Fox news: "we did PR for the tea party"

File under the utterly obvious. I was pondering what would have happened if the anti-war movement got as much profile as the tea parties did. The one problem (there was just one???)during the anti war effort was that what little media coverage we got was generally photos/film of the protests with most commentators on left(sic) and right talking more about the protests than the message. Granted the tea bagging meme was in a similar vien but no where near the level.

Via Media Matters report on the Fox News coverage of Tea Parties:

Examples of Fox News' and Fox Business' April 15 tea party coverage included:

Discussing how to show support for tea parties, Fox & Friends' Gretchen Carlson claimed: "You can hang [a teabag] from your mirror, too, like fuzzy dice."

Fox News host Megyn Kelly claimed that "you can join the tea party action from your home if you go to the FoxNation.com ... a virtual tax day tea party."

Fox Business anchor Cody Willard asked, "Guys, when are we going to wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating this country?"

Willard further stated that conservatives and liberals are "both fascists who are taking all of my money and building up corporate America with my welfare."

Fox News host John Gibson expressed "hope[]" that millions of people" would participate in the protests.

Fox Business anchor David Asman told viewers they "need[ed] to go" to the tea party merchandise website "no matter what side of the issue you're on."
Willard asked a protester: "Are you worried about me taking these dollars from you ... or destroying those dollars? I mean that's what the government does anyway."

On The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Dennis Miller claimed that "the average American taxpayer feels like they've just been shot in the head in a deck chair on a sinking boat."

Fox News host Sean Hannity asked contributor Newt Gingrich "one serious question": "Is this now a battle between capitalism and socialism?"

Hannity also asked: "Why don't we have more anger towards government, or is this the anger that finally is beginning to emerge?"

Discussing the protests on Hannity, RedState's Erick Erickson stated, "[I]f we don't do something, if we don't turn the corner, we're going to be enslaved to the government."

Also on Hannity, radio host Bill "Bubba" Bussey said it was "time for a revolution."
Hannity also featured a Thomas Paine imitator to plug the tea parties.

Granted i'm not as in a huff as others about the astro turf campaign... if people come out, and organize on their own (like Henry's) thats grassroots to me. But the point remains it was astro turf--just like Obama's astro turf election I guess?

But here is a question... did you hear anything about the anti-war tax day protests? Yeah. I thought so.

Right wing entertainment...

Conservatism as Entertainment

You hear a lot these days that Republicans are “in disarray.” But they’re not, really. It’s just that the way our political institutions work, a congressional minority party doesn’t generate a high-profile leader. Now you combine this leadership vacuum with the fact that the right has developed a very robust ideological media apparatus on talk radio and on Fox News and you have a problem. In effect, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are more prominent public figures than are John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, to say nothing of legislators who might actually be appealing figure. And since only a tiny minority of Republican members of congress are willing to suffer the dread “RINO” tag, the vast majority of elected officials seem to feel the need to kowtow to the whims of conservative movement media leaders.

The problem is that the incentives facing a media figure are very different from the incentives facing a politician.

A politician needs, basically, a majority. And the decisive votes are bound to come from people who don’t like politics much or really care about it. For a media figure, however, a much smaller audience than “half the people” would still constitute enormous success. But you need to appeal, intensely, to the small minority of people who care enough about politics to bother watching, reading, or listening to political commentary.

One problem is that tv formating leads to sound byte politics.  Actually the internet leads to blog byte politics--where you send off links that nobody reads and get responses with links that you don't read...

When I debate online I make an effort to dig into the oppositions arguments and I know of a few others who do as well.  And yes, we all slip up and/or are on the fly.  But the entertainment factor in the conservative movement is just as true within "liberals" out in the world as well. 

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Reagan and the tea party

Tea Parties Forever:

Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats. But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.

One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties”... antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so. But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party. Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

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O'Reilly needs facts? no kidding...

Bill O'Reilly Needs Facts!

A New York Post feature headlined "A Day in the Life of Bill O'Reilly" offers this insight into life working for the Fox host:

"The staff of 15 meets 7:30 every morning. Working for me, you've got to be a Navy SEAL. No mistakes. I need facts, or it'll get rammed down my throat."

Huh. When did this "no mistakes" policy start?

Of course, some former employees of O'Reilly recall a slightly different workplace experience....

 

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Do illegal immigrants cost $338.3 billion dollars a year? More than the Iraq war?

lets check

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Does the GOP lack economists right now?

Krugman:

I wonder if this country can handle the crisis we’re in. Remember, John Boehner is, in effect, the second-most influential member of the GOP (after Rush Limbaugh). And while Democrats hold a majority, it’s not enough of a majority to make the minority party irrelevant.

So the fact that Boehner’s idea of economics is completely insane matters.

What’s insane about Boehner’s remark? He’s talking about the current economic crisis as if it were a harvest failure — as if we faced a shortage of goods, so that the more you consume the less is left for me. In reality — even most conservatives understand this, when they think about it — we’re in a world desperately short of demand. If you consume more, that’s GOOD for me, because it helps create jobs and raise incomes. It’s in my personal disinterest to have you tighten your belt — and that’s just as true if you’re “the government” as if you’re my neighbor.

Plus, who is “the government”? It’s basically us, you know — the government spends money providing services to the public. Demanding that the government tighten its belt means demanding that we, the taxpayers, get less of those services. Why is this a good thing, even aside from the state of the economy?

Again, this is what the leaders of a powerful, if minority, party think. Can this country be saved?

Just as an aside... because i'm now playing so much catch up with my blog consumption I tend to go through one blogger at a time... which means my blogging goes in theme's.  Its as if i'm a Krugman drone... and then i'm a Dean Baker drone... and then I'm a brad delong drone... and then and then and then...

automaton bloggers unite!

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Thomas Frank interview

Q+A With Thomas Frank

In the book you talk about this cynicism as being self-fulfilling.

If you believe in bad government you will deliver bad government. If you think big government is by nature going to fail, is corrupt, is evil, that's what you'll deliver. That's the larger message of the book...

...And yet they love big government, in the sense that they've figured out a way to appropriate it.

But they have the deniability. They can always get out of it. "No, we're against Bush. He's a Big Government conservative!" And then the people that criticize Bush will get in and do the same thing. My friend calls it the "no true Scotsman fallacy." The story goes like this: a guy is Scotland says no Scotsman would put soy milk in his porridge and someone says, Oh yeah, Joe Blow puts soy milk in his porridge. "Ah," he responds, "but no true Scotsman would ever put soy milk in his porridge. You can always retreat, but you see it's a fallacy. It's time to make that retreat impossible.That's one of the projects of the book, to take that sanctuary away from the conservatives. Let's examine this beast, this movement, not by what is says but what it has done every time it takes over.

Taxs cuts--the not so magic bullet...

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT TAX CUTS LOSE REVENUE

the web of denial

Arguments from global warming skeptics

right wing(nuts)

CONSERVATIVES' CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIES....

What does Blagojevich have to do with making it easier for workers to form a union?

Nothing

the Palin wing of the Republican party

Rodrick on development

Self-discovery in practice

entrepreneurship in a developing country consists of discovering the underlying cost structure--what can and cannot be produced profitably. Initial investors in a new line of economic activity face a great amount of uncertainty, since foreign technology always needs some local adaptation. Plus, their cost discovery soon becomes public knowledge--everyone can observe whether their projects are successful or not--so the social value they generate exceeds their private costs. If they succeed, much of the gains are socialized through entry and emulation, whereas if they fail, they bear the full costs.

He includes a great example of "free markets theory" being ignored for the better...

Some of the what I have been seeing in Ethiopia is a picture perfect illustration of this process at work. Most notable in this respect is the flower industry, which was started by some courageous entrepreneurs who had observed the success of the industry in nearby Kenya and wondered if it could be made to work in Ethiopia as well. Even though much of the technology is standard, local soil conditions make a lot of difference to the economics of growing flowers, and a whole range of other services--from daily cargo flights to high-quality cardboard packaging--has to be in place before the operation can succeed. To its credit, the Ethiopian government understood the need to subsidize these pioneer firms, through cheap land and tax holidays, and the industry took off. Exports have reached $100 million from zero in just a few years. There are now around 90 flower farms in the country, with latecomers the beneficiary of the tinkering that early investors have undertaken.

quote of the day... and the Bush Legacy....

From Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:

No, there was no Lewinsky during Bush's presidency. But my standard for "honor and dignity" has always been a little higher than that.

this at the end of his post on the Bush Legacy Project currently going on to rewrite history on failures such as Iraq

the jihadists at home...

Muslim’s scarf leads to arrest at courthouse

A Douglasville woman was jailed Tuesday after a judge found her in contempt of court for refusing to remove her hijab, the head covering worn by Muslim women.

Lisa Valentine, also known by her Islamic name, Miedah, 40, was arrested at the Douglasville Municipal Court for violating a court policy of no headgear, said Chris Womack, deputy chief of operations for the Douglasville Police Department.

corruption in Iraq

Bush Asleep While Iraqi Fraud Funnels Millions To al-Qaeda

former Iraqi officials revealed that more than $18 billion intended to rebuild Iraq may have been lost to local fraud and that millions have been funneled to al-Qaeda by corrupt Iraqis

More from Think Progress:
Rice: No ‘American Money’ In Iraq Was Lost To Corruption

Throughout the U.S. occupation of Iraq, billions in tax dollars have been lost due to corruption and incompetence. Some of the most egregious losses have been via “American programs”:

– The Coalition Provisional Authority delivered 363 tons of cash on an airplane, totaling $12 billion, to Iraq “without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for.”

– The State Dept spent $36.4 million dollars on weapons and equipment that could not be accounted for because “invoices were vague and there was no backup documentation“.

– Top contractor KBR came under fire last year from government investigators for overpricing its contract by $2 billion, which, for example, included overstating labor costs by 51 percent.

– State Dept. employees testified in May 2008 that the U.S. “allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government,” resulting in the loss of billions in U.S. tax dollars.

The use of private contractors, a major source of the corruption, has skyrocketed under Bush. The government has spent $85 billion on contracts in Iraq and other countries in the first four years of the war. “Taxpayers have been bled dry with massive misuse of public dollars,” observed Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who has spearheaded investigations into waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq.

Thus far, some $50 billion in taxpayer dollars have been spent on the reconstruction of Iraq, which anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International listed as the third-most corrupt nation in the world.

The trouble with economics

It isn't exactly science, as noted at the economist.com:

First of all, I know that we all consider economics a science, but as sub-fields go, macroeconomics is one of the least science-y. Among the reasons—too many variables, too small samples, no repeatable experiments, and so on. Consider the paper Mr Cowen would have us consider. It examines the American economy from 1955 to 2000, and it excludes all fiscal shocks but those that are orthogonal to the business cycle. What that leaves is, well, not very much. There are similar methodologies in other key papers on the subject, including that by the family Romer, and given the range of multipliers presented I don't know how one could conclude, definitively, that the science isn't there.

Which is why it's important to have a good, qualitative model of the mechanisms involved to supplement the data analysis. Greg Mankiw gave us a potential model for a way in which tax cuts might boost private investment, but it's not clear that his narrative is superior to those explaining just how deficit-funded government investment might work. In short, the data, on its own, isn't compelling enough in such cases to justify policy.

with Mark Thoma also noting:

We have very little U.S. historical data for time periods when the economy is in a depression, so we don't know a lot about the effectiveness of policy in this framework. It's hard to find decent data about the economy prior to 1947 (and make that 1959 for data on money), and we haven't had that many recessions in that time period. And more importantly, we haven't had the deep kind of recession that depression economics is intended to address. When most of your data (half in any case) is from good times, it is not surprising that the empirical evidence finds that crowding out is an important consideration. If we had lots of episodes like the current one to look at, then I would have more confidence in these results, but we don't. Parameters such as the responsiveness of investment and money demand to changes in the interest rate, the marginal propensity to save, etc., can all change drastically in deep recessions, and that means that the results from empirical investigations covering other time periods won't be very informative. I don't think we know much at all from the econometric evidence about the success of fiscal policy in deep downturns. We'll know more in the future because we'll be able to look back at this one, but for now policymakers are flying pretty blind. What we can examine is the experience of the Great Depression, and when you do, the case for fiscal policy is strong.

Go read the rest of Marks Post Depression Economics: Normal Rules Don't Apply, as it takes apart a lot of what conservatives are saying right now... and has an awesome example for answering the question about government spending crowding out private investment.

Republican's and their leaders...

Republicans consistently hold positions different from their base. The "no bailout for CEO's" is something I commonly hear from conservatives on the ground. Yet the broader point is this:

QUITE A LOOPHOLE....

When lawmakers considered the $700 billion bailout package a few months ago, they argued with the Bush White House over restrictions on executive compensation. Democrats insisted that firms accepting bailout funds could not, in turn, lavish their top executives with multi-million dollar salaries and/or "golden parachute" severance pay. The president wanted no such restrictions.

At first glance, it was a fight Democrats appeared to win, and strict limits were included in the final legislation. Indeed, there was even an IRS mechanism that mandated a close review of executive compensation, and tax penalties for companies that failed to comply.

Those evil Democrats

right wing entertainment

Glen Beck getting it right time and time again...

Beck: ‘I Was The Most Well-Researched Show’ On CNN, ‘They Forced Me To Document It’

In fact, it seems that no matter what politically-relevant topic Beck chose to discuss, we could count on Beck to get it wrong:

– On Taxes: Falsely claimed the U.S. is the “number two” highest taxed country in the world.

– On Energy: Falsely claimed “drilling in ANWR alone would yield 100 million barrels a day.”

– On Global Warming: Falsely claimed that “the globe was the hottest” and “America’s temperature peaked” in 1934.

– On Sub-prime Crisis: Falsely claimed that the sub-prime lenders were “blackmailed” into lending to the poor and minorities by community organizers.

– On The Iraq War: Falsely claimed that the U.S. “went into Iraq…to prevent World War III.”

– On the Middle East: Falsely claimed that Palestine is “being run now by Hezbollah,” President Abbas is an extremist.

– On Obama: Falsely claimed that Fidel Castro endorsed Obama’s candidacy.

Given Beck’s principled disregard for the facts, it’s no wonder that Sean Hannity recently welcomed beck to Fox News Channel saying, “You’re a perfect fit, a great addition to family“

No wonder people think Sarah Palin is talking any sense... this fits right in line with the sounds good, feels good policy of conservatives.

I was on tv... who let that happen?

Was on local tv two weeks ago and they just posted it up.
I goofed on the tax brackets... 90% until Kennedy... 50% with Reagan...

Also did too much hedging... but then again I get myself in trouble with Democrats more so than Republicans. I also didn't articulate it well--and it also speaks to my comfort zone being behind the written word where I can cite the specifics accurately--but I kept deferring to experts. What I always try to get people to see/do is to dig into the issues.

The anti-intellectual climate we've had since Reagan has allowed for Sarah Palin types to be considered legitimate policy makers. These folks may hold legitimate opinions and feelings but no one need take seriously ideas that have no bases in empirical and real world scenarios. So I like promoting the idea that specialist do have something important to contribute.

I can't be an expert in every field and most find folks whose sole purpose is to learn that field. I go to a plumber for my toilet, a climatologist for my global warming questions, a biologist for evolution questions, an economist for the economy, and a pyschiatirst for my bi-polar. Just-so storys and sounds good feel good--"makes sense to me!" policy positions; though sometimes valid, vital, and democratic; aren't always up to date on the way the world acutally works. Its a complex place you know...

Thats why pretty much to a person--aside from my Libertarian friends--I argue down conservatives to the point that they "have their reasons" for voting conservative. Which is fine... as long as we don't pretend those reasons are based in anything other than sounds good feels good policy. Gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared as they say.

Once they lose their talking heads lecture points,cut the hyperbole and pejorative talk about Liberals and Democrats, and get down to the issues they tend to be shockingly silent for all the certainty and disdain they have for others policy views it speaks volumes. Intimidation and logical fallcies don't work on me and I actively look to 'pick a fight' if you will.

But for my first gig as a talking head I think I didn't do too bad. (Of coarse I support the train going to hampton!) And I didn't get any shots in on the nonsense about Republicans supporting "Free markets" over government intervention--ever hear of patent protections or immigration controls or food safety regulations... or or or... they just support certain forms of protectionism's that help certain sectors of the economy. They like socializing the costs and privatizing the profits. It falls in line with the "rich people work hard" (as if poor people don't) and that all those benefits come out of pure old fashioned sweat--nonsense if there ever was. Check out Herbert Simon, or listen to Warren Buffet talk about the importance of social capital if you were confused.

Anyways hopefully I'll be a little less nervous next time and can do a little less ummm's and ahh's and more specifics. I know them I was just afraid my memory would bungle something.

And it just hit me.. .I didn't even talk about the health care crisis! I guess the Martin/Obama messaging of the economy the economy the economy worked on me just as well as everyone else.

Sigh...