive Times readers.

For today, let's consider a performance which was even worse, considering the high caliber of its source. We refer to Paul Krugman's column in last Friday's Times.

Krugman said that Candidate Carson lied, then called him something worse. Below, you see the start of one of the worst columns Krugman has ever written.

To conservatives, work like this looks like that famous old devil, liberal bias. In the case of Krugman's column, we'd say the charge is fair:

KRUGMAN (10/30/15): Springtime for Grifters

At one point during Wednesday’s Republican debate, Ben Carson was asked about his involvement with Mannatech, a nutritional supplements company that makes outlandish claims about its products and has been forced to pay $7 million to settle a deceptive-practices lawsuit. The audience booed, and Mr. Carson denied being involved with the company. Both reactions tell you a lot about the driving forces behind modern American politics.

As it happens, Mr. Carson lied. He has indeed been deeply involved with Mannatech, and has done a lot to help promote its merchandise. PolitiFact quickly rated his claim false, without qualification. But the Republican base doesn’t want to hear about it, and the candidate apparently believes, probably correctly, that he can simply brazen it out. These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.

Was Krugman making deceptive claims in that passage? Consider one example:

From that account, a reader would think that the audience booed when Carson was asked about Mannatech—before Carson made his denial. That rather obvious suggestion is just flatly false.

In fact, the audience booed after the second follow-up question by Carl Quintanilla, one of CNBC's trio of hapless moderators. That third question concluded a journalistically hapless exchange which lasted roughly one minute and led to a shower of pleasing tribal claims.

Can we talk? The follow-up question which got booed was just utterly silly. Simply put, Quintanilla's question deserved to be booed.

To conservative voters, questions like Quintanilla's follow-up question will look like examples of liberal bias. For ourselves, we wouldn't make that assumption about the motives behind Quintanilla's question or his overall hapless performance. But then, we also wouldn't change the chronology of an exchange to heighten our case against that Republican audience. And we'd be happy to state the truth:

On a journalistic basis, Quintanilla's follow-up question was hapless. So was a great deal of CNBC's work this night.

Inevitably, performances like CNBC's will trigger cries of liberal bias. So will columns like Krugman's.

In the case of Krugman's column, we'd say the charge is accurate. Here's why:

In the passage shown above, Krugman accuses Candidate Carson of lying at the debate. As he continues, he accuses Carson of something else. He says that Carson's a grifter.

Regarding the claim that Carson lied, Krugman's standard of evidence is remarkably weak. "PolitiFact quickly rated his claim false," Krugman says, as it that "quick" assessment somehow settled this question.

We hate to be the killjoy here, but as the years have rolled along, PolitiFact has performed increasingly lazy work. In this case, PolitiFact's "ruling" (their term) was delivered by Lauren Carroll, who graduated from college in June 2014.

Corporate entities make such hires to keep labor costs down, making owners happy. The quality of the journalism may suffer in the process.

In the case of Carson's claims about Mannatech, Carroll called his statement "a stretch." In our view, she did a rather lazy job sorting out the facts in question. But so what?

Thee careless work of a college kid was good enough for Professor Krugman! Conservatives will call this "liberal bias." We'd say they have a strong point.

We'll examine the claim that Carson lied a bit more as the week rolls on. For today, let's consider Krugman's second claim, the claim that Carson is a "grifter."

Also, consider the ease with which Krugman extends this insulting claim to other Republican candidates. This is the way he continued in this unfortunate column:

KRUGMAN (continuing directly): And this doesn’t just go for outsider candidates like Mr. Carson and Donald Trump. Insider politicians like Marco Rubio are simply engaged in a different, classier kind of scam—and they are empowered in part by the way the grifters have defined respectability down.

That is a very strange paragraph. It provides the gateway to a column which recalls Joe McCarthy's work.

In the course of his column, Krugman says and suggests that he's naming the names of a long list of grifters. That said, please note the lazy bases on which he'll extend this charge.

Presumably, Candidate Carson is a grifter because he has somehow made money from a company's fraudulent claims. PolitiFact offers no evidence of such behavior, but the G-bomb gets dropped anyway.

That ascription is slippery enough. But in the passage posted above, Candidate Trump is quickly called a "grifter" too, with Krugman making no attempt to explain this unpleasant charge. Candidate Rubio is quickly thrown in the stew as well, although he is said to be engaged in a classier kind of scam.

We would agree with that assessment. But note the way this unfortunate column by Krugman proceeds.

As he proceeds, Krugman describes three levels of "grifters." He has already fingered Carson and Trump as grifters, in the latter case with no explanation at all. As he continues, he names the names of other alleged grifters, sometimes naming names and explaining the nature of his charges.

Krugman names names! He names the name of "former Congressman Ron Paul," who isn't an actual candidate.

He also names the name of Glenn Beck. Beck's not a candidate either.

In the course of naming these names, another person who is a candidate seems to get nailed as a grifter. Pulling a list from his inside pocket, Krugman names that additional name rather late in his column:

KRUGMAN: At a higher level still [of grifter scams] are operations that are in principle engaging in political activity, but mainly seem to be generating income for their organizers. Last week The Times published an investigative report on some political action committees raising money in the name of anti-establishment conservative causes. The report found that the bulk of the money these PACs raise ends up going to cover administrative costs and consultants’ fees, very little to their ostensible purpose. For example, only 14 percent of what the Tea Party Leadership Fund spends is “candidate focused.”

You might think that such revelations would be politically devastating. But the targets of such schemes know, just know, that the liberal mainstream media can’t be trusted, that when it reports negative stories about conservative heroes it’s just out to suppress people who are telling the real truth. It’s a closed information loop, and can’t be broken.

And a lot of people live inside that closed loop. Current estimates say that Mr. Carson, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz together have the support of around 60 percent of Republican voters.

Suddenly, Candidate Cruz seems to be maybe a grifter too, without any explanation of how he earned inclusion with previous grifters Carson and Trump. "Furthermore, the success of the grifters has a profound effect on the whole party," Krugman says as he continued. "As I said, it defines respectability down."

Did Krugman define journalistic respectability down with this unfortunate column? This column throws ugly charges around in much the way Tailgunner Joe once did. The whole thing starts with a pleasing passage in which Krugman reinvents a simple chronology to make his pleasing claims stick. He then turns to an underwhelming college kid to settle a serious charge.

Very, very late in his column, Krugman gets to the heart of the mess which surrounds the candidates who stood on that stage last Wednesday night. Only then does he start to explain the way Candidate Rubio's name got thrown into the "grifter stew" he ladled at the start of his column.

Conservative voters will see this column as an example of liberal bias. It's hard to say they're wrong.

The column's straight outta McCarthy! Krugman drops G-bombs on candidates' heads without a hint of explanation or justification. In the case of Candidate Carson, he links to the work of a college kid who doesn't allege that Carson took money on the basis of fake product claims.

Krugman rarely does this, but that column was McCarthyistic. It shows what can happen when Even Our Very Best let tribal feelings hold sway.

Yesterday morning, Krugman was back to a serious column about serious issues. On Friday, though, he performed very poorly.

Here's the worst part of Friday's column. As he rampaged about the grifters, Krugman largely failed to discuss the utterly crazy budget proposals those ten candidates have made. And he failed to do something else:

He failed to discuss the horrible work done by those hapless CNBC moderators.

Please understand the situation those moderators faced last Wednesday night. Before them stood a row of candidates with the craziest budget plans ever presented. Meanwhile, the moderators hailed from a major news org with a focus on business, finance, economics.

Before them stood ten crazy plans. But the moderators engaged in mountains of drivel and oceans of snark. Their utter lack of focus was their defining trait this night. Their pitiful journalistic conduct was a gift to the GOP.

The liberal world has refused to see or say these things. We prefer to rampage around saying that Candidate Carson lied. How do we know he lied? Because a college kid said!

Truly, we liberals are utterly hapless. It's true almost all the way down.

Tomorrow: Charles Blow's liberal bias

What happened at last Wednesday's debate?

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2015

Our answer starts tomorrow: What do people do with the hour they gain when we’re told to set our clocks back?

Visiting friends in the Hudson Valley, we finally got the answer! In some instances, people spend that extra hour trying to figure out how to re-set their clocks!

We don’t know if the clocks in question were really antiques, but we know they were hard to set back! The extra hour was burned away in attempts to correct the record.

For ourselves, Amtrak has arranged to return us today to our sprawling campus. Tomorrow, we’ll start examining CNBC’s journalistic performance at last Wednesday’s Republican debate.

Over the weekend, we were disappointed by the number of liberals and mainstream journalists who fell in line with a blinkered old script in which the journalistic performance just wasn’t that bad, or was perhaps even heroic. Where do such story lines come from?

To some extent, this claim may be pleasing to career journalists who are inclined to observe their guild’s code of silence. To some extent, this claim may be pleasing to tribal liberals, who pleasure themselves by repeating dog-eared claims about Republican deception and cant.

In our view, CNBC’s performance was extremely weak—and this weak performance served as a gift to the GOP and its ridiculous candidates. So does the childish liberal reaction which insists that any complaint from The Other Tribe is wrong by definition.

We liberals! With our gatekeepers largely gone, are we up to the challenge of playing this game? Do we have what it takes to struggle and win?

At bottom, we’d say the answer seems to be no. We read a lot of work this weekend which struck us as silly and less than obsessively honest—and as self-defeating.

Tomorrow, we’ll start to examine CNBC’s performance. We’ll probably start with Paul Krugman’s column from last Friday.

To read it, just click here.

Last Friday, on the train coming north, Krugman’s column struck us as odd. We’ll peruse it again on the train heading south, double-checking that reaction. For ourselves, we’d say we spent our own extra hour looking at bundles of tribal cant.

We liberals! With the gatekeepers gone, we’ve been left on our own. It sometimes seems to us that we’re eager to blow one again.

The greatest joke of all: Yesterday's chaos made us think of "Goldberg's Law," human history's greatest known joke:

"The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure."

Often, it's better to stick with one watch. On the other hand, it can be disabling to insist on one lone narrative.