This is literally disgraceful by the Republicans party and Speaker Johnson to leave on Christmas break without passing a bill to fund Ukraine. Their doing this deliberately for Trump and Putin and to make Biden fail. Republicans in the house are pure evil. They haven't done a damn thing for our national security or the American people. Hopefully the Senate will come to a resolution to fund Ukraine. The majority of us who believe in democracy are sick and tired of house Republicans not governing. Not mention them trying to impeach President Biden. I pray that justice will prevail at the end.
The American people are emotionally drained. But we can't give up! We have a tough road ahead in 24. Vote 💙 blue.
Their current stunts seem to me to telegraph weakness' like they have run out of cunning plots and are just acting out in an effort to maintain confusion. They still have a lot of power, so they're still very dangerous, but their lock-step seems to be stumbling.
As Catherine L. notes above, the corrupt of politics have had unprecedented help in maintaining distraction and confusion from the engineered constructions of corporate media. Mainstream media now largely offers neither news nor education but is selling confirmation bias to the citizens they have groomed through deliberate polarization to become addicted to it. The drug comes in both blue and red pill form, and it is deadly, perhaps terminally so, to a functional government that depends on a functioning democracy.
Don't MSNBC, to some extent CNN, and the late-night comics count?
I'd call them all mainstream. But they deal in facts, with interviews of leading actors of the public agenda. Ari Melber often cites figures from today's arts for their keeping the pulse, and all the late-night hosts do the same. So, no, I don't think they're dealing in polarization, given that the other, Republican side has zero public policy programs, withdrawing more and more only to sensationalism.
As Heather Cox Richardson points out, even when it appears they might have a public policy concern (the southern border), they'd rather shirk doing anything about it for the sake of keeping it vitriolically shrieking instead.
Here are two parts of a twelve part series produced with many colleagues last year. It is an academic peer-reviewed blog --a source produced by people who are respected in what they do and backed by peer reviewed research, not secondary sources. Links to primary research help us dig deeper. So do the links on HCR's letters.
We ALL have bias, and the extent to which both blue and red pills control us is revealed in the second link with the quantitative reasoning sample, but read the first one first…and the second one second. ☺
Note a danger symptom to see in ourselves is to start to fool ourselves by reverting to logical fallacies, one trying to substitute the source of an argument for evidence . Who presents the argument has no bearing on resolving the truth of the argument. Don't stop with letting your favorite network tell you what is true. Dig deeper.
More and more Americans are not watching any of the "networks". Cable news is in a spiral dive to irrelevance. Most people who are not reading this news letter get their news on their phones - from a mind bending variety of sources. The debate between MSNBC and FOX ... and the "new" CNN is fast becoming "old" news - an antique way of getting information.
Of course, your concept applies universally. But when we are in the trenches of a world war - it really doesn't matter. You just have to win. Or your way of life dies.
In a theoretical world where the difference between two political parties is a competition between governing philosophies - either of which could function to serve all the people - but using different structures...your depth of reasoning and research would have great value. Choose one or the other or ideally find compromise to achieve a functional middle ground.
But in the present moment, it is a distraction. I get the concept. But today, the red pill means fascism and bigotry towards anything not white male, not "Christian", "America First"...and the enormous one: denying our impact on the Climate Crisis. The red pill has sympathy with a nation that is engaged in genocide and encouraging it elsewhere.
The blue pill is the antithesis of all that exclusive hate. It embraces science. It actually believes in democracy. It is quite imperfect and has been penetrated by the oligarchs as well. It makes many mistakes. But it does want to honor international agreements. It does want to help people with the cost of education, child care, healthcare, food security, clean water, housing.
The choice of pills couldn't be more starkly obvious. Choose red if you are a selfish hater of others. Or choose blue if you think we are all in the same boat and the resources of the world should be shared more widely. Choose blue if you think we should help protect people from disease. Choose blue if you think we should honor and protect the planet that we are perched on.
The best news is news created from actual facts, actual reality, and the Muckrakers typified that with their explosive articles in publications like McClure's Magazine.
I'm pleased that I still have a number of copies of that publication from over a hundred years ago, and credit my high school teachers for having us read the Autobiography of Lincoln Stephens albeit in a shortened version which stopped at the point where he left for Russia and became a Communist. Such were the times.
But my favorite was the legendary muckraker (that is, staunch investigative reporter) Ida Tarbell who exposed the predations of Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil Company (see https://allthatsinteresting.com/ida-tarbell). What a great role for a kid in high school, head and shoulders above journalists today!
As we know from the Trump years, there's a whole lot to be said for fact-based reality and objective, truthful journalism.
Great analysis. CNN is toast. NYT and WAPO hanging on. I think their liberal readers, the majority of their subscribers, are not following either as we once used to. I read them only selectively. HRC has nailed it. We have returned to the age of the crusading Editor. This kind of Editor does not abandon the truth or facts, but expresses them in the context of moral conviction. I am old enough to remember Walter Cronkite, delivering the news. He always did so in a detached, but avuncular way. But the broadcast that sticks in my mind is the time he broke down in tears, reporting the news of the assassination of John Kennedy. From then on, I knew he cared, and it showed increasingly on his reporting of the Vietnam war. Goodbye, Columbia school of journalism. The times are a changin.
My thoughts exactly. Is there sidesism? Bias? Yes. Even in science? Yes, but not nearly to the extent science-deniers (e.g. Republicans, hyper-Christians, vaccine deniers, etc) will have you believe. They are projecting. It is not difficult at all to cite the difference between the blue pill and the red pill when comparing to reality, and a compassionate world view. I first got wind of this long ago with the young earth creationists versus ancient earth and evolution of species. There was clearly a wrong and a right that blew through any tweaking due to bias. And then example after example reared their ugly heads - climate change being the largest and most important. We have biases, but which pill is dominated by them and which not so much?
Despots leading parties have successfully lied their citizens into countless wars (both declared and undeclared) by using a few skillful manipulators to successfully convince a host of followers to "take a side" and cast both reason and research aside. The choice to employ reason and research or let manipulators lead you by your bias to act in their interests is the starkly obvious choice. I see you have lots of support to dump both reason and research.
Sure, in my spare time, I already spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to sort through the sewer. Where is Walter when our survival depends on truth in packaging…
Thanks Ally! I always love reading your posts on this site. If you would rather do a tour in video, the same writers are on here giving a very structured panel at the National Numeracy Network about a year and a half before they produced the blog articles. You only need to endure each of us for about four minutes. :)
I skimmed both articles. I tend to agree with the authors but of course behavioral “science” isn’t science, but I think it more accurately when done right, which it seldom is, is a great illustration of the technique of knowing.
I’ve long had a huge issue with how basic science is taught. It’s useless. No one needs to understand how to balance equations.
As a chemist, loving it so much I have a mass spectrometer in my house, there is a way to teach it so that it is relevant. And it’s relevant if it makes you understand it well enough to read the original ivermectin -might -fight -covid paper and easily understand why it doesn’t show anything of the sort, but raises another question. It’s my current go-to explanation of how scientific studies work.
Your articles are nice for someone who doesn’t know how to think.
Anyone who listens to any of the main stream media on, say, the economy, really isn’t doing their due diligence.
As a chemist, have you noticed any situations in which your pre-existing cognitive biases interfere with data interpretation, I wonder? As in, dismissing studies done in disciplines with different parameters than yours as “not really science”, “only good for people who don’t know how to think” or “shallow”?
"Your articles are nice for someone who doesn’t know how to think."
Yeow! Now that verbal attack is a knife to the front, not in the back. So you're saying that the articles, which I didn't and now won't read, are worthless, a waste of time. Maximum shade there, but being direct and clear may well be called for often; however, experience tells me that the author(s) will now go into defensive mode and reject your comment as just the spawn of a hateful creator. Most of us need a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
Of course we all have bias and your article does a good job of explaining it.
The problem arises when we try to “both sides” our treatment and one side is holding the gun of facism to our heads, refusing to acknowledge the facts. I do get multiple news inputs, mostly from the sources that Ad Fontes Media puts at top for truthfulness and center for lack of bias (Ap/Reuters, ABC, BBC, NPR).
Thanks Mary Hardt. When you read the math example by Kahan et al. that involves both Republicans and Democrats making their "interpretations" while clutching their little colored pills of choice, you see the thing that drives that is "my-side" bias. What you are calling "both sides" is really my-side bias directing the anger at those who look at the pills and ask "What's in 'em?"
Reading the content fro the first link, a red light flashed caused by the introduction of mathematical analysis of human behavior!
Recall the last financial disaster was brought on by AIG’s bookmaking bets on tranches of financial paper, cobbled together by unscrupulous financial houses, based on the hired quants who claimed their mathematical model was more than 97% accurate!
Ed, Thank you for this resource. As to bias, Will Rogers may have said it best: "It's hard to get a man to see the truth of something when his paycheck depends on him NOT seeing it." Or words to that effect. Too lazy to dig up the exact quote. ;0)
Ed, how timely--I watched this clip from the popular Beau of the Fifth Column yesterday in which he explains how to verify/debunk internet "news" bites. Will people who are biased take the time to do Beau's suggestions? Probably not.
We are both subscribers here for good reasons. Love the historical perspectives Heather brings to this. I prefer good independent media with investigative reporting to the talking heads on network TV.
Letters From an American IS Social Media. Just whom do you think should be doing Heather's research for her? Why should she not be doing her own? This Substack site surely is not peer-reviewed primary research. If you want to try to imply Substack is a variety of QAnon site, you have allies in highly placed Democratic Party operatives who want government to create a legal definition of "a journalist" so they can shut down access to independent journalists not in the employ of corporations. Watch the March "hearings" grilling of Matt Taibbi and how they deprecate Substack. But we are here, and neither one of us is being killed.
Our Letters are full of the work that has been done by journalists and for subscribers who have any doubt about that take a look at 'Notes:' at the
end of this Letter, which started with a story in the Associated Press. Trump and MAGAs bash the 'free press' calling it 'the enemy of the people'. There is a lot of crap in the 'media' and much of 'social media' is a propaganda engine. Let's know the difference and share that news.
Fern, perhaps my overactive imagination is working here, but it seems to me that your comments lately have been fewer and those that appear are brief? I do scan for your comments. I hope that you are well, and the reason that this seems to be happening (at least in my eyes?) is that you have many delightful tasks taking up your time currently.
Miselle, thank you for inquiring about my health, which is okay. I have been around, but, perhaps, a little less frequently and sometimes toward the end of our comments. I appreciate
your kindness and encouragement. All my encouragement and support of your steady engagement in the principles and survival of Democracy.
The Republicans don't ACTUALLY want to fix immigration by debating and hashing out policy details. They just want to use immigration as a cudgel to beat Democrats with to stir up their base to turn out. Right now, I think the R's are using the loss of reproductive rights to fulfill Steve King's remark, "We can't build our country with other people's babies." King, a former congressman from Iowa is indicative of what lots of people think. He is racist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-immigration, etc. He is against anything not straight, white, Christian, and male.
Yep, we have long had an opportunity to fix immigration, but have failed to do so. So now when things have gotten so bad in countries to the south of us, partially because of our meddling, and people are willing to take long dangerous treks to get here, it is suddenly the Ds who are the problem.
Ed, you are correct about the corporate media and the effect of their propaganda. The Democratic Party needs to take this as a lesson. The idea that "when they go low, we go high" has to be discarded. Why is Biden trashed about the economy when it is soaring? Simple - Republican propaganda. The Democrats need a leader who understands the need to propagandize our case. Jamie Harrison, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, doesn't seem "to get it."
A vast right wing propaganda machine carefully built by corporations and rich folks. To serve there interests.
Supported by outsourcing and offshoring by the same people so that real Americans are disenchanted with the current system that they believe failed them.
A double pronged strategy. Make everyone poor and tell everyone it is the Democrats fault.
Mike, Pres. G.W. Bush nailed it on 3/31/2001 when at the White House Correspondents' Dinner he said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." Yes, they're aware that there are a lot of people who will listen and follow the Pied Piper.
We are in the choir preaching to each other. Given the lack of credit Biden gets for what he has been able to do, I sometimes wonder if the operatives that control the Party really care. I get the most news of the specific good Biden has done from Progressive news sources like Tom Hartmann on Sirius radio that are not even the "mainstream" Democratic Party cheerleading sites from which I would most expect this to come. This election is for the party to lose by making it all about finger-pointing, which actually puts the focus on the other party instead of on issues that inspire people and that many have long wanted some control over through true representation.
Ed The Economist has two excellent articles on how the media has badly served the American public. One is in this week’s edition. The other is a much longer article in the 1843 Magazine in which ‘Lexington’ describes in great detail how the New York Times fails to fulfill its earlier masthead promise “to provide all the news that is fit to print.”
It seems some want us to choose oligarchy but wrap it in only one of the two terms. I'll not be choosing to be the dualistic thinker like Stefanik was, bullying college presidents with her rhetorical question and demands they choose only her dualistic answers.
Ed, as a geologist with an interest in psychology ('Metacognition'), I would like to know about your knowledge of journalism; understanding of the content of social media, in other words, how much of its presentations are based on journalism versus propaganda. commercial sales, conspiracy theories, etc. Are you informed about how many Americans receive their 'news' from social media as well as its effect on the audiences' political positions, factual understanding of what is happening in their communities, state-wide, in the US as well as the major issues of the time, such as Climate Change and large conflicts around the world, such as in Ukraine, 2nd Congo War, Yemen, Myanmar, Israel, Ethiopia, etc.?
'News Platform Fact Sheet' (PewResearchCenter)
'The transition of the news industry away from print, television and radio into digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices. Explore the patterns and trends that shape the platforms Americans turn to for news below.'
What are the effects of social media on participatory democracy, our mental health and knowing the difference between facts and propaganda?
Noam Chomsky expressed a philosophy of media and media literacy that I just found and discover that it is similar to my own too. Education, not training, and certainly not partisanship that requires neither, is what prepares one to engage effectively with both information and misinformation.
Of equal impact on our news is the monopolization of the information system by the major corporate publishing houses and putting our primary literature behind their paywalls. I presume you have been following that as well as how the corporations have been using "Trade Agreements" and restrictive fair use to move information beyond reach of not only individuals but also universities and colleges without big endowments? Berkeley did a revolt against Elsevier a while ago that made the news, but most of this goes on quietly until the damage is too great to overcome.
"Ed, as a geologist with an interest in psychology ('Metacognition'), I would like to know about your knowledge of journalism; understanding of the content of social media, in other words, how much of its presentations are based on journalism versus propaganda. commercial sales, conspiracy theories, etc. Are you informed about how many Americans receive their 'news' from social media as well as its effect on the audiences' political positions..." Returning to this a night later.
Journalism is a distinct profession, so to find out the best journalism sources, I tend to go to the sources that accumulate the journalists who receive the recognition from their peers, not from the political parties, the corporations, or the conspiracy recruiters. I can't reach to learn everything in depth, but getting educated in logic enough to recognize fallacies when an advocate is using them, knowing the levels of intellectual development so one understands whether an argument is being made at a dualistic stage rather than at a higher stage of reasoning, and some experience in understanding when the evidence required for an argument is really being offered is much more useful for dealing with real-world problems than acquiring memorized facts. Also, being willing to go to primary sources, to those who peers identified recognized as credible in their fields by electing them as officers of their professional organizations, putting them on the review, editorial boards or advisory boards of their professional journals is a practice I've found useful to quickly getting the advice I need when I don't have it.
I don't think it is possible to have a true democracy without having free access to information and having a populace educated sufficiently to be competent synthesizers and consumers of that information and to know how education differs from training.
I wish they would stop putting trump in the news. Trump MIGHT do this. Trump may face charges for that crime. trump has a rally in Sioux Falls. I know-it is Sioux City Iowa and not in S.D. Just tell me he is convicted. Tell me the gag order is in place yet again (should never have been taken off). No more petty stuff. Keep him out of the paper.
I've seen estimates that the corporate media essentially gave him about 2 billion dollars of free advertising in 2016 every time they featured him. So did the Democratic Party every time they talked about him as "the greater evil" rather than about what they were FOR and what they are going to DO. All that brought him name recognition. Didn't matter that it was negative. It all gave him fame.
MAGA Republicans depend on their supporters being clueless idiots who don't recognize how transparently idiotic their MO is, not to mention the damage to the country domestically and internationally. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
The MAGA/KKK are the "True Believers" that Eric Hoffer wrote about in "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements." At its core, the movement is purely racist. I attach KKK to MAGA because that is, IMO, what this is: white Protestant supremacy. That is what is most important to them.
Jim, thank you for this note. True, when I said that the MAGA/KKK are white Protestant supremacists, it would have been more descriptive and more accurate to identify them as "White Protestant Christian supremacists." I capitalized the "C" though they really are Chinos.
Trump alone is a cornucopia of crap. My thoughts are that "GOP" lies are a liability for them that can be used against them, and have not be leveraged enough. The Jan 6th committee was a well organized attempt to advertise the truth, as are an array of trials. The Biden impeachment effort is pretty weak tea, that may fire up the "hypnotized" base, but speak to those who need more encouragement to be politically engaged. For too long corruption has been met with inaction.
However, I read the Wall Street Journal and I can tell you that Trump is well organized and well supported on the right.
If he wins, and, he very well might, he will put in place a highly effective organization that will support Putin's ability to continue to give Trump huge money to do Putin's bidding. Plus, he will be able to get his appointee, Jerome Powell, to print money for him again like he did during the Pandemic.
American Democracy will be over. At least for a while, maybe forever.
Sadly, killing Democracy was a bi-partisan process. Outsourcing and offshoring, an initially Republican led effort, was fully supported by Democrats in the Clinton administration when they passed NAFTA which, instantly created that "great sucking sound" that Ross Perot warned about.....jobs going to Mexico.
Killing American jobs and leaving the working class poor was a bi-partisan effort of American Democracy (paid for by lobby money by big corporations).
That failure of real Democracy to heed the future of the voter has now left us with a huge desire among the "people", to just get rid of the failed system that has not worked for them (or me honestly).
Who can blame them/me? I am one of those that was outsourced to India when I was 61. Of course, the software product I was supporting is now no longer sold because the nice Indian kids could not do the complex work.
But, the laws here that allow corporations to leverage unqualified slave labor in India are the problem. And? Those laws were paid for by big companies in India lobbying my Congressmen and women.
American Democracy is under attack because it has failed so many real Americans. The government John Adams established has been gone for ages supplanted by a government by the corporation, for the corporation and of the corporation (whichever lobbyist just paid of my Congress person).
I would say it is sad, but, it is just reality in America.
Yup. NAFTA symbolizes a sell out by Democrats. A fantasy that by opening the flood gates of global trade - with no guard rails for American workers - would somehow deliver prosperity to all. Dems dumped their core constituency.
Companies COULD have been regulated. If you are going to shut down a factory here, you will be responsible for the towns and employees you are abandoning until they can replace that income and tax base! And you have to give the town a few years warning - providing assistance until it is no longer needed. Hmmm. That cheap labor in China or Mexico would suddenly be less attractive.
What if Clinton and others had taken up the cause of "fly over" country? What if Democrats had protected jobs and families? GOP "populism" would not have been nearly as successful. We handed over the key issue in America to what would become MAGA.
We let corporate Americans put their personal profits over the personal survival of millions of ordinary working Americans. That in itself was a form of fascism.
Although Bill, One CAN have such a "business-first" government if it is counterbalanced by a "social-contract" component of that government (Labor? Socialist?), a component which sees the government as serving the needs of its people AT LEAST as much as the needs of its businesses for inexpensive labor, not necessarily to say competent and reliable employees.
Yes! The Nordic nations are a model of just that. A social support system and a thriving business sector. We are too "exceptional" to look around the world for successful approaches to healthcare, education and retirement.
Maybe if voting was handled as Australia does?
What bogles my mind is that as a highly competitive business person, I would look at my competitors and emulate their successes - trying to use those ideas with my own enhancements. Why doesn't America search the world for what works well and adapt it our unique circumstances?
I spent a little over 3 weeks in Sweden. It sure seemed to me that profit-making business were thriving. But Swedish cities seems somehow more people-friendly. Certainly more architectural art and whimsy.
High taxes, high levels of happiness. Low levels of worry about being deprived of education or healthcare. And lower levels of ostentation. Far from perfect, like anyone. But way ahead of our chaos and disenfranchisement.
Maybe the public good should (which includes unalienable human rights) should always be paramount, but business is very much a part of that, and we get to set the rules that it not stray from the boundaries of, at the very least, doing no harm, and ideally observing a duty to the common weal like any other social entity.
Would it not be reasonable to require contracted offshored production to observe some basic US labor and environmental standards? I noticed that during the worst unemployment of the "Great Recession", companies were still moving whole departments abroad. Patriotic? Somehow they get away it calling any boon to workers "Job Killing" but kill real jobs with little reaction. The "Downsizing" as more and major companies become quasi-monopolies seems accepted as a fact of life, with faint resistance.
This is what feudalism looks like in the 21st Century and narcissists like Musk and Harlan Crow are the new lords. Effective government of the people, by the people, for the people absolutely has to be government of the people, by the people, for the people. We are fully entitled to make rules for corporations as for any other societal entity, including whether or not corporations even exist. The tail has been wagging the dog.
That's a helpful read. Thanks. It makes it clear. Note that in the 7 points mentioned as goals for NAFTA there is no mention of protecting American jobs. The whole project wreaks of "trickle down" economics. If it's good for American companies, then it must be good for Americans. Nope.
The day that workers have equal status with management and stockholders is the day that real democracy could exist in the US. For now, we worship at the altar of "business" which is another name for oligarchy.
And just to drive the point home, when that factory left that Ohio town, it took more than manufacturing jobs. It ripped away employment in every other element of society. Restaurants, grocery stores, real estate sales, hospitals...every enterprise that relied on factory workers income. And schools...
Businesses are an essential part of society. And along with that comes social responsibility.
So… understanding the past is important. More important is looking towards the future and a new approach to governance. HB 1 is a start in addressing dark money sources, a path corporate America abhors. Dems must push this agenda until the outsourced 61 year olds understand the whys and are motivated to act.
The core of "Reaganomics" was defamation of democracy and the glorification of plutocracy. It sounds absurd, but enough of the nation fell for it; big time. Obama was such a breath of fresh air after G. W. Bush, and he had a hell of a mess to clear, but I was greatly disappointed by how consistently he put banks in charge of remediation, with expectable results. How after a robust effort to root out crooks in the Saving and Loan Scandal, crooks got to walk, with a bonus, in the Subprime debacle. Why, after initially passive, hands-off promotion of his own heath plan, he was so keen to push the TPP?
Money is the cancer on our body politic, in the word of Conservative Democrat Fritz Hollings. And isn't that even an understatement? The de facto sale of political outcomes to those with the most money is classic corruption, very serious corruption, and we have been utter fools to tolerate it as a society, as long as we have.
Mike S, I think the drift away from the government John Adams helped define and describe it is not a uniquely American phenomenon but rather represents an international phenomenon arising from the development of railroads in England in the 1820s when the government recognized it needed a more universally recognized time of day so that people in each of the towns to which the trains provided service would know WHEN the train would (most likely) come to/through the station (see Sapiens pp. 350-375 by Yuval Noah Harrari). This led to government increasingly discovering the value of supporting individual mobility and "independence" for industry as well as the value to government itself. This drift away from Adams' concept of government over the past 200 years contributed to the reduction of power and influence of the family throughout the previous history of mankind.
They left because they don't care about Ukraine....or the United States and the American people...or Europe. Don't get me started on how they don't care about fixing borders and our collapsing environment. They are a party of evil which manifests by inaction and prevention of action. They only care about creating chaos ( isn't that the definition of Satanism?).
The border issue—repubs cannot tell the WH what it is they want. Pretty hard to resolve an issue when the other side demands a “solution” but doesn’t know what that might be.
I'm reading We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I; A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh. Re: international negotiations in 1949 -
"What struck me as I read these documents was the clarity, lucidity and precision of the drafting. No doubt this was due to the predominance of legal minds among members of the congress." (This right to return plan was undermined by British/Arab/Israeli agendas). "What a contrast this was to the PLO, which went on to negotiate the most important document, in the first ever negotiations with Israel, which took place in Oslo in 1992, without the presence of a single legal adviser". We see how that ended up. MAGA is our PLO. Hopefully they won't become our Hamas.
We should be filing a class action lawsuit against them for dereliction of duty, and demand our money back in the form of tax rebates, while they work unpaid if they do not get things passed in time. I would like that to be a requirement to their getting paid. Who keeps their jobs elsewhere when they don't do any work, and all they do is cause trouble.
In any case, this is the party of criminals and hypocrites, so it is about time the press starts pointing this out.
Linda, I said basically the same thing during phone calls made to Mike Johnson, James Comer, Jim Jordan, and my very own Mike Kelly. As you might imagine, my comments were met with the resounding sounds of crickets.
I think we should all call Mike Johnson's office say that he is a traitor for undermining our national security by not passing a bill to fund Ukraine. Here are his phone numbers:
I so agree with you ..they can just take their 3 weeks vacation plus all of their benefits and walk out without doing their job?? In what company would they not be fired??
No , I disagree. Their job is to governing this country and the American people in a time of crisis. They took an oath to protect the constitution and this country. They have completely failed in do so. Their blind sided with power for Trump and Putin. To put an traitor and a adversarie first before the safety of your country and the American people is, unexpectabke and shouldn't be tolerated by the people of this country. We should be protesting at their homes.
Thank you, Patricia. I feel the same. I also encourage people to vote blue. Actually, it was nice to read a few bits in the letter today about how things are not going well for Rs instead of the constant drumbeat that all is lost.
Joe Biden needs one's help to fail. Indeed, he has already botched the war in Ukraine. Instead of providing all necessary military aid in a timely manner when the Russians were on the back foot, the Biden Administration hemmed and hawed and negotiated with itself as to whether Ukraine really needed this or that weapons system & etc. Apparently, Biden was petrified that Putin would respond to such escalation with a nuclear strike—which was and is absurd. Anyhow, we have that pusillanimity to thank for the fact that the war has reached a stalemate and will drag on for another year or more. Incidentally, I foresaw the present stalemate back in August:
It's so easy for you to critique from the back seat and in hindsight! But President Biden absolutely had to contend with the possibility of WW3....just as he is doing in the Middle East. And do so with variable and often incomplete information. His job as Commander in Chief is protecting American lives...both military and civilian. His job as President is protecting democracy. He has done both in spades...and across multiple arenas.
A couple of things. Given the fact that I foresaw in August 2023 the strong possibility that Biden's wavering, half-a-loaf policy would produce the present stalemate, I can hardly be charged with criticism in hindsight.
Napoleon said to one of his generals, "Ask me for anything but time." There was, as I said, a moment in time when the Russians were on the back foot, their initial invasion of Ukraine having failed. Instead of capitalizing on that moment, Biden dithered. And so the opportunity to bring the Russo-Ukrainian War to a timely end was thrown away. That is inarguable. And now the war will go on, with more death and destruction, and much less of a chance for a favorable outcome.
As for Biden's fears of World War III, they were illusionary, as I explained in this article, written in September 2022. The last thing Putin wanted then, or wants now, is for Russia to become embroiled in a war with the US and NATO—a war that Russia could never win.
As for the excuse that Biden's actions have been governed by worries about "American lives"—well, if that's the overriding priority then it wouldn't it have been better to stay out of the Russo-Ukrainian War altogether? But presidents can't think like that. Did Lincoln during the Civil War? Did FDR during World War II? They knew that by their decisions there were sending scores of thousands of young men to their deaths. And sometimes that's the job. Biden's not being asked to make such terrible decisions. But he just can't screw up his courage to the sticking point and do what's necessary.
Biden doesn't have the dictatorial powers that would have been necessary to achieve what you claim he should have done. He also has no power over what other countries' governments decide to do. In Ukraine, Biden has not committed any American lives to the struggle, and most of the spending went to American military replacement. I do think more should have been given Ukraine earlier on, but it was the hard right Republicans (doing Putin's wishes) who kept the US from wholesale support of Ukraine. I knew then that Republican support for Ukraine would fail far short of their needs.
As for the historical conflicts you mentioned, Lincoln was forced into the Civil War by Southerners who seceded after his election but before he took office. FDR waited years before joining the WW2 because of the very strong profascism and isolationist movements here in America.
Both were examples of protecting Democracy (and freedom) first...even at the expense of American lives, because the priority of the 2 goals had been flipped by the aggression of the enemy of both.
Right, right, as usual it’s somebody else’s fault. But no. As I detailed and you didn’t dispute, Biden dithered and wavered when he should have acted with decision and dispatch. So now the war’s at a stalemate and what is he proposing to do about that? I doubt he has a clue.
By the way, it’s not true that “hard-right Republicans prevented him from doing more. Can you cite one example of that? No, you can’t.
“In the 1890s, once the dominant narrative cracked, an entire industry rose as journalists investigated those whose access to power had for decades protected them from scrutiny.” A hundred years from now, may the same thing be said of the 2020s. It’s way past time!
No, he's been trying to *become* the press, and has for years. He has long manipulated the genuine and credentialed journalists by acting as a "source" to propagate his message while calling out MSM as "Fake News". This has opened up a place in the very low end of the journalistic spectrum for pseudo-journos to fill (think Newsmax, OAN, etc.) and he amplifies their products. During his term, the WH Press Room was practically turned into his comms office, by berating and removing credentialed, respected reporters while giving access to shills. He forces media to bend to his will and whim, and deliver his messages of madness, and many are all too willing to repeat them. Look what he did to Faux News: they were his favorite source (until they weren't) and they spread his lies; now are on the hook for nearly $800 million. This is what has happened to our once-proud media.
The cruelty and bullying on display the last several years as Hunter Biden has been hunted down as a proxy for his father has been uncomfortable to watch. I am so glad he has stood up to his attackers as he did a couple of days ago, as difficult as that may have been. I do not wish ill upon anyone, but maybe if these pack animals experience some of their own consequences, they may emerge with some compassion for others. Hope springs eternal.
They used to be... back in the days when they set up PEPFAR. Now they are attempting to scupper it, one of their most successful and generous policies.
It was set up in 2003 by GWBush with wide bipartisan support. Every President since then has supported it, even Trump (although ‘support’ is overstating it for Trump). The deadline for a new 5 year re-authorisation was up this year & MAGAs scuppered it. It was left to limp on another year.
I don’t think they will ever become compassionate people. That is not in their nature. The abject cruelty on display towards Hunter Biden and the young woman from Texas is horrifying. That they might finally be called out on their years of vile conduct would be enough.
They are always guilty of worse than any Dem’s transgressions, was true with Clinton and it’s true today. But they have the Fox bull horn to fool the fools.
It seems to me that what Trump had asked the Ukraine president to do prior 2020, to simply say he was going to investigate Biden to put a shadow on his campaign, he has now been able to achieve with the Republicans.
It is power, notoriety and a no work job. My representative, Tom Kean, is nothing but an empty suit. No budget, no farm bill, no progress on any front just for ability to point fingers. Scratch the surface and it is easy to find how they all game the system to enrich themselves. They all take the path of least resistance.
My rep, Tim Burchett, mentored George Santos (per Santos). Yet Burchett voted to throw over McCarthy because McCarthy insulted Burchett’s religion. And oh btw Burchett said on tv after the Nashville school shootings there is simply nothing that can be done so why try.
To be honest, I think the only hold tffg has on the GOP House Reps is his cultish grip on the base, to whom he offers his harangues and from which gets his adulation fix. That keeps the MAGAts in line because every time tffg harangues them it's a demonstration of tffg's power over the base and thus over the career of every GOP Rep.
And well, gee....A GOP Rep can't get rich if he's primaried out, after his first term, now can he???--so every venal MAGAt Rep (they're ALL venal) shakes in his shoes and scurries to do tffg's bidding. I've never seen such a collection of moronic spinelessness as the entire current GOP House conference.
After I read a story about the stock market hitting new highs the last two days on AOL, I decided to check out the comments. It was mostly MAGANAZIs basing Biden. The typical comment was "Biden has ruined the country." and "I agree." I decided to have a little fun and asked them to be specific. More bashing of "liberals" as well as Biden, but again, no specifics. AOL checks comment content for specific words as do most sites and so the worst thing they could call me was ignorant and a liberal. Ouch! /S
Anyway, my thought is to find an AOL comment buddy and start trolling these low information MAGANAZIs. Of course that term is banned from AOL, but whatever. I could get multiple sign ons but it would be more fun to have a comment buddy. I think I can probably find one on AOL and catch them offline, but we'll see.
Like the Lincoln Project contends, if you can swing 3% of voters, you will win a large percentage of the races.
I have been saying for months. . . . Why don’t those people with “megaphones” pin down the maganazis with questions. Like, when they say tRump is the greatest president in their lifetime, ask “how so? What did he do that benefitted you or the country?” When they say Biden has tanked the economy, ask for specifics. Make them explain their stance and at least make an attempt to get them to do some critical thinking. Not challenging their beliefs is letting them off the hook and perpetuating the belief.
But isn't it scary how many buy into it. How poorly our education system has done teaching to the numb multiple-choice questions but not teaching how and when to inquire.
I think it’s their great fear of being primaried and consequently possibly losing their cushy jobs where they can go on holiday break having accomplished absolutely nothing for their constituents. Unfortunately, their constituents seem to be blissfully unaware.
History is repeating itself with this impeachment inquiry. It reminds me of when Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr led the impeachment against Bill Clinton, accusing him of various things related to his extra-marital affair, while they themselves were cheating on their spouses and getting away with it!
I guess it all boils down to what the definition of "is" is.
Where is Daniel Schorr when we really need him? Please someone at NPR resurrect him with ChatGPT and deepfake his voice so that NPR can actually comment on the news meaningfully, instead of free-advertising all the time for Trump and making him live rent free in our minds!!! I just wish Trump's arteries would catch up with him or that he would flee to Russia or something so we could all forget about him. Maybe lock him up finally to silence him!
Instead we have to hear about every damn threat that he is making in Mob-boss Dictator fashion, commonly without any kind of commentary of how we got to the point where we have a major candidate who is a worst case scenario, and Americans are so numbed down or distracted that they accept this blithely, since Trump is all we hear about. Nobody on NPR and most other media (except for HCR) is pointing out how blatantly unusual this is.
Clinton's impeachment was politically motivated, but i reject the claim that his only crime was an extra-marital affair (he is far from the first president in that category). I fault Bill Clinton for staring into the TV cameras, unequivocally lying to the pubic and defaming his accuser. He could have admitted the truth, publicly apologized for unprofessional behavior, and toughed it out; without empowering GOP theatrics. Trump lies whenever he speak, but I don't think any president should lie to the public to which he has a fiduciary duty about behavior on the public's dime. With great power comes great responsibility.
"I fault Bill Clinton for staring into the TV cameras, unequivocally lying to the pubic and defaming his accuser."
That is not Bill Clinton's biggest failure. ONE of his real failures is shoving a near teenage girl under the desk of the Oval Office and unzipping his pants. THAT was both Bill Clinton's fatal flaw and his largest mistake.
Clinton spent more time thinking about p***y than working on the job. His secret service people were forever taking him here and there for a quickie.
Also, he was buds with, and visited with that guy who was selling access to 15 year old's. Yep, Jeffrey Epstein and Clinton were tight. Along with Bill Gates and a bunch of other rich, white dudes who have sick minds.
Clinton's real problem was not lying, although that was something he did routinely. His real problem was that he was a real security threat.
Also, don't forget, Clinton did pass the "war on drugs" laws that put black men in jail for 30 years for having one ounce of Marijuana in their pocket at the same time that white kids in the suburbs were smoking dope in their cars at lunch at school.
Clinton was just a disaster. Really.
Lastly, don't forget. IF Clinton had kept his pants on Gore would have won and we would never have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
Clinton's legacy is large large alright. Largely evil.
And yet….his accomplishments while president are beyond incredible:
Longest economic expansion in American history
The President's strategy of fiscal discipline, open foreign markets and investments in the American people helped create the conditions for a record 115 months of economic expansion. Our economy has grown at an average of 4 percent per year since 1993.
More than 22 million new jobs
More than 22 million jobs were created in less than eight years -- the most ever under a single administration, and more than were created in the previous twelve years.
Highest homeownership in American history
A strong economy and fiscal discipline kept interest rates low, making it possible for more families to buy homes. The homeownership rate increased from 64.2 percent in 1992 to 67. 7 percent, the highest rate ever.
Lowest unemployment in 30 years
Unemployment dropped from more than 7 percent in 1993 to just 4.0 percent in November 2000. Unemployment for African Americans and Hispanics fell to the lowest rates on record, and the rate for women is the lowest in more than 40 years.
Raised education standards, increased school choice, and doubled education and training investment
Since 1992, reading and math scores have increased for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders, math SAT scores are at a 30-year high, the number of charter schools has grown from 1 to more than 2,000, forty-nine states have put in place standards in core subjects and federal investment in education and training has doubled.
Largest expansion of college opportunity since the GI Bill
President Clinton and Vice President Gore have nearly doubled financial aid for students by increasing Pell Grants to the largest award ever, expanding Federal Work-Study to allow 1 million students to work their way through college, and by creating new tax credits and scholarships such as Lifetime Learning tax credits and the HOPE scholarship. At the same time, taxpayers have saved $18 billion due to the decline in student loan defaults, increased collections and savings from the direct student loan program.
Connected 95 percent of schools to the Internet
President Clinton and Vice President Gore's new commitment to education technology, including the E-Rate and a 3,000 percent increase in educational technology funding, increased the percentage of schools connected to the Internet from 35 percent in 1994 to 95 percent in 1999.
Lowest crime rate in 26 years
Because of President Clinton's comprehensive anti-crime strategy of tough penalties, more police, and smart prevention, as well as common sense gun safety laws, the overall crime rate declined for 8 consecutive years, the longest continuous drop on record, and is at the lowest level since 1973.
100,000 more police for our streets
As part of the 1994 Crime Bill, President Clinton enacted a new initiative to fund 100,000 community police officers. To date more than 11,000 law enforcement agencies have received COPS funding.
Enacted most sweeping gun safety legislation in a generation
Since the President signed the Brady bill in 1993, more than 600,000 felons, fugitives, and other prohibited persons have been stopped from buying guns. Gun crime has declined 40 percent since 1992.
Family and Medical Leave Act for 20 million Americans
To help parents succeed at work and at home, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. Over 20 million Americans have taken unpaid leave to care for a newborn child or sick family member.
Smallest welfare rolls in 32 years
The President pledged to end welfare as we know it and signed landmark bipartisan welfare reform legislation in 1996. Since then, caseloads have been cut in half, to the lowest level since 1968, and millions of parents have joined the workforce. People on welfare today are five times more likely to be working than in 1992.
Higher incomes at all levels
After falling by nearly $2,000 between 1988 and 1992, the median family's income rose by $6,338, after adjusting for inflation, since 1993. African American family income increased even more, rising by nearly $7,000 since 1993. After years of stagnant income growth among average and lower income families, all income brackets experienced double-digit growth since 1993. The bottom 20 percent saw the largest income growth at 16.3 percent.
Lowest poverty rate in 20 years
Since Congress passed President Clinton's Economic Plan in 1993, the poverty rate declined from 15.1 percent to 11.8 percent last year — the largest six-year drop in poverty in nearly 30 years. There are now 7 million fewer people in poverty than in 1993. The child poverty rate declined more than 25 percent, the poverty rates for single mothers, African Americans and the elderly have dropped to their lowest levels on record, and Hispanic poverty dropped to its lowest level since 1979.
Lowest teen birth rate in 60 years
In his 1995 State of the Union Address, President Clinton challenged Americans to join together in a national campaign against teen pregnancy. The birth rate for teens aged 15-19 declined every year of the Clinton Presidency, from 60.7 per 1,000 teens in 1992 to a record low of 49.6 in 1999.
Lowest infant mortality rate in American history
The Clinton Administration expanded efforts to provide mothers and newborn children with health care. Today, a record high 82 percent of all mothers receive prenatal care. The infant mortality rate has dropped from 8.5 deaths per 1,000 in 1992 to 7.2 deaths per 1,000 in 1998, the lowest rate ever recorded.
Deactivated more than 1,700 nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union
Efforts of the Clinton-Gore Administration led to the dismantling of more than 1,700 nuclear warheads, 300 launchers and 425 land and submarine based missiles from the former Soviet Union.
Protected millions of acres of American land
President Clinton has protected more land in the lower 48 states than any other president. He has protected 5 new national parks, designated 11 new national monuments and expanded two others and proposed protections for 60 million acres of roadless areas in America's national forests.
Paid off $360 billion of the national debt
Between 1998-2000, the national debt was reduced by $363 billion — the largest three-year debt pay-down in American history. We are now on track to pay off the entire debt by 2009.
Converted the largest budget deficit in American history to the largest surplus
Thanks in large part to the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, and President Clinton's call to save the surplus for debt reduction, Social Security, and Medicare solvency, America has put its fiscal house in order. The deficit was $290 billion in 1993 and expected to grow to $455 billion by this year. Instead, we have a projected surplus of $237 billion.
Lowest government spending in three decades
Under President Clinton federal government spending as a share of the economy has decreased from 22.2 percent in 1992 to a projected 18.5 percent in 2000, the lowest since 1966.
Lowest federal income tax burden in 35 years
President Clinton enacted targeted tax cuts such as the Earned Income Tax Credit expansion, $500 child tax credit, and the HOPE Scholarship and Lifetime Learning Tax Credits. Federal income taxes as a percentage of income for the typical American family have dropped to their lowest level in 35 years.
More families own stock than ever before
The number of families owning stock in the United States increased by 40 percent since 1992.
Most diverse cabinet in American history
The President has appointed more African Americans, women and Hispanics to the Cabinet than any other President in history. He appointed the first female Attorney General, the first female Secretary of State and the first Asian American cabinet secretary ever.
Your worthy comment shows why all voters need to realize that ANY POTUS is human, and thus they are not perfect. It seems to me that right now, Biden can't seem to please anybody--no matter what he does, if he doesn't perfectly align with our view on our pet issues, he is condemned.
This attitude which could cause voters to either sit out the election in protest, or vote third party might send Trump back into the White House.
IMO, unless there is a MASSIVE unequivocal blue tsunami, we will either get four more years of him (and lose democracy) or we will listen to him WHINE until he is dead.
Clinton’s signature on NAFTA, welfare ‘reform’, the crime bill, the repeal of Glass-Stegall, and the failure to regulate derivatives, and the resulting pain and misery from each, his embrace of neoliberal economics, triangulation, and willingness to pursue grand bargains with cretins like Newt Gingrich, dwarfs all the combined cheery kudos on your list.
I never said you said he was perfect. I said he was horrific, and stand by it.
His complicity in the mendacious policies I noted cost millions their jobs, and robbed the middle class of trillions of wealth. Better shape? For whom? The wealthy. GDP and economic numbers mean squat when wages are flat and the cost of necessities like health care, drugs, and higher Ed skyrocket.
Use the all caps function until your fingers bleed, the lesser evil argument and refusal to acknowledge the sins of Democratic Party complicity since Reagan in our circling of the drain as a nation does nothing but drive people towards both sides suck populism, which unchecked, leads directly to a willingness to support authoritarianism to make the trains run on time.
Clinton put the Democratic Party establishment and the DNC on the path to caring more about its monied interest donors than working people, a duplicitous paradigm that was every bit as destructive to the national interest as was Reagan’s the government is the problem BS.
Agreed. In my view, Clinton’s most significant historical failure was his failure to resign, and to allow Al Gore to complete his term. Had Clinton sufficient character to resign, then Gore, in my view, would likely have earned sufficient presidential stripes to win the Bush election outright. No Bush, no Iraq invasion.
Mike S, I too agree Clinton was a disaster and I think history will remember him as a corrupt individual and his legacy the expansion and entrenchment of our out- of-control carceral system. The "war on drugs," keeps some people in prison even now. I repeat myself all the time about my home state of WI. We have 38 prisons filled with people who have been traumatized and forgotten. Not to mention their families left behind. This is what some WI legislators offered their constituents as a way to make a living and raise a family--a prison to work in. There are 4 in Dodge County alone (I am not counting the ICE Detention Center). And the assembly person representing Dodge County gets to count the prisoners as constituents, none of whom can vote. Dodge County is just an example because as I said, there are 38 prisons--there are other legislators with the same advantage of constituents in prison who cannot vote. Exploitation. Of course, Clinton was a master of exploitation. It is and remains disgraceful and heartbreaking.
"so that NPR can actually comment on the news meaningfully, instead of free-advertising all the time for Trump"
Casey, I was a bit puzzled to see this reference to NPR advertising for Trump. I listen to my local NPR station a fair bit and both the National NPR broadcast and my local broadcast make it clear that Trump is a criminal dolt.
Recently, I had a conversation with an elderly, rural, conservative resident in my apartment complex. It is not uncommon for my residents to gratuitously bemoan immigrants that have moved into the area.
Instead of attacking her, I took the tact of education. I noted that immigrants are essential to supporting elderly Americans. They add $2 trillion annually to our GDP and $500 billion to the state, local and federal taxes. They pay into social security, their benefits are deferred and if they are undocumented they get no benefits. They are essential to the service economy that supports the elderly and lowers prices. She knew none of the above.
I have a weatherization and energy efficiency capital improvement program underway funded by the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Act and the workers making the improvements are a racial mixed group. The residents are seeing real improvements in their lives and many hard working and nice the workers are.
Alas, it’s a truth that not enough Americans see and understand.
Exactly. We all need to listen carefully and reach people where they are at. This is something the Democrats really need to address in the rural areas!
We need to remember that most of us have immigrant ancestors. My maternal grandmother immigrated to the US as a young girl in the 1880’s, becoming an American citizen when she married in 1917.
In 1980, meat packers were Black, earning a good middle class wage, thanks to decades of organizing. By that decade's end, they were mostly immigrants, toiling under atrocious conditions for barely above minimum wage. The same pattern applied in most of the low/no-skilled jobs, stagnating workers' wages for nearly 40 years. Some fired American workers had to train their foreign replacements
Immigration is big biz' way of keeping wages down. You can read about it in Back of the Hiring Line A 200 Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, adn Depression of Black Wealth.The book is solid--296 footnotes, from the academic economic literature, statements of Black leaders beginning with Frederick Douglass, Black periodicals, and gov't commissions on immigration reform. The late Barbara Jordan, the Blck former Texas Congresswoman who made her name on the Jurdiciary Committee during Watergate, who ran the most recent commissions on immigration reform under PRes Clinton, recommended cutting immigration numbers nearly in half, in no small part to enable Blacks to find employment. She also recommended strict enforcement of immigration laws.
Had Barbara Jordan's recommendations been followed, Trump probably would not have been elected. Immigration was his signature issue.
It’s said that the apple does not fall [too] far from the tree or” like father like son” ... trump showed how much he cared for human lives by the way he handled - or attempted to - the COVID outbreak. The MAGA republicans in the House are showing the same sentiments by how they’re leaving the Ukrainians need for continued financial and military aid hanging ... and they appear to be clueless as to how they are aiding and abetting Putin’s slaughter of innocent people in Ukraine and how or what it might mean for other countries in that area - and us - if Putin were to win this war.
Some clearly are manipulators and other are more being duped. The poor fool who went to jail for an armed attack on the Comet PingPong Pizza joint seemed sincere about attempting to rescue non-existent abused children for the non-existent basement.
They slithered out of town, like they always do to friendlier MSM territory. They can sit and have spiked eggnog for 3 weeks on the $175K we pay them to pass 22 bills in an entire year. And none of them were the spending bills they should have passed.
If you live in a district represented by a MAGANAZI Congresscritter or Senator, remind them what you think of them abandoning Ukrainian soldiers fighting against Putin's cannon fodder. I live in a Blue district so I have adopted two red districts and use the address of family members that allow me to use their addresses.
No reason to ever call them names or threaten them. Just remind them we are watching them do nothing for their constituents and our allies.
I just donated to the Democrat running against the initial RepubliKan elected to Oregon's new congressional district. That is about as close as I can get, since I am personally well represented in both the House and Senate.
I spent a year reading Weiss’s three volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and was shocked to learn how much support Hitler and Mussolini had from wealthy folks. We have to get past this.
Are the Republicans clueless about what they’re doing to Ukraine? Or do they know exactly what they’re doing and whom they are serving? Which would make one ask, why have they become Putin‘s servants? Maybe it’s just the oldest motivation in history.
For every politician who uses the term Biden Crime Family, we should also add those terms to their name. For example, the Jordan Crime Family. Every time!
But for gun battles and spooky disappearances, the entire Republican operation has looked more like a Racketeer Influenced Criminal Organization with every passing day.
Marking the eleventh anniversary: we must never forget the lives lost in the tragic Sandy Hook Shooting. A 20 year old shooter murdered 20 first graders and six staff members. “Americans demanded background checks for gun purchases, a policy supported by 90% of Americans. But the measure was killed in the Senate by lawmakers who represented just 38% of the American people.” Since then, Republicans have blocked legislation to regulate guns and have instead offered thoughts and prayers after each mass shooting. And still today guns over children is the real law. “In Gunned Down: The Power of the NRA, FRONTLINE goes inside the politics of America’s gun debate. Veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk investigates the NRA, its political evolution and influence, and how it has consistently succeeded in defeating new gun control legislation.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/gunned-down/
My heart always sinks when I realize it's the anniversary of that massacre; one of the most shameful moments in this country's history and that includes the aftermath of lies those poor parents suffered.
... and then there are perverts like Alex Jones who are 'allowed' to call the massacre 'fake', insulting parents and others by stating the 'event had been staged' ... and this guy is still running free, not having paid a nickel of his 'penalty' of several million dollars.
Yes, I totally agree, and he is still running free, and has declared "bankruptcy", and there might never be a payout, as Angelica assumes, but this evil person will sit in a chair by the beach and spend the money he has pushed into some tax enclave, still peddling his lies and conspiracy s..t. on his podcasts.
I figured that when we got no meaningful legislation out of Sandy Hook, there would never be any. SInce then of the many school shootings, two stand out for me: Parkland High School and Robb Elementary, both of which were nearly (with 17 and 19 fatalities). They stand out because of the failures of law enforcement as first responders to actually respond as the training dictates (as you might guess, I am disgusted with the responses of law enforcement in both of these cases. Antithetical to our training.)
I fail to comprehend how the massive loss of life of innocent people is less important than unfettered access to military grade weapons for untrained civilians.
"The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm."...
"Since 2017, firearm suicide has been the cause of roughly 25,000 deaths each year. Nearly 80 percent are white males ages 15 and older."...
'Several Republicans indicated to Politico’s Playbook that they are not actually interested in a deal, since “polling consistently shows that immigration is the most toxic issue on the campaign trail for Biden. Why take that off the table as an attack on him in 2024?” ' Thank you, HCR, for this summary of our legislative state of affairs
Always great to have historical context, but in our case today, the MAGAts are a different breed from the robber barons of the 1890’s. They are nihilists, drunk on the power of identity politics, and exploiting the largesse of their corporate greedhead benefactors.
I think that what we have are "robber barons" are the ones pulling the strings; think Koch/Leo. The MAGATs are as you describe, "nihilists, drunk on the power of identity politics". I think that there is also a religious component to the mission of the uber rich that cannot be overlooked.
It is long past time journalists got our their shovels and started to dig into the muck that is today’s republican party. Thank you for this reminder, Professor Richardson, let it be an inspiration to those in the press who follow your Letters.
Dear God, could it be that truth is FINALLY breaking through in the minds of the American public……that the Comer’s and their ‘shell companies’, the crude lies about Hunter Biden, the silliness of IMPEACHING his father?
In the 1890s, once the dominant narrative cracked, an entire industry rose as journalists investigated those whose access to power had for decades protected them from scrutiny.
I have yet to hear any compelling argument for the legitimacy of shell corporations. I have read any number of articles in which shell companies have been used of highly unethical or illegal purposes that rush to reassure the reader that not all shell companies are used by crooks. But why have them at all? Does the function the serve legitimate business outweigh the obvious advantages they offer crooks? I assume that Hunter Biden's use was on the up and up, but I wish they were just gone.
Shell corporations are legitimate, legal entities that do not possess actual assets or run business operations. They function as transactional vehicles for a variety of firms and for a myriad of purposes. Generally, they are used to obtain financing, maintain control over a conglomerate company, allow firms more favorable tax treatment, and occasionally facilitate money laundering as well as other illegal activities.
Shell companies are non-traded corporations, meaning that they are not listed on any stock exchanges for buying and selling by investors. Most exist in name only, other than as a mailing address, and on paper as a registered financial entity. To become a shell corporation, an interested party must first file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Examples are limited liability companies (LLCs) and trusts, provided that they are not comprised of any physical properties. In a sense, any startup firm that files with the SEC is technically a shell corporation.
There are roughly 21.6 million LLCs in the United States. In comparison, there are approximately 1.7 million traditional C-Corporations, and approximately 23 million sole proprietorships.
As I understand it (very limited knowledge here so quoting experts) the LLC ‘stage’ is pretty to very common in business development and the SEC has a Herculean task to monitor) these LLC’S are internationally used ….by all sorts of folks….
I’m guessing that many ARE ILLEGALLY used, but many are just a legal ‘step’ in a legal business development.
Boy is this a ‘governance HOLE’’ that needs a LOT MORE effective supervision!
I’ve been a corporate officer in family held corporation that has behaved well…with no legal problems, I’m grateful for the opportunity and I’m not in favor of ‘blanket condemnations’ of ‘business’….
That's an interesting comment about the history of journalism in the US holding the wealthy and the corporations up for scrutiny. Can I gather from that kind of journalism that it contributed to passing the first anti-trust laws in 1890 and 1914?
Regarding support for Ukraine - I regret to say that in the EU, MAGA and Putin friend Viktor Orban - whose country, Hungary, has been a net recipient of EU development largesse - is currently blocking a €50 billion support package for Ukraine, and just attempted to derail (but did not succeed) opening accession talks for Ukraine and Moldova. Orban is evidently learning from his MAGA counterparts. Unlike American journalism, Hungarian journalism is unfree - due to Orban - but social media and the rest of European journalism is not: Hungary is increasingly isolated, despite the likes of Fico and Meloni now heading governments in the EU, but this illustrates that the ability for one extremist or bad actor, be he ever so corrupt (as Orban is), to derail a country or supranational entity is not only a US problem. And in the meantime, poor Ukraine continues to suffer the attacks of a dictator and his vile army and Europe is less secure.
One hugely sad fact about Orban and all those nationalists.
While they shout racial and cultural purity, you'll never see any one of them ever cite a novel from their own cultures, or a movie, memoir, theatrical production, poem, or song.
You will see them driving latest model cars. Carrying credit cards. Possessing the largest-screen video systems possible. Linked to computers. Purchasing international name brand fashion items, accessories, and cosmetics.
They're all hostage to slogans, blanket labeling, and hate abstractions -- all suckers for the outside consumerism which covers for their illiteracy as to their own cultures, illiteracy, too, as to individual-based humanities in all neighboring or farther-off cultures.
This is literally disgraceful by the Republicans party and Speaker Johnson to leave on Christmas break without passing a bill to fund Ukraine. Their doing this deliberately for Trump and Putin and to make Biden fail. Republicans in the house are pure evil. They haven't done a damn thing for our national security or the American people. Hopefully the Senate will come to a resolution to fund Ukraine. The majority of us who believe in democracy are sick and tired of house Republicans not governing. Not mention them trying to impeach President Biden. I pray that justice will prevail at the end.
The American people are emotionally drained. But we can't give up! We have a tough road ahead in 24. Vote 💙 blue.
Their current stunts seem to me to telegraph weakness' like they have run out of cunning plots and are just acting out in an effort to maintain confusion. They still have a lot of power, so they're still very dangerous, but their lock-step seems to be stumbling.
As Catherine L. notes above, the corrupt of politics have had unprecedented help in maintaining distraction and confusion from the engineered constructions of corporate media. Mainstream media now largely offers neither news nor education but is selling confirmation bias to the citizens they have groomed through deliberate polarization to become addicted to it. The drug comes in both blue and red pill form, and it is deadly, perhaps terminally so, to a functional government that depends on a functioning democracy.
Don't MSNBC, to some extent CNN, and the late-night comics count?
I'd call them all mainstream. But they deal in facts, with interviews of leading actors of the public agenda. Ari Melber often cites figures from today's arts for their keeping the pulse, and all the late-night hosts do the same. So, no, I don't think they're dealing in polarization, given that the other, Republican side has zero public policy programs, withdrawing more and more only to sensationalism.
As Heather Cox Richardson points out, even when it appears they might have a public policy concern (the southern border), they'd rather shirk doing anything about it for the sake of keeping it vitriolically shrieking instead.
Here are two parts of a twelve part series produced with many colleagues last year. It is an academic peer-reviewed blog --a source produced by people who are respected in what they do and backed by peer reviewed research, not secondary sources. Links to primary research help us dig deeper. So do the links on HCR's letters.
We ALL have bias, and the extent to which both blue and red pills control us is revealed in the second link with the quantitative reasoning sample, but read the first one first…and the second one second. ☺
https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/understanding-bias-in-behavioral-sciences/
https://www.improvewithmetacognition.com/understanding-bias-in-physical-and-quantitative-sciences/
Note a danger symptom to see in ourselves is to start to fool ourselves by reverting to logical fallacies, one trying to substitute the source of an argument for evidence . Who presents the argument has no bearing on resolving the truth of the argument. Don't stop with letting your favorite network tell you what is true. Dig deeper.
More and more Americans are not watching any of the "networks". Cable news is in a spiral dive to irrelevance. Most people who are not reading this news letter get their news on their phones - from a mind bending variety of sources. The debate between MSNBC and FOX ... and the "new" CNN is fast becoming "old" news - an antique way of getting information.
Of course, your concept applies universally. But when we are in the trenches of a world war - it really doesn't matter. You just have to win. Or your way of life dies.
In a theoretical world where the difference between two political parties is a competition between governing philosophies - either of which could function to serve all the people - but using different structures...your depth of reasoning and research would have great value. Choose one or the other or ideally find compromise to achieve a functional middle ground.
But in the present moment, it is a distraction. I get the concept. But today, the red pill means fascism and bigotry towards anything not white male, not "Christian", "America First"...and the enormous one: denying our impact on the Climate Crisis. The red pill has sympathy with a nation that is engaged in genocide and encouraging it elsewhere.
The blue pill is the antithesis of all that exclusive hate. It embraces science. It actually believes in democracy. It is quite imperfect and has been penetrated by the oligarchs as well. It makes many mistakes. But it does want to honor international agreements. It does want to help people with the cost of education, child care, healthcare, food security, clean water, housing.
The choice of pills couldn't be more starkly obvious. Choose red if you are a selfish hater of others. Or choose blue if you think we are all in the same boat and the resources of the world should be shared more widely. Choose blue if you think we should help protect people from disease. Choose blue if you think we should honor and protect the planet that we are perched on.
Bill,
And? The blue pill has also gone through clinical trials successfully with widespread positive outcomes for some folks!!
Thank you. The constant both sidesism is tiresome. You well describe the difference.
The best news is news created from actual facts, actual reality, and the Muckrakers typified that with their explosive articles in publications like McClure's Magazine.
I'm pleased that I still have a number of copies of that publication from over a hundred years ago, and credit my high school teachers for having us read the Autobiography of Lincoln Stephens albeit in a shortened version which stopped at the point where he left for Russia and became a Communist. Such were the times.
But my favorite was the legendary muckraker (that is, staunch investigative reporter) Ida Tarbell who exposed the predations of Rockefeller Sr. and his Standard Oil Company (see https://allthatsinteresting.com/ida-tarbell). What a great role for a kid in high school, head and shoulders above journalists today!
As we know from the Trump years, there's a whole lot to be said for fact-based reality and objective, truthful journalism.
Blue please.
Great analysis. CNN is toast. NYT and WAPO hanging on. I think their liberal readers, the majority of their subscribers, are not following either as we once used to. I read them only selectively. HRC has nailed it. We have returned to the age of the crusading Editor. This kind of Editor does not abandon the truth or facts, but expresses them in the context of moral conviction. I am old enough to remember Walter Cronkite, delivering the news. He always did so in a detached, but avuncular way. But the broadcast that sticks in my mind is the time he broke down in tears, reporting the news of the assassination of John Kennedy. From then on, I knew he cared, and it showed increasingly on his reporting of the Vietnam war. Goodbye, Columbia school of journalism. The times are a changin.
Interesting analysis, Bill. Thank you.
My thoughts exactly. Is there sidesism? Bias? Yes. Even in science? Yes, but not nearly to the extent science-deniers (e.g. Republicans, hyper-Christians, vaccine deniers, etc) will have you believe. They are projecting. It is not difficult at all to cite the difference between the blue pill and the red pill when comparing to reality, and a compassionate world view. I first got wind of this long ago with the young earth creationists versus ancient earth and evolution of species. There was clearly a wrong and a right that blew through any tweaking due to bias. And then example after example reared their ugly heads - climate change being the largest and most important. We have biases, but which pill is dominated by them and which not so much?
Aspirational Blue here....
We can do more in '24! VOTE BLUE!!!!
Around here, a disheartening number of locals get their 'news' from the boys down at the local diner, when they meet for their morning coffee.
"Reasoning" and "Research" is a distraction???
Despots leading parties have successfully lied their citizens into countless wars (both declared and undeclared) by using a few skillful manipulators to successfully convince a host of followers to "take a side" and cast both reason and research aside. The choice to employ reason and research or let manipulators lead you by your bias to act in their interests is the starkly obvious choice. I see you have lots of support to dump both reason and research.
Very well said, Bill.
Sure, in my spare time, I already spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to sort through the sewer. Where is Walter when our survival depends on truth in packaging…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gwbcDqTyGQ
Ed, you are gonna make my brain work with those. I have them bookmarked, and will try them after the magic bean juice has done its work.
Thanks Ally! I always love reading your posts on this site. If you would rather do a tour in video, the same writers are on here giving a very structured panel at the National Numeracy Network about a year and a half before they produced the blog articles. You only need to endure each of us for about four minutes. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRuGd9I-Hzw
I skimmed both articles. I tend to agree with the authors but of course behavioral “science” isn’t science, but I think it more accurately when done right, which it seldom is, is a great illustration of the technique of knowing.
I’ve long had a huge issue with how basic science is taught. It’s useless. No one needs to understand how to balance equations.
As a chemist, loving it so much I have a mass spectrometer in my house, there is a way to teach it so that it is relevant. And it’s relevant if it makes you understand it well enough to read the original ivermectin -might -fight -covid paper and easily understand why it doesn’t show anything of the sort, but raises another question. It’s my current go-to explanation of how scientific studies work.
Your articles are nice for someone who doesn’t know how to think.
Anyone who listens to any of the main stream media on, say, the economy, really isn’t doing their due diligence.
"I’ve long had a huge issue with how basic science is taught. It’s useless. No one needs to understand how to balance equations."
Maybe no one except chemists.?
As a chemist, have you noticed any situations in which your pre-existing cognitive biases interfere with data interpretation, I wonder? As in, dismissing studies done in disciplines with different parameters than yours as “not really science”, “only good for people who don’t know how to think” or “shallow”?
"Your articles are nice for someone who doesn’t know how to think."
Yeow! Now that verbal attack is a knife to the front, not in the back. So you're saying that the articles, which I didn't and now won't read, are worthless, a waste of time. Maximum shade there, but being direct and clear may well be called for often; however, experience tells me that the author(s) will now go into defensive mode and reject your comment as just the spawn of a hateful creator. Most of us need a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
Ed,
Of course we all have bias and your article does a good job of explaining it.
The problem arises when we try to “both sides” our treatment and one side is holding the gun of facism to our heads, refusing to acknowledge the facts. I do get multiple news inputs, mostly from the sources that Ad Fontes Media puts at top for truthfulness and center for lack of bias (Ap/Reuters, ABC, BBC, NPR).
https://adfontesmedia.com/gallery/
Thanks Mary Hardt. When you read the math example by Kahan et al. that involves both Republicans and Democrats making their "interpretations" while clutching their little colored pills of choice, you see the thing that drives that is "my-side" bias. What you are calling "both sides" is really my-side bias directing the anger at those who look at the pills and ask "What's in 'em?"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992 (This is for those who might have asked such a question too, rather than popped a pill to please peers).
Reading the content fro the first link, a red light flashed caused by the introduction of mathematical analysis of human behavior!
Recall the last financial disaster was brought on by AIG’s bookmaking bets on tranches of financial paper, cobbled together by unscrupulous financial houses, based on the hired quants who claimed their mathematical model was more than 97% accurate!
You will like this even less. It comes out of the work done by the same people who wrote the articles that Jen Andrews found "shallow." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/
Ed, Thank you for this resource. As to bias, Will Rogers may have said it best: "It's hard to get a man to see the truth of something when his paycheck depends on him NOT seeing it." Or words to that effect. Too lazy to dig up the exact quote. ;0)
Ed, how timely--I watched this clip from the popular Beau of the Fifth Column yesterday in which he explains how to verify/debunk internet "news" bites. Will people who are biased take the time to do Beau's suggestions? Probably not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gwbcDqTyGQ
Thanks for your links. Reading the comments from this forum is a worthy continuing education seminar for this senior citizen.
Bye the way, I did watch Beau's video.
We are both subscribers here for good reasons. Love the historical perspectives Heather brings to this. I prefer good independent media with investigative reporting to the talking heads on network TV.
“Dig deeper”??? Sounds like QAnon’s “Do your own research.”
Which of course means: Hunt down the sites and people and false prophets that support your particular beliefs.
Social media is KILLING us.
Letters From an American IS Social Media. Just whom do you think should be doing Heather's research for her? Why should she not be doing her own? This Substack site surely is not peer-reviewed primary research. If you want to try to imply Substack is a variety of QAnon site, you have allies in highly placed Democratic Party operatives who want government to create a legal definition of "a journalist" so they can shut down access to independent journalists not in the employ of corporations. Watch the March "hearings" grilling of Matt Taibbi and how they deprecate Substack. But we are here, and neither one of us is being killed.
Thank you so much. A dozen of us worked really hard on what turned out to be a bigger project with over a dozen articles than we anticipated.
Our Letters are full of the work that has been done by journalists and for subscribers who have any doubt about that take a look at 'Notes:' at the
end of this Letter, which started with a story in the Associated Press. Trump and MAGAs bash the 'free press' calling it 'the enemy of the people'. There is a lot of crap in the 'media' and much of 'social media' is a propaganda engine. Let's know the difference and share that news.
Fern, perhaps my overactive imagination is working here, but it seems to me that your comments lately have been fewer and those that appear are brief? I do scan for your comments. I hope that you are well, and the reason that this seems to be happening (at least in my eyes?) is that you have many delightful tasks taking up your time currently.
Miselle, thank you for inquiring about my health, which is okay. I have been around, but, perhaps, a little less frequently and sometimes toward the end of our comments. I appreciate
your kindness and encouragement. All my encouragement and support of your steady engagement in the principles and survival of Democracy.
The Republicans don't ACTUALLY want to fix immigration by debating and hashing out policy details. They just want to use immigration as a cudgel to beat Democrats with to stir up their base to turn out. Right now, I think the R's are using the loss of reproductive rights to fulfill Steve King's remark, "We can't build our country with other people's babies." King, a former congressman from Iowa is indicative of what lots of people think. He is racist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-immigration, etc. He is against anything not straight, white, Christian, and male.
Yep, we have long had an opportunity to fix immigration, but have failed to do so. So now when things have gotten so bad in countries to the south of us, partially because of our meddling, and people are willing to take long dangerous treks to get here, it is suddenly the Ds who are the problem.
Perhaps the over hyped southern border problem should have been solved before the ancestors of the magas were admitted to their port of call!
Last week I was surprised to learn that more people (20 million a night, I believe) watch CBS, NBC and ABC news than all the cable networks combined.
Not good.
Geez, THANK you, Phil.
Ed, you are correct about the corporate media and the effect of their propaganda. The Democratic Party needs to take this as a lesson. The idea that "when they go low, we go high" has to be discarded. Why is Biden trashed about the economy when it is soaring? Simple - Republican propaganda. The Democrats need a leader who understands the need to propagandize our case. Jamie Harrison, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, doesn't seem "to get it."
A vast right wing propaganda machine carefully built by corporations and rich folks. To serve there interests.
Supported by outsourcing and offshoring by the same people so that real Americans are disenchanted with the current system that they believe failed them.
A double pronged strategy. Make everyone poor and tell everyone it is the Democrats fault.
Working pretty well as far as I can tell.
Mike, Pres. G.W. Bush nailed it on 3/31/2001 when at the White House Correspondents' Dinner he said: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." Yes, they're aware that there are a lot of people who will listen and follow the Pied Piper.
Richard,
Thanks. I had not previously heard the quote so thank you. I am not surprised. Bush II and Cheney had hearts of pure evil combined with minds of mush.
We have the leader you describe. Joe Biden.
We are in the choir preaching to each other. Given the lack of credit Biden gets for what he has been able to do, I sometimes wonder if the operatives that control the Party really care. I get the most news of the specific good Biden has done from Progressive news sources like Tom Hartmann on Sirius radio that are not even the "mainstream" Democratic Party cheerleading sites from which I would most expect this to come. This election is for the party to lose by making it all about finger-pointing, which actually puts the focus on the other party instead of on issues that inspire people and that many have long wanted some control over through true representation.
Ed The Economist has two excellent articles on how the media has badly served the American public. One is in this week’s edition. The other is a much longer article in the 1843 Magazine in which ‘Lexington’ describes in great detail how the New York Times fails to fulfill its earlier masthead promise “to provide all the news that is fit to print.”
Thanks Keith. I used to subscribe but given your tip I will try to dig these out. Really do appreciate the resources!
True, as far as it goes, but there is no equivalence. Choose fascism or democracy.
It seems some want us to choose oligarchy but wrap it in only one of the two terms. I'll not be choosing to be the dualistic thinker like Stefanik was, bullying college presidents with her rhetorical question and demands they choose only her dualistic answers.
Ed, as a geologist with an interest in psychology ('Metacognition'), I would like to know about your knowledge of journalism; understanding of the content of social media, in other words, how much of its presentations are based on journalism versus propaganda. commercial sales, conspiracy theories, etc. Are you informed about how many Americans receive their 'news' from social media as well as its effect on the audiences' political positions, factual understanding of what is happening in their communities, state-wide, in the US as well as the major issues of the time, such as Climate Change and large conflicts around the world, such as in Ukraine, 2nd Congo War, Yemen, Myanmar, Israel, Ethiopia, etc.?
'News Platform Fact Sheet' (PewResearchCenter)
'The transition of the news industry away from print, television and radio into digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news at least sometimes from digital devices. Explore the patterns and trends that shape the platforms Americans turn to for news below.'
What are the effects of social media on participatory democracy, our mental health and knowing the difference between facts and propaganda?
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/
Where Americans get their news: New data from Pew ...
https://www.prdaily.com/where-americans-get-their-news-new-data-from-pew-research/
Noam Chomsky expressed a philosophy of media and media literacy that I just found and discover that it is similar to my own too. Education, not training, and certainly not partisanship that requires neither, is what prepares one to engage effectively with both information and misinformation.
https://progressivehub.net/conformist-media-outlets-hide-realities-of-power-noam-chomsky-has-exposed-them/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=8577f8f7-3886-4dfd-b11d-5ebf81fe5ac6
I had written you a long reply and clicked on a link (https://www.opensecrets.org/industries//summary?ind=Q05&recipdetail=S&sortorder=S&mem=Y&cycle=2022) to add to several and the Substack platform erased it all. I'll try putting it back again tomorrow. Gallup carries research similar to Pew's https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx and if one is going to use digital sources one needs to have bookmarked links to check the sources like MediaBias FactCheck and Snopes.
Of equal impact on our news is the monopolization of the information system by the major corporate publishing houses and putting our primary literature behind their paywalls. I presume you have been following that as well as how the corporations have been using "Trade Agreements" and restrictive fair use to move information beyond reach of not only individuals but also universities and colleges without big endowments? Berkeley did a revolt against Elsevier a while ago that made the news, but most of this goes on quietly until the damage is too great to overcome.
"Ed, as a geologist with an interest in psychology ('Metacognition'), I would like to know about your knowledge of journalism; understanding of the content of social media, in other words, how much of its presentations are based on journalism versus propaganda. commercial sales, conspiracy theories, etc. Are you informed about how many Americans receive their 'news' from social media as well as its effect on the audiences' political positions..." Returning to this a night later.
Journalism is a distinct profession, so to find out the best journalism sources, I tend to go to the sources that accumulate the journalists who receive the recognition from their peers, not from the political parties, the corporations, or the conspiracy recruiters. I can't reach to learn everything in depth, but getting educated in logic enough to recognize fallacies when an advocate is using them, knowing the levels of intellectual development so one understands whether an argument is being made at a dualistic stage rather than at a higher stage of reasoning, and some experience in understanding when the evidence required for an argument is really being offered is much more useful for dealing with real-world problems than acquiring memorized facts. Also, being willing to go to primary sources, to those who peers identified recognized as credible in their fields by electing them as officers of their professional organizations, putting them on the review, editorial boards or advisory boards of their professional journals is a practice I've found useful to quickly getting the advice I need when I don't have it.
I don't think it is possible to have a true democracy without having free access to information and having a populace educated sufficiently to be competent synthesizers and consumers of that information and to know how education differs from training.
I wish they would stop putting trump in the news. Trump MIGHT do this. Trump may face charges for that crime. trump has a rally in Sioux Falls. I know-it is Sioux City Iowa and not in S.D. Just tell me he is convicted. Tell me the gag order is in place yet again (should never have been taken off). No more petty stuff. Keep him out of the paper.
I've seen estimates that the corporate media essentially gave him about 2 billion dollars of free advertising in 2016 every time they featured him. So did the Democratic Party every time they talked about him as "the greater evil" rather than about what they were FOR and what they are going to DO. All that brought him name recognition. Didn't matter that it was negative. It all gave him fame.
MAGA Republicans depend on their supporters being clueless idiots who don't recognize how transparently idiotic their MO is, not to mention the damage to the country domestically and internationally. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
The MAGA/KKK are the "True Believers" that Eric Hoffer wrote about in "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements." At its core, the movement is purely racist. I attach KKK to MAGA because that is, IMO, what this is: white Protestant supremacy. That is what is most important to them.
BINGO! You nailed it!
Richard, I think that you’re insulting them by not using the word christian - unless your omission is intentional?
Jim, thank you for this note. True, when I said that the MAGA/KKK are white Protestant supremacists, it would have been more descriptive and more accurate to identify them as "White Protestant Christian supremacists." I capitalized the "C" though they really are Chinos.
We MUST vote them out of power in 2024! Otherwise they will continue to bring down our republic and our people.
Absolutely.
Make that “goose step!” And just ask Kate Cox if they appear to be stumbling!
J L, are you saying that the R's are running out of sh*t to flood the zone with? I would have thought they had an inexhaustible supply!
Trump alone is a cornucopia of crap. My thoughts are that "GOP" lies are a liability for them that can be used against them, and have not be leveraged enough. The Jan 6th committee was a well organized attempt to advertise the truth, as are an array of trials. The Biden impeachment effort is pretty weak tea, that may fire up the "hypnotized" base, but speak to those who need more encouragement to be politically engaged. For too long corruption has been met with inaction.
And, the only liver that will be eaten is orange and will go well with a "good chianti & fava beans." Yum.
To your point this is a good read.
https://open.substack.com/pub/aaronrupar/p/jack-smith-scotus-petition-presidential-immunity?r=dy5ew&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
If you read the WH fb page, you can see what propaganda is being feed to them without enduring faux news
I will vote blue.
However, I read the Wall Street Journal and I can tell you that Trump is well organized and well supported on the right.
If he wins, and, he very well might, he will put in place a highly effective organization that will support Putin's ability to continue to give Trump huge money to do Putin's bidding. Plus, he will be able to get his appointee, Jerome Powell, to print money for him again like he did during the Pandemic.
American Democracy will be over. At least for a while, maybe forever.
Sadly, killing Democracy was a bi-partisan process. Outsourcing and offshoring, an initially Republican led effort, was fully supported by Democrats in the Clinton administration when they passed NAFTA which, instantly created that "great sucking sound" that Ross Perot warned about.....jobs going to Mexico.
Killing American jobs and leaving the working class poor was a bi-partisan effort of American Democracy (paid for by lobby money by big corporations).
That failure of real Democracy to heed the future of the voter has now left us with a huge desire among the "people", to just get rid of the failed system that has not worked for them (or me honestly).
Who can blame them/me? I am one of those that was outsourced to India when I was 61. Of course, the software product I was supporting is now no longer sold because the nice Indian kids could not do the complex work.
But, the laws here that allow corporations to leverage unqualified slave labor in India are the problem. And? Those laws were paid for by big companies in India lobbying my Congressmen and women.
American Democracy is under attack because it has failed so many real Americans. The government John Adams established has been gone for ages supplanted by a government by the corporation, for the corporation and of the corporation (whichever lobbyist just paid of my Congress person).
I would say it is sad, but, it is just reality in America.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/the-conservative-coterie-behind-trumps-second-term-agenda-3c13b533?page=1
Yup. NAFTA symbolizes a sell out by Democrats. A fantasy that by opening the flood gates of global trade - with no guard rails for American workers - would somehow deliver prosperity to all. Dems dumped their core constituency.
Companies COULD have been regulated. If you are going to shut down a factory here, you will be responsible for the towns and employees you are abandoning until they can replace that income and tax base! And you have to give the town a few years warning - providing assistance until it is no longer needed. Hmmm. That cheap labor in China or Mexico would suddenly be less attractive.
What if Clinton and others had taken up the cause of "fly over" country? What if Democrats had protected jobs and families? GOP "populism" would not have been nearly as successful. We handed over the key issue in America to what would become MAGA.
We let corporate Americans put their personal profits over the personal survival of millions of ordinary working Americans. That in itself was a form of fascism.
Nobles: one
Peasants: zero
Profits of gun manufacturers over the lives of children
Although Bill, One CAN have such a "business-first" government if it is counterbalanced by a "social-contract" component of that government (Labor? Socialist?), a component which sees the government as serving the needs of its people AT LEAST as much as the needs of its businesses for inexpensive labor, not necessarily to say competent and reliable employees.
Yes! The Nordic nations are a model of just that. A social support system and a thriving business sector. We are too "exceptional" to look around the world for successful approaches to healthcare, education and retirement.
Maybe if voting was handled as Australia does?
What bogles my mind is that as a highly competitive business person, I would look at my competitors and emulate their successes - trying to use those ideas with my own enhancements. Why doesn't America search the world for what works well and adapt it our unique circumstances?
The answer is obvious and sad.
I spent a little over 3 weeks in Sweden. It sure seemed to me that profit-making business were thriving. But Swedish cities seems somehow more people-friendly. Certainly more architectural art and whimsy.
High taxes, high levels of happiness. Low levels of worry about being deprived of education or healthcare. And lower levels of ostentation. Far from perfect, like anyone. But way ahead of our chaos and disenfranchisement.
AMEN says I!
Maybe the public good should (which includes unalienable human rights) should always be paramount, but business is very much a part of that, and we get to set the rules that it not stray from the boundaries of, at the very least, doing no harm, and ideally observing a duty to the common weal like any other social entity.
I teally appreciate this info and insight, Bill. Thank you.
Would it not be reasonable to require contracted offshored production to observe some basic US labor and environmental standards? I noticed that during the worst unemployment of the "Great Recession", companies were still moving whole departments abroad. Patriotic? Somehow they get away it calling any boon to workers "Job Killing" but kill real jobs with little reaction. The "Downsizing" as more and major companies become quasi-monopolies seems accepted as a fact of life, with faint resistance.
This is what feudalism looks like in the 21st Century and narcissists like Musk and Harlan Crow are the new lords. Effective government of the people, by the people, for the people absolutely has to be government of the people, by the people, for the people. We are fully entitled to make rules for corporations as for any other societal entity, including whether or not corporations even exist. The tail has been wagging the dog.
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/history-of-nafta-3306272
That's a helpful read. Thanks. It makes it clear. Note that in the 7 points mentioned as goals for NAFTA there is no mention of protecting American jobs. The whole project wreaks of "trickle down" economics. If it's good for American companies, then it must be good for Americans. Nope.
The day that workers have equal status with management and stockholders is the day that real democracy could exist in the US. For now, we worship at the altar of "business" which is another name for oligarchy.
And just to drive the point home, when that factory left that Ohio town, it took more than manufacturing jobs. It ripped away employment in every other element of society. Restaurants, grocery stores, real estate sales, hospitals...every enterprise that relied on factory workers income. And schools...
Businesses are an essential part of society. And along with that comes social responsibility.
(I am a retired business man :)
As Richard Wolff says, without democracy in the workplace, we can’t have a democracy.
WSJ is Rupert’s rag, propaganda that Fox wouldn’t bother with
Mornin' Jeri!
Yes, I know but I still read some of it. I want to know what the investment community is being fed.
You can be sure Rupert approves
Jeri,
I might need Rupert after Trump wins so, in keeping with "keep your enemy closer"......here's a morning cheer!
If you can stand the stench…
So… understanding the past is important. More important is looking towards the future and a new approach to governance. HB 1 is a start in addressing dark money sources, a path corporate America abhors. Dems must push this agenda until the outsourced 61 year olds understand the whys and are motivated to act.
The core of "Reaganomics" was defamation of democracy and the glorification of plutocracy. It sounds absurd, but enough of the nation fell for it; big time. Obama was such a breath of fresh air after G. W. Bush, and he had a hell of a mess to clear, but I was greatly disappointed by how consistently he put banks in charge of remediation, with expectable results. How after a robust effort to root out crooks in the Saving and Loan Scandal, crooks got to walk, with a bonus, in the Subprime debacle. Why, after initially passive, hands-off promotion of his own heath plan, he was so keen to push the TPP?
Money is the cancer on our body politic, in the word of Conservative Democrat Fritz Hollings. And isn't that even an understatement? The de facto sale of political outcomes to those with the most money is classic corruption, very serious corruption, and we have been utter fools to tolerate it as a society, as long as we have.
Mike S, I think the drift away from the government John Adams helped define and describe it is not a uniquely American phenomenon but rather represents an international phenomenon arising from the development of railroads in England in the 1820s when the government recognized it needed a more universally recognized time of day so that people in each of the towns to which the trains provided service would know WHEN the train would (most likely) come to/through the station (see Sapiens pp. 350-375 by Yuval Noah Harrari). This led to government increasingly discovering the value of supporting individual mobility and "independence" for industry as well as the value to government itself. This drift away from Adams' concept of government over the past 200 years contributed to the reduction of power and influence of the family throughout the previous history of mankind.
They left because they don't care about Ukraine....or the United States and the American people...or Europe. Don't get me started on how they don't care about fixing borders and our collapsing environment. They are a party of evil which manifests by inaction and prevention of action. They only care about creating chaos ( isn't that the definition of Satanism?).
The border issue—repubs cannot tell the WH what it is they want. Pretty hard to resolve an issue when the other side demands a “solution” but doesn’t know what that might be.
“Confusion is the devil’s tool.” A quote from the ages.
I'm reading We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I; A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh. Re: international negotiations in 1949 -
"What struck me as I read these documents was the clarity, lucidity and precision of the drafting. No doubt this was due to the predominance of legal minds among members of the congress." (This right to return plan was undermined by British/Arab/Israeli agendas). "What a contrast this was to the PLO, which went on to negotiate the most important document, in the first ever negotiations with Israel, which took place in Oslo in 1992, without the presence of a single legal adviser". We see how that ended up. MAGA is our PLO. Hopefully they won't become our Hamas.
We should be filing a class action lawsuit against them for dereliction of duty, and demand our money back in the form of tax rebates, while they work unpaid if they do not get things passed in time. I would like that to be a requirement to their getting paid. Who keeps their jobs elsewhere when they don't do any work, and all they do is cause trouble.
In any case, this is the party of criminals and hypocrites, so it is about time the press starts pointing this out.
Linda, I said basically the same thing during phone calls made to Mike Johnson, James Comer, Jim Jordan, and my very own Mike Kelly. As you might imagine, my comments were met with the resounding sounds of crickets.
I think we should all call Mike Johnson's office say that he is a traitor for undermining our national security by not passing a bill to fund Ukraine. Here are his phone numbers:
DC: 202-225-2777
Leesville, LA: 337-423-4232
Bossier City, LA: 318-840-0309
Will do!!
Great!! 🙏🏼🙏🏿🙏
I so agree with you ..they can just take their 3 weeks vacation plus all of their benefits and walk out without doing their job?? In what company would they not be fired??
Bravo!!!
No , I disagree. Their job is to governing this country and the American people in a time of crisis. They took an oath to protect the constitution and this country. They have completely failed in do so. Their blind sided with power for Trump and Putin. To put an traitor and a adversarie first before the safety of your country and the American people is, unexpectabke and shouldn't be tolerated by the people of this country. We should be protesting at their homes.
Thank you, Patricia. I feel the same. I also encourage people to vote blue. Actually, it was nice to read a few bits in the letter today about how things are not going well for Rs instead of the constant drumbeat that all is lost.
Joe Biden needs one's help to fail. Indeed, he has already botched the war in Ukraine. Instead of providing all necessary military aid in a timely manner when the Russians were on the back foot, the Biden Administration hemmed and hawed and negotiated with itself as to whether Ukraine really needed this or that weapons system & etc. Apparently, Biden was petrified that Putin would respond to such escalation with a nuclear strike—which was and is absurd. Anyhow, we have that pusillanimity to thank for the fact that the war has reached a stalemate and will drag on for another year or more. Incidentally, I foresaw the present stalemate back in August:
https://unwokeindianaag.substack.com/p/biden-botches-ukraine
It's so easy for you to critique from the back seat and in hindsight! But President Biden absolutely had to contend with the possibility of WW3....just as he is doing in the Middle East. And do so with variable and often incomplete information. His job as Commander in Chief is protecting American lives...both military and civilian. His job as President is protecting democracy. He has done both in spades...and across multiple arenas.
A couple of things. Given the fact that I foresaw in August 2023 the strong possibility that Biden's wavering, half-a-loaf policy would produce the present stalemate, I can hardly be charged with criticism in hindsight.
Napoleon said to one of his generals, "Ask me for anything but time." There was, as I said, a moment in time when the Russians were on the back foot, their initial invasion of Ukraine having failed. Instead of capitalizing on that moment, Biden dithered. And so the opportunity to bring the Russo-Ukrainian War to a timely end was thrown away. That is inarguable. And now the war will go on, with more death and destruction, and much less of a chance for a favorable outcome.
As for Biden's fears of World War III, they were illusionary, as I explained in this article, written in September 2022. The last thing Putin wanted then, or wants now, is for Russia to become embroiled in a war with the US and NATO—a war that Russia could never win.
https://unwokeindianaag.substack.com/p/vladimir-strangelove-putin
As for the excuse that Biden's actions have been governed by worries about "American lives"—well, if that's the overriding priority then it wouldn't it have been better to stay out of the Russo-Ukrainian War altogether? But presidents can't think like that. Did Lincoln during the Civil War? Did FDR during World War II? They knew that by their decisions there were sending scores of thousands of young men to their deaths. And sometimes that's the job. Biden's not being asked to make such terrible decisions. But he just can't screw up his courage to the sticking point and do what's necessary.
Biden doesn't have the dictatorial powers that would have been necessary to achieve what you claim he should have done. He also has no power over what other countries' governments decide to do. In Ukraine, Biden has not committed any American lives to the struggle, and most of the spending went to American military replacement. I do think more should have been given Ukraine earlier on, but it was the hard right Republicans (doing Putin's wishes) who kept the US from wholesale support of Ukraine. I knew then that Republican support for Ukraine would fail far short of their needs.
As for the historical conflicts you mentioned, Lincoln was forced into the Civil War by Southerners who seceded after his election but before he took office. FDR waited years before joining the WW2 because of the very strong profascism and isolationist movements here in America.
Both were examples of protecting Democracy (and freedom) first...even at the expense of American lives, because the priority of the 2 goals had been flipped by the aggression of the enemy of both.
Right, right, as usual it’s somebody else’s fault. But no. As I detailed and you didn’t dispute, Biden dithered and wavered when he should have acted with decision and dispatch. So now the war’s at a stalemate and what is he proposing to do about that? I doubt he has a clue.
By the way, it’s not true that “hard-right Republicans prevented him from doing more. Can you cite one example of that? No, you can’t.
Hard right Republicans are preventing Ukraine aid RIGHT NOW, and being praised for it in Russian press.
“In the 1890s, once the dominant narrative cracked, an entire industry rose as journalists investigated those whose access to power had for decades protected them from scrutiny.” A hundred years from now, may the same thing be said of the 2020s. It’s way past time!
But Trump is trying to silence the press …
No, he's been trying to *become* the press, and has for years. He has long manipulated the genuine and credentialed journalists by acting as a "source" to propagate his message while calling out MSM as "Fake News". This has opened up a place in the very low end of the journalistic spectrum for pseudo-journos to fill (think Newsmax, OAN, etc.) and he amplifies their products. During his term, the WH Press Room was practically turned into his comms office, by berating and removing credentialed, respected reporters while giving access to shills. He forces media to bend to his will and whim, and deliver his messages of madness, and many are all too willing to repeat them. Look what he did to Faux News: they were his favorite source (until they weren't) and they spread his lies; now are on the hook for nearly $800 million. This is what has happened to our once-proud media.
discredit the press
The cruelty and bullying on display the last several years as Hunter Biden has been hunted down as a proxy for his father has been uncomfortable to watch. I am so glad he has stood up to his attackers as he did a couple of days ago, as difficult as that may have been. I do not wish ill upon anyone, but maybe if these pack animals experience some of their own consequences, they may emerge with some compassion for others. Hope springs eternal.
Methinks if Republicans were capable of compassion, we would have seen evidence by now. Alas…
Best joke, thanks. W tried to fool us with that one, but it smelled too much like greed.
They used to be... back in the days when they set up PEPFAR. Now they are attempting to scupper it, one of their most successful and generous policies.
Annis,
Correct me if I am wrong but it looks like Biden established PEPFAR? What am I missing?
https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-u-s-presidents-emergency-plan-for-aids-relief-pepfar/
It was set up in 2003 by GWBush with wide bipartisan support. Every President since then has supported it, even Trump (although ‘support’ is overstating it for Trump). The deadline for a new 5 year re-authorisation was up this year & MAGAs scuppered it. It was left to limp on another year.
George W Bush, 2003.
No, I believe it was actually GW.
At the behest of Colin Powell.
Some will, some won't. People's attitudes can change, especially the one's who get to see that they were being played.
Wallace did soften his stand on segregation after ge was shot.
I don’t think they will ever become compassionate people. That is not in their nature. The abject cruelty on display towards Hunter Biden and the young woman from Texas is horrifying. That they might finally be called out on their years of vile conduct would be enough.
They are always guilty of worse than any Dem’s transgressions, was true with Clinton and it’s true today. But they have the Fox bull horn to fool the fools.
"Pack animals" - perfect!
It seems to me that what Trump had asked the Ukraine president to do prior 2020, to simply say he was going to investigate Biden to put a shadow on his campaign, he has now been able to achieve with the Republicans.
There must be something he has over them to get them all to fall in line. Scary to think, but they all act as though on a short leash.
It is power, notoriety and a no work job. My representative, Tom Kean, is nothing but an empty suit. No budget, no farm bill, no progress on any front just for ability to point fingers. Scratch the surface and it is easy to find how they all game the system to enrich themselves. They all take the path of least resistance.
My rep, Tim Burchett, mentored George Santos (per Santos). Yet Burchett voted to throw over McCarthy because McCarthy insulted Burchett’s religion. And oh btw Burchett said on tv after the Nashville school shootings there is simply nothing that can be done so why try.
To be honest, I think the only hold tffg has on the GOP House Reps is his cultish grip on the base, to whom he offers his harangues and from which gets his adulation fix. That keeps the MAGAts in line because every time tffg harangues them it's a demonstration of tffg's power over the base and thus over the career of every GOP Rep.
And well, gee....A GOP Rep can't get rich if he's primaried out, after his first term, now can he???--so every venal MAGAt Rep (they're ALL venal) shakes in his shoes and scurries to do tffg's bidding. I've never seen such a collection of moronic spinelessness as the entire current GOP House conference.
After I read a story about the stock market hitting new highs the last two days on AOL, I decided to check out the comments. It was mostly MAGANAZIs basing Biden. The typical comment was "Biden has ruined the country." and "I agree." I decided to have a little fun and asked them to be specific. More bashing of "liberals" as well as Biden, but again, no specifics. AOL checks comment content for specific words as do most sites and so the worst thing they could call me was ignorant and a liberal. Ouch! /S
Anyway, my thought is to find an AOL comment buddy and start trolling these low information MAGANAZIs. Of course that term is banned from AOL, but whatever. I could get multiple sign ons but it would be more fun to have a comment buddy. I think I can probably find one on AOL and catch them offline, but we'll see.
Like the Lincoln Project contends, if you can swing 3% of voters, you will win a large percentage of the races.
I have been saying for months. . . . Why don’t those people with “megaphones” pin down the maganazis with questions. Like, when they say tRump is the greatest president in their lifetime, ask “how so? What did he do that benefitted you or the country?” When they say Biden has tanked the economy, ask for specifics. Make them explain their stance and at least make an attempt to get them to do some critical thinking. Not challenging their beliefs is letting them off the hook and perpetuating the belief.
Have u gotten any of them to respond?
The short leash, as you call it, Bonnie, is that the MAGA are all humanities illiterate.
But isn't it scary how many buy into it. How poorly our education system has done teaching to the numb multiple-choice questions but not teaching how and when to inquire.
Bingo, Phil!
I think it’s their great fear of being primaried and consequently possibly losing their cushy jobs where they can go on holiday break having accomplished absolutely nothing for their constituents. Unfortunately, their constituents seem to be blissfully unaware.
They're using that ploy a LOT! Was just thinking the other day of the parallels between then and now.
Election interference against Biden. Plain as day.
History is repeating itself with this impeachment inquiry. It reminds me of when Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr led the impeachment against Bill Clinton, accusing him of various things related to his extra-marital affair, while they themselves were cheating on their spouses and getting away with it!
I guess it all boils down to what the definition of "is" is.
Where is Daniel Schorr when we really need him? Please someone at NPR resurrect him with ChatGPT and deepfake his voice so that NPR can actually comment on the news meaningfully, instead of free-advertising all the time for Trump and making him live rent free in our minds!!! I just wish Trump's arteries would catch up with him or that he would flee to Russia or something so we could all forget about him. Maybe lock him up finally to silence him!
Instead we have to hear about every damn threat that he is making in Mob-boss Dictator fashion, commonly without any kind of commentary of how we got to the point where we have a major candidate who is a worst case scenario, and Americans are so numbed down or distracted that they accept this blithely, since Trump is all we hear about. Nobody on NPR and most other media (except for HCR) is pointing out how blatantly unusual this is.
Clinton's impeachment was politically motivated, but i reject the claim that his only crime was an extra-marital affair (he is far from the first president in that category). I fault Bill Clinton for staring into the TV cameras, unequivocally lying to the pubic and defaming his accuser. He could have admitted the truth, publicly apologized for unprofessional behavior, and toughed it out; without empowering GOP theatrics. Trump lies whenever he speak, but I don't think any president should lie to the public to which he has a fiduciary duty about behavior on the public's dime. With great power comes great responsibility.
"I fault Bill Clinton for staring into the TV cameras, unequivocally lying to the pubic and defaming his accuser."
That is not Bill Clinton's biggest failure. ONE of his real failures is shoving a near teenage girl under the desk of the Oval Office and unzipping his pants. THAT was both Bill Clinton's fatal flaw and his largest mistake.
Clinton spent more time thinking about p***y than working on the job. His secret service people were forever taking him here and there for a quickie.
Also, he was buds with, and visited with that guy who was selling access to 15 year old's. Yep, Jeffrey Epstein and Clinton were tight. Along with Bill Gates and a bunch of other rich, white dudes who have sick minds.
Clinton's real problem was not lying, although that was something he did routinely. His real problem was that he was a real security threat.
Also, don't forget, Clinton did pass the "war on drugs" laws that put black men in jail for 30 years for having one ounce of Marijuana in their pocket at the same time that white kids in the suburbs were smoking dope in their cars at lunch at school.
Clinton was just a disaster. Really.
Lastly, don't forget. IF Clinton had kept his pants on Gore would have won and we would never have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
Clinton's legacy is large large alright. Largely evil.
And yet….his accomplishments while president are beyond incredible:
Longest economic expansion in American history
The President's strategy of fiscal discipline, open foreign markets and investments in the American people helped create the conditions for a record 115 months of economic expansion. Our economy has grown at an average of 4 percent per year since 1993.
More than 22 million new jobs
More than 22 million jobs were created in less than eight years -- the most ever under a single administration, and more than were created in the previous twelve years.
Highest homeownership in American history
A strong economy and fiscal discipline kept interest rates low, making it possible for more families to buy homes. The homeownership rate increased from 64.2 percent in 1992 to 67. 7 percent, the highest rate ever.
Lowest unemployment in 30 years
Unemployment dropped from more than 7 percent in 1993 to just 4.0 percent in November 2000. Unemployment for African Americans and Hispanics fell to the lowest rates on record, and the rate for women is the lowest in more than 40 years.
Raised education standards, increased school choice, and doubled education and training investment
Since 1992, reading and math scores have increased for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders, math SAT scores are at a 30-year high, the number of charter schools has grown from 1 to more than 2,000, forty-nine states have put in place standards in core subjects and federal investment in education and training has doubled.
Largest expansion of college opportunity since the GI Bill
President Clinton and Vice President Gore have nearly doubled financial aid for students by increasing Pell Grants to the largest award ever, expanding Federal Work-Study to allow 1 million students to work their way through college, and by creating new tax credits and scholarships such as Lifetime Learning tax credits and the HOPE scholarship. At the same time, taxpayers have saved $18 billion due to the decline in student loan defaults, increased collections and savings from the direct student loan program.
Connected 95 percent of schools to the Internet
President Clinton and Vice President Gore's new commitment to education technology, including the E-Rate and a 3,000 percent increase in educational technology funding, increased the percentage of schools connected to the Internet from 35 percent in 1994 to 95 percent in 1999.
Lowest crime rate in 26 years
Because of President Clinton's comprehensive anti-crime strategy of tough penalties, more police, and smart prevention, as well as common sense gun safety laws, the overall crime rate declined for 8 consecutive years, the longest continuous drop on record, and is at the lowest level since 1973.
100,000 more police for our streets
As part of the 1994 Crime Bill, President Clinton enacted a new initiative to fund 100,000 community police officers. To date more than 11,000 law enforcement agencies have received COPS funding.
Enacted most sweeping gun safety legislation in a generation
Since the President signed the Brady bill in 1993, more than 600,000 felons, fugitives, and other prohibited persons have been stopped from buying guns. Gun crime has declined 40 percent since 1992.
Family and Medical Leave Act for 20 million Americans
To help parents succeed at work and at home, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. Over 20 million Americans have taken unpaid leave to care for a newborn child or sick family member.
Smallest welfare rolls in 32 years
The President pledged to end welfare as we know it and signed landmark bipartisan welfare reform legislation in 1996. Since then, caseloads have been cut in half, to the lowest level since 1968, and millions of parents have joined the workforce. People on welfare today are five times more likely to be working than in 1992.
Higher incomes at all levels
After falling by nearly $2,000 between 1988 and 1992, the median family's income rose by $6,338, after adjusting for inflation, since 1993. African American family income increased even more, rising by nearly $7,000 since 1993. After years of stagnant income growth among average and lower income families, all income brackets experienced double-digit growth since 1993. The bottom 20 percent saw the largest income growth at 16.3 percent.
Lowest poverty rate in 20 years
Since Congress passed President Clinton's Economic Plan in 1993, the poverty rate declined from 15.1 percent to 11.8 percent last year — the largest six-year drop in poverty in nearly 30 years. There are now 7 million fewer people in poverty than in 1993. The child poverty rate declined more than 25 percent, the poverty rates for single mothers, African Americans and the elderly have dropped to their lowest levels on record, and Hispanic poverty dropped to its lowest level since 1979.
Lowest teen birth rate in 60 years
In his 1995 State of the Union Address, President Clinton challenged Americans to join together in a national campaign against teen pregnancy. The birth rate for teens aged 15-19 declined every year of the Clinton Presidency, from 60.7 per 1,000 teens in 1992 to a record low of 49.6 in 1999.
Lowest infant mortality rate in American history
The Clinton Administration expanded efforts to provide mothers and newborn children with health care. Today, a record high 82 percent of all mothers receive prenatal care. The infant mortality rate has dropped from 8.5 deaths per 1,000 in 1992 to 7.2 deaths per 1,000 in 1998, the lowest rate ever recorded.
Deactivated more than 1,700 nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union
Efforts of the Clinton-Gore Administration led to the dismantling of more than 1,700 nuclear warheads, 300 launchers and 425 land and submarine based missiles from the former Soviet Union.
Protected millions of acres of American land
President Clinton has protected more land in the lower 48 states than any other president. He has protected 5 new national parks, designated 11 new national monuments and expanded two others and proposed protections for 60 million acres of roadless areas in America's national forests.
Paid off $360 billion of the national debt
Between 1998-2000, the national debt was reduced by $363 billion — the largest three-year debt pay-down in American history. We are now on track to pay off the entire debt by 2009.
Converted the largest budget deficit in American history to the largest surplus
Thanks in large part to the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, and President Clinton's call to save the surplus for debt reduction, Social Security, and Medicare solvency, America has put its fiscal house in order. The deficit was $290 billion in 1993 and expected to grow to $455 billion by this year. Instead, we have a projected surplus of $237 billion.
Lowest government spending in three decades
Under President Clinton federal government spending as a share of the economy has decreased from 22.2 percent in 1992 to a projected 18.5 percent in 2000, the lowest since 1966.
Lowest federal income tax burden in 35 years
President Clinton enacted targeted tax cuts such as the Earned Income Tax Credit expansion, $500 child tax credit, and the HOPE Scholarship and Lifetime Learning Tax Credits. Federal income taxes as a percentage of income for the typical American family have dropped to their lowest level in 35 years.
More families own stock than ever before
The number of families owning stock in the United States increased by 40 percent since 1992.
Most diverse cabinet in American history
The President has appointed more African Americans, women and Hispanics to the Cabinet than any other President in history. He appointed the first female Attorney General, the first female Secretary of State and the first Asian American cabinet secretary ever.
VermontGirl57 - WOW! Well-endowed list!
Seems you must have been keeping track!
Your worthy comment shows why all voters need to realize that ANY POTUS is human, and thus they are not perfect. It seems to me that right now, Biden can't seem to please anybody--no matter what he does, if he doesn't perfectly align with our view on our pet issues, he is condemned.
This attitude which could cause voters to either sit out the election in protest, or vote third party might send Trump back into the White House.
IMO, unless there is a MASSIVE unequivocal blue tsunami, we will either get four more years of him (and lose democracy) or we will listen to him WHINE until he is dead.
Thank You.
Clinton’s signature on NAFTA, welfare ‘reform’, the crime bill, the repeal of Glass-Stegall, and the failure to regulate derivatives, and the resulting pain and misery from each, his embrace of neoliberal economics, triangulation, and willingness to pursue grand bargains with cretins like Newt Gingrich, dwarfs all the combined cheery kudos on your list.
He was horrific.
I never said he was perfect - but he left office with our country in far better shape than ANY republican EVER.
I never said you said he was perfect. I said he was horrific, and stand by it.
His complicity in the mendacious policies I noted cost millions their jobs, and robbed the middle class of trillions of wealth. Better shape? For whom? The wealthy. GDP and economic numbers mean squat when wages are flat and the cost of necessities like health care, drugs, and higher Ed skyrocket.
Use the all caps function until your fingers bleed, the lesser evil argument and refusal to acknowledge the sins of Democratic Party complicity since Reagan in our circling of the drain as a nation does nothing but drive people towards both sides suck populism, which unchecked, leads directly to a willingness to support authoritarianism to make the trains run on time.
Clinton put the Democratic Party establishment and the DNC on the path to caring more about its monied interest donors than working people, a duplicitous paradigm that was every bit as destructive to the national interest as was Reagan’s the government is the problem BS.
He was horrific. Deal with it.
Agreed. In my view, Clinton’s most significant historical failure was his failure to resign, and to allow Al Gore to complete his term. Had Clinton sufficient character to resign, then Gore, in my view, would likely have earned sufficient presidential stripes to win the Bush election outright. No Bush, no Iraq invasion.
Mike S, I too agree Clinton was a disaster and I think history will remember him as a corrupt individual and his legacy the expansion and entrenchment of our out- of-control carceral system. The "war on drugs," keeps some people in prison even now. I repeat myself all the time about my home state of WI. We have 38 prisons filled with people who have been traumatized and forgotten. Not to mention their families left behind. This is what some WI legislators offered their constituents as a way to make a living and raise a family--a prison to work in. There are 4 in Dodge County alone (I am not counting the ICE Detention Center). And the assembly person representing Dodge County gets to count the prisoners as constituents, none of whom can vote. Dodge County is just an example because as I said, there are 38 prisons--there are other legislators with the same advantage of constituents in prison who cannot vote. Exploitation. Of course, Clinton was a master of exploitation. It is and remains disgraceful and heartbreaking.
yes,
White kids at suburban white schools ALL across America would race out to their cars at lunch to trade, sell and smoke dope. Nary a cop in sight.
But, in the inner city, where all the cops were assigned, if a black man was caught smoking dope in his car, bang,
30 years in the state penitentiary and no parole.
It was almost like Clinton was from the rural south and hated black folks.
Wait? hmmmm....
Wait, whuuut??? <sarcasm>
A mixed bag in my view, repubs were almost as guilty, just without the oval.
"so that NPR can actually comment on the news meaningfully, instead of free-advertising all the time for Trump"
Casey, I was a bit puzzled to see this reference to NPR advertising for Trump. I listen to my local NPR station a fair bit and both the National NPR broadcast and my local broadcast make it clear that Trump is a criminal dolt.
but could NPR just mention him less? Not use his voice? Please stop using his voice!
read the stories online. don't listen
As bad as the Sore Loser's voice is, the nasal whine of MTG grates on me much worse.
I do agree with you. I’m tired of having to hear about that jerk and have him “live rent free in my head.” Make him old news now.
AMEN! I can barely watch NPR these days, there is such a lot of right wing pov and commentary on it!
watch?
Hah...I was thinking of Public Television but the same goes for NPR, to which I listen while driving.
Balance, you know.
😆
2 marks!
Recently, I had a conversation with an elderly, rural, conservative resident in my apartment complex. It is not uncommon for my residents to gratuitously bemoan immigrants that have moved into the area.
Instead of attacking her, I took the tact of education. I noted that immigrants are essential to supporting elderly Americans. They add $2 trillion annually to our GDP and $500 billion to the state, local and federal taxes. They pay into social security, their benefits are deferred and if they are undocumented they get no benefits. They are essential to the service economy that supports the elderly and lowers prices. She knew none of the above.
I have a weatherization and energy efficiency capital improvement program underway funded by the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Act and the workers making the improvements are a racial mixed group. The residents are seeing real improvements in their lives and many hard working and nice the workers are.
Alas, it’s a truth that not enough Americans see and understand.
I’m really glad you’re doing this. It’s a good example for all of us . Thank you 😊
Well done, Paul!
Exactly. We all need to listen carefully and reach people where they are at. This is something the Democrats really need to address in the rural areas!
Fish don't see the water they swim in.
We need to remember that most of us have immigrant ancestors. My maternal grandmother immigrated to the US as a young girl in the 1880’s, becoming an American citizen when she married in 1917.
Wholeheartedly agree. My grandmother emigrated from Ireland at the age of 17.
Alas, I have relatives that convinced to overlook that fact.
See my comment directly above. Immigration is big biz' way of depressing wages.
In 1980, meat packers were Black, earning a good middle class wage, thanks to decades of organizing. By that decade's end, they were mostly immigrants, toiling under atrocious conditions for barely above minimum wage. The same pattern applied in most of the low/no-skilled jobs, stagnating workers' wages for nearly 40 years. Some fired American workers had to train their foreign replacements
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html
Immigration is big biz' way of keeping wages down. You can read about it in Back of the Hiring Line A 200 Year History of Immigration Surges, Employer Bias, adn Depression of Black Wealth.The book is solid--296 footnotes, from the academic economic literature, statements of Black leaders beginning with Frederick Douglass, Black periodicals, and gov't commissions on immigration reform. The late Barbara Jordan, the Blck former Texas Congresswoman who made her name on the Jurdiciary Committee during Watergate, who ran the most recent commissions on immigration reform under PRes Clinton, recommended cutting immigration numbers nearly in half, in no small part to enable Blacks to find employment. She also recommended strict enforcement of immigration laws.
Had Barbara Jordan's recommendations been followed, Trump probably would not have been elected. Immigration was his signature issue.
It’s said that the apple does not fall [too] far from the tree or” like father like son” ... trump showed how much he cared for human lives by the way he handled - or attempted to - the COVID outbreak. The MAGA republicans in the House are showing the same sentiments by how they’re leaving the Ukrainians need for continued financial and military aid hanging ... and they appear to be clueless as to how they are aiding and abetting Putin’s slaughter of innocent people in Ukraine and how or what it might mean for other countries in that area - and us - if Putin were to win this war.
In my more cynical moments I don't believe they're clueless whatsoever, they know exactly what they're doing.
Some clearly are manipulators and other are more being duped. The poor fool who went to jail for an armed attack on the Comet PingPong Pizza joint seemed sincere about attempting to rescue non-existent abused children for the non-existent basement.
Good to be reminded of that. I have an old friend who is a kind soul but completely taken in by conspiracy theories.
Some of these situations and how people can be so easily mislead are frighteningly sad!
Some do, the master manipulators. The others? They just follow their orders.
... an seemingly blindly - with little to NO thought nor analysis(es)!!!
As Heather suggested, MAGAt Republicans have no interest in governing.
They slithered out of town, like they always do to friendlier MSM territory. They can sit and have spiked eggnog for 3 weeks on the $175K we pay them to pass 22 bills in an entire year. And none of them were the spending bills they should have passed.
If you live in a district represented by a MAGANAZI Congresscritter or Senator, remind them what you think of them abandoning Ukrainian soldiers fighting against Putin's cannon fodder. I live in a Blue district so I have adopted two red districts and use the address of family members that allow me to use their addresses.
No reason to ever call them names or threaten them. Just remind them we are watching them do nothing for their constituents and our allies.
I just donated to the Democrat running against the initial RepubliKan elected to Oregon's new congressional district. That is about as close as I can get, since I am personally well represented in both the House and Senate.
Good idea neighbor!!😉
Hi-De-Ho, Good Neighbor!!
Good job! I'm thinking about giving to the Democrat running against the entitlement hating Senator Rick Scott in FL.
I think that cannot be said often enough. I’m tired of paying their salaries for doing nothing.
It's not like nobody's sure who was the aggressor here, and which side the victim. Many rich people sided with Hitler as well.
I spent a year reading Weiss’s three volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and was shocked to learn how much support Hitler and Mussolini had from wealthy folks. We have to get past this.
Are the Republicans clueless about what they’re doing to Ukraine? Or do they know exactly what they’re doing and whom they are serving? Which would make one ask, why have they become Putin‘s servants? Maybe it’s just the oldest motivation in history.
They are not clueless
They are not clueless. They are marching to TrumPutin’s tune.
For every politician who uses the term Biden Crime Family, we should also add those terms to their name. For example, the Jordan Crime Family. Every time!
But for gun battles and spooky disappearances, the entire Republican operation has looked more like a Racketeer Influenced Criminal Organization with every passing day.
I believe it is. Putin is a crime boss, not an effective leader.
He is arguably shadiest among the shady.
The modern "GOP" collapsed into a massive black hole form which neither truth or light ever escapes. That not to say we can't detect what's going on.
Marking the eleventh anniversary: we must never forget the lives lost in the tragic Sandy Hook Shooting. A 20 year old shooter murdered 20 first graders and six staff members. “Americans demanded background checks for gun purchases, a policy supported by 90% of Americans. But the measure was killed in the Senate by lawmakers who represented just 38% of the American people.” Since then, Republicans have blocked legislation to regulate guns and have instead offered thoughts and prayers after each mass shooting. And still today guns over children is the real law. “In Gunned Down: The Power of the NRA, FRONTLINE goes inside the politics of America’s gun debate. Veteran FRONTLINE filmmaker Michael Kirk investigates the NRA, its political evolution and influence, and how it has consistently succeeded in defeating new gun control legislation.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/gunned-down/
My heart always sinks when I realize it's the anniversary of that massacre; one of the most shameful moments in this country's history and that includes the aftermath of lies those poor parents suffered.
... and then there are perverts like Alex Jones who are 'allowed' to call the massacre 'fake', insulting parents and others by stating the 'event had been staged' ... and this guy is still running free, not having paid a nickel of his 'penalty' of several million dollars.
Alex Jones is scum lower than trump and that’s saying something!! I imagine the people that sued him will never get a dime.
He’s hidden all his millions in offshore accounts.
He’s evil incarnate.
Yes, I totally agree, and he is still running free, and has declared "bankruptcy", and there might never be a payout, as Angelica assumes, but this evil person will sit in a chair by the beach and spend the money he has pushed into some tax enclave, still peddling his lies and conspiracy s..t. on his podcasts.
And will probably never have to pay, just like Rudy won’t.
The thing that made me sure that people were not stupid enough to buy his Schitt. Silly me.
I figured that when we got no meaningful legislation out of Sandy Hook, there would never be any. SInce then of the many school shootings, two stand out for me: Parkland High School and Robb Elementary, both of which were nearly (with 17 and 19 fatalities). They stand out because of the failures of law enforcement as first responders to actually respond as the training dictates (as you might guess, I am disgusted with the responses of law enforcement in both of these cases. Antithetical to our training.)
I fail to comprehend how the massive loss of life of innocent people is less important than unfettered access to military grade weapons for untrained civilians.
Seen from abroad, pure institutionalized savagery. Randomized human sacrifice to the Gun God.
Unfortunately, the ultra-paranoid gun cult is not the only instance of an endemic mass psychosis. What else is the Trump cult?
A good read: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/nra-gun-ownership-suicide-rates/676309/?utm_campaign=one-story-to-read-today&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20231214&utm_term=One+Story+to+Read+Today
"The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm."...
"Since 2017, firearm suicide has been the cause of roughly 25,000 deaths each year. Nearly 80 percent are white males ages 15 and older."...
I know someone whose teenager took their own life by their parents handgun.
That will live with them forever. It has destroyed them.
The same happened in our community about 10 years ago. The boy was TWELVE.
Heart-breaking.
'Several Republicans indicated to Politico’s Playbook that they are not actually interested in a deal, since “polling consistently shows that immigration is the most toxic issue on the campaign trail for Biden. Why take that off the table as an attack on him in 2024?” ' Thank you, HCR, for this summary of our legislative state of affairs
This is the crux of the matter, duh
Always great to have historical context, but in our case today, the MAGAts are a different breed from the robber barons of the 1890’s. They are nihilists, drunk on the power of identity politics, and exploiting the largesse of their corporate greedhead benefactors.
Social mores change and circumstances change, but I see the palette of human behaviors as pretty consistent though the ages.
I think that what we have are "robber barons" are the ones pulling the strings; think Koch/Leo. The MAGATs are as you describe, "nihilists, drunk on the power of identity politics". I think that there is also a religious component to the mission of the uber rich that cannot be overlooked.
It is long past time journalists got our their shovels and started to dig into the muck that is today’s republican party. Thank you for this reminder, Professor Richardson, let it be an inspiration to those in the press who follow your Letters.
One of the best introductory paragraphs in all of the history of letters.
Dear God, could it be that truth is FINALLY breaking through in the minds of the American public……that the Comer’s and their ‘shell companies’, the crude lies about Hunter Biden, the silliness of IMPEACHING his father?
In the 1890s, once the dominant narrative cracked, an entire industry rose as journalists investigated those whose access to power had for decades protected them from scrutiny.
I have yet to hear any compelling argument for the legitimacy of shell corporations. I have read any number of articles in which shell companies have been used of highly unethical or illegal purposes that rush to reassure the reader that not all shell companies are used by crooks. But why have them at all? Does the function the serve legitimate business outweigh the obvious advantages they offer crooks? I assume that Hunter Biden's use was on the up and up, but I wish they were just gone.
Investopedia defines ‘shell companies’ thusly:
Shell corporations are legitimate, legal entities that do not possess actual assets or run business operations. They function as transactional vehicles for a variety of firms and for a myriad of purposes. Generally, they are used to obtain financing, maintain control over a conglomerate company, allow firms more favorable tax treatment, and occasionally facilitate money laundering as well as other illegal activities.
All seriously crooked? Seems to be made up by corporate thugs
jL I think a distinction must be made between legitimate ‘shell companies’ and the seriosly crooked ones!
Do tell.
Examples?
Show your work.
Structure
Shell companies are non-traded corporations, meaning that they are not listed on any stock exchanges for buying and selling by investors. Most exist in name only, other than as a mailing address, and on paper as a registered financial entity. To become a shell corporation, an interested party must first file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Examples are limited liability companies (LLCs) and trusts, provided that they are not comprised of any physical properties. In a sense, any startup firm that files with the SEC is technically a shell corporation.
There are roughly 21.6 million LLCs in the United States. In comparison, there are approximately 1.7 million traditional C-Corporations, and approximately 23 million sole proprietorships.
As I understand it (very limited knowledge here so quoting experts) the LLC ‘stage’ is pretty to very common in business development and the SEC has a Herculean task to monitor) these LLC’S are internationally used ….by all sorts of folks….
I’m guessing that many ARE ILLEGALLY used, but many are just a legal ‘step’ in a legal business development.
In other words, legalized money laundering.
I think I want a shell company for Christmas.
https://wapo.st/3uYytaq
Article from 2022 about the legal holding company business that is welcome in Wyoming
Excellent article, serious thanks, strongly recommend reading it!
Thanks! I was seriously dismayed when I read it😕!
Very understandably!
Boy is this a ‘governance HOLE’’ that needs a LOT MORE effective supervision!
I’ve been a corporate officer in family held corporation that has behaved well…with no legal problems, I’m grateful for the opportunity and I’m not in favor of ‘blanket condemnations’ of ‘business’….
WOW
Incredible!!!!
(If you can open this gifted article) read about legal shell companies in Wyoming.
That's an interesting comment about the history of journalism in the US holding the wealthy and the corporations up for scrutiny. Can I gather from that kind of journalism that it contributed to passing the first anti-trust laws in 1890 and 1914?
Regarding support for Ukraine - I regret to say that in the EU, MAGA and Putin friend Viktor Orban - whose country, Hungary, has been a net recipient of EU development largesse - is currently blocking a €50 billion support package for Ukraine, and just attempted to derail (but did not succeed) opening accession talks for Ukraine and Moldova. Orban is evidently learning from his MAGA counterparts. Unlike American journalism, Hungarian journalism is unfree - due to Orban - but social media and the rest of European journalism is not: Hungary is increasingly isolated, despite the likes of Fico and Meloni now heading governments in the EU, but this illustrates that the ability for one extremist or bad actor, be he ever so corrupt (as Orban is), to derail a country or supranational entity is not only a US problem. And in the meantime, poor Ukraine continues to suffer the attacks of a dictator and his vile army and Europe is less secure.
One hugely sad fact about Orban and all those nationalists.
While they shout racial and cultural purity, you'll never see any one of them ever cite a novel from their own cultures, or a movie, memoir, theatrical production, poem, or song.
You will see them driving latest model cars. Carrying credit cards. Possessing the largest-screen video systems possible. Linked to computers. Purchasing international name brand fashion items, accessories, and cosmetics.
They're all hostage to slogans, blanket labeling, and hate abstractions -- all suckers for the outside consumerism which covers for their illiteracy as to their own cultures, illiteracy, too, as to individual-based humanities in all neighboring or farther-off cultures.
Few Hungarian writers, past or present, would endorse them.
Thank you for this. I actually think our fight is about extremism and corruption no matter what the country or label.
Absolutely brilliant comparison. Thank you!!