Information about deductibles!

MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2017

The discussions that don't seem to bark: In this recent post, Kevin Drum describes the state of deductibles under Obamacare.

For those who care about such things, his information will be interesting. Based upon cable news air play, that will be virtually no one.

Drum says the deductibles aren't as bad as conservatives like to say. Based upon official data, he says, "Only about a fifth [of Obamacare enrollees] had the horror-story $6,000+ deductibles that we hear so much about."

He also offers a "guess," a guess which may well be accurate:

"My guess is that the majority of the people with high deductibles are the famous 'young invincibles' who are single, don't qualify for subsidies because they're fairly well off, and don't think they're going to get sick. So they buy the cheapest plan they can."

This may all be true. We'd love to see these topics discussed much more, but the truth is, nobody actually cares about this Over Here in our tribe. (Also, nobody cares about low-income schools or about what occurs in such places. Few things could be more clear. Our team lets every kind of propaganda and misinformation slide by uncorrected, unchallenged. We've done so for many years.)

Meanwhile, for what it's worth, this is what Sarah Kliff wrote in her recent report for Vox. As she starts, she's talking about a 59-year-old working class woman who can't afford to go to the doctor because of her $6000 deductible under Obamacare:

KLIFF (12/13/16): The woman was mad because her costs felt overwhelmingly expensive. These are some of the most common frustrations with the Affordable Care Act. Surveys show that high deductibles are the top complaint; 47 percent of enrollees told the Kaiser Family Foundation they were dissatisfied with their deductible.

A study from the Commonwealth Fund earlier this year found that four in 10 adults on Affordable Care Act plans didn’t think they could afford to go to the doctor if they got sick. Fewer than half said it was easy to find an affordable plan.

We have no idea how these matters shake out. We do know this—within the tents of our upscale liberal world, no one actually cares. (We exclude Drum from that judgment.)

We'd also like to return to those data we posted here last week. To simplify matters, we pulled these numbers from the craziest data set in the world, as we've been doing for years:

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

In France, everyone received full health care despite that lower per capita spending. Meanwhile, here in the States, health care spending that year broke down as shown, according to the OECD data:

Per person health care spending, United States, 2015
Government spending: $4672
Personal expenditures: $4779

In the United States, government health care spending, all by itself, exceeded all French health care spending that year. If we had a liberal or progressive movement, questions like these would routinely be asked:

Given that amount of government spending, why do we have any deductibles or co-pays at all?

Given those numbers, why do we have anyone who is uninsured?

And also this:

Where is all that extra money going? When we compare our overall spending to that of France, who's siphoning all that extra money out of our national health care?

Those questions are never asked. You'll see your favorite stars on MSNBC exploring the work of the Bolshoi Ballet before you'll see any such questions pursued.

In response to Kliff's report, we liberals showed that we don't give a flying fig when 59-year-old women in Kentucky can't go to the doctor—can't afford health care. But then, we've shown for many years that we have no progressive politics at all, except the kind which lets us drop our various bombs on Those People's heads.

It's the only play we know. It's our only pleasure.

We aren't very smart and we aren't very nice. In each of those ways, our tribe has unwittingly worked, for many years, to create these deeply troubling Days of Trump.

Why we lack a progressive journalism: Jim Garland famously sang, "We don't want your millions, mister."

Again and again, the people we accept as upper-end mainstream and liberal journalists rather plainly do.

How much will Greta Van Susteren be paid? You will never be told.

Should journalists call a lie a lie?

MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2017

Inquiring minds have asked: Margaret Sullivan made a "modest proposal" in today's Washington Post. For reasons you can check for yourself, she suggested that journalists should stop using the term "fake news."

Sullivan also made a suggestion. On its face, her suggestion seems to make obvious sense.

In our view, though, her suggestion isn't especially smart:

SULLIVAN (1/9/17): So, here’s a modest proposal for the truth-based community.

Let’s get out the hook and pull [the term "fake news"] off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.

Instead, call a lie a lie. Call a hoax a hoax. Call a conspiracy theory by its rightful name. After all, “fake news” is an imprecise expression to begin with.

Should journalists "call a lie a lie?" In most cases, they probably shouldn't!

We'll offer an explanation below. First, a bit of background:

Should journalists call a lie a lie? Eight days ago, the question went viral in the wake of an exchange on Meet the Press.

On the venerable Sunday show, Chuck Todd posed a question to Gerard Baker, editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal. This is what Todd said:

TODD (1/1/17): The issue of facts. We don't—

People always say, "You've got to fact-check, you've got to fact-check." But we sometimes—there isn't an agreement on what the facts are. And this is yet another challenge for you and everybody here, which—

Do you feel comfortable saying, "So-and-so lied?" To be that—

You know, if somebody says just an outright falsehood, do you say the word "lie?" Is that important to start putting in reporting or not?

If somebody "says an outright falsehood," should journalists say that he or she "lied?" That's the way Todd framed the question for Baker. In the eight days since the Todd-Baker exchange, an array of journalists have offered their thoughts on this matter.

Yesterday, Sullivan said that journalists should just "call a lie a lie." On its face, that seems to make perfect sense—but in most cases, that advice is almost certainly wrong. This is why we say that:

Duh. In most cases, journalists won't be in a position to know that the lie is a lie.

That may know that Person X made a fairly obvious misstatement. But was Person X telling a lie?

In most cases, Journalist Y won't be in a position to know. If we expect journalists to report what they know, that should, in most cases, settle the question right there.

Having said that, let us add this further point. All too often, pundits or journalists generate a bad result when they call a misstatement a lie.

Maybe we're the only ones who have ever watched a cable news pundit discussion. But when pundits refer to misstatements as lies, they frequently generate a type of second-order discussion, in which defenders of Person X note the fact that the journalist can't possibly know that Person X is lying.

On cable channels like CNN, skillful defenders of Person X will instantly change the subject in the manner described. Just like that, the onus gets shifted from a groaning misstatement by Person X to an unsupported claim made by Journalist Y.

This switch in focus is quite common on CNN's gong-show panels.

Should journalists use the term "lie?" In our current downward spiral, this question has been gaining currency since 1994 or 1995.

Howls were heard when Newt Gingrich, breaking with long-standing tradition, began using the L-bomb to describe certain (perfectly accurate) statements by President Clinton. Ten years later, our own David Corn explicitly changed the traditional definition of the term "lie" in order to fuel his tribally pleasing book, The Lies of George W. Bush.

In the liberal and mainstream worlds, Donald J. Trump's endless array of bogus statements have fueled a desire to add the L-word to our array of bombs. Todd's recent question on Meet the Press has fueled a renewed discussion.

For ourselves, we've been struck by the primitive set of skills our journalists bring to this discussion. Our lazy, C-minus array of skills have helped create the cultural mess we're all in.

We'll look at some of the post-Todd chatter in the next few days. Tomorrow, we'll start with Todd's question itself. We'll even look at Baker's reply.

Should journalists call a lie a lie? Working from the transcript above, we're going to ask why Chuck asked!

INTRODUCING THE GRETA: Exciting new era begins!

MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2017

Part 1—Major star vouches for car: This evening, at 6 PM Eastern, an exciting new era begins on The One True Liberal Channel.

Greta Van Susteren debuts tonight as a nightly MSNBC host. She brings her program, On the Record, to The One True Channel, name unchanged, after fourteen years' service at Fox.

What will this new program be like? We have no idea. But last Thursday night, a certain unnamed cable star was vouching rather aggressively for Van Susteren's greatness.

This big "corporate liberal" cable news star was aggressively selling the car. To watch the entire segment in question, you can just click here.

At Media Matters, a cynical writer was trying to say that Van Susteren had been a tool for Donald J. Trump down through those many long years. (For our report on those remarks, you can just click this.) Today, we'll show you what that unnamed cable star was saying about Van Susteren on her eponymous program last Thursday night.

In our view, this unnamed star was gushing rather hard. She started by offering her greatest possible praise. You can tell Van Susteren is great, she said, because she herself has often played videotape of Van Susteren on her own cable show.

Here's how last Thursday evening's Greta-vouching began:

MADDOW (1/5/17): In telling the stories of the day, covering the day's news, on this show, we tend to show a lot of archive footage. I don't know if you saw when we ran our year-end credits this year, there are like five zillion archivists in our credits.

We love our archivists, we love our archives, we love showing news footage and historical footage from all the way back to the dawn of news.

We play a lot less contemporary news coverage on this show. I know a lot of other shows do it, but I just don't end up showing a lot of, you know, "Here's a thing somebody said on TV last night." It just doesn't come up that often on this show.

"I I I I I I I!" Already, our analysts were voicing their patented trill. Then, the vouching for Greta got started:

MADDOW (continuing directly): One thing I have noticed, though, over the eight years or so that we've been doing this show, is that when I do use contemporary footage, when there's no other way to tell the story without showing you what just happened on somebody else's TV show, that footage disproportionately and by a mile tends to come from one place. It has come from one show, hosted by one particular person, who we've used footage from over and over and over again.

[Brief video clips of past exchanges from Van Susteren's program]

If you want to count on your fingers how many times we on this show have played clips of Greta Van Susteren over the years, you could not do it. You need like four extra hands.

And I know everybody thinks that various news outlets and news networks are at each other's throats, particularly between Fox and MSNBC, we must hate each other's guts, but you know what?

Greta Van Susteren is great. She is!

"Greta Van Susteren is great," the unnamed cable star exclaimed. And how do we know that Van Susteren's great? We know it because the unnamed star has played tape of her down through the years!

Self-affirming metrics like that are par for the course on this program.

In this case, the self-affirming metric raised an obvious question. Why has the unnamed star played so much tape of Van Susteren? As she continued, the unnamed star explained:

MADDOW (continuing directly): And she has an uncanny ability to make newsworthy things happen when the red light is on the camera and she is on TV talking about the news. She can get anybody to talk to her. She has reported from all over the world. She had a decade at CNN. She had 14 years at Fox.

She's also, outside this building, one of the single most decent and genuine and honorable people I have ever come across in this business. And this, that I just showed you a minute ago, this is her new studio-to-be, because she starts here at MSNBC, 6 Eastern on Monday night. And I could not be happier about it.

And joining us now from right next to her brand new studio in D.C. is Greta Van Susteren host of For The Record, which launches here on MSNBC, 6 o'clock Monday night.

My friend, congratulations.

VAN SUSTEREN: You know, and, [Name Withheld], thank you, that's so kind of you. And I couldn't be happier. I mean, just think about it. I mean, I'm the luckiest person alive.

Why has the unnamed star played so much tape from Van Susteren's program? Because "she can get anybody to talk to her." Because "she has an uncanny ability to make newsworthy things happen when the red light is on the camera and she is on TV talking about the news."

Outside the building, is Van Susteren "one of the single most decent and genuine and honorable people...in this business?" Leaving the contradiction aside (one of the single most decent people?), it may well be that she is.

(As we noted last week, we've done a few shows with Van Susteren in the past. She was never anything but totally pleasant, helpful, cheerful, upbeat, professional, nice.)

That said, the crucial question about "this business"—about the business these stars have chosen—concerns the way a major star behaves when she's on the air. With that in mind, we're going to let you review some of Van Susteren's work at the Fox News Channel in the course of the next few days.

Brief aside: It's hard to know how the unnamed star knew so much about Van Susteren's work. In earlier years, she has claimed that she doesn't watch other cable news shows. When she was establishing her profile as a star, she routinely insisted that she didn't own a TV set—that she couldn't pown a TV set, because she's such a loser klutz that she'd do nothing but watch TV if she had the chance.

Whatever! The unnamed star was now vouching for Greta's work, and she was vouching quite hard. As the two stars began to chat, we even learned more about their friendship off the air:

VAN SUSTEREN (continuing directly): I mean, look, I have many good friends over at CNN and over at Fox News Channel who have been colleagues too, but just think about this.

I know Chris Matthews, known him for years. Andrea Mitchell, traveled the world with her, following secretaries of state, even trying to keep up with Andrea because she outraces all of us.

You and I have been friends for a long time. You and— And to be honest, you and my husband and I have tipped a few glasses of wine together, or more. So, I mean, like—so, I mean, how could I not be luckier? It's like this is just so exciting.

This is fun for me. I'm thrilled to be here.

How lucky can one person be? Van Susteren has known Chris Matthews for years! And not only that! She and her husband, DC lawyer John Coale, have even gone out drinking with the unnamed star!

The unnamed star pantomimed this drinking as Van Susteren talked down to her new liberal viewers, treating them as if they had IQs of maybe like 9.

As the chat continued, the unnamed star played dumb too. Some of the analysts ran for the year when the star said this:

MADDOW: You know, one of the things I have that always been envious of you for is your ability to get anybody to talk to you. Like, your history, your interview history is like reading an encyclopedia. But in the last year or two, you've been particularly good at getting Donald Trump to talk to you, about getting all the Republicans to talk to you.

Let me ask you, honestly, do you feel like some of that was specific to the fact that you were at Fox? Or do you think that those Republican connections that you made, the Republican guests you've been able to book up to and including the president-elect, do you think they will still want to talk to you over here? I certainly hope so.

VAN SUSTEREN: I think so. I mean, look, I`m curious and I think they're going to come over here. I'm going to give them a fair shake. I`m going to give Republicans a fair shake. I'm going to give Democrats a fair shake.

You know, here's sort of the odd thing. As certain as I am of anything at all, [Name Withheld], I'm not 100 percent certain. So I actually want to know what people have to say because maybe they'll change my mind. Maybe I'm wrong about something.

So you know, I think I'm a very—I think I'm a curious person and I'm not out to gun anybody down. I'm out to get some information and, frankly, I want to hear what they have to say.

Van Susteren was just "out to get some information" during her years at Fox. Meanwhile, several analysts ran for the yard as Maddow feigned surprise at Van Susteren's ability to attract Republican guests while she was serving at Fox.

By now, the gushing and fawning had been matched by both stars' treatment of liberal viewers as complete absolute fools. Just for the record, the gushing continued as the unnamed cable host ended the chat, offering one final claim:

MADDOW (continuing directly): Greta Van Susteren, host of the soon-to-be hit show, For the Record, here on MSNBC starting Monday at 6.

Greta, I can`t speak for everybody in the building, but let me speak for everybody in the building. We're super psyched that you're coming here and I can't wait for you to get to work here. It's really going to be great to be a colleague.

VAN SUSTEREN: And you know what, Rachel? I am so glad to be here. It's fun for me.

Look, you're my friend. I mean, this is exciting. I've wanted to work with you. So this is great. So thank you very much. It's been fun. And I look forward to a lot of exciting times ahead.

MADDOW: Good times. Thanks, Greta. Good luck.

All right. Let me just say, I know what you're thinking. Nobody asked to do that. It's true! Nobody asked me to do that.

I do not have that kind of relationship with anybody who works as an executive in this building. I did that of my own accord because I really am psyched about Greta being here. I do think she's great.

And I know you're thinking, "Ex-Fox News? Really, Maddow?"

Really! She's her own person. Nobody tells Greta what to do. Nobody ever has.

She's incredibly heterogeneous in terms of her ideological interests, in terms of her convincibility. She's been all over the world. She really does have an incredible curiosity and enthusiasm for this job and I think you're going to like her and I think you should give her a chance.

So there. OK, go away!

That was the end of the segment. No one had made the unnamed star gush about Greta that way. Instead, it was Greta's heteregeneous convincibility which, at least in part, led her to sell us the car.

Way back when, Ford had a lot of trouble selling car called the Edsel. In 1978, a major movie concerning a fictional attempt to sell a car called The Betsy. (Harold Robbins had written the book.)

Last Thursday night, a major cable news star was aggressively selling the Greta. She imagined some viewers being suspicious, given Van Susteren's previous service at Fox.

We don't know what Van Susteren's work will be like at The One True Liberal Channel. That said, we think her work at Fox sheds a great deal of light on the way we've entered an age of propaganda, constant dissembling and the absence of discernible "facts" or "truth."

Starting tomorrow, we're going to review some of Van Susteren's work at Fox. That will including the work in which she helped Donald J. Trump spread his birther claims around, as that cynic at Media Matters had suggested or said.

We'll also suggest, once again, that serious liberals and progressives should be very wary of our own extremely strange, unnamed cable star. Last Thursday, she was selling a new model car—and attempting to mislead her starry-eyed viewers again.

Tomorrow: Let's start with those video clips

Why would big journalists do it this way?

SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 2017

The New York Times tries to report on the Russkies and on the wall: At the top of this morning's front page, the New York Times tries to describe the new report about that Russian misconduct.

Shear and Sanger did the report. Below, you see the way it begins, hard-copy headline included.

This all appears on the Times front page. Why on earth would a major newspaper offer that weird fifth paragraph?

SHEAR AND SANGER (1/7/17): Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation's top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday to Mr. Trump.

The officials presented their unanimous conclusions to Mr. Trump in a two-hour briefing at Trump Tower in New York that brought the leaders of America's intelligence agencies face to face with their most vocal skeptic, the president-elect, who has repeatedly cast doubt on Russia's role...

Soon after leaving the meeting, intelligence officials released the declassified, damning report that described the sophisticated cybercampaign as part of a continuing Russian effort to weaken the United States government and its democratic institutions. The report...made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin.

The Russian leader, the report said, sought to denigrate Mrs. Clinton, and the report detailed what the officials had revealed to President Obama a day earlier: Mr. Trump's victory followed a complicated, multipart cyberinformation attack whose goal had evolved to help the Republican win.

The 25-page report did not conclude that Russian involvement tipped the election to Mr. Trump.

That fifth paragraph is technically accurate. But why in the world would a major newspaper offer such a misleading account of such a major point?

"The 25-page report did not conclude that Russian involvement tipped the election to Mr. Trump?" That statement is technically accurate.

That said, the report also "didn't conclude" that Starbucks sells the best coffee. This new report "didn't conclude" that Tom Brady throws the best spiral.

This major report by the intel agencies "didn't conclude" a lot of things! Journalistically, the Times did something very strange in reporting its contents that way.

Duh! If you read all the way to paragraph 20, Shear and Sanger (or maybe their editor) finally provide "the rest of the story." Inside the paper, on page three million, they finally tell readers this:

SHEAR AND SANGER: The report, reflecting the assessments of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, stopped short of backing up Mr. Trump on his declaration that the hacking activity had no effect on the election.

''We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,'' the report concluded, saying it was beyond its responsibility to analyze American ''political processes'' or public opinion.

Duh! Inside the paper, in paragraph 20, Shear and Sanger finally tell all. The intelligence agencies didn't try to assess the effects of the Russian misconduct!

In the language of paragraph 5, the intelligence agencies "didn't conclude" one way or the other. The question of political effects lay outside the scope of their probe.

Why in the world would a major newspaper present this point in the way the Times did? On its own, paragraph 5 will tend to be grossly misleading. But there it sits on the Times front page, shorn of the obvious context which only comes in paragraph 20.

Why in the world would you do it that way? We don't know, but consider another bit of Trump-reporting in this morning's Times.

This second report, by Shear and Huetteman, concerns the possible construction of a wall along the southern border. Why in the world would a major newspaper report the possible cost of the project this way?

SHEAR AND HUETTEMAN (1/7/17): The full cost of a wall as described by Mr. Trump could be enormous. Attaching such a charged issue to annual, mandatory government funding measures could instigate a risky political fight. Those who want to block money for the wall by holding up the bills could find themselves accused of shutting down the government.

The Government Accountability Office has estimated it could cost $6.5 million per mile to build a single-layer fence, with an additional $4.2 million per mile for roads and more fencing, according to congressional officials. Those estimates do not include maintenance of the fence along the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

From what planet does the Times recruit its reporters and editors? There are two obvious, puzzling problems with that puzzling account.

First problem: presumably, a "wall" is not the same thing as a "single-layer fence." The scribes report that the cost of a wall could be enormous. They then proceed to report the possible cost of a fence!

Journalistically, that decision is strange. But why in the world would you describe the cost of a fence or a wall by the mile?

Amittedly, math is hard. That said, why wouldn't you multiply it out, providing the projected cost for the full two thousand miles?

Journalistically, both these decisions are strange. By way of contrast, note the way the Washington Post managed to handle this second problem on today's front page:

DEBONIS (1/7/17): There is no reliable price tag on building a border wall, but Trump has estimated the cost at $8 billion. Recent congressional legislation pegged the number at $10 billion, and construction experts say it could be more than double that.

We don't know whose estimate is right. But what could possibly be the point of presenting the cost by the mile?

A deep-dish cynic would answer that question in a deeply cynical way. This is what a deeply cynical person would tell you:

Each of the New York Times' strange decisions tilts things in Trump's favor. Concerning the intel report, that paragraph 5, out on the front page, will tend to give readers a false impression. It will tend to suggest that the intelligence agencies judged that the Russian misbehavior didn't tilt the election.

The agencies didn't reach that conclusion. But inevitably, that's what paragraph 5, sitting all by itself, will surely tend to suggest.

It's astonishing that the Times reported that point that way. That said, a cynic would tell you that the weird reporting about the cost of the wall tilts in Trump's favor too.

Rightly or wrongly, that cynic would tell you that reporting the possible cost by the mile (by the mile!) tends to obscure the large cost of such a project. And by the way, if you read to the end of the Shear/Huetteman report, you will see a slightly weird passage which might give the impression that Nancy Pelosi might be trying to tilt the cost of Trump's wall.

A cynic would tell you that the Times is currying favor with Trump, or possibly with Trump supporters. We aren't saying that cynic is right. But that's what a cynic would say.

For ourselves, We'll say something simpler. Again and again, Times reporters seem weirdly incompetent in an array of ways. They seem like members of a social club rather than highly skilled journalists.

Those Times reports are very weird. Who but the Times jumbles facts this way?

Donald J. Trump would be one such person. How many more can you name?

Greta Van Susteren joins the team!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 2017

Rachel sells you the car: Last night, Rachel Maddow made it official. Greta Van Susteren is coming over to join the MSNBC team.

Full disclosure—we know Greta the very tiniest tad. We've done several shows with her in the past. We'd call her a very nice person.

We've also puzzled, many times, over her performances for Fox. She left the network a few months ago after fourteen years of service.

With respect to her move to MSNBC, it's a tale of two reactions. Two days ago, when the move was being rumored, John Whitehouse offered these thoughts at Media Matters:

WHITEHOUSE (1/4/17): Van Susteren has given Trump a welcoming platform for years. Before the Republican primary, Trump appeared more times on Van Susteren’s On The Record than on the rest of the Fox News prime-time shows combined. During the Republican primary, Van Susteren had Trump on for over five hours, dwarfing other candidates. During these appearances, Trump pushed birtherism, claimed Obama didn’t write his own memoir, and made bigoted remarks about refugees...

To be fair, On The Record was not the worst on Fox News, and Van Susteren may well have been playing to the conservative audience. But the absolute worst Trump hagiographic moment during his campaign came during her “documentary” interview with his campaign...

Onlookers harshly criticized the special, with MSNBC host—and potential future colleague—Chris Hayes declaring that it was reminiscent of state media under a dictator. Hayes tweet: "A glimpse of what state media will look like after Glorious Leader Trump is victorious."

As of now, Van Susteren’s hiring is still a rumor and may not come to pass. But either way, a likely factor in MSNBC’s desire to add her to its lineup is her established track record of getting access to Trump, which she certainly didn’t accomplish because she subjected him to tough interviews.

We can't vouch for every word. We'd be surprised if Van Susteren was hired to lure Trump to MSNBC.

That said, if you click to the Whitehouse report, you can look at tape of Van Susteren with Trump. To see a millionaire cable news host getting pistol-whipped by someone who's nuts, check the footage at this post under the headline, "Trump Suggested Obama's Long-Form Birth Certificate Was Forged."

Whitehouse offered one reaction to Van Susteren's possible hiring. Last night, Maddow took a different approach.

She gushed and fawned and sold us the car in record-breaking manner. She polished Greta up one side, then buffed her down the other.

We'd post the text of what she said but MSNBC is slow posting its transcripts today, including on Nexis. On this official network site, it hasn't posted Maddow transcripts since December 14. Whatever!

Later today or tomorrow, we'll post what Maddow said. In the meantime, to watch an all-star selling a car, you can just click here.

Fair warning: If you click that link, you'll encounter this headline at Maddow's site:

Rachel Maddow: "Greta is great!"

People, we're just saying.

THE PROBLEM INCLUDES US: What, Us worry, perform or care?

FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 2017

Part 4—Journalistic/professorial fail: Time magazine made a big mistake about film-maker Michael Moore.

Back in 2005, the list-making magazine honored Moore as one of the world's 100 most influential people. Two years later, the gentleman made a great film, and we all got to see that Time had been very wrong.

The film in question was Sicko, a humorous but highly pertinent look at the various health care systems of the developed nations. The film could have launched a great discussion, but we don't do discussion here—especially about the type of topic Moore attempted to tackle.

At the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter was called out of retirement to roll his eyes at Moore's film. "Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can agree on two things," he said as he started. "The American health-care system is busted and Michael Moore is not the guy to fix it."

In regular order, the Post's William Booth was more jocular in his own discussion of Moore's film. He described the way Moore had taken "his patented shtick to Canada, England and France...paint[ing] a very rosy picture, especially of the generosity of France."

At the New York Times, Moore's patented shtick was treated semi-fairly in an analysis piece by Philip Boffey. In this sardonic passage, he too mentioned France:

BOFFEY (7/5/07): After all these depressing tales, the second half of the film ushers us into a nirvana of humane and caring treatment supposedly provided to the citizens of Canada, France, Britain and even Cuba, a needlessly provocative choice that detracts from the main message.

While Mr. Moore could find almost nothing good to say about American health care, he can find almost nothing bad to say about the government-run national health systems abroad. There is no acknowledgement of the months-long waits to see specialists in Canada and Britain, of the sick people who fall through the cracks in every system or of rising costs in virtually all countries.

The French system comes off as best, where the government dispatches home aides to help new mothers do the laundry and American expatriates extol the quality and promptness of care. We are left with the impression that these foreign systems are geared up to provide care, while our insurance companies are motivated to deny it.

How strange! To think that viewers could have been left with an "impression" like that!

In fairness, the New York Times published a lengthy editorial, in which the editors made an admission against major corporate interest. "Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations," the editors noted. "France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th."

Say what? France had been found to have the world's best health care system? Could that possibly help explain why Moore had taken his shtick there?

Inevitably, Paul Krugman devoted yet another column to the attempt to explain that countries like France provide universal health care, with health care outcomes as good as ours, at less than half the per person cost.

That said, if there was anyone less influential than Moore, it had to be Krugman, who had committed the cosmic error of knowing whereof he spoke. Meanwhile, rather weirdly, the editors completely skipped the issue of per person cost in their 1300-word editorial.

They examined a range of ways in which the U.S. health system fell short of those in other lands. But they completely failed to mention the matter of per person costs.

Let's return to our basic point. Rather plainly, Michael Moore wasn't hugely influential as of 2007. His superb film came and went, producing little change in this nation's pitifully Potemkin discussion of health care.

In part as a result, we can once again show you the startling numbers from yesterday's award-winning post. Nine years after Michael Moore's film failed to ignite a real discussion, you can once again see the remarkable numbers we have posted below.

The numbers come from the OECD. They compare the per person health care spending of the United States and France:

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

Say what? France spends less than half as much per person? The U.S., which doesn't have universal care, spends an extra $5000 per person per year?

In a word, those numbers are astonishing. In two more words, those numbers are never discussed. Thanks to the reliable silence of people like Maddow, Lilla and Rampell—we're naming just three in a cast of thousands—our standard gong-show pseudo-discussions roll along without anyone being asked to ponder the craziness of those blatantly crazy numbers.

Pretty amazing, isn't it? Five thousand dollars per person per year disappears into the maws of our "health care system," and we still can't provide the universal coverage achieved by a nation like France! Meanwhile, major news orgs break their backs to avoid discussing this state of affairs. Dearest darlings, it just isn't done!

Topics like these don't get discussed, not even by our own tribe. On the corporate channel which gets sold as "liberal," you see a great deal of mugging and clowning. But you never see the multimillionaire hosts discuss such looting at that.

What do we liberals do instead? When Sarah Kliff describes the fact that certain people in Kentucky can't afford to go to the doctor, we attack those people for their dumbness and, of course, for their presumed racism.

Skillfully, we doctor our facts, making their decisions seem more dumb than they actually are. We kick down at these average people as we maintain our well-paid silence about the looting conducted by the society's corporate interests and its professional swells.

What kind of professoriate conducts itself this way? What kind of liberal rank and file gets conned by the mugging and clowning of a car salesman like Maddow? And of course, health care looting is only one area where the Maddows agree to avert their gaze from the looting conducted by the interests.

To cite one other remarkable area, you're also constantly kept from knowing the truth about domestic and international test scores. This lets the interests pursue their attacks on public schools and public school teachers in their headlong pursuit of privatization's sacks of cash.

Incredibly, we aren't even allowed to know about the large score gains achieved by our low-income kids. Rachel would jump off the Golden Gate Bridge before she's discuss such a topic. No one else gives the first flying fig either, as their silence makes clear.

Today, we find ourselves two weeks away from a visibly crazy president. But guess what? We liberals can't persuade The Others that they've been taken in by Trump, in large part because we've been taken in by the Maddows and the long list of silent professors.

They tell us which groups we should "want to protect." In turn, they drop dick jokes and R-bombs on the heads of The Others.

Dumbly, we get swept along, rarely failing to tell ourselves how brilliant and caring We are.

To our own non-professional eye, Donald J. Trump seems diagnosable. It isn't a moral failing when someone is crazy, but that doesn't mean that he isn't crazy, and it seems to us that Trump is.

In theory, it isn't easy to lose a race to a visible crackpot like Trump. But in part because of our professors and our mainstream and corporate-liberal "journalists," we've been working for twenty-five years to help this disaster occur.

We slept in the woods as the narratives grew. We were barefoot and happy, convinced of our manifest brilliance.

Persistently, we name-call The Others, while protecting the elites by whom they're getting looted. This is very much the way our pathetic tribe rolls.

As this month's disaster approaches, we keep pleasuring ourselves with our attacks on the dumbness and racism of Those People. It's the only play we seem to know, and we know it amazingly well.

As the disaster looms, we keep pleasing ourselves this way. Might we suggest that the problems which now surround us have, in some tiny small way, maybe perhaps come from Us?

Milbank decided to challenge the Times!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2017

Who writes copy like this: In this morning's Washington Post, Dana Milbank decided to give the New York Times a run for its money.

The Post can be weirdly incompetent too. What possesses a professional journalist to write a statement like this?

MILBANK (1/5/17): Before the election, President Obama campaigned for Hillary Clinton by reciting the many achievements of his administration: economic recovery, rebuilt auto industry, 15 million new jobs, less foreign oil, cheap gas, more clean energy, fewer troops overseas, Osama bin Laden dead, agreements on climate change and Iran’s nukes, higher incomes, less poverty, same-sex marriage legalized, millions more insured. “Thanks, Obama!” he said, appropriating the meme his critics used ironically.

But Americans thought the country was on the wrong track, and voters demanded change. They rejected Obama’s handpicked successor in favor of the man who led the campaign challenging Obama’s legitimacy as a natural-born American.

It isn't that Trump didn't win the election. Under our electoral rules, he plainly did.

The question is journalistic. Given the way Trump won—by slender margins in a few decisive states, while losing the overall popular vote by two percentage points—why would a professional journalist describe the situation like that?

Dana Milbank went to Yale. According to standard cogitations, this represents the best we have. After decades of The Crazy, this is all we've got.

Times bungles Trump birtherism again!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2017

Least competent news org around: Back in 2011, Donald J. Trump told the world who he was through his birther depredations.

From that to this this, the New York Times has had a hard time discussing what Trump said and did. How strange is the work of the glorious Times? Consider Jonathan Mahler's piece in last Sunday's New York Times magazine.

Ironically, Mahler's piece was an essay about what the headline described as our "Post-Truth Era." Pitifully, it didn't take long for Mahler himself to go all post-truth on us.

These were his fourth and fifth paragraphs:

MAHLER (1/1/17): Our most famous self-investigator is, of course, our incoming president, Donald J. Trump; perhaps no one is more committed to embracing and trumpeting unproven claims from the internet. Six years ago, as he flirted with the idea of running for president, he became especially preoccupied with a theory being advanced by a right-wing extremist named Joseph Farah...

Farah had floated plenty of specious arguments in the past, among them the claim that gay men orchestrated the Holocaust and that Muslims have a 20-point plan for conquering the United States by 2020. But the Farah campaign that captured Trump’s imagination held that America’s first black president, Barack Obama, might have been born outside the United States. Trump talked about this notion almost nonstop; he even said he was considering sending private investigators to Hawaii to prove that the president’s birth certificate was a forgery.

Good God. In talking about this notion nonstop, Trump didn't say that he was considering sending private investigators to Hawaii to investigate Obama's birth. Repeatedly, he said that he had actually done so.

There is no doubt about what Trump actually said. On April 7, 2011, he said this, as part of a long exchange with Meredith Vieira on the Today Show:

TRUMP (4/7/11): You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. He may not have been born in this country, and I'll tell you what. Three weeks ago I thought he was born in this country. Right now I have some real doubts. I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding.

VIEIRA: You have people now down there searching—I mean—

TRUMP: Absolutely.

VIEIRA: I mean in Hawaii.

TRUMP: Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they're finding.

He didn't say that he was considering sending investigators. He said his gumshoes were already there, that they couldn't believe what they'd found. To watch the tape, click here.

Trump's meaning was fairly clear that day, but he erased any possible doubt in the days which followed. Obliterating any ambiguity, Trump repeated these claims on at least two different Fox News programs and on ABC's This Week.

We don't plan to search beyond that. He may have made these noxious claims on additional programs.

That said, isn't it amazing? Six years later, the New York Times still can't get these basic facts right, not even in a magazine piece about "the post-truth era!" We say they "still" can't get it right because of the paper's previous remarkable blunders, committed in July of last year.

How incompetent is the Times? On Sunday, July 3, 2016, the paper published a lengthy, front-page report about Trump's history as a birther. Ashley Parker was the lead writer, ensuring the gong show which followed.

This is the way she began. Remember, Parker got her start as (and no, we aren't making this up) Maureen Dowd's "research assistant:"

PARKER (7/3/16): Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that ''cultural Marxists'' were plotting to destroy the country.

But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.

That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.

''What can we do to get to the bottom of this?'' Mr. Trump asked him. ''What can we do to turn the tide?''

Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama's birthplace, to resolve the debate.

There again, in paragraph 5, Parker made the same basic error. Rather plainly, she seemed to imply that Donald J. Trump had only proposed sending gumshoes to Hawaii.

It was strange that Parker wrote it that way, because, on this rare occasion, she seemed to know the truth. Much later in her lengthy piece, she described Trump's actual claim—although, in keeping with basic Times rules, she also committed a basic factual error:

PARKER: But what most impressed Mr. Farah was just how many hours Mr. Trump was willing to devote to the question. ''This was a busy guy, this was a multibillionaire, and I was surprised that he was willing to spend that kind of time on it,'' he said.

Mr. Farah also stressed to Mr. Trump that the issue was one of ''transparency,'' and Mr. Trump began using the phrase.

''He started saying 'transparency,''' said Mr. Nunberg, Mr. Trump's former adviser. ''It's code for, 'This guy is the Manchurian candidate.'''

Mr. Trump also said repeatedly that he had sent a team of investigators to Hawaii to unearth information about Mr. Obama's birth records. ''They cannot believe what they are finding,'' Mr. Trump told ABC's ''The View.''

Deep inside her lengthy piece, no longer on the Times' front page, Parker now reported what Trump had actually said. Unfortunately, he didn't make any such statement on The View, as a review of this videotape shows. Parker was quoting what he had said on the April 7 Today Show.

Well sir, six months went by, and the New York Times decided to tackle this gruesome behavior again. It wasn't on a Sunday front page this time. This time, it appeared at the top of a Sunday magazine piece—and Mahler bungled again.

We close with a simple question. At this point, how could any journalist still not know what Donald Trump actually said? In this case, it seems that Mahler may not have known, and some editor didn't know either. In what realm do they live?

The sheer incompetence of the Times is truly a thing to behold. That said, such incompetence only takes hold among folk who simply don't care.

Final point about Parker's report: Back in July, Parker's greatest dive for Trump involved the question that didn't howl.

Were Trump's "repeated" statements actually true? Did Trump ever send gumshoes to Hawaii? Or had he just been lying all along?

It was the world's most obvious question; Parker posed it to no one at all. Dearest darlings! When you work for the glorious Times, there are questions you simply don't ask!

No one has to ask it now! In a bit of post-truth work, Mahler has reinvented the basic facts about what Donald Trump said.

THE PROBLEM INCLUDES US: The mother of all data sets!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 2017

Part 3—Sadly, we liberals don't care: Should Professor Lilla, 60 years old, care about Name Withheld?

We're going to say that he should! That said, his recent rhetoric, which may have been misleading, gave the impression that he doesn't—and that he doesn't think liberals should care about people like her.

Quickly, let's visit Name Withheld one more time. For background on what Lilla said, see yesterday's report.

Name Withheld lives in Corbin, Kentucky. Her situation was described by Sarah Kliff in a recent report for Vox.

Name Withheld, who's 59, can't afford to go to the doctor! Once again, this was Kliff's basic outline of the situation:

KLIFF (12/13/16): [A health care worker] renewed a 59-year-old woman’s coverage (who asked her personal information be left out of this story)...She and her husband received a monthly tax credit that would cover most of their premium. But they would still need to contribute $244 each month—and face a $6,000 deductible.

[...]

The deductible left her exasperated. “I am totally afraid to be sick,” she says. “I don’t have [that money] to pay upfront if I go to the hospital tomorrow.”

Her plan did offer free preventive care, an Obamacare mandate. But she skips mammograms and colonoscopies because she doesn’t think she’d have the money to pay for any follow-up care if the doctors did detect something.

The woman said she only buys insurance as financial protection—“to keep from losing my house if something major happened,” she says. “But I’m not using it to go to the doctor. I’ve not used anything.”

The woman was mad because her costs felt overwhelmingly expensive. These are some of the most common frustrations with the Affordable Care Act.

This woman can't afford medical care. Should Professor Lilla, one year her senior, possibly "care about" her? Once again using his language, should he "want to protect" her?

Professor Lilla's recent rhetoric made it sound like he pretty much doesn't. You see, this woman may not belong to the groups Lilla says we liberals "care about" and "want to protect."

Given the professor's taxonomy, this woman's husband is definitely out in the cold. As a woman, she may make it into the tent, despite her apparently disfavored "race." But as a white working-class cis-gender male, her husband lies outside the circle of Professor Lilla's apparent approval.

We'll assume that Professor Lilla didn't actually mean what he seems to have said in his interview with Vox. That said, we liberals are constantly making unpleasant statements in which we consign disfavored groups to the lower rungs of Hell.

In a recent column, the Washington Post's Catherine Rampell was especially unsympathetic in her assessment of people like those on whom Kliff reported. (Name Withheld was mentioned.) But we saw no liberal who was able to notice an obvious fact about Kliff's report—namely, that Kliff was describing a serious problem with this woman's health care.

(An editorial suggestion: Knowing how dense we liberals are, Kliff should have stated this obvious fact in a more explicit fashion.)

At this point, we're going to take a guess. Professor Lilla receives excellent health care through his employment at Columbia. Presumably, Rampell has excellent health care through the Post.

Professor Lilla spent last year in Europe. Presumably, he would have been able to get excellent health care there. Persistently, though, the lordly types who define our liberal discourse seem to find it hard to sympathize with people like Name Withheld.

Reviewing the dumbness of Name Withheld, some liberals have introduced racism into the story, though nothing in Kliff's report pointed in that direction. Increasingly, this is the one play we upper-class liberals know, and we know it extremely well.

We liberals! We aren't very nice and we aren't very smart, except when you let us describes ourselves. For decades, we've been trashing Those People, then puzzling about the way They refuse to vote in the ways we prefer.

Our presidential candidate calls them deplorable and irredeemable; we aren't real skilled at seeing the problem with this kind of thing. Back in 2009, Rachel dropped dick jokes on their heads for two weeks. This made us love Rachel more.

This may explain why We aren't very nice, but why do we say that We aren't very smart? Consider that same old set of statistics, the set of statistics you'll never encounter while watching MSNBC.

The statistics come from the OECD. They constitute the most striking data set in the known world.

These data are simply astounding. Our professors and journalists don't care:

Per person health care spending, 2015
United States: $9451
Germany: $5267
Canada: $4608
Australia: $4420
France: $4407
Japan: $4150
United Kingdom: $4003
Finland: $3983
Italy: $3272
Spain: $3153
South Korea: $2488

Good God, that first number is large! Somewhat paradoxically, it helps explain why Name Withheld, age 59, can't afford to go to the doctor. It explains why she has health insurance, but isn't receiving health care.

Good lord, that number is large! Just think of it—among comparable developed nations, only one nation, Germany, spends even half as much, on a per person basis, as the United States does.

All the other nations spend less than half what we spend! Let's simplify that chart a bit. Let's include just the U.S. and France:

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

Good lord! France provides universal health care while spending less than half what we spend! We spend more than twice what France spends, but we still have millions who are uninsured—and we have others, like Name Withheld, who are technically insured but don't receive health care.

Should Professor Lilla, 60, feel sorry for Name Withheld, 59? As a progressive, he actually should, for a reason which is blindingly obvious, except to losers like Us:

Duh! On a per person basis, $5000 disappears each year into the maws of our "health care" "system." In a somewhat paradoxical way, that missing money helps explain why everyone in France receives health care, but Name Withheld and millions more do not.

(That missing money also explains our federal deficits. As Dean Baker has frequently noted, our annual deficit would disappear if our per capita health care spending suddenly matched that in France.)

Five thousand dollars per person, per year, disappears in our health care system! Here's a quick point for professors to ponder:

That missing money isn't being siphoned off to the needy. That missing money is being looted by a wide range of corporate entities and demographic elites. Working class people of various "races" have to go without health care because a range of corporate interests are taking their cuts off the top.

The data we've posted are simply astounding. You rarely see such a remarkable set of statistics.

That said, so what? Those data are never mentioned by our major news orgs or by our liberal elites. We liberals prefer to drop our tribal bombs and take our sabbaticals in France.

We're not very nice and we're not very smart. We have a limited number of scripts, which we recite in our sleep.

On a political basis, we're easy to beat. We proved that again this past year.

As Paul Krugman noted this Monday, our political systems have been imploding for at least the past twenty-five years. We'll make our suggestion once again:

This problem, which should be very troubling, has always and does involve Us.

Tomorrow: Picnic and Baby Doll, plus Sicko. Also, this new piece by Drew Altman

On the inclusion of Finland: In the data from the OECD, we included Finland. We did so for a reason.

Finland is a much smaller nation than the others on that list. For that reason, it doesn't exactly fit in that data set.

We included Finland for this reason. Our big news orgs constantly tell us too marvel at Finland's transplendent test scores (which sometimes aren't real transplendent). They never ask us to wonder about its low level of health care spending.

Simply put, our big newspapers avoid today's astounding data like the plague. But so does Rachel and a wide range of fiery liberals.

They sell us attacks on Name Withheld. It's one of the ways we all lose.

The things we read in the New York Times!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2017

Gravitational waves and clothing: In our previous post, we mentioned the New York Times' list of "The Most-Read Stories of 2016."

In perfect Times fashion, the report was premature; it appeared on December 19. It only covers clicks (or so we assume) through November 30!

In perfect Times fashion, the paper doesn't explain how the list was compiled. It doesn't state the number of times each item was read.

It refers to its reports as "stories," just as a 5-year-old would.

Yesterday, Kevin Drum correctly sang the blues about the second most-read report of the year. Dearest darlings, it had everything, including lots of sexy-time sex and a kill shot at Candidate Clinton!

We were struck by other phenomena. The eighth most-read report of the year was the one about gravitational waves. Much as we have suspected, we the people seem to enjoy reports we can't understand!

We were also struck by the most-read reports from the major party conventions. The one concerned Michelle Obama's dress, the other Melania's flub.

The most-read columns didn't come from the columnists we might have suspected. On the extremely bright side, no column by Maureen Dowd cracked the year's Top 100. Brooks and Kristof had three columns each, Krugman only one.

That silly report about Trump's final days ranked number 58. That's the one where Haberman, Parker, Barbaro and them put all their thumbs on all the scales, letting us laugh about the ways Trump was going down to defeat.

The number one most-read report? It dealt with the reasons why we keep marrying all the wrong people. The third most-read report detailed 52 different places we can go to escape. Apparently, the Times was prescribing one vacation per week.

The seventh most-read report last year dealt with the ways we keep gaining weight. The American people are pretty sharp, exactly as the Top 100 most-loved pundits have said.

How did the malpractice get this far?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2017

Pierce, Drum and Krugman explain and fail to explain: In his latest column, Paul Krugman made several charges about the press corps' behavior.

"America is rapidly turning into a [banana republic]," Krugman wrote. "This debacle didn’t come out of nowhere," he further alleged.

Krugman said this state of affairs has been developing for decades. He fingered "the supine news media" as a major player:

KRUGMAN (1/2/17): How could this happen in a nation that has long prided itself as a role model for democracies everywhere? In a direct sense, Mr. Trump’s elevation was made possible by the F.B.I.’s blatant intervention in the election, Russian subversion, and the supine news media that obligingly played up fake scandals while burying real ones on the back pages.

But this debacle didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been on the road to stan-ism for a long time: an increasingly radical G.O.P., willing to do anything to gain and hold power, has been undermining our political culture for decades.

People tend to forget how much of the 2016 playbook had already been used in earlier years. Remember, the Clinton administration was besieged by constant accusations of corruption, dutifully hyped as major stories by the news media; not one of these alleged scandals turned out to involve any actual wrongdoing. Not incidentally, James Comey, the F.B.I. director whose intervention almost surely swung the election, had previously worked for the Whitewater committee, which spent seven years obsessively investigating a failed land deal.

According to Krugman, the age of "fake scandals" dates at least to Whitewater, which began (in the New York Times) in early 1992. He says "the supine news media" has "obligingly played up" these fake scandals while "burying real ones on the back pages."

According to Krugman, the press corps behaved this way this in the 2016 campaign, and in the original Bill Clinton era. Krugman is thereby alleging a cultural spiral which has been underway for at least twenty-five years.

We think Krugman's history is basically accurate. We also think that mainstream and liberal journalists don't like discussing this topic.

According to a recent release by the New York Times, Krugman's most widely read column in 2016 was the September column which carried the headline, "Hillary Clinton Gets Gored." In that column, Krugman said the press corps was treating Candidate Clinton the same way they treated Candidate Gore during Campaign 2000. He ended up making this connection three separate times this fall.

At the time, we noted a bit of a problem. Very few people had ever heard about the press corps' War Against Gore, we brightly alleged. For that reason, it seemed to us that Krugman's warning might tend to fall on deaf ears.

Is it true that very few people have heard about the War Against Gore? Consider the way two liberal journalists recently described that phenomenon. This may help you see why the misconduct Krugman describes somehow managed to survive for a full twenty-five years.

We'll start with Charlie Pierce at Esquire. In the week before Christmas, Pierce savaged the mainstream press corps' treatment of Hillary Clinton, and of Candidate Gore before her. Here's part of what he wrote:

PIERCE (12/20/16): [T]he 2000 election is instructive. There was no question that Al Gore was the victim of extraordinary media malpractice. There was no question that [George W. Bush] won because he carried Florida, and there was no question that he carried Florida through various schemes arranged in that state in which his brother was the governor and his state chairman was secretary of state. There was no question that a perfectly legal recount in that state was stopped by the unprecedented—and non-precedential—intervention of a Scalia ex machina Supreme Court, several justices of which had naked conflicts of interest. Some 100,000 people showed up in Washington to protest the inauguration, and TV showed them hardly at all.

Soon, all of this was obscured by the fact that Al Gore had "lost his home state," that he had failed to use Bill Clinton properly, and that he had failed to counteract the stupid caricature of himself that was presented to the voters in the guise of campaign journalism. The unique circumstances of how his loss had been calculated and certified were just one factor among many, and it was time to move forward as a nation.

We are seeing much the same thing at work today. There is no question that Hillary Rodham Clinton won the popular balloting by almost three million votes. There is no question that she did this despite extraordinary media malpractice dating back 25 years...

Pierce specifically said that the media malpractice against Hillary Clinton "dated back 25 years." Beyond that, you'll never see a career journalist describe the War Against Gore more clearly.

According to Pierce, Candidate Gore had to battle a "stupid caricature of himself that was presented to the voters in the guise of campaign journalism." According to Pierce, "there was no question that Al Gore was the victim of extraordinary media malpractice."

For ourselves, we had a slight problem with that.

Maybe it's all a matter of what the meaning of "was" is! Reading that passage, a reader would almost surely think that the "media malpractice" described by Pierce was widely discussed and understood in real time.

Obviously, any such idea would be totally false. At this site, we tried for years to get career journalists to discuss the phenomenon Pierce correctly describes in that post. (We started in March 1999, in the very week when the attacks against Candidate Gore began.)

For the next ten years, we tried to get career journalists to discuss the phenomenon Pierce correctly describes. We found that it simply couldn't be done, that mainstream and liberal writers simply refuse to go there.

As an apparent example of what we mean, consider Kevin Drum's recent discussion of this same topic.

Drum's post appeared on New Year's Eve. In it, he offered a somewhat odd assessment of the reasons for Candidate Clinton's loss to Candidate Trump.

Along the way, Drum mentioned Candidate Gore. In this passage, you see the way career liberals have persistently curried defeat:

DRUM (12/31/16): ...I want to suggest something the 2016 election does teach us: persistent, obsessive investigations pay off. In the 90s, Republicans started investigating Whitewater. Even Ken Starr knew there was nothing to this after a couple of years, but he was put under pressure to keep at it, and eventually he hit some fluke paydirt: Monica Lewinsky. This had nothing to do with Whitewater, but who cares? Scandal is scandal, and it rubbed off enough on Al Gore that Republicans took back the presidency in 2000.

Fast forward to 2012. Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong related to Benghazi. That was clear pretty quickly, but Republicans kept at it. I laughed at them at the time, but they had the last laugh when they once again hit a fluke bit of paydirt: Clinton's private email server. Clinton didn't really do anything seriously wrong here either, but it didn't matter. Republicans kept at it for the next year and a half, and that was enough to convince a lot of people that Clinton was, somehow, corrupt and untrustworthy. That allowed Republicans to retake the presidency.

In the narrow sense, Drum is certainly right. "Persistent, obsessive investigations" did pay off for Republicans, first in the case of Candidate Gore, then in the case of Candidate Hillary Clinton.

But according to Krugman and Pierce, that "persistent, obsessive" behavior only had the desired effect because of "extraordinary media malpractice" by the "supine news media." Drum blows right past that factor in his description of Campaign 2000. He simply says that the Whitewater/Lewinsky fluke "rubbed off on" Candidate Gore in some unspecified way.

Good God! At this site, we spent years describing the ways the earlier pursuit of the Clintons managed to "rub off on" Gore. It involved twenty months of outrageous media malpractice, in which a "stupid caricature of [Gore] was presented to the voters in the guise of campaign journalism."

This presentation was made again and again and again and again, over and over and over and over, in journalistically outrageous ways in every available medium. For whatever reason, people like Drum have always preferred to bury that outrageous malpractice, as he did in that silly account of what happened in Campaign 2000.

And yes, the disappearing of that media malpractice in Campaign 2000 has always been the overpowering norm. To state the obvious, this helps explain how similar conduct could have been directed at Candidate Clinton sixteen years later.

What can you say for a liberal world which operates this way? Only that its major career players have long been complicit in its disastrous defeats, and that its rank and file are unable to notice this conduct.

For ourselves, we were struck by Pierce's suggestion that the media malpractice directed at Gore was discussed and understood at the time. Plainly, it was not.

Eleven days later, we were struck by the familiar way Drum disappeared this entire kettle of fish. But then, let's state the obvious:

Our leading stars have behaved this way from 1992 forward. That's true of our major mainstream journalists, and of our liberal journalists. We've explained the presumptive reason for this until we're blue in the face. Nothing affects our tribe's remarkable lethargy.

Krugman's column alleged journalistic malpractice which continued for twenty-five years. "How could that possibly have happened?" a thoughtful reader might have asked.

Simple! A code of silence has long obtained, enabling this malpractice. For that reason, when Krugman alluded to Gore this fall, we said the same thing every time: Very few people are going to know what he's talking about!

Everyone, Krugman included, has played a sick role in this horrible game, which, as Krugman correctly describes, has led to the edge of disaster.

Tomorrow: Different strokes? Amazingly, the New York Times bungles Trump's birtherism again!

THE PROBLEM INCLUDES US: Professor Lilla and one other person!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2017

Part 2—Should he care about her: Did Professor Lilla actually mean what he seemed to say?

Back in mid-December, he spoke with Sean Illing for Vox. As we noted yesterday, we thought the remarks shown below were strange, but familiar and perhaps instructive.

Within the context of the full discussion, "these people" were, quite plainly, the white working class. For full transcript, click here:

LILLA (12/16/16): The bottom line is that we can't win [elections] without these people...

So if we care about the people we say we care about—African Americans, women, LGBT people, Latinos—if we want to protect them, symbolic victories won't do. We have to be competitive and we have to win at every level of government, and that means sucking it up and getting the votes of everyone.

[...]

Political work is only about acquiring and using power to protect the people you want to protect.

An election is not a seminar. It is not a therapy session. It is not a chance to rewrite history. An election is only about winning, and you do what you have to do. And yes, that doesn't mean you have to pander to people, but it may mean you have to be silent about certain things and get your apron dirty.

If you want to reform the American soul, become a minister. But if you're serious about politics, you have to go where the people are and find a way to reach them, and not be afraid to get dirty.

Did Lilla actually mean what he seems to have said? He seems to have said that we liberals "care about," and "want to protect," a finite number of groups.

He seems to have said that we have to seek the votes of the white working class so that we can protect other groups. He seems to have said that we don't care about, or want to protect, people in the white working class. He seems to have said that we may dirty ourselves as we seek their votes.

Can that be what the professor meant? We only ask because, rather clearly, that seems to be what he said.

Briefly, let's be fair. In the vast sweep of things, very few people will note or remember the various things Lilla said in this particular exchange. That said, comments like these sound to us like an invitation to the white working class—an invitation to vote for conservatives right down the line, and never to listen to Us.

That may not be what the professor meant. That said, we liberals make remarks of this general type all the time. Once again, let's recall the unfortunate thing Candidate Clinton said:

CLINTON (9/9/16): You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call "the basket of deplorables."

[APPLAUSE AND LAUGHTER]

Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up....Now some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

For transcript and tape, click here.

Bombs away! In fairness, Clinton said that only half of Trump's supporters belong in the "basket of deplorables" and therefore seem to be "irredeemable." In comment threads, we everyday liberals routinely say or suggest that all of Donald J. Trump's supporters should be regarded this way.

In fairness, Candidate Clinton only consigned half Those People to a place in Hell. Still, we'd also describe her remarks as an invitation to vote for the other side and never to listen to Us.

We libs can be highly censorious! On December 29, the New York Times rang out the old year with a letter from Woodbury, Minnesota—and from an all-too-familiar Salem Village of the liberal/progressive mind.

The letter writer went out of her way to say that Trump voters "may not believe they themselves are bigoted." "Every Trump voter claims to have voted for the right reasons," she also mordantly said.

Still, this writer was willing to consider no framework, experience or point of view other than her own. As with the parsons and goodies of old, she made Trump voters complicit in, and responsible for, every imaginable evil event from this moment forward—and as with the parsons and goodies of old, she was willing to imagine quite a few such events.

The Others would be fully responsible. No possible error was hers.

"Easy to be hard," the poet once thoughtfully said. We liberals frequently choose such roads, inviting The Others out.

Did Professor Lilla mean to do some such thing in his remarks to Vox? Did he really mean that we "care about" and "want to protect" African Americans, women, LGBT people and Latinos, but that we don't care about members of the white working class, in the pursuit of whom we're likely to get ourselves dirty?

On their face, we thought his remarks were unfortunate. That made us think of a person we've heard about—a woman Professor Lilla should probably want to protect.

This woman lives in Kentucky; on the downside, she seems to be from the white working class. Still, she can't afford to go to the doctor. She doesn't avail herself of free diagnostic services because she knows she couldn't afford to pay for treatment if a medical problem was found.

Sarah Kliff described that woman's plight in a different report for Vox. In his remarks to Illing, it almost sounded like the professor might be cuffing this person to the curb.

The woman in question voted for Trump; she's from the white working class. Should liberals "care about" and "want to protect" her, even in spite of that?

Tomorrow, we'll show you why we think the answer is plainly yes. We'll also discuss the ridiculous way our multimillionaire corporate liberals—and even our highest ranking professors!—keep us liberals barefoot and clueless about the powerful interests at play in matters like this.

In part because of our corporate liberals, we liberals can be amazingly dense. Once again, we suggest a theme:

Our political culture lies in ruins. The problems, in part, lie with Us.

Tomorrow: Revisiting Michael Moore's film

Welcome to the same old year!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2017

What narcissism looks like: Is Donald J. Trump a narcissist of some kind?

We don't know how to assess that. That said, we do know what narcissism sometimes looks like. Last night, at 9 PM Eastern, we'd say it looked like this:

MADDOW (1/2/17): Good evening, Ari. I want to thank you in particular for all you did to fill and hold things together last week. It was great. Thank you, my friend.

MELBER: Great. Thank you. Happy New Year.

MADDOW: Thanks. And thanks to you at home for staying with us for the next hour.

It was really nice to have a few days off. It is really, really nice to be back. I keep running into old friends and family members and people on the street and people like, you know, out on the dog walk and stuff. People want to talk to me about politics. They say, with concern in their eyes, "How are you feeling about 2017?

And I found myself by the end of my vacation saying, "I'm really excited for 2017." I am. My job is to explain stuff. And oh, my God, is that a good job to have this year already?

As we've mentioned in the past, Rachel Maddow never stops discussing herself. Our analysts always launch their patented cry:

"I I I I I I I!"

Perhaps it's just a branding tool, a way to pose as the viewer's friend. In this case, she made it sound like she'd returned home after an absence of years.

More striking was the way Maddow described her excitement concerning the new year.

Sensible liberals are very concerned about the coming year. As Maddow has noted in the past, she's taking a different approach. She's excited about the new year. Given the multimillion-dollar job she holds, she thinks the new year should be both exciting and fun!

(Will millions of people lose their insurance? It should be fun to find out!)

In our view, liberals should be very concerned about the peculiar actions, reactions and outlooks of Donald J. Trump. Liberals should also be concerned about the peculiar instincts of Maddow.

Late in the show, she did it again, telling us about the brilliant past work of "the great Steve Benen, who writes the blog for our show." As usual, the statements which followed struck us as perhaps a bit misleading. (This isn't Benen's fault.)

Maddow is constantly selling the car. In this, a deeply troubling new year, it's time for the liberal world to grow up and see her self-dealing behaviors and instincts as a point of concern.

Krugman makes several important points!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2017

Concerning "supine news media:" Is the United States becoming a gong-show version of Greater Tinpotistan?

In yesterday's column, Paul Krugman said the answer is yes. "America is rapidly turning into a stan," he wrote, using a nickname for tinpot feudal states.

"Everything we know suggests that we’re entering an era of epic corruption and contempt for the rule of law," Krugman said. At this point, he failed to mention the gong-show intellectual practices which are a key part of the decline.

That said, he only gets 800 words.

Eventually, Krugman reviewed the history of this decline, and he mentioned the press. In this passage, he's making two different key points:

KRUGMAN (1/2/17): How could this happen in a nation that has long prided itself as a role model for democracies everywhere? In a direct sense, Mr. Trump’s elevation was made possible by the F.B.I.’s blatant intervention in the election, Russian subversion, and the supine news media that obligingly played up fake scandals while burying real ones on the back pages.

But this debacle didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been on the road to stan-ism for a long time: an increasingly radical G.O.P., willing to do anything to gain and hold power, has been undermining our political culture for decades.

People tend to forget how much of the 2016 playbook had already been used in earlier years. Remember, the Clinton administration was besieged by constant accusations of corruption, dutifully hyped as major stories by the news media; not one of these alleged scandals turned out to involve any actual wrongdoing. Not incidentally, James Comey, the F.B.I. director whose intervention almost surely swung the election, had previously worked for the Whitewater committee, which spent seven years obsessively investigating a failed land deal.

Krugman makes two key points in that passage:

First, the gong show within we live has been underway for decades. It dates at least to the pseudo-scandals of the 1990s.

(Whitewater began on the front page of Krugman's own paper—in early 1992, long before he got there.)

Second, a "supine news media" has been a key player every step of the way. Krugman says this was true in the 1990s, the age of the Clinton pseudo-scandals. He says it was true this past year.

Krugman only gets 800 words. You can't expect him, or anyone else, to provide a detailed discussion of this cultural breakdown when writing at that length.

That said, we'll offer a few observations as we prepare to use his column as a framework over the next several days:

This column provides no specifics concerning that supine news media. Only one "fake scandal" is cited by name.

No individual journalist or news org is named. No specific performance is mentioned.

Krugman only gets 800 words. That said, let's ponder this:

According to Krugman, the "supine news media" has been pimping "fake scandals" for more than twenty years. If we start our clock with the one fake scandal he names, the supine media has been playing this role for the past 25 years!

With that in mind, this is the question we ask:

Krugman gets only 800 words. That said, people like Matthews, Maddow, O'Donnell and Hayes get a full hour each night.

Twenty-five years into this descent, can you name a single high-profile journalist who has addressed the state of affairs Krugman describes? Do our journalists ever critique their own guild? Or do they avoid such discussions?

Moving right along:

Have you ever seen anyone on MSNBC address the state of affairs Krugman describes? Do "corporate liberal" journalists avoid these discussions too?

Krugman is right, of course. The press corps has played a leading role in the disintegration he described. And the corps has been playing this leading role for at least 25 years.

In the next few days, we'll look at some recent work to show you the way the press corps avoids addressing these facts. We'll focus on leading liberal journalists, the people our team hails and trusts.

THE PROBLEM INCLUDES US: Professor Lilla's strange remarks!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3, 2017

Part 1—Strange, but perhaps instructive: In mid-December, as the year neared its end, it seemed to us that Professor Lilla made some strange remarks.

Back in November, the Columbia professor turned heads with a front-page piece in the New York Times Sunday Review—with an essay concerning a practice he called "identity liberalism."

In our view, the professor made one blindingly obvious statement in that November piece. (If you're going to name some groups, you'd better name them all.) For our money, much of the rest of what he wrote at that time was a bit unclear.

That said, Professor Lilla had seemed to criticize the practice of "identity politics." Inevitably, one of his colleagues knew what that heresy meant.

With lightning speed, Professor Franke produced a piece which linked her colleague to David Duke. So it currently tends to go over here in our part of the world.

Just like that, Lilla became a running dog accomplice of the Klan! At Vox, Sean Illing decided to check him out.

Illing interviewed Lilla at some length; if you want to read the full interview, you can do so here. But during that exchange, Professor Lilla said some things which struck us as strange—and perhaps as instructive.

Illing and Lilla were discussing Those People, the white working class. At one point, Lilla warned against "writing off a whole group of people that you need to reach if you want to be elected."

To us, that seems to make obvious sense. Soon, though, Lilla seemed to state a somewhat condescending assumption. ("People in these communities" are "voting against their own interests," he seemed to say.)

And then, the professor made the remarks shown below. These remarks strike us as strange, but also perhaps as instructive:

LILLA (12/16/16): The bottom line is that we can't win without these people. And when I'm talking about winning, I'm not just talking about presidential elections—we pay too much attention to that. The things that get done in this country are done through legislation, which means you have to win the Congress and you have to go every state in the country. The laws, moreover, get enforced in state governments, and so you if you're not competitive there, you can't guarantee that the laws you pass will get enforced.

So if we care about the people we say we care about—African Americans, women, LGBT people, Latinos—if we want to protect them, symbolic victories won't do. We have to be competitive and we have to win at every level of government, and that means sucking it up and getting the votes of everyone.

Can that be what the professor meant? On its face, he almost seems to have said that we liberals care about African Americans, women, LGBT people and Latinos—apparently full stop.

Based on what the professor said, we don't seem to care about "these people" (his term), the white working class! But since we can't win elections without them, we have to "suck it up"—degrade ourselves—and go after their votes too.

That's what the professor seems to have said. Can that possibly be what he meant?

As Professor Lilla continued, he almost seemed to express this general viewpoint again. We liberals may have to "get dirty" pursuing the white working class, he repeatedly said:

LILLA: There are all sorts of ways we can work to make America more tolerant and inclusive. But we can't confuse that work with political work. Political work is only about acquiring and using power to protect the people you want to protect.

An election is not a seminar. It is not a therapy session. It is not a chance to rewrite history. An election is only about winning, and you do what you have to do. And yes, that doesn't mean you have to pander to people, but it may mean you have to be silent about certain things and get your apron dirty.

If you want to reform the American soul, become a minister. But if you're serious about politics, you have to go where the people are and find a way to reach them, and not be afraid to get dirty.

In context, he almost seems to have said it again. "We want to protect" African Americans, women, LGBT people and Latinos. We don't seem to want to protect the white working class. Talking to them may make our aprons dirty!

That's what the professor seems to have said. Can that possibly be what he meant?

Briefly, let's be fair. In at least one basic respect, Professor Lilla's formulation doesn't exactly make seems to make sense. So maybe it's not what he meant!

What doesn't make sense in Lilla's remarks? Roughly half the members of the white working class actually are women! Meanwhile, a smaller proportion of "these people" are LGBT—and we do care about such people, according to his remarks.

Such apparent contradictions may arise when we start picking winners and losers—when we start saying we "care about" certain people and groups, but not about certain others. This may suggest that the things we seem to have said may not quite be what we meant.

In these exchanges, Professor Lilla doesn't sound a whole lot like David Duke. He does sound like the kind of figure who signals to folk in the white working class that they should listen to and vote for Republicans, right on down the line.

We liberals frequently send these whistles, perhaps not realizing that we do so. This calls a basic fact to mind as we enter a troubling new year:

Our journalistic and political systems lie in shambles. As Paul Krugman noted in yesterday's column, this state of affairs has been developing for decades.

Our journalistic, intellectual and political systems lie in ruins. All month, we'll discuss a basic point, a basic fact which can be hard for us liberals to see.

Here is the point we plan to discuss, though we know such discussion is bound to be fruitless:

A significant amount of this terrible problem may perhaps lie with Us.

Tomorrow: Should we "want to protect" this person?

Dramatis personnae to date: According to the leading authority, Professor Lilla is a political scientist, an historian of ideas, a journalist and a professor of humanities at Columbia. In the 1990s, he wrote widely on twentieth-century European philosophy, at least to the extent that such a critter exists.

During that period, he wrote The Reckless Mind, a meditation on the "philotyrannical" bent of twentieth-century continental philosophy. His most recent book, The Shipwrecked Mind, is a study of how nostalgia has shaped modern politics, from Middle America to the Middle East.

According to her Columbia Law School profile, Professor Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and is the faculty director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project. It seems to us that she serves on a large number of steering committees, but that could just be us.

By Columbia's admission, she is among the nation's leading scholars writing on law, religion and rights, drawing from feminist, queer, and critical race theory. With intellectual leaders like Lilla and Franke, it's hard to see how we liberals and progressives ever find ways to lose.