Chris Hayes' opening segment on All In was superb. He very clearly and precisely said what we all thought on Wednesday when CNN claimed a suspect had been arrested in Boston and that suspect was 'dark-skinned.'

Since 9-11, CNN has really changed, and not for the better. When I worked there, they were far more concerned with being right over being first. But that standard has been shattered, along with any pretense of objectivity. Hayes gives it a name:

This wasn't just some abstraction happening on cable news that no one was paying attention to, and I understand people make mistakes, but the bungling of the story today mattered. This is video outside the courthouse in Boston after all that frenzied, inaccurate reporting this afternoon. A crowd has gathered. To be sure, a lot of these people are reporters and media folks, but they are people who show up in hopes of seeing a suspect brought in.

Among them were likely anguished, angry people whose city has just been through a terrible trauma who wanted to see with their own eyes someone suspected of being responsible for it, a suspect who would not even exist yet but were told by the news was already in custody. And the one thing people knew about the suspect, the only thing they thought they knew for sure, thanks to CNN's reporting was the following descriptor:

It was described to me as a dark-skinned male individual.

I was told by a source that was a law enforcement official that this was a dark-skinned male. Source had been briefed on the investigation, I should say, that the suspect was a dark-skinned male.

Continue reading »

Ed Schultz said goodbye to his 8PM weekday time slot on MSNBC Thursday night, but not before he addressed the rumors Politico put out yesterday about his switch to a 2-hour show on Saturdays and Sundays. In their article announcing the change, Dylan Byers insinuated that Schultz was being shoved out by MSNBC executives, something Schultz vehemently denies.

Chris Hayes will launch a new show in the 8 PM timeslot, beginning April 1st.

Speaking at the end of his Thursday show, Shultz thanked his wife, his viewers and his team but made it abundantly clear he was ready to take on the weekend cable lineup and shake it up.

Ed Schultz closed his final weekday show on MSNBC Thursday night by thanking his viewers, his team, and his wife of 16 years for supporting him during his time as host of the 8 p.m. show.

Schultz said he looked forward to telling real American stories on MSNBC. “We’re going to build those hours to be the best hours in cable,” he said.

“This is what The Ed Show has always been about, this is what The Ed Show is always going to be about: the people on the road, the stories, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—those middle-class Americans who are fighting for a fair share, and their dream, their piece of the pie of this great country,” he added.

My viewing relationship with Shultz has been tempestuous. There were times where I'd shake my fist at him and other times where I'd give him an ovation. But he has consistently put the spotlight on stories that mean something to those of us who are not celebrities, who are not politicos, but who are just ordinary people trying to get by from day to day.

Ed shined the light on Scott Walker and the Wisconsin union situation right away, and stayed with that story to the end. He highlighted the 47 percent story, and was rewarded with the first interview with Scott Prouty. Watching Ed Schultz could be a little on the tiring side sometimes, but there was never any doubt that he was passionate and ready to do battle (and fire up the troops) for ordinary people.

I wish Chris Hayes much luck in that time slot. I like Chris, but I confess to not having quite the same viewing relationship with him. I think he's brilliant and sometimes funny, but also quite similar to Rachel Maddow in style and approach. We shall see. In the meantime, I'm going to make a commitment to see what Ed does with that weekend slot, because I do believe him when he vows to make those hours the best ever.

Whatever else it is, it will definitely be a refreshing change from the usual Saturday and Sunday afternoon talking heads on Fox and CNN.

Best of luck to you, Ed.

DOWNLOADS: (233)

PLAYS: (2856)

Embed

We are hearing far too much of this from our elite news media:

And the fact is that the American people, who want all the benefits and want the free lunch, and don't want a single gray hair on the beautiful head of Social Security or Medicare touched, and basically don't want to pay for it, I mean, the old line is, we elect Republicans because we don't want to pay for it and we elect Democrats because we want everything that government is going to give us.

Instead, we should be hearing more of what Chris Hayes is saying. The Villagers are already playing into the right wing frame, that there is a crisis brewing, that the baby boomers are going to bankrupt the country, that health care costs will chew up our budget and our GDP over the next 20 years, and everybody batten down the hatches and hang on because, well...it's a crisis, stupid.

No, it's not a crisis, and thankfully there is one adult in the room who is asking why everyone is setting their hair on fire before the complete package of reforms built into the ACA come to pass. What he is saying is what we all need to keep hammering on. Here's the list:

1. Medicare is in about the same shape it has been in since its inception. It's solvent for 11 more years without touching anything. That's standard solvency now and yesterday for Medicare.
2. We spent an enormous amount of time and political energy on the Affordable Care Act, which is a 2,000 page bill, as the Tea Party and Republicans are fond of pointing out. The Affordable Care Act has consumer protections and Medicare reforms written into it. The consumer protection piece is about 60 pages. The other 1,940 pages are Medicare reforms intended to control the rising cost of health care.
3. We will not know whether those reforms are effective for three to four years. What we know today is that Medicare spending has decreased over the last three years, and that's before all of the ACA reforms take hold.

This is the conversation that isn't happening anywhere else. Note Megan McArdle's shocked reaction when Hayes actually dares to say that everyone is setting their hair on fire years early.

You know why it is that conservatives make such a big deal out of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)? It has nothing to do with death panels and authoritarianism, despite what they whine about in public. It is because it will quite likely end the medical gravy train so many have been on for so long, without decreasing quality of care.

I repeat: Without decreasing quality of care. It will end practices like charging uninsured patients $3,000 for a colonoscopy that costs $300. It will begin to end unnecessary tests and procedures which are performed because fee-for-service medicine requires more and more services to maintain profitability. This is why conservatives hate it with an undying passion. It actually limits and controls costs.

These same Very Concerned Conservatives are so very concerned about Medicare costs that they are going to block the IPAB's fast-track funding required in the ACA. Via The Hill:

The House is set to vote Thursday afternoon on rules for the 113th Congress. The rules package says the House won't comply with fast-track procedures for the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a controversial cost-cutting board Republicans have long resisted.

The rules package signals that Republicans might not bring up Medicare cuts recommended by the IPAB — blocking part of a politically controversial law, and resisting Medicare spending cuts.

Let's review the bidding here. Republicans are making the rounds and gladhanding with the likes of Pete Peterson, rending their garments and claiming our children and grandchildren will be saddled with too much debt, too much debt because their parents and grandparents had the temerity to get sick and require Medicare coverage, while they are aggressively blocking the ONE SINGLE THING that will likely contain those costs.

Tell me more about how we must cut, cut, cut in order to avoid a terrible horrible future after they sit down and get out of the way. When the ACA reforms take hold (whether the House likes it or not), that cost curve will likely bend sharply downward.

Republicans are hoping they can distract us long enough with their incessant crying and stalling so they can gut it before the reforms happen.

Don't let them win.

As someone who wrote and opined on the year's events, I think it's safe to say that 2012 has been an incredibly colorful year, and one in which few could have imagined turning out quite as extreme, quite as absurd or quite as theatrical as it was.

There were many times that Amato and I would exclaim that no one would believe the Republican primary race if it had been a screenplay. The suspension of belief required to accept Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich holding the frontrunner spot at various times is far too much to ask of the average viewer. For me, the Republican Primary, in all its tone-deaf glory--denying science, denying women the agency of their body, denying basic facts--was the ultimate in political theater. From "9-9-9" to the endless parade of Republican debates, they were the very worst of our political system.

What were the standout moments of political theater for you?

There's something refreshingly satisfying when you hear former Reagan Budget Director Bruce Bartlett dismiss Veronique de Rugy after her multiple attempts to inject the standard conservative economic talking points into the discussion: everyone knows that raising taxes hurts the economy; that there's a massive crisis in entitlement spending; that federal dollars spent at the state level meant there were no austerity measures, etc., etc. When de Rugy questioned whether taxes could restrain future spending, Bartlett blew up:

“But if you raise taxes first, then you wouldn’t have the deficits,” Bartlett said. “Your idea is so g–damn dogmatic that you’re living in a fantasy world where we’re going to balance the budget by abolishing Medicare and other ludicrous ideas.”

With the exception of the vulgarity, it's little different from the conversations occuring on any other Sunday news show.

But you know what important piece of information you were missing? Veronique de Rugy is a Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center, which is housed at George Mason University. She is not paid by George Mason. Guess who funds the Mercatus Center?

n the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank. Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.”

The founder of the Mercatus Center is Richard Fink, formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. In addition, he is the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the president of the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, a director of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, and a director and co-founder, with David Koch, of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

That's right, the woman whose dogmatism prevents her from anything resembling an honest discussion of responsible fiscal policy is employed by a think tank founded and run by a lobbyist whose sole focus is the deregulation on behalf of energy companies.

It's this kind of cronyism that gave Time Magazine's Michael Grunwald his own Howard Beale moment (h/t David Atkins at Hullabaloo)

Given the rotten state of journalism in this country, it's nice to see not only cheetos-eating bloggers like me and Digby, but someone on the inside of the Village stand up and tell the emperor they have no clothes as well. Case in point: Michael Grunwald, senior editor of Time Magazine, calling out the not only the fiscal cliff fiction, but also journalists' role in perpetuating it:

Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened...

This, a thousand times this. Not all sides in this debate are equal and the 'truisms' that partisans like de Rugy tried to steer the debate are anything but. They've been long debunked and one can simply look at the state of our economy with an eye to its historical cycles and intellectual honesty to see that they're still manifestly not true.

I think it's fine to have conservatives making their case to the viewing public. But let's be open about who pays them and what their agenda actually is, so that the viewing public has the opportunity to make a judgment about just how god-d*mned dogmatic they're being.

DOWNLOADS: (155)

PLAYS: (1796)

Embed

After a frustratingly dull debate, the mainstream media eagerly goes to the spin room, looking for any little soundbyte from a proxy that will help drag out this horse race.

But you need to be a pretty savvy proxy to go up against the best and brightest of MSNBC's debate coverage: Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. Rudy Giuliani, frankly, isn't that savvy. Those pesky facts about Mitt Romney's tax policy require Mr. "A Noun, a Verb and 9/11" to get quite testy, especially when it comes to his own returns:

After Giuliani stressed the need to stop "feeding the beast" of federal spending, Hayes, the host of MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes, asked Giuliani point-blank about federal contracts he said Giuliani's firm holds with the Department of Homeland Security.

"Does the Department of Homeland Security and related spending through contracts on say, private consulting firms like yourself, does that count as feeding the beast or not?"

Giuliani denied that his firm held such contracts.

You really want to go with that post-fact response, Rudy? Because there's ample proof you're talking out of your posterior:

But in his various roles, Mr. Giuliani does not hesitate to work closely with government officials abroad and at home. As a consultant, he attended two meetings in 2002 to discuss OxyContin with Purdue executives and Mr. Hutchinson, the D.E.A. administrator at the time. As a law enforcement icon who once was one of the top three officials in the Department of Justice, he also stood next to Mr. Hutchinson that same year in Washington at a ribbon-cutting for a new Drug Enforcement Museum exhibit, an event that included a luncheon where the former mayor helped the agency's museum raise $25,000.

About 10 months after Mr. Giuliani's firm began its work for Purdue, it also won a $1.1 million contract from the Department of Justice to look for ways to improve the effectiveness of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. The force's duties included helping investigate OxyContin abuse, and Purdue officials had appealed to its director, Karen Tandy, for help, a Justice Department official said.

There's many more where that came from. But hey, when did truth matter to a Republican?

It's easy to love the troops when you don't have to be the troops--Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.)

Chris Hayes is still quite visibly moved by the uproar caused by his Memorial Day show, when he expressed discomfort with the ubiquitous use of the word "hero" to discuss our military, because rhetorically, it shuts down all discussion of justifications of war. It's a fair point, if inartfully made, and I'm sure that he's still feeling the reverberations from the blowback he received in the last week.

But the larger discussion deserves--and gets--exploration. And Chris Hayes give is the respect and time it needs, speaking to MSNBC's Military Analyst Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.), Josh Trevino, founder of RedState.com and an Iraq war vet, Anu Bhagwati, co-founder of the Service Women's Action Network and Kayla Williams, of the Truman National Security Project and also an Iraq vet.

The percentage of the US population who are active duty military is ridiculously small (less than one percent). It's not enough to slap a yellow ribbon magnet on your car and feel self-satisfied that you support the troops, safe and anesthetized, tens of thousands of miles away, as they endure their third, fourth and fifth tour of duty. It's not enough.

Jacobs suggests that bringing back the draft would bring more skin in the game. And while the notion sends shivers down my spine, I agree with the premise that if the war was everpresent in our collective consciousness, it would not still be dragging on in its eleventh year.

As Chris Hayes points out in this column for The Nation, the sudden urgency over deficit reduction has no basis in reality, much like our experience with another national frenzy:

The hysteria has reached such a pitch that Republican senators (joined by Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson) have filibustered an extension of unemployment benefits because it was not offset by spending cuts. Keep in mind, the cost of the extension for people unlucky enough to be caught in the jaws of the worst recession in thirty years is $35 billion. The bill would increase the debt by less than 0.3 percent.

This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation—if it can be called that—about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable—Saddam Hussein—became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost.

We are poised on the same tipping point with regard to the debt. Amid official unemployment of 9.5 percent and a global contraction, we shouldn't even be talking about deficits in the short run. Yet these days, entrance into the club of the "serious" requires not a plan for reducing unemployment but a plan to do battle with the invisible and as yet unmaterialized international bond traders preparing an attack on the dollar.

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity—about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.

Remember that the Iraq War might have been prevented had more Congressional Democrats stood up to oppose it. Instead, many of those who privately knew the entire enterprise was a colossal disaster in the making buckled to right-wing pressure and pundit hawks and voted for it. That mistake is being repeated. Despite White House economists' full realization of the need for stimulus in the face of astronomically high unemployment, the New York Times has reported that the political minds inside the White House, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, have decided that the public has no appetite for increased spending. "It's my job to report what the public mood is," Axelrod explained. He then showed up on ABC's This Week to wave the white flag, saying that the president would continue to press to extend unemployment benefits; conspicuously omitted was any mention of aid to state governments, which had originally been included in the president's June letter to Congress asking for a new stimulus package.

There is hope, however: the public is nowhere near as obsessed with the deficit as are those in Washington. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans support "additional government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy," with 38 percent opposed. A Hart Research Associates poll published in June showed that two-thirds of Americans favor continuing unemployment benefits. There is also very little public appetite for "entitlement reform," a k a cutting Social Security.

The lesson of the Iraq War is that over the long haul, good politics and good policy can't be separated. If the White House is tempted to support bad policy in the short term because it seems less risky politically, it should give John Kerry a call and ask him how that worked out for him with Iraq.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled that DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) is unconstitutional. Chris Hayes anchored Rachel Maddow's show and led off with this segment and interview with Martha Coakley.

We begin tonight with breaking news out of Massachusetts. A federal judge ruled that the federal government's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro decided that the defense of marriage act violates the fundamental principles of this nation.

With that, the judge made advocates of marriage equality very happy. One of the rulings involved seven couples and three widowers, all of whom who had been ineligible for the federal benefits that come with being lawfully wed thanks to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. That law required the federal government to ignore for federal purposes any marriage not between a man and women.

Same-sex wedded couples have no access to family health insurance, no social security survivor benefits, no joint filing of federal taxes.

There are two salient things about the ruling. The judge granted the plaintiffs what's known as summary judgment. Both sides filed their arguments and the judge decided he didn't need to hear another word.

The remarkable part of the ruling is the reason for it. In addition to ruling that DOMA violated the equal protection clause, he also invoked the Tenth Amendment, which Chris Hayes points out as the "holy grail" of conservative thought:

Judge Tauro saying the rationale strains credulity. Judge Tauro ruled that a key part of the bill violated a couple's right to equal protection. Judge Tauro also ruled for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, saying the federal government wrongly forced it to discriminate, writing "the federal government, by enforcing DOMA encroaches on the province of the state and offends the Tenth Amendment.

The tenth amendment is the "don't tread on me" amendment. It's the one conservatives are using to repeal health reform. It's Texas governor Rick Perry's favorite battle cry. Now, today, the Tenth Amendment means gay couples are one step closer to being treated equally in this country. Don't tread on them either.

I believe the Obama administration concurred with the judge's ruling, which is why the President issued his executive order protecting the rights of gay couples with regard to health care and ordered benefits extended to same-sex partners.

It does, however, place the DOJ in a weird position. Since the DOJ is responsible for enforcing the laws on the books, they're going to have to appeal this judge's ruling, even if the opinion inside the administration is that the judge was right. This is their duty under the law, and it carries the risk that this case will go to the Supreme Court for a final resolution. When it's appealed, don't assume the administration is against the ruling simply because DOJ is doing its job.

If it reaches the Supreme Court and Elena Kagan is confirmed, it affirms the wisdom of her refusal to answer the question about DOMA's constitutionality. Had she answered that question, she would have had to recuse herself from any proceedings that related to it, which would have left an unbalanced court to decide the case.

In any event, this is a landmark decision which sets a much faster pace for the eventual repeal of DOMA.

Jon Stewart has described the media’s style of pack journalism many times with the same analogy: 8-year-olds playing soccer. As Stewart describes it, there’s a weird clump of legs, all moving in the same direction. Suddenly the kids see a ball rolling, and the weird clump converges on it in an awkward, graceless, and rather amusing fashion.

As Stewart sees it, reporters are the kids and news stories are the ball. Chris Hayes, displaying why he’s as good a political analyst as anyone I can think of, explains the psychology of the political press in a great item, written after last night’s debate in New Hampshire.

Reporting at event like this is exciting and invigorating, but it’s also terrifying. I’ve done it now a number of times at conventions and such, and in the past I was pretty much alone the entire time. I didn’t know any other reporters, so I kept to myself and tried to navigate the tangle of schedules and parking lots and hotels and event venues. It’s daunting and the whole time you think: “Am I missing something? What’s going? Oh man, I should go interview that guy in the parka with the fifteen buttons on his hat.” You fear getting lost, or missing some important piece of news, or making an ass out of yourself when you have to muster up that little burst of confidence it takes to walk up to a stranger and start asking them questions.

Of course, it’s amazing work. But I realized for the first time yesterday, that this essential terror isn’t just a byproduct of inexperience. It never goes away. Veteran reporters are just as panicked about getting lost or missing something, just as confused about who to talk to. This why reporters move in packs. It’s like the first week of freshman orientation, when you hopped around to parties in groups of three dozen, because no one wanted to miss something or knew where anything was.

The reporting that emerges from this is, to put it mildly, unhelpful. Read the rest.