The Media We Have.

Atrios: First, Assume Away Morning Joe

Everybody in media world agrees. MSNBC is to the left, Fox is to the right, and CNN tries to be down the middle. They all also agree to pretend Morning Joe doesn't exist, even if they're regular guests.

Here's Rachel, committing journalism again.
Racist roots of Arizona law April 26: Rachel Maddow exposes the origins of Arizona's new immigration law in the racist Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Benen: IN DEFENSE OF FACT-CHECKING, CONT'D

The larger discussion about Sunday shows and fact-checking continues to percolate, and I'm delighted to see the concerns that originated with NYU professor Jay Rosen generate so much attention.

We know that ABC's "This Week" is partnering with PolitiFact.com to check its content, and Jake Tapper has defended the idea. We also know that "Meet the Press" has declined, and David Gregory has said that viewers can fact-check the program "on their own terms."

This week, Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation," weighed in, taking Gregory's side.

Bob Schieffer, host of CBS' "Face the Nation," similarly described his role as "the front line on fact-checking," when a guest makes a dubious claim, he's there to ask follow-up questions.

And if an inaccurate statement slips by, Schieffer said he expects that viewers and media-monitoring groups on the left and right will call attention to it quickly, noting that "everybody's welcome to fact-check us all they want."

To be sure, the notion that the host is the first line of defense against false claims is compelling. When a guest says something that's not true, ideally the host would follow-up and make that clear to viewers. But the first line of defense often fails -- sometimes a host isn't aggressive enough; sometimes the host simply doesn't have the information at his or her fingertips to know that the guest isn't telling the truth.

That said, Schieffer's take, like Gregory's, seems to miss the point of the exercise.

About 2.3 million Americans tune in to watch "Face the Nation." Presumably, they watch to learn something about current events and public affairs. Schieffer asks questions, and we hear arguments from various political figures. If those 2.3 million Americans want to know if the arguments are accurate, why would Schieffer expect them to go figure it out on their own? If they trust "Face the Nation" and its host enough to tune in, shouldn't they also trust the program to separate fact and fiction?

I suppose it's nice, in a way, to give the audience credit for being so sophisticated, they'll not only watch the interviews, but also have the wherewithal to do independent research to verify the accuracy of the claims.

But realistically, a mainstream audience isn't well equipped to do its own analysis and fact-checking -- the public relies on professional news outlets to provide them with reliable information. Schieffer wants to give viewers the arguments, not the truth. At that point, the show itself becomes unnecessary -- we can all just read press releases and then scour the 'net to learn if the points are true.

A couple of months ago, when this discussion began in earnest, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, host of his own CNN program on the media, talked to a guest who said online sites are adequate for fact-checking the newsmakers. Kurtz responded, "Exactly. And I'm saying why leave it entirely to the blogs? Why don't television producers and correspondents do it themselves?"

That was in January. We haven't heard a good answer yet.

Postscript: In related news, some interested students have launched "Meet the Facts" to fact-check "Meet the Press." Seems like a worthy endeavor.

Booman: Clowns to the Left of Me, Nutters to the Right

Steve Benen:

Long-time readers may recall a discussion we had back in December, about the quality of the debate over health care reform. It was obvious at the time that the meaningful, interesting disputes weren't between conservatives and liberals, but between liberals and other liberals.

It's not that the right remained silent; it's that they offered arguments that no serious person could find credible. Consider, just off the top of your head, the most prominent concerns raised by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. What comes to mind? "Death panels." "Socialism." "Government takeover."

It was the biggest domestic policy fight in a generation, but most of the policy debate was spent debunking transparent, child-like nonsense. The left approached the debate with vibrancy, energy, and seriousness. The right thought it was fascinating to talk about the number of pages in the legislation.

This is a result of the FrankLuntzification of the Republican Party. Nevermind the frothing maniacs on the radio or Fox News, the Republicans are actually operating in lockstep on the basis of focus-grouped talking points. Then the nutters throw in some Death Panel nonsense for good measure and suddenly Chuck Grassley isn't looking to cut a deal but talking about a government conspiracy to kill our grandmas.

So, yeah, there is no doubt that the only interesting political conversations going on in this country right now are between liberals and other liberals, and sometimes with centrist Democrats, too. The only factual criticism of the president is coming from the left. And there is plenty of it. A lot of it isn't fair, but much of it is. I heard David Brooks say on NPR today that the whole Crist-Rubio spectacle (and what is signifies for the modern GOP) makes him want to suck on a tailpipe. I don't blame him.

Benen: AMBITION AND SUCCESS ARE NOT OFTEN PUNISHED

Today, a tri-partisan climate/energy bill was supposed to be unveiled after months of efforts. The package -- crafted by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) -- faced an uphill climb, but the legwork had been done, and it stood a fighting chance of passage.

Late Saturday, Lindsey Graham signaled his intention to walk away. As he explained it, Democratic leaders seem more interested in tackling immigration before climate -- instead of the other way around, as he'd been led to believe -- so he's inclined to kill both efforts.

Joe Klein argued yesterday that Graham has done Democrats "a big favor." When I saw the headline, I thought Klein may have identified some other way to get the bills passed without Graham's support. But Klein was actually arguing the opposite -- Graham's doing Dems a favor because he's killing the legislation Dems want to pass.

Lindsey Graham effectively killed the Senate's looming cap-and-trade package by yanking his support from the bill -- and thereby did the Democrats a favor. I'm all in favor of combating global warming, although I think a straight-ahead carbon tax (refundable in the form of reduced payroll taxes) would do the job far more efficiently than cap-and-trade. But if I'm a Democratic strategist, I'm thinking Augustinian thoughts: Lord, make me energy independent, but not just yet.

Why? Because the public has had quite enough, thank you, of government activism this year ... and, after Wall Street reform is passed, any further attempts to pass major legislation will add to legitimate conservative arguments that the federal government is attempting to do [too] much to do any of it well.... [P]ublic skepticism about the Democratic Party is bound to increase if another humongous piece of legislation, which effectively guarantees higher energy prices, is passed this year.

I see the political landscape much differently. For one thing, I've seen no evidence to suggest Americans want policymakers to stop having so many successes. This came up a bit last year -- many pundits insisted that President Obama was doing "too much, too fast" -- but it was never borne out by the polls. I tend to think the electorate will be more impressed by Democratic successes than by relative inaction over the six months preceding the midterm elections.

Put it this way: when was the last time a party was punished by voters for successfully passing too much of its policy agenda, and fulfilling too many of its campaign promises?

For another, to characterize the climate/energy bill as "effectively guaranteeing higher energy prices" isn't entirely fair -- with various incentives and tax credits, most consumers wouldn't see a price increase, and many would actually see their energy bills drop.

But perhaps most importantly, I think Klein underestimates what the lawmaking process will be like in 2011 and 2012. He wants to see bills on climate and immigration pass -- and so do I -- but Klein seems to believe policymakers can just pick this up again in the next Congress.

That's almost certainly not the case. In the Senate, the Democratic majority is poised to shrink quite a bit, making it nearly impossible to overcome Republican filibusters. In the House, the Democratic majority may very well disappear entirely, and a GOP-led House will immediately ignore every policy request made by the administration.

It's why I think Klein has it backwards -- those who want to see progress on climate and immigration have to act quickly, because this is likely the last chance policymakers will have on either effort for quite a while.

Closure

Kurtz (TPM): 'What Is With These Guys?'

The RNC continues to send out deceptive mailers designed to look like census documents just weeks after Congress passed a law aimed at making such practices illegal and requiring certain information on the envelope to prevent recipients from being mislead. We have the mailer and the RNC's response: The law doesn't apply to us.

• TPMMuckraker
  

  After her office was forwarded a copy of the mailer, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who sponsored the bill passed last month, noted that the mailer "does not appear to meet" the requirements of the new law -- and slammed the RNC.

  "What is with these guys?," she said. "We pass a law in record time, with unanimous bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, to reduce confusion about the real Census-- knowing that every census form that isn't returned costs taxpayers money and hurts accuracy. But there goes the RNC again, right back to trying to make a buck on the Census!"

  She added: "I don't understand why the RNC has so much trouble following the law given the level of bi-partisan support to protect the Census."

  But RNC spokesman Doug Heye told TPMmuckraker: "We simply looked at the new law, saw that it did not apply to our mailer and continued with the mail pieces." Heye did not elaborate on the RNC's view that the new law did not apply to its mailers.

Krugman: Epistemic Closure In Macroeconomics

There’s been a huge outpouring of blogospheric discussion about “epistemic closure” on the right: a complete refusal to look at evidence or arguments that don’t come from the like-minded. I don’t have much to say about all that aside from the fact that it’s obvious, and has been going on for years.

But I think it’s worth pointing out that something similar has long been true in macroeconomics. And like the political version of epistemic closure, it’s not a “both sides do it” issue. It’s a fresh-water phenomenon; salt-water macro isn’t subject to the same problem.

Here’s what I mean: ask a grad student at Princeton or MIT, “How would a new classical macro guy answer this?”, and the student can do it; classes at freshwater departments teach real business cycle theory, and good students can tell you what it says even if their professors have a different view.

But students at freshwater schools — or, alas, many of their professors — can’t return the favor. It’s been painfully obvious since the crisis broke that people at Minnesota, or even many people at Chicago, have no idea what New Keynesian economics is all about. I don’t mean they disagree, or think it’s garbage, they literally have no idea what the concepts are. And that’s why they reinvent 80-year-old fallacies when they try to discuss the subject.

It’s interesting to ask why this sort of cocooning is a feature of the right but not the left. But it’s very real, and has a dire impact on economic as well as political discourse.

Bernstein: More on that Closed Loop

I think we can add "epistemic closure" to the things that Jonah Goldberg either doesn't understand, or pretends not to understand.

In his second post on the subject (here's the first one, and Conor Friedersdorf's reaction; see also Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait), Goldberg fights back against the accusation that conservatives are subject to "political correctness and intellectual taboos." Moreover, he believes that "the larger 'evidence' that seems to be driving the idea that conservatives are brain dead is the fact that the GOP has become the 'Party of No.'" But that's not what Julian Sanchez was actually talking about in his post that set everyone talking. Here's Sanchez:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!).

The accusation isn't that conservatives all reach the same conclusions about everything, nor is it that conservatives are excessively politically correct, nor is it that conservatives demand strict adherence to a set of ideas if one is to remain a conservative in good standing. It's rather about information, and what counts as evidence about the real world. Sanchez's point is that if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves, that one will have a closed mind (not his phrase, by the way) regardless of what one does with that information.

Evidence to contradict Sanchez can't be found by comparing how many people your side has exiled with the number of people the other side has exiled (and, you know, I can't help but point out that if your prime example of someone who has been banned for violations of political correctness is the president's current director of the National Economic Council, you might want to look for a better example. Or does Goldberg think that David Frum is likely to get a prominent position in the next Republican White House? How about Bruce Bartlett? Lawrence Wilkerson? Richard Clarke?). No, evidence to contradict Sanchez would involve...well, to start with, Jonah Goldberg could report where he gets his information? Does he always watch Fox News, or does he also turn to CNN? Does he read the New York Times? If so, does he consider news reports in the Times reasonably reliable (subject, of course, to critical thinking and additional evidence) or does he think news reports in the Times can be "dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted" (as Sanchez asserts). Does he seek out information from academic sources; does he read, for example, blogging political scientists such as those at the Monkey Cage, or Brendan Nyhan, and Plain Blog (wait, that's me!).

And then Goldberg could self-report other things (and by the way, I don't know the answer to these questions; I read him only occasionally). For example: was he one of the conservatives who was certain, in late January and in February, that health care reform was dead? How often (and I don't know the answer to this) does he find himself repeating things that have long been debunked by neutral fact-check sites such as Politifact.com? Ah, there's a good one -- does he believe that all such sites that claim to be neutral are really just liberals in disguise?

Of course, there are hints that Goldberg would stand as an example of the thing he denies. He critiques Noah Mellman's essay, and concludes that perhaps Mellman is just upset with those who are more "consistently conservative" than Mellman. That is: there is conservatism, and if you don't agree with its official positions on the issues, then you're not a consistent conservative. Or, as Goldberg explains, "A lot of this closed-mind talk sounds like tendentious code for why conservatives should change their convictions" (his emphasis). To an outsider, this sounds suspiciously like exactly what Sanchez and others are saying, no? Conservatism, to Goldberg, is constantly under assault from people -- non-conservatives -- who want real conservatives to give up their deepest principles, their capital-C convictions. It appears difficult for him to imagine a situation in which two people are equally conservative, even though they disagree on a number of issues.

I saved the best for last. Goldberg:

And I just don't know what these people are talking about when it comes to the notion that the conservative mind is closed. In a way it smacks of the tendency of losers in foreign policy fights to insist they're the "realists" unlike the winners who are really ensorcelled by ideology or idealism. Just because your preferred position didn't win, doesn't mean the winners have some major intellectual defect or shortcoming.

Look, "realist" and "idealist" are not terms invented post-hoc by people upset that they didn't get their way in Iraq (or any other contemporary policy fight); they are long-settled ideas about international relations. Nothing about the terms implies "major intellectual defect or shortcoming." That's Goldberg's view from the apparently very narrow place he lives. The idea that these types of schools of thought, realists or idealists, could "win," after which conservatives, having settled their convictions in foreign policy, are done with that debate and can safely ridicule the losers (can safely think of them as losers) -- well, that's what we're talking about. That is what one who is closed-minded does.

Obviously, everyone has sources they trust more, sources they are somewhat suspicious of, and sources they dismiss. What Sanchez is talking about is a group of people who all agree on which sources are to be trusted -- and who have narrowed it down to a fraction of all the information out there, a fraction which is both closed and small and suspicious of any outside sources. He's actually not talking at all about ideology or issue positions; he's talking about staying in touch with reality, which as Andrew Sullivan reminds us (quoting Orwell) "needs a constant struggle."

Sanchez, Millman, and Friedersdorf are struggling. Jonah Goldberg doesn't seem to see the point of it.

flory: A little closure

I generally leave discussion of wingnut philosophical debates to Thers -- mostly because he can make them entertaining. And humor is the only safe way to enter the conservative body politic. Sort of a wingnut condom.

But Noah MIllman has a very long post about the whole 'epistemic closure' fandangle over at The American Scene, and this part really struck me:

yet the common perception of those who worry about the “closing of the conservative mind” is that something has changed – certainly since the right’s intellectual heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. (emphasis mine)

I think what struck me was how this has become received wisdom -- on both the right and the left -- that there was some kind of intellectual golden age in conservative thought in the 70s and 80s. And that got me thinking about exactly how the right's political agenda was shaped by Reagan era thought. To wit:

1. Communists are bad. I think communists figured that one out on their own. Not sure how much conservative intelligentsia contributed.

2. Relatedly -- giant shiny missile shields will protect us from scary communists. How's that one working out?

3. Tax cuts for the rich are teh bomb!

4. Deregulation uber alles!

5. Going to war with brown people living in deserts will fix.......pretty much everything.

I'm sure I'm missing a few but that's my not-conservative memory of the intellectual output of movement conservatism from the Reagan-Bush era.

Maybe the fact that this is considered their golden age is the answer to what's wrong with wingnuttia?

David Frum: Groupthink at National Review

How wonderful to return to a free country, I thought as I stepped off the plane from Beijing at Washington Dulles. No more censorship, no more official lies, no more kowtowing to high officials who gained power by their mindless repetition of party dogma…

Then alas I opened my browser and read the dump-on-Manzi comments on NRO’s The Corner. Manzi had deviated from the One Correct Way of Mark Levin Thought, and all his former colleagues had been summoned together to Denounce and Struggle Against Him.

Not one stood up to be counted in Manzi’s defense, not even colleagues whom Manzi might have had reason to regard as close personal friends. (Take a second to notice whose bylines are missing from yesterday’s discussions.)

What makes this episode all the more remarkable is that Manzi is actually a member of NR’s board of trustees – i.e., somebody who might claim a little more scope to speak his mind. But even for trustees, there are limits, and Manzi crossed them.

It’s important to understand what exactly the limit is.

Manzi could have safely disputed Levin’s claims on global warming if he had observed a couple of conditions. First, acknowledge Liberty and Tyranny as a good and important book. Second, acknowledge Levin’s “service” (i.e., leadership) of the conservative cause. Third, isolate criticisms to one particular finite point – avoid drawing any larger conclusions – and be sure to wrap any criticisms in a blanket of compliments. Just because one particular chapter happens to be slovenly, ignorant, and hysterical should not lead you to question the intellectual merit of the book as a whole.

Manzi negligently violated the rules, and the results are as you see.

The episode reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a year ago, shortly after I published my piece on Rush Limbaugh in Newsweek. I won’t embarrass my friend by mentioning his name, but if I did, you’d certainly recognize it.

My friend: “You aren’t really mad at Rush Limbaugh you know.”

Me: “I’m not? I thought I was.”

My friend: “You’re not even mad at Fox News. You want to win elections, you know that the troops have to be mobilized, somebody has to get them fired up, and you don’t fire them up with Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson. You are mad at the conservative intellectual elites. They’re the ones who are supposed to uphold intellectual standards, to sift actual facts from what you call ‘pretend information’. Rush Limbaugh isn’t any worse than he was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, conservatism offered something more than Rush Limbaugh. Since then, the conservative elite has collapsed. Blame them, not talk radio.”

What happened to Manzi is a perfect illustration of this elite collapse.

Reading through the comments in the Corner, there’s no mistaking who’s in charge, who’s subservient. Two Corner contributors complained about Manzi’s “tone.” Levin is the most vituperative radio host this side of Mike Savage – but imagine anyone at The Corner complaining about Levin’s tone!

Conservatism has always had both elite and popular wings, and in the past they worked together productively. Fred Schwarz drew tens of thousands to his Christian Anti-Communist Crusade in the early 1960s, at the same time as Milton Friedman was publishing Capitalism and Freedom; F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty; and Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Nobody however demanded that Milton Friedman hail Schwarz’s pamphlets as serious contributions to conservative thought, in the way that the Cornerites demand that Manzi kiss Levin’s ring.

It’s different now, to conservatism’s present shame and future detriment.

Benen: CALLING OUT MCCONNELL, CONT'D

I'm always (pleased) when Paul Krugman appears on one of the Sunday shows; he tends to say things most guests don't.

Take yesterday, for example. On ABC's "This Week," Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) spoke at some length about the need for the Wall Street reform bill pending on the Hill to be "bipartisan." Soon after, the roundtable discussion focused on this, and the NYT columnist emphasized a point that often goes overlooked.

"Anyone who says we need to be bipartisan should bear in mind that for the last several weeks, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has been trying to stop reform with possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics, which is the claim that having regulation of the banks is actually bailing out the banks," Krugman noted. "And basically, the argument boils down to saying that what we really need to do to deal with fires is abolish the fire department. Because then people will know that they can't let their buildings burn in the first place, right? It's incredible. So anyone who says bipartisan, should say, bipartisan doesn't include the Senate minority leader."

Sure, it's a little -- but only a little -- hyperbolic to say McConnell's "institutionalized bailout" lie is "possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics," but McConnell's breathtaking dishonesty deserves to be called out in bold terms.

But Krugman's larger point is arguably more important: the conventional wisdom continues to insist the lawmaking process is somehow inadequate, and possibly even illegitimate, if proposals aren't "bipartisan." But we're also dealing with a dispute in which the leadership of a party has no qualms about blatantly, shamelessly lying.

And while it didn't come up, the same dynamic has existed in every other policy debate of the last year and a half -- health care, economic recovery, combating global warming, etc. -- in which Dems are told they must gain Republican support, and the GOP leadership demonstrates its commitment to the process by making things up.

Which is why Krugman's point is worth emphasizing, especially for establishment figures that assume Dems must be doing something wrong if Republican leaders aren't happy.

cliffweathers: NY-19: Candidate says GOP liberated Europe in WWII

This promises to be a bizarre political year, with GOP candidates not only running to the far right, but veering way off track. Earlier this week, Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden of Nevada grabbed the crazy baton from Rep. Michele Bachman when she suggested that people should barter and haggle with their doctors for health care, rather than rely on insurance. But what she said is nothing compared to what the newly minted challenger to Congressman John Hall said in her candidacy's opening days.

Kristia Cavere is the Tea Party and a Republican candidate for New York's 19th Congressional District seat held by Hall. Cavere thinks that the Democrats have co-opted Republican values and claims, among other things, that: "The Republicans are the ones who liberated Europe in World War II." She continued by saying that the Republicans have always initiated "every" advancement of freedom in our history. "Unfortunately, today there are many Republicans in office who are cowards and who are bad communicators," she said. "We have the right ideas, the right principles, the right philosophy and history on our side." Her comments appeared in the April 23 edition of the Record-Review, a newspaper that serves Pound Ridge and Bedford, NY. The newspaper has not printed an online version of the article. Ms. Cavere is only 30, but that does not excuse her for having poor grasp of American history. The last thing I would ever want to do is to politicize something as significant as our victory in World War, or at least the European end of it, as she sees it. Yes, this is the last argument I would ever want to have with anyone, but this is what it's starting to boil down to: defending our values against lies by the far rightwing when they attempt to discredit and demonize the Democratic Party. There is no honor or logic to making such a partisan claim, no matter what party you're affiliated with. I would be just as ashamed if someone said the Democrats won World War II because FDR and Truman were the presidents during the war-that's just wrong! Thousands of Democrats died in the Battle of the Bulge right next to the thousands of Republicans who also gave their young lives. This is true for all the battles. It was true in World War II, it was true in Vietnam, and it's true today.

...

• from Balloon Juice:

  mistermix
  

  According to her bio,

  In May 2009, Kristia received a Masters in Science degree in “Defense and Strategic Studies” from Missouri State University, which is located in Fairfax, Virginia right outside our nation’s Capitol. She graduated summa cum laude and with a 4.0 grade point average.

  I’d like to know what else she learned at MSU. Unfortunately, even though she claimed to be raising $300K, she hasn’t filed a FEC report, so we probably won’t be hearing much more from Ms. Cavere.

  SGEW

  “The Republicans are the ones who liberated Europe in World War II.”

  It’s the Jonah Goldberg formula:

  Liberating Europe = Fighting Fascism
  Fascism = Liberalism
  Liberalism = Democrats
  Fighting Democrats = Republicans

  Q. E. Duh.

  [Either that, or she’s claiming that Stalin was a Republican.]
  

  stevie314159

  If we had promised the Germans a capital gains tax cut, the war would have been over in 1942.

Weigel: How to read New York magazine's big Palin story

Gabriel Sherman's sprawling New York magazine cover story on "Palin, Inc." is actually a fast and breezy read. It being an article about Sarah Palin, there's no policy to slow it down. We get a brief explanation of how bitter Palin was serving as governor of Alaska while journalist Kaylene Johnson got rich ("I can’t believe that woman is making so much money off my name," said Palin), especially after Palin realized that her gubernatorial duties would complicate her national book tour. So she quit, and we're off.

Read it all, but take note of these points.

- According to Sherman, Palin writes her own Facebook posts. That shouldn't be news, but Palin hired a ghostwriter to finish "Going Rogue"-- and some of her early posts, festooned with footnotes, don't sound like her. According to Sherman, said ghostwriter considered suing Palin over an article by Max Blumenthal that made hay of her collaboration with conservative reporter Robert Stacy McCain.

- Discovery Communications bought Palin's TV show as the "centerpiece of a strategy that TLC executives see as positioning the network as the anti-Bravo, whose shows like Top Chef, the Real Housewives franchise, and America’s Next Top Model are programmed to a liberal urban audience." Bodes poorly for boycotters.

- The backstory on Palin's speech to the National Tea Party Convention is as seedy as we might have guessed.

To help pay Palin’s fee, [Tea Party Nation's] Judson Phillips turned to Bill Hemrick, the founder of Upper Deck baseball cards, for a seed investment of $25,000. With Phillips, Palin struck a hard bargain. Her contract stipulated that for almost any reason she could back out and send a surrogate. “If we fart wrong, she is gonna back out on us,” Phillips declared in one planning meeting, according to a participant. “That’s how detailed this contract is.”

And I can't let this part go without comment.

Online, right-wing sites like the Drudge Report frequently plug Palin headlines, while Palin’s presence at liberal outlets like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo routinely sparks hundreds of reader comments.

As with the tea parties, Palin benefits from an intense partisan interest in news about her. To be fair, however, many of the comments that accompany stories on Palin's newest blog posts plaintively ask the editors of those liberal web sites why they're giving her so much attention.

Neiwert (C&L): Yes, the American Right really has gone insane

By David Neiwert Monday Apr 26, 2010 8:00am

A couple of weeks ago, when I was about to appear on-air with Rachel Maddow, her producer warned me that one of the questions might be: "You and John Amato have a new book coming out this spring titled Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. Insane?"

Easy reply: A-yup.

Unfortunately, she never actually asked it. Now, of course the title is a bit of hyperbole in that it's hard to say whether one could accurately call this a clinical insanity (more on that in a bit). But what John and I and the rest of the C&L team have been observing over the past year, and have compiled into a coherent and (we hope) thought-provoking study, is simply the descent into madness of an entire political bloc. It's a verdict that, in the past couple of weeks, has been not just vindicated but manifested in news events.

Sometimes the insanity turns up anecdotally, as in this e-mail I was forwarded from a friend:

I got a call from my daughter that the whole family went out to dinner. While eating dinner my granddaughter gets a text message from one of her classmates. The text is: "It's God's responsibility to forgive Obama but it's our responsibility to arrange the meeting between God & Obama." My granddaughter is 12 years old, black and in the sixth grade at an elementary school [near Atlanta]. The classmate who sent the text is also twelve years old but white. When my daughter saw this message, she texted this 12-year-old back and asked her what she meant by arranging the meeting between God and Obama. The 12-year-old essentially said it meant to kill Obama.

Or it turns up in the Facebook page with a "joke" wishing for God to take Obama:

A recently created Facebook page reads, "Dear Lord, this year you took my favorite actor, Patrick Swayzie (sic). You took my favorite actress, Farah (sic) Fawcett. You took my favorite singer, Michael Jackson. I just wanted to let you know, my favorite president is Barack Obama. Amen."

Most often these days, it turns up at Tea Parties and related right-wing events, such as the April 19 D.C. armed march, featuring gun-nut rhetoric like that from Media Matters Action Network in the video above.

Some of this, as the Violence Policy Center recently explored in a study titled "Lessons Unlearned: The Gun Lobby and the Siren Song of Anti-Government Rhetoric" [PDF file] is being deliberately whipped up by right-wing organizations, notably the gun lobby.

And some of it is merely free-floating right-wing angst, stirred up by sources ranging from Glenn Beck to Ron Paul to FreedomWorks. I especially enjoyed this video from the April 15 Tea Party protest in D.C., compiled by the fine folks at NewLeftMedia:

I especially loved the woman who informed us that President Obama plans to ban fishing, didn't you?

The insanity also manifests itself in Republican governors' new fondness for Guy Fawkes as a model for Tea Partiers to follow. As Josh Marshall put it, "I find this completely bewildering. The Republican Governors Association is embracing the mantle of a 17th century radical who tried but failed to pull off a mass casualty terrorist attack to kill the King of England and all of Parliament.... Nothing shocks me anymore. But this shocks me."

Adds Steve Benen:

It's a reminder that the Republican mainstream made a right turn at scary, and have arrived right at stark raving mad.

Even for Beltway folks like Marc Ambinder are wondering: "Have Conservatives Gone Mad?" Ambinder's answer: A-yup.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don't exist -- serious Republicans -- but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors, and where the incentive structures exist to stomp on dissent and nuance, causing experimental voices to retrench and allowing a lot of people to pretend that the world around them is not changing. The obsession with ACORN, Climategate, death panels, the militarization of rhetoric, Saul Alinsky, Chicago-style politics, that TAXPAYERS will fund the bailout of banks -- these aren't meaningful or interesting or even relevant things to focus on. (The banks will fund their own bailouts.)

This disconnect from reality is occurring because the American Right is insistent on it. Indeed, one of the reasons that I'm perfectly comfortable calling the American Right "insane" -- even if you couldn't call them "insane" in the legal or clinical sense -- is that one of conservatives' outstanding characteristics is their perfervid insistence on believing things that are provably untrue, even when presented with insurmountable and indisputable evidence.

If, per Einstein, doing something repeatedly and expecting different results defines "insanity," then similarly, insisting on believing in things that are provably untrue is also a definable sign of it. Which is, in fact, what I was going to tell Maddow.

Here, just for starters, are the Top 10 Provably Untrue Things Tea Partiers Believe In:

1. The Birth-Certificate Conspiracy.

2. Death Panels.

3. Obama Is A Muslim/Socialist/Fascist.

4. Obama Is Going To Take Away Our Guns.

5. Obama Is Raising Our Taxes.

6. Fascism Is A Left-Wing Phenomenon.

7. Global Warming Is A Hoax.

8. Two Million People Were at 9/12 March.

9. 16,000 New IRS Agents.

10. The Tea Parties Are a Non-Partisan, Broad Grassroots Movement.

That really is the definition of insanity.

Sunday Morning Potpourri

Booman has a Casual Observation

Maybe it's true that we're at fault and that Obama hasn't changed while the public has. But he hasn't adjusted. And I think he needs to. Trust in government is at an all-time low at a time when Obama is trying to get government to do really big things. He's needs to incorporate messaging that suits 2010, not 2008. I think the answer is more of a populist touch.

Atrios: Have Fun Arizona

The only way for them to avoid endless civil rights law suits is if the cops harass large numbers of white people too. Enjoy!

Arizona embraces profiling April 23: New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson talks with Rachel Maddow about his concerns about how Arizona's new immigration law will be applied to people of Hispanic appearance.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

mistermix: Costosa y Dolorosa

Here’s an interesting clause in the Keeping Brown Down Act of 2010:

Disallows officials or agencies of the state or political subdivisions from adopting or implementing policies that limit immigration enforcement to less than the full extent permitted by federal law, and allows a person to bring an action in superior court to challenge an official or agency that does so.

In other words, any Minuteman who doesn’t see enough cops stopping Mexicans in his town can file a lawsuit. If they win, the judge is mandated to award the militia member costs and attorney fees, and assess the town a $1,000 to $5,000 fine per day between the time the lawsuit was filed and the court ruling.

Between this and the inevitable civil rights lawsuits, every little town in Arizona will either have to raise taxes or declare bankruptcy. Since the former is politically impossible, expect to see bucket brigades and volunteer posses replacing fire and police departments. It’ll be a glibertarian paradise!

"Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black" - Tim Wise

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, ...
... the rest is at the link.

Marshall: Don't Say You Weren't Warned

For your weekend enjoyment, take a look inside the battle against forced-microchip implantation in state legislatures around the country.

Aravosis: Gingrich is off his meds again

I find Gingrich a rad sad and tragic character. He's always struck me as an incredibly intelligent man. Bordering on brilliant. But he's also somewhat nuts. He's the breed of Republican that throws around words like "socialist" when talking about the US, rather than the Soviet Union or France. And to Americans, when they say socialist, they mean communist - Soviet communist to be precise. And talking about anything in America, any mainstream politician or political party as being akin to the Soviet Union, is delusional.

It's why I find Gingrich, and the branch of Republicanism he represents, such a conundrum. I've met some very nice, intelligent Republicans who actually believe that Obama has Maoists in his Cabinet. That's simply insane. And it's troubling, since these are people with half a brain who work in Washington. People like Gingrich. They're the modern children of McCarthyism. And it's hard to know how to deal with them, how to even react, because, at their core, they're all a little nuts.

I remember in a Shakespeare class my senior year of college the professor asked us if we could understand Lear's madness. None of us could. She explained the conundrum. If you're sane, it's impossible to understand madness.

And that's all well and good. But Gingrich is the putative leader of the Republican party, along with three other mad ducks, Palin, Limbaugh and Beck. None of the four are in possession of a full Happy Meal. And if all goes wrong, they could be running the country.

Marshall: Caput?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he's pulling his support for a bipartisan climate bill -- seemingly killing its chances in this Congress -- because, he says, President Obama has abandoned climate legislation in favor of immigration reform.

Booman: Lindsey Graham Pulls the Climate Football Away

No one could have predicted that Lindsey Graham would play Lucy to John Kerry's Charlie Brown.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) abandoned his effort to push a climate and energy bill Saturday, saying he would continue only if Democratic leaders promise to relinquish plans to bring up immigration legislation first.

Graham's departure likely dooms any chance of passing a climate bill this year. He is the sole Republican working with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) on a compromise proposal that they had planned to unveil Monday.

I have no idea whether or not Sen. Graham will make good on his threat, but it doesn't pay to trust John McCain's best buddy when you're trying to get some bipartisanship. Either climate change is important or its not. Withholding support for a climate bill because of the order in which it is prioritized doesn't even make a modicum of sense.

Benen: LOWDOWN ON LOWDEN

Sue "Chicken for Checkups" Lowden clearly didn't have a very good week. The Republican Senate hopeful became something of a national laughingstock with her livestock-centered approach to health care delivery. "Let's change the system and talk about what the possibilities are. I'm telling you that this works," Lowden said on Monday. "You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say I'll paint your house.... Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system."

Democrats are anxious to keep this story alive as long as possible, and they're having some success. Nevada Dems, for example, held a protest yesterday outside Lowden's campaign office in Reno. It came just hours after some very clever folks launched a new website: "The Lowden Plan, a simple health care plan anyone with a few thousand live chickens can use." There's a very helpful Lowden Plan Medical Chicken Calculator on the site.

But as entertaining as this is, there's a related policy observation that shouldn't go overlooked. Paul Krugman explained late yesterday:

Sure, it's funny to see a 21st-century political candidate pining for the days of a barter economy. But [Lowden's] remarks would have been breathtakingly ignorant even if she had called for payments in cash.

The key fact about health care -- the central issue in health care economics -- is that it's all about the big-ticket items. Checkups don't cost much; neither does the treatment of minor illnesses. The money that matters goes to bypasses and dialysis -- costs that are highly unpredictable, and that almost nobody can afford to pay out of pocket. Modern health care, if it's going to be provided at all, has to be paid for mainly out of insurance.

Conservatives don't like this; if few of them propose paying in chickens, there is nonetheless a constant refrain of calls for making the market for health care more like the market for bread, with consumers paying out of medical accounts and engaging in comparison shopping.

Why this preference for cash? Because even conservatives know in their hearts that insurance markets are deeply imperfect, which means that standard free-market arguments become very weak once insurers are involved. And so they pretend that we don't really need all that insurance.

It's been lost in the shuffle, but Krugman's description of the GOP line is absolutely right. Indeed, as Lowden became a national punch-line, the Nevada Republican Party predicated its defense of the Senate candidate on exactly this point: Lowden's over-arching concern is that Americans rely on health insurance to help cover medical bills, and that's a bad thing.

Nevada GOP communications director Ciara Turns told Eric Kleefeld the other day, "[Lowden] was clearly trying to make the point that if we moved away from an insurance-based system and more people started paying cash for their health care, then prices would come down. But [Democrats] don't want to address that ... because it's a legitimate point that they can't argue."

Now, looking specifically at the plain wording of Lowden's argument, she was specifically (and repeatedly) talking up the notion of bartering, not bargaining. Turns' interpretation is generous, to put it mildly.

But even if we accept the defense at face value, as Krugman explained, the underlying policy dispute is hardly any better for Lowden and the Nevada GOP.

"another liberal plant"

A.L. is back with a barnburner of a post (see bottom of this thread):

From my perch back in the empirical world, I'm just not sure know to deal with this. How do you begin to make your case when there aren't any mutually accepted facts? How do you convince someone that the people they trust are liars and charlatans? Writing posts trying to correct the record and dispel misinformation can at times feel about as pointless as trying to bail water out of the ocean.

Kurtz: The Year of the Chicken

From TPM Reader LM:

I just went to my doctor's office for a sinus/ear infection. I had never seen this particular physician before and certainly didn't bring up politics with him, but as I was about to pay my bill, he volunteered, "We take cash, check, credit or debit card. No chickens." I'm in Indiana, mind you. I think Sue Lowden is in real trouble if even random doctors in Indiana are mocking her to near-total strangers.

Marshall: This is Their Messaging?

I find this completely bewildering. The Republican Governors Association is embracing the mantle of a 17th century radical who tried but failed to pull off a mass casualty terrorist attack to kill the King of England and all of Parliament. Only now Obama plays the role of James I. Guy Fawkes is their new hero?

Nothing shocks me anymore. But this shocks me.

Kurtz (TPM): In The Crucible

When your mettle is truly tested, you don't get any do-overs. In her declining years, will Gov. Janice Brewer (R-AZ) look back on today with pride? Or will she feel the pangs of conscience that Earl Warren later expressed over his role in the internment of Japanese-Americans?

DougJ: Constitutional rights

This sounds more like some kind of Biblical right to me:

The Arizona cops are hot on the trail of the man who threatened to kill Raul Grijalva’s staff over immigration, Tucson police spokesman Fabian Pacheco tells me. They have the number of the cell he used to make the threats and are looking to make an arrest.

Intriguing detail: The man allegedly told Grijalva’s staff that he was going to exercise his “constitutional right” to go kill Mexicans at the border, Pacheco says.

Probably another liberal plant anyway.

Benen: DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

It was fairly amusing earlier this week when Glenn Beck told his radio audience that God is communicating with him directly and giving him "a plan ... that is not really a plan." As Beck explained it, "What He is asking us to do is to stand peacefully, quietly with anger, loudly with truth."

As a rule, when strange men with a history of substance abuse start claiming that they're passing along messages from above, it's a strong hint that the audience might want to change the channel. What's that old joke? "When you talk to God, it's prayer; when God talks to you, it's schizophrenia"?

Nevertheless, it was even more striking to hear Beck go a little further today.

"We are entering a dark, dark period of man. Um, I was, um, I was in the Vatican, and I was surprised that the individual I was speaking to knew who I was. And they said: 'Of course we know who you are. What you're doing is wildly important. We're entering a period of great darkness, and if good people don't stand up, we could enter a period unlike we have seen in a very long time.'"

Ben Dimiero summarized this nicely:

Of course, Beck doesn't clarify whether the "individual" he talked to was a Vatican official or a tourist from Omaha, but the impression he wants to give his listeners is clear: the Vatican itself has identified Beck as "wildly important" in the coming "dark, dark period of man."

You may see the ongoing debate in our country about health care reform, financial reform, and a variety of other issues in terms of how they will affect our policy decisions. Glenn Beck envisions things on a slightly larger scale - with himself at the center of it all.

Two things. First, given the support the Roman Catholic church has shown for social justice -- a concept Beck believes is "code" for Marxism -- I'm not sure why he would consider the Vatican a source for wisdom anyway. Just last month Beck implored his minions to "run as fast as you can" away from churches that value social justice. So, why'd he go to the Vatican in the first place?

And second, I know the phrase "delusions of grandeur" gets thrown around casually sometimes, but when someone who claims to receive messages from God, and characterizes himself as "wildly important" in some kind of global scenario to prevent a dark period for humanity, doesn't the phrase take on a more literal, clinical meaning?

Benen: THE CONSEQUENCES OF INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY

Long-time readers may recall a discussion we had back in December, about the quality of the debate over health care reform. It was obvious at the time that the meaningful, interesting disputes weren't between conservatives and liberals, but between liberals and other liberals.

It's not that the right remained silent; it's that they offered arguments that no serious person could find credible. Consider, just off the top of your head, the most prominent concerns raised by opponents of the Affordable Care Act. What comes to mind? "Death panels." "Socialism." "Government takeover."

It was the biggest domestic policy fight in a generation, but most of the policy debate was spent debunking transparent, child-like nonsense. The left approached the debate with vibrancy, energy, and seriousness. The right thought it was fascinating to talk about the number of pages in the legislation.

Making matters worse, the quality of the discourse on health care wasn't especially unusual. We endured a mind-numbing debate over economic recovery efforts because Republicans weren't prepared for a serious argument. We can't discuss Wall Street reform because Republicans keep saying "bailout" for no reason. We can't discuss a climate bill because Republicans reflexively reject the science.

Every major issue has strengths and weaknesses, and every major piece of legislation is subject to legitimate criticism. In 2010, however, the right seems fundamentally unprepared to even have the conversation.

Given all of this, Marc Ambinder asks today whether the right has "gone mad."

Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow's grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann's hectoring Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald's criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn's keepin'-them-honest perspectives on health care, the civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don't exist -- serious Republicans -- but because, as [Julian] Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

Ambinder ponders various explanations -- the habit of conservatives to take entertainers seriously as political actors, the "incentive structures exist to stomp on dissent and nuance," the epistemic closure problem in which conservatives ignore news outlets that might tell them what they don't want to hear -- but doesn't draw a clear conclusion.

In a way, that's a shame. I was really hoping he'd help me understand how one of the nation's dominant political parties and the ideology it embraces chose intellectual bankruptcy.

Anonymous Liberal: An Army of Trumans

This is the first post I've written since last November. Part of what drove me to take a break from writing about politics was a growing realization that the Great Conversation in this country had completely ceased, that the various sides were no longer speaking the same language, like dialects that have--over time--drifted so far apart that they are no longer mutually intelligible. Watching Fox News and Tea Party rallies, it became apparent to me that the right wing in this country had severed the few remaining ties it had to the world I live in, the empirical world.

In its place, the Right has constructed its own Bubble World, a sort of political Truman Show complete with its own facts and rules (albeit facts and rules that are constantly changing based on political expediency). The writers, directors, and actors in this conservative version of Seahaven are the legions of GOP politicians, operatives, and conservative media outlets that relentlessly push this politically expedient alternative reality, and the Trumans are the millions of regular Americans who don't realize the joke is on them.

In this Bubble World, it is an accepted truth that our President is a bumbling ignoramus who can only string together a coherent sentence if he uses a teleprompter (which, apparently, other politicians don't use). I can understand a world in which Obama's political opponents mock him as a being too professorial or out-of-touch or arrogant. But unintelligent? Inarticulate? I don't know how to deal with that. It's like mocking John Boehner for being pale.

Similarly, it is an accepted fact in the Bubble World that Obama is an extreme liberal, if not an outright socialist or communist. According to Newt Gingrich, Obama is "the most radical president in American history." Again, I just don't know how to deal with that. This is a guy who, at every point in his political career, has gone out of his way to position himself as a moderate, as a pragmatic technocrat. Since taking office, he has not, as far as I can tell, made a single policy decision that can fairly be described as liberal, much less radical. The only significant pieces of legislation he's passed are a stimulus package that nearly every economist endorsed and a health care reform bill modeled on Romney-care (which, while better than nothing, is nowhere close to the kind of bill most liberals--much less a communists or socialists--would have crafted).

In Bubble World, there is a movement known as the Tea Party, whose members are simultaneously incensed about the size of the deficit and the fact that they have to pay taxes (even though they have the lowest tax rates in the free world and just got significant tax cuts--from Obama--in the past year). Moreover, they're not angry at the party that built the deficit--by starting wars and giving massive tax cuts to people who are much richer than them--or that presided, just recently, over the near collapse of the economy. But they are furious at the party that just recently took the reins, inheriting both a crumbling economy and massive deficit. And if they had their way, they would put back in power a party whose only policy idea is, that's right, cutting taxes; which, of course, would only make the deficit much worse.

But not in Bubble World. In Bubble World, cutting taxes actually raises revenue. In Bubble World, "the market" will magically solve all of our health care problems and true "freedom" is defined by one's ability to be denied health coverage for pre-existing conditions. And in Bubble World, a set of sensible and long-overdue financial regulations designed to prevent another meltdown of the economy and foreclose any future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street is actually a "permanent bailout bill."

In this alternative universe, the facts are literally whatever the political consultants say they should be. Whatever resonates with the focus group. If you're working on behalf of Wall Street lobbyists to kill a bill that would impose more accountability on Wall Street, you simply accuse those who support the bill of doing Wall Street's bidding. It doesn't matter that this is the opposite of the truth and is, in fact, exactly what you're doing. While these facts might matter to people in the empirical world, the facts in Bubble World are whatever the right wing wants them to be. In Bubble World, Mitch McConnell is bravely protecting the people from the Wall Street bigwigs, not doing the bidding of Wall Street lobbyists.

And that sad reality goes a long way toward explaining why I haven't been blogging lately. We've reached a point where the right wing in this country has achieved complete epistemic closure. Aided by their extensive and growing media apparatus and a traditional media that is uninterested in playing umpire, the Right has managed to escape entirely from the gravitational pull of the empirical world, and in fact, has a created a world of its own, one with a rapidly growing gravitational field that, everyday, pulls in more and more of the unsuspecting and uninformed.

From the comfort of this Bubble World, people like Mitch McConnell can simply say whatever the hell they want to say, no matter how ludicrous, and trust that much of the country will readily accept it as true. As Christof famously says in the Truman Show, "we accept the reality with which we are presented." And that's particularly true when that reality is one that is focus-grouped tested to conform with our pre-existing biases and hammered home repeatedly by the folks we rely on to keep us informed (which, for a scary number of people these days, means Fox News and Rush Limbaugh).

From my perch back in the empirical world, I'm just not sure know to deal with this. How do you begin to make your case when there aren't any mutually accepted facts? How do you convince someone that the people they trust are liars and charlatans? Writing posts trying to correct the record and dispel misinformation can at times feel about as pointless as trying to bail water out of the ocean.

I had high hopes after the thumping the Republicans took in 2006 and 2008 that we had finally turned a corner, that the cracks were beginning to show in Bubble World and the empirical world was slowly re-exerting its influence. I got the feeling that more and more people who had been stuck in the bubble were beginning to sense that something just wasn't right.

But I was wrong. Freed from the burden of any actual governing responsibility, the GOP has been free to devote all of its efforts to reconstructing their Bubble World. And they've been largely successful. An entire movement has formed that is based, almost entirely, on confusion and mis-directed anger, a movement that sees the world only through the lens of Fox News and other right wing outlets. The Tea Party is an army of Trumans, a movement of people who have whole-heartedly embraced the false reality with which they've been presented.

The central dilemma for those us left in the empirical world is how to puncture the bubble. What can we do to make facts once again relevant? What can be done to dis-incentivize the kind of lying and reality denial that has become the hallmark of the modern conservative movement? I can't say that I have answers to these questions, but I'm pretty confident that these are THE questions that we should be asking. Policy debates are great, but only when they take place in the empirical world. If a majority of Americans aren't living in that world, then such debates risk becoming purely academic exercises.

An Open Letter to a Certain Half-term ex-Governor.

Dear half-term ex-Governor from Alaska who is fond of asking: “How’s that hopey changey thing workin for ya?”

Excellent question. Let’s see:

• The Democrat’s Stimulus Bill created the largest and most successful economic recovery package in history. It saved us from a depression, created millions of jobs, stabilized critical industries, and moved from losing 700,000 jobs a month to increasing employment. The economy is recovering.
• 99% of working West Virginians received a tax cut in 2009 as part of the Democrat’s Stimulus Bill.
• Thanks to President Obama’s intervention, General Motors and Chrysler still exist. GM just paid off their loans from the Canadian and US governments in full, five years early, with interest, and is building new vehicles whose sales have allowed the company to invest more than $1.5 billion at 20 plants in the U.S. and Canada.
• The war in Iraq is winding down and the war in Afghanistan has a strategy for success, eliminating a major sinkhole for our tax dollars.
• Obama just signed a treaty that will achieve Ronald Reagan’s dream of reducing nuclear arsenals. This was possible only because he had restored America’s relationships with our allied nations.
• Thanks to Obama’s international policies and behavior, America is once again the most admired nation in the world, instead of the most feared.
• The Democrats passed a moderate universal health care plan that addresses one of the most serious economic and societal challenges of our time and will cut the deficit by a trillion dollars.
• Obama is the only President in 30 years with the courage to eliminate the F-22 white elephant and cut billions in wasteful spending, despite bipartisan pork barrel opposition.
• Finally, Obama has, remarkably, remained resolutely civil in spite of it all: the attacks from Republicans playing politics; the racist, violent, and hateful actions of the radical fringe; the willful disinformation campaign from the right wing media.

So, that hopey changey thing is working out really well!

Thanks for asking.

Real Media

DougJ: Now it’s gone too far

I can’t take ManziGate anymore. I just caught myself nodding along with Marc Ambinder, something I promised myself I would never do:

Can anyone deny that the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama today comes not from the right but from the left? Rachel Maddow’s grilling of administration economic officials. Keith Olbermann’s hectoring of Democratic leaders on the public option. Glenn Greenwald’s criticisms of Elena Kagan. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn’s keepin’-them-honest perspectives on health care. The civil libertarian left on detainees and Gitmo. The Huffington Post on derivatives.

I want to find Republicans to take seriously, but it is hard. Not because they don’t exist—serious Republicans—but because, as Sanchez and others seem to recognize, they are marginalized, even self-marginalizing, and the base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking.

Ambinder is one of the voices of Official Washington (he co-wrote The Note for years). So it’s pretty shocking to hear this from him. But he’s completely correct—I read lots of compelling criticism of Obama from the left and literally none only Daniel Larison from the right.

• from the comments:
  

  Syphon
  

  The big difference between the right and left:
  During a Democratic Presidency, we get intelligent and constructive criticism from the same side as the administration

  During a Republican Presidency, we get blind and unquestioning devotion from the same side as the administration

Stelter (NYT): Jon Stewart’s Punching Bag, Fox News

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1.

Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.

It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.

“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.

On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.

It has been noticed by, among other people, the Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who called Mr. Stewart a “devoted critic” of Fox News and said “his influence is growing.”

Separately, this week Mr. Stewart’s contract was renewed by Comedy Central into 2013. Combining the earnestness of a journalism professor and the sarcasm of a satirist, Mr. Stewart routinely charges that Fox’s news anchors and commentators distort Mr. Obama’s policies and advance a conservative agenda. He reminds some viewers of the left-wing group Media Matters but much funnier.

“Stewart does a great job of using comedy to expose the tragedy that is Fox News, and he also underscores the seriousness of it,” said Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters.

The segments about Fox are often replayed hundreds of thousands of times on blogs and other Web sites, amplifying their significance. “Media criticism has become part of his brand,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that Mr. Stewart had also dissected CNN and CNBC in lengthy segments in the past.

It is true that the often-left-leaning “Daily Show” deals with a wide array of topics, but Fox is one that Mr. Stewart is overtly passionate about; he said on the show this week that he criticizes the network a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

According to “The Daily Show” Web site, thedailyshow.com, Fox News has been a subject of 24 segments so far this year, including eight in the month of April. The lower-rated news channel CNN, by contrast, has been a subject of five segments this year.

In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”

In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”

In March he ridiculed the news anchor Megyn Kelly for lining up guests who were opposed to the Democratic health care overhaul and citing polls that claimed the American people were opposed to it. Then he played a clip from October 2008, when Mr. Obama was leading in most polls, of Ms. Kelly’s saying “don’t trust the polls.”

In the past week and a half he found himself in a fight with Bernie Goldberg, the Fox News contributor, after suggesting that Mr. Goldberg and others were hypocritical for having bemoaned generalizations about the Tea Party while having demonized liberals.

As Fox’s ratings have surged, so too has the amount of criticism, particularly surrounding its combination of news programs and conservative opinion programs. Asked on Friday about Mr. Stewart’s criticism, a Fox spokeswoman, Loren Hynes, said the channel would pass on an opportunity to comment.

Mr. O’Reilly responded to Mr. Stewart on his Fox program on Wednesday, calling “The Daily Show” a “key component of left-wing television” and concluding: “Here, we have all kinds of views, all kinds of debates, and we’re not boring. That’s why Jon Stewart loves us, and, yes, needs us, especially Bernie Goldberg.”

Mr. Stewart and his executive producers usually let their segments speak for themselves, and they declined interview requests about Fox this week. Friends and colleagues of Mr. Stewart say privately that he cares deeply about media issues and happens to be in a position to talk about them.

His staff members regularly dismiss claims that “The Daily Show” is a form of journalism. “I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box,” Mr. Stewart said on the show on Tuesday, adding, “The news box is moving toward me.”

But there he was, checking in with the White House when Fox didn’t. The inspiration for the “Fox & Friends” segment about the “Islamic image” came from The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation. Mr. Stewart cut up the clips of the co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson reckoning that the flags of Muslim nations look a lot like the summit logo — followed by Ms. Carlson’s saying “you be the judge” — before letting rip.

“Yeah, you be the judge,” Mr. Stewart said, hurling an expletive and continuing, “We’re just curious citizens, wondering if we put that logo up with four Muslim flags, whether you’ll have a visceral reaction that our president is perhaps Muslim.”

He concluded: “Anyway, what do you think? We’re just doing the math and then giving you the answer, and then asking you to check our work.”