Conor Friedersdorf at
The Atlantic discusses
Why Broadcast Journalism Is Flirting With Jon Stewart:
Would network news be better if politicians were interviewed by comedians rather than broadcast journalists? That's one question raised by Gabriel Sherman's report that NBC executives wanted Jon Stewart to host Meet the Press, the prestigious Sunday-morning interview program. Had higher-ups at NBC pursued Jimmy Kimmel or Sacha Baron Cohen for the gig, they'd stand accused of undermining the quality of their news programming to chase ratings. But few doubt that The Daily Show grapples with politics and policy, often with more sophistication than the broadcast journalists it incisively mocks. For that reason, news that Stewart was considered for the gig has prompted earnest debate about the merits of the idea. Some say he's "a devastatingly effective interrogator," others that he's "congenitally unprepared for any serious policy discussion."
That fight is beside the point. Interviews on The Daily Show are uneven, but they're also a rushed afterthought on a daily program whose purpose is to get laughs. How would Stewart perform given a week for interview prep and a charge to inform? I'd wager he'd do better than any Meet the Press host. But that is a low bar.
E.J. Dionne Jr at
The Washington Post writes
‘Citizens United’ is turning more Americans into bystanders:
Defenders of massive spending on advertising, positive or negative, will make the case that at least the ads engage voters. Not necessarily, and certainly not this year. Indeed, the Pew Research Center found in early October that only 15 percent of Americans are following the elections “very closely.” Interest in the campaign, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew, “is the lowest it has been at this point in an off-year election in at least two decades.”
Robert Fisk at
The Independent Beware of the role of the laptop in our addiction to politics and war:
Ever since the Pentagon started talking about Isis as apocalyptic, I’ve suspected that websites and blogs and YouTube are taking over from reality. I’m even wondering whether “Isis”—or Islamic State or Isil, here we go again—isn’t more real on the internet than it is on the ground. Not, of course, for the Kurds of Kobani or the Yazidis or the beheaded victims of this weird caliphate. But isn’t it time we woke up to the fact that internet addiction in politics and war is even more dangerous than hard drugs?
Over and over, we have the evidence that it is not Isis that “radicalises” Muslims before they head off to Syria—and how I wish David Cameron would stop using that word—but the internet. The belief, the absolute conviction that the screen contains truth—that the “message” really is the ultimate verity—has still not been fully recognised for what it is; an extraordinary lapse in our critical consciousness that exposes us to the rawest of emotions—both total love and total hatred—without the means to correct this imbalance. The “virtual” has dropped out of “virtual reality.”
At its most basic, you have only to read the viciousness of internet chatrooms. Major newspapers – hopelessly late – have only now started to realise that chatrooms are not a new technical version of “Letters to the Editor” but a dangerous forum for people to let loose their most-disturbing characteristics. Thus a major political shift in the Middle East, transferred to the internet, takes on cataclysmic proportions
For more pundit excerpts, read below the orange caterpillar.
The New York Times Editorial Board says what voter rights advocates have been saying for years about right-wing motives in The Big Lie Behind Voter ID Laws:
Voter ID laws, as their supporters know, do only one thing very well: They keep otherwise eligible voters away from the polls. In most cases, this means voters who are poor, often minorities, and who don’t have the necessary documents or the money or time to get photo IDs.
In her remarkable 143-page opinion in the Texas case, Federal District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos found that the law violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Voting Rights Act, and that by forcing registered voters to track down and pay for qualifying documents, it functioned as an “unconstitutional poll tax.”
Most striking of all, Judge Ramos found that the rapid growth of Texas’s Latino and black population, and the state’s “uncontroverted and shameful history” of discriminatory voting practices—including whites-only primaries, literacy restrictions and actual poll taxes—led to a clear conclusion: Republican lawmakers knew the law would drive down turnout among minority voters, who lean Democratic, and they passed it at least in part for that reason. Judge Ramos’s finding of intentional discrimination is important because it could force Texas back under federal voting supervision, meaning changes to state voting practices would have to be preapproved by the federal government.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times explains
How Righteousness Killed the World Economy:
Why are debtors receiving so little relief? As I said, it’s about righteousness—the sense that any kind of debt forgiveness would involve rewarding bad behavior. In America, the famous Rick Santelli rant that gave birth to the Tea Party wasn’t about taxes or spending—it was a furious denunciation of proposals to help troubled homeowners. In Europe, austerity policies have been driven less by economic analysis than by Germany’s moral indignation over the notion that irresponsible borrowers might not face the full consequences of their actions.
So the policy response to a crisis of excessive debt has, in effect, been a demand that debtors pay off their debts in full. What does history say about that strategy? That’s easy: It doesn’t work. Whatever progress debtors make through suffering and saving is more than offset through depression and deflation.
Cole Stangler at
The New Republic gives an nuh-uh about applause for the president in
Obama's Environmental Policies Don't Deserve Paul Krugman's Praise:
In the latest cover story for Rolling Stone, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offers a full-throated defense of the Obama administration, taking to task its critics from across the political spectrum. Included in the typically dour liberal’s praise: the president’s environmental policy, which "is starting to look like it could be a major legacy."
“We'll have to do a lot more soon, or face civilization-threatening disaster,” Krugman writes. “But what Obama has done is far from trivial.”
He ought not to give the White House so much credit.
Any rigorous measure of environmental policy has to consider the scope of the global climate crisis. If the planet is to avoid a two degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial levels—the internationally recognized threshold that, if surpassed, will unleash the most nightmarish effects of climate change—then we need to start leaving carbon in the ground, right now. (Activist and writer Bill McKibben has calculated about four-fifths of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the soil.) Given that math, the least we might ask of an American administration is not to exploit the reserves that happen to fall within U.S. borders. We might also ask that federal policy encourage a faster transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
On both counts, the administration has failed.
Ben Adler at
Grist writes
Why climate hawks should still vote for fossil-fuel-loving Democrats:
According a poll released this week by Kentucky’s major news organizations, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes leads Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the race for his Kentucky Senate seat by two points, 46-44. That’s within the margin of error, and most political insiders are still betting on McConnell. Incumbent senators win about 90 percent of the time, low-turnout midterm elections favor Republicans because the electorate is older, richer, and whiter than in presidential years, and Kentucky is a conservative Republican state.
But if Democrats are to hold onto their Senate majority, they are going to have to win some upsets like the race in Kentucky. Small, rural states are over-represented in the Senate. And they happen to be especially well-represented in the Senate seats that are up this year. To hold their majority, Democrats need some of their incumbent senators in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Alaska to win. They are facing an uphill battle in all of these places. Winning a surprisingly competitive Republican seat in a red state such as Kentucky would give Democrats a lot more breathing room.
Environmentalists might find it hard to root for these Democrats, all of whom promote the fossil fuel industry. Still, they would be wise to so anyway. [...]
But why, you might wonder, is Grimes any better for the environment than McConnell?
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times offers us his take on the
Best and worst ads in this year's U.S. Senate races:
Here are my picks for some of the best and worst ads of the year so far, all of them watchable on the Internet regardless of where you live:
Worst Democratic attack ad: Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska). In August, Begich ran a spot accusing his GOP opponent, former Alaska Atty. Gen. Dan Sullivan, of approving light sentences for sex offenders—including one who, after his release from prison, was accused of murdering a couple and raping their 2-year-old granddaughter. Two problems: there was no evidence that Sullivan handled the earlier case, and the victims' family, offended by the ad, demanded that Begich take it off the air. He did.
Worst Republican attack ad: David Perdue, a Senate candidate from Georgia. Perdue has a spot up charging that his Democratic opponent Michelle Nunn "funded organizations linked to terrorists" when she ran the Points of Light Foundation, which was founded by former President George H.W. Bush. But the charge turned out to be a mirage: Points of Light allowed individual donors (not Nunn) to direct gifts to Islamic Relief USA, a Muslim organization that the U.S. government does not consider linked to terrorists.
Greg Grandin at
The Nation writes
‘The New York Times’ Wants Gary Webb to Stay Dead:
Kill the Messenger, a movie starring Jeremy Renner, just opened, about the life and death of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gary Webb, who committed suicide in 2004. Webb came late to the Iran/Contra scandal, long after most of the mainstream media had moved on. In 1996, he wrote a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News, “Dark Alliance,” that exposed the distribution network, which included the Nicaraguan Contras, responsible for supplying the cocaine that helped kick off South Central Los Angeles’s crack epidemic. [...]
I haven’t seen Kill the Messenger yet, but there’s no doubt that it sides with Webb. That seems to have unsettled David Carr, the media critic for The New York Times. Last week, in an anguished, deeply ambivalent assessment of Webb’s legacy, Carr admitted that the thrust of what Webb wrote about “really happened,” making passing reference to Kerry’s “little-noticed 1988 Senate subcommittee report.” Carr tentatively suggests that perhaps journalists should have better spent their energy reporting the larger story, rather than relentlessly fact-checking Webb. At the same time, though, he presented the campaign that ultimately drove Webb to his death as a “he-said-she-said-who-can-ultimately-say?” matter of interpretation, given ample space to Webb’s tormentors, like Tim Golden, who wielded the hatchet for The New York Times, and the odious Jerry Ceppos, the executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News who, faced with unrelenting pressure from the big boys in NY, LA and Washington, betrayed Webb. [...]
Webb won’t be vindicated by the movie Kill the Messenger because he has already been vindicated by serious nonfiction reporters, like Schou and others. And by history itself.
Jeremy Brecher, Ron Blackwell and Joe Uehlein at
New Labor Forum argue for a new approach by unions in
If Not Now, When? A Labor Movement Plan to Address Climate Change:
Those in organized labor who are skeptical about climate protection efforts identify genuine problems in the policies proposed by environmentalists. They point out that the closing of coal-fired power plants, for example, will lead miners, truck drivers, and utility workers to lose their jobs—in many cases, the only well-paid union jobs in their localities. They argue that projects like the Keystone XL pipeline will provide jobs for workers who suffer from historic rates of unemployment. They maintain that a prosperous economy depends on cheap and abundant energy—so restrictions on fossil fuel energy could well lead to economic catastrophe. And they point out that restrictions on fossil fuel energy are likely to lead to rising prices for the energy to heat our houses, run our appliances, and drive our cars—price increases that will most hurt workers and the poor and further increase our society’s unjust economic inequality.
Much in this critique is valid. But criticizing the weaknesses in mainstream climate policy proposals is not a strategy for combating climate change. Labor needs to propose a climate protection strategy of its own—one that realistically protects the livelihood and well-being of working people and helps reverse America’s trend toward greater inequality while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the speed scientists say is necessary to reduce climate catastrophe. A strategy designed to provide full employment and rising living standards by putting millions of people to work on the transition to a climate-safe economy could transform the politics of climate by shattering the “jobs versus the environment” frame. And it could provide a common platform around which climate protection advocates at every level of the labor movement could rally.