GOP Civil War will soon be televised

Talking Points Memo: Fox’s monopoly on conservative cable news may soon come to an end.

A Bloomberg Businessweek profile published Thursday revealed Newsmax.com founder and CEO Christopher Ruddy’s plans to expand beyond his highly-trafficked website and influential magazine into television with a 24-hour cable news channel called NewsmaxTV — described as a “kinder, gentler Fox” — launching as early as June.

“Our goal is to be a little more boomer-oriented, more information-based rather than being vituperative and polarizing,” Ruddy told the magazine.

Business-wise, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Demographic trends show that Republicanism — kinder and gentler or not — isn’t exactly a growth industry. Why you’d want to compete with Fox for an ever-shrinking piece of the pie is a bit of a mystery. Maybe a show on Fox or a syndicated Sunday morning yack show, ala “Meet the Press,” but 24 hours of “Gee, but aren’t Republicans swell”? Yeah, I’m not seeing the genius behind this particular business model.

Still, if conservatives want to start whacking away at Fox News, I can’t say I’m against the idea. But Fox is aimed straight at the brainless ‘bagger base, while it sounds like NewsmaxTV would be aimed more at the people that National Review used to try to attract — i.e., conservatives who take a moment to think about things — before they too decided that the gullible and easily riled dummies were easier to milk. That audience that Ruddy seems to want to appeal to may have passed on with Reagan — that is, the real Reagan, not the cartoonish Reagan ‘bagger’s worship now. That audience would be the Reagan/Dole/Kemp conservatives. Or as Tea Partiers call them these days, “RiNOs.”

The GOP Civil War might take to the upper channels of cable, but you’ve got to wonder how long it’ll last.

American media in a nutshell

Matt Bors.

Does a CBO report really say Obamacare means 2 million will lose their jobs? In a word, no

Or at least, only if you misunderstand it —which, sadly, is easy to do when major news outlets are misreporting the story. The right is, of course, running wild with the story and it seems no one has actually bothered to sit down and read the damned thing. There’s a rampant misunderstanding of how jobs are measured in the Congressional Budget Office’s report and this is resulting in confusion — which the right and Republicans are running in to exploit. TPM’s Dylan Scott has the skinny (emphasis mine):

What the CBO really found was that the numbers of hours worked would decrease under Obamacare, by roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent between 2017 and 2024. The report then translated those lost hours into the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs. But that doesn’t mean 2.5 million jobs are going to disappear from the U.S. economy.

The CBO report, in fact, specifically undermines that claim.

Those lost hours will “almost entirely” be the result of people choosing to work fewer hours because of Obamacare — not because they lost their jobs or can’t find a full-time job.

"The report explicitly says that Obamacare isn’t going to force businesses to cut jobs on any grand scale," Scott reports. "What it is going to do is change how much Americans work." Obamacare will actually free people to work less, since insurance coverage won’t be dependent on full-time hours. 35 hours a week is better fit for your family? Great. Knock yourself out. It’s not like you’ll lose your health coverage or anything.

No wonder the GOP is eager to spin this thing right out of the gate; if Americans find out what it really means, they’re not going to be interested in messing with Obamacare at all, much less repealing it.

Today’s ridiculous spin from Politico

Or “Trashy, sensationalist story is trashy, sensationalist.”

Politico: President Barack Obama is counting on Senate Democrats to help approve his legislative agenda during his final years in office. And though they are his staunchest allies on most economic issues, many Democratic senators are breaking with him on key issues in very public ways.

From trade to Iran sanctions, the Keystone XL pipeline, Obamacare, the National Security Agency and energy policy, Senate Democrats seem unusually comfortable criticizing the president, with only minimal concerns about repercussions from the White House.

Even Obama’s steadfast ally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, didn’t mince words last week when he rejected a bill to fast-track trade deals that is strongly backed by the White House, working against Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, a Senate colleague who has been tapped to be the president’s ambassador to China.

Even some Republicans are noticing.

Old and tired: GOP Civil War. Fresh and exciting: Democratic Civil War. Pretty snazzy, huh?

Well, it would be if it didn’t also happen to be horsecrap.

Ed Kilgore: Splits from the majority Democratic position by Members of Congress from energy-producing areas is about as new a development as the electric guitar. Of course Mary Landrieu and Joe Manchin are going to complain about utility regulations and fracking restrictions. Indeed, until Republicans abandoned their own environmentalist tradition, a Member of Congress’ region or home-state was far and away the most reliable indicator of their position on energy and environmental issues. And it will, of course, be most visible in the Senate where every energy-producing state has two representatives.

Harry Reid’s rejection of fast-track trade negotiating authority is also un-newsy to anyone remembering similar Democratic hostility to fast-track during the Clinton administration. Yes, there is underlying tension within the Democratic coalition (and also within the Republican coalition, though to a lesser extent) over trade policy, but again, it goes back at least to the 1970s.

The Democratic “revolt” on Iran policy is yesterday’s news in a somewhat different respect: it has been largely quelled as Democratic cosponsors of the Menendez-Kirk sanctions legislation mostly line up in favor of letting Harry Reid keep the bill off the Senate floor until the administration’s negotiations with Iran run their course.

There’s more, but you get the idea. The bare bones of Politico’s hackfest here is that Democrats aren’t of a hivemind — like the lockstep thinking that’s usually a hallmark of the GOP — and that means everything’s in disarray and the party’s falling apart and the White House’s legislative agenda is in shambles and isn’t it all so wonderfully chaotic and newsworthy that you just have to read you some Politico?

But none of this is anything new. It’s become cliché to say that getting Democrats on the same page is like herding cats. and that’s because people have been repeating the analogy for years. None of this is new. Democrats tend to be more independent-minded and willing to go their own way than the more authoritarian and doctrinaire Republicans — Republicans who, ironically, claim to value individualism.

Stories like this are less about Washington and more about Politico’s market strategy. They seek to be the most important journalistic voice in DC by being the one that “drives the conversation.” So if you’re not reading Politico, you’re out of the loop. And you drive the conversation not by being accurate, apparently, but by twisting facts in order to “find” stories that no one else is reporting on. This isn’t so much actually “driving the conversation” as it is “being a hack.”

And it’s not so much journalism as it is writing Washington insider fan fiction.

Pew poll finds voters’ assessments of the two US political parties surprisingly accurate

Washington Post: Democrats hold a sizable advantage on Republicans on several key perceptions of the United States’s two major political parties, according to a new poll.

The Pew Research Center poll show Americans perceive Democrats as more willing to work with the other party than Republicans, by a margin of 52 percent to 27 percent.

Democrats also hold a 20-point advantage when it comes to which party “is more concerned with the needs of people like me” and a 10-point edge when it comes to governing in a more ethical and honest way.

The GOP, meanwhile, is viewed as much more “extreme” in its issue positions (54-35) and more influenced by lobbyists (47-30).

In other words, all five measures favor Democrats by a significant margin.

What’s interesting to me about this is that it demonstrates the complete failure of the “both sides are just as bad” false equivalency narrative that much of the media have been trying to get Americans to buy into. After years of GOP obstructionism, the government shutdown, and the debt limit fiasco, it’s become a tough sell.

You can’t continually vote against the wishes of the people — as the GOP has with immigration, the minimum wage, and unemployment benefits — and expect people to see you as the good guys. And the media is thankfully no help at all in bailing them out. It turns out that their actions speak louder than the media’s words and no amount of spin will bail them out for continually failing the American people.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Megyn Kelly on white Santa controversy: ‘Nuh-uh, you’re the one being racist’

Politico: Megyn Kelly said Friday evening she was making off-hand and “tongue-in-cheek” comments about Santa Claus and Jesus Christ being white, and that the controversy over the segment is a result of “race-baiting” while the real debate was lost.

Devoting more than 15 minutes of “The Kelly File” to the subject and bringing on two panelists to discuss the reaction, Kelly said the original Wednesday segment was just a way to bring some humor to her show.

"I realize that the piece by [Aisha] Harris which went on to argue that Santa should be a penguin was also tongue in cheek. That’s in part why we covered the story in the first place,” Kelly said. “Humor is part of what we try to bring to the show. Sometimes that’s lost on the humorless.”

Kelly played several clips of other networks and late-night comedians discussing or making jokes about the Santa segment. The frenzied reaction would be funny Kelly said, “if it were not so telling of our society if any the knee jerk instinct to race bait” and attributed part of the blow back to Fox News’ popularity.

See, Kelly was just joking around. But liberals are so brainwashed by their PC rules that they have no sense of humor any more. That explains why late night comedians couldn’t tell either, because… OK, you just lost me there Megs. The undisputed experts at comedy detected no comedy — attempted or otherwise.

What we see here is the time-honored “I am rubber, you are glue” defense. Conservatives love to defend racism by claiming the people who notice it are the real racists. That’s how their whole “reverse racism” scam got started in the first place — as a way to claim that anti-racist policies and sentiments were in themselves racist.

In other words, people who complained about her segment are just racist against white people and Megyn Kelly — like every conservative everywhere in every minute of their lives — is the real victim. Just ask any of them, they’ll show you all the victim cards you want.

Conservatives often go off on long lectures about “personal responsibility.” You’d think they’d try a little themselves occasionally.

The do-nothing congress finally did one thing. Doesn't mean they still don't suck

With the year in Congress entering its final days, the House of Representatives last night passed a budget deal easing the sequester, and the Senate is expected to pass it next week. This is already being widely hailed as a truce in the sabotage governing wars and a return to some semblance of normalcy, however modest.

But if there’s one fact that continues to sum up this Congress, it’s this. Lawmakers remain far more likely to vote on a political, counter-productive measure on Iran than to vote on extending unemployment benefits for over one million Americans. And let’s not even talk about whether Congress will vote on any serious proposals to boost economic growth and create jobs amid a still sluggish recovery.
— Greg Sargent, pointing out that congress still sucks.

Look at it this way, this congress just passed a forgettable horsetrading bill that accomplishes nothing much other than avoiding a budget debate for a couple of years — and the media and punditry are acting like they’ve just passed the Civil Rights Act or something.

Why? Because this pile of nothing is among the 113th congress’ crowning achievements. This is being heralded as a tremendously important moment in modern history because the bar is just that low.

This is a Republican shutdown, plain and simple

James Fallows lists “The Two Basic Facts That Should Be in Every Shutdown Story”:

1. If the House of Representatives voted on a “clean” budget bill — one that opened up the closed federal offices but did not attempt to defund the Obama health care program — that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over. Nearly all Democrats would vote for it, as would enough Republicans to end the shutdown and its related damage. (And of course it has already passed the Senate, repeatedly, and would be signed by the president.) For illustrations of the wanton damage, see here and here.
   
   
2. So far House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let this vote occur. His Tea Party contingent knows how the vote would go and therefore does not want it to happen; and such is Boehner’s fear of them, and fear for his job as Speaker, that he will not let it take place.

Therefore, the shutdown is a strictly Republican baby. If the bill that John Boehner now has stuffed in his back pocket were to go up for a vote, it would pass and that would be that. The shutdown continues because Boehner refuses to end it.

Period. End of story.

[photo by Gage Skidmore]

People explaining why they prefer the Affordable Care Act over 'Obamacare'

RNC finalizes NBC, CNN debate boycott

Liberal Youth: BREAKING: The RNC has passed a resolution to ban CNN, NBC from 2016 GOP primary debates if they continue with Hillary Clinton programs.

The Hillary documentaries are actually a pretense. There hasn’t even been scripts written yet, so the idea that they’re pro-Clinton propaganda would be ridiculous speculation, if it was really the reason.

In the 2012 autopsy report, the RNC concluded that one of the things that sunk the party’s presidential chances was the fact that there were a bazillion primary debates, allowing low-wattage candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann far too many opportunities to step in front of a camera and say something flabbergastingly stupid. All the documentaries do is allow them to throw out the victim card while they do what they’ve been planning to do for months.

If you want further proof that this is the case, take the news that the GOP is looking to talk radio for debate moderators. If the party didn’t think debates were a big problem, they wouldn’t be talking about having Sean Hannity ask candidates why they’re so awesome.

If it’s not about race, why are Zimmerman supporters in agreement with racists?

Mother Jones: In April 2012, two days before George Zimmerman was arrested for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, he huddled with a fellow neighborhood watch volunteer, Frank Taaffe. According to Taaffe, who disclosed the meeting on Fox News, Zimmerman asked him to share “several talking points” with the media. Taaffe obliged. Indeed, as Zimmerman’s legal drama unfolded over the next year and a half, Taaffe emerged as his most visible and outspoken defender. He gave hundreds of interviews to media outlets, ranging from the New York Times to Fox News to CNN, and made near-daily appearances on cable news shows during Zimmerman’s trial.

Taaffe used this platform to cast Martin as a drug-addled hoodlum and Zimmerman as a community-minded do-gooder (“the best neighbor you would want to have”) who had every reason to suspect the black teen was up to mischief. He also railed against Zimmerman’s critics, whom he accused of staging a witch hunt. “It’s really sad that he has already been convicted in the public media and has already been sentenced to the gas chamber,” he lamented in an interview with NBC’s Miami affiliate last year.

Taaffe was hardly the ideal person to be weighing in on a case suffused with racial angst—or commenting on criminal-justice matters, period. A Mother Jones investigation has found that the 56-year-old New York native has a lengthy criminal record that includes charges of domestic violence and burglary, and a history of airing virulently racist views. Just last Sunday, he appeared on The White Voice, a weekly podcast hosted by a man named Joe Adams, who has deep, long-standing ties to white-power groups and has authored a manual called Save The White People Handbook. (Sample quote: “A mutt makes a great pet and a mulatto makes a great slave.”)

With my headline here, it’d be easy to accuse me of applying guilt by association. Except for one thing: Zimmerman supporters aren’t in agreement with Taaffe on just one or two points, they’re in agreement with him about everything. When you’re in complete agreement with a racist, that makes you a racist — just as someone in complete agreement with Marx is a Marxist.

From the “drug-addled street thug” smear to the “let’s all start racially profiling” argument currently so popular on the right, at no point do conservative Zimmerman supporters and this avowed white supremacist part company. It’s only in how openly racist they are that they start to part ways; Taaffe is proudly racist, where the right is ashamed of it — or, at least, aware enough that it’s a bad thing to go to great lengths to distance themselves from it.

And it’s not just here, the only difference between a rightwing blog post about Trayvon Martin and one at Stormfront is word choice. The fundamental argument is the same: African-Americans are a naturally criminal population who can’t — and shouldn’t — be trusted.

So it should come as no surprise that a bona fide white supremacist could pass as an average Zimmerman supporter for so long and so successfully. There really is no difference between the two.

Rightwing blogosphere catches a dose of Mad Deer Disease

This one’s kind of hilarious, once you get past the sad. So here goes the sad: a bunch of armed government agents raided a Society of St. Francis animal shelter in Wisconsin to take out a baby deer. No doubt, they were concerned about Chronic Wasting Disease, which is like Mad Cow for deer. When you come across an orphaned fawn, you’ve got to wonder what happened to mom, especially when you’re fighting a contagion that constantly threatens to turn into an epidemic. In any case, it’s a violation of law to keep wildlife.

OK, so that’s the sad.

It turns out that the wingnut blogosphere got wind of this, including the National Review’s Mark Steyn, who’s regarded as one of the smart guys on the right. Anyhoo, this is the worst thing ever and an example of big federal gummint overreach and here comes communism and HIDE THE CHILDREN FOR THE SWEET LOVE OF GOD!

The whole thing was done under the auspices of the Department of Natural Resources. If that federal agency doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because it doesn’t exist — not as a federal agency, anyway. It’s a state agency. A Wisconsin state agency. A Wisconsin state agency that’s part of the administration of Tea Party hero Gov. Scott Walker. It’s not an example of federal government gone mad, it’s one of local government losing it’s marbles under one of their beloved authoritarian ideologues.

Let the furious backpedaling begin.

[photo by star5112]

Washington Post defends appallingly racist column

Huffington Post: The Washington Post is defending the publication of a column Tuesday that argues George Zimmerman was justified in being suspicious of Trayvon Martin on the night he stalked and killed the unarmed teenager because Martin was wearing a hoodie -– a “uniform we all recognize," according to the column.

“I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist,” wrote longtime Post columnist Richard Cohen. “The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.”

Politico later asked Cohen about the hoodie “uniform" that he described Martin as wearing the night he was killed.

"It’s what’s worn by a whole lot of thugs," Cohen said. “Look in the newspapers, online or on television: you see a lot of guys in the mugshots wearing hoodies."

That this argument is nearly logically identical to the “women in short skirts are begging to be raped" argument is apparently lost on both Cohen and the Post. But the underlying argument is far worse — that Zimmerman was justifiably suspicious of a young black male, simply because he was a young black male.

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared, and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

You wonder if Cohen has ever heard the term “driving while black" or knows that 50% of the people who are subjected to NYPD’s “stop and frisk" policy are black, despite that demo making up only 10% of the population. Black people don’t commit more crimes than white people, black criminals are just caught more often because black people are heavily over-policed. Inversely, if police didn’t stop black people, few black people would ever be arrested and whites would make up the bulk of arrested criminals — but it wouldn’t mean that whites were suddenly committing more crimes. And if whites intereacted with police as often as blacks, the percentages would be pretty much equal.

But that’s math, math is a science, and science is of the devil.

Cohen’s column is as inexcusably racist as it is logically nonsensical. Not only should it be pulled, but Cohen should be fired. It’s the 21st century, not the 19th.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Washington Post’s paywall goes up June 12

Washington Post: On June 12, we will begin phasing in our metered subscription model. It will take us a few weeks to get everyone into the system, but doing that will allow us to ensure that you have the best possible experience.

Once the subscription service launches, you will initially be able to view 20 pieces of content per month before being asked to subscribe. We hope you will consider subscribing even if you don’t reach the limit; a subscription will provide unlimited access to all The Post’s world-class journalism, multimedia and interactive features and more. Importantly, you will also be helping to support our newsgathering operations.

Whether or not you subscribe, we will not limit your ability to view The Post’s homepage and section front pages, watch videos or search classified advertising. In addition, readers who come to The Post through search engines or shared links will be able to access the linked page regardless of the number of articles they have previously viewed.

So basically, it’s pretty much identical to the NYT’s paywall. I’ve found this model to be surprisingly unburdonsome. If you have favorite columnists or bloggers, bookmark their Twitter or Facebook feeds and you should be able to continue to read them no problem. I’ve also found that aggregators get through the paywall — I have no problem reading Krugman through links on my own Must-Read Superfeed — presumably because they’re redirected through Feedburner and Yahoo! Pipes. I guess this qualifies as “shared links.” I’m assuming that bloggers like Ezra Klein and Greg Sargent will work the same way. Worse comes to worst, run the link through TinyURL and it should get you through.

We’ll find out for sure on June 12th and I’ll make any adjustments to the Superfeed that need to be made. But judging from WaPo’s own reporting, it doesn’t look like I’ll have to change a thing.

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Panicked, gullible rightwing bloggers get the story exactly wrong — again

CNN:  Evidence uncovered so far supports the theory that the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings had no help, authorities said Saturday.

“From what I know right now, these two acted together and alone,” Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau told CNN. “I think we have to be ever vigilant, and we’re learning as we go along, but as far as this little cell — this little group — I think we got our guys.”

Deveau said investigators were continuing to look into where Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. and Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, may have gotten the resources to amass the cache of weapons used in the bombings and afterward. “We have to figure that out,” he said. “There’s a lot more work to go.”

But, asked whether Boston residents can rest easy, Deveau said, “We got our two guys.”

You might recall that during the weekend, the rightwing blogosphere was breathlessly repeating a Daily Mirror report about an FBI investigation into a 12-person “sleeper cell” who were responsible for the bombings. No one else was reporting this anywhere, but the rightwing blogs ate it up — just as they’d fallen for the New York Post’s Boston bombing fan fiction. All of these people need to print the following sentence out in giant letters and paste it over the PC’s they blog with: TABLOIDS ARE BULLSHIT FACTORIES!

The problem with the wingnut blogosphere is that they’re more interested in propaganda than in facts. So they’ll repeat the scariest stories, because that serves their agendas. They seem to think that sooner or later, GWB’s torture and wiretap legacy will get turned around by the facts and they’ll grasp at any straw that will make them look less like panic-stricken idiots who followed neocon monsters in the eyes of history.

But the facts never seem to do that job — mostly because they actually were panic-stricken idiots following neocon monsters. So they’ll keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over, because reality is never going to come to their rescue.

So just point and laugh. Because the only other option is to feel sorry for them… And they don’t deserve that.

[photo by thebudman623]

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd cuts off speculation about bomber’s motives, possible connections to terrorism.

Politico: …On today’s edition of MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, which Todd hosts, NBC News analyst Evan Kohlmann started describing what he believed was one of the suspect’s Amazon “wish lists” — that is, a list of products the suspect wanted to buy on Amazon.com, the online retail site.

“Let me stop you there,” Todd said. “We don’t know for sure this is one of his Amazon wish lists?”

“I want to stress, we don’t know for sure, but it is certainly his name….” Kohlmann said, before being interrupted by Todd.

“I’ve got to stop you there,” Todd said. “Our folks — we don’t necessarily want to put this on air yet until we verify it.”

Kohlmann said he understood, then started speculating on possible links between the suspects and Al Qaeda or other organized terror networks on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which, he said, have been known to use Chechens or individuals who look like Chechens.

“One of those groups is known as the Islamic Jihad Union,” Kohlmann said.

In the studio, off camera, a voice could be heard saying, “Oh my God.”

Todd finally cut in again: “I didn’t mean to cut you off, but we don’t want to draw so many conclusions,” he said. “But your point is that this is the type of string that the intelligence community is going to start pulling at — is that right.”

Kohlmann said that yes, this was a possible clue, but not a solid fact.

I’m posting this mainly because it shows just how skittish networks have gotten about running with false reports. After CNN’s fiasco especially, they all seem to want to avoid reporting anything that isn’t confirmed as fact by investigators or officials.

“Chuck Todd may have saved MSNBC from an enormous blunder this morning when he stopped one of the network’s analysts from speculating on ‘the electronic trails’ of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects,” writes Politico’s Dylan Byers. Would that all reporting were as cautious and diligent. When the rush to be the first and slap “EXCLUSIVE!” on your report begins to outweigh the need to be right, you’re doing it wrong.

[image by Nic*Rad]

A day of tragedy, made worse by rightwing media feeding frenzy

Amy Davidson, The New Yorker: A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead—a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?

A can’t quote the entire thing here, but you can go and check it out. It’s definitely worth your time. Most of the media failed miserably to rise to the occasion, but it was the rightwing media who dropped a giant turd on an already horrible day by tormenting a witness, rumor mongering, and fear mongering. The New York Post ran with wildly inaccurate reports, which the rightwing media immediately fell for. As wee see here, Fox harassed an innocent person. Then useless wingnut blogger Jim Hoft posted photos of the Saudi witness, taken from his Facebook page, in a way that served no rational purpose. The stupid, cowardly, panic-stricken rightwing media stampeded between ridiculously obvious false stories, stupid speculation, and baseless assumptions all day.

And the worst part is that, if you take a trip through these blogs and news sites, you get no sense of shame at all. In fact, you get the feeling that they have no idea that they should be ashamed. They’re all just plugging along in blissful ignorance, still guessing stupidly (and often pointlessly) as to what the truth might be, rather than waiting patiently until we know.

Hey GOP, here’s your biggest problem winning over voters: your base is so exhausting, no one wants anything to do with them. Between the panic and the fake outrage and the real (but misplaced) outrage and the other panic and the outrage with that and on and on and on and on, no one can keep up. The relentless stupidity just wears you down.

For fuck’s sake give it a break. Don’t you guys ever get tired of being outraged, panicked, and wrong?

The PC market isn’t dying, they’re just lasting longer

Slate: PC sales suffered their steepest decline in history last quarter, plummeting 14 percent worldwide, according to a report from market research firm IDC. As the Statista chart below shows, the malaise hit every major manufacturer except Lenovo, whose sales were flat. HP and Acer had the steepest drops.
Why is this happening? There are two prevailing theories. One is that it’s Microsoft’s fault. Historically, when Redmond releases a new version of Windows, PC sales spike as people upgrade their machines to take advantage of the fresh software. But with Windows 8, that hasn’t happened. That may because the radical redesign is confusing. A year ago, my colleague Farhad Manjoo predicted, “You’ll hate Windows 8.” Some analysts speculate that people may even hate it so much that they’re resisting buying a new machine just to avoid it. There may be some truth to that. We’ll know more once Apple releases its quarterly earnings on April 23.
The second theory for PCs’ sales decline is that, in short, the PC is dead. The media say this at least a couple times a year, and the latest wave of pronouncements includes obituaries from Salon and ReadWriteWeb. The idea is that, with people doing so much computing on their smartphones and tablets these days, they have no need for their old workhorse desktop or laptop anymore.

From what I’ve seen and heard, the second theory is the most popular with the media — probably because it’s the easiest to explain, not because it’s the truest. In fact, it turns out that both theories are wrong:

In the past, you had to replace your computer every few years or else it would become hopelessly bogged down trying to deal with the latest desktop applications, operating systems, and Internet technologies. But thanks to Moore’s Law, your average PC’s processing power now exceeds most people’s daily needs by a healthy margin. Meanwhile, the rise of the cloud has reduced the need for extra memory. And as ZDNet’s Simon Bisson explains in depth, a strategic shift by Microsoft in recent years has meant that you no longer need to buy a new machine in order to take advantage of each new operating system. The result is that PCs have become more durable than smartphones and tablets, which are still puny enough in their powers that you have to upgrade them regularly.

It isn’t that the days of the PC are over, it’s that the days of the disposable PC are over. People aren’t replacing their machines as often, because they don’t need to. The story the press has been repeating for months is BS.
Once again, the buffalo herd mentality of the media steers everyone wrong.

ABC’s weird take on perfectly rational taxation policies

Or “Today’s adventure in sensationalist google bait.”

ABC News: President Obama has plenty of big taxes in his budget proposal.

To achieve $1.8 trillion in new revenue, the president suggested a few of the policies he’s raised while battling Republicans over the past four years: taxing higher incomes by capping itemized tax deductions, rolling back domestic-production credits for oil companies, instituting the “Buffett Rule” of a 30 percent minimum tax rate for people making over $1 million in a year, and taxing investment managers’ “carried interest” profits as regular income top the list.

But the tax code is a jungle of odd rules, and the penny-pinching side of Obama’s budget raises some new taxes (or closes some “loopholes”) that might not readily occur to most taxpayers filling out run-of-the-mill 1040s this weekend.

What follows is the dreaded “listicle”; i.e., something that in it’s best form is an article in the form of a list and at its worst is a list pretending to be an article. To his credit, author Chris Good manages the former. But that’s where any credit stops. Here’s Ed Kilgore’s breakdown of the “weird” taxes Pres. Obama proposes:

Good identifies five revenue raisers as self-evidently risible: (1) eliminating an exemption from distilled spirits taxes for flavored vodkas (“Obama wants to tax your Stoli Razberi”); (2) eliminating the practice of claiming land conservation tax credits for golf courses; (3) boosting federal cigarette taxes to pay for a national pre-K program (“Obama smokes from time to time”); (4) getting rid of the corporate jet tax write off (“Perhaps a dead horse by now, but Obama is still beating it”); and (5) stopping businesses from writing off punitive damages they are assessed, typically for egregiously harmful behavior.

Yeah, it’s pretty dishonest and awful. “The whole thing seems to add up to one of those ‘if it moves, liberals will tax it’ kind of ‘stories’ that conservatives trot out before April 15 every year,” Kilgore explains. “It’s less news coverage than agitprop disguised as stand-up, but I’m sure it will get good circulation at golf resort clubhouses where tobacco executives smarting from punitive damages meet to sip Stoli Razberi and complain about Obama before boarding their corporate jets to go home.”

In short, how out of touch would you have to be to find any of this beyond the pale? I mean, why do flavored vodkas get a tax exemption anyway? If anything, Obama’s eliminating a weirdness with that one. And you have to pay taxes on your corporate Gulfstream? Cry me a river, Richie Rich.

Weird is finding any of this weird.

Rape Vigil

Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle.