Unsurprisingly, it’s an editor for The New Republic, Jonathan Chait, who writes a New York Times OP/ED calling liberals whiny bitches for not worshipping at the alter of Barack Obama.
Category: Hack Journalism
Jury Pushes Back Against the Police State
A stripper attempted to file a sexual harassment complaint against a Chicago police officer, and when she approached Internal Affairs, instead of making an effort to investigate the allegations, they attempted to get her to withdraw their complaint.
In response, she taped their malfeasance, and the response of the District Attorney was to charge her with a felony.
Thankfully, the jury realized that this was yet another attempt to exempt police from any sort of public scrutiny, and acquitted her:
A former stripper, who secretly recorded two Chicago Police Internal Affairs investigators while filing a sexual harassment complaint against another officer was acquitted on eavesdropping charges Wednesday.But why the f%$# did the reporter feel it germane to the story.
She alleged that she was fondled by a cop on a domestic abuse call.Why the hell is this in the story/
It doesn’t matter if she was a freaking nun, or a lobbyist, it was a damn domestic abuse call, and there were allegations of sexual harrassment.
“I’m feeling a lot better now,” a smiling Tiawanda Moore said after a Cook County jury returned the verdict in a little over an hour.The 20-year-old Indiana woman admitted she taped the officers on her Blackberry in August of last year. But she said she only did it because the investigators were coaxing her to not go forward with her complaint.“I wanted him to be fired,” Moore testified of the cop she alleges fondled her and gave her his phone number during a domestic battery call at the South Side residence she sometimes shares with her boyfriend.Moore said she didn’t know about the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which prohibits the recording of private or public conversations without the consent of all parties. Even so, Moore’s attorney, Robert Johnson, said his client was protected under an exemption to the statute that allows such recordings if someone believes a crime is being committed or is about to be committed.The Internal Affairs officers were “stalling, intimidating and bullying her,” Johnson said. The recording, which was played in court during the one-day trial, proved it, Johnson said.Assistant State’s Attorney Mary Jo Murtaugh told jurors, “The content of the tape is not the issue. The issue is that the words were taped.”
No, the IA officers were conspiring to conceal an alleged crime, and as such they were engaging in conspiracy, abuse of office, and probably a few dozen other crimes that someone better versed in the law would be aware of.
But Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the verdict “reflects a repudiation of the eavesdropping law in Illinois. Clearly, the public believes that individuals should be able to record police engaged in their public duties, in a public space in an audible voice.”
Your mouth go God’s ear, Mr. Yohnka.
There is a word for societies where law abiding citizens are prosecuted for uncovering and revealing police corruption, and that work is police state
Wanker of the Jay
New York Times Columnist Joe Nocera, who writes that by enforcing the law against illegal retaliation against unions, the Democrats are anti-job.
This is about the Boeing case, where Boeing executives publicly bragged about moving an assembly line to South Carolina specifically because of legal labor actions taken by the union.
Somehow or other, all the “Very Serious People” out there stem to feel that blatant law breaking by large corporations must be tolerated, because they count more than the rest of us.
Wanker of the Day
NY Times Reporter and columnist Frank Bruni, who admits that he has written opinion pieces about things that he has no knowledge or opinion, because he wanted to look cool:
I’m glad Bruni feels comfortable admitting that he’s a poseur. This admission confirms the suspicions I had about Bruni as a political reporter and as a food critic.
It’s good to know upfront that your op/ed columnist is so insecure that he’ll generate spurious opinions rather than admit that he’s not well-informed or even interested in the topic at hand.
Everyone fronts from time to time, but it’s disconcerting to realize that Bruni thinks this bad habit is something to brag about.
As an opinion columnist, they have every right to their opinion, but the idea that they would fake having an opinion just boggles the minds.
You can read the rest of Lindsay Beyerstein’s post on this, it’s short, and well worth the read.
The Casey Anthony Case
I’ve not followed it. My only thought about it is to make sure that, as much as possible, my children were not exposed to that damn circus.
I think that I largely succeeded.
This is What Qualifies for Good Economic News
The fact that homer prices in May fell year over year, but they rose month to month:
Finally, perhaps some good news on housing values.
On Tuesday, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, a closely watched measure of home prices, posted a rise for April, the first in eight months.
The index increased 0.7 percent, reflecting increases in prices in 13 of the 20 cities tracked. That compared with a 0.8 percent decline in March, when the index hit a new low.
But analysts said it was unclear that a sustained rebound in the housing market was under way, noting that sales were typically stronger in the spring.
David M. Blitzer, the chairman of the index committee at S.& P. Indices, called the April increase a welcome shift from previous months. “However, the seasonally adjusted numbers show that much of the improvement reflects the beginning of the spring-summer home buying season,” he added in a statement. “It is much too early to tell if this is a turning point or simply due to some warmer weather.”
It’s the warmer weather, but we have papers trumpeting this because they are desperately trying to pander to your realtors who buy ads in your paper.
The fact that home prices rose a bit in April relative to March isn’t news.
Thing about it: The last time home prices rose in the Case-Shiller index was 8 months ago, and 8 months back from April is …… August …… Naah, nothing seasonal here.
Republican Terrorists Blow Up Police Officer
OK, it’s Irish Republican Terrorists who did this.
This is the first of a continuing series Fox News Headlines.
Seriously, have you ever spent 5 minutes reading their headline ticker?
I do not mean to diminish the senseless and tragic death of Ronan Kerr, nor the impact on Omaugh, which saw a horrific bombing by the so-called “Real IRA” 13 years ago, but I was waiting for service with a channel tuned to Fux Snooze today, and it got me pissed off.
Your Michelle Rhee Fraud Roundup
I thought that Michelle Rhee was a fraud when I discovered that her “school reforms” in the DC school district appeared to be to focus on tests, and that she never had any sort of plan for early intervention and pre-school.
If you want to improve education in the future, you get the kids early, when you can give them the most, and longest lasting benefit.
If you intend to pump and dump, you ignore that, focus on tests, and find someone to demonize.
Michelle Rhee got her start in the Teach for America program, which, considering its alumni, is to education what Typhoid Mary is to beefsteak tartar.
In any case, on her resume Rhee claimed that her students at her first position, “That after two years 90 percent of her students had reached the 90th percentile in reading and math.”
The problem is that this is not true. In fact her performance as a teacher, particularly in her years, was an unmitigated disaster which would have gotten her fired by Michelle Rhee, the DC schools administrator.
Jay Matthews, the Washington Post‘s education blogger, takes exception to (first link) takes exception to G.F. Brandenburg’s characterization of Rhee’s work as “lies” (second link), but this is an illustration about how the press in general, and the Kaplan Test Prep company in particular, find calling out obvious lies to be distasteful.
Rhee put numbers on her resume that were well nigh miraculous, but they were false, so either she had access to the numbers, which makes it a lie, or she did not have access to the numbers, and she put the false numbers (she claims that her principal told her) which is also a lie.
But it gets even better, because Michelle Rhee just loves what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin, because, as I have said before, finding an enemy is easier that generating real results.
And now we know that her results were the result of massive systematic fraud:
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its “shining stars.”
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.
Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
………
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
rasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.’s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.
In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.
On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.
………
In 2008, the office of the State Superintendent of Education recommended that the scores of many schools be investigated because of unusually high gains, but top D.C. public school officials balked and the recommendation was dropped.
McGraw-Hill’s practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman’s terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.
Remember here, that 4 σ is just where the testing program begins to note irregularities, so we are probably somewhere well into the 6 figures against, and the fact that Rhee and Her Evil Minions™ strongly fought against a meaningful investigation indicates that they either knew, or they were willfully blind, which is the same thing.
But we will be seeing more of this, because Rhee has failed up, and is now running a non-profit that she hopes will raise a billion dollars, and Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, have repeatedly indicated that they would like to repeat her “success”.
Between for profit profiteers, and Ponzi educators like Rhee, the educational reform establishment is toxic.
Fux Snooze Admits the Obvious
Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon has admittedly to consciously, repeatedly, and deliberately lying during the 2008 campaign:
In newly uncovered audio, a Fox News executive boasts that he lied repeatedly during the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign when he speculated on-air “about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism.”
Speaking in 2009 onboard a pricey Mediterranean cruise sponsored by a right-wing college, Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon described his attempts the previous year to link Obama to “socialism” as “mischievous speculation.” Sammon, who is also a Fox News vice president, acknowledged that “privately” he had believed that the socialism allegation was “rather far-fetched.”
“Last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to quote, ‘spread the wealth around,’ ” said Sammon. “At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”
The only thing shocking about this is the fact that the rest of the media seems to feel honor bound to defend their shoddy and fraudulent journamalism whenever someone criticizes them.
Do Not F%$# With Jon Stewart!
Jon Stewart explains the current sissy war going on between CNN and Fox News over their Libya coverage.
It’s why he’s the best news anchor in the business, and why we are all unbelievably screwed, because we have to rely on a professional comedian to find actual news.
No, 11 Year Old Girls Are Not Asking for It!
The New York Times times reported on a horrific rape of an 11 year old girl in Texas, and saw fit to blame the victim for the crime.
Some selected quotes:
The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.
………
The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?
“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”
Drawn into the act?
The alleged Rapists have to live with this for the rest of their life?
But it gets even better:
Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.
“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”
You see, she hung out with the wrong crowd, and she wore slutty clothes, so she deserves to be raped.
By comparison, the Houston Chronicle doesn’t go out of their way to portray an 11 year old girl as something akin to Jezebel.
Why reporter James C. McKinley Jr. and whoever his editor is are still employed at the Times is completely beyond me.
The Grauniad* Lambastes Wikileaks for What the Grauniad* Published
Glenn Greenwald details just how ridiculous the ongoing feud between The Guardian and Julian Assange has become, with the paper the paper accusing Assange of endangering lives because of cables that were released by The Guardian itself:
Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime: an act likely to be deemed to be treasonous in that country, for obvious reasons. By publishing this cable, “WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder,” Richardson wrote. He added: “WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.”
This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick — the long-time assistant of The New Republic‘s Marty Peretz — wrote under this headline: “Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.” Kirchick explained that “the crusading ‘anti-secrecy’ website released a diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Harare” which exposed Tsvangirai’s support for sanctions. As “a result of the WikiLeaks revelations,” Kirchick wrote, the reform leader would likely be charged with treason, and “Mr. Tsvangirai will have someone additional to blame: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” The Atlantic‘s Chris Albon, in his piece entitled “How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe,” echoed the same accusation, claiming “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and that Assange has thus “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy.” Numerous other outlets predictably mimicked these claims.
There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that. In early December, that newspaper — not WikiLeaks — selected and then published the cable in question. This fact led The Guardian — more than a full week after they published Richardson’s accusatory column — to sheepishly add this obscured though extremely embarrassing “clarification” at the end of his column:
• This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.
(emphasis original)
While I find The Guardian to be a top flight paper, this is inexcusable.
I get the impression that Assange is a bit of a jerk, and hard to deal with, but that does not excuse this crap.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
David Zurawik is the Dumbest Muthahf%$#er on the Face of the Earth
And considering the fact that he is the Baltimore Sun‘s TV critic, which means that he had to beat out other TV critics, this is a big hurdle to jump.
You see Zurawik was commenting on the fact that former CBS reporter, and former CNN anchor John Roberts, a generally well respected journalist, was moving from CNN to Fox, largely because Fox was willing to base him in the same town as his fiancee.
When all is said and done, I can agree that this was generally a net plus for Fox in terms of journalism, considering the fact that “Biff the Wonderdog” would be an improvement over the likes of Britt Hume, but then he unleashes this corker:
The channel doesn’t need more ratings magnets — it has all of them any cable channel needs right now. What Fox needs to do is continue to add journalistic strength and depth as it did in October with Juan Williams.
Yes, he said that the man who vehemently defended Clarence Thomas against accusations of sexual harassment while not revealing that he himself was accused of sexual harassment is a paragon of Journalist Strength and depth.
This is a guy who had an interview with George W. Bush, and said, on camera, that he prayed for him.
If this is what David Zurawik calls journalist strength and depth, I am Edward F%$#ing Murrow
It’s the Fracking Juxtaposition of a Contrail and Forced Perspective
Once Again, Jon Stewart Does News Better than the News Networks
You know, the earth is round, and if a jet is passing directly over you as it comes over the horizon, its contrail looks vertical.
Of course, we know what this was. It was a slow speed chase involving a white Ford Bronco.
As Jon Stewart notes, quoting the helicopter pilot who filmed it, this “rocket plume” continued for about 10 f%$#ing minutes, which would put the missile (assuming a 1 G acceleration) would put the missile about 1800 km (100 mi) down range.
<Facepalm>
They Really Are Sociopaths……
No, I don’t mean the Teabaggers, I mean the beltway pundits.
Case in point, David Broder, who is suggesting that Barack Obama start a war with Iran, because it might be good for the economy and his election prospects. (No direct link, we should not reward such behavior with eyeballs.)
As Scott Horton notes (link above), this clearly demonstrates the, “strongest evidence yet of the moral depravity and sheer nuttiness,” of the WaPo editorial page.
And I am sure that Broder was very proud of what he came up with, it seems so clever, and counter-intuitive, and it means that young men will die.
I bet that it gave the octogenarian psychopath his first stiffie in weeks.
Here is hoping that Keith Olbermann thinks to put him on his “worst” list tonight.
So, ABC decided to have Andrew Breitbart as a contributor to their election night coverage, despite the fact that he has repeatedly punked the news media with deliberately false and deceptive “news” stories, and now they are trying to walk this clusterf%$# back:
Since conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart announced on his website that he was going to be a participant in ABC’s Town Hall meeting at Arizona State University, there has been considerable consternation and misinformation regarding my decision to ask him to participate in an election night Town Hall event for ABC News Digital. I want to explain what Mr. Breitbart’s role has always been as one of our guests at our digital town hall event:
Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.
He is not an ABC News consultant.
He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.
He is not being paid by ABC News.
He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News.
Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.
He has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of different political persuasions, to engage with a live, studio audience that will be closely following the election results and participating in an online-only discussion and debate to be moderated by David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on ABCNews.com and Facebook. We will have other guests, as well as a live studio audience and a large audience on ABCNews.com and Facebook, who can question the guests and the audience’s opinions.
I have no objection to ABC using conservatives as either news analysts or “guests” on their discussions.
That is a basic journalistic activity.
That being said, when you do so, you have an obligation to bring on someone who has is own opinions, not his own (made up) facts.
Andrew Breitbart is an individual who has deliberately, and maliciously created fake news stories to pursue his political agenda, and he continues to do so.
If you are a news organization, and you don’t use the words, “professional liar,” before any mention of him, you are a piss-poor news organization.
Good Riddance…………
National Public Radio has fired Juan Williams over his statements that he is scared by Muslims in public places on Bill O’Reilly’s show:
I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.
It’s actually more than that, because while this seems to be an admission that is an admission that he will sometimes judge people by color of their skin rather than by the content of their character, it actually followed a bigoted rant by Long Island Klansman Bill O’Reilly about the “Muslim dilemma”.*
So it was not just an admission of personal weakness, it is an active endorsement of O’Reilly’s bigoted screed.
His explicit endorsement of bigotry is not surprising. He is Fox News’ “House Slave,” to quote Harry Belafonte, and he has his tongue so far up Billo’s ass that he is tasting tonsils.
He was on the Long Island Klansman’s (O’Reilly), and Billo had been launching into his bigoted screeds. and his seemingly mild statement validated those screeds.
I think that context and venue matter. This was not Nightline, or Jon Stewart. This was Bill O’Reilly, and fellow hater Mary Katherine Ham, in a full blown hate-fest, and they Williams basically said that it was OK.
As to the effect on NPR, I think that his leaving will be good for the network.
Williams has always been a hack, and a stupid one at that, as his truly pitiful tenure as Talk of the Nation host showed.
He has been coasting on his work writing the companion book to the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize for decades.
I’m with Matthew Yglesias’s take on this, which was that he should have been fired long ago, “on the grounds of general lameness and lack of valuable contribution to their programming.”
Additionally, he has always been ethically challenged. During the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, he was a vociferous defender of Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court nomination hearings, but he neglected to disclose that he himself was the subject of credible allegations of sexual harassment of a subordinate the Washington Post.
I do find the fact that we now have two echos of Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment and perjury in the same week rather odd. Synchronicity, neh?
I’m so glad that I won’t have to listen to him any more. Hopefully they can send Cokie Roberts away too.
* Which has eerie echos of people 70 years ago talking about the “Jewish Problem.”
Yes
Jonathan Bernstein asks, “Is Howard Kurtz Always This Awful?
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
Good Riddance
I was listening to a hagiography on Michelle Rhee, now former Chancellor of the DC public schools on NPR today, and I had to change the channel.
She got test scores up by focusing on nothing but, and the evidence is that, in one of the most disadvantaged school districts in the nation, she had no interest at all in early education, basically ignoring it in her 5 year plan.
As Matthew Yglesias noted 2 years ago, “A certain type of person isn’t interested in any education improvements that don’t involve picking fights with teacher’s unions, and this seems to me like perhaps an example of Rhee suffering from that affliction.”
Basically, she spent a lot of time being an asshole, because that’s what got her the good press, and teaching to the test, along with a headlong embrace of gentrification, were what caused the bump in her numbers.
A Reason to Consider Subscribing to the Washington Post
Not a reason to actually subscribe, mind you, it’s still a cesspool of conventional thinking and bad access journalism (Hi, Bob Woodward) but the fact that the professional hack masquerading as a media critic, Howard Kurtz is leaving the Washington Post and moving to the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s online news web site.
Well the Washington Post‘s gain is Tina Brown’s loss.
He is, after all, a guy who writes on cable news while pulling down a 6-figure income from CNN, and writes on politics while his wife pulls down a 6-figure income as a Republican political consultant.
Well, it’s a reason second source anything that you see on the Daily Beast.