The Victim

Thursday 16 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

It’s amazing how quickly media coverage will change depending on who the victim of government overreach is. Glenn Greenwald:

Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign.

snip . . .

You don’t say! The Washington Post’s breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama’s civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: “I’m disgusted with this president.” In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a “better-late-than-never” outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.

As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterday headlined “DC turns on Obama”, writing that “the town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House” and “reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.” The Washington Post’s political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies “reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days”. About the AP story, Balz wrote that “no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists.”

This morning, the New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the AP story and the broader War on Whistleblowers, and said that Obama’s presidency is “turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press.”

[. . .]

The New York Times itself editorialized today that “the Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification” for its “spying on the AP”; the NYT editors also quoted a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Attorney General Holder stating that the AP spying “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press. The New Yorker this morning published an article by its general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, denouncing the DOJ’s conduct as “cowardly”; she wrote: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.” Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale, who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration, said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms.

Those are all media venues generally sympathetic to and supportive of Obama. But this anger has infected even the most Obama-loyal circles. Journalist Jonathan Alter, who has literally written books using what he touts as his “unmatched access” that are paens to Obama’s greatness and Goodness, yesterday demanded: “Obama should simply apologize to the AP and its reporters. It’s the least he can do to show he still believes in the First Amendment.” Even at MSNBC, its most influential host, Rachel Maddow, broadcast a 20-minute segment vehemently condemning the Obama DOJ on the AP matter that featured an interview with an AP lawyer and used Nixon’s attacks on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as the historical context. Maddow then broadcast another segment on the IRS’ targeting of right-wing groups in which she correctly pointed out that there is no evidence of Obama’s personal role in that targeting but that it will create serious problems for his administration. Even Harry Reid – the Senate’s top Democrat – denounced the DOJ’s actions as “inexcusable”, saying “there is no way to justify this.”

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”.

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs – suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.

I agree with Greenwald in that it’s better late than never for the media to finally call the Obama administration out on his bullshit, but that it took them over 4 years and an attack on the media to do it is fucking shameful. Perhaps had they not been actively carrying water for Obama during his entire presidency, they would have done their jobs and stopped his bullshit before they were the victims of inevitable government abuse. Apparently the only way to get journalists to do their job is to either elect a Republican, or actively spy on them, igniting their ire.

Comments Off on The Victim  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-16  ::  madlibertarianguy

Price Controls

Thursday 16 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Price controls suck. The Guardian:

First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper.

Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.

That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday.

“This is the last straw,” said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. “I’m 71 years old and this is the first time I’ve seen this.”

One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread.

“I’ve been looking for it for two weeks,” said Cristina Ramos. “I was told that they had some here and now I’m in line.”

Economists say Venezuela’s shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government’s controls on foreign currency.

“State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union,” said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.

Not being able to get TP is pretty fucking crappy. When will governments learn that price controls never work?

1 comment  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-16  ::  madlibertarianguy

A Reminder

Wednesday 15 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

J.D. Tucille of Reason:

The founders, for all of their many flaws, understood that coercive power is inevitably abused, which is why they didn’t trust us with anything like the “awesome authority” that is currently wielded by the government. It’s impossible to believe that veterans of the stamp tax and the trial of John Peter Zenger would have been even slightly surprised by the use of tax collectors against political targets, or by the targeting of journalists.

And yet here we are, with a president who simultaneously professes the goodness of government even as that government misuses power in all the old familiar ways, changing only to adapt to new technology.

So, as we prepare to hand authority over our health care system to a tax agency that has, time and again, wielded its power for political purposes on behalf of whoever is currently in power, we owe thanks. Thank you, Mr. President, for demonstrating that you’re just as untrustworthy a bastard as all of your predecessors. Thank you for reminding us that, no matter the public assurances we receive, every iota of power given to the government will be misused. We repeatedly forget these lessons, and we need our reminders.

Many of us didn’t need a reminder that government is nothing but legally entrenched coercive power, but it’s good to have one for those who have heretofore bought what Obama, and the media, have been selling the population since 08. Government is NOT good, and in the end it will bite the hand of even those who support it most.

Comments Off on A Reminder  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-15  ::  madlibertarianguy

Motherfucker.

Tuesday 14 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

“The IRS shifts the burden of proof from the tinfoil behatted to the government by targeting the Tea Party and other conservative groups.” Jon Stewart of The Daily Show:

Don’t worry, government is good and benevolent. There’s no way that government would ever abuse its power.

Comments Off on Motherfucker.  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-14  ::  madlibertarianguy

I Wonder . . .

Tuesday 14 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

I wonder how long it’ll take until the left starts calling West an Uncle Tom/house nigger/lawn jockey as it is wont to do with other prominent blacks who dare criticize Democrat policy. Common Dreams:

In an interview with the Guardian published on Sunday, renowned professor and prolific critic of the “military-industrial-complex” and rampant “plutocracy” in the U.S. and around the world, Dr. Cornel West explained his views on the state of America today and his fall from grace, by design, with President Barack Obama: “He’s just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal.”

I don’t agree much with West’s policy prescriptions, but his diagnosis is right on.

Comments Off on I Wonder . . .  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-14  ::  madlibertarianguy

Sounds

Wednesday 8 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Sounds from the tolerant left.

I don’t know anything at all about this election as it isn’t my state and I have no say in anything that happens in South Carolina. But if a Republican beating a well-known liberal whose entire campaign was based on being Steven Colbert’s sister can expose the self proclaimed tolerant left as the utter hypocrites they are, I’m all for it.

Comments Off on Sounds  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-08  ::  madlibertarianguy

Surprise!

Monday 6 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Shocked, I am.

Comments Off on Surprise!  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-06  ::  madlibertarianguy

The Lesson

Monday 6 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

The lesson to be learned here is that food in rich countries is a fuck-ton more expensive than food in poor countries.

Comments Off on The Lesson  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-06  ::  madlibertarianguy

The Silver Lining

Friday 3 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Maybe Obamacare has a silver lining afterall. Politico:

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.

If Obamacare leads to a downsizing in government sector jobs, bravo. Especially considering that this is the type of shit that the private sector is dealing with too. And here I was thinking that government workers are selfless individuals who work for nothing but the good of civilization whose jobs are of paramount importance to the continuance of society. Dinah Wisenberg Brin at Entrepreneur:

The Affordable Care Act is certainly not affordable for us as a small business in America,” said Marsha Newberry, owner of a business in Grand Prairie, Texas, in a post dated last Friday. “I do understand what President Obama is trying to do, however I do not believe this is the correct answer.”

“This has caused our company to examine our projects and reduce our employee numbers by eliminating the labor intense projects,” she added. “All this to avoid mandated healthcare by the federal government. So we slow and or reduce our company growth to avoid complete closure of the company. Neither of these are a good solution for small business in America.

Sounds great.

Comments Off on The Silver Lining  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-03  ::  madlibertarianguy

One Can Only Hope

Friday 3 May 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Let’s hope so.

Comments Off on One Can Only Hope  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-05-03  ::  madlibertarianguy