Tag Archives: Journalism

She’s the reporter who asked Secretary Pompeo “Did you retaliate against NPR?” and what sort of message that sends to countries “whose governments routinely suppress press freedoms?”. I was already impressed that the US secretary of state was getting a lesson on respect for the free Press in Kazakhstan whose dictator used to be the general secretary of the communist party of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (and has been in office ever since and...

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: January 27, 1869 (1) I have gotten a little behind in this project. Congressional activity picked up considerably in the last week of January 1869. Rep. Charles A.Eldridge (D-Wisconsin) addressed a civil rights bill by Massachusetts Representative Buckalew under the 14th Amendment as well as the proposed 15th Amendment: I have not the vanity to suppose that anything I say will cause them to hesitate or consider....

Senate to emerge from impeachment trial guilty of extreme partisanship, Paul Kane The absolute need to balance blame for Republican partisanship with false claims about Democrats overcame Mr Kane’s interest in elementary logical consistency. He wrote none of the rank-and-file senators made a single real effort to negotiate their own compromise on witnesses. “Nope. I’ve made phone calls, I’ve sent emails,” Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) said Friday....

Which Lie Is The Worst? With the conclusion of the Trump defense in his impeachment trial, the question arises as to which lie told by the defense is the worst? Sean Hannity has been emphasizing four in particular.  In the first, he claims that there was no linkage between military aid and investigating the Bidens in the July 25 phone transcript.  But there it is in black and white that when Zelensky mentioned wanting more military aid, Trump immediately...

Like many liberals, I am encouraged by the new energy of progressives and the growing political support for progressive causes.  But I also share the common worry that the idealism of progressives is in danger of becoming self-defeating (see, e.g., Judis and Edsall for two recent discussions).  That’s a problem, because the stakes are high and we don’t have much room for error. As I see it, progressive idealism today has two manifestations, one political,...

Part 2 discusses why we must have the government issue payments to hospitals, clinics, etc. and also set the budgets for hospitals and this is how they are paid rather than billing multiple insurers and also patients. There is also only one payer. The later part is what I have been pounding on repeatedly. Forget prices and work with cost data. It is then we have a much clearer picture of the costs of healthcare and we can begin to control prices. Rep...

The standard rule that reporters cover both sides of a debate and find some source to contest lies rather than doing it in their own name (and the name of the newspaper) has not survived Mitch McConnell’s office. In the New York Times, Nicholas Fandos notes that “A senior Republican aide in the Senate” lied on a very simple fact which is in the public record. The aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail internal strategy, argued that in...

For MLK Day: unemployment by race In observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, almost all US markets are closed and there is no economic data. So on this day let’s see the extent to which economic opportunity in several neutral metrics has improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Here in unemployment for African Americans (blue) vs. whites (red) since the former began to be measured in 1972 (white unemployment had been...

There was, all too predictably, no shortage of political profiteering in the wake of November’s London Bridge terror attack, in which Usman Khan fatally stabbed two people before being shot dead by police. In particular, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, swiftly called for longer prison sentences and an end to “automatic early release” for convicted terrorists. In the two decades since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States, terrorism has become the...

Further Followup On The Soleimani Assassination I wish to bring out some matters not getting a lot of attention in the US media. An important one of those was reported two days ago by Juan Cole. It is that apparently it has not been determined for certain that the initial attack that set off this current round of deaths when a militia in Iraq attacked an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk in which an American contractor was killed, almost certainly a matter...