Category Archives: Media Criticism

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hillary’s Email Plot Thickens

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Yes, they never should have been sent on a private system. And despite her deepening troubles, she continues to obfuscate and lie:

“We all have a responsibility to get this right, I have released 55,000 pages of emails, I have said repeatedly that I will answer questions in front of the House committee,” Clinton said at her address in New York, where she outlined a tax plan and endorsed New York’s move toward a $15 minimum wage.

“We are all accountable to the American people to get their facts right, and I will do my part, but I will also stay focused on the issues,” added Clinton, who let her frustration with the stories show.

Even ignoring the fact that (for no good reason whatsoever) she didn’t turn over the emails, but printed pages (making them difficult to search), whenever someone (and particularly a Democrat, and even more particularly a Clinton or a Clinton defender) tells you how many “thousands” of documents they’ve “turned over,” it is to deflect from the number of the documents that haven’t been turned over, and that in many cases have been deliberately destroyed. They think we’re stupid, and sadly, in many cases, too many are. And right on cue:

Democrats rallied to Clinton’s defense, characterizing the referral from the federal watchdogs as routine.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so criminally corrupt, and this unqualified liar wasn’t still in a position to become president. Matt Welch (no Republican he) calls it like it is:

In sum, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again. Now comes word that, unsurprisingly, two inspectors general are recommending that the Department of Justice open a criminal inquiry into the matter. One of their findings was that the private server, contrary to Clinton’s repeated claims, contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.”*

So how much do Democrats value basic transparency, accountability, and honesty in their presidential candidates? Not bloody much, if you go by the handy polls over at RealClearPolitics. The six national polls taken this January and February, before the email scandal first broke, averaged out to a whopping 43 percentage-point lead for Hillary Clinton. How about the next six, in March and April? Plus 50. The 11 polls in May and June, when Berniementum first started sweeping the country, came in at +48, and the most recent five in July stand at +41.

Do Democrats have any aversion left to Nixonian non-transparency, which had been so anathema to them during the presidency of George W. Bush? Here’s a possible bellwether: Key Nixon-administration turncoat John W. Dean, who wrote a 2004 book entitled Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, reacted to the latest Clinton story by tweeting “Leaking This Makes It Pure Politics,” and “GOP Behind False Charges In NYT. It’s gonna be a long 16 months.

They don’t care about honesty, they don’t care about transparency, they don’t care about integrity. They care about nothing but continuing their power over our lives. At some point, we will rebel, and it won’t be pretty for them, or for the country.

[Update a few minutes later]

Parsing Clinton: What is she hiding?

Clinton has put herself in a box. She can either hand the server over to an independent third party, who would protect her private email and our government’s working email. Or she can stonewall.

The latter course gives every voter the right—and every self-respecting journalist the responsibility—to ask, “What were you hiding, Hillary?”

What are you hiding?

While it’s nice to see that Ron Fournier has finally turned, the Republic continues to have a paucity of “self-respecting journalists.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Andrea Mitchell: “The media underestimated the impact of the Clinton email scandal.” No, as is pointed out, hacks like Andrea Mitchell overestimated their ability to make it go away by pretending it didn’t exist. As with the IRS scandal.

Health, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Technology and Society

High Blood Pressure

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This looks interesting, but I’d like to see some numbers. Like, how much does it cost, and what kind of reductions are they seeing? I often see studies that amuse me, as though a barely-statisrically-significant 10% risk reduction for some expensive drug with unpleasant side effects is actually worth it.

And is it a permanent solution, or does it require periodic retreatment? Also, are there side effects (like insufficient blood flow to the brain on suddenly standing up)?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

An Impeachable Offense

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Yes, the Iran deal is.

But it’s not like it’s his first impeachable offense. The Founders would be aghast at a Congess that has let a president get away with so much. But it happened because the separation of powers becaame severely weakened with the development of political parties (that most of them hoped would never happen), in which loyalties to one’s own party, even in another branch of government, has superseded loyalties to the institution of Congress and its Constitutional prerogatives. Plus, while electing Barack Obama was clearly an act of color blindness, impeaching and removing him over his repeated abuse of his power would obviously be racist (do I need a sarcasm tag on that one?).

Ultimately, of course, as we saw with Bill Clinton, what constitutes a “High Crime And Misdemeanor,” even when it involves multiple federal felonies and flouting of one’s oath of office, is a political judgment. So we’re stuck with him for another year and a half.

[Monday-morning update]

“The Lawless Underpinnings of the Iran Nuclear Deal”:

Rivkin and Casey are right about the Constitution’s treaty power being circumvented, with the unfortunate blessing of a cowardly Congress. They’re also right that the Administration’s decision to obtain a speedy U.N. Security Council resolution prior to the Corker-Cardin congressional vote is a blatant and reckless end-run around U.S. sovereignty, bypassing our national legislature in favor of a multi-lateral, extra-sovereign body. Any future President wishing to unravel the Iranian nuclear deal–which Secretary of State has assured us repeatedly is “not legally binding“– will now be branded by the U.N. as an international “law breaker,” a point I made back in April.

I hope States do, indeed, continue to refuse to do business with companies doing business with Iran. The financial impact probably won’t be enough to trigger an Iranian accusation that the Obama Administration isn’t enforcing the deal, however, and consequently the Administration is unlikely to march into court claiming that the Supremacy Clause trumps States’ actions. So I doubt States’ doing this will “prompt the [nuclear] deal to unravel.” Nonetheless, this is one interesting and creative way that States can constitutionally push back.

The States need to start reasserting their rights in general, and restore the 10th Amendment and federalism from a federal government run amok (with the aid of both Democrats and Republicans, for decades).

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Jon Stewart’s Racism

Yes, call him out on it:

These liberal/progressives deserve to be called out–every single time–on their hypocrisy. Don’t hold back calling them the “r” word, because they surely would not, if the tables were turned.

Yes (though they’re neither liberal or “progressive” — their ideas are some of the oldest ones in the book). I long ago lost any compunction in calling them racist, because they have no problem whatsoever falsely accusing me of that. And in their case, calling them out on it has the additional virtue of actually being true.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

$15/Hour

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How’s that new minimum-wage working out for you, Seattle?

The notion that employees are intentionally working less to preserve their welfare has been a hot topic on talk radio. While the claims are difficult to track, state stats indeed suggest few are moving off welfare programs under the new wage.

Despite a booming economy throughout western Washington, the state’s welfare caseload has dropped very little since the higher wage phase began in Seattle in April. In March 130,851 people were enrolled in the Basic Food program. In April, the caseload dropped to 130,376.

At the same time, prices appear to be going up on just about everything.

Some restaurants have tacked on a 15 percent surcharge to cover the higher wages. And some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income. Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut.

Some long-time Seattle restaurants have closed altogether, though none of the owners publicly blamed the minimum wage law.

“It’s what happens when the government imposes a restriction on the labor market that normally wouldn’t be there, and marginal businesses get hit the hardest, and usually those are small, neighborhood businesses,” said Paul Guppy, of the Washington Policy Center.

And then there was this exchange I had with Asantha Cooray over on Twitter earlier in the week:

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Good Space Policy Advice

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Stephen Smith has some for the presidential candidates:

U.S. Census statistics show that more people alive now were born after Apollo (185 million) than before (123 million). For the majority of the population, the 1960s Space Age is a page in a history book, and has little personal emotional resonance.

So do yourself and the nation a favor. Don’t invoke Kennedy.

As your campaign staff develops its space policy white paper, begin with a fundamental question — why should people be in space?

Yes.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hillary’s Email Crimes And Lies

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When you’ve lost Ron Fournier…

Here’s all you need to know: The Clinton campaign doesn’t—and can’t—deny the nut of this story. Two Obama administration inspectors general want a criminal investigation into whether her personal email system contributed to the release of classified information.

A rogue email system that:

—violated clear White House policy.

—shielded her work from congressional oversight, media inquiries, or any accountability.

—contributed to a conspiracy of secrecy worthy of criminal inquiry.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for the (In)Justice Department to do anything about it.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Remember Memogate?

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The makers of a new Dan Rather documentary apparently don’t:

Now, I say “probably,” because I can’t exclude the very remote possibility that in the early 1970s Bush’s commanding officer, for reasons lost to history, decided to type up these memos himself (even though his wife said he couldn’t type) rather than getting his secretary to do it.

I can’t prove that he never got his hands on a rather exotic typewriter instead of using the ones that were in his office, spent some time working on it with a soldering gun, and managed to coincidentally produce a document that looked exactly like what you would get if you opened up Microsoft Word 2003 and started typing.

I can’t rule out the possibility that he, for reasons known only to himself, wrote these documents using Army jargon in several places rather than the terms that would have been used in the Air National Guard.

I can’t rule out the possibility that these documents somehow escaped from his office, roamed around in the wild for several decades, and eventually ended up in the possession of a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard, who had an ax to grind against both the National Guard and one George W. Bush.

I also can’t rule out the possibility that somewhere in this vast universe of ours, there is a planet composed entirely of marshmallow, where the rivers run with honey.

This document ended up on the air because neither Rather nor his producer did their jobs right. They ignored glaring red flags about the source of the document, including the fact that he kept changing his story and finally settled on an implausible and uncheckable version about a mysterious woman who wanted the originals destroyed because … um, why? (Mary Mapes, the producer, speculated that she might have been worried about DNA evidence. Too bad she did not settle on the more likely scenario: that they were destroyed to conceal their creation on a laser printer.) Rather and his producer ignored experts who raised problems with the document.

They rushed the documents onto air, and then, when the story exploded in their face, they spent an unconscionably long time attacking the people who had pointed out the glaring issues with their source material. They clung to theories along the lines of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian assiduously fiddling with the margin stops on his typewriter, such that they coincidentally lined up exactly with the defaults in as-yet-uninvented Microsoft Word. For two weeks, they dragged their network through a professional embarrassment of a scale that has rarely been reached again, because they didn’t do the most basic thing we’re paid for: properly vet their story before they started hurling serious, potentially election-altering accusations at a sitting president.

I find it amazing that there are still people who believe that document was genuine. This was my take, at the time, on the stupidity of Mary Mapes.