REPORTING MISSOURI AND YALE: Inevitably, the Klan is seen!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Part 3—The corps' standard list of events: During times which are fraught and increasingly tribal, competing tribes will often accept the task of dumbing their own members down.

Certain events will be broadcast to one tribe, often in inflammatory ways. Members of the other tribe will never hear about these events.

Consider one such event. It concerns Payton Head, 21, the impressive, energetic student body president at the University of Missouri.

Payton Head is black and gay; he grew up in Chicago. According to a news report in the September16 Washington Post, "There was record high turnout when he was elected president of the Missouri Students Association, he said, on a platform that called on 'Mizzou to embrace students who are different. I think it was because the student body recognized that change needs to happen.'"

Does change need to happen at Mizzou? In part because we live in Maryland, we have no particular way of knowing. In part, we also have no way of knowing because we read the mainstream press.

The Post ran that news report in September because of an event Head had reported. In a widely-forwarded Facebook post, he had said, in the words of the Post, that he'd been "walking with a friend to get cookies Friday night when a red pickup truck slowed and young people screamed the n-word at him."

There was no sign that anyone knew who accosted Head, or if they were students. According to the Post, "A spokesperson for the campus police said that the incident was reported to have happened near campus, not on it."

To state the obvious, people shouldn't ride around in trucks screaming racial insults at people. In our view, people ought to "pity the fools"—the people Dylan described as "poor immigrants"—who persist in such hopeless behavior.

Other people, perhaps especially the accosted, may have different feelings about behavior of this type.

The Post seemed to say that this was the second time Head had been accosted in this fashion in his three-plus years at Missouri. In his Facebook post, Head described an array of experiences he and other students have had in and around the Missouri campus.

Head, who is an impressive person, is highly ecumenical in his view of the way people deserve to be treated. In his Facebook post, he encouraged people to understand the types of experiences black and gay students may face. But he also described the experiences of people from other groups.

Payton Head is energetic, impressive. He's also a fairly young person in a time which is highly fraught.

Everyone can show imperfect judgment at times which are highly fraught. In theory and according to tradition, people who are fairly young may be more susceptible than their elders, who are traditionally presumed to be somewhat wiser.

Payton Head's Facebook post has been widely discussed and reported. When major news orgs list the events which precipitated the recent unrest on the Missouri campus, the September incident typically starts the list, as we'll note below.

Major news orgs have written, again and again, about the name-calling incident. But if you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, you haven't heard about a second, more recent incident, where Head, as everyone on the planet has done, showed imperfect judgment and a lack of perfect wisdom.

Uh-oh! The incident occurred last week, a highly fraught time at Mizzou. CNN reported the incident in an on-line report which, as a matter of course, was perhaps a bit jumbled:

YAN AND STAPLETON (11/11/15): A day after protests brought down two University of Missouri officials, reports of racially charged threats permeated social media—as well as a rumor the Ku Klux Klan had arrived on campus.

University police said they investigated and determined the reports Tuesday night were false. But the rumors had already spread far and wide.

[...]

[A police spokesperson] said officers went to where the KKK was reported to be—and found nothing. "We have found no evidence of anything related to the KKK on campus," he said.
Student Body President Payton Head had already posted about it on Facebook.

"Students please take precaution. Stay away from the windows in residence halls. The KKK has been confirmed to be sighted on campus," Head wrote in a post that has since been deleted. "I'm working with the MUPD, the state trooper and the National Guard."

The police spokesman said the National Guard was not on campus, "nor have they been called to assist."

Head quickly apologized for spreading the rumor. "I'm sorry about the misinformation that I have shared through social media," he posted on Facebook.

"I received and shared information from multiple incorrect sources, which I deeply regret. The last thing needed is to incite more fear in the hearts of our community."

Especially at highly fraught times, everyone is prone to making mistakes. In this case, the inevitable KKK sighting began to be bruited on campus. Head spread the rumor, including an apparent embellishment of his own role in the pursuit of the Klan. He apologized for spreading the rumor in a later post.

Everybody makes mistakes! In this instance, Head's bruiting of the mistaken Klan sighting has been almost wholly ignored by the mainstream press.

Elsewhere, things have been different. Within the conservative world, his error has been widely pimped by the usual suspects, who have used it as a way to claim that Head surely must have "lied" about the racial epithet itself.

Should major newspapers have reported Head's error? The answer isn't obvious. That said, the racial epithet event has been widely reported, in a way which has possibly been a bit odd on a journalistic basis.

Here's the start of why we say that:

The Missouri events hit the New York Times on Monday morning, November 9. On that day and on November 10, the Times published front-page reports about the "racial tensions" at Missouri.

On November 9, Marc Tracy began his report with this synopsis, which is basically accurate, perhaps completely so. Four other reporters contributed to the front-page report:

TRACY (11/9/15): Students at the University of Missouri have been demonstrating for weeks for the ouster of the university president, protesting the school's handling of racial tensions. But their movement received a boost over the weekend when dozens of black football players issued a blunt ultimatum: Resign or they won't play.

Fueling the anger were a series of on-campus incidents: racial slurs hurled at black students and feces smeared into the shape of a swastika on a wall in a residence hall. What many students viewed as a sluggish response from the administration gave rise to calls for the removal of the president, Timothy M. Wolfe.

The Legion of Black Collegians, which administers campus groups that primarily serve black students, posted a photograph to Twitter on Saturday night of more than 30 football players linked in arms with a graduate student who is staging a hunger strike.

As it turned out, Tracy only described three in the "series of on-campus incidents" to which he referred. According to Tracy's report, these events had spawned demands that Wolfe resign. They'd even spawned "a decision by a black graduate student, Jonathan Butler, to go on a hunger strike over what he said in a letter to the Board of Curators were 'a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., incidents that have dynamically disrupted the learning experience' of minority groups at Missouri."

What were the slew of events in question? Near the end of his lengthy report, Tracy offered this account:

TRACY (11/9/15): Frustrations have mounted since September when Payton Head, the president of the Missouri Students Association, who is black, said a man had called him a racial slur as he walked on campus. Students protested for a week before Mr. Loftin, the chancellor, responded to the incident.

In October, members of the Legion of Black Collegians reported that someone had yelled a racial slur as they rehearsed for a play in a campus plaza. Later that month, someone used feces to draw a swastika in a bathroom in a new dormitory. At the homecoming parade last month, students formed a human chain to block Mr. Wolfe's car in an attempt to speak with him after officials did not respond to earlier requests to talk to him, the students said. Mr. Wolfe, who did not get out of the car, later apologized.

As far as we know, everything Tracy wrote was accurate, except for the possibility that the racial slur was yelled at Head near the campus, not on it. That said, we'll have to make an admission:

This list of events quickly became the press corps' standard list of precipitating events. That said, the list left us somewhat puzzled.

Here's why:

Obviously, people shouldn't yell racial slurs at people, whether on or near a college campus. This goes for the racial slur yelled at Head and for the racial slur directed at the Legion of Black Collegians.

The sickness of the swastika incident would seem to speak for itself. That said:

According to Tracy, students, including the football team, were calling for the resignation of the college president in connection with these events. The football team was refusing to play its upcoming game. A graduate student was even conducting a hunger strike.

People shouldn't direct racial slurs at people. That said, Tracy never quite explained what students thought the university president should be doing about these events, or why they thought his failure to act reached this level of concern.

By the way, did any students commit any of the offenses in question? That question went unexplained in Tracy's front-page report. You'll find an answer in this October 5 report by the student newspaper, which seems to say that the student who insulted the Black Collegians had already been identified and removed from campus.

Let's be fair! You can't necessarily expect a journalist to answer every question about a set of events in his first report on the subject. In the next day's front-page report, the Times provided more information about the nature of the complaints about Wolfe.

That said, a basic question has been lurking in all the reporting about the recent racial events at Missouri and Yale: Is it possible that students are over-reacting in some way to the events in question?

To state the obvious, there is no final, objective way to answer a question like that. In the end, different people will reach different judgments concerning any such question.

That said, at highly fraught times, we humans will be inclined to split into tribal groups. One tribe will hear about false reports of KKK sightings and about students being removed from campus. The other tribe will not.

The tribe which hears about the false sighting will be encouraged to think the worst about the people who reported the sighting. The tribe which doesn't hear about such events will be free to assume the best about the overall judgment of those with whom they're inclined to sympathize and agree.

Neither tribe is well served by this division of information. Increasingly, it's the way our tribalized systems work.

Why are students upset at Missouri and Yale? In our view, our big newspapers have done a rather shaky job reporting the nature of their complaints. On a journalistic basis, we think the commentary which has been published has been substantially worse.

Why are students so upset? What kind of advice are these students receiving from adults at their universities?

Most importantly from our perspective, what kind of journalism has been offered about these important events? We think the reporting has been rather weak, the commentary much worse.

Tomorrow: The New York Times goes to Mizzou

Supplemental: Kevin Drum keeps getting it right!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2015

As our tribe keeps getting it wrong: Our recent critiques of Kevin Drum have really begun to pay off! To cite just one example, we strongly recommend his new post about Syrian refugees.

Gack! In the passage shown below, Drum describes the type of behavior within Our Own Tribe which we've spent recent years lamenting. In our view, Drum is perfectly right in what he says here. If anything, he understates the size of the political problem at issue.

Warning! Drum is discussing "the average person," a person our tribe loves to hate:

DRUM (11/17/15): Here's the thing: to the average person, it seems perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of admitting Syrian refugees to the country. We know that ISIS would like to attack the US. We know that ISIS probably has the wherewithal to infiltrate a few of its people into the flood of refugees. And most voters have no idea how easy it is to get past US screening. They probably figure it's pretty easy.

So it doesn't seem xenophobic or crazy to call for an end to accepting Syrian refugees. It seems like simple common sense. After all, things changed after Paris.

Mocking Republicans over this—as liberals spent much of yesterday doing on my Twitter stream—seems absurdly out of touch to a lot of people. Not just wingnut tea partiers, either, but plenty of ordinary centrists too. It makes them wonder if Democrats seriously see no problem here. Do they care at all about national security? Are they really that detached from reality?

We weren't exposed to Drum's Twitter stream, but we agree with those highlighted points. For the record, Drum supports admitting those refugees. He opposes trashing average people who are inclined to a different view.

Almost surely, denying admission to Syrian refugees will seem like common sense to vast numbers of people. Based on Drum's Twitter stream and our tribe's past behavior, many players in our tribe will respond with air strikes, dropping their R-, B- and X-bombs on the heads of these evil-doers.

That would be pitifully dumb on the merits, even worse on the politics. Alas! Watching tape of Saturday's Dem debate, we were struck by how horrible the politics of this issue will almost certainly be:

DICKERSON (11/14/15): Secretary Clinton, let me ask you a question from Twitter which has come in, and this is a question on this issue of refugees. The question is, with the U.S. preparing to absorb Syrian refugees, how do you propose we screen those coming in to keep citizens safe?

CLINTON: I think that is the number-one requirement. I also said that we should take increased numbers of refugees. The administration originally said 10,000. I said we should go to 65,000, but only if we have as careful a screening and vetting process as we can imagine, whatever resources it takes because I do not want us to, in any way, inadvertently allow people who wish us harm to come into our country.

As a general matter, we're strongly opposed to making predictions, since they always turn out to be wrong. That said, it's hard to believe that the politics of that highlighted statement won't be extremely difficult.

Drum speaks on behalf of the average person, the person our tribe loves to hate. We'll only suggest that the great progressive/liberal achievers have tended to be the people who don't react to The Others that way.

Historically, the great progressive/liberal achievers have tended to be the people who can see themselves in others, even in those who may not support them:

We think of the young Dr. King, pitying the city fathers of Montgomery. "Even their churches and ministers" taught them to see the world through the lens of race, he wrote, sympathetically, in a stunning passage in Stride Toward Freedom.

We think of Mandela, inviting one of his jailers to be his guest at his inauguration.

We think of Lincoln, at the time of victory, refusing, even then, to declare his own beliefs and his own cause right in the eyes of God, as he made the most radical statement in the history of moral statements:

LINCOLN (3/4/65): Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the seat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”

Both sides have been profoundly punished, and the punishment may continue. But no one can call this outcome unjust, the victor in this war said.

In the more modern political context, we also think of President Clinton, explaining why Arkansas' Pentecostals are the finest people he's ever known, even though they rarely supported him politically. “Knowing the Pentecostals has enriched and changed my life,” Clinton wrote in his book, My Life. “Whatever your religious views, or lack of them, seeing people live their faith in a spirit of love toward all people, not just your own, is beautiful to behold. If you ever get a chance to go to a Pentecostal service, don’t miss it.”

Whatever your religious views—or lack of them. Clinton was suggesting that liberals reach out to others, see the merit in people unlike us. Historically, people seem to admire, like, revere and remember progressives and liberals of this stripe.

By way of contrast, our own liberal tribe is full of love—the love of tribal loathing. At times like these, we hurry to do the political work of those on the other side.

REPORTING MISSOURI AND YALE: And youth!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2015

Part 2—Prologue to a journalistic semi-enigma: Starting on November 9, the mainstream press corps began reporting and discussing two sets of important events.

Some of these events occurred at Yale, a university in New Haven, Connecticut. Some of these events occurred at the flagship campus of the University of Missouri.

We've been struck by some of the ways those events have been reported and discussed within the mainstream press. But first, for one day only, consider a piece of prologue from New York magazine and the Washington Post.

In itself, this piece of prologue isn't hugely important. That said, it may tell us something about one of the players the press corps discussed, or failed to discuss, when it discussed the events at Yale and Mizzou.

That key player is youth. For our prologue about that key player, consider a blog post from New York magazine.

The report was posted by Nathan Pemberton, a young reporter who graduated from Florida State in 2009. Pemberton's report begins as shown below.

Our hypothesis will be the following. Only a fairly young person, at a fraught time, could have thought the highlighted claim made even a lick of sense:

PEMBERTON (11/16/15): Roughly 44 million Americans have an encounter with police each year. During these routine stops, in cars or on the street, black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to experience excessive force at the hands of police. The data, composed of public surveys collected and compiled by the Department of Justice, reveals that 75 percent of those stopped by police reported excessive force of some kind. Respondents defined excessive force broadly, ranging from verbal aggression (shouting, cursing, threatening) to physical force (grabbing, punching, kicking) and include severe responses (pepper spray, Taser usage, or officers pulling their guns out).

Does it make sense to list "shouting" among examples of "excessive force" by police? We'd be inclined to say no.

That said, Pemberton had seemed to stop making sense before he offered that list. The young reporter had made a claim which seems absurd on its face.

According to Pemberton, roughly 44 million Americans have some kind of encounter with police in the course of the typical year. Here's the part which seems to make no sense:

According to Pemberton, 75 percent of those people report excessive force of some kind on the part of police! 75 percent!

Being wise and mature beyond our years, that statement struck us as crazy. It didn't seem crazy to Pemberton, or to editors at New York magazine, if any such people monitor posts by the magazine's young, inexpensive reporters.

Pemberton didn't provide a link to the DOJ study he was discussing. Instead, he provided a link to a news report from Sunday's Washington Post—a page A2 report which struck us as unusually flawed when we read it in our hard-copy Post on Sunday morning.

Pemberton didn't provide a link to the study in question. Then again, neither had Anu Narayanswamy, the somewhat older scribe whose name appeared on the Post's report, not even in the on-line version of her report.

We weren't surprised to see a weird claim emerge from the poorly-written Post report, which appeared on page A2 of the newspaper's Sunday edition. Yesterday, when we read that weird claim, we decided to check the DOJ study to see what it actually said.

Uh-oh! As pretty much anyone would have guessed, Pemberton's claim was off a factor of a whole giant amount. As the DOJ's first paragraph states, the actual figure is 1.2%, not the clownishly larger percentage New York magazine reported.

Below, you see the original source of Pemberton's claim, headline included:

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REPORT (11/15): Police Use of Nonfatal Force, 2002-2011

From 2002 to 2011, an annual average of 44 million persons age 16 or older had one or more face-to-face contacts with police. Of those who had contact, 1.6% experienced the threat or use of nonfatal force by the police during their most recent contact. About 75% of those with force (1.2% of persons with police contact) perceived the force as excessive...

A coherence problem already exists in that first paragraph by the Justice Department. ("Of those with force?") But according to the DOJ, 1.2 percent of the "persons with police contact" reported the use of force by the police which they perceived to be excessive.

At New York magazine, Pemberton reported the number as 75 percent. At this point, we'll repeat our hypothesis:

Only a very young person, at a fraught time, could have thought that number made sense.

Our hypothesis is crazily wrong, of course. Older people believe crazy claims too. This fact is proven every day, in and out of the press corps.

That said, we'll make this suggestion. At times which are fraught, young reporters, and other young people, may be inclined to believe improbable claims and reach judgments which may be a bit overwrought. They may be even more inclined to believe improbable claims than the older folk who are egging them on—though in saying that, we've started to put our thumbs on the scale concerning this week's topic, which is extremely important.

Full disclosure! In that news report in the Washington Post, Narayanswamy didn't say that 75 percent of people who had a police contact claimed excessive force. Still, her own reporting was so jumbled and so flawed that we suspected the source of Pemberton's peculiar claim before we clicked his link.

These kids today! The events at Missouri and Yale involve the reactions of people who are on the youngish side. Sometimes, young people are more perceptive than those who are older. Other times, though, they are not.

Are students at Missouri and Yale over-reacting to events at a time which is rather fraught? We don't know how to answer that question. In part, that's because we've been reading the work of the mainstream press corps.

What has been happening at Missouri? In our view, the New York Times and the Washington Post have done a fairly lazy job reporting that important topic.

Tomorrow, we'll start to review the basic reporting. From there, we'll move on to the op-ed pieces which appeared in last weekend's high-profile Sunday editions.

What has been happening at Yale and Missouri? For our money, the basic reporting has been rather weak, the commentary rather selective.

In the conservative world, the usual suspects have been tilting hard in the other direction, often in unpleasant ways. In the process, though, we'll have to say this: conservatives are being exposed to certain facts which are being withheld from everyone else.

Facts are being withheld from us. People, imagine that!

Tomorrow: We're not quite sure this made sense

What Narayanswamy reported: In the Washington Post, Narayanswamy didn't make the improbable statement Pemberton apparently thought he had read.

Still, her work struck us as very poor, from start to finish. This is the way she began:

NARAYANSWAMY (11/15/15): Black Americans are more than twice as likely as white Americans to experience non­fatal force or the threat of force from police, according to a new Justice Department study.

The study, which was released Saturday, found that an annual average of 44 million U.S. residents older than 16 had at least one face-to-face contact with police between 2002 and 2011. About 75 percent of those who had encountered force from the police perceived the force to be excessive.

The scribe omitted a basic fact. Can you discern what it was?

Narayanswamy was writing at a highly fraught time. Her omission led to Pemberton's highly improbable claim. His claim made sense to New York magazine's editors, if such workers exist.

REPORTING MISSOURI AND YALE: Amputated tomcat ears!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2015

Part 1—The medical kit of the press: Be forewarned! For our money, Stacy Schiff's new book is an annoying, difficult read.

You won't be told that in the reviews, almost all of which are glowing. But for our money, Schiff takes a fascinating historical episode and, through her precious, confusing constructions, makes it a very hard slog.

That said, even Schiff can't rob this episode of its fascinations. In the passage shown below, she describes the state of medical science in the Massachusetts colony at the time of the Salem witch trials.

Samuel Parris is the minister whose 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old niece touched off the famous panic in January 1692. This is the sort of help he got when he called in the doctors:

SCHIFF (page 23): Through February Parris looked largely to fast and prayer. He consulted with fellow clergymen...But when he had had enough of the “odd postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that Scripture would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.

Years later, the practice of medicine in Boston would be deemed "perniciously bad" by a university-trained physician: in 1692, no university-trained physician had yet arrived in Salem town or its neighbor, tiny Salem village, where the girls twitched and snapped. A basic medical kit looked little different from an ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart. In powders or plasters, snails figured in many remedies. They were at least easier to harvest than unicorn's horn. The fat of a roasted hedgehog dripped into the ear constituted "an excellent remedy for deafness." The most informed medical man in the colonies at the time swore by saltpeter for measles, headache and sciatica. Cotton Mather believed sixty drops of lavender and a mouthful of gingerbread cured memory loss...Hysteria had been cataloged well before 1692. A Salem physician treated it with a brew of breast milk and the blood from an amputated tomcat ear.

As we read that passage, we're supposed to be struck by the total lack of medical science available to Salem village. We're supposed to be struck by the way the world of Salem differed from ours.

We had a second reaction. You see, we read that passage shortly after the crackpot grilling of Candidate Clinton before that special House committee. But also this:

We read that passage during the time when several major American news orgs pretended or seemed to stage debates in which the current Republican candidates were questioned about economic issues.

On October 28, CNBC pretended or seemed to stage the first of these two debates. Thirteen days later, on November 10, the Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal pretended or seemed to stage the second such session.

We watched the way those debates were conducted. We also watched the way those debates were critiqued by the mainstream news corps, including our top liberal pundits.

During this period, we read that passage from Schiff's book. Perhaps for that reason, we had a second reaction to that passage:

As were read Schiff's descrption of Salem's lack of medical science, we thought of the utter lack of journalistic skill on display in our modern "press corps"—the lack of skill we accept from these doctors on a regular basis.

Did Mather believe that lavender drops might cure memory loss? That's nothing! Ezra Klein didn't know what it meant when a journalist accused a candidate of running a "comic book" campaign!

Did Salem physicians treat hysteria with blood from an amputated tomcat ear? That's nothing! Our brightest, most dispassionate liberal pundit thinks that derisive comments represent the most honest way for a journalist to challenge a crazy tax plan!

He couldn't think how else you could do it!

Is it strange to think that doctors in Salem village carried basic medical kits which "consisted of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried dolphin heart?" Does it seem strange to think that no one perceived this as strange?

On both counts, it does seem strange, at least from the modern perspective. But it was just as strange to see the attention deficit disorder which seemed to afflict the highly-paid, high-ranking journalists who conducted those recent debates. And it was just as strange when our leading liberal pundits couldn't seem to discern this affliction, even as it played out before our eyes.

When Samuel Parris called in the doctors, did the doctors arrive bereft of any medical skills? So it seems from Schiff's account. But that's nothing! A similar problem obtains in our own village when we call in the people who, or so we're told, come bearing journalistic skills.

Why did we think of Harwood, Quick and Quintanilla—of Klein, Saletan, even of Drum—when we read that passage from Schiff's book? A very fast review:

The current GOP candidates have proposed the craziest budget plans in the history of the republic. One day before the CNBC debate, one of their number, Candidate Kasich, expressly said as much.

"Crazy," Candidate Kasich said. He was describing the budget plans of Candidates Carson and Trump.

Those plans are crazy—and Kasich said so! But one night later, the journalists from CNBC arrived with peculiar medical kits. They pretended to ask a couple of questions about the craziness of those plans, and then, their attention deficits took hold.

Losing their focus, they wandered the countryside; they avoided the craziness of those plans for the rest of the evening. But so what? By the next day, liberal pundits were standing in line to praise them for the "substantive" nature of their evening's work!

The moderators' bags had been full of lavender too. Our pundits couldn't seem to see this. Within our own failing culture, it has become the norm to see TV stars work from journalism kits filled with tomcat ears.

For eighteen years, we've been trying to warn you, much as Cassandra once did:

Our modern mainstream press corps is a Potemkin village. Its inhabitant are largely actors. They possess, or are willing to employ, almost no journalistic skills.

Salem's physicians were hopeless, clueless. Our journalists pretend or seem to be clueless too.

Last week, our journalists focused their lack of skill on a new, extremely important topic. They focused their lack of skill on events at Missouri and Yale.

What's happening at Yale and Mizzou? Like you, we don't have the slightest idea. All week, we'll examine the journalism about those important events.

Try to remember—we're talking about the journalism, not about the students involved in those important events. Regarding the journalism, we'd have to say this:

It's been the fat of a roasted hedgehog, pretty much all the way down.

Tomorrow: Attempts to report what happened at Mizzou

The one high-placed dissenter: Routinely, our mainstream journalism works from script. Not infrequently, this is true of book and film reviews.

Schiff's book has been widely praised. One dissenter spoke from a rather high scaffold. We refer to Professor Kamensky, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

For our money, Schiff's book is a strangely difficult slog. To review Professor Kamensky's critique, you can just click here.

Jim Sleeper didn't like the book either. He opined at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

MAY LOOK LIKE PLUTOCRAT BIAS: CNBC really wasn't substantive!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2015

Part 5—Our big liberal pundits won't tell: We've now had four Republican debates. Have any of these sessions actually been "substantive?"

Strongly, we would say no. In a front-page report in today's New York Times, Haberman and Flegenheimer allude to one of the problems.

The reporters describe a familiar sequence from Tuesday evening's fourth debate. This is precisely the way "substantive" discourse dies:

HABERMAN/FLEGENHEIMER (11/13/15): The immigration issue flared briefly during the Republican debate on Tuesday night in Milwaukee, with Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio saying there was no way to conduct the types of mass deportations that Mr. Trump has called for.

Just after they addressed the issue, the Fox Business Network moderators turned to Mr. Rubio, but instead of pressing him on the issue, they turned to a new topic, sparing him difficult questions in front of a nationally televised audience.

So true! For whatever reason, attention disorder reared its very familiar head during that exchange. The moderators asked two candidates about mass deportation, thus rushed to a new/improved topic.

Was this done as a favor to Candidate Rubio? Some have offered that speculation; we have no idea. But when debates are run in this scattershot way, they become beauty pageants.

TV viewers get to see and hear how the candidates look and sound. But it's hard to conduct a substantive discussion when moderator hopscotch around in grab-bag fashion, asking unrelated questions in much the way the ping-pong balls appear in a lottery drawing.

This approach is a gift to the candidates, especially to the slackers and the dissemblers. They get to recite a few easy points. The moderators then move on.

This approach is the death of substance. Moderators who behave this way can spend two hours asking questions, all of which deal with matters of substance, without advancing anyone's grasp of any major issue.

By the end of a two-hour session, such moderators may be asking questions about fantasy football as the audience jeers. Indeed, that's exactly what happened at the third GOP debate, the October 28 debate run by CNBC.

Deeply important policy questions were quickly abandoned and ignored. Instead, the moderators rattled a long list of relatively trivial questions, including many which were loaded with snark. Many of these snark-filled questions involved no substance at all.

Consider the first round of questions for the ten candidates—the round of questions which were asked before the evening's first commercial break. Presumably by corporate design, these questions were loaded with attitude, provocation and snark.

But uh-oh! In the process of pimping their tude, the moderators abandoned any attempt to create a substantive discussion. In particular, the candidates received a very large pass concerning their ludicrous budget plans, which Candidate Kasich had correctly denounced as "crazy" just one day before.

The moderators hopscotched around, asking a grab-bag of unrelated, trivial questions. But so what? Within a matter of days, Ezra Klein and other major pundits were hailing the "substantive" work of those overpaid TV stars.

A cynic might even think that ludicrous claims had the look of careerist guild bias! That said, how "substantive" was that first round of questions, which Candidate Cruz was soon denouncing?

Let's take a look at the record:

A highly charitable person could claim that the first three questions—to Candidates Trump, Carson and Kasich—were an attempt to stage a substantive discussion of those budget plans.

For reasons we'll note below, we wouldn't be that charitable. At any rate, the exchanges with those first three candidates lasted only seven minutes, in a session which ran two hours.

At that point, guess what happened? We'll simply borrow the language shown above from today's news report:

"Just after they addressed the issue, the [CNBC] moderators turned to Mr. Rubio, but instead of pressing him on the issue, they turned to a new topic, sparing him difficult questions in front of a nationally televised audience!" That same thing happened on October 28!

Question 4 went to Candidate Rubio. But he wasn't asked about his own budget plan which, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, "would add $11.8 trillion to the national debt over a decade." In an outbreak of attention deficit, that giant topic had been abandoned. Instead, Rubio was asked an amazingly snarky question, in which it was suggested that he should quit the race, postponing his pursuit of the White House until he becomes a bit older.

("You've been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s...Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?" In the second round of questions, Rubio was asked if he possibly lacks the "maturity" to serve in the White House.)

Think back to late October 2007. In that year, Candidate Obama was a young first-term senator, as Rubio is today. (Obama had just turned 46; Rubio is 44.)

Back in 2007, if any moderator had posed such questions to Candidate Obama, the liberal/progressive world would have been upset. The question to Rubio was highly presumptuous, even if our own tribal bias may have kept us from seeing as much.

Be that as it may, the question to Candidate Rubio wasn't "substantive" at all. Meanwhile, the candidates' crazy budget plans had now disappeared from view.

The next question, Question 5, went to Candidate Bush. This question didn't deal with a substantive topic either. Instead, Bush was asked to discuss "how far your stock has fallen in this race, despite the big investment your donors have made."

There is no bigger waste of time than a debate question about bad poll numbers. Meanwhile, this question came with a peculiar pair of gotchas: "I want to ask you in this context. Ben Bernanke, who was appointed Fed chairman by your brother, recently wrote a book in which he said he no longer considers himself a Republican because the Republican Party has given in to know-nothingism. Is that why you're having a difficult time in this race?"

In that way, Bush was asked to discuss the possibility that Republican voters are a gang of know-nothings. Apparently, he was also expected to respond to everything that has ever been said by one of his brother's appointees.

Question 6 went to Candidate Fiorina. She was asked, for the ten millionth time, to recite her standard speech about her tenure at Hewlett Packard. Beyond that, she was asked to explain a weird statement by a former HP board member who has taken to defending her tenure. This matched the question to Candidate Bush about Bernanke's statement.

By now, the moderators had abandoned the candidates' crazy tax plans. Indeed, the moderators had moved on from substance altogether. Instead, they wasted everyone's time with a question about bad polls, the ultimate waste-of-time debate query. They littered the countryside with snark and with peculiar gotchas.

When Cruz got a somewhat snarky Question 7, he denounced the moderators. By the end of the debate, RNC chairman Reince Priebus was doing the same.

Alas! The snark which drove these early questions turned into an unpaid gift for the GOP. Meanwhile, we liberals failed to notice the way the moderators had given the candidates a pass on those ludicrous tax proposals, which Kasich had denounced as "crazy" just one day before.

Let's be fair! At first, we liberals did wail and moan about the moderators. As we noted yesterday, Josh Marshall quickly reported what everyone was saying.

"As everyone is already discussing, CNBC probably shouldn't be allowed to run a debate again," Marshall wrote. "Aside from the expertly prepared John Harwood, the moderators were bad and poorly—almost embarrassingly—prepared."

In our view, Harwood was awful too. As we'll note below, his ridiculous opening questions for Trump established the snark-infested tone of the first round of questions.

At any rate, Marshall posted again an hour later. "Let's not even get into perhaps the most comically poor debate prep we've ever seen in a national debate," he wrote. "Are these folks even journalists?"

According to Marshall, everyone was saying it. The debate had been so poorly run that CNBC should never be allowed to run one again. But heaven help our tribalism, which is eating the brains of the liberal world. As soon as the GOP began to criticize the moderators, we liberals copped a new attitude! We praised them for their substantive questions, often in ludicrous ways.

For starters, just consider what Ezra Klein said about Harwood's first question to Trump.

Harwood's first question to Trump was barely a question at all. "Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?" the expertly-prepared moderator had said.

Basically, Harwood had stated his derisive judgement in the form of a question! But alas! His snark-drenched non-question question served as a gift to Trump. So did his second insult-in-the-form-of-a-question, where he pictured Trump trying to fly off the stage by flapping his arms very hard.

As he opened the evening's questions, Harwood trafficked in insults rather than journalism. But as soon as Priebus complained, we liberals began to defend him, with Ezra Klein making one of the dumbest comments ever committed to print:

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

Earth to Ezra: Everybody else on the planet does know what that means!

Other pundits struggled manfully, defending the substantive nature of CNBC's early questions. William Saletan parsed it thusly at Slate:

SALETAN (10/29/15): Half an hour into Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, Sen. Ted Cruz exploded at the CNBC moderators. “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz fumed. “You look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?”

[...]

Take Cruz’s speech. It doesn’t even match the debate transcript. To begin with, nobody called Trump a villain. CNBC’s John Harwood asked Trump how he would fulfill his promises to “build a wall and make another country pay for it” (Mexico), “send 11 million people out of the country” (undocumented immigrants), and “cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit.” Second, nobody asked Carson whether he could do math. CNBC’s Becky Quick asked Carson how he would close the $1 trillion gap between current federal spending and the revenue projected from Carson’s 15 percent flat tax. Third, nobody asked Kasich to insult his colleagues. Kasich volunteered that Trump’s and Carson’s promises were impractical and incoherent. All of these questions were substantive. In fact, Cruz’s speech was a diversion from the query that had been posed to him—namely, why did he oppose this week’s agreement to raise the debt limit?

Truly, that's sad. Saletan criticized Cruz for failing to match the debate transcript, which didn't exist at the time Cruz spoke.

Saletan did have a transcript, but he chose to ignore it. He disappeared Harwood's "comic book" reference, thereby giving a false impression of what Harwood had actually said.

"All these questions were substantive," Saletan also said. In this statement, he simply ignoring the several questions which weren't.

Cruz's take on the questions to Rubio and Bush had been perfectly fair, perhaps even soft. Saletan simply ignored those non-substantive questions, along with the golden oldie to Fiorina, as he praised the moderators for their substantive work.

Once the RNC got into the hunt, presentations like this became de rigueur for many liberal pundits. If the RNC was attacking the panel, that seemed to mean that we liberals had to assert their greatness. We were too dumb, too lazy, too uncaring to note a basic fact:

In fact, the overpaid TV stars had abandoned substance early on, giving those candidates a near total pass on the craziness of their budget proposals.

Perhaps it was our "tribal bias"--our instinct to contradict whatever The Other Tribe says. Perhaps it was our "careerist guild bias"--our instinct to maintain the code of silence about way our colleagues and possible future employers actually work.

It may have been free-floating "plutocrat bias"--our inability to care at this point when massive upward redistribution is being proposed in front of our eyes.

Whatever it was, it had us saying that we don't even know what the term "comic book" means! And this Monday, it had our analysts with red swollen eyes after they read a post by their Uncle Drum.

Good lord! Drum listed a few of the ludicrous elements in those "crazy" tax proposals. But then, good grief! He said this:

DRUM (11/9/15): This is all fantasyland stuff. So why doesn't the media hammer them more on it? Why do debate moderators let them get away with such lunacy? Good question. John Harwood tried the only honest approach in the last debate, suggesting that Donald Trump was running a "comic book" campaign—and it was Harwood who got hammered. Harwood gamely tried a second time with Trump, telling him 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." Trump brushed him off. Harwood tried yet again with Rubio, this time citing numbers from the Tax Foundation, and Rubio brushed him off. That's a couple of tries at mockery and one try at arithmetic, and they both had the same effect.

"Harwood tried the only honest approach?" What have they done with our real Uncle Drum, two or three analysts cried.

Was Harwood's approach honest at all? We have no idea. We'll guess it may have been prescribed by his corporate owners. We'll guess they may have wanted to establish a tone in the first round of questions. We'll guess they simply overshot the runway by a few thousand yards.

Those would be our guesses. But whatever else can be said about Harwood's approach, his approach wasn't journalistic.

A journalist can't establish a point by use of derisive language. He has to establish his points by reference to basic facts.

Harwood cited very few facts in his first round of questions to Trump. Later on, he used real facts with Rubio, but there was no follow-up from the rest of the panel after Rubio evaded and dissembled.

Uncle Drum seemed puzzled about what a panel can do about this. Luckily, we can explain! This is what the CNBC panel should have done in that third debate:

They should have set a block aside to discuss budget plans—nothing else. They should have announced that their first long block would be about nothing else.

In discussing those budget plans, they should have established the lunatic size of those proposed tax cuts. It isn't enough to say that Trump is proposing $10 trillion in cuts. You have to say that his $11-12 trillion in tax cuts is many times larger than Bush's tax cuts. You have to say that he would cut one-fourth of all federal receipts.

In discussing those budget plans, they should have established the degree of fantasy involved in the candidates' projected growth rates. Will Candidate Trump preside over an economy with 6% annual growth rates? The history of our annual growth rates is easy to cite; many experts can be quoted. It's easy to see that Trump is projecting that cows will jump over the moon.

In discussing those budget plans, they should have insisted that the candidates start naming specific budget cuts. Journalistically, garbage like this should never be allowed to occur:

CARSON (10/28/15): You also have to get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes. You also have to do some strategic cutting in several places. Remember, we have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies. Anybody who tells me that we need every penny and every one of those is in a fantasy world.

So, also, we can stimulate the economy. That's gonna be the real growth engine, stimulating the economy. Because it's tethered down right now with so many regulations.

QUICK: You'd have to cut— You'd have to cut government by about 40 percent to make it work with a $1.1 trillion hole.

CARSON: It's not true.

QUICK: That is true, I looked at the numbers.

CARSON: When— When we put all the facts down, you'll be able to see that it's not true, it works out very well.

QUICK: Dr. Carson, thank you.

Journalistically, that's an abomination. To her credit, Quick almost seemed to be trying. That said, here's what occurred:

Carson said we don't need every one of our 645 federal agencies. Plainly, that is true. It also has nothing to do with the amount of cutting his crazy plan would require.

Quick then made one tiny attempt to discuss some actual numbers. Carson said her statement wasn't true. Quick then thanked him for saying that and she hurried on. None of the panelists ever mentioned Carson's manifest bullshit again.

In discussing those budget plans, they have to ask the so-called "flat taxers" to name the deductions they would dump. These deductions have all been costed out. It's easy to say how much money would be saved by dumping different deductions.

Journalistically, you can't allow this gang of hustlers to drift along with endless vague statements about getting rid of loopholes. By the way, would Carson keep the standard deduction as part of his lunatic single-rate plan? In eleven hours of pseudo-debate, no one has bothered to ask.

"Harwood tried the only honest approach?" That's right up there with Ezra's claim that he doesn't know what "comic book" means. Luckily, the honest journalistic approach is easy to define.

A panel has to stick to fact-based questions about those tax proposals. And they have to engage in persistent follow-up. They can't do what the New York Times describes this very morning:

"But instead of pressing him on the issue, they turned to a new topic, sparing him difficult questions in front of a nationally televised audience."

That's exactly what these corporate panels have been doing all along. People like Ezra, Marshall and Saletan can't seem to figure this out.

(Drum has been strongly back on track in the past several days. He's been listing the ludicrous budget claims these candidates must be called on.)

For ourselves, we'll guess those panels are doing what their corporate bosses instructed. That said, why won't your favorite liberals say what those panels are doing?

Why won't they say that those panels have been hopscotching all around, refusing to stage a sustained critique of those "crazy" budget proposals? Why won't our favorite star liberals tell us the truth about that?

It may be their "careerist guild bias." They want to sit on those panels some day. Within the Potemkin American press, you never criticize your possible future employers.

(This is known as the code of silence.)

It could be their "tribal bias." If Priebus says the panelists were bad, we know they must have been good.

(This is the way we liberals get dumb and dumberer.)

Clearly, though, this conduct has to reflect a bit of "plutocrat bias." Those tax proposals are plainly crazy, just as Kasich said. Beyond that, they're an abomination of upward distribution to the vastly rich, with the strong possibility that some of the plans will increase federal tax bills to the middle class.

Ezra doesn't seem to care about that any more. Maybe he's been in This Town too long. Maybe he's gotten too rich.

Supplemental: How crazy are those crazy tax plans?

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2015

Some points which are being ignored: How crazy are the crazy tax plans John Kasich assailed as "crazy?"

The craziness of these crazy tax plans is being widely ignored. Debate moderators keep averting their gaze as they hurry past in embarrassment. Liberal pundits have barely noticed.

How crazy are the crazy tax plans? Consider a factoid from Josh Barro in today's New York Times.

To encounter this startling factoid, readers had to go all the way to the end of a 2700-word report by a collection of reporters. If they made it to the end, they would have encountered this, about Tuesday night's debate:

BARRO (11/12/15): The candidates debated two main questions about taxes: Should they be lower than they are now, or should they be way lower? And should there be fewer tax rates, or just one single rate for everyone, rich and poor?

On the first question, one might say the proposed tax cuts range from huge to yooooooge. Mr. Trump’s tax cut would appear to cost about $11 trillion—a quarter of expected government revenue—over a decade. Mr. Kasich said that was too much because a tax cut that big “will put our kids way deeper in the hole than they have been.”

Crazy, ain't it? Candidate Trump's crazy proposal would eliminate a quarter of federal revenue over its first ten years.

Also crazy is this:

Two debates have occurred since this crazy plan was released. Neither CNBC nor the Fox Business Network made any real attempt to question Trump about the manifest craziness of his crazy proposal.

As he continued today's brief sub-report, Barro did something we've been waiting to see. He put the size of these crazy tax plans into another context—a basic context which might ring some bells for the average citizen:

BARRO (continuing directly): But even Mr. Kasich, despite his relative restraint, is proposing to cut taxes more deeply than President George W. Bush did and Mitt Romney promised to in 2012. He would lower the top personal income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 28 percent, the top capital gains tax rate from 23.8 percent to 15 percent and the top corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent—an approach that would greatly increase the deficit, if not as greatly as Mr. Trump’s ideas would.

George W. Bush's iconic tax cuts have long been thought of as very large. Candidate Trump's tax cuts are massively larger. Even Candidate Kasich's cuts are larger, Barro says.

The press corps is largely avoiding/ignoring the craziness of these plans. Our liberal pundits are following suit. A cynic would say that this conduct has the look of plutocrat bias, defined as the inability to become aroused by massive redistribution in an upward direction.

That said, we'll leave you with one more possibility to ponder. It involves the crazy proposal of Candidate Carson, which still hasn't been spelled out.

Might Carson actually increase federal taxes for those with lower incomes? Back in September, Richard Phillips speculated about that possibility in a post for Citizens for Tax Justice.

Some of what follows is now outmoded. Still, this passage establishes a possible problem—a problem our debate moderators, and our liberal pundits, have politely been passing over:

PHILLIPS (9/1/15): Without specific details, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) Director Bob McIntyre made a generous estimate of how much Carson’s 10 percent flat tax could reasonably raise by simply multiplying total federal adjusted gross income estimated for 2016 ($11.25 trillion) by 0.10. This would yield tax revenues of only $1.1 trillion. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that the federal government will raise an estimated $3.5 trillion and spend $4 trillion in 2016.

[...]

Carson is sticking to his guns, stating that he has talked to economists who said with enough loophole closing a workable tax rate would be “somewhere between 10 and 15 percent.” However, our calculation demonstrates that even with every deduction eliminated, Carson’s 10-percent flat tax would increase the deficit by $3 trillion in just one year.

Even if Carson increased the rate of his flat tax, it would still be bad policy for the nation. Flat taxes plans are generally regressive. A CTJ analysis of one revenue-neutral flat tax plan found that it would raise taxes on the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers by an average of $2,887, while cutting them by an average of $209,562 for the richest one percent of taxpayers each year.

Is it possible that Candidate Carson's Biblical plan would actually increase federal taxes for lower- or middle-income people? Our journalistic elites don't seem to care.

In Tuesday night's debate, Carson said that his eventual plan would include "a rebate for people at the poverty level." This makes it sound like he's planning to do without the standard deduction. Wouldn't a plan like that raise federal taxes for many low- and middle-income people?

None of these questions seem to matter to our debate moderators, our major journalists, or our liberal thought leaders. Even after Candidate Kasich denounced the Trump/Carson plans as "crazy," debate moderators kept hurrying past, politely averting their gaze from the lunacy of these proposals. Liberal pundits have been extremely slow to notice.

That said, will Candidate Carson ever present a plan? No one seems to care about that either! As we noted yesterday, this absurd exchange occurred at the CNBC debate, in the few minutes the moderators devoted to these crazy plans:

QUICK (10/28/15) [A 15 percent single-rate tax] still leaves you with a $1.1 trillion hole [presumably, in the annual federal budget].

CARSON: You also have to get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes. You also have to do some strategic cutting in several places. Remember, we have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies. Anybody who tells me that we need every penny and every one of those is in a fantasy world.

So, also, we can stimulate the economy. That's gonna be the real growth engine, stimulating the economy. Because it's tethered down right now with so many regulations.

QUICK: You'd have to cut— You'd have to cut government by about 40 percent to make it work with a $1.1 trillion hole.

CARSON: It's not true.

QUICK: That is true, I looked at the numbers.

CARSON: When— When we put all the facts down, you'll be able to see that it's not true, it works out very well.

QUICK: Dr. Carson, thank you.

On its face, that's a crazy presentation by Carson. It ended with Carson saying it will all make sense "when we put all the facts down."

An actual journalist would have asked an obvious question. She would have asked Carson when he actually plans or expects to "put all your freaking facts down."

Quick may have been gripped by a touch of the 24-hour plutocrat bias. Instead of asking that obvious question, she simply thanked Carson instead. Twelve days later, Carson got a softball-sized pass on this manifest nonsense at the Fox Business Network debate.

These tax plans are off-the-wall crazy. But they're getting a pass from our Potemkin debate moderators, and from our career liberal world.

Candidate Carson just keeps on smiling. Our scribes, including our liberal scribes, just keep averting their gaze.

(What should we do about fantasy football? Major stars ask such questions instead.)

MAY LOOK LIKE PLUTOCRAT BIAS: Josh Marshall almost semi-flips!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2015

Part 4—May look like tribal bias: It was Wednesday night, October 28. The third Republican debate had ended ten minutes earlier.

The debate had been staged by CNBC. Under an unflattering headline, Josh Marshall explained how poorly the network's team had performed:

MARSHALL (10/28/15): Why is this debate so bad?

As everyone is already discussing, CNBC probably shouldn't be allowed to run a debate again. Aside from the expertly prepared John Harwood, the moderators were bad and poorly—almost embarrassingly—prepared. There's also the CNBC bubble—which makes some of the questions seem odd even for a Republican debate. What about onerous personal helicopter regulation?

Everyone already knew it. CNBC probably shouldn't be allowed to run another debate!

Except for John Harwood, the two to five other moderators had been "almost embarrassingly bad," Marshall said. And not only that! Because of the network's bubble, some of the questions they asked had seemed odd, even for a Republican debate.

For our money, Marshall vastly over-praised Harwood's performance. Beyond that, we'd add an extremely basic complaint to his remarkably harsh indictment:

The moderators almost totally failed to challenge the utterly "crazy" budget plans the candidates had produced. Instead, they'd hopscotched around in grab-bag fashion, offering a crazy-quilt collection of the types of questions Marshall rejected as odd.

Within the next hour, Marshall offered two more posts about CNBC's epic fail. But how odd:

By 11:15 that night, the GOP was making complaints about the moderators. Marshall thought these complaints were odd, but he went into more detail about how bad their performance had been:

MARSHALL (10/28/15): RNC Chair Reince Priebus, who partnered with CNBC to put on this debate, is crapping on CNBC big time for putting on a terrible debate. I thought it was a terrible debate. But I was a little unclear why Priebus thought it was so terrible from a GOP perspective...

[A]s I reflect on the debate a bit more I think a big reason the debate was so weird was that so many of the questions were based on obscurantist and myopic CNBC nonsense—which is not only far-right and identified with great wealth but specifically owned by the bubble of Wall Street. That led to a lot of odd questions—like Jim Cramer's saying why aren't GM execs going to jail, Santelli's wild questions or that question about fantasy football. Lots of people are into fantasy football. But whether it's betting and whether it should be regulated, that's a Wall Streeter question—in the same way huge amounts of the money that gets pushed through political betting sites comes off Wall Street. It's hard for Republicans to say this. But I think this is a significant reason why the debate seemed so odd. And it made it kind of odd to hear anti-liberal bias attacks on the moderators when they were asking questions like shouldn't the Fed be forced to take us back to the gold standard.

Let's not even get into perhaps the most comically poor debate prep we've ever seen in a national debate. Are these folks even journalists? Or do they just spend all day talking about capital gains tax cuts?

In real time, Marshall really didn't think the moderators performed well.

He described "perhaps the most comically poor debate prep we've ever seen in a national debate." "Are these folks even journalists?" the CNBC-basher asked. That said, given the types of questions which had been asked, Marshall couldn't imagine how Priebus could be complaining about "liberal bias."

If Marshall was being sincere, he was revealing a hole in his ability to see the world as it is. To us, his analysis carries the scent of a destructive, age-old devil, tribal bias.

Was Priebus sincere in his complaints? We have no way of knowing; we'd assume he partially was. Starting with the first two questions from the expertly-prepared Harwood, the moderators had invited his attack with their ridiculous snark and the pointlessly derisive way they framed their scattershot questions.

This conduct was not journalistic, and it invited attack. No matter! Marshall, being a tribal player, couldn't seem to see what had just occurred. We think we can explain why that is:

To tribal players, derision and snark are always justified when aimed at The Others. This "tribal bias" may keep such players from seeing and understanding events which occur in their world.

At any rate, in real time, Marshall thought the moderators were awful. "Everyone is already discussing this," Marshall said as soon as the debate ended.

Everyone was already saying how bad the moderators had been! But then, the moderators came under attack from the chairman of The Others, and a predictable thing occurred. The liberal world began to claim that the moderators had done a good, "substantive" job! By this past Tuesday evening, even Marshall's tone about the CNBC debate had taken a turn.

"Whatever you can say about the CNBC debate, it was tight, with sharp exchanges and memorable moments," he wrote in Tuesday's night's review of the Fox Business Network debate. "There was very little of that tonight."

Twelve days after the CNBC debacle, Marshall was now describing a tight debate with sharp exchanges and memorable moments. Beyond that, he seemed to be describing martyrs when he discussed CNBC's moderators.

"Simply pressing the candidates to answer questions or noting when they're making demonstrably untrue claims made them liberal," Marshall now declared.

Alas! Marshall was misstating the nature of the complaints about the CNBC moderators. He was also misstating what they'd done. This sort of thing makes us liberals happy. It also makes us dumb.

Let's recall the early chronology of the CNBC debate:

Confronted with "crazy" budget plans which service the rich and threaten everyone else, the moderators had basically turned tail and run. As we noted yesterday, they started the debate with a couple of questions aimed at the ludicrous budget proposals of Candidates Trump and Carson. After seven unproductive minutes, they abandoned this topic, essentially for the rest of the night.

They moved ahead to the scattershot questions about which Marshall complained. But as they moved ahead, they continued along with their snark.

Their first two questions to Candidate Trump had been dripping in snark. These questions came from the expertly-prepared Harwood. His derisive language served as a gift to the candidate with the craziest plan of them all.

After budget-based questions for Carson and Kasich, the moderators abandoned this hugely important topic. They let the crazy plans escape, but continued along with their snark, as we'll detail tomorrow.

Just for today, can we talk?

Snark is not journalistic. Neither is derisive language in service to poorly framed, lazy questions with lack any real follow-up. This was the unhelpful approach the expert Harwood took.

Seven minutes—count em, seven!—were spent on those crazy budget plans. The next two questions, to Rubio and Bush, were non-substantive, but built around snark.

Fiorina was then asked to discuss Hewlett-Packard for about the ten millionth time. Those moderators had run out of gas. The debate had barely begun.

Marshall noticed the lousy questions which dominated the evening. He said the preparation was the worst he'd ever seen. He didn't mention the important questions which went unasked.

Marshall noticed the lousy questions; Priebus noticed the snark. And how odd! As soon as Priebus began to criticize the moderators, we liberals began to say they'd been great!

Tomorrow, we'll show you the comments we liberals made as we praised their manifest greatness. This is the way tribal players get dumb—and in the long run, dumbness doesn't help our tribe, our values or our interests.

In a point we'll explain tomorrow, this is also the way of Salem Village.

We've been reading the Stacy Schiff book. To our ear, Schiff's book seems to be all about us. It's also all about Priebus.

Tomorrow: "Substantive," Ezra said

BREAKING: Carson cribs from his own exam!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2015

Used exact same answer: Many people are noting the fuzzy incoherence of one of Candidate Carson's "answers" in last night's debate.

He was asked about the wisdom of having special ops troops in Syria. His "statement" started like this:

"Well, putting the special ops people in there is better than not having them there because that's why they're called special ops. They're actually able to guide some of the other things that we're doing there. And what we have to recognize is that Putin is trying to really spread his influence throughout the Middle East. This is going to be his base. And we have to oppose him there and in an effective way. We also must recognize it's a very complex place...What we've been doing so far is very ineffective. But we can't give up ground right there. But we have to look at this on a much more global scale."

Some people are trying to say that the answer was fuzzy and vague.

Breaking! We've learned that Carson has cribbed from himself. We're told he used the same answer at Yale on that make-up psych exam!

The other youngster had all gone home, but he decided to go with that! We once used a similar answer on a Kant exam.

Supplemental: Important lessons from Mizzou!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2015

All us humans are dumb: The assistant professor in question has several areas of specialization.

Like you, like us, like everyone else, she can also be very dumb.

Earlier this week, she was captured on videotape, making a call for "muscle." You see, someone was shooting videotape of a public event in a public space at a major state university. The assistant professor was calling for "muscle" to come and remove this very bad young person.

As you may know, the assistant professor was playing a role in the student protests at the University of Missouri. In our view, the seven-minute videotape which surfaced this week is highly instructive.

The New York Times provides the tape here. It teaches us quite a few lessons:

First, we can see that college students can sometimes have very poor judgment. This shouldn't be completely surprising. They're just college kids, after all.

(For the record, most of the students in the tape seem to be scrub-faced, middle-class white kids. Their behavior in that videotape is just extremely dumb.)

When we the people are young, we can be very dumb! On the other hand, the videotape also shows a university administrator and the assistant professor behaving extremely foolishly.

In theory, these adult authority figures are supposed to be smarter than students. They're supposed to have a better sense of the way our society works, post-Enlightenment and all.

Everybody makes mistakes! This assistant professor's mistake was on videotape and was unattractive. She has been reprimanded by all sorts of university officials. The student protest movement has said she was wrong. Her behavior was very dumb.

Her behavior also helps us see how deeply tribal we the liberals can be. In recent years, we think this has been the most important developing story in American media.

Uh-oh! Ditto-headedness and mob rule aren't just for The Others any more! To watch a bunch of Us behaving like the apocryphal Them, please watch all seven minutes of that videotape.

We'll suggest two further points:

To a large percentage of American adults, that videotape will look completely crazy. Over at the Washington Post, Eric Wemple put it like this:

"To watch the video of photographer Tim Tai getting pushed around by a turf-protecting scrum of protesters at the University of Missouri is to experience constitutional angst."

In the past, we liberals have elected Republicans this way, most notably during the years of the Nixon/Reagan backlash. In the course of the next twelve months, we could easily do so again. People like the assistant professor are working for the GOP, although they likely don't know it.

We had another reaction. It involved the assistant professor's areas of specialization. Her official bio says this:

"Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children's television programs."

Some of that doesn't seem to be written in English. That said, here's our question. When universities hire professors to study such topics, do they have the right to be surprised when they find them behaving absurdly?

In recent years, we've noted the way we liberals are adopting the values of the mob. We've also complained about the overall work, or lack of same, of the nation's professors.

Please ponder. In the past forty years, the academy hasn't found a way to address or explain the bogus claim that the Social Security trust fund is "just a bunch of worthless IOUs." It has found the time and the money to hire people with doctorates to research topics like those.

One last question. When you see those college kids behaving so dumbly, how much confidence do you have in their judgments about other things, like the various events at Mizzou?

Where does wisdom lie at Mizzou? Not being there, we have no clear idea. Treat yourself to a basic reality:

You're probably a bit unclear too.

We haven't used anyone's name in this post. You don't want to make people targets. Everybody makes mistakes. All us humans are dumb.

MAY LOOK LIKE PLUTOCRAT BIAS: CNBC's seven-minute fail!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2015

Part 3—No focus, but plenty of snark: Let's start with some small tiny praise.

In last night's GOP debate, moderators from Fox Business and the Wall Street Journal did a better job. They surpassed the miserable performance of CNBC in the October 28 debate.

That doesn't mean that they did a good job. It means they weren't as bad.

One mark of the improvement appeared right at the start of the evening. Right at the start, moderator Neil Cavuto announced that the forum would have a clear focus:

CAVUTO (11/10/15): I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the elephant in the room, and I'm not talking about your party's fine symbol.

I'm talking about the purpose of tonight's debate: The economy and what each of you would do to improve it.

No more, no less. We are focused on those issues, and what you have said on those issues in your words and what your opponents have said in their words about your words. That is the agenda tonight.

Good lord! Despite his status in cable news, Cavuto was able to conceive of maintaining a focus! He said the debate would focus on what the candidates had said about the economy and on what they would do to improve it.

For the most part, the moderators stuck to that statement of purpose. Except for one segment about use of the military, almost all the questions last night dealt with the economy.

Twelve nights before, as we'll see below, CNBC had abandoned that focus after just three questions, totaling seven minutes. Last night, Fox Business and the WSJ managed to stick to their framework.

Warning! That doesn't mean that they actually ran an informative, "substantive" debate.

Alas! Moderators can run an uninformative, insubstantial debate while asking nothing but substantive questions! They can accomplish that task by hopscotching through a scattershot list of unrelated substantive questions. Also by failing to challenge responses which are false or evasive.

For the most part, that's what Fox Business and the Journal did last night. Their performance was still much better than CNBC's pitiful effort--an effort many liberal pundits decided to praise after it was criticized by the GOP.

Tomorrow, we'll look at the peculiar ways our leading liberals reviewed that debate. For today, let's get clear on the lousy job CNBC did, right from the start, on October 28.

Again, let's review the setting for their performance. A cynic might say that their effort that night had the look of plutocrat bias.

Ten candidates stood on the stage that night. They had presented the craziest budget plans in the history of the republic—and they were facing a star-studded panel from a major news org with a business/economics focus!

How ludicrous were those budget proposals? One day before, Candidate Kasich had called the front-runners' budget plans "crazy!" With that, the stage had been set for some real bloodletting about those crazy proposals.

Nothing like that occurred. Those budget plans contained massive tax cuts for the rich. It seemed that several of the plans would increase tax bills, perhaps substantially, for the lower half of income earners.

To all appearances, the plans would create massive drains on the federal treasury. And, to explain why that wouldn't happen, the candidates had done several more crazy things:

They'd predicted ludicrous growth rates for the economy, growth rates which have basically never occurred in the nation's history. They had said they would get rid of "loopholes" and deductions, without actually specifying any and without attempting to show how much money the treasury would save.

They had said they'd offset their massive tax cuts with massive cuts in federal spending. What types of spending would they cut? Few specifics had been advanced.

Their proposals were straight outta fantasyland; Kasich had said they were "crazy." Indeed, Kasich's colorful attack had made the moderators' job that much easier. They could surf behind his colorful language, thus defining the size of the problem without having to use insulting language of their own.

The stage was set for a real bloodletting, but it didn't occur. The moderators avoided the lunacy of these proposals, which massively favor the rich.

A cynic might have chalked it up to the corporate press corps' plutocrat bias! How strange to think that our liberal pundits were soon praising the way this debate had been run!

How did things proceed that night? Let's start at the beginning, with the first round of questions to the candidates.

After a silly opening question, the first serious question went to Candidate Trump. Arguably, Trump had the craziest budget plan, and John Harwood seemed to know that.

Unfortunately, Harwood's focus was AWOL from the jump. He threw a sprawling, multipart question at Trump, giving him sixty seconds to answer. The craziness of the budget proposal was just one part of the stew.

This was the evening's first serious question. It produced a lot of commentary, but only because of its snark:

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?

Already, focus was in short supply as Harwood began the debate. The craziness of Trump's budget proposal was just one part of a variegated stew.

The craziness of Trump's "$10 trillion" tax cut floated around with the carrots and greens. It was Harwood's derisive language which drew all the attention.

In fact, Harwood had perhaps understated the craziness of Trump's plan. The Tax Foundation had said that Trump's proposals would cut taxes by $11.98 trillion on a static basis. They got the projected revenue loss down to $10.14 trillion by applying assumptions about economic growth which may or may not be justified, then said that other factors meant that the revenue loss would be higher.

Whatever! Left on their own, very few viewers have any way of judging the size of tax cuts and revenue loss. Is $10 trillion a lot or a little? Do tax cuts of that general size actually make any sense?

George W. Bush's famous tax cuts had totaled some $1.6 trillion, but Harwood made no attempt to place Trump's massively larger figure in any context. And when he asked a follow-up question, he committed the same sorts of sins:

HARWOOD: We're at 60 seconds. We're at 60 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 would cut taxes $10 trillion and the economy would take off like, 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 really hard.

Harwood didn't name any experts. He could have named the Tax Foundation itself, a business-friendly group which said Trump's plan would lose $10-12 trillion in revenue, even allowing for economic growth.

Once again, Harwood's question was unhelpfully vague. Once again, his question drew attention, but only for the pointlessly derisive language with which he framed it.

For the record, someone did cite the Tax Foundation before Trump's turn was done. It was Candidate Bush, jumping into this wild scramble as CNBC's moderators tried to hurry things along:

KASICH: John? John, listen, on balance—

BUSH: The Tax Foundation says, has looked at all of our plans and—and [Trump's] creates, even with the dynamic effect, $8 trillion dollar deficits.

QUICK: Gentlemen, we'll, we'll get back to this. Just a minute now, just a minute! We're gonna continue this. I wanna talk taxes—

HARWOOD: Hold it! We'll coming back to you in just a minute! Becky's moving on!

QUICK: Dr. Carson, let's talk about taxes.

At this point, the questioning of Candidate Trump was abandoned. Quick moved ahead to a question for Candidate Carson.

"Becky's moving on!" That could have been on the coat of arms for the evening as the moderators persistently jumped from one question to the next.

In this case, when Quick moved to Candidate Carson, she questioned him in rather precise ways about the mammoth revenue loss his tax proposal would apparently cause. But alas! Her brief exchange with Candidate Carson ended like this, with the hapless candidate explaining how he would balance the budget with a 15 percent tax rate:

QUICK: 15 percent still leaves you with a $1.1 trillion hole.

CARSON: You also have to get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes. You also have to do some strategic cutting in several places.

Remember, we have 645 federal agencies and sub-agencies. Anybody who tells me that we need every penny and every one of those is in a fantasy world.

So, also, we can stimulate the economy. That's gonna be the real growth engine, stimulating the economy. Because it's tethered down right now with so many regulations.

QUICK: You'd have to cut— You'd have to cut government by about 40 percent to make it work with a $1.1 trillion hole.

CARSON: It's not true.

QUICK: That is true, I looked at the numbers.

CARSON: When— When we put all the facts down, you'll be able to see that it's not true, it works out very well.

QUICK: Dr. Carson, thank you.

"I looked at the numbers," Quick said, instead of citing a budget authority. The "$1.1 trillion hole" to which she referred seemed to be annual deficit Carson's plan would cause, but she never explicitly said so.

Earlier, Quick had agreed with Carson when he inaccurately said that he'd never proposed a single rate of ten percent. Now, she thanked him for his crazy comments as the debate sped ahead.

Candidate Carson had made a set of ludicrous claims—ludicrous claims about economic growth; ludicrous claims about (unspecified) budget cuts; puzzling claims about the (unspecified) deductions and loopholes he'd dump. As always with Candidate Carson, the statement we've shown you is a textbook case of evasion and cluelessness.

The moderator thanked him for this. She didn't ask him when he planned to "put all the facts down," and no one ever returned to his hapless statements again.

The moderators made no attempt to alert the public to the haplessness of this clueless man's peroration. A cynic might wonder what could explain the lethargy that was displayed.

Trump and Carson had now been questioned about their "crazy" tax plans. From the start of Harwood's initial question, just over four minutes had passed.

Some of that time had been burned away on Trump's immigration plan, which had formed part of Harwood's initial question. By now, less than four minutes had been devoted to the candidates' "crazy" tax plans.

Harwood now threw to Candidate Kasich, asking if he'd like to repeat the "very strong words" he had uttered about "what you're hearing from the two gentlemen we've just heard from." Kasich spoke for roughly three minutes, some of which was devoted to Trump's immigration plan.

"Thank you, governor," the third moderator then said—and after roughly seven minutes, the evening's discussion of those "crazy" tax plans was essentially done.

Roughly seven minutes had passed; three candidates had been questioned. The next candidates to be questioned were Rubio, Bush, Fiorina.

Tomorrow, we'll show you what those hopefuls were asked. We're willing to offer a spoiler now:

The questions they got were long on snark, but substance had now been abandoned.

From that point on, the moderators burned the rest of the two hours with a scattershot, grab-bag collection of unrelated questions. Near the end of the evening, Candidate Christie got the biggest cheer of the night.

Christie ridiculed the moderators for asking about a question about the regulation of fantasy football. This is what the candidate said. The audience went wild:

CHRISTIE: Carl, are we really talking about getting government involved in fantasy football?

(LAUGHTER)

We have— Wait a second! We have $19 trillion in debt. We have people out of work. We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us. And we're talking about fantasy football? Can we stop?

(APPLAUSE)

CHRISTIE: How about this? How about we get the government to do what they're supposed to be doing, secure our borders, protect our people, and support American values and American families. Enough on fantasy football! Let people play! Who cares?

Candidate Christie was widely hailed for this perfectly sensible speech. Astoundingly, liberal pundits were soon defending the moderators for their pitiful, woeful performance.

Good God! The candidates who stood on that stage had presented the craziest budget proposals in the nation's history. Candidate Kasich has said as much, just one day before.

Those budget plans constituted giant windfalls to the rich. Some of the plans seem to raise the federal tax bill for the poor and the middle class, perhaps in substantial ways.

But so what? With their exquisite focus on the economy, the moderators devoted seven snark-infested minutes to those crazy plans. At that point, they wandered off into the woods, where they spent the rest of their evening.

To even the mildest of cynics, the moderators' disinterest in those crazy plans might look like a marker of plutocrat bias. But how strange! Those moderators are still being praised by major liberals for their handling of that debate.

We can't read the minds of those liberal pundits. But liberal praise for that awful performance helps show us the world in which we live.

How deep is our culture's plutocrat bias? By legend, still waters run deep!

Tomorrow: Why would liberals say this?

Seeing may even be believing: To watch the debate, click here.

Supplemental: What is Carson proposing on taxes?

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Bartiromo, Cavuto should ask: What sorts of "crazy" budget proposals will get examined tonight?

Consider Chuck Todd's recent discussion with the Candidate Fiorina. Their brief discussion was shown, on tape, on Sunday's Meet the Press.

Todd began with a small complaint. He noted that Fiorina doesn't have a full-blown budget proposal:

TODD (11/8/15): We've already heard from three of the main outsider candidates for president today. Yesterday, I caught up with another, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina.

And I asked her why she is one of just two candidates who have yet to release a detailed tax plan, or, frankly, any policy plans on her Web site. Here's her answer.

Fiorina has presented no detailed tax plan, Todd said. Presumably, the other slacker to whom Todd referred is the front-running Candidate Carson.

Why hasn't Fiorina presented a budget plan? Her initial answer bordered on the absurd:

FIORINA (continuing directly): Well, let me disagree with the premise of your question.

How often do politicians put out detailed plans? How often do they get enacted?

Never! That's the problem. Politicians put out detailed plans for all kinds of things, it never happens. But if you go to the carlyforpresident.com Web site, what you can do is ask a question and you will see me answering the question in public, verbally. In other words, I am being held accountable.

A plan—anybody can write a plan. Anybody can put a plan on a Web site. It's another thing to say, "You know what I think we need do?" and say it over and over again in public and be held accountable for this.

You know what I think we need to do? We need to go from a 73,000 page tax code, which is what we have today, with 4,000 changes since 2001 and we need to get it down to about three. And what that means is we need to close every loophole and lower every rate. Maybe there are two or three loopholes—

At that point, Todd interrupted. Here's what was wrong so far:

First, politicians do present, and then enact, detailed budget plans. In Campaign 2000, Candidate Bush presented a detailed tax plan. In 2001, it was formally proposed, and then enacted, with very few major changes.

Beyond that, Fiorina's presentation didn't make much sense. If she will tell us what her budget plan is, why can't she just write it down?

In fact, what she's saying is quite vague where the rubber meets the road. Improbably, Fiorina says we should reduce the tax code from 73,000 pages down to just three. To do that, she says we need to "close every loophole and lower every rate."

Todd should have stopped her right there. Would she really get rid of every "loophole"--of every deduction which helps create that lengthy tax code?

She seemed to say she would retain a few. Would she get rid of the standard deduction? We ask that question for a reason, as we'll note below.

Second point: Fiorina said she would "lower every tax rate" as part of the process of winnowing down the tax code. That said, lowering tax rates doesn't simplify or shorten the tax code. (She may simply mean that she would lower tax rates to offset the loss of all those deductions.)

Which "loopholes" would Fiorina retain? the question is very important. When Todd broke in, he challenged her in a sensible way. But in the end, she simply restated her previous formula:

TODD: So we shouldn't expect a tax plan out of you any time soon, on paper?

FIORINA: I've given you a tax plan. I've given you a tax plan. It needs to be three pages. And the only way to get there is to lower every rate and close every loophole.

This time around, Fiorina brooked no exceptions. She'll close every "loophole," she said. She'll lower every rate.

Given her recent drop in the polls, Fiorina doesn't seem especially viable at this point. She doesn't seem to going anywhere. Candidate Carson still is.

Carson is leading many GOP polls. Here's why we would have liked to see Todd ask Fiorina about specific "loopholes:"

It sounds to us like Candidate Carson wants to dump the standard deduction in the course of enacting his single-rate tax. Here's how he described his plan two months ago, at the first GOP debate:

CARSON (8/6/15): We need a significantly changed taxation system. And the one that I've advocated is based on tithing, because I think God is a pretty fair guy.

And he said, you know, "If you give me a tithe, it doesn't matter how much you make. If you've had a bumper crop, you don't owe me triple tithes. And if you've had no crops at all, you don't owe me no tithes." So there must be something inherently fair about that.

And that's why I've advocated a proportional tax system. You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one. And everybody gets treated the same way. And you get rid of the deductions, you get rid of all the loopholes, and—

(DOUBLE BELL RINGS)

BAIER: Governor Bush?

CARSON: And I have a lot more to say about it.

Candidate Carson has sometimes said that it's "condescending" to the poor to treat them differently within the tax code. It sounds to us like he would do without the standard deduction, the way God did back in the day.

Presumably, that would massively increase the federal tax burden on the bottom half of the income scale. This man is leading the Republican polls. Could someone possibly ask him about his basic ideas in this area?

Three months ago, Carson said he had "a lot more to say about" federal taxes. As of today, the cupboard at his web site is almost completely bare concerning his tax proposals.

Carson is proposing a major overhaul of the tax system. Fox Business is running tonight's debate. Bartiromo and Cavuto should get off their ascots and ask what he plans to do.

Will they ask him about the trillions of dollars he would move around in tax policy? Or will they ask about the ten-dollar bill he says that professor once gave him?

Given the press corps' "plutocrat bias," can anyone really be sure?