This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 33)

This is a (very) long one, so we'll skip the intro. We did try something new this time--highlighting in gray some of the more important sentences or phrases, so if you don't have time to read everything, read the parts around those. And of course, click through as many links as you can.

This Week in Debates

We mentioned last week that we weren't going to try to cover Thursday night's debates in that edition, because we would want more time to digest them. Having had more time, we've also seen that everybody who writes about politics anywhere, ever, has already commented on it, and we don't have much to say that hasn't been said, so--believe it or not--this is the short version. (There's a debate transcript here.) Jeb Bush denied having called Donald Trump an asshole, while Donald Trump stood next to him proving that he actually was. The Fox "News" moderators did an admirable job reining in some of the crazy, though with those 10 men on stage (and the seven more candidates, including one of the two women in the 2016 primaries--for both parties--in the kiddie table debate) a certain amount of crazy seeped through, anyway.

The Weekly Sift points out what a careful job Fox did of trying to restore some dignity--and some electability--to the Republican Party. The three moderators asked what seemed to be some tough questions, but any time an issue was potentially controversial, they asked the candidate with the most moderate record on that issue to justify that record. For instance, Ohio governor John Kasich was asked to justify expanding Medicaid in his state, but the governors who have refused to do so weren't asked why they chose to prevent their state's working poor from having decent healthcare.

The hardest questions went to Donald Trump, because everybody in the Republican Party except Trump himself wants to distance him from the party, so his particularly repulsive brand of campaigning won't spill over onto the rest of them. The very first question--asking for a show of hands of anyone who would not promise to support the party's eventual nominee, and not run as a third-party candidate--was designed to isolate Trump . Everybody knew what his answer would be, and he did not disappoint. Megyn Kelly followed up with a couple of hard questions about his very public misogyny and "when he actually became a Republican." His answer to that seemed to imply that the terrible record of George W. Bush's last months in office had something to do with it, which makes no sense except that Trump rarely makes sense.

In the interests of fairness and science, we watched both debates (and although we were largely alone for the first one, for the second we were joined by about 24 million other people, making it the most-watched cable news program in the history of cable news. As everyone else has already concluded, Carly Fiorina walked away with the kiddie table debate--although given the competition, that wasn't too hard. She came across as sensible and intelligent, if a little dishonest in some of her attacks. Now she has to somehow deal with the fact that the only record she has to run on is her business record, for which she's often included in lists of the worst CEOs in American history.

According to the Los Angeles Times, "She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard from mid-1999 to early 2005, a period in which the company’s stock sank 49% to 60% (depending on how you count), making it one of the worst-performing high-tech firms. … She cut HP’s payroll by 10,000 employees in 2000 while surrounding her glamorous self with clouds of image and strategy consultants. She marketed overpriced knockoffs of other companies’ consumer technologies and then, disastrously, doubled down on the PC business by acquiring Compaq in 2002, when the right move would have been to exit that low-margin business altogether. The Compaq takeover led to a bruising battle with the HP board, which she utterly mismanaged, leading to her bitter ouster in 2005."

James Hohman of the WaPo adds, "None of the above is news for Californians. [I worked for the San Jose Mercury News in 2006 when it came out that investigators working for HP had illicitly obtained reporter phone records to crack down on leaks.]"

In an era when the electorate seems more focused than ever on inequality and populist rage bubbles just beneath the surface, this kind of thing seems like it won't play well. Nor will, to many, the fact that this week she landed squarely on the side of the anti-vaxxers.

As well as Fox staged the big debate, though, they did a disservice to the candidates in the kiddie table debate. While the men were consistently referred to by their titles, Ms. Fiorina was repeatedly called "Carly." A wide shot of the stage clearly showed that Lindsey Graham was standing on a raised platform so that he wouldn't look tiny compared to the others (which could explain why he looked and sounded like a robot--if he paid attention to what he was saying, he might have fallen off). And the decision to let only family and friends watch the debate might not have been so bad if it hadn't taken place in the same enormous stadium where the main event was held, and if Fox hadn't continually showed all the empty seats. Audience reaction is an important part of debates, and there was virtually none during the first debate.

In the main debate, the consensus seems to be that Kasich and Marco Rubio came off well. Kasich scored because he was seemingly able to get away with some sane statements that ran against party orthodoxy, as in his answer about expanding Medicaid and the obvious revelation that he would still love his daughters if they turned out to be lesbians. (Lest anyone think he's a closet moderate, over the weekend he came out in favor of climate change denial.) Rubio delivered his usual rhetoric, but without stumbling or reaching off-screen for a water bottle. He looked and sounded confident, even when he was wrong. By contrast, establishment favorites Bush and Scott Walker gave reasonably solid answers, but projected no warmth or charisma and seemed to fade into the background. Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee competed to see who could snarl and snap most like a junkyard dog, without a clear winner. Rand Paul, seemingly aware that he wouldn't get much air time, argued with Trump and Christie. Ben Carson appeared nervous, even timid, as well as woefully ignorant.

There were plenty of untruths to go around (not even counting Trump, whose only true sentence of the night might have been "What I say is what I say.") Carson's was perhaps the most egregious, because he wants to be commander in chief but clearly has no understanding of military capabilities and limitations. He repeated the line thoroughly debunked in 2012 that "Our navy is at its smallest size since 1917." Not only is that factually untrue--we have more ships now than we did then--but a single modern carrier group could destroy 1917's entire navy in an afternoon.

Bush tossed out a couple of lines he's been using on the trail, both of which are nonsense. He said that ISIS exists because President Obama withdrew our troops from Iraq--failing to mention that ISIS grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't exist until his brother started a war that created a power vacuum, and that ISIS existed (though not at its present strength, obviously) before Obama took office. Or that Obama was simply adhering to the Status of Forces Agreement that George W. negotiated with Iraq before leaving office.

He also continues to claim that in Florida, he "created" 1.3 million jobs. The truth is that a huge real estate bubble created a lot of jobs. Just as he was leaving office, that bubble started to deflate, and then the Bush recession came along and popped it entirely, destroying 900,000 of those jobs. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says, "So Jeb! is basically promising that as president, he can generate Florida-style bubbles, which bring disaster when they burst, to the rest of America!"

Christie said twice that he was appointed US Attorney on September 10, 2001. Sounds good, and buttresses his self-declared persona as a terrorist fighter. Except he was actually nominated on December 7, 2002, confirmed later that month, and took office in January 2003.

There were plenty more; here are some fact checkers: Washington Post, PBS, New York Times.

The debates were almost more notable for what wasn't discussed. Climate change and energy policy never came up, beyond a mention of the Keystone XL pipeline. The minimum wage, race, and criminal justice reform were glossed over. Income inequality was only briefly mentioned, and then Kasich said the way to deal with it is to grow the economy. Well, yes, except he's missing a key point--income inequality inhibits growth. You deal with the inequality first, then grow the economy from the middle out.

And foreign policy* was only lightly touched on. Everybody seems to oppose the Iran deal**; nobody offered a serious alternative. A couple of candidates don't think President Obama is doing enough to fight terrorism because he doesn't say the precise words "radical Islamic terrorism." They might reconsider Teddy Roosevelt's maxim--the words don't matter so much as the judicious application of the big stick, and Obama is the best terrorist fighter ever.

* Part of the problem with Republican perceptions of foreign policy is that they believe in the legend of the Iraq surge. Here's why that's a mistake.

**One of the most prominent groups working against the deal, United Against Nuclear Iran, has just made ex-senator and constant PITA Joe Lieberman its chairman. The group has been around for a long time, but its previous chairman had to go because he supported the Iran deal. Most people who really understand the issue do support it. If Lieberman and his allies are successful, United Against Nuclear Iran will actually help to create a nuclear Iran.

* * *

Trump's supporters seem to be willing to stick with him no matter what he says. He can lie with every breath, but as long as he does it in his typical blustery fashion they call him a truth-teller. He's either profoundly ignorant, profoundly dishonest, or both. Anyone outside the bubble can see that he makes stuff up and convinces himself that it's true, or he doesn't care that it's not true. Either way, it's disturbing that so many people are taking in by the circus act.

Trump said during the debate that the biggest problem the country faces is political correctness. Anyone who actually believes that (and we doubt that Trump does) is a fool. And as Catherine Rampell writes in the Washington Post, the right has its own standards of political correctness. Asking a presidential candidate to not refer to women as "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals" is not a violation of his First Amendment rights, but asking the government to ban certain books is.

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In Scott Walker, we would have a president who takes his marching orders directly from the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) (which, incidentally, should not have tax-free status), as he's done throughout his entire political career.

Below the fold: Economics, Voting, Guns, Flags, The Bubble, Bears, and much more!

This Week in Economics

Another fact that didn't come up Thursday night was that the deficit continues to shrink at record rates. Most Americans don't seem to know this--years of Republicans claiming the opposite has convinced them that it's growing out of control. It's not.

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Sen. Rand Paul still believes in trickle-down economics, and uses that to defend his ridiculous tax "plan." On Fox over the weekend, he said, "The thing is, income inequality is due to some people working harder and selling more things. If people voluntarily buy more of your stuff, you’ll have more money."

When the Fox host asked if his plan wouldn't increase inequality, Paul said, "It’s a fallacious notion to say, 'Oh, rich people get more money back in a tax cut.' If you cut taxes 10 percent, 10 percent of a million is more than 10 percent of a thousand dollars. So, obviously, people who pay more in taxes will get more back. We all end up working for people who are more successful than us, and that’s a good thing, that more money will be back in the economy."

We're curious as to what "things" he thinks the rich are making and selling. And why the increased productivity we've been seeing for decades hasn't resulted in increased wages. And why he thinks it's a "fallacious notion" that rich people get more money back in a tax cut, when he goes on to explain the math. And why he thinks the money that the richest people make trickles down into everybody else's politics, when every economic measure in the past thirty years has proven that wrong. Just ask Kansas.

But then, Paul seems more than a little economically challenged. In his quest to make headlines, he's taken to attacking Donald Trump, even releasing an ad hitting Trump for being a secret liberal. That might be a reasonable attack in a Republican primary--trouble is, many of the things the secret liberal says in the ad are things that are true, and Paul is trying to make them seem not true. For instance, Trump says, "I've been around for a long time, and it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans." That's not a matter of opinion, it's a factual statement. Paul doesn't seem to understand the distinction.

Side Note: Speaking of Sen. Paul, he's been trying to get the Republican Party in Kentucky to change its rules so he can run for president and for reelection to his Senate seat at the same time. They would have to change their primary to a caucus, because one candidate's name can't appear on the ballot twice. For a while, the party seemed amenable, but that was when Paul was going to cover all the expenses. Now he's hesitant--possibly because his campaign is stumbling--and the party is having second thoughts. Even if they did switch to a caucus for now, in the highly unlikely event that he won the nomination, he'd face the same issue in the 2016 general election--and then a caucus wouldn't be a solution. With luck, he'll lose both and go back to ophthalmology.

This Week in Voting

And speaking of Kansas, that state never runs out of ways to make itself more backward and unwelcoming. The economy is in freefall, teachers are abandoning the state in droves (to which the state's response is to make it easier to hire unqualified teachers), and Gov. Sam Brownback (R) has given champion vote suppressor Secretary of State Kris Kobach "law enforcement" powers, allowing him to prosecute voter fraud cases (because the state's attorney general was unwilling to prosecute cases that didn't exist). The latest news is that Kobach wants to be able to purge the voter rolls of another 30,000 pending registration applications by shortening, midstream, the time period during which those applicants have to show proof of US citizenship. Never mind that when they applied, they were told they have until election day--Kobach wants to make it 90 days from when his scheme takes effect. And yes, the aforementioned ALEC is involved in this nonsense, too. (Arizonans might remember Kobach as the carpetbagger largely responsible for the ill-considered SB-1070.)

If there's a greater enemy to democracy holding office in the United States, we don't know who it would be.

This Week in 2016 (Democrats Edition)

A new Democrat announced his intention to join the presidential race this week: Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig. He's a single-issue candidate, who says he'll leave office when his issue is resolved and turn the job over to the vice president. Which means he would probably be in office for the rest of his life, because his fix won't work.

His issue is money in politics. His fix is for Congress to pass a law overturning Citizens United and creating a public campaign financing system. The problem is that a Lessig win would be unlikely to have coattails big enough to bring in congressional majorities who also believe in his philosophy, and because money in politics is the issue, and everyone in Congress benefits from that money, they won't pass his bill.

His point is a good one. He understands that economic, racial, and social justice are all really one big issue, and that the people with the most money are the people for whom the status quo is most beneficial, so they contribute to campaigns that will prevent economic, racial, and social justice from being achieved. We can't address the nation's racial imbalance, or immigration, or climate change, or Wall Street criminality, or any of our other real problems in any concrete and permanent fashion as long as the rich have virtually unlimited power over the political process. But they do have that power, so Lessig's approach won't work.

He does not, of course, expect to be elected. He wants to shed light on the issue, and maybe he'll be able to do that. He says he'll run if his crowd-funded campaign raises a million dollars by Labor Day.

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"This isn’t just symbolism. It’s how you change the world."

Those are words from a speech actress Meryl Streep gave about Hillary Clinton, back in 2012.

Streep said:

Anabella De Leon of Guatemala pointed to Hillary Clinton, who was sitting right in the front row, and said, 'I met her and my life changed.' And all weekend long, women from all over the world said the same thing:

'"I’m alive because she came to my village, put her arm around me, and had a photograph taken together.'

"'I’m alive because she went on our local TV and talked about my work, and now they’re afraid to kill me.'

"'I’m alive because she came to my country and she talked to our leaders, because I heard her speak, because I read about her.'

"I’m here today because of that, because of those stories. I didn’t know about this. I never knew any of it. And I think everybody should know. This hidden history Hillary has, the story of her parallel agenda, the shadow diplomacy unheralded, uncelebrated — careful, constant work on behalf of women and girls that she has always conducted alongside everything else a First Lady, a Senator, and now Secretary of State is obliged to do.

"And it deserves to be amplified. This willingness to take it, to lead a revolution – and revelation, beginning in Beijing in 1995, when she first raised her voice to say the words you’ve heard many times throughout this conference: 'Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.'

"When Hillary Clinton stood up in Beijing to speak that truth, her hosts were not the only ones who didn’t necessarily want to hear it. Some of her husband’s advisors also were nervous about the speech, fearful of upsetting relations with China. But she faced down the opposition at home and abroad, and her words continue to hearten women around the world and have reverberated down the decades."

Streep concluded with this: "Never give up. Never, never, never, never, never give up. That is what Hillary Clinton embodies."

It's a strong testament to Clinton's largely invisible work, and it deserves to be remembered in the face of nonsense about Benghazi and e-mail servers.

Side Note: Where were the people complaining about Clinton's personal e-mail server when we learned that former Secretary of State Colin Powell also used a personal e-mail account for State business--and unlike Clinton, didn't keep records of those e-mails?

This Week in Taxes

It's hard to thing of any single factor that's been more destructive to the American economy than Grover Norquist's "No New Taxes" pledge. So many elected Republicans have signed on that they've tied the hands of Congress, preventing it from taking necessary action during times of economic crisis. Absolutes are almost always (see what we did there?) a bad idea, because the world is in a constant state of change. Norquist's pledge even forbids sensible things like ending tax breaks for oil companies, because that would add more revenue to government coffers, and Norquist's stated goal is to "drown it [government] in the bathtub."

Which is why Gov. Chris Christie finished disqualifying himself this week. His general election appeal is that he has won twice in blue state New Jersey, but now he's running in the Republican primary, which means trying to look as conservative as possible. To do that, he's signed the pledge.

Later in the week, Christie made a startling revelation, saying of birthright citizenship, "I think all this stuff needs to be reexamined in light of the current circumstances. It may have made sense at some point in our history, but right now, we need to re-look at all that."

Christie might have forgotten about the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, or the many, many times the Supreme court has upheld it. If he wants to "re-look" at it, he'll need a constitutional amendment to change it. Rand Paul isn't too fond of that amendment, either.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This Week in Faulty Memory

As mentioned above, Jeb Bush made some dishonest claims about Iraq and ISIS during the debate. This week, he took his "analysis" further delivering a staggeringly dishonest foreign policy address at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. He opened the speech with praise for Reagan, which seems fitting in that he was about to tell a series of lies about foreign policy, and Reagan--whose administration sold arms to Iran in order to illegally finance terrorists in Central America--was nothing if not skilled in that practice.

In his speech, Bush said, "No leader or policymaker involved will claim to have gotten everything right in the region, Iraq especially. Yet in a long experience that includes failures of intelligence and military setbacks, one moment stands out in memory as the turning point we had all been waiting for. And that was the surge of military and diplomatic operations that turned events toward victory. It was a success, brilliant, heroic, and costly. And this nation will never forget the courage and sacrifice that made it all possible."

"It was a success, brilliant, heroic, and costly." Really, Jeb? Let's review. The day President Bush announced the surge, his administration explained its goal: "The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen."

The brutal violence--many Iraqis would not eat fish from the Tigris River because the water was so thick with human corpses--did subside. Not just because of the surge, though. As Peter Beinart explains, "In a daring about-face, Petraeus’s forces began paying the very Sunnis who had once fought Americans to fight al-Qaeda instead. That August, seeing a drop in Sunni attacks, the Shia militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr agreed to a cease-fire. The decline in violence was astonishing: In 2007, the war took the lives of 26,000 Iraqi civilians. In 2008, that number fell to just over 10,000. By 2009, it was down to about 5,000."

But the point wasn't only to reduce Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. It was to control the violence in order to pave the way for Sunni-Shia reconciliation. That never happened. Prime Minister Maliki started his persecution of the Sunnis well before Bush left office and the troops left Iraq, and that persecution helped Al Qaeda in Iraq morph into ISIS and gain popularity among the Sunni population. And it's not the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that's a problem today, it's the fact that Iraq is divided into three warring factions, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. So Jeb's starting point is nonsense--the surge didn't come close to accomplishing its goal, and changing the goal after the fact doesn't fly.

Jeb continued: "So why was the success of the surge followed by a withdrawal from Iraq, leaving not even the residual force that commanders and the joint chiefs knew was necessary? That premature withdrawal was the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to fill – and that Iran has exploited to the full as well. ISIS grew while the United States disengaged from the Middle East and ignored the threat."

That "premature withdrawal" was negotiated with Iraq by his brother, George W., not by President Obama. By the time Obama was elected, Maliki wouldn't even discuss extending the American presence there. And Bush had declared Iraq a sovereign country with its own government, responsible for its own security--to have remained in opposition to his Status of Forces Agreement would have been tantamount to a new invasion/occupation.

Four-star general and Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, who commanded the troops in Iraq after Petraeus left, retired this week. On his way out, he said, "I remind everybody, us leaving at the end of 2011 was negotiated in 2008 by the Bush administration. That was always the plan. We had promised them that we would respect their sovereignty."

Jeb went on to say, "All of that is in the past; it cannot be undone. Another terrible miscalculation, unfolding right now, is a different story. That would be the Obama-Clinton-Kerry policy of treating the mullahs in Iran as a stabilizing force in the region when in fact they are deceitful dictators causing nothing but instability."

Those are the mullahs his hero Reagan sold arms to, but never mind that. Jeb offers no alternative to the Iran deal, or any serious explanation of why it won't prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Instead, his prescription is laughably thin: "If the Congress does not reject this deal, then the damage must be undone by the next president – and it will be my intention to begin that process immediately. Knowing what has gone wrong, however, is not the same as knowing how to set it right."

That last bit, at least, is correct. He "knows" what has gone wrong, in his mind, but he doesn't know how to set it right. If Congress rejects the deal, the president will, rightly, veto that rejection. And if the next president reverses course, then America's foreign policy will never be the same--no other nation could again trust that we would stand by any agreement. And, of course, if he undoes the deal, then Iran will become a nuclear power in a matter of months. Finally, he talks as if the deal was just between us and Iran, and it's not--it's between us, Iran, and five other of the world's most powerful countries. "Undoing" it doesn't just mean breaking our word to Iran, but to those other nations as well. American credibility would be nonexistent at that point.

Jeb speaks as if what he's saying makes sense. But when it's built on a dishonest foundation, it can't. Only by looking realistically at where we are and how we got there can we find legitimate solutions. Like his brother, Jeb is anything but realistic about the Middle East, and if he should become president, that would be a big problem.

Side Note 1: Jeb Bush won't rule out torture, if he becomes president. What is it with those Bushes and their willingness to cast aside America's moral center?

Side Note 2: The Iran deal is publicly supported by US ambassadors from Democratic and Republican administrations, former national security officials from various administrations, esteemed scientists who have advised multiple presidents, and former generals and flag officers from every branch of the military. Still, some people choose instead to listen to Jeb Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Side Note 3: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo argues that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D/NY) should be disqualified from taking up the Minority Leader reins after Sen. Harry Reid (D/NV) retires next year, because of Schumer's opposition to the deal. As Marshall sees it, Schumer is smart enough to see through the arguments against the deal, but for political reasons of his own, pretends they have merit, That fundamental calculation is what rules out Schumer from the leadership. Marshall writes, in part, "Finally he notes that the deal only makes sense if you believe that Iran will become more moderate and less belligerent under the deal. Again, a bad faith argument. I think there are actually good reasons to think the consequences of the deal may lead to that outcome. To at least grant that this is a possibility one need only look at the fact that the Iranian reformers we allegedly love are all for it and the hardliners in the regime are all against it. But the deal is actually more important if you have the most dire read of the regime and its future. If you do think the worst, is it better to put in place what is unquestionably the most rigorous inspections and surveillance regime ever devised or leave the Iranians entirely free to start building nuclear weapons immediately? The answer to this question is so blindingly obvious it really ends the debate."

This Week in Gun Safety

South Dakota's two Republican senators, John Thune and Mike Rounds, have introduced a bill that would allow military spouses to buy handguns in the state where their spouses are assigned to active duty, even if that state is not their official state of residence.

This seems misguided in any number of ways. First, those active duty military people can still buy guns, which presumably they would leave behind with their spouses when they go to work on a base or are deployed. And second, what's far and away the most common cause of gun deaths? Not homicide, but suicide. And what's one of the biggest problems facing the military today? That's right, suicide. Places with more guns see drastically more successful suicide attempts.

Good move, SD senators. Pure genius.

* * *

A tragic truth of the gun business is this: when there's a widely publicized mass murder--think Aurora, or Sandy Hook, or Charleston--some people start talking about stricter gun regulations. When people talk about regulating guns, other people panic and start buying them up. Mass murder is good for gun industry profits.

* * *

A new study finds that the states with the highest rates of gun ownership also have the highest rates of police officers killed in the line of duty.

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We wish the nation could just accept the fact that all the data show: guns are very rarely used in self-defense. They are far too often used to end people's lives. The best way to avoid being killed with a gun is to stay away from where guns are found.
(Thanks to TWiA special live ammo correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)

This Week in Healthcare

All the Republican presidential candidates, except perhaps for John Kasich, want to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act. Replace with what? They won't say. It's like they think repealandreplace is all one word. They rarely even explain why anymore; it's just axiomatic that the ACA is a Bad Thing. They used to at least say it would hurt the economy (it hasn't), increase the deficit (it hasn't), and kill jobs. New research shows that it hasn't done that, either. What has it done? According to the CDC, knocked the uninsured rate in America to 9.2%, the lowest ever recorded. It would go even lower, faster, if certain elected Republicans would stop opposing it for purely ideological reasons.

This Week in the Bubble

The significance of the fact that Fox "News" hosted the first Republican debate can't be understated. Fox is the disinformation arm of the Republican Party, and the most trusted news source--despite its frequent errors and blatant deception--among Republicans. But it's not alone--it functions as part of the larger media/internet bubble that echoes conservative ideas so thoroughly that those trapped within it come to think those ideas are true, because they've been exposed to them in so many different places that they can't possibly be wrong.

Journalist Jackie Calmes has published an important and revealing paper, well sourced and complemented by interviews with many Republicans--office-holders and strategists alike--who describe the toxic effect that bubble has had on the conservative movement.

Calmes writes:

"Said another Republican, who has worked in the top ranks of congressional and presidential politics, but, like some others, asked to remain unidentified lest he provoke the far-right messengers against his current boss: 'It’s so easy these days to go out there and become an Internet celebrity by saying some things, and who cares if it’s true or makes any sense. It’s a new frontier: How far to the right can you get? And there’s no incentive to ever really bother with reality.' Or to compromise: 'There’s no money, ratings or clicks in everyone going along to get along.'

"Asked whether he could offer examples of legislative outcomes affected by conservative media, this Republican all but snapped, 'Sure. All of ‘em.' Does he worry more broadly then about the small-d democratic process? 'absolutely. Because the loudest voices drown out the sensible ones and there’s no real space to have serious discussions.'"

Our system of governance was designed by the Founders to require compromise. To pass a bill, two houses of Congress must first agree on it, then it's signed by the president, and finally, its constitutionality can be ruled on by the Supreme Court. But the conservative media consider compromise the same as retreat. The conservative media promoted and supported the Tea Party wave of 2010, which filled Congress with people who went there not to govern, but specifically to prevent the possibility of governing. And that wave terrified more moderate Republicans that they would be the next to face primary challenges from the right, so they moved right themselves.

"The problem, as they see it: Conservative media, having helped push the party so far to the anti-government, anti-compromise ideological right, attacks Republican leaders for taking the smallest step toward the moderate middle. 'In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Democrats weren’t dealing with a media that has become the way the conservative media has become,' which is 'much more powerful than John Boehner and Mitch McConnell,' said Matthew Dowd, a strategist in George W. Bush’s campaigns. Democratic leaders 'didn’t have to deal with a quote-unquote liberal media out there that was going to confront them every time they took a turn.'

The conservative media, Calmes writes, came about early in the postwar era. But later regulatory changes and technological advances gave it far more power and influence. "The second generation of conservative media took root late in Reagan’s presidency, helped by the government’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine governing broadcasters in 1987 and by technological advances predating the Internet’s emergence, including toll-free national phone service allowing listeners nationwide to call in. Limbaugh, the former D.J. and college dropout, began airing his caustic conservatism nationally in 1988. Six years later, he would get some credit for Republicans’ takeover of Congress – the House for the first time in 40 years. Its grateful new majority made him an honorary member. Two years after that, Fox News debuted on Oct. 7, 1996. In 1998 came National Review Online, as a first-generation publication adapted to the Internet, and, in Hemmer’s words, 'heralded a new era for conservative media activism, when the barriers to entry plummeted and innovation flourished.'"

The inevitable result? "'This is by any measure the most conservative Republican caucus in my lifetime,' said [Rep. Tom] Cole [R/OK]. But for most in conservative media, 'The idea of getting half of a loaf and moving down the road is just anathema to them. It’s got to be good guys and bad guys, and if our side doesn’t win it’s got to be because there’s something wrong with our side,' he said, not the Democrats. 'They’re looking for fights to pick with, quote, establishment Republicans, unquote.'"

Calmes goes on to report, "The problem that this media pressure creates for governance has been most evident among House Republicans, but it vexes those in the Senate, too – the [unnamed] Republican quoted above has served in both chambers – especially as the Senate has come to include more Tea Party members and former House militants. 'More people on our side are playing to the conservative media,' said a Senate aide who has worked for several Republican senators, each of them conservative yet pragmatic, who declined to be named in deference to them. 'Before it used to be more playing to – I hate the term – the mainstream media, or what these people would term the mainstream media, and trying to reach a larger audience through that,' the aide said. 'Now it seems that so many people are going for the niche, for the red meat, and there are all these outlets where you can do that. It’s playing to the base, but the base doesn’t live in reality. And that’s the problem: It’s taken the party in a really self-destructive direction.'"

Adding to the chaos is the fact that far-right groups are, in many cases, financially supporting the media figures. "Even before the Fluke storm, some syndicated radio hosts were taking sponsorship dollars from Tea Party-affiliated groups, including FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party Patriots and the Senate Conservatives Fund. That cemented the collaboration of media and advocacy groups in opposing the Republican leadership, and in demanding an ideologically pure agenda and discouraging compromise. Politico reported in April 2014 that, based on its review of federal tax filings and other information, several of the well-known groups had spent almost $22 million between 2008 and 2012 to sponsor programs including those of Limbaugh, Levin, Ingraham, Hannity and Beck, as well as lesser-known hosts. FreedomWorks, Politico reported, had given $6 million in that time to Beck, while Heritage sponsored Hannity for several years and spent $9.5 million over five years to back Limbaugh’s program. The talkers in turn promote the groups, their positions on issues and their favored candidates – candidates who often have been Tea Party challengers to Republican incumbents or, in open-seat races, to the establishment’s preferred candidates."

That's not a trend that seems to be abating. As Buzzfeed reported just this week, "According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website — using it to hype his political prospects and attack his enemies. One current editor called the water-carrying 'despicable' and 'embarrassing,' and said he was told by an executive last year that the company had a financial arrangement with Trump. A second Breitbart staffer said he had heard a similar description of the site’s relationship with the billionaire but didn’t know the details; and a third source at the company said he knew of several instances when managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest. Additionally, a conservative communications operative who works closely with Breitbart described conversations in which 'multiple writers and editors' said Trump was paying for the ability to shape coverage, and added that one staffer claimed to have seen documentation of the 'pay for play.'"

There is no corresponding media presence on the left (writer Eric Alterman demolished the myth of the liberal media in his 2003 book What Liberal Media?). Calmes writes, "More than any other group, Pew [a Pew Research Center report in October 2014] found, many 'consistent conservatives' cited a single source for their information about government and politics: 47 percent named Fox News. These consistent conservatives, so-designated based on answers to questions on issues, said they distrusted 24 of the 36 sources on Pew’s media list. But 88 percent of them expressed trust in Fox. 'When they turn to other sources,' Pew said, 'they opt for those not consumed by many others'– like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and conservative news sites The Blaze, Breitbart and Drudge Report. 'Consistent liberals,' by contrast, consume a varied mix of media and trust more sources, Pew reported. But 81 percent said they distrust Fox News – nearly the mirror image of conservatives who said the opposite."

She goes on to say, "In 2010, libertarian scholar Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute provoked a lively debate among conservative intellectuals when he wrote that the expansion and success of conservative media had created a closed information circle harmful to conservatism. Conservatives, he said, could pick from so many sources to buttress their biases that they could dismiss as false any contrary information from outside that circle. He called this 'epistemic closure,' borrowing from a term in philosophy (and perhaps ensuring that the highfalutin phrase did not catch on beyond the intelligentsia). For many conservatives, 'Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines and of course, Fox News,' Sanchez wrote in the first of several online essays. 'Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.'"

The result of all this? Conservatives have trapped themselves in a bubble that pushes them ever farther to the right--largely because of the quest for ratings and clicks (and therefore greater financial reward) for the various outlets. That bubble doesn't value objective reality. So birther conspiracies, death panels, secret Muslims, gun confiscation, Jade Helm 15, climate change denial and the rest get treated as if they were actually true. Elected Republicans become afraid to admit that they're not true, and some now are so deep inside the bubble themselves that they probably believe the lies. Inevitably, people like Michele Bachman, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R/TX), and Donald Trump come along, parrot what the bubble says, and do it so forcefully that it seems to be confirmation. Had the Republican Party not embraced conservative media and the Tea Party movement so thoroughly, they might be able to govern today. But they didn't, so they can't. As Republican author Geoffrey Kabaservice says in Calme's paper, "These people, practically speaking, are preventing the Republican Party from governing, which means they’re really preventing it from becoming a presidential party as well."

The paper is long--as, admittedly, is our description of it--but there's a considerably shorter summation here. Anyone interested in an in-depth look at where contemporary conservatism is would do well to read the whole thing, though.

This Week in Rivers

As if the EPA didn't have enough political trouble right now, they accidentally massively polluted the Animas River. And the Navajo Nation is considering a lawsuit.

This Week in Flags

The seemingly omnipresent POW/MIA flag is a lie. A fascinating glimpse into the largely forgotten history of Vietnam.

This Week in Race

So this happened in the United States of America in 2015.

This Week in Bears

That must have been a realistic fake deer.

Mama Bear and her adorable cubs come into town for lunch.

Despite last week's grizzly bear attack in Yellowstone, if you die in a National Park (which is highly unlikely--the odds are just as good that you'll die of Ebola), you're probably not going to be killed by wildlife, but by drowning or a car crash.