By Hanlon, on August 7th, 2010 at 09:16 AM
Good for him.
See, the problem with the Anti-Defamation League is that they aren’t like the ACLU in truly going after injustice from all quarters. The ADL is truly an organization that only focuses on Israel/Jewish specific problems. You’d think a bunch of people protesting the building of a mosque and being incredibly anti-Islam about it would be a prime target for the ADL to step in and stand up for someone’s right not to be defamed.
I’ll say this, too: seems like the Obama administration has really started to usher in an era of not bending over backwards for Israel with no questions asked. Good times, indeed.
By Hanlon, on June 7th, 2010 at 05:21 PM
 This one definitely bums me out.
Over the years, there has been but one good voice in the pit of the White House press conference: Helen Thomas. It didn’t matter what administration she was under, what political party was in charge, she’d be there to put their balls in a clamp and squeeze until she either got an answer or showed the world what was wrong.
But now she’s done, and not for a good reason, either.
Her decision comes after her controversial remarks about Israel hit the blogosphere. She later apologized for her comments, saying she “deeply regretted” making them.
…
Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.”
The comments were made during a White House event on May 27 celebrating Jewish heritage. And they came during a time of international outrage at Israel for its attack on a Turkish ship that left nine dead. Israel has rejected calls for an investigation of the incident.
Two things bother me here:
- No one gives two shits when the various right-wing flamethrowers say outrageous things, so what’s up with Helen Thomas? Or is it because she had the temerity to not fellate Israel?
- In all likelihood, this will tank her legacy. When people watch a movie, they only tend to remember the ending (or at least it heavily colors their opinion of the rest), so anyone who’s all pissed off at her now will probably remember her more for this than all the good she did.
Actually, I’m a liar. More bothered me than just that, so let me get all hot and bothered here.
Helen Thomas says something vaguely inflammatory, the blogosphere and internet go berzerk, in response to it all the White House completely throws her under the bus, and she retires with heavy apology. Conservative media shitheads* say all kinds of terrible things, they don’t apologize, the politicians continue to hold onto them tightly, and they not only don’t retire but get a career boost from it all. What in the hell.
I hate to say it, but it really seems like the only difference was that it involved Israel.
* When other liberal media shitheads say terrible things, the difference is that Washington does distance itself from them. The rest remains the same. Occasionally they apologize.
By Hanlon, on May 24th, 2010 at 05:56 PM
FOX edits applause out of an Obama speech.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h61vrbxfw1k[/youtube]
I have a theory about FOX and their ilk. For years, they interpreted any criticism of the president, even valid ones, as partisan attacks and belligerence. Thus, in an attempt to “fight fire with fire”, they’re launching partisan attacks and belligerence at the president.
By Hanlon, on March 15th, 2010 at 05:31 PM
 When I read the opening paragraph of this Washington Post story concerning Obama’s changes to No Child Left Behind, I admit it sounded a little bizarre. I’d been hearing rumblings about these changes and the story seemed to suggest that it would be uneven.
For most public schools, the perceived heavy hand of the federal government would become a lighter touch under President Obama’s plan to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law. But for others, the consequences of academic failure would stiffen considerably.
Really? He’d be gentler on some schools and harsher on others? Why? What’s wrong with the others?
Let’s take a look see.
Education Department officials said 5 percent of the lowest-performing schools would face radical interventions, including replacing the principal in nearly all cases. Those are tougher remedies than current law provides. The next-lowest 5 percent would be placed on watch lists and forced to take major steps. Another 5 percent with wide gaps in achievement between disadvantaged and better-off students would face interventions.
Oh I see. So, in fact, it isn’t “some” schools that face harsher consequences for academic failure, they all do. If any school drops into those lower echelons then they face harsh penalties. That sounds downright fair to me, and it seems like no schools will be treated differently at all.
Now, I think NCLB has somewhere between ten and a million flaws to it, but painting the changes as affecting schools “differently” implies that the changes aren’t merit based. I mean, if a retail store decided that the lowest-performing 5% of employees would face harsh penalties, I don’t think anyone would say “why are we getting treated differently?” The answer’s kinda obvious: you don’t want the penalties, ya gotta do better.
By Hanlon, on January 31st, 2010 at 05:41 PM
Paul Krugman is, and will always be, my hero.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ8Aajfw3HQ[/youtube]
By Hanlon, on December 15th, 2009 at 02:57 PM
 There are some writers who, when they write an opinion I patently disagree with, cause me to pause and re-evaluate what I had previously thought. One of those authors is Nate Silver of 538, so when I saw a clip of his article on Ted Goddard’s Political Wire in a post on why liberals should back the health care bill, I listened.
“For any ‘progressive’ who is concerned about the inequality of wealth, income and opportunity in America, this bill would be an absolutely monumental achievement. The more compelling critique, rather, is that the bill would fail to significantly ‘bend the cost curve’. I don’t dismiss that criticism at all, and certainly the insertion of a public option would have helped at the margins. But fundamentally, that is a critique that would traditionally be associated with the conservative side of the debate, as it ultimately goes to mounting deficits in the wake of expanded government entitlements.”
It’s worth saying that most of us on the left have put almost our entire stock in the public option. We’ve basically said that any bill lacking a PO is useless, it’s not enough, it doesn’t do anything worth doing. But there certainly many other facets to the health care system, and they wouldn’t all be fixed with a public option. So maybe Nate, Ezra, and John are right. The bill isn’t perfect, but it’s as big a reform as we could conceivably hope for now.
Personally, I’m hoping Ezra Klein is right that this keeps the door open for future reforms.
By Hanlon, on November 16th, 2009 at 03:46 PM
 For internet news junkies, the panic du jour is the Ukrainian flu outbreak. If you haven’t heard about it, you’ve been missing out. In the past two weeks, over a million people have gotten infected with the mystery flu, though with the oddly small death total of (at last count) just under 300.
This isn’t swine flu, mind. As per the article, we’re dealing with less than 100 cases of H1N1, and less than twenty of them were fatal. Rather, it’s a mysterious illness, one with frightening infection rates, albeit low mortality.
Naturally, panic has spread in some quarters, as the deaths that have occurred were especially grisly, one doctor saying the deads’ lungs looked as though they’d been burned. However, something is strange here.
For one, the infection went from zero to nearly a hundred thousand almost overnight. Remember swine and bird flu? There were early warning signs in a few areas of Mexico and Asia (respectively), a couple of infections that looked as though they could turn into the next big problem. It was quite some time before H1N1 went from media darling to full-on pandemic. In the Ukraine, by contrast, there was absolutely no warning. Everything was fine, and then the country was on quarantine. Within two weeks it went from 80,000 to over a hundred thousand to 750,000 to over a million.
Compounding that, the infections haven’t spread, geographically speaking. Oh sure there have been H1N1 cases in Russia and the surrounding area, but remember that we’re not talking about H1N1. Rather, the million-plus infections have all remained within the western chunk of the Ukraine. That is incredibly odd for a virus that’s so contagious it’s been growing on a near logarithmic scale.
By way of contrast, consider our other two pandemics. Remember the maps for swine flu that The Daily Show so effectively mocked? Tracking the swine flu was an exercise in hilarity, seeing huge countries colored in red because there were a dozen infections in that area. The swine and bird flu each took some time to warm up, with infections worldwide that slowly spread into their local populations.
According to the frenzied reports, the Ukraine has a flu that came out of nowhere, spread like wildfire, but didn’t move beyond the borders of the Ukraine. Hell, it didn’t even move into eastern area of the damn country. All the million-plus infections are on the western half of the nation, and have not budged beyond. If this was an actual viral explosion, then anyone traveling into and out of the country in the first seven days would have taken it with them, and with the speed of the infection within the country half of Europe would have been in the hospital by now.
So we’ve got a virus that supposedly spreads like wildfire, but hasn’t left the Ukraine and kills somewhere around 0.02% of those infected with it. We’re left with two possibilities:
- The stories are true, which would point toward a biological or chemical attack, which would rather nicely explain why there have been so many infections in such a small area.
- The stories are are the result of mass hysteria, which would explain why for such a supposedly horrific virus only a teeny number have died and why only a whopping two have had the “burnt lungs” effect.
Extra strange is that the western media hasn’t really touched it. Normally if there’s a whiff of medical catastrophe anywhere in the world, it’s all over the CNN/MSNBC/FOX triumvirate. Bird flu, swine flu, mad cow, you name it. The moment a few people die anywhere in a potentially pandemic-triggering way our American media eats it up. We love our pandemics, but this one? Not so much. Maybe even the US media realized the story wasn’t going anywhere.
By Hanlon, on November 16th, 2009 at 01:34 PM
 I think, on some level, we all have a similar presumption about the current wave of right-wing protesters. We see them as hypocrites, either willful or not. We see them as people who sat through eight years of Bush terrorizing, economic obliteration, and war crimes and now that a Democrat is in office suddenly they give a shit about things like executive overreach and fiscal responsibility.
Brad Friedman over at the Guardian has another perspective. It’s not that they saw and ignored Bush’s transgressions, they just didn’t know about them.
By contrast, Fox presents an alternative reality where Republican hypocrisy, scandals and abuses of power are either spun into something they are not or, more frequently, simply not mentioned at all. As such, the depths of the historically unprecedented failure that was George Bush’s presidency remain virtually unknown to Fox viewers. In the bargain, as the young Obama administration moves forward, attempting to deal with countless disasters they’ve inherited, issue after issue now comes as a complete surprise to the majority of Fox’s audience.
…
The list goes on and on, but the frothing teabaggers protest as if the last eight years never happened. Rather, these poor saps were presented with a phony version of reality produced with Hollywood-style special effects and distractions (missing blonds, steroids in baseball, terrorists around every corner, non-existent voter fraud). Now these confused souls roam the streets, town halls and email lists as clueless zombies, unaware of who and what they are fighting for (government-supported corporatocracy) or against (their own self-interest).
We’ve all been hit with a moment where, after combing through more ideologically tilted news outlets, we’re caught in the headlights by a pretty dang important story that didn’t get mentioned anywhere you were looking. Now, most of us have some diversity in where we get the news, and so such stories are cases of “falling through the cracks” that don’t happen all that often.
Imagine, though, living as someone who gets all of their news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. Literally, all of it. The way you’ve heard, Bush was a steadfast and courageous man of God whose presidency was plagued with evil liberals attempting to destroy his good works. The war was always justified, and always successful, thanks to the brave Republicans fighting off Democrats who tried to ruin it. The economy was doing great under Bush until the Democrats started screwing it up, and the bailouts and such were all Obama’s ideas.
This is why these people are willing to follow Glenn Beck unquestioningly, despite his tenure on CNN as a republican cheerleader who wholly endorsed just about everything he’s now calling a threat to the United States’ soul: they never watched him on CNN. Having never branched beyond the FOX/Limbaugh sphere, they’re unaware of anything that may have happened out there, be it news items or massive cognitive dissonance in their heroes.
Consider the O’Reilly strategy of dealing with criticism: cite nothing and attack viciously. This gives the appearance of covering “the other side” without ever making his poor, fragile viewers actually have to see it. So sure, Factor viewers are aware OF some sort of row between himself and Olbermann over something, but not having seen any of it, they’re left taking Bill-O’s word that the spat was because O’Reilly said something Keith didn’t like and so KO threw an ideology-based fit.
Welcome to the right-wing media mold. Spin everything, deflect criticism, ignore stories that muck with your narrative. Is it any wonder that people are up in arms?
By Hanlon, on October 23rd, 2009 at 06:44 PM
Sha-zam.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4q_FvNc6KY[/youtube]
By Hanlon, on October 19th, 2009 at 11:02 AM
In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has made what may or may not be an unprecedented move: formally taking a stance against a media outlet, in this case FOX News. Be it making comments during interviews on other networks or setting up fact-checker-checker articles on the White House home page, the administration has decided that they and FOX are opposing players on the field, but should that be the way?
There are those who blame this battle on communications director Anita Dunn, who last week directly called the network an arm of the Republican party. To place the blame squarely on Dunn, however, is to ignore FOX’s senior VP of programming Bill Shine’s rather proud declaration that FOX is the “voice of opposition” in the Obama era back in March. From the get go, FNC decided that their role was not objective observer, but political player.
One is tempted to cheer the decision (I certainly did at first), as a quick look at the formation does put the blame in FOX’s lap. That said, how responsible is it for an administration to formally stand against a single network? Fighting lies and misinformation is one thing, even if it tends to come from the same source. Focusing that fight on one channel, however, has the danger of coming across as wanting to “censor” rather than a genuine fight for honesty.
The odds of the White House winning this one aren’t great anyway. Presidents come and go, their grip on re-election is fairly tenuous, whereas the big 24/7 news stations aren’t going anywhere unless another one manages to kill their ratings. Keep in mind that FOX’s big draw right now is their opposition to the administration. In the eyes of nearly every anti-Obama zealot, FOX is the voice of reason in a sea of media adoration. For the White House to elevate them to the point of calling them an actual opponent (rather than say, an annoying tabloid), is to give the base exactly what it wants and potentially drive viewership into the stratosphere.
Remember, all that a network needs is for people to pay attention to it. It doesn’t matter why people are watching, even if it’s just to see what all the fuss is about. So long as there are eyeballs on their programming, they win. Support, opposition, background noise, morbid curiosity, no matter. A president needs motivated support to win re-election, and while the odds of FOX’s whining about Obama will boost his ratings in the polls, Obama’s whining about FOX will boost their Nielsen ratings almost certainly.
What might have been a smarter play would have been to continue to “fight the smears”, as it were, but never call out FOX by name. This gives the appearance that the target of the fight is lies, misinformation, not a certain network or specific pundits. By elevating the battle beyond ”administration fights for truth in reporting” to “Obama vs FOX”, what could have been a strong stand against media dishonesty has turned into a battle of “those who are on Obama’s side and those who aren’t.” They may have shot themselves in the foot, here.
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