Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 846
March 4, 2016
Bernie’s critics are full of it: 5 things you need to know about his economic proposals
Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Bernie Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it. 1. “Well, do the numbers add up?” Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth. 2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?” They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s. 3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?” His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system. 4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.” My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently. 5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?” Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Bernie Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it. 1. “Well, do the numbers add up?” Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth. 2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?” They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s. 3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?” His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system. 4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.” My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently. 5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?” Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Bernie Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it. 1. “Well, do the numbers add up?” Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth. 2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?” They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s. 3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?” His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system. 4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.” My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently. 5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?” Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Bernie Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it. 1. “Well, do the numbers add up?” Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth. 2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?” They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s. 3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?” His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system. 4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.” My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently. 5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?” Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Bernie Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it. 1. “Well, do the numbers add up?” Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth. 2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?” They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s. 3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?” His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system. 4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.” My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently. 5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?” Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.Not day goes by, it seems, without the mainstream media bashing Bernie Sanders’s economic plan – quoting certain economists as saying his numbers don’t add up. (The New York Times did it again just yesterday.) They’re wrong. You need to know the truth, and spread it. 1. “Well, do the numbers add up?” Yes, if you assume a 3.8 percent rate of unemployment and a 5.3 percent rate of growth. 2. “But aren’t these assumptions unrealistic?” They’re not out of the range of what’s possible. After all, we achieved close to 3.8 percent unemployment in the late 1990s, and we had a rate of 5.3 percent growth in the early 1980s. 3. “What is it about Bernie’s economic plan that will generate this kind of economic performance?” His proposal for a single-payer healthcare system. 4. “But yesterday’s New York Times reported that two of your colleagues at Berkeley found an error in the calculations underlying these estimates. They claim Professor Gerald Friedman mistakenly assumes that a one-time boost in growth will continue onward. They say he confuses levels of output with rates of change.” My esteemed colleagues see only a temporary effect from moving to a single-payer plan. But that view isn’t shared by economists who find that a major policy change like this can permanently improve economic performance. After all, World War II got America out of the Great Depression – permanently. 5. “So you think Bernie’s plan will generate a permanent improvement in the nation’s economic performance?” Yes. Given that healthcare expenditures constitute almost 18 percent of the U.S. economy – and that ours is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, based on private for-profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies that spend fortunes on advertising, marketing, administrative costs, high executive salaries, and payouts to shareholders – it’s not far-fetched to assume that adoption of a single-payer plan will permanently improve U.S. economic performance.
March 3, 2016
Donald Trump declares that “you’ll have to ask a psychiatrist” to understand why his opponents have gone negative
After the GOP tonight, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly assaulted the Republican hopefuls and asked the questions no one not named Bill O'Reilly really wanted to hear the answers to. He asked, as if the answer wasn't obvious, "Why do you think you engender so much loathing in your fellow Republicans," and Trump corrected him, saying "and love," as if the past two televised hours hadn't actually happened, or been televised. He boasted that he will win Florida and New York, and that he's the only Republican who can -- a clear shot at Marco Rubio, who had a strong showing tonight -- and said that with the number of people he's bringing into the party, conservatives need not worry about the number of voters he'll alienate. O'Reilly later asked whether Trump got "mad at guys like me when [we] ask you negative questions," to which the front-runner replied, "Yes, I think you've become very negative." When asked why he thought that, Trump shot back, "Who knows? You'll have to ask your psychiatrist." If that exchange doesn't really seem to make much sense, don't worry, that's on them -- not you.After the GOP tonight, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly assaulted the Republican hopefuls and asked the questions no one not named Bill O'Reilly really wanted to hear the answers to. He asked, as if the answer wasn't obvious, "Why do you think you engender so much loathing in your fellow Republicans," and Trump corrected him, saying "and love," as if the past two televised hours hadn't actually happened, or been televised. He boasted that he will win Florida and New York, and that he's the only Republican who can -- a clear shot at Marco Rubio, who had a strong showing tonight -- and said that with the number of people he's bringing into the party, conservatives need not worry about the number of voters he'll alienate. O'Reilly later asked whether Trump got "mad at guys like me when [we] ask you negative questions," to which the front-runner replied, "Yes, I think you've become very negative." When asked why he thought that, Trump shot back, "Who knows? You'll have to ask your psychiatrist." If that exchange doesn't really seem to make much sense, don't worry, that's on them -- not you.After the GOP tonight, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly assaulted the Republican hopefuls and asked the questions no one not named Bill O'Reilly really wanted to hear the answers to. He asked, as if the answer wasn't obvious, "Why do you think you engender so much loathing in your fellow Republicans," and Trump corrected him, saying "and love," as if the past two televised hours hadn't actually happened, or been televised. He boasted that he will win Florida and New York, and that he's the only Republican who can -- a clear shot at Marco Rubio, who had a strong showing tonight -- and said that with the number of people he's bringing into the party, conservatives need not worry about the number of voters he'll alienate. O'Reilly later asked whether Trump got "mad at guys like me when [we] ask you negative questions," to which the front-runner replied, "Yes, I think you've become very negative." When asked why he thought that, Trump shot back, "Who knows? You'll have to ask your psychiatrist." If that exchange doesn't really seem to make much sense, don't worry, that's on them -- not you.After the GOP tonight, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly assaulted the Republican hopefuls and asked the questions no one not named Bill O'Reilly really wanted to hear the answers to. He asked, as if the answer wasn't obvious, "Why do you think you engender so much loathing in your fellow Republicans," and Trump corrected him, saying "and love," as if the past two televised hours hadn't actually happened, or been televised. He boasted that he will win Florida and New York, and that he's the only Republican who can -- a clear shot at Marco Rubio, who had a strong showing tonight -- and said that with the number of people he's bringing into the party, conservatives need not worry about the number of voters he'll alienate. O'Reilly later asked whether Trump got "mad at guys like me when [we] ask you negative questions," to which the front-runner replied, "Yes, I think you've become very negative." When asked why he thought that, Trump shot back, "Who knows? You'll have to ask your psychiatrist." If that exchange doesn't really seem to make much sense, don't worry, that's on them -- not you.After the GOP tonight, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly assaulted the Republican hopefuls and asked the questions no one not named Bill O'Reilly really wanted to hear the answers to. He asked, as if the answer wasn't obvious, "Why do you think you engender so much loathing in your fellow Republicans," and Trump corrected him, saying "and love," as if the past two televised hours hadn't actually happened, or been televised. He boasted that he will win Florida and New York, and that he's the only Republican who can -- a clear shot at Marco Rubio, who had a strong showing tonight -- and said that with the number of people he's bringing into the party, conservatives need not worry about the number of voters he'll alienate. O'Reilly later asked whether Trump got "mad at guys like me when [we] ask you negative questions," to which the front-runner replied, "Yes, I think you've become very negative." When asked why he thought that, Trump shot back, "Who knows? You'll have to ask your psychiatrist." If that exchange doesn't really seem to make much sense, don't worry, that's on them -- not you.
The Clinton camp is clearly happy with Salon’s coverage of the “unintelligible yelling” that’s defining recent GOP debates
You may remember that during the previous GOP debate, Salon's mostly deaf assistant editor discovered that the closed captioner had lost the will to live and just started writing "unintelligible yelling" during the constant stream of cross-talk between the Republican hopefuls. Tonight's Fox News debate has been, perhaps appropriately, even less regulated than the previous one, so much so that cross-talk is essentially defining the debate. While that might be entertaining, it's left this writer utterly incapable of understanding 99 percent of what's being said. Fortunately, he's not alone in his inability to separate the signal from the noise, as the Clinton campaign is equally unimpressed, and expressed its exasperation by using the very language Salon called attention to last week: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/st... may remember that during the previous GOP debate, Salon's mostly deaf assistant editor discovered that the closed captioner had lost the will to live and just started writing "unintelligible yelling" during the constant stream of cross-talk between the Republican hopefuls. Tonight's Fox News debate has been, perhaps appropriately, even less regulated than the previous one, so much so that cross-talk is essentially defining the debate. While that might be entertaining, it's left this writer utterly incapable of understanding 99 percent of what's being said. Fortunately, he's not alone in his inability to separate the signal from the noise, as the Clinton campaign is equally unimpressed, and expressed its exasperation by using the very language Salon called attention to last week: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/st... may remember that during the previous GOP debate, Salon's mostly deaf assistant editor discovered that the closed captioner had lost the will to live and just started writing "unintelligible yelling" during the constant stream of cross-talk between the Republican hopefuls. Tonight's Fox News debate has been, perhaps appropriately, even less regulated than the previous one, so much so that cross-talk is essentially defining the debate. While that might be entertaining, it's left this writer utterly incapable of understanding 99 percent of what's being said. Fortunately, he's not alone in his inability to separate the signal from the noise, as the Clinton campaign is equally unimpressed, and expressed its exasperation by using the very language Salon called attention to last week: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/st... may remember that during the previous GOP debate, Salon's mostly deaf assistant editor discovered that the closed captioner had lost the will to live and just started writing "unintelligible yelling" during the constant stream of cross-talk between the Republican hopefuls. Tonight's Fox News debate has been, perhaps appropriately, even less regulated than the previous one, so much so that cross-talk is essentially defining the debate. While that might be entertaining, it's left this writer utterly incapable of understanding 99 percent of what's being said. Fortunately, he's not alone in his inability to separate the signal from the noise, as the Clinton campaign is equally unimpressed, and expressed its exasperation by using the very language Salon called attention to last week: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/st...
“I’m changing, I’m changing”: Trump fesses up to blatantly flip-flopping on immigration during Fox News debate
Fox News is hosting yet another Republican debate in Detroit tonight and now that the dick measuring questions are out of the way, moderator Megyn Kelly is attempting to try out a little fact-checking of Donald Trump in front of a live audience more fit for Wrestlemania. For the 48 percent or so of Republicans who indicate in polls that they do not support the candidacy of the current frontrunner, perhaps Kelly's risky maneuver to tangle with Trump, again, and risk the blowback from his online supporters paid off. On the issue of immigration, Kelly pointed out that Trump's campaign website "to this day argues that more visas for highly skilled workers would 'decimate American workers.'" However, as Kelly pointed out, Trump recently spoke out in support of such H1B visas. "At the CNBC debate you spoke enthusiastically in favor of these visas. So, which is it?" Kelly pointedly asked to a finally inaudible audience. "I'm changing, I'm changing," Trump conceded, fessing up to his sudden flip-flop. "We need highly skilled workers in the country," Trump insisted, citing Wharton Business grads who are shoved out of Silicon Valley. "They want to stay here desperately. They’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country.” "So you are abandoning the position on your website?" Kelly followed-up. "I'm changing it and I'm softening," Trump explained, echoing language he reportedly used in an off-the-record meeting with New York Times editors. Kelly asked Trump about the Buzzfeed report and if he had any plans to ask for the transcript from that meeting to be released. This "will have some asking if you're really just playing to people's fantasies, which is a tactic you praised in your book, 'Art of the Deal,'" Kelly pressed before moving on to try fact-checking "Lyin Ted" Cruz.Fox News is hosting yet another Republican debate in Detroit tonight and now that the dick measuring questions are out of the way, moderator Megyn Kelly is attempting to try out a little fact-checking of Donald Trump in front of a live audience more fit for Wrestlemania. For the 48 percent or so of Republicans who indicate in polls that they do not support the candidacy of the current frontrunner, perhaps Kelly's risky maneuver to tangle with Trump, again, and risk the blowback from his online supporters paid off. On the issue of immigration, Kelly pointed out that Trump's campaign website "to this day argues that more visas for highly skilled workers would 'decimate American workers.'" However, as Kelly pointed out, Trump recently spoke out in support of such H1B visas. "At the CNBC debate you spoke enthusiastically in favor of these visas. So, which is it?" Kelly pointedly asked to a finally inaudible audience. "I'm changing, I'm changing," Trump conceded, fessing up to his sudden flip-flop. "We need highly skilled workers in the country," Trump insisted, citing Wharton Business grads who are shoved out of Silicon Valley. "They want to stay here desperately. They’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country.” "So you are abandoning the position on your website?" Kelly followed-up. "I'm changing it and I'm softening," Trump explained, echoing language he reportedly used in an off-the-record meeting with New York Times editors. Kelly asked Trump about the Buzzfeed report and if he had any plans to ask for the transcript from that meeting to be released. This "will have some asking if you're really just playing to people's fantasies, which is a tactic you praised in your book, 'Art of the Deal,'" Kelly pressed before moving on to try fact-checking "Lyin Ted" Cruz.Fox News is hosting yet another Republican debate in Detroit tonight and now that the dick measuring questions are out of the way, moderator Megyn Kelly is attempting to try out a little fact-checking of Donald Trump in front of a live audience more fit for Wrestlemania. For the 48 percent or so of Republicans who indicate in polls that they do not support the candidacy of the current frontrunner, perhaps Kelly's risky maneuver to tangle with Trump, again, and risk the blowback from his online supporters paid off. On the issue of immigration, Kelly pointed out that Trump's campaign website "to this day argues that more visas for highly skilled workers would 'decimate American workers.'" However, as Kelly pointed out, Trump recently spoke out in support of such H1B visas. "At the CNBC debate you spoke enthusiastically in favor of these visas. So, which is it?" Kelly pointedly asked to a finally inaudible audience. "I'm changing, I'm changing," Trump conceded, fessing up to his sudden flip-flop. "We need highly skilled workers in the country," Trump insisted, citing Wharton Business grads who are shoved out of Silicon Valley. "They want to stay here desperately. They’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country.” "So you are abandoning the position on your website?" Kelly followed-up. "I'm changing it and I'm softening," Trump explained, echoing language he reportedly used in an off-the-record meeting with New York Times editors. Kelly asked Trump about the Buzzfeed report and if he had any plans to ask for the transcript from that meeting to be released. This "will have some asking if you're really just playing to people's fantasies, which is a tactic you praised in your book, 'Art of the Deal,'" Kelly pressed before moving on to try fact-checking "Lyin Ted" Cruz.
Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly face off: Tonight’s Fox News debate puts the notorious rivals face-to-face after a 7-month standoff
A day doesn’t seem to go by of this 2016 primary season without presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump getting into a snit-fit with some member of the Republican establishment. This morning, it was former nominee Mitt Romney, who went out of his way to deliver a speech condemning Trump. For the past week, it’s been Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s most vocal opponent in the primary—one who is trying and failing to be just as charmingly irreverent as the Donald. And before the former Governor dropped out of the race, Jeb Bush was a frequent and “Sad!” punching bag. But aside from elected officials he’s theoretically campaigning against, Trump’s public enemy no. 1 for the past several months has been Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. Their meeting on August 6, the date of the first Republican debate, turned rancorous when Trump got defensive at Kelly’s question about the names he has called women in the past. From then on, the candidate has hounded her on his immensely popular Twitter, engaging in a professional media version of schoolyard taunting—calling her names, commenting on her menstrual cycle, and refusing to come to a party at her house (which was, in this case, the second Fox News debate, on January 28). Trump boycotted the second debate, which Kelly co-moderated, and instead held a counter-programming rally “for veterans” for the first hour of it, carried by MSNBC and CNN. Tonight, after seven months of whingeing, Trump will have to stand at a podium in front of Megyn for the third Fox News debate, and one where the stakes are quite different; Trump is the lead GOP nominee. Kelly has been reasonably professional throughout this whole affair. She is a good interviewer and a competent journalist, one who is able to maneuver past the inflated egos and pompous grandstanding of all the candidates, not just Trump. In her interview with Vanity Fair, Kelly said of that infamous question on gender:
I wrote it. I researched each line item myself. It was interesting to me after the debate when people started fact-checking my question. My own reaction was “Bring it on.” You think I’d go out there and ask a question like that at the first G.O.P. debate without making sure I was bulletproof on every single word?In the second debate, Kelly was merciless, cutting the other candidates down to size with clip-reels and follow-ups on the hypocrisy of candidates’ campaign rhetoric. History suggests she will not show Trump anything different in this debate. And Fox News is so tied to the GOP establishment that evaluating Trump’s Republican-ness is going to be a major angle. The real question is which Donald Trump will show up. As I’ve mythologized previously, Trump is a kind of assimilating juggernaut, one that can turn nearly every seeming negative into an advantage. The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers speculates that Trump will be on his best behavior, because the candidate’s stance in each debate has been one calculated to advance his current image with the country. For this debate, Trump needs to be a “unifier,” because he’s already, in his mind, running for the general election. But the Trump that shows up could still be carnival-sideshow über-troll Trump. The stubborn question of the party’s embrace is still outstanding, the GOP having painted themselves into the hilarious corner of having no viable candidate except Trump or a Democrat. Trump is still clamoring for acceptance from either the party or Fox News, with a kind of childish insistence on being loved that even further depicts the man as one who has never heard the word “no” in his entire life. His face-off with Kelly tonight is perhaps the first test of whether or not he’s going to be able to play nice with that network and with the GOP. Personally, I hope it’s a shitshow.A day doesn’t seem to go by of this 2016 primary season without presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump getting into a snit-fit with some member of the Republican establishment. This morning, it was former nominee Mitt Romney, who went out of his way to deliver a speech condemning Trump. For the past week, it’s been Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s most vocal opponent in the primary—one who is trying and failing to be just as charmingly irreverent as the Donald. And before the former Governor dropped out of the race, Jeb Bush was a frequent and “Sad!” punching bag. But aside from elected officials he’s theoretically campaigning against, Trump’s public enemy no. 1 for the past several months has been Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. Their meeting on August 6, the date of the first Republican debate, turned rancorous when Trump got defensive at Kelly’s question about the names he has called women in the past. From then on, the candidate has hounded her on his immensely popular Twitter, engaging in a professional media version of schoolyard taunting—calling her names, commenting on her menstrual cycle, and refusing to come to a party at her house (which was, in this case, the second Fox News debate, on January 28). Trump boycotted the second debate, which Kelly co-moderated, and instead held a counter-programming rally “for veterans” for the first hour of it, carried by MSNBC and CNN. Tonight, after seven months of whingeing, Trump will have to stand at a podium in front of Megyn for the third Fox News debate, and one where the stakes are quite different; Trump is the lead GOP nominee. Kelly has been reasonably professional throughout this whole affair. She is a good interviewer and a competent journalist, one who is able to maneuver past the inflated egos and pompous grandstanding of all the candidates, not just Trump. In her interview with Vanity Fair, Kelly said of that infamous question on gender:
I wrote it. I researched each line item myself. It was interesting to me after the debate when people started fact-checking my question. My own reaction was “Bring it on.” You think I’d go out there and ask a question like that at the first G.O.P. debate without making sure I was bulletproof on every single word?In the second debate, Kelly was merciless, cutting the other candidates down to size with clip-reels and follow-ups on the hypocrisy of candidates’ campaign rhetoric. History suggests she will not show Trump anything different in this debate. And Fox News is so tied to the GOP establishment that evaluating Trump’s Republican-ness is going to be a major angle. The real question is which Donald Trump will show up. As I’ve mythologized previously, Trump is a kind of assimilating juggernaut, one that can turn nearly every seeming negative into an advantage. The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers speculates that Trump will be on his best behavior, because the candidate’s stance in each debate has been one calculated to advance his current image with the country. For this debate, Trump needs to be a “unifier,” because he’s already, in his mind, running for the general election. But the Trump that shows up could still be carnival-sideshow über-troll Trump. The stubborn question of the party’s embrace is still outstanding, the GOP having painted themselves into the hilarious corner of having no viable candidate except Trump or a Democrat. Trump is still clamoring for acceptance from either the party or Fox News, with a kind of childish insistence on being loved that even further depicts the man as one who has never heard the word “no” in his entire life. His face-off with Kelly tonight is perhaps the first test of whether or not he’s going to be able to play nice with that network and with the GOP. Personally, I hope it’s a shitshow.
The ballad of Lindsey Graham, Republican truth-teller and aspiring late-night comic, and the death of the GOP
I have been stalking Sen. Lindsey Graham ever since he launched his short-lived presidential campaign and revealed himself to be the impish, acid-tongued troll of the 2016 Republican field. (Which at one time, let us remember, resembled the roster of a minor league baseball team both in numerical size and intellectual aptitude.) Those second-tier GOP debates were genuinely great TV: Graham, who favors immigration reform, believes climate change is real and has intermittently been willing to discuss firearms regulation, repeatedly made Bobby Jindal’s head explode and revealed Rick Santorum to be a human-sized block of timber, stuffed with pre-recorded racist malapropisms. I have called; I have written. I left messages at Graham’s campaign headquarters in South Carolina (which was probably a Mail Boxes Etc. store) and his Senate office in Washington, all to no avail. He ran out of money and dropped out of the race long before things got serious in Iowa and New Hampshire, and it’s not like he had ever, even for a split-second, thought he would win. My ardor did not lessen. I didn’t stand outside Graham’s window with a boom-box playing Peter Gabriel at full volume, but only because I haven’t owned a boom-box since 1988, and I wasn’t sure how I would explain the whole thing to the police department of some manicured Virginia suburb: “I’m not insane! I’m a journalist.” Unlike Jindal and Santorum and the other 57 varieties of Republican failure on offer this year — George Pataki, who last ran for public office 15 years ago, gets a special prize — Graham has not vanished from the news cycle since he quit the race. He’s an even more effective GOP troll as a non-candidate, because he’s a reliably hilarious TV guest and producers don’t have to worry about providing equal time to other people who are boring. In case this isn’t obvious, my love affair with Graham is entirely about personality and style and not at all about substance, since he’s an unreconstructed Bush-Cheney neocon and his foreign policy positions are largely terrible. (In fairness, he’s only, like, a click and a half to the right of Hillary Clinton on most things; I’m not saying that’s much of a recommendation.) But style and substance are intertwined, shall we say, and Graham’s one-man crusade to restore some semblance of sanity and normalcy to the Republican Party has fallen afoul of its own internal contradictions. Graham has been a leader of the “Stop Trump” movement since before that was a thing, and has consistently rebuked other GOP candidates for playing to the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment that has driven the Trump wave. Earlier this week Graham suggested he might be willing to support Ted Cruz in order to defeat Trump — and this is the same guy who said a few months ago that if another senator murdered Ted Cruz and the trial was held in the Senate, the killer would walk free. Graham and Cruz hate each other passionately; if a political fairy godmother offered Graham the choice between President Ted Cruz and the indefinite reign of Emperor Barack Obama, he’d have to think about it long and hard. There’s no hypocrisy in Graham’s position at that most basic level: Like everyone else in the Republican establishment, he understands that if the party drives away Latinos and middle-class women, they have almost no chance of winning a presidential election against Hillary Clinton or Leon Trotsky or McDuff the Talking Dog. But when you see Mitt Romney step forward as he did on Thursday, waving the banner of reason and telling us that Donald Trump is a fraud and a phony who is “playing the American public for suckers” — I mean, you have to laugh at the brazen, balls-out, Mormon underwear, “kicking the can down the road” hypocrisy of it all, don’t you? Playing the public for suckers is the Republican brand in a nutshell, and Lindsey Graham is too smart not to see that. Here’s what I really want to ask Graham: Does he get what happened here? Does he understand that the Republican Party designed and built the lab in which the Trumpian monster was created, and made its terrifying emergence nearly inevitable, with three or four decades’ worth of discount-store Leo Strauss political mendacity? They lied to their own voters repeatedly and treated them with unlimited contempt. They went out into the boondocks with larded-up accents and patted people on the head and talked about God and abortion. They told folks in trailer parks and ramshackle exurban bungalows that they were in debt and going broke and dying of strokes in their 50s because of all the immoral and deviant practices of gays and feminists and black people. Then they went back to Georgetown for an amazing steak dinner and laughed themselves sick and got down to the real business of cutting taxes on the rich and bombing remote villages where some 14-year-old kid might or might not have hidden a Kalashnikov. There’s no way Graham hasn’t thought about that. He was the one person among all those deranged and hateful Republican candidates who seemed disinclined to lie about his beliefs and intentions, which of course meant that no one was likely to vote for him. (I guess we can extend the same compliment to Santorum, who is a lot dumber and believes even worse things but is entirely sincere.) Graham went out there and said that he would send thousands of American ground troops back into the Middle East to fight ISIS, which was a huge buzzkill but of course is what all the other candidates, Clinton included, intend to do as well. One of Graham’s problems with Donald Trump is that to the extent Trump has any coherent foreign policy, it’s all about video games and blustering rhetoric and his hot-and-heavy bromance with Vladimir Putin, and not enough about perma-war everywhere. But I digress. As some indulgent readers already know, I feel a certain vague affection for the historical role played by the old Republican Party, the one that stood with hardware-store proprietors and vice-presidents of Midwestern banks and Presbyterian ministers. Despite Lindsey Graham’s self-assigned role as the last honest Republican amid a horde of flesh-eating zombies, he has been a prominent member of Congress since the Bill Clinton years and is implicated up to his eyeballs in the gradual process of soul-suckage that transformed the party of Eisenhower and Fiorello LaGuardia and Jacob Javits (not to mention Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate, and Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve both in the House and Senate) into the White Man’s Party of Nihilism and Hate. Graham’s status as the 2016 fan-fave among people who were never going to vote for him (or any other Republican) went beyond the fact that he was definitely the funniest person running for president in either political party, and quite likely the smartest too. Oh sure, Hillary Clinton is highly intelligent after her fashion, but it’s all turned to the service of wily, tactical decision-making. Before she decides between pepperoni and plain, she commissions a special working group to figure out the messaging. Ted Cruz has that fancy Ivy League education, and the permanent stick up his butt to prove it. When I saw him talk to a room full of prospective New Hampshire voters, he started lecturing at them, in pedantic high-school history teacher mode, about why New England was given that name by the first Puritan settlers. I can understand why people might want to vote for Trump more clearly than why they would vote for Cruz, who seems ill-tempered and psychotic and views the non-Cruz proportion of humanity with distaste. What Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz don’t have, and what Lindsey Graham has in spades, is some degree of self-awareness and ironic detachment. Neither of those people ever looks at themselves and what they’re doing and reflects that ultimately it’s all ridiculous and does not matter. Whereas Graham has the soul of a poet, or at least of a late-night TV host, which in terms of 21st-century culture is roughly the same thing. It's probably not a quality conducive to political victory. When I finally encountered Graham in person, at a Jeb Bush campaign event in Salem, New Hampshire, it was even better than I could have hoped. Graham was there to warm up the crowd for the so-called main event, and even hapless Jeb understood it was a tough act to follow. "That guy has another career waiting for him after politics," said Bush. Graham always starts by insulting himself fulsomely — he’s too short to be president, he’s funny looking, he’s a poorly educated Carolina hick who ran a terrible campaign — before throwing rapid-fire shade at Trump and Cruz and Marco Rubio and everybody else. We were in a middle-school auditorium and Graham took a moment to talk to the students who were present: “I loved middle school! It was the best six years of my life.” (Ha ha ha.) “Let me promise you kids one thing, though: It gets better.” Yeah: “It gets better,” coming out of the mouth of a Republican senator from one of the most conservative states in the country, a man who has never been married or had a visible girlfriend, and who has been surrounded by rumors about his sexual orientation for years. I don’t know whether Lindsey Graham is gay and I don’t care; that moment felt halfway between an elaborate joke that almost no one got and a cri de coeur in the safe space of libertarian New Hampshire, an appeal to a better version of the Republican Party that is now unimaginably far from reality. I had so many things to ask him! But then Jeb Bush talked for a while, which was kind of dull and hopeful and desperate, and after that Graham disappeared into the security scrum around Jeb as they pushed out the door toward a limousine. (He's right about being too short; I think he’s shorter than Hillary Clinton.) I gave my number to one of Jeb’s aides, who swore she would put me in touch with the guy who handles Lindsey Graham’s cell-phone calls. Awesome, right? It didn’t happen, of course, which is understandable because Jeb’s people had bigger problems, such as discovering that they didn’t have a political party anymore.I have been stalking Sen. Lindsey Graham ever since he launched his short-lived presidential campaign and revealed himself to be the impish, acid-tongued troll of the 2016 Republican field. (Which at one time, let us remember, resembled the roster of a minor league baseball team both in numerical size and intellectual aptitude.) Those second-tier GOP debates were genuinely great TV: Graham, who favors immigration reform, believes climate change is real and has intermittently been willing to discuss firearms regulation, repeatedly made Bobby Jindal’s head explode and revealed Rick Santorum to be a human-sized block of timber, stuffed with pre-recorded racist malapropisms. I have called; I have written. I left messages at Graham’s campaign headquarters in South Carolina (which was probably a Mail Boxes Etc. store) and his Senate office in Washington, all to no avail. He ran out of money and dropped out of the race long before things got serious in Iowa and New Hampshire, and it’s not like he had ever, even for a split-second, thought he would win. My ardor did not lessen. I didn’t stand outside Graham’s window with a boom-box playing Peter Gabriel at full volume, but only because I haven’t owned a boom-box since 1988, and I wasn’t sure how I would explain the whole thing to the police department of some manicured Virginia suburb: “I’m not insane! I’m a journalist.” Unlike Jindal and Santorum and the other 57 varieties of Republican failure on offer this year — George Pataki, who last ran for public office 15 years ago, gets a special prize — Graham has not vanished from the news cycle since he quit the race. He’s an even more effective GOP troll as a non-candidate, because he’s a reliably hilarious TV guest and producers don’t have to worry about providing equal time to other people who are boring. In case this isn’t obvious, my love affair with Graham is entirely about personality and style and not at all about substance, since he’s an unreconstructed Bush-Cheney neocon and his foreign policy positions are largely terrible. (In fairness, he’s only, like, a click and a half to the right of Hillary Clinton on most things; I’m not saying that’s much of a recommendation.) But style and substance are intertwined, shall we say, and Graham’s one-man crusade to restore some semblance of sanity and normalcy to the Republican Party has fallen afoul of its own internal contradictions. Graham has been a leader of the “Stop Trump” movement since before that was a thing, and has consistently rebuked other GOP candidates for playing to the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic sentiment that has driven the Trump wave. Earlier this week Graham suggested he might be willing to support Ted Cruz in order to defeat Trump — and this is the same guy who said a few months ago that if another senator murdered Ted Cruz and the trial was held in the Senate, the killer would walk free. Graham and Cruz hate each other passionately; if a political fairy godmother offered Graham the choice between President Ted Cruz and the indefinite reign of Emperor Barack Obama, he’d have to think about it long and hard. There’s no hypocrisy in Graham’s position at that most basic level: Like everyone else in the Republican establishment, he understands that if the party drives away Latinos and middle-class women, they have almost no chance of winning a presidential election against Hillary Clinton or Leon Trotsky or McDuff the Talking Dog. But when you see Mitt Romney step forward as he did on Thursday, waving the banner of reason and telling us that Donald Trump is a fraud and a phony who is “playing the American public for suckers” — I mean, you have to laugh at the brazen, balls-out, Mormon underwear, “kicking the can down the road” hypocrisy of it all, don’t you? Playing the public for suckers is the Republican brand in a nutshell, and Lindsey Graham is too smart not to see that. Here’s what I really want to ask Graham: Does he get what happened here? Does he understand that the Republican Party designed and built the lab in which the Trumpian monster was created, and made its terrifying emergence nearly inevitable, with three or four decades’ worth of discount-store Leo Strauss political mendacity? They lied to their own voters repeatedly and treated them with unlimited contempt. They went out into the boondocks with larded-up accents and patted people on the head and talked about God and abortion. They told folks in trailer parks and ramshackle exurban bungalows that they were in debt and going broke and dying of strokes in their 50s because of all the immoral and deviant practices of gays and feminists and black people. Then they went back to Georgetown for an amazing steak dinner and laughed themselves sick and got down to the real business of cutting taxes on the rich and bombing remote villages where some 14-year-old kid might or might not have hidden a Kalashnikov. There’s no way Graham hasn’t thought about that. He was the one person among all those deranged and hateful Republican candidates who seemed disinclined to lie about his beliefs and intentions, which of course meant that no one was likely to vote for him. (I guess we can extend the same compliment to Santorum, who is a lot dumber and believes even worse things but is entirely sincere.) Graham went out there and said that he would send thousands of American ground troops back into the Middle East to fight ISIS, which was a huge buzzkill but of course is what all the other candidates, Clinton included, intend to do as well. One of Graham’s problems with Donald Trump is that to the extent Trump has any coherent foreign policy, it’s all about video games and blustering rhetoric and his hot-and-heavy bromance with Vladimir Putin, and not enough about perma-war everywhere. But I digress. As some indulgent readers already know, I feel a certain vague affection for the historical role played by the old Republican Party, the one that stood with hardware-store proprietors and vice-presidents of Midwestern banks and Presbyterian ministers. Despite Lindsey Graham’s self-assigned role as the last honest Republican amid a horde of flesh-eating zombies, he has been a prominent member of Congress since the Bill Clinton years and is implicated up to his eyeballs in the gradual process of soul-suckage that transformed the party of Eisenhower and Fiorello LaGuardia and Jacob Javits (not to mention Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate, and Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve both in the House and Senate) into the White Man’s Party of Nihilism and Hate. Graham’s status as the 2016 fan-fave among people who were never going to vote for him (or any other Republican) went beyond the fact that he was definitely the funniest person running for president in either political party, and quite likely the smartest too. Oh sure, Hillary Clinton is highly intelligent after her fashion, but it’s all turned to the service of wily, tactical decision-making. Before she decides between pepperoni and plain, she commissions a special working group to figure out the messaging. Ted Cruz has that fancy Ivy League education, and the permanent stick up his butt to prove it. When I saw him talk to a room full of prospective New Hampshire voters, he started lecturing at them, in pedantic high-school history teacher mode, about why New England was given that name by the first Puritan settlers. I can understand why people might want to vote for Trump more clearly than why they would vote for Cruz, who seems ill-tempered and psychotic and views the non-Cruz proportion of humanity with distaste. What Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz don’t have, and what Lindsey Graham has in spades, is some degree of self-awareness and ironic detachment. Neither of those people ever looks at themselves and what they’re doing and reflects that ultimately it’s all ridiculous and does not matter. Whereas Graham has the soul of a poet, or at least of a late-night TV host, which in terms of 21st-century culture is roughly the same thing. It's probably not a quality conducive to political victory. When I finally encountered Graham in person, at a Jeb Bush campaign event in Salem, New Hampshire, it was even better than I could have hoped. Graham was there to warm up the crowd for the so-called main event, and even hapless Jeb understood it was a tough act to follow. "That guy has another career waiting for him after politics," said Bush. Graham always starts by insulting himself fulsomely — he’s too short to be president, he’s funny looking, he’s a poorly educated Carolina hick who ran a terrible campaign — before throwing rapid-fire shade at Trump and Cruz and Marco Rubio and everybody else. We were in a middle-school auditorium and Graham took a moment to talk to the students who were present: “I loved middle school! It was the best six years of my life.” (Ha ha ha.) “Let me promise you kids one thing, though: It gets better.” Yeah: “It gets better,” coming out of the mouth of a Republican senator from one of the most conservative states in the country, a man who has never been married or had a visible girlfriend, and who has been surrounded by rumors about his sexual orientation for years. I don’t know whether Lindsey Graham is gay and I don’t care; that moment felt halfway between an elaborate joke that almost no one got and a cri de coeur in the safe space of libertarian New Hampshire, an appeal to a better version of the Republican Party that is now unimaginably far from reality. I had so many things to ask him! But then Jeb Bush talked for a while, which was kind of dull and hopeful and desperate, and after that Graham disappeared into the security scrum around Jeb as they pushed out the door toward a limousine. (He's right about being too short; I think he’s shorter than Hillary Clinton.) I gave my number to one of Jeb’s aides, who swore she would put me in touch with the guy who handles Lindsey Graham’s cell-phone calls. Awesome, right? It didn’t happen, of course, which is understandable because Jeb’s people had bigger problems, such as discovering that they didn’t have a political party anymore.
The doomsday coverage stops now: Hillary defies inane “choker” narrative
The time has come for the campaign press to finally pack away its Hillary Clinton doomsday script. Since the new year, much of the Clinton campaign coverage has revolved around trying to detail her weaknesses, stitching together scenarios where she would fail, and just generally bemoaning what an awful campaign she was supposedly running: She's too loud! And "everything" is going wrong. In fact, the primary season has unfolded in the way level-headed observers suggested it might: Iowa was close, Sanders enjoyed a clear advantage in New Hampshire, and then Clinton started accumulating victories. But instead of telling that sober story, the press opted for a far more tantalizing tale -- a Clinton collapse! A 2008 repeat! Even when Clinton did win, the press often stressed how her victories weren't really victories. (Politico claimed Clinton was "stung" by her narrow Iowa win.) The narrative has been tightly knit: Voters don't really like her. "In reality, nobody is that excited about Hillary Clinton, and young voters, women and men -- the foot soldiers of any Democratic Party movement -- aren't coming around," BuzzFeed reported. Days later, Clinton won women voters in South Carolina by nearly 50 points. Keep in mind, Clinton's win-loss primary record today doesn't look that much different from Donald Trump's. Yet his coverage is delivered in the glow of a celebrity; of a candidate who's enjoying an astounding run of unmatched victories. Instead, the tone and tenor of Clinton's coverage this year often mirrored that of Jeb Bush's -- the guy who ran a historically futile campaign and dropped out without winning a state. By all indications the Democratic primary contest will march on, and Clinton remains a ways away from securing the delegates needed to officially secure the nomination. But in the wake of Super Tuesday and Clinton's widespread primary success, this seems like a good time for the press to reassess its coverage; to maybe reset how it sees the campaign, and specifically adjust the at-times comically doomsday coverage it continued to heap on the Democratic frontrunner. Request to the media: Please take your thumb off the scale. In fact, please take both thumbs off the scale. Trust me, critics of the Clinton coverage aren't looking for the Democratic frontrunner to get a free pass. Close observers of the Clintons over the years know that's just never going to happen. They just want a fair shot. They'd like the press to go back to its job of simply reporting and analyzing what's happening on the campaign trail and to get out of the narrative-building business. Stop with the hyperventilating that every Clinton campaign speed bump seems to produce, and stop trying to force-feed voters a story that's not actually happening. The cyclical waves of she's-doomed coverage have become as tiresome as they are predictable: *During Clinton's summer of 2014 book tour, which the press announced was a complete "disaster." *During March of 2015 when the Clinton email story broke. *During the Clinton Foundation witch hunt in May of last year. *During renewed email fever last September when the Washington Post averaged more than two Clinton email updates every day of the month. On and on this production has run. But was it really that bad this winter? Consider that this was an actual headline from a February Washington Post column, "Clinton email scandal: Why It Might Be Time For Democrats To Draft Joe Biden." Yep. Democrats might need to replace Clinton. On the eve of the Nevada vote, Vanity Fair insisted Clinton allies were "panicking," and that anything short of a "blowout" win would be "disastrous" for her campaign. Indeed, when Clinton won by five points, Vanity Fair announced she had lost "her narrative." Author Gail Sheehy, writing a piece for The New York Times, claimed Baby Boomer women weren't supporting Clinton's campaign, when in fact Baby Boomer women are among Clinton's most ardent supporters. And reporting from South Carolina, the Post stressed that Bill Clinton was causing all kinds of "headaches" for the campaign by being caught "on the wrong side of the headlines." Critiquing his campaign persona, the Postinsisted "he seems to lose it," pointing to his "apparent vitriol." Hillary Clinton's subsequent 47-point victory in South Carolina raised doubts about the paper's claim that Bill Clinton was hurting the campaign. Meanwhile, Post columnist Kathleen Parker, leaning heaving on the she's-doomed narrative, painted an extraordinarily negative picture of Clinton's chances of winning in the Palmetto state. Parker claimed Clinton was entering "troubled water" in South Carolina and "particularly among African Americans." Fact: Clinton won
86 percent
of the South Carolina African-American vote. As a pundit, it's hard to be more wrong than Parker was. Can you imagine scribes typing up articles and columns this winter about how Bernie Sanders was having trouble attracting young voters and arguing that if he couldn't tap into the enthusiasm of millennials his campaign was doomed? Of course not, because that would have made no sense. Yet that didn't stop people from writing about how Clinton was struggling with women and black voters, even though the premises were so easily debunked. Those are the Clinton Rules: Anything goes. There's no penalty for being wrong about the Clintons, which of course only encourages people to be as illogical as they want when chronicling her campaign. But now as the contours of the looming general election race come into view, it's time now for an honest media reassessment.
Los Angeles plumbs new depths: City to crack down on tiny homes donated to homeless
The Los Angeles housing crisis reached absurd new levels this month when city authorities began impounding and seizing tiny houses that were donated to homeless people to give them safe places to sleep. The 6-by-10 foot structures were built by Elvis Summers, a musician and south L.A. resident who told the L.A. Times he used to be homeless himself. The mission of his organization, My Tiny House Project LA, is to “create tiny house shelters, rebuild communities, help those who need it and to inspire people to be Doers and to act now for a better tomorrow and to open their minds to compassion and empathy.” Summers left dozens of the brightly colored structures, which are equipped with solar-powered lighting, near encampments and highways to offer more sturdy alternatives to tents. But the Bureau of Sanitation seized three tiny houses earlier this month, with spokesperson Elena Stern claiming they pose a safety and health hazard. The bureau has been widely criticized for its aggressive and forceful clearing of homeless camps across the city, with Steve Pedersen, the chief environmental compliance inspector, stating in January, “We average about 117 [clearings of] encampments per month.” Authorities had planned to impound several more structures late last week, but Summers and his team cleared them away first, reportedly moving some of them to private land so people can continue to stay in them. “People can easily see that it’s effective, cheap and gives people a warm, safe shelter for right now until permanent housing can be built,” Summers told Mashable. “That’s a threat to the city’s money. They’re taking millions of dollars from very corner they can get it from and not doing anything with it.” The city’s aggressive crackdown on the structures comes in the midst of a housing crisis so severe that the city council declared a state of emergency on homelessness last year. As of fall 2015, there were over 44,000 people without homes documented by the government. The humanitarian disaster is bad even by nationwide standards. A reportreleased last year by real estate website Zillow, found that Los Angeles residents pay the highest percentage of their incomes on rent in the country. A separatestudy released around the same time by UCLA researchers found that “Los Angeles is the least affordable region of all metro areas,” outdoing New York and San Francisco. Larry Gross, director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, declared in December that the city’s “foreclosure crisis and its impact on hardworking Americans is a national disgrace.” Social justice organizations across the city are calling for large-scale solutions, including protections against gentrification, the safeguarding of rent control and an immediate halt to unjust evictions and displacement. In light of these challenges, the government’s punitive response this month to tiny gestures of humanity reveals a great deal about where its priorities lie. 
Call it David Brooks syndrome: Antonin Scalia, Marco Rubio and the media’s morally hazardous obsession with manners
Given how quickly the news cycle spins these days, Pope Francis’ extemporaneous criticism of candidates who would rather build walls than bridges, prompted by a reporter’s question about Donald Trump, already seems like ancient history. And even Justice Antonin Scalia’s death a few days later is fading into the political fog. But these two disparate events tell us something about the media coverage of the current election campaign, or, more accurately, they tell us about something sorely lacking in that coverage: the issue of values. Aside from Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio proclaiming their own virtuous values, this may be the last time during this election that you’re likely to hear that word. I have already griped here that journalists give us virtually no reporting on policy. But that doesn’t mean all the coverage is horse race stuff. Occasionally, when the spirit moves them, the media get all grandiloquent on us and purport to examine the person inside the candidate. Of late, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been particularly interested in manners — bad manners. He wrote a whole column recently about Trump’s, which, in Brooks’ view, seem to be the candidate’s major failing. Boy King Marco Rubio professes to believe in most of the same scorched earth pronouncements as Trump, but he is such a nice, polite young man when he says them that he gets a pass from the MSM. It is what you might call the “politics of etiquette,” with Rubio as its Eddie Haskell. And then we get the typical election-year blather about character and how it supposedly reveals who a candidate really is. This is a particular specialty of the right-wing press, who seem to think that if you are a Republican, you have character; if you are a Democrat, you don’t. Just Google “Hillary Clinton” and “character” and see what I mean. I am not sure that manners or character have all that much to do with governance. (OK, I might make an exception for Ted Cruz.) Some of our best presidents seem to have had questionable character, and some – think of Andrew Jackson – had bad manners. But values are different. Values define who we are, how we think about the world, and, most important of all, how we treat others. A candidate’s values are not only important; they may be more important than anything else in the campaign, and possibly the surest guide to what that candidate would do in office. Policies may change. Values are bedrock. I think that’s what Pope Francis was saying when he was invited to criticize Trump. Whether or not you believe he should have waded into that muddy political swamp, Francis wasn’t really being political. He was addressing the fact that any individual who was more interested in keeping out people in distress rather than reaching out and drawing them in was, in his estimation, not someone who is living Christian values. Yet for the media, this was framed as a kind of wrestling match. “Trump vs. the Pope” was the headline everywhere. It made for great drama, but it missed the point. This wasn’t about a religious figure taking on a political windbag. This was about the kind of values we want our leaders to have and the kind of people we want to be. That is much worthier of discussion than Trump vs. the Pope, mano a mano. Similarly, I was struck by the encomia lavished on the late Justice Scalia. He was praised to the skies by just about everyone in the media, and not just the conservative media. But you might have noticed something missing in these eulogies that, while praising his intellect, wit and acerbity, said not a single word about his values. It was left to the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin to spoil the lovefest and examine the Scalia behind the legal sanctimoniousness and heartstring-tugging personal anecdotes. Here is Toobin’s assessment:
Scalia devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.That is the value assessment of Scalia, a bully who detested homosexuals, refused to stay the death penalty even where there was reason to believe the convicted was innocent, and never ruled for the powerless and afflicted when instead he could rule for the powerful and the afflicting. This isn’t a matter of jurisprudence. It is a matter of basic human decency, and it is a matter the media, save Toobin, refrained from addressing. That’s because journalists don’t seem comfortable talking about values. To many of them, values probably seem squishy. They seem to depend on whoever happens to be enumerating them, and they have, in truth, been devalued by the conservative trumpeting of “family values,” as declaimed by homophobes like the Family Research Council, which was named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Moralism is not morality. What’s more, values are especially susceptible to the media’s old symmetry ploy that makes sure whatever they put on one side of the equation is balanced by the other side, so that conservative values and liberal values are always in constant equipoise. But this pretense of equivalence is just another journalistic dodge. Values aren’t really squishy, and conservative values and liberal values aren’t really morally equal, though I suspect conservatives want us to think they are. There are bad values. We just don’t hear about them in the media. You will never hear this in the MSM, but here goes: There actually is such a thing as good values and bad values, values that emanate from the best part of us, those better angels, and values that emanate from the worst. How do we know? Because our parents taught them to us. They taught us compassion, tolerance, charity, empathy for the less fortunate and those in need. These values were and are unimpeachable, and while they’re certainly not the only values we learned, I don’t recall hate, hardheartedness, or self-righteousness being on the list. That was Pope Francis’ real message when he was asked about that Mexican wall Trump promises to build. To put a sharper point on values, try applying the Golden Rule to our politics. How many Americans would like to be treated the way the Republicans vow to treat undocumented immigrants by deporting them or breaking up their families? How many would want to be on the other side of health insurance when the Republicans defund Obamacare? How many would want their children and grandchildren to live in a world of climate change that the Republicans deny exists? How many would like to be denied the right to vote because Republicans have pressed for voter suppression laws under the guise of protecting us from non-existent fraud? How many would want to lose food stamps when they need them to feed their children? See what I mean? There are bad values. We just don’t hear about them in the media. Perhaps there was a time when Republicans and Democrats, at least moderate Republicans and northern Democrats, more or less shared those hallowed values, if not the means to realize them or the priorities assigned to them. Historians even talk of a “liberal consensus” in the '50s and '60s around which both parties largely coalesced. Obviously, things are different now. What’s remarkable is not that no Republican candidate today espouses values that could pass the old Golden Rule test. It’s that the media won’t talk about it, which is one reason why our elections devolve into playground fights and name-calling. So here is my suggestion for this campaign season: Just as we need a “knowledge-based” journalism in which reporters provide substantive information to help us assess candidates, we need an “impact-based” journalism that asks and describes how policies will affect both ordinary people and the most vulnerable among us — a journalism that restores to our political discourse a discussion of values that has been too long absent. Not to do so is not only a grave dereliction of the press’ duty; it is a moral breach. Our politics, I suspect, would look very different if the media provided information on policies and an analysis of their effects. Republicans just better hope journalists continue to refuse the challenge. The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers. Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.Given how quickly the news cycle spins these days, Pope Francis’ extemporaneous criticism of candidates who would rather build walls than bridges, prompted by a reporter’s question about Donald Trump, already seems like ancient history. And even Justice Antonin Scalia’s death a few days later is fading into the political fog. But these two disparate events tell us something about the media coverage of the current election campaign, or, more accurately, they tell us about something sorely lacking in that coverage: the issue of values. Aside from Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio proclaiming their own virtuous values, this may be the last time during this election that you’re likely to hear that word. I have already griped here that journalists give us virtually no reporting on policy. But that doesn’t mean all the coverage is horse race stuff. Occasionally, when the spirit moves them, the media get all grandiloquent on us and purport to examine the person inside the candidate. Of late, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been particularly interested in manners — bad manners. He wrote a whole column recently about Trump’s, which, in Brooks’ view, seem to be the candidate’s major failing. Boy King Marco Rubio professes to believe in most of the same scorched earth pronouncements as Trump, but he is such a nice, polite young man when he says them that he gets a pass from the MSM. It is what you might call the “politics of etiquette,” with Rubio as its Eddie Haskell. And then we get the typical election-year blather about character and how it supposedly reveals who a candidate really is. This is a particular specialty of the right-wing press, who seem to think that if you are a Republican, you have character; if you are a Democrat, you don’t. Just Google “Hillary Clinton” and “character” and see what I mean. I am not sure that manners or character have all that much to do with governance. (OK, I might make an exception for Ted Cruz.) Some of our best presidents seem to have had questionable character, and some – think of Andrew Jackson – had bad manners. But values are different. Values define who we are, how we think about the world, and, most important of all, how we treat others. A candidate’s values are not only important; they may be more important than anything else in the campaign, and possibly the surest guide to what that candidate would do in office. Policies may change. Values are bedrock. I think that’s what Pope Francis was saying when he was invited to criticize Trump. Whether or not you believe he should have waded into that muddy political swamp, Francis wasn’t really being political. He was addressing the fact that any individual who was more interested in keeping out people in distress rather than reaching out and drawing them in was, in his estimation, not someone who is living Christian values. Yet for the media, this was framed as a kind of wrestling match. “Trump vs. the Pope” was the headline everywhere. It made for great drama, but it missed the point. This wasn’t about a religious figure taking on a political windbag. This was about the kind of values we want our leaders to have and the kind of people we want to be. That is much worthier of discussion than Trump vs. the Pope, mano a mano. Similarly, I was struck by the encomia lavished on the late Justice Scalia. He was praised to the skies by just about everyone in the media, and not just the conservative media. But you might have noticed something missing in these eulogies that, while praising his intellect, wit and acerbity, said not a single word about his values. It was left to the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin to spoil the lovefest and examine the Scalia behind the legal sanctimoniousness and heartstring-tugging personal anecdotes. Here is Toobin’s assessment:
Scalia devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.That is the value assessment of Scalia, a bully who detested homosexuals, refused to stay the death penalty even where there was reason to believe the convicted was innocent, and never ruled for the powerless and afflicted when instead he could rule for the powerful and the afflicting. This isn’t a matter of jurisprudence. It is a matter of basic human decency, and it is a matter the media, save Toobin, refrained from addressing. That’s because journalists don’t seem comfortable talking about values. To many of them, values probably seem squishy. They seem to depend on whoever happens to be enumerating them, and they have, in truth, been devalued by the conservative trumpeting of “family values,” as declaimed by homophobes like the Family Research Council, which was named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Moralism is not morality. What’s more, values are especially susceptible to the media’s old symmetry ploy that makes sure whatever they put on one side of the equation is balanced by the other side, so that conservative values and liberal values are always in constant equipoise. But this pretense of equivalence is just another journalistic dodge. Values aren’t really squishy, and conservative values and liberal values aren’t really morally equal, though I suspect conservatives want us to think they are. There are bad values. We just don’t hear about them in the media. You will never hear this in the MSM, but here goes: There actually is such a thing as good values and bad values, values that emanate from the best part of us, those better angels, and values that emanate from the worst. How do we know? Because our parents taught them to us. They taught us compassion, tolerance, charity, empathy for the less fortunate and those in need. These values were and are unimpeachable, and while they’re certainly not the only values we learned, I don’t recall hate, hardheartedness, or self-righteousness being on the list. That was Pope Francis’ real message when he was asked about that Mexican wall Trump promises to build. To put a sharper point on values, try applying the Golden Rule to our politics. How many Americans would like to be treated the way the Republicans vow to treat undocumented immigrants by deporting them or breaking up their families? How many would want to be on the other side of health insurance when the Republicans defund Obamacare? How many would want their children and grandchildren to live in a world of climate change that the Republicans deny exists? How many would like to be denied the right to vote because Republicans have pressed for voter suppression laws under the guise of protecting us from non-existent fraud? How many would want to lose food stamps when they need them to feed their children? See what I mean? There are bad values. We just don’t hear about them in the media. Perhaps there was a time when Republicans and Democrats, at least moderate Republicans and northern Democrats, more or less shared those hallowed values, if not the means to realize them or the priorities assigned to them. Historians even talk of a “liberal consensus” in the '50s and '60s around which both parties largely coalesced. Obviously, things are different now. What’s remarkable is not that no Republican candidate today espouses values that could pass the old Golden Rule test. It’s that the media won’t talk about it, which is one reason why our elections devolve into playground fights and name-calling. So here is my suggestion for this campaign season: Just as we need a “knowledge-based” journalism in which reporters provide substantive information to help us assess candidates, we need an “impact-based” journalism that asks and describes how policies will affect both ordinary people and the most vulnerable among us — a journalism that restores to our political discourse a discussion of values that has been too long absent. Not to do so is not only a grave dereliction of the press’ duty; it is a moral breach. Our politics, I suspect, would look very different if the media provided information on policies and an analysis of their effects. Republicans just better hope journalists continue to refuse the challenge. The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers. Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.Given how quickly the news cycle spins these days, Pope Francis’ extemporaneous criticism of candidates who would rather build walls than bridges, prompted by a reporter’s question about Donald Trump, already seems like ancient history. And even Justice Antonin Scalia’s death a few days later is fading into the political fog. But these two disparate events tell us something about the media coverage of the current election campaign, or, more accurately, they tell us about something sorely lacking in that coverage: the issue of values. Aside from Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio proclaiming their own virtuous values, this may be the last time during this election that you’re likely to hear that word. I have already griped here that journalists give us virtually no reporting on policy. But that doesn’t mean all the coverage is horse race stuff. Occasionally, when the spirit moves them, the media get all grandiloquent on us and purport to examine the person inside the candidate. Of late, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been particularly interested in manners — bad manners. He wrote a whole column recently about Trump’s, which, in Brooks’ view, seem to be the candidate’s major failing. Boy King Marco Rubio professes to believe in most of the same scorched earth pronouncements as Trump, but he is such a nice, polite young man when he says them that he gets a pass from the MSM. It is what you might call the “politics of etiquette,” with Rubio as its Eddie Haskell. And then we get the typical election-year blather about character and how it supposedly reveals who a candidate really is. This is a particular specialty of the right-wing press, who seem to think that if you are a Republican, you have character; if you are a Democrat, you don’t. Just Google “Hillary Clinton” and “character” and see what I mean. I am not sure that manners or character have all that much to do with governance. (OK, I might make an exception for Ted Cruz.) Some of our best presidents seem to have had questionable character, and some – think of Andrew Jackson – had bad manners. But values are different. Values define who we are, how we think about the world, and, most important of all, how we treat others. A candidate’s values are not only important; they may be more important than anything else in the campaign, and possibly the surest guide to what that candidate would do in office. Policies may change. Values are bedrock. I think that’s what Pope Francis was saying when he was invited to criticize Trump. Whether or not you believe he should have waded into that muddy political swamp, Francis wasn’t really being political. He was addressing the fact that any individual who was more interested in keeping out people in distress rather than reaching out and drawing them in was, in his estimation, not someone who is living Christian values. Yet for the media, this was framed as a kind of wrestling match. “Trump vs. the Pope” was the headline everywhere. It made for great drama, but it missed the point. This wasn’t about a religious figure taking on a political windbag. This was about the kind of values we want our leaders to have and the kind of people we want to be. That is much worthier of discussion than Trump vs. the Pope, mano a mano. Similarly, I was struck by the encomia lavished on the late Justice Scalia. He was praised to the skies by just about everyone in the media, and not just the conservative media. But you might have noticed something missing in these eulogies that, while praising his intellect, wit and acerbity, said not a single word about his values. It was left to the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin to spoil the lovefest and examine the Scalia behind the legal sanctimoniousness and heartstring-tugging personal anecdotes. Here is Toobin’s assessment:
Scalia devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.That is the value assessment of Scalia, a bully who detested homosexuals, refused to stay the death penalty even where there was reason to believe the convicted was innocent, and never ruled for the powerless and afflicted when instead he could rule for the powerful and the afflicting. This isn’t a matter of jurisprudence. It is a matter of basic human decency, and it is a matter the media, save Toobin, refrained from addressing. That’s because journalists don’t seem comfortable talking about values. To many of them, values probably seem squishy. They seem to depend on whoever happens to be enumerating them, and they have, in truth, been devalued by the conservative trumpeting of “family values,” as declaimed by homophobes like the Family Research Council, which was named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Moralism is not morality. What’s more, values are especially susceptible to the media’s old symmetry ploy that makes sure whatever they put on one side of the equation is balanced by the other side, so that conservative values and liberal values are always in constant equipoise. But this pretense of equivalence is just another journalistic dodge. Values aren’t really squishy, and conservative values and liberal values aren’t really morally equal, though I suspect conservatives want us to think they are. There are bad values. We just don’t hear about them in the media. You will never hear this in the MSM, but here goes: There actually is such a thing as good values and bad values, values that emanate from the best part of us, those better angels, and values that emanate from the worst. How do we know? Because our parents taught them to us. They taught us compassion, tolerance, charity, empathy for the less fortunate and those in need. These values were and are unimpeachable, and while they’re certainly not the only values we learned, I don’t recall hate, hardheartedness, or self-righteousness being on the list. That was Pope Francis’ real message when he was asked about that Mexican wall Trump promises to build. To put a sharper point on values, try applying the Golden Rule to our politics. How many Americans would like to be treated the way the Republicans vow to treat undocumented immigrants by deporting them or breaking up their families? How many would want to be on the other side of health insurance when the Republicans defund Obamacare? How many would want their children and grandchildren to live in a world of climate change that the Republicans deny exists? How many would like to be denied the right to vote because Republicans have pressed for voter suppression laws under the guise of protecting us from non-existent fraud? How many would want to lose food stamps when they need them to feed their children? See what I mean? There are bad values. We just don’t hear about them in the media. Perhaps there was a time when Republicans and Democrats, at least moderate Republicans and northern Democrats, more or less shared those hallowed values, if not the means to realize them or the priorities assigned to them. Historians even talk of a “liberal consensus” in the '50s and '60s around which both parties largely coalesced. Obviously, things are different now. What’s remarkable is not that no Republican candidate today espouses values that could pass the old Golden Rule test. It’s that the media won’t talk about it, which is one reason why our elections devolve into playground fights and name-calling. So here is my suggestion for this campaign season: Just as we need a “knowledge-based” journalism in which reporters provide substantive information to help us assess candidates, we need an “impact-based” journalism that asks and describes how policies will affect both ordinary people and the most vulnerable among us — a journalism that restores to our political discourse a discussion of values that has been too long absent. Not to do so is not only a grave dereliction of the press’ duty; it is a moral breach. Our politics, I suspect, would look very different if the media provided information on policies and an analysis of their effects. Republicans just better hope journalists continue to refuse the challenge. The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers. Neal Gabler is an author of five books and the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, Time magazine's non-fiction book of the year, USA Today's biography of the year and other awards. He is also a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society and is currently writing a biography of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
