Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

 

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

awful @MeetThePress premise this morning: we're "divided" over Covid and masks! we're not: 70% have a shot. 70% support masks.

Eric Boehlert

The problem with the crush of COVID-19 patients using up most of the available ICU beds* and crowding out emergency facilities is that it’s all so unnecessary.

*Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas are nearly out of ICU beds as Covid-19 cases surge across the US — particularly among unvaccinated Americans.

CNN

Here are the ICU beds that are occupied just by Covid patients in each of 14 states. Now, if you’re vaccinated and catch even the dreaded Delta Variant of the coronavirus, it might still result in some unpleasantness, but you’re unlikely even to have to go to the hospital.

To say that Americans are “divided” is to suggest that both sides have good reason to feel the way they do. That, for instance, taking Ivermectin, a cow de-wormer that yes, people can safely take under some very specific circumstances, but that the FDA says please don’t use it for Covid, is a reasonable and rational choice. It isn’t. It’ completely insane to think that the vaccines that the US went to great length to produce and to safety-test and to test for efficacy is less safe or effective than a quack cure pushed by Fox News and other conservative commenters.

There’s also a problem with a claim that anti-choicers/forced birthers make, that the new Texas “snitch” law “...bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women are even aware they are pregnant."

As the C&L piece points out, a six week-old embryo (It won’t become a fetus for another month) doesn’t actually have a heart!

The rhythmic sound that can be heard is "a group of cells with electrical activity. That's what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system." That's all from Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at University of California, San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology

There’s absolutely no question that the people who came up with the term did so consciously and deliberately, with malice and forethought. But why mainstream news reporters keep mindlessly repeating that “fetuses” have a heartbeat after six weeks is a real puzzle. This is a claim that fails a very simple true/false test.

Another recent problem is that the Texas “snitch” law didn’t just suddenly pop up out of the blue. The law was passed back in May. The course it took to the Supreme Court was publicly documented. Yet, the Supreme Court decision landed like a bombshell because, apparently, the press was so wholly and completely absorbed in the withdrawal from Afghanistan (a legitimate and worthwhile story) that it just didn’t have any time or attention to spare for the gutting of a Supreme Court ruling that’s been in effect since 1973. The press played catch-up with a number of pieces after the ruling was made, but there was absolutely no need for it to have been such a surprise.

Why does this happen? Why does the press constantly use right-wing talking points that are completely bonkers or ignore a clearly important issue that will obviously have a great impact? My own personal theory is that media people like to run stories through people they feel are outside experts, who are always free to chat and who provide authoritative-sounding quotes. In other words, reporters have right-wing “friends” who have cultivated close relationships with them and who assure them that a fetal heartbeat at six weeks is a real thing and who discourage putting out pieces on something like the Texas “snitch” law that will make right-wingers look bad (Fox News apparently realized how unpopular the new law was as they didn’t mention it for quite awhile). Reporters don’t need to stop talking with right-wing “friends.” What reporters need to do is to get friends on the “other side of the aisle” who can provide corrections and equally authoritative-sounding quotes.

Letter to the Editor 10 November

 

 

The letter-writer writes to the Philadelphia Inquirer to express her support for President Trump.

First, she learns from a relative of hers that the relative opposed Trump strictly due to his personality. I agree that this is a really stupid reason to oppose a politician. The younger George Bush was reputed to be a really cool guy to have a beer with. I have no doubt that he would be. Problem is, he ignored warnings about 9-11, launched the completely unnecessary Iraq War, left people stranded after Hurricane Katrina and opposed efforts to work against climate change. Does being a cool guy to have a beer with make up for any of that? Hardly.

She feels businesses are never over-budget. Erm, consumers and businesses both take out bank loans for cars, houses, equipment, paying employees when a business first starts up, etc. That’s exactly how deficit spending works. The government gives itself a loan by selling bonds and pays those bonds off. If she were really serious about how terrible deficit spending was, she would have opposed Trump’s 2017 tax cut that exploded the deficit!

Did he care and try hard to solve national problems? Hardly. A reporter noticed that he couldn’t specify what he had done about COVID-19 during the months of February and March. That’s because he spent that time pretty much just sitting around and twiddling his thumbs, playing golf, conducting rallies and firing people who had crossed him during his impeachment. Obama spent eight years playing 306 golf games. Trump has spent half that time playing, at this point, 297.

The hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) was indeed sent to New York City on 30 March, long after it was clear that there was a worldwide pandemic that required a “All Hands on Deck” approach and as NYC was reaching its peak caseload.

Was President Trump informing us in the daily briefings or would actual scientists giving us detailed facts and figures have done a better job? Was it helpful for Trump to have speculated that for people to have injected themselves with bleach? Or would he have been better off actually attending the meetings of the scientists that happened before each briefing?

Will we “again, be the laughingstock of the world” when Biden takes over? Or did the laughing start under Trump?

Answer to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

The Post-Gazette tries to defend the President’s record. They repeat the same, tired old yada-yada about there having been a “boom,” but really, job creation levels have not been terrible, but weren’t spectacular, either.

The piece then talks about lowest Black unemployment, which was clearly due to Obama’s policies.

It talks of trade relations. I don’t follow that closely, but knew that soybeans were the biggest issue for a while. How’s that doing? Oops! “YTD: U.S soybean sales to China lowest in 5 years”

Sending jobs overseas. What has he actually done about that?!?!? Moving the debate is all very fine and well, but actually getting something done on the issue will require focus and attention to detail, neither of which he’s known for.

Being a Democrat, I’m not the slightest bit impressed with his putting “originalists” onto the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett is only “best” if you ignore her extremely rushed confirmation and how completely out of step she is with Americans in general.

Energy? Well, yeah, energy has been going great if you regard burning more fossil fuels as good. That’s obviously NOT good if you know anything about the science of climate change.

This is really sad:

Has Mr. Trump handled the pandemic perfectly? No. But no one masters a pandemic. And the president was and is right that we must not cower before the disease and we have to keep America open and working.

Actually, most of the countries on the planet have handled the pandemic far better than Trump has. The very first thing we desperately needed to do, and which the US miserably failed to do, was to produce Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). This failure is especially sad as producing equipment for wars has been a specialty of the US Government going back at least to the Civil War.

And yes, I agree with and endorse this sentiment 100%!

He is not a unifier. He often acts like the president of his base, not the whole country. He has done nothing to lessen our divisions and has, in fact, often deepened them.

This is probably the single most important job any president can have. To move the country in a direction that’s healthy for all Americans. The people, united, have a wisdom that exceeds that of any one individual or party. The president can move out ahead and can slowly bring people along. See Barack Obama and gays in the military. By moving slowly but purposefully, he repealed the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and instituted full equality. Trump can’t do anything like that because he simply isn’t disciplined enough to pull it off.

How has Trump done at turning people against DACA or the Dreamers? Not so hot.

In fact, the poll indicates that wide swaths of registered voters support Dreamers regardless of gender, education, income, ethnicity, religion and ideology. That includes 68 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of conservatives and 64 percent of those who approve of the job Trump is doing.

From the very beginning of his presidency, Trump has opposed the Dreamers. At this late date, he clearly hasn’t brought anyone along with him.

The Post-Gazette has a lot of criticisms of Biden, but all of that is based on sheer guesswork and their peering into a crystal ball.

Color me extremely unimpressed! Vote out Trump and put in Biden!

Closing arguments against re-electing Donald Trump as President

PBS put out an episode of Frontline that’s a bit less than an hour on how Donald Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. PBS is less partisan then the media I normally consume, so I recommend it for people who are more middle-of-the-road than I am. The episode blames President Obama for not leaving the US as prepared as he could have. I found all of their arguments on that score to be reasonable and well-documented.

They had a Rear Admiral who was in charge of the  FEMA Supply Chain Stabilization Task Force who was, wow, he sounded straight out of the Vietnam War "Five O'Clock Follies," and just kept repeating that everything was fine and everybody was well-supplied. The report makes it clear that neither assertion was true.

What particularly infuriated me was when the President had a "meeting" with regular doctors (Around the 30 minute mark in the episode). With Trump sitting down, everybody else standing and everyone facing the camera (Trump had to crane his neck back to talk to people), it was crystal clear that the "meeting" was intended to be nothing more than a quick photo-op. The President clearly had no interest in getting input from the field.

One of the weaknesses of the episode is that it nowhere mentions that the US shipped off large quantities of supplies that we urgently needed here at home. Nothing wrong with helping out other countries, as long as we have a fully-functioning supply chain that’s busy cranking out enough supplies for both US domestic needs and for what foreigners need. This Twitter thread details the large quantities of supplies that were sent off to other countries in March. Apparently, the Trump Administration ceased to do this at the end of March, but it’s just amazing that they had so little concern for what our own domestic needs were.

The result of all of these shortages of basic equipment and of the President slacking off on the wearing of masks is that we’re now heading for a third peak of infections! Every other country just had one. They might be headed for another wave of infections, but the US never stopped getting a high rate of infections, so our ”wave” just keeps getting higher and higher.

The President admitted on October 15th that he owes around $400 million. This is extremely serious. When agencies investigate people for security clearances, one of the first things they look at is whether the person is financially secure. If they’re not, they’re open to being blackmailed! This, in light of the fact that the President has tried extremely hard, throughout his presidency, to keep his income tax returns a secret. CNBC:

Since entering the White House, Mr. Trump has broken with tradition set by his predecessors by not only refusing to release his tax returns but by waging a legal battle to keep them hidden.

What else is he hiding, even after the NY Times revealed many years worth of tax returns? Point 3 in the CNBC report says that Trump has lost $315 million on his golf courses since 2000. The United States has an extreme security risk in that the President owes so much money and that the US still doesn’t have a complete picture of his finances.  

Amazingly, there are still people who are skeptical that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The Republican-led Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Russia intervened from 2014 to 2017. Is Russia still meddling? Well, if the Trump Administration is trying to show that Russia isn’t meddling, it’s taking actions that increase Democratic suspicions rather than to disprove them.

A blog reports that: “The Presidency of the United States Has Been Penetrated By Russian Intelligence: The US Intelligence Community Determined That Rudy Giuliani Was the Target of a Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!”

How has the President been on dealing with three foreign countries? Sure, Europeans may disdain him and think he’s uncouth and disloyal to NATO, but hey, he’s been effectively dealing with Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, right?

Trump has been trying to conduct a “regime change” in Venezuela for quite a while now.  Juan Guaido – president of the National Assembly who is recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by more than 50 countries, has been trying to overthrow Venezuela’s de facto president, Nicolas Maduro since January 2019. The latest attempt was in early May. Venezuela is undergoing a massive humanitarian crisis with a 94% poverty rate, but Hollywood fantasies expressed in initiatives like Operation Gedeon give the government legitimacy and encourage Venezuelans to “rally ‘round the flag” in opposition to the imperialist US.

The “Maximum Pressure” campaign against Iran has been similarly unsuccessful.

While many ordinary Iranians are suffering, the economy is not in total free fall, as many in Washington hoped for. Instead, the country has shown signs of economic recovery, with domestic production and employment increasing. According to Iran’s Central Bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati, Iran’s nonoil gross domestic product grew by 1.1 percent last year. Prominent Iranian economist Saeed Laylaz also contends that Iran’s economy can weather the coronavirus pandemic and may experience growth this year despite the virus.

For years, the Trump Administration has taken the view that Iran was about to collapse and surrender any day. Clearly, that’s not going to happen.

How has the US been doing with North Korea? It’s hardly Trump’s fault that North Korea threatens the US with nuclear weapons. They’ve been doing that under many leaders for many years. ArmsControl.org refers many time to “denuclearization.” But has North Korea agreed to a definition of the term? It’s impossible to engage in any serious negotiations unless both parties agree to terms that are critical to the issue that’s under discussion. Apparently, according to NK, that term means that everybody in the entire world must decommission their nuclear arms all at once. The US is, of course, highly unlikely to ever agree to this. In July of this year, North Korea declared that denuclearization “is not possible at this point in time.” So, despite President Trump making many cheerful declarations, diplomacy with NK isn’t any further advanced than it was when Trump entered office.

There are many other issues we could discuss, including the President’s apparent belief that he’s free to discuss wacky theories like what QAnon brings up as though he’s just some private citizen that no one takes seriously, but he is taken seriously by many millions of people as they, quite reasonably, believe that he has access to the best and most current information.

My view is that he’s accomplished nothing of note in the last 3-plus years and that his record simply does not justify giving him another term.  

Update: The former star of Cheers, Kirstie Alley, weighs in on the election:

Kirstie Alley

@kirstiealley

· 9h

I’m voting for @realDonaldTrump because he’s NOT a politician. I voted for him 4 years ago for this reason and shall vote for him again for this reason. He gets things done quickly and he will turn the economy around quickly. There you have it folks there you have it

1. Agree. Trump is an utterly incompetent politician. 2. "He gets things done..." Erm, ah, no. No, he doesn't. He can't get things done at all. See the above essay. 3. "he will turn the economy around..." For the same reason he can't apply "Law 'N' Order," no, he can't turn the economy around because he's responsible for the horrible shape that it's in today. Nothing is going to change after a successful election.

President Trump and the coronavirus

 This, to me, is the Trump Administration's worst failure. 

Was Trump responsible for the existence of COVID-19? No, and neither was China (Which is why it's racist to call it the "China virus").

Was he responsible for it spreading to the US? No, it spread everywhere. Even though the route from China to the US was partially blocked, evidence has shown that it was Italy was the main portal that the coronavirus came from. 

The REAL problem is pointed out in this piece: "...hospitals were pleading for masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment to safeguard their medical staff." 

The piece goes on to document the Trump Administrations faith in the free market. But the free market was simply not the answer, as producing equipment is something that the federal government has done extremely well for well over a century. 

As the piece explains, the need for the federal government to take the lead was obvious. This is something that, over the past several months, has gotten better. But this, and other problems the piece points to ("With just 4% of the world’s population, we now account for 20% of global deaths from the virus."), shows that Trump is simply incapable of doing the job of President. 

The free market was simply incapable of doing the job of supplying America's hospitals with what was needed and The President deserves every curse and insult he's gotten for not recognizing this.

Update I: The Press Secretary condemned the Vanity Fair story and is heavily criticized by commenters on Twitter. 

Update II: From a Vanity Fair story about the Pentagon being allocated $1 billion to fight the pandemic by producing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE - gowns, masks, gloves, etc.) and then deciding to spend it on other things.  

Meanwhile, U.S. health officials say there are still significant funding gaps in the country’s pandemic response, with CDC director Robert Redfield warning a Senate panel last week that states urgently need about $6 billion for vaccine distribution. There is still a severe shortage of N95 masks at multiple U.S. hospitals. 

The rally at Tulsa

Keep in mind that Brad Parscale, the President's campaign manager, has been paid lots and lots of money to do his job. Remember that when we look at the utter cluster%$#@ from last night. This link is the complete thread for all that follows, but I've selected a few highlight here.

How much of a disaster was it last night? Hoo boy!

Remember, the President is a malignant narcissist. These are "trigger words!"

Again, the President seems to be convinced that if you don't test for a disease, then everything will be okay. We had diseases for many millennia before we had tests for them.

Context for this clip: Aftermath from the brutal murder of George Floyd and 121k coronavirus deaths and this is what he talks about.

Oh, and there was racism, plenty of racism. Nothing overly blatant, just stuff like "kung-flu."

Campaign makes the wild, hysterical, utterly ridiculous charge that protesters blocked access to the rally. Really? There were no police there? Or the police put up with that? And also, uh, no video?

Ooh! NY Times asks "...has the MAGA rally lost its luster?"

As I mentioned months ago, any city that fails to get the Trump campaign to pay for everything up front is run by idiots. No sympathy for them. They'll never see that money!

The President's rich fantasy life

 

 The President sure has a rich fantasy life. This is from a recent tweet:

"The people that know me and know the history of our Country say that I am  the hardest working President in history. I don’t know about that, but I am a hard worker and have probably gotten more done in the first 3 1/2 years than any President in history."

Trump's fourth Press Secretary says:

"[White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows] looks at the president's schedule and he made the point the president is so busy and so hard at work, his concern is making sure he gets a bite to eat here and there, so you gotta put that in context."

Yet, Slate says:

...the wealthiest country in history cannot seem to provide basic medical equipment to doctors and nurses and lifesaving care to its citizens during an emergency.

Slate says the problem is the same as in Eastern Europe during the 1980s:

One of the most enduring images of 1980s Eastern Europe is people queuing up outside of stores for scarce goods. But people were resourceful; they leveraged personal connections to skip lines and made do with ersatz products when something simply wasn’t available.

What characterizes a "failed state?" More than any other one factor, corruption.

An extremely consequential example of corruption has been FEMA seizing medical supplies from those states and institutions that have ordered and paid for those supplies. When someone orders supplies from a vendor, it's because they've calculated that's what they need. When the Veterans Health Administration orders 5 million masks, it's because they've calculated that's what they need, not because "Hey, it'd be cool to have 5 million masks."

How well has the US responded to COVID-19?

Reported US coronavirus deaths on date:

Feb. 26: 0 deaths
Mar. 26: 1,195 deaths
Apr. 26: 54,856 deaths

Italy has been very hard hit and has suffered 26,640 deaths. Their death rate has declined to "only" around 400 a day. At their peak, they were around 750 a day, give or take 100. But Italy's daily death rate has been declining since late March. That of the US is still growing.

So yeah, it's a really nice idea that our President thinks he's working really hard, but he declared that COVID-19 was a crisis on 13 March, 46 days ago. Trump likes to grade his own performance as an A+, regardless of how well he actually does. I'd say his response to the coronavirus rates about a D-, at best.

Special Olympics and Trump Administration

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to cut a small program like Special Olympics and to then turn around and say you have a heart just like everyone else. 

And keep in mind that while Special Olympics costs $18 million a year, DeVos's around-the-clock security detail cost $7.54 million last year and will be $7.7 million this year.

"DeVos defends plan to eliminate Special Olympics funding"
Two statements that caught my eye:

“Given our current budget realities..."

What "realities" might those be? Oooh yeaaah! The massive tax cut that's pretty much the sole legislative accomplishment of Speaker Ryan, Majority Leader McConnell and President Trump.
 

DeVos replied that she thinks the group is “awesome” but should be supported by philanthropy.

That's a defensible idea, but how about some sort of transition? How about a planned move from being government supported to being self-sustaining? I know, I know, that would require, y'know, work and effort and something more than just lounging around on your yacht.

Education Secretary DeVos gets overruled on funding the Special Olympics. She then desperately pretends to be okay with that. "I am pleased and grateful the President and I see eye-to-eye on this issue..." Neither one explains how the issue arose in the first place or why her initial decision was overruled.

“The White House, Not DeVos, Wanted to Slash Special Olympics Budget”
I had heard the first part of this statement, but not the second. The second makes no sense unless one “accepts the premise that the White House, not DeVos, ordered the cut in the first place.

After Trump reinstated the funds, DeVos issued a statement saying she was “pleased and grateful the President and I see eye-to-eye on this issue.” She then adds“This is funding I have fought for behind the scenes over the last several years.”

Jon Voight and the President's record

The actor Jon Voight has a very high opinion of President Trump: "our country is stronger [&] safer... because our president has made his every move correct."

Stronger? Since 1976, views on pregnancy/abortion haven't changed much. The pro-choicers have consistently outnumbered anti-choicers by about 2 to 1, yet anti-choicers have been strengthened by this President (and by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader who saw to it that the Supreme Court was not turned liberal by preventing the seating of Judge Merrick Garland) to the point where there are "soaring incidents of trespassing, disruption, and intimidation at abortion clinics." The President has gone all-in on supporting anti-choicers. How is this sort of divisive political action making us stronger?

Safer? Looking at a public opinion poll that examined international attitudes towards the US, there are only three countries that view the US in a more favorable light than they did at the end of the Obama Presidency, Israel, Kenya and Russia. The rest of the world, including long-time allies, view us less favorably.
Also, the US has an intelligence-sharing program with four other countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, that is now endangered by the President giving Attorney General William Barr complete authority to investigate how the Mueller Report originated.
How on Earth does any of this count as making us any safer?!?!?!

NY Times makes major screw-up

On the 21^st of September, the New York Times published a story suggesting that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had seriously proposed wearing a wire in meetings with the President. Criticism of the story was so swift and severe that by the end of the day, Matthew Rosenberg (he covers intelligence and national security for the Times) said: “Enough already: @adamgoldmanNYT & @nytmike broke an important story that advances our understanding of a crucial moment. It’s no plot by pro-Trump forces. It’s good reporting.”

Actually, it’s hard to imagine how the story ever got off the ground when:

Rosenstein disputed this account.

“The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,” he said in a statement.

Now, when someone denies a story in which they are accused of taking an action, it hardly means they're innocent. But it does mean that the story needs to be backed up with serious evidence. If the news source doesn't have that stronger evidence, the story needs to stay in the reporter's desk drawer or computer to await the day when better evidence is available.

But the story was based on second-hand, hearsay sources. When the story says of their sources:“The people were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by F.B.I. officials...” then that means that nobody who was quoted was actually in the room when Rosenstein said what he allegedly said. That means that Rosenstein's word trumps anything the paper's sources said.

Was the story “important?” Good Heavens, if the story can’t even be substantiated as accurate, then no. By definition, it isn’t important.

Also, it’s not as though a story about hate and discontent and chaos in the early days of the Trump Administration is “news” in any meaningful sense of the word . People generally knew that. No, nothing was “advanced.”

Good reporting? Hardly. This fails Journalism 101.

Was the story consequential? Unfortunately, yes it was. The President immediately accused Rosenstein of having been “hired” by the Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

ThinkProgress reports that:

The news story has Washington on edge, amid fears that the report may push the mercurial president to fire Rosenstein — an action he has long been rumored to be considering. Such a move would have knock on effects on the ongoing Justice Department probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, an investigation being led by former FBI chief Robert Mueller.

And Sean Hannity of Fox News said that Rosenstein was "leading a silent coup against Trump."

Liberals and conservatives evaluate news differently. A conservative commenting in my local paper dismissed a piece of evidence I produced because it came from a magazine called “Mother Jones.” Obviously, he thought, nothing serious could come out of a news source with such a silly name.

Liberals have little use for knowing where a news item came from. It’s not completely irrelevant, but it’s not among the top five pieces of evidence we need to evaluate a story. In addition to whether a story follows the rules of just plain good journalism as we saw in the story I just cited, then if it's accurate, it will be re-published by several different sources as each of those sources will be expected to do their due diligence to verify the story. Also, if the story is accurate, the other sources are likely to add other details to it.

If a story is crap, it won't go anywhere. The host of Infowars, Alex Jones, came up with the bizarre notion of humanoids, who are “like 80 percent gorilla and 80 percent pig and they're talking." Never heard of this story? Exactly. If the story had any credibility, it would have been re-published by other sources. As it was, it didn't survive getting outside the “hothouse” of Infowars.

Lara Trump and the Women's March

Hmm. So Lara Trump (Daughter-in-law of the President) has several “proofs” as to why participants in last Sunday’s Woman’s March actually had nothing to complain about.

1. "Melania is incredible" Well, the last we heard of Melania's cyber-bullying initiative was in September and the last I heard, no one from the community that deals with that subject had heard anything from her in terms of her seeking any advice from them. So it's hard to give her any credit when she's invisible on her chosen issue.

2. "Democrats, they are okay with all women as long as you have their same opinion on things." Is Lara suggesting that wearing a skirt is sufficient reason for feminists/Democrats to support a woman? Certainly, Mike Huckabee has suggested that. He thinks that because his daughter (Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Press Secretary) is female, she should get support from feminists.

3. "the Women's March wasn't just about women. It was more of a hateful, anti-Trump protest" Yeah, that was kind of the whole point of it. As a participant in both this years and last years marches, I agree that our disagreement with the President was a very major reason for both marches.

4. "He has a woman as the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Education"

   4.a. The National Review had a headline on Kirstjen Nielsen "Left Fails to Praise Trump's Nomination…" (See point 2 about Mike Huckabee) But Neilsen was apparently amazed to hear that Norway had mostly white people in it. She's also never met a Dreamer. She was in the room for President Trump's "shithole" comment but gee, just can't seem to recall the word he used. These and many more details at this link.

   4.b. As to the Department of Education, yes, we've gone over and over Betsy DeVos. She tries to present herself here as a daring and innovative outsider. Her results though, have been less than impressive.

[DeVo] has yet to fill senior staff positions, and it’s widely known that numerous prominent Republicans having turned down offers. She has struggled to acclimate to the proverbial big ship that turns slowly. Perhaps most significant, she failed to persuade the committees of jurisdiction in Congress to approve her and the department’s budget request, which would have slashed funding to other initiatives in the name of expanding DeVos’ pet cause, school choice. It amounted to an embarrassing repudiation of a president and a secretary in their first year, when there is traditionally the most political capital to spend—especially considering Republicans control both the House and Senate.

So yes, Trump has appointed women to high-level positions, but are those appointees anything for feminists to feel pride in?

5. "He had the first woman run a successful presidential campaign, with Kellyanne [Conway]" Yeah, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into how much of Trump’s “successful presidential campaign” was the result of good campaigning and how much was Russian influence, how much was white-collar crime and how much was cyber crime.

6. "Women's unemployment is at a 17-year low right now" When an economy does well or poorly at the beginning of a presidential term has a great deal to do with what happened in prior years. A big national economy is like an oil tanker. It’s a really big and hard-to-steer ship which takes a lot of energy to move. Changing course is difficult. It’s far from clear that Trump deserves much credit for economic good news. When does a president deserve credit? The Obama stimulus is a good example. Nearly $800 billion was pumped into the economy in short order and the economy very quickly became a success story. Eventually, Trump will be able to claim credit, but that will take awhile.

So, the big, final, ultimate conclusion that Lara Trump reaches is: "And, yet, these women out there are so anti-Trump. And I don't even think they know why. They just think that's the thing to do." Yeah, Twitter had a field day at that, many users asking who Lara even was.

Why did I march? The event that caused me to completely give up on the President and to conclude that he simply didn’t stand for American values was his reaction to the alt-right, torch-lit march in Charlottesville. By defending the march, Trump made it clear that he stood for Third Reich values.

President Trump’s war on climate change science has resulted in a staggering amount of straight-out censorship. As to the current effects of climate change:

We are now seeing the impacts of climate change everywhere. None of us thought that we would find huge changes taking place in the oceans, which have been largely ignored. But the range shifts [migration of plants and animals] there are 10 times that of land. Also, we are seeing diseases coming from ocean systems, like outbreaks of vibrio poisoning [bacteria that occur naturally in warm coastal areas]. We think of these as being tropical but we are now seeing outbreaks in colder waters like the Baltic and Alaska.

"Trump talked big about the opioid crisis, but he's failing to lead on that, too" “He did appoint a commission. I think those people did a pretty good job. They were smart, they listened, they came up with a lot of good ideas. And they’ve been ignored entirely.” There’s plenty of agreement on what to do, but spending money that way conflicts with the big Republican tax cut that was passed in December.

Vice President Pence was warned that Trump’s abrupt, unilateral decision to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Jordan sees nothing positive in that decision and much to be concerned about. It was announced in December that "Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced Wednesday that the Palestinians will no longer work with American peace negotiators...”

It’s only when people get all of their news within the right-wing bubble that Trump’s presidency looks like a success.

President's speech on pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord

Okay, just read the President's speech on climate change and on his pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

1. Is the economy "coming back?" The latest jobs report is not horrible, but not really that impressive. There is no sign of a Trump boom and good reason to worry.

2. He goes through a series of promises kept, one of which is "putting in place tough new ethics rules." Erm, yeah. About those "tough" rules, the Trump Administration has already made 16 exceptions, a number that, in five months, is equal to Obama's over eight years.

3. One commitment that was very clearly not kept was the commitment to not touch Social Security or Medicaid. As AARP puts it "The proposed [AHCA/Trumpcare] legislation would also make huge cuts to Medicaid by taking $880 billion out of the program by 2026" and SSDI benefits are slated to be cut as well. Yes, the President keeps his promises, but in a highly selective manner. Some promises he takes seriously. Others, not so much.

4. The promise to renegotiate the Paris Climate Accord is dead on arrival. Won't happen.

5. From the speech: "The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries..." Erm, no. Preventing global warming is good for all humans on the planet. "Climate change resulting from rising greenhouse gas emissions is expected to lead to increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns over the next century that will, among other things, significantly affect human livelihoods. Since the beginning of this millennium, natural hazards, such as hurricanes, have triggered disasters, which have reversed years of development work." In fact, climate change is already making us sick. The Navy is very much aware that rising seas pose an enormous danger to coastal military bases.

6. The WaPo has an extensive fact-checking piece that thoroughly debunks the speech.

Update: People have asked how serious the President is on this issue.  I really don't think there's much room for doubt. He's taken the same position consistently since 2012, that global warming is a hoax. His position may be completely cynical, but he's held for a long time.

Between rock and hard place

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) complains about Obama's approach to ISIS. Problem is, McCain is in kind of a bind. On the one hand, Iran is acting against ISIS on the ground in Iraq. ISIS is a truly awful, terrible outfit that commits atrocities. We're conducting active hostilities against them, bombing them very frequently. Iran is the entity we're negotiating with about their not-yet-built nuclear weapon and is supporting many not-friends in the Middle East. Iran is also actively conducting hostilities against ISIS (A point that Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) appeared to be very confused on a while ago). McCain wishes to replace Iran in Iraq with American “boots on the ground,” but Americans are very unenthusiastic about getting back into a war in Iraq. A Quinnipiac University poll (18-22 Nov 2014) asked respondents: "Do you think the United States military should have combat troops on the ground in Iraq or not?" The response was that only 37% of the public is in favor of that, 55% said no. 
 
Speaker of the House John Boehner is also very unhappy and is also in a bind. He's very unhappy with the draft AUMF that President Obama has proposed for authorizing a war against ISIS. Also, “For years, Boehner and other GOP leaders have complained that Obama is an out-of-control tyrant, hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and amassing excessive power in the executive.” So, Boehner's statement on the situation is: “President Obama should scrap his war powers request to fight Islamic terrorists and go back to the drawing board, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Tuesday.”

But why is the President the one who has to “go back to the drawing board”? Why can't Congress draft and pass its own AUMF? There's no obvious reason that anyone is able to see for Congress to delegate this job to the President. Yes, it's a difficult process, with lots of clashing priorities. That doesn't get Congress off the hook. Boehner is a Speaker “with a large majority in the House at his back and a longing for historical significance in his heart, Boehner is determined to be remembered by history as someone who did something.” But in order for a legislator to be remembered as a significant figure, that means doing the hard work of governing, not just slacking off and expecting others to do your work for you.

ISIS and Iran and the unwillingness of the American people to re-engage in Iraq makes for a tough, hard-to-resolve situation. It's not difficult to see that there are no quick and easy and simple, expedient answers. It appears that the Republican Congress and Senate are both so used to simply saying “No” to everything, they've forgotten how to do the hard work of governing.

Bush speaks on Obama's Mideast policy

G.W. Bush “at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do.” His first impulse was the correct one. He really should have stayed quiet.

Bush relied on an old friend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for advice on how Obama should have dealt with the Iraqi insistence that the US should have stuck to the originally schedule of withdrawal by the end of 2011, as the agreement Bush and the President of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, specified back in 2008. Bush suggests that Obama could have renegotiated that agreement to allow a least a substantial contingent of US troops to remain. But Global Policy cited three works, all from 2006, showing that Iraqis in general had a very negative opinion of seeing permanent US bases in Iraq. It's highly unlikely that Iraqis would have changed their minds by 2011 as US troops had made themselves very unpopular during their stay there and the Iraqi people were given no reason to want to see them staying on. Did the surge have a dramatic effect on convincing Iraqis that Americans were good guys? No, the surge temporarily quited things there, but there were no serious political changes afterwards.

Also, reconstruction was a complete and utter bust. Just a few months after the war of 1991 with the US and a coalition of nations, the evil dictator Saddam Hussein completed “bubble-gum and scotch-tape” repairs to his country's infrastructure, but the American reconstruction effort after the invasion of 2003 was a complete waste.

Virtually every senior Iraqi, in sharp contrast, said the decade-long U.S. occupation was beset by huge misspending and waste and had accomplished little. The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money-laundering. Such a huge investment "could have brought great change in Iraq," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, but the gains were often "lost."

How reliable is Graham for policy analysis? Well, in November 2014, CNN asked him to respond to the report on Benghazi put out by the Republican House Intelligence Committee. Basically, the report said he was completely wrong on everything he had said about the case. He got very heated about a very secondary issue concerning talking points that were put out later and made stern and angry pronouncements based on that. This is hardly unusual for Graham, as in his public career, Graham has rarely been correct on any matter of substance.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State [IS, ISIL or ISIS] as al-Qaeda’s 'second act' and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic.

First off, “murdering innocents” is hardly a tactic unique to al Qaeda. That alone does nothing to connect the two groups. As a blogger points out in Informed Comment:

Like Al-Qaeda and other militants, ISIS offers a militant warped and distorted Salafi ideology/religious rationale or rationalization to justify, recruit, legitimate and motivate many of its fighters. Much of what they do violates Islamic law, its unabashed acts of terrorism: slaughter of civilians, savage use of beheadings, killing of innocent Muslims and Christians. While there are similarities between ISIS and other terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda in their ideological worldview and tactics, there is also distinctive difference. ISIS seeks to create a state, to occupy and control areas, to govern, not just to dream of or speak of but to create and impose their version of a transnational caliphate, with its harsh version of law and order. At the same time, they are far more ruthless in driving out, suppressing and executing Shiah and Kurds, Sunni imams/religious leaders and others who disagree, as well as minorities such as Christians and Yazidis, demanding conversion to their warped and extraordinarily violent brand of Islam. Having populations forced to publicly pledge their allegiance (baya) to the caliphate in exchange for which they are offered security, a mafia like version of “protection” and social services.

So no, ISIS is a very distinct and separate group from al Qaeda.

Yes, under Bush, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured. But,

...where Bush officials brazenly dismissed law as an inconvenient obstacle and sought to deal with suspects outside the law, Obama has said that the struggle with Al Qaeda must adhere to our nation’s first principles. He argues that the rule of law lends our struggle legitimacy and helps to isolate and defeat our enemies.

Obama has fallen short on applying these principles, but he has adhered to them far better than Bush ever even tried to.

Did Bush's policies decrease terrorism around the world? Actually, according to the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, terrorism increased under Bush sevenfold. Plus, if one is interested in holding back Iran and keeping Iran from territorial expansion, taking out Saddam Hussein of Iraq was a pretty terrible move. For all of Saddam's faults, and he had many, Iraq was a stable state that stood fast against Iran. Now, of course, the need to combat ISIS has opened up room for Iran to operate in Iraq. In a piece about a proposed bill to aid forces in Iraq that are friendly to the US, The Guardian points out that

Those Shia militias, many of which are sponsored by Iran, have played key roles in fighting Isis, to include spearheading the recent monthlong battle to retake the Sunni city of Tikrit.

Here's an interesting comment:

[Bush] said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your military and say ‘What’s your plan?’ ” He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007, by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

So Bush says that leaders should listen to the military, which is all very fine and well, but Bush's military leaders actually disagreed with the surge. As Commander in Chief, Bush insisted on it anyway, as was his right, but this is a case where Bush very clearly departed from his own advice. Reporter Bob Woodward reported that, on “60 Minutes” in September 2008, "The records of the joint chiefs show that the idea of five brigades came from the White House, not from anybody except the White House."

In the same month, presidential candidate Barack Obama admitted that the surge was indeed succeeding. What was clear was that a reduction in violence was occurring. But why that reduction was occurring had to do with the Sunni Awakening (Al Qaeda was overdoing the violence and alienating Sunni Iraqis), Muqtada al-Sadr decided that his Mahdi army should cease operations and the US was paying many groups of guerrillas to fight on the side of the US. Unfortunately, the whole political purpose of the surge was never carried out and no political transformation ever took place during the “breathing room” that the addition of five brigades were supposed to have secured for Iraq's leadership. Thus was set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

Putin’s domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush. "Hell, I'd be popular, too, if I owned NBC news," he said.

Actually, Bush claimed in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN arms inspectors in 1998. What actually happened was that Clinton wanted to bomb Iraq, told the UN inspectors to leave for their own safety and, when the bombing was over, Saddam refused to let inspectors back in. Pretty much the entire US media dutifully repeated Bush's lie that Saddam had kicked out the inspectors, which of course, had the added advantage of making Clinton look weak and helpless in retrospect. Bush may not have formally controlled the media, but he had virtual, de facto control anyway.

After it became clear that Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, Bush claimed several times that Saddam Hussein was given a choice prior to the invasion of 2003, to let in weapons inspectors or to be invaded. Bush maintained several times that Saddam refused to let the inspectors in and so sealed his fate. But everyone knew that wasn't true. Inspectors came into Iraq and inspected everything they wanted to. But the press corps permitted Bush to lie unchallenged.

So I'm really not sure what Bush's problem with the press corps is. They permitted many lies to go unchallenged. Their discipline did break a few times, notably in the case of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, but by and large, they maintained a rigid, lock-step discipline and didn't permit themselves too much independence.

No, if Bush became unpopular, that was due to his staggering ineptitude and horrible policies, not because the press was biased against him. I remember reading back in early 2009 that several Bush Administration members got together and talked over old times. They identified four disasters, 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, New Orleans/Katrina and the collapse of the housing bubble that resulted in the Great Recession. Problem is, in all four cases, Bush and his people had a great deal to do with either initiating the disaster or in not responding properly. In none of the cases could they plausibly claim to have been innocently taken by surprise. No, if Bush is regarded today as something you'd scrape off of the bottom of your shoes, his own actions had everything to do with that.

Gun bill “fails” with 54 in favor and 46 against

There are two methods of fixing the Senate rules, there's the “Constitutional Option,” where the rules are changed at the beginning of the two-year session and then there's the “Nuclear Option,” where the rules are changed mid-session. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), opted for a really mild, watered-down Constitutional Option this last January in order to deal with the filibuster (Note: the filibuster is not in the Constitution and the first filibuster didn't occur until 1837). We saw today with a vote on an already weakened and watered-down gun safety bill that the Constitutional Option produced an insufficient safeguard against an out-of-control overuse of the filibuster, where a minority of the Senate opposes a measure supported by around 90% of the American people.

Wonkette replies to a disgruntled conservative with a scathing, NSFW (Not Safe For Work) commentary (The conservative whined and moaned about former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords “bullying” people), which expresses my mood about Harry Reid and the filibuster quite well.

Update: Excellent reaction by President Obama. Hear! Hear!

Broder's latest

David Broder accuses the Democratic majority in Congress ("The Votes Obama Truly Needs" Jan 30) of using

...the tight timetable and their control of legislative procedures to block virtually all efforts to open the [economic recovery] bill to compromise.

Sounds like a serious charge. What exactly were these oh-so-productive and highly useful "compromises" that the Republicans were generously and patriotically offering to "improve" the economic recovery bill? Broder doesn't say. This is a rather crucial point if Broder is to make the case that compromise is necessary. How can citizens decide whether compromise is needed if we have no idea what one of the sides is offering?

As it turns out, what was being offered was essentially tax cuts. On MSNBC Live, CNBC host Erin Burnett stated that conservative icon Rush Limbaugh offered "serious ideas" on the issue and proceeded to name " 'cutting the corporate tax' and 'slashing capital gains [taxes]' ", after which Media Matters quotes economists examining such ideas and awarding them a failing grade. Very usefully, the piece shows a chart giving us the relative efficacy of various proposals. Giving the proposal "Cut in corporate tax rate" a "score" of 1:0.30 means that if the US cuts the corporate tax rate, it will sacrifice one dollar that would otherwise go to the Treasury in return for 30 cents worth of economic stimulus. A "score" of 1:1.59 for "Increased infrastructure spending" means that for a dollar spent on that item, the US gets $1.59 worth of economic stimulus back.

A member of the American Enterprise Institute think tank made precisely the same point in a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Obama must grab the U.S. mood" Feb 1), namely that Democrats should make unspecified compromises in order to get Republican support for the economic recovery bill. Nothing wrong with a columnist using Republican talking points without bothering to even talk to the majority party that dominates both chambers and runs the White House, but it's a rather obvious giveaway when blatantly partisan talking points are so seamlessly lifted from one source to another.

Broder also makes a very interesting statement later on in his piece when he talks about:

...the sickening economic slide that has gripped the country in the past five months.

Okay, so there's a real rush here and the rush is not entirely due to Democrats using their "control of legislative procedures" to hurry the other side along. Again, this gives the impression that this article is a hurried cut-and-paste job, copied almost verbatim from Republican talking points.

Nothing was more central to [Obama's] victory last fall than his claim that he could break the partisan gridlock in Washington.

Really? I don't remember any such promise. The closest I found to that was:

“I’ve always believed that you can only bring about real change when people come together across party lines, and I’ve seen what happens when folks put politics aside and get down to work,” Senator Obama said. “If you can’t bring people together across the old fault lines, you simply aren’t going to be able to make progress on the challenges we face.”

This certainly sounds to me like President Obama intended to try and "break the partisan gridlock," but he doesn't "promise" to do any such thing. He very definitely expresses it as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself.

What I really remember was Obama promising to do specific things that George W. Bush and John McCain were strongly opposed to, such as to get American troops out of Iraq, to fix America's then-looming economic crisis and to restore America's moral place in the world by stopping torture and closing Guantanamo. One of the more effective lines in the campaign was that McCain was seeking to do "Bush's third term." Obviously, this line was effective precisely because Americans were not looking for Democrats and Republicans to be nice to each other and agree with each other about everything. Sure, it'd be nice to get the other side of the aisle to vote for an effective economic recovery, but I think most Americans would rather see a good bill with no Republican votes than a bad bill with Republican votes. Broder then states that

[Obama] wants to be like Ronald Reagan, steering his first economic measures through a Democratic House in 1981, not Bill Clinton, passing his first budget in 1993 without a single Republican vote.

The first way leads to long-term success; the second foretells the early loss of control. 

Erm, Clinton "lost control" because Republicans under Newt Gingrich took an extraordinarily partisan approach to governing, spending enormous amounts of time investigating non-stories such as Whitewater and later demonstrating screeching hysteria over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, an extremely trivial, low-grade scandal that would not have warranted even being publicly mentioned a few short decades ago. Sorry, but the lessons history teaches often can't fit neatly onto a bumper sticker the way Broder clearly wants this example to.
Wow! A

...dozen or so House Republicans who wanted to vote yes before the process turned ugly...

sounds to me like these House Republican are guilty of the charge "Dereliction of Duty." If they voted against an urgently needed bill because they wanted to quibble over a few details or because their tender sensibilities were bruised, they need to simply quit their jobs and hand them over to people who are capable of doing them. To play such juvenile games with an economic crisis is...wow!

David Broder is obviously just cutting-and-pasting without any real thought or concern for what he's writing. Can he please retire now? There's a rocking chair on a porch with his name on it.

Accomplishments?

Several years back, I heard about a high school girls cross-country track team. For a reason I forget, it didn't have much in the way of leadership for a whole school year. The girls slacked off and ran at a leisurely pace, didn't really try and didn't push themselves. Their poor performance really made itself felt at their year-end party. They realised that they had nothing to celebrate as they hadn't accomplished anything.

I remembered that story when reading about this years White House Correspondents' Association dinner. It was apparently a complete drag as the Bush Administration had nothing it had accomplished in the past seven-plus years that it could openly brag about. Katrina/New Orleans is something they may have regarded as a success, but obviously, they can't brag (at least not openly) about it. I mean, besides voter suppression and initiating bogus "voter fraud" (i.e., anti-likely-Democratic-voter cases) and getting the Iraq War extended into the next president's term, what can loyal Republicans brag about?

The press corps? The statement by the evening's entertainer was "It is your task to watch the government, to make sure they do not exceed their power. Well done on that, by the way, the last eight years." But the press corps did nothing of the sort. On March 8th of this year, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed waterboarding. That very evening, Bush attempted some off-key warbling and the press corps stood to applaud him. One could perhaps argue that the correspondents were applauding his singing and that his veto of the bill wasn't considered to be relevant, but it's not like their publications made a big fuss over the veto, either (Our local paper covered it, but it's hard to say where in the paper the story appeared. A Yahoo search shows many, many more alternative media sources on the story than it does traditional media sources).

The story of networks using retired generals as TV commentators, generals who were still working for the Pentagon to spread the Bush Administration's stories, was put out on the 20th of April. On the 24th of April,

Judy Woodruff stated:"[W]e invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond."
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Media Matters for America previously noted that, in contrast with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, as of 11:59 p.m. on April 22, none of the following outlets had covered the Times report on shows whose transcripts are available in the Nexis database: PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, and NPR. A follow-up search* on April 25 determined that as of 11:59 p.m. ET on April 24, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News had still not covered the report during news programs whose transcripts are available in the Nexis database.**

So no, it really can't be said that the traditional media had anything to celebrate, either. But Froomkin gets in a good one:

Throngs surrounded aging professional floozy Pamela Anderson, a guest of Bloomberg, who happily posed for countless photos in a dress that exposed the preponderance of her two most outstanding achievements.

Ooooh! Snap!!

The 16 April Obama-Clinton debate

George Stephanopoulos defends the 16 April so-called "debate" between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but really, it was largely just an attack on Obama by Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson. Clinton caught some flak as well, but she joined in a few times, thereby occasionally making it a three-to-one fight.

“The vote for the president,” Stephanopoulos said, “is one of the most personal” decisions that someone makes.

“When people make that choice, they take into account how candidates stand on the issues,” he said, but also are concerned with “experience, character [and] credibility.”

“You can’t find a presidential election where those issues didn’t come into play,” he said.

Stephanopoulos explained that since the candidates are not far apart policy-wise, the “core of the nomination fight” has been about these issues.

“They’ve been fighting it out on this turf,” he said, adding that these are things that “came up between this debate and the last one.”

But as Media Matters has pointed out more than once, the media really can't be relied upon to assess character with any accuracy.

Of course character is important in choosing a president; of course personality will always play a role. The problem isn't that journalists think character and personality matter, it is that they are spectacularly bad at assessing these traits, and even worse at predicting how the candidates will govern as a result.

One example was the case of Al Gore and Naomi Wolf. It was charged during the 2000 presidential election that Wolf was advising Gore to wear "earth tones." Well, Wolf was indeed working with Gore as a campaign adviser, but she wasn't hired to provide clothing advice. And if she had been doing so? Well, John McCain was heard to complain just a few months back that his campaign adviser instructed him to wear what he called "gay" sweaters, so it would hardly be a dramatic break with tradition for Wolf to have provided that advice.

In their attempt to assess Gore's character, the media messed up the Gore-Wolf story on two levels. One, it wasn't even true. Two, even if it were true, so what?

As to experience, G W Bush was an MBA, the CEO of several companies and Governor of Texas. We can see where all that experience got us.

The Obama-Clinton "debate" spent almost a full hour on such idiotic trivialities as to what Obama's pastor said during a sermon shortly after 9-11 (Obama says he wasn't there and nobody considered the speech significant enough to have told him about it, a quick look at Wright's biography shows that the attitude expressed in the speech was a very minor part of his life) and Obama's being on same board of directors with a former Weather Underground member who made a really stupid statement about 40 years ago (Obviously, if the fellow was serving on a board of directors, then he's apparently matured and is much less stupid these days). Clinton, to her discredit, chimed in to agree that Obama showed poor judgement in both cases.

Clinton claimed that she's faced the Republican Noise Machine in the past and so knows how to handle it. Well, I don't think it shows very good judgement to back up the other sides' talking points and attacks on your own side. Even if you agree that your ally showed poor judgement, it's a very, very bad idea to join up with the other side to attack your own side. As Allahpundit from the blog that Michelle Malkin sometimes contributes to, Hot Air, puts it: "Hillary: Why, yes, Jeremiah Wright is a legitimate campaign issue," followed by "Coming soon to a McCain campaign ad near you."

That was a major complaint about Joe Lieberman that cost him his membership in the Democratic Party. As the Jewish Daily Forward put it:

Many activists believe that Lieberman’s conciliatory approach [to Republicans] undercuts the party’s unity, consistency and confrontational posture, all of which are essential for an effective opposition party. They resent his style more than they resent his voting record, which is not very different from those of many popular Democrats.

Andrew Sullivan was less than impressed with Clinton's performance:

Clinton has exposed herself in this campaign as one of the worst shells of a cynical pol in American politics. She doesn’t just return us to the Morris-Rove era, she represents a new height for it.

The Swamp from Baltimore agrees:

...for Hillary Clinton to get so giddy about the Wright question was really just sad. She was the official purveyor of fringe talking points. Shockingly so. And, she seemed to enjoy it. There’s a reason people think Clinton is dishonest as we saw today in the findings of the Washington Post-ABC News poll. She’s not only in this to win, she’s in it to win dirty — and to destroy Obama. She invoked Louis Farrakhan tonight for no reason — just to say it.

Daily Kos was considerably less than kind to the two interrogators:

I’ll bet if they had more time, ABC anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolus would probably have gotten around to asking Obama and Clinton about Willie Horton….The questions asked were not the kinds of questions Democratic primary voters care about. But they are the “gotcha” kinds of questions Republicans try to spring on Democrats in general elections.

Very interestingly, a blogger from Hot Air was very supportive of Clinton:

…The winner of this debate? John McCain. Both Democrats came out of this diminished, but Obama got destroyed in this exchange.

Jon Stewart's Daily Show for 18 April also commented on this episode:

ABC News had traveled about, taping questions from Pennsylvanians. Which question was presented to Obama? A woman asked him to explain why he doesn’t wear a lapel pin.

Should that question have been selected? You can make a case for almost anything. And it’s true—this matter has been bruited about; almost surely, there are other Pennsylvanians who are wondering about it. Some Pennsylvanians, including that woman, may even cast their vote on this basis. (People vote for every imaginable reason. See example below.)

But ABC News had less than two hours, and the world is full of complex issues. At some point, journalists have to set their priorities. And by the way: If ABC taped a lot of citizens, surely someone looked into the camera and asked Obama if he’s a Muslim—or if it’s true that he won’t swear on a Bible. Did someone ask Clinton about all her murders? At some point, a news org has to show some judgment about which questions to pick.

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In the real world, some questions are more equal than others. And some questions reflect the broken-souled culture of a broken, multimillionaire press corps.

Both The Moderate Voice and AmericaBlog have done round-ups of opinion on the web.