Let’s go Pens!
NHL, Game of Thrones, Mad Men Open ThreadPost + Comments (54)
by John Cole| 54 Comments
This post is in: Sports
by John Cole| 70 Comments
This post is in: Cat Blogging
After a long day of relaxing in the sun and cool grass, what’s better than a little after dinner catnip buzz:
It’s good to be the king. I just love this cat. I hope I never ever have a skinny cat. I want them big and lazy and fluffy. This is what housecats are meant to do.
This post is in: Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Readership Capture, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Many thanks to Paddy at Political Carnival for the video. This is truly an excellent commencement speech, and not just for the snippet everybody is quoting:
“Failure is the key to success for so many great people… Oprah was demoted from her first job as a news anchor, and now she doesn’t even need a last name!
And then there’s this guy, Barack Obama, who lost — {crowd cheers} — I could take up a whole afternoon talking about his failures, but — he lost his first race for congress, and now? He gets to call himself my husband.”
***********
What’s on the agenda for the ragged remnant of the weekend?
Sunday Evening Open Thread: “Do Not Waste A Minute Living Someone Else’s Dream”Post + Comments (31)
by DougJ| 144 Comments
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment
As with LewisnkyGate and TravelGate and SoxGate and FastAndFuriousGate before it, the public doesn’t give a fuck about IRSGate and BenghaziGate and APGate:
According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
Here’s the media matters rundown on how veteran journalists are reacting to Jonathan Karl’s exploits last week:
The slippery language Karl and ABC News adopted in describing the emails has drawn fire from media ethicists and veteran journalists.
“At best, it’s extremely sloppy. At worst, it’s a deliberate attempt to conceal the secondhand — and possibly distorted — nature of the information ABC was relying on so as to put its shoulder to the wheel of a highly prejudicial reading of the affair,” said Edward Wasserman, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Miami Herald columnist. “Whether best or worst is true, it’s highly problematic ethically, and the failure to acknowledge and correct is even worse.”
Tim McGuire, journalism professor at Arizona State University and former president of the American Society of News Editors, criticized Karl for failing to adhere to basic standards of ethics.
“If the ethical journalist is dedicated to transparency Mr. Karl seems to have failed that standard,” he said in an email. “The Benghazi story raises such trust issues anyway it seems to me all the details of what Mr. Karl saw are crucial to both sides.”
Tom Fiedler, dean of the Boston University College of Communication and former Miami Herald executive editor, said Karl’s report “cries out for a correction.”
“Karl was sloppy – or being deliberately ambiguous – about these e-mails to enhance the ‘exclusive’ he claimed to have,” Fiedler said. “Most important here is whether the ‘summaries’ of the e-mails cast a different light on the event than the e-mails themselves.”
Fiedler said that Karl’s reporting has suffered from its inconsistent and at times false descriptions of what he had reviewed.
“At minimum, Karl should have acknowledged on the air and in his on-line postings that he had only seen (or had read to him) summaries, and that he couldn’t say whether those summaries were in context of the original e-mails,” he added. “This caveat is no small thing as Karl could well have left himself vulnerable to being used for political purposes.”
Kevin Smith, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee, called it “inaccurate reporting.”
“I don’t understand how you can claim to have the emails but then backtrack and say you were quoting from summaries,” he said. “What was the fact when you initially reported – had the emails or summaries? Were you trumping up the story? Did you know the difference and if you did, why did you misrepresent? In the end I’d say there is a serious credibility issue with ABC’s reporting on this issue.”
So how has Karl reacted? By giving you, me, and everyone else the middle finger:
Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, addressed criticism of his reporting on the Benghazi talking points controversy, saying in a statement to CNN that he regrets the inaccuracy of his report.
“Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands. I should have been clearer about the attribution. We updated our story immediately,” he said in the statement to Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
I guess when it is someone as ethically challenged as Howard Kurtz holding your feet to the fire, you probably just think you can tell people to piss off and be done with the whole matter.
What happened is clear. Karl lied to us because he trusted his source. His source, however, burned him, and Karl’s lie was exposed. Instead of burning his source to show that he takes this matter seriously and won’t be lied to again, he is doubling down and protecting his source, because as we all know with our current media, access is more important to accuracy.
If the editors at ABC News had any damned integrity, Karl would be forced to expose his source, apologize, and then take a couple weeks off. Maybe some summer school ethics course.
by Zandar| 175 Comments
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Flash Mob of Hate, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, Schadenfreude, THIS WAS AWESOME
So Peggy Noonan went to the Fainting Couch Superstore over the IRS this week and got a few new pieces. It was bad enough in her eyes that anyone would dare question the notion that Tea Party groups were perfectly non-political and deserve tax-exempt status, the real issue is that President Uppity “T-Bone” YoungBuck dared to go after rich Romney voters, because that’s the only possible explanation for this:
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.”
Won’t you help America’s most victimized class, the obnoxiously rich, fend off these heartless attacks?
All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.
It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.
If only there was somebody who could tell us, through that person’s mastery of statistical analysis, just how remote the possibility of this not being deliberate targeting was. Just so we’d know how worried to be when Obama comes to kill the opposition.
You know, somebody like, hmm, ohh…Nate Silver!
In the table below, I’ve estimated the number of taxpayers in each income group who were audited in 2012, as derived from statistics in the I.R.S.’s 2012 Data Book. It is also possible to estimate how many Mitt Romney and Barack Obama voters would have been audited last year. The calculation assumes that an individual’s chance of being audited was related to their income, but not to their political views.
I estimate the number of voters in each income bracket from the 2012 Current Population Survey. I then estimate the share of the vote in each income bracket that went to Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama based on last year’s national exit poll. (Note that the income brackets used in the exit poll and the Current Population Survey do not exactly match the income brackets listed in the I.R.S.’s audit data, so I use the closest available approximations.)
This results in an estimate that about 380,000 of Mr. Romney’s voters were audited last year, as were about 480,000 of Mr. Obama’s voters.
Well. It’s almost like the IRS audits low-income Americans far more than the wealthy because there are far more low-income Americans to audit, and they are much more likely to receive a refund from the government, and that these low-income Americans are primarily Obama voters. It’s also almost like Peggy Noonan found a couple people who had been audited and concluded, without any evidence whatsoever, that they had been deliberately targeted because of their political views, and that she then dismissed every other possible explanation for the audits.
And then Nate Silver came along and said “Wow, this woman is insane, TO THE NATE CAVE” and then squished her. Then he probably had a tasty beverage.
It tasted like victory and Noonan tears.
This post is in: Garden Chats
Roses in Georgia, from commentor Raven.
I’m looking forward to thirty-eight heirloom tomato plants arriving from three different mail-order companies, anytime starting this Monday. If I tell you it took both me and the Spousal Unit over an hour to dig out, hook up, and field-test the various tangles of last year’s hoses and hose heads leading from the one working faucet on the north side of the house to the flower and vegetable boxes on the south side of the house, will that help you understand why I don’t start my own plants from seed?
Meanwhile, our lilacs are glorious this year, and the dianthus and heucheria plants I thought had died over the winter have finally popped up, reinforcing my conviction that (global warming or not) one should never dig up a ‘winter killed’ plant in New England before Memorial Day.
How are things in your gardens, this week?