Beating the hell out of WaPo

I'm looking for journalism that's a few steps up from mere transcription of official remarks. The Washington Post seems to be having a lot of trouble with that lately.

I once was confident the Post would survive the current vicious shakeout. Now I'm not so sure. With

• this proffer by Katharine Weymouth of Establishment access,
  
• this perennial blindness from Howard Kurtz
• in defense of this misleading tantrum of spite from Dana Milbank,
  
• and this ideological purge of Dan Froomkin,

the Post is a hollow shell of its former self - and you don't even have to consider the neocon dominance that makes its editorial and op-ed pages irrelevant in the real world.

Here's one more small example in the death of a thousand cuts.

This CNN report on the Air France Airbus 330 crash over the South Atlantic is far clearer about what we know and what we don't know than this reprinted Washington Post story. The Post story, which is supposed to be straight news, is more concerned about reassurance than facts:

[T]he 216 passengers and 16 crew on AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were probably unaware during their final minutes that they were speeding from 35,000 feet toward the deadly crash.

Even if the investigator implied this, which I doubt, it's bullshit. You can't fall that far without noticing that something is very wrong. I can't understand how any writer could fail to know this. He's a foreign correspondent, so he's been on a plane before. Surely he's noticed the tremendously more subtle but still plain-as-day moment when a plane starts its controlled descent.

The CNN story, although labelled an analysis, is factual and evinces the writer's prior knowledge:

Not only did the passengers have no reason to expect to ditch, but with the aircraft out of control it may have been impossible for them to reach them due to high G-forces.

What neither of them reports, presumably because the facts are still unknown or unproven, is what trajectory the aircraft took to its ditching point and whether it had any forward airspeed.

The one scenario I'm aware of that is consistent with what little we know is an uncontrollable flat spin to a pancake crash. My reasoning:

• Landing belly down means the plane was not ballistic.
• Vertical crushing means vertical speed dominated over forward speed.

Yeah, it's not much, and I don't know much about this subject, which is why I'd like to hear more from Kieran Daly. The Post? How is it relevant?

Browse this

Does Firefox run away on you? Happens to me all the time, and it's very frustrating. CPU spikes up to 99%, mouse clicks take 30 seconds to take effect, the fan runs high to disperse the smoke coming off the processor. Meanwhile, my laptop is unusable.

The culprit? Not Windows (except for its architectural - and false - assumption that processes are well-behaved).

CNN.com is the problem, usually in reaction to any of the Windows sleep modes that come after inactivity. Kill the tab that CNN occupies, and everything goes back to normal. You can even bring CNN back up.

Getting to the bottom of why, I leave to someone who knows more than I do.

Get behind Michele Bachmann

The wingiest of wingnuts, including Michele Bachmann and G. Gordon Liddy, are threatening to boycott the 2010 census because they received the long form or just because they believe in massive resistance to all government questions or maybe even because ACORN will apparently supply census workers. Never mind that this census will be the 22nd, dating back to 1790. Never mind that the detailed questions of the long form have several decades of precedent without any significant problems. Never mind that ACORN won't be canvassing wingnut neighborhoods.

Well, I'm all for the wingnut boycott. Best way I can see for Massachusetts to keep its delegation of ten at least reasonably liberal Representatives is for wingnuts everywhere to disappear themselves from the census rolls.

Full disclosure: A friend of mine has trained to be a census worker, though not through ACORN. [/snark]

Millions for slot machines, not a penny for tribute

Bill Bennett is betting on a GOP without Mark Sanford. But he ought to know how strong the conservative culture of self-forgiveness is.

Bunk and debunk

I'm all for casting a gimlet eye at popular myths and calling bullshit. But sometimes the skeptics replace one load of bullshit with another. (Yes, even me.) The life lesson is to read carefully always.

Here's a case where self-appointed bullshit detectors may not effect a net reduction in bullshit. Eleven myths? Let's see how these doctors did.

1. Everyone with half a brain knows that viruses cause colds, but here's another repetition of medicine's favored myth: Maybe cold season is a result of people staying indoors in close quarters. Uh, bullshit! We're inside all the time year round. There's no doubt that the correlation of cold, damp weather with colds and flu is real. Medical science has no satisfactory explanation for that fact. Besides, if medicine had to give up correlation as a proxy, however poor, for causation, hardly any drugs could be deemed proven.
   
2. Lack of efficacy of antibiotics against a green-mucus symptom doesn't speak one way or another to the existence of a sinus infection.
3. When your feet are cold, put on your hat - one of my favorite maxims. It's still true, even if the 30% number deserves skepticism. Lots of people go bareheaded in winter. We also know that the brain is an energy-intensive organ.
4. O.K. Milk makes you acutely phlegmy, but a little water should take care of that.
5. Yep, well-known debunking.
6. Hey, I never heard that one. Of course, the authors make a value judgement, and it's important to distinguish that from their evidence.
7. O.K., fine. But married people who aren't having sex still can make a rational choice to try single sex again. No one faces this decision as a decision about aggregates. On average, I'm happy? Yeah, sure, I reason that way about my life.
8. Kids are wild without the help of sugar-hype. Who knew!
   
9. The desirability of bowel regularity is a half-truth because it's not required by a medical definition. That's as circular as a draining toilet.
10. Physicians are very defensive about germ theory. People don't double dip because they think it's hygienic. They do it because they think they can get away with it. Mostly, they can (though, please don't).
11. The study of the 5 second rule in fact showed that the faster you pick up your morsel, the less contaminated it is. An intelligent judgement should be relative: What's the threshold above which a reasonable immune system can't handle those bacteria? How much does a cleanish floor differ from a cleanish countertop? But no one who drops a cookie in the bathroom should eat it.

I won't pretend to score this up or down. The devil's in the details.

Worried about a gas tax?

Deval Patrick is right that a gas tax would be a good way to raise additional revenue against budget shortfalls. Demand is pretty strong, but even so, a reduction in demand for gasoline has other positive public policy outcomes. A reduction in pollution is the biggest.

But, not to worry all you frothing anti-tax teabaggers: He doesn't have the votes, not even close, at least not in the House. It takes 81. Fifty would be a miracle.

Editorial decision

This doesn't happen by accident. Someone in a management position at CNN decided that this bullshit story quoting Dick Cheney as liking Republicans (how novel!) deserves to float to the top of the ticker for the second day in a row. Also, as someone in the now-deleted comments observed, why would anyone quote from the Washington Times, which is even more a wingnut propaganda outfit than Fox?

Darth does get off one unforgettable line:

"I think that it's just a matter of time before the party begins to sort of firm up around a few key individuals, and we'll hear big things from them in the future," Cheney said.

And here I thought firming up around key individuals was the problem that Ensign and Sanford had.

WWCD?

No, 'C' doesn't stand for Christ. What would communists do?

"This is President Obama saying 'Well, we have to cover this up, because there's such terrible torture things we did, people will get angry about it.'

That's why we prosecute it, you don't conceal that. That's what the Soviet Union would do, that's what China would do, not the United States of America," [Bruce Fein, a former senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration,] said.

Disbarment is a negligible consequence, but at least it's some small punishment for torture.

Wrong lesson from history

When I read that Obama was warning against carbon tariffs, I had a couple of thoughts:

• The only way to equalize cost pressures faced by American manufacturers is to make sure that competing foreign products face them at the border.
• Of course, that same fairness rationale works against other ardent market-based sprints to the bottom - other environmental concerns, labor standards, etc.
• Smoot-Hawley. Raising tariffs in a recession is canonically bad.
• Tariffs blunt comparative advantage and thus the economies of globalization.
  

Good, I thought, Obama is thinking about job one, the economy. Without fixing the economy, there's no scope to fix anything else.

Only, no, these carbon tariffs aren't due to take effect until 2020. If the economy is still dead by then, only Michelle Obama will be eligible for the Presidency, and I'm sure Congress can remain true to form and delay them if need be.

Today, Krugman weighs in:

[I]n this case the non-economic objective is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, never mind their source. If you only impose restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from domestic sources, you give consumers no incentive to avoid purchasing products that cause emissions in other countries; as a result, you have an inefficient outcome even from a world point of view. So border adjustments here are entirely legitimate in terms of basic economics.

So, I've thought about this again, and I now see that the first two points outweigh the last two.

Culture of hype

When the death of Billy Mays can lead CNN.com, you have to know that our culture has lost its way into inconsequential worship of D-grade celebrity. Mays may have been a great guy, but his cultural value as a penny-ante, grating, shouting cable TV pitchman for crappy overrated products was a net negative.

I only wanted Mays off my television, not dead, but god, is this what we've come to? At least Michael Jackson had real, honest-to-god talent to accompany his transcendent weirdness.

David Vitter watch, day 717

The response of conservatives to sexual misconduct in their leaders is objectively pro-hypocrisy:

[W]hile Vitter, Ensign, Gingrich and perhaps Sanford have been able to retain their positions and political viability, the same cannot be said for the most recent offenders on the progressive side. Neither Eliot Spitzer nor John Edwards, each among the most promising figures in the Democratic Party, will ever be a candidate for public office again, although their misbehavior was no worse than what their Republican counterparts did.

Not to mention, pro-adultery.

Lost in irony

Click image for full Elena Steier cartoon.

No stuffing cash in your bra, either

Click image for full Bruce Beattie cartoon.

Canonical response to bad puns

Many of my relatives, friends, and acquaintances would like to have this response in their arsenals.

Click image for full Randy Bish/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review cartoon.

Priorities

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

Simple, simplistic, simple-minded

Simplicity is often good, but simple-minded free market economists bury their heads in a sand of simplistic cases because they can't reconcile the economic systems with their easy cases.

Krugman fails to call bullshit on his friends and colleagues quite as vehemently (shrilly?) as he does on politicians. That's understandable, though fortunately his commenters feel no such compunction to politesse.

Wrong

Indefinite detention on the unchecked say-so of the executive is just as wrong when the executive is Obama as it was when the executive was Darth Cheney, uh, Duhbya.

Downpayment on credibility