Chief Justice John Marshall: Not Enough "Experience"?

The one thing supporters and opponents of Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court should agree on is this: it’s about time we had some non-judges on the high court…again.

The history of the Supreme Court is one filled with brilliant (and some not-so-brilliant) members who had never been judges before being confirmed. That was once considered not only normal, but a good thing. The non-judges have been some of the most remarkable names in the Court’s long history: Marshall, Brandeis, Frankfurter, Rehnquist, Warren. Thirty-seven other justices were part of the “not-a-judge” club. They brought a different view from that forged by a career in robes and, whether you agreed with their reasoning on individual cases, you could not argue that their perspectives were valuable.

Some, like Alabama Senator Hugo Black, President William Taft, and California Governor Earl Warren brought the political experience of elected office. Their frame of reference was not a narrowly legalistic one but rather one that incorporated the give-and-take of the public will. Others, like Attorney General Harlan Stone, corporate attorney Lewis Powell, and NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall saw the law in ways that were deeply informed by their varied careers.

This was once considered a benefit — the idea that the nine (men) would deliberate and debate using the experiences they brought to the Court was thought to be the essence of the uniquely powerful and independent American judiciairy. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.

Currently all nine members of the Court were not only circuit court judges but appellate court judges as well. They’re all steeped in the Federal judiciary, for better or worse. Amidst the predictable arguments from Kagan’s opponents — she’s a nutty liberal anti-military lesbian — her lack of judicial experience seems a pretty dumb thing to pick on. That didn’t stop the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center Ed Whelan from going in whole hog:

Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any justice in the last five decades or more. In addition to zero judicial experience, she has only a few years of real-world legal experience. Further, notwithstanding all her years in academia, she has only a scant record of legal scholarship.

All of which is true…of Kagan and the late William Rehnquist. Rehnquist — arguably the first justice to vigorously push a newly-developoing hard-right legal philosophy into the Supreme Court’s deliberations — was a darling of conservatives. But his resume was as “thin” as Kagan’s and arguably more troubling if “real-world” experience is what you’re after.

Out of Stanford Law in 1952 Rehnquist clerked for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. It was there he wrote a controversial brief arguing that Plessy v Ferguson was “right and should be affirmed.” You may recall from 8th grade history that Plessy was the 1896 ruling in which the Court declared that racial segregation was perfectly constitutional under the theory that “separate but equal” accommodations were enough to satisfy the law. And that was pretty much that in terms of Rehnquist’s judicial legal experience.

He moved to Phoenix and was a private practice attorney who worked with the state’s Republican Party including Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. When Richard Nixon was elected he brought Rehnquist to Washington and installed him in the Attorney General’s office as essentially the AG’s legal counsel. Two years later Nixon placed him on the Court. While 26 Senators voted against him — including two Republicans — no one said he didn’t have enough judicial or legal experience.

The truth is Supreme Court nominations are now primarily political battles. Certainly Nixon faced something similar when his first two picks for the Court were rejected by the Senate but his next choice — Lewis Powell — was confirmed 89-1. That kind of vote wasn’t so rare all the way into the early 90s. As incredible as it seems now, uber-conservative Antonin Scalia was confirmed 98-0. Not one Democrat voted against the most provocatively conservative nominee in a generation. (OK Robert Bork was probably more provocative but still, 98-0???).

And so it should surprise no one that conservatives are bust trying to define the nominee just as they tried to do with Sonia Sotomayor and liberals did with Bork. The game is well known and it is on. The right is gonna have to do better than “she’s not been a judge” though. I’m betting they run with the gay thing. Let’s see how that works for them….

What is Comcast thinking?

Normally Get Real is about politics but I can’t help myself on this one. I worked at NBC for 11 years and in the television biz for 21 years. It gives me a little perspective on the Comcast-NBC deal. A lot of people have written a lot of copy on this takeover and there are a lot of angles on it. But I haven’t see anyone point out the obvious: Comcast is looking a lot like Time-Warner, Rupert Murdoch, and GE in betting on the wrong company in the wrong business at the wrong time. The only thing Comcast has gotten right is the price — NBC is being stolen. We’ll get to that.

In all the coverage about Comcast’s purchase of NBC there’s been tons of talk about how NBC Universal has done very badly in traditional broadcast television world but very well in cable. True enough if your horizon stretches no further than, say, next summer. The obits for broadcast have been written before and with $600 billion in ad revenues sloshing around I’d bet the reports of broadcast television’s death are still very premature. But there’s no denying cable networks have a better economic model — at this moment. Here’s the conventional wisdom as written in the New York Times on Saturday:

NBC has been mired in fourth place among the major broadcast networks, and the economics of the broadcast television business has deteriorated in recent years amid declining overall ratings and a decline in advertising. By contrast, cable channels have continued to thrive because they rely on a steady stream of subscriber fees from cable companies like Comcast.

True dat. But for how long? AOL seemed like a sure thing when Time-Warner made one of the dumbest, costliest decisions in the history of corporate America. After all, everybody was getting on the web and AOL had the biggest market share. In dial-up.

Fast forward a few years and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corportation made what many considered a very savvy play by buying MySpace for $580 million. Rupe grabbed the hottest company in the hottest tech segment, social networking. But a funny thing happened on the way to the rich house — Facebook. FT has a pretty devastating look at all this here. As News Corp employee Homer Simpson would say, “Doh!”

And then there’s NBC itself. In 2006 GE allowed NBC honcho Jeff Zucker to spend $600 million (really!) on women’s web portal iVillage. Even at the time a lot of people questioned what they were smoking on the 52nd floor of 30 Rock. Needless to say, iVillage didn’t prove to be NBC’s salvation as women moved on to websites with better social networking. And that promised synergy? The iVillage Live TV show didn’t work out so well.

So now comes Comcast to snatch NBC away from a desperate GE. Clearly Comcast has driven a hard bargain as it is getting 51% of a $37 billion company (the new NBCU) for just 37% of $37 billion ($6.5 B paid to GE and $7.25 B in Comcast cable networks being put into the new company). But even at this fire sale price, is it a smart deal?

The potentially fatal troubles for broadcast have been easy to see for a decade for anyone bothering to look. Broadcast is a linear medium: you experience it in continuous timeframe. While first the VCR and now the DVR allowed viewers to take some control, broadcasters could still be sure their programming was being watched on televisions. That day is swiftly ending and with it broadcasters will be left high and dry.

Comcast, though, is a cable company and is not terribly interested in NBC’s broadcast unit nor it’s anachronistic television stations. For now the company is making all the right noises about keeping broadcasting free for the public, blah, blah, blah but there are a lot of regulators to please in the next year so what do you expect. Think about it: take NBC’s local stations. From Comcast’s perspective, what’s the point? When 90% of Americans get their TV via cable or satellite, what purpose does a local TV station play? Comcast could get NBC programming directly from NBC, split the cable fee revenue, and it’s cable subscribers wouldn’t know anything has changed (other than they’re missing the local news but NBC has pretty much given up on local news anyway and Comcast has 24/7 news operations in many markets so it’s unclear anyone would notice).

No, Comcast doesn’t care about broadcast. It wants Universal’s movies to fill its cable pipelines and it wants NBC’s hot cable networks and their hefty cash flows. Cable nets like the supposed crown jewels in NBC’s crown (Bravo, USA, SyFy) have two big advantages over their broadcast counterparts. First, cable audiences have different expectations about the amount and quality of programming on cable. While it’s true that cable nets are increasingly running first-rate original dramas, most of these channels live on a diet of reality, reruns, and replays. Programming a week of USA or Bravo is an exercise in putting a small number of shows into a large number of slots. And audiences are okay with that. Imagine CBS getting away with running only 3 or 4 hours of fresh programming a week.

The other edge cable has over broadcast is money. Cable nets get money from advertising and from the cable companies like Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, and Comcast. That’s why your cable bill is a hundred bucks a month. You are paying a buck for  O, another buck for Nat Geo, maybe two bucks for Discovery or A+E, and pretty soon you’ve spent some real money. That’s the dirty little (not so) secret of the cable biz. But it’s also where the fallacy of Comcast deal lies.

People have stopped watching broadcast TV in large numbers because they can see broadcast TV programming when and where they want it. Viewers are in control and that is decimating the broadcast industry. A friend of mine watches downloaded commercial-free episodes of Fox’s “Glee” on his iPhone. Not because he can’t watch it on TV when it actually airs or on DVR playback but because this method gives him TOTAL control. And there’s the canary in cable’s coalmine.

What happens when people start dropping their cable TV connections in the same way they’re dropping their telephone landlines? It’s not a hypothetical. There’s strong evidence this is just beginning to happen with young adults who aren’t cutting out cable — they’re not getting in the first place. Did you catch the lead paragraphs in Brian Stelter’s Times piece on this very topic?

As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories. “Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge. That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”

But she does not, actually. For 60 years, TV could be watched only one way: through the television set. Now, though, millions watch shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on demand and online on network Web sites like Ms. Sweeney’s ABC.com and on the Internet’s most popular streaming hub, Hulu.com.

Ask a 25-year-old what night, time, and channel her 3 favorite shows are on — cable or broadcast. You’ll be stunned at how few can do it. That’s because it’s no longer how people find and use video media. Here’s another way of looking at it: why do we still have channel numbers? I have no idea what channel number MSNBC or Bravo or TNT are on. Do you? Verizon FiOS already groups cable networks by themes in their system. Channel numbers are as archaic and irrelevant as program times.

Which brings us back to GE’s pathetic stewardship of NBC and Comcast’s late-to-the-dance takeover of the faded legend. Everybody touts the great cash-generating cable nets Comcast is getting. But if the band has packed up, the bar has closed, and the lights are about to be shut off at broadcast’s goodbye party, the DJ is clearly preparing to spin “Last Dance” at cable’s shindig.

GE is taking a well-deserved bath on NBC Universal but it’s far from clear Comcast is getting  an asset with anything other than declining value. AOL anyone?

Funny thing is the preaction from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and it’s enablers in the blogosphere was just as predictable. They have signaled from the start of the Afghanistan conversation that more troops — escalation — was a terrible, dangerous decision they could not support. Now that the Iraq War is winding down it’s no time to up the ante on another foreign adventure whose subtitle is “Quagmire.” Their talking point: Vietnam.

What seems to be missing here is an undeniable fact which Obama helpfully reminded America about right at the start of his (too) lengthy speech:

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaida and those who harbored them — an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.

No one has really argued that the threat from al-Qaida has vanished. Indeed Obama’s critics on both sides (many of whom participated in those votes) acknowledge the criminal terrorist gangs have regrouped along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But to say (as some progressives do) that this wouldn’t be the case had Bush not redirected the effort to Iraq where al-Qaida had no personnel and no bases, is a red herring. Yes it’s true history will almost certainly regard Bush’s Iraq dance as a sham and a distraction but that doesn’t mean al-Qaida isn’t alive and well in Afghanistan. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold makes a more convincing case in questioning whether more troops now, years after military commanders on the ground began asking for them, will actually work. He raises valid questions and he may be right but Obama is betting additional troops will make the difference. There is no demonstrably right answer. It’s a toss of the dice either way with our national security at stake.

On the other hand to argue that Obama’s decision is late (a total lie, as the AP helpfully points out on Fox’s website) or that in setting a deadline he is sending a message to the terrorists to,

Wait it out. Blend in. Pretend to be a non-terrorist until July of 2011, then all will be well.

is kinda bizarre. That last quote was from the radical Christian radioman Kevin McCullough whose “analysis” of the Obama speech was prominently featured on Fox’s website yesterday evening. He spins the yarn that setting objectives and deadlines is handing al-Qaida a gift. We’ll be hearing that non-stop for a while I suspect since conservatives have been pushing for big troop deployments to Afghanistan for months. But doing a troop surge and then setting deadlines for withdrawal is precisely what Bush eventually did in Iraq and, much to the chagrin of his critics, it worked better than anything else he tried. Indeed Bush’s conservative defenders say liberals refuse to give him credit for accomplishing what those critics said he wouldn’t with the surge.

What last night’s speech really did was make plain that there are no good choices here and that while our last President governed with his gut, this one is governing with his head. To some that may sound like an improvement but it doesn’t mean he’s gonna get it right either.

Back up to this past winter when Paterson’s amateur-hour handling of his pick to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate left just about everyone slack-jawed. He managed to piss of anyone connected to the Kennedys (not an insignificant body of people especially in the Democratic Party) by publicly dissing and embarrassing Caroline Kennedy before doing precisely what the White House didn’t want him to do — pluck newly-reelected Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand from her very Republican district thereby allowing the GOP to score a quick victory just months after Obama’s sweeping win. Fortunately for Dems the GOP in New York is even more dysfunctional than they are and managed to lose what should have been a sure win.

That gave New Yorkers a taste of the Governor’s incompetence. He then inexplicably fed that perception over the next couple of months by failing to exert any leadership over the Legislature as it’s members descended into chaos. Ever since Paterson’s poll numbers have been in the dumps and we’ve talked a lot about it here, here, and here. In fact all along we’ve said despite his disasterous ratings — even among African-Americans — Paterson was probably safe from a primary challenge unless a major African-American politician broke from supporting him.

Enter Barack Obama.

But why? Why would Obama care enough at this stage to get involved in New York’s local politics? He’s not from here. He doesn’t need help from a New York Governor. The election isn’t until 2010 when Congresssional elections will surely dominate the political storyline. So why?

Enter Chuck Schumer.

Several people close to Paterson and Schumer say this has Chuck’s fingerprints all over it. Schumer was the one who first mentioned Gillibrand and eventually got his way. Chuck is the one who in two terms heading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee brought his party first into the majority and then made it filibuster-proof. Chuck is the (not so) hidden power center in the Senate. And Chuck doesn’t want to deal with a Governor heading the ticket in 2010 that could bring it all crashing down.

You see Senator Gillibrand is up for election in 2010 too and her poll numbers are only so-so despite her spreading a heavy dose of Chuck’s media magic across the Empire State. If Paterson is in trouble on top — especially if Rudy Giuliani were to run as he has been threatening — Gillibrand could be collateral damage. Meaning Chuck’s choice — Chuck’s bluest of blue states — could be the one that yields the filibuster-proof majority.

And so he called in the big gun to try and ease Paterson out. Unfortunately the Governor has other ideas and our sources say he is the one who leaked the story creating blowback on Obama and Schumer (neither of whom he is all that fond of anyway). So now Paterson can say he’s running and he’s standing up to pressure from his own party because he puts the people of New York first. Blah blah blah.

Michael Steele’s unchecked inanity aside (the Times lets the RNC Chairman get away with this: “I think Governor Paterson’s numbers are about the same as Governor Corzine’s numbers, and yet the president was with Governor Corzine and I don’t know whether there’s been a request for Governor Corzine to step down in New Jersey….” Corzine is down by 8, Paterson is down by 20), Obama should not have let himself be drawn into this mess this early. Worse, he got smacked by the woefully undertalented Paterson.

Nonetheless Paterson and the Democrats have real problems. Watch Charlie Rangel. If he starts spending private time with Paterson the feckless Governor may yet find himself with an ambassadorship to Fiji.

Joker or Whiteface?

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.

Maureen Dowd put it this way on Sunday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Nothing new here if you’re a regular follower of even the slightly-left-of-center blogosphere but for the Doyenne of the Paper of Record it’s a mighty leap.

It’s not a leap Obama nor his inner circle want to make, though, lest the President get drawn into the elemental American battle. It’s been raging for 300 hundred years — from the Founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board, OJ Simpson, to the first African-American president. America has never worked through it’s race-tainted birth and probably never will unless and until we’re all so intermixed that to be American means to be “Made of Many Parts.”

Obama has done his best to act as if we are post-racial but he, and everyone else, knows better. As a black man, though, he can’t actually engage in this battle directly without becoming exactly what his conservative critics so desire — another Jesse Jackson. Turning Obama into a black guy who happens to be President (as opposed to what he is: the President who happens to be a black guy) would be a major accomplishment for the Beck-Limbaugh Axis of Anger. And so they will continue to work very hard on that goal knowing they have fertile soil in which to till their seeds of rage.

In the meantime let’s face the facts: When a bunch of angry, white, post-65-year-old people scream and yell all summer about the government taking over health care, it cannot really be about the government taking over health care. Why? Because the screamers all have government health care. It’s called Medicare and every American over 65 gets it (not that Maria Bartiromo would know this). So when these folks rage with such force that they risk stroke and heart attack they do so knowing full well that should such a health calamity befall them, you and I  will pick up the tab for their hospitalization and care. Must be nice.

And when fringe groups organize Tea Parties to protest taxes and bailouts that then reappear months later as personal hate-fests aimed at one man, it is clearly not about taxes and bailouts which got relatively scant attention at Saturday’s big 9/12 rally in Washington. The rally, which was respectfully covered by the Washington Post and The Hill has become yet another paper tiger for conservatives like Matt Welch (of the conservative opinion mag Reason) writing in today’s New York Post:

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you support? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.

“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.

Welch goes on to quote the head of a DC-based think tank and, of course, Dowd. When he frames the argument that way (using a liberal blogger, a think-tanker, and a liberal op-ed columnist as the only evidence of media bias) he’s able to make a convincing case that the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the mainstream media keeping the facts from the American people. Well done sir!

Of course we can thank Representative Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (oh, sorry, that’s Joe to his constituents) of “You Lie!” fame for at least some of this belated recognition of racism as the root. The Republican Congressman from the great state of South Carolina was a folk hero at the march on Saturday for allegedly speaking truth to power. There were more than a few “Joe for President” signs. But as Dowd put it better than I can:

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.

Joe Wilson is a racist. And so are many of the people that have attended rallies and town halls who are incapable of explaining what it is they are opposed to other than “him”. “Socialism” doesn’t count — especially for Medicare recipients and anyone who lives in the West where life exists in most places only because the Federal government built dams to provide cheap water and cheap power. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbauch are racists of convenience: Spouting thinly-veiled racism earns them huge paychecks (Limbaugh = $38 million/year minimum, Beck = $18 million/year).

Case in point: Beck’s recent regurgitation of a video showing young black men in military camo pants and blue t-shirts doing some sort of drill. Watch it all here. Beck first spent a couple of weeks wondering what these young men were up to back in October (during the last month of the campaign natch) and never quite was able to discover (despite plenty of very quick posts to the web explaining what the video was) that it was a high-school drill team practice. If only they’d been dressed in leotards he would have understood! In fact Beck learned very quickly what the video was and he certainly knows now but he still uses it to conjure up the specter of a secret army of black men ready to help the black president get his way — and give us all health care….

And then there’s that Obama as The Joker poster. Is it an affirmative action success story that a black man is playing the Joker? Or is it a not-very-subtle racist reminder of the not-so-distant past? We report, you decide.

Everyone knows there’s deep-seated racism in America and it’s not just among white people. Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caribbean-Americans, Indians. There’s racism in every group and in every one of us. Sometimes there’s a lot,  sometimes very little. And that’s what Obama tried to be open about in his groundbreaking speech on race during the campaign. His grandma was a little bit racist and so is he. His point was that racism is alive and well and will never go away unless we acknowledge it, talk about it, and keep it uncovered.

Unfortunately some people have taken that to mean wearing racism on one’s sleeve is a good thing.

Walter Cronkite

OK so if the pundits left, right, and center are to be believed Barack Obama’s 7-month-old Presidency is in trouble and his speech to Congress on health care was his last best chance to keep the ship afloat. We’ll let you decide if that’s a bit hyperbolic (see: Bill Clinton health care failure 1994, reelection 1996 or George W. Bush “Education President” 2001, Iraq War legacy-killer 2008).

The big speech on the hill is getting plenty of (digital) ink but it was not Obama’s most important speech on Wednesday. That came hours earlier in New York when he spoke at Walter Cronkite’s funeral. And what he said has everything to do with his, and America’s problems, real and imagined.

Standing before the assembled masses of media and journalism executives and stars Obama spoke truth to power:

It may have seemed inevitable that he was named the most trusted man in America. But here’s the thing: That title wasn’t bestowed on him by a network. We weren’t told to believe it by some advertising campaign. It was earned. It was earned by year after year and decade after decade of painstaking effort; a commitment to fundamental values; his belief that the American people were hungry for the truth, unvarnished and unaccompanied by theatre or spectacle. He didn’t believe in dumbing down. He trusted us.

What a novel thought. Earned trust built over time. Not trust claimed in splashy promos so silly they look like Daily Show parodies. But there was more.

We also remember and celebrate the journalism that Walter practiced — a standard of honesty and integrity and responsibility to which so many of you have committed your careers. It’s a standard that’s a little bit harder to find today. We know that this is a difficult time for journalism. Even as appetites for news and information grow, newsrooms are closing. Despite the big stories of our era, serious journalists find themselves all too often without a beat. Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so has the bottom line.

Ah yes, money. As Obama notes journalism is in perilous times. The giant corporate owners of newspapers are staring into the abyss of free online content and vanishing paid paper circulation. Advertising has disappeared. They are responsible to their shareholders first. Readers and citizens second (maybe).

And television? Despite the predictable lionizing of Mr. Cronkite, network television was always the place of news stars who commanded large salaries to recreate the morning headlines from the New York Times and Washington Post in moving pictures. Before GE figured out it could force NBC to make a profit in news the networks at least did a public service in exchange for the use of the publicly-owned airwaves. Remember those hour-long documentaries in prime time? Those days are long gone as the President noted.

And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. “What happened today?” is replaced with “Who won today?” The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should — and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation. We seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society. Which price is higher to pay? Which cost is harder to bear?

It is not a lofty philosophical question. The destruction of journalism as a place where citizens could reliably get (mainly) facts and reason is a cancer that will destroy this 233-year-old democracy. It’s easy to blame the big bad companies that control the mainstream media (by which I mean giant corporate media like Fox, NBC, USA Today — not the silly meaning ascribed the phrase by bed-wetting whiny conservatives) but the old answer — the audience chooses what to watch/read/listen — is partly true.

There are choices galore. We have become the Wal-Mart of information: Cheap, available, and disposable. We consume the information we desire. We depend on our Facebook friends to tell us what’s going on. We only watch what we already believe. We believe we know the truth while the other side is brainwashed. Nuance? Shades of gray? The possibility that perhaps we are wrong and the other side is right? Even occasionally? [Insert shouts of righteous indignation here.]

We are children. And we have very bad parents.

The crowd at Cronkite’s funeral dutifully nodded at Obama’s points and then got into their awaiting black cars and returned to their plush offices to prepare the next posting/article/op-ed/newscast/chatterfest. They all might individually agree with what the President said but likely feel powerless to do anything about it. And be honest about it: Is Keith Olbermann suddenly going to grow up and use his keen wit and insight to examine all sides of an issue? Is Diane Sawyer going to grab the reins of World News and use it to give her viewers more than fast-paced gloss-over 2-minute reports on the biggest stories of the day? Is Rupert Murdoch going to direct his minions at Fox News to at least be responsible enough to stick to the facts instead of making things up? Is Jon Klein going to use CNN’s substantial resources to replace his network’s prime-time chatter with actual reporting?

And from their perspective why should they? The audience would rather watch train-wreck TV. And they have all those choices!

If you expect the media to fix itself you are delusional. Along with his honest diagnosis Obama gave the modern-day “giants” of journalism a little pat on the back but it was hard to take seriously. Cronkite was no god. Murrow did more to save America from itself. Adolph Ochs essentially founded objective American journalism. But Cronkite at least believed that he had a responsibility to his country. The Sean Hannity’s of this world believe only in what supports the largest paycheck.

“This democracy,” Walter said, “cannot function without a reasonably well-informed electorate.” That’s why the honest, objective, meticulous reporting that so many of you pursue with the same zeal that Walter did is so vital to our democracy and our society: Our future depends on it.

So look in the mirror. When the American people stop caring about what’s true and factual instead buy into whatever superstition or fantasy suits them at the moment, our democracy is lost.

Our American story continues. It needs to be told. And if we choose to live up to Walter’s example, if we realize that the kind of journalism he embodied will not simply rekindle itself as part of a natural cycle, but will come alive only if we stand up and demand it and resolve to value it once again, then I’m convinced that the choice between profit and progress is a false one — and that the golden days of journalism still lie ahead.

I Know Nothing!

It’s nothing new. Humans seem to prefer faith to facts. And I’m not talking about religion.

Howard Kurtz got lots of (liberal) blog links early this week with an article about the health care “debate” and how facts have been relegated to the sidelines. Kurtz now reports that it was Monday’s most commented piece on the paper’s website as people poured forth their vitriol from both sides of the health care aisle.

Kurtz’s main point was pretty simple: Despite the fact that many reporters demonstrably proved that the death panels myth was indeed a myth, almost half of the Americans surveyed by NBC News believe death panels are a part of the President’s health care reform proposals. Sadly this is not surprising. Jay Leno has played the often incredible ignorance of Americans for laughs on the Tonight Show for years. Likewise Comedy Central’s The Daily Show openly laughs at ignorant Americans (especially those in the media and politics) almost nightly.

It’s all pretty funny until someone gets hurt. And that’s what’s happening. It’s not so much someone but something. America.

It’s one thing to simply decry how uninformed or ignorant people are about things in the news but that misses the point. The problem is that many Americans are eager to be misinformed and wear it as a badge of honor.

Not long ago I gave a talk about politics and media to a small group of people upstate. These were people who paid attention. They read the papers. They watched the news. They listened to the radio. But when I suggested that media hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity are not journalists and that no one should pretend otherwise, I was greeted with dismay. There was nothing I could say, no data I could cite that would convince one woman that what came out of Limbaugh’s mouth was not a stream of facts. Rush says he’s 100% correct in his assertions and this woman could not be persuaded otherwise. Others in the room were aghast until I suggested that Rachel Maddow was hardly different.

“But Rachel doesn’t make things up!” “She’s not like O’Reilly and Limbaugh because she tells the truth!” Indeed she traffics in a completely different drug. She does focus in on facts but often only those facts that support her point of view. Facts that don’t help don’t generally get a big airing on her show.

That’s all fine if people understand that prime-time cable news is not the province of journalism but of opinion. The problem is the avid fans of these shows don’t see the difference. The opinions they share with their favored hosts are the facts — according to them.

It’s easy to blame the media for all this and in some respects it’s accurate as well. In their drive to stay relevant (and alive) newspapers have been hacking away at the things that made them a critical part of American democracy. Reporting facts.

When the television networks were freed from producing newscasts and documentaries as a condition of “borrowing” the public airwaves the result was inevitable. Real journalism is expensive. Sitting two people with opposite opinions down in a TV studio is cheap.

When was the last time you saw a well-produced, thoroughly reported story told by an experienced correspondent — a journalist — on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC? Their days are filled with yakking lightweights chatting up current events with whoever will come on free. Their nights are filled with screaming sarcasm and anger from highly-paid hosts trading knowing lies with a small stable of favored “experts”. There is no news here. This is “news” as a game played with a nod and a wink.

As America’s most trusted news anchor (John Stewart) pointed out recently, Fox News hosts have made a healthy living railing against the “mainstream media” while simultaneously trumpeting the fact that Fox News is the number one rated all-news network by a very large margin. Can’t have it both ways? Sure you can in a country where huge numbers of citizens can’t even grasp the concept of cognitive dissonance.

But the media is the dealer feeding the fix. It didn’t create the addiction.

You talkin' to me?

Somewhere along the line that whole Age of Reason thing has failed to stick. Logic is the province of eggheads. Facts are ephemera. Belief is all that matters.

This is an epidemic no one will confront because it hits all the buttons Americans are afraid of: Intelligence, education, real dialogue. Thinking. The American creation myth since Andrew Jackson is built on action. Never mind that our oft-lionized Founding Fathers valued intelligence far more. We are a nation of Rambos and Dirty Harrys. Reagans and Rumsfelds. Doers not thinkers. And in that reality facts don’t really matter.

So let people point out that there are no death panels in ObamaCare. That there is no evidence whatsoever that the World Trade Center was brought down by: a) bombs; b) U.S. missiles; c) Isrealis; d) UFOs. That Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. For many Americans conclusive absence of evidence is no barrier to belief in a thing.

This is where our leaders fail us. Politicians refuse to tell the truth. When Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley (widely seen as a responsible adult) parrots the death panel fiction he aids and abets our decline. He and his ilk are cowards.

When cable news claims to be “Fair and Balanced” or “The Place for Politics” Orwell’s fictional future becomes our factual present. When being “The Coolest News on Earth” gets ratings it can’t be long before one network adopts that as it’s slogan.

And it will only get worse. As we splinter into ever smaller social networking groups, subscribing to our selected Twitterers, monitoring our selected Facebook friends, reading our selected websites, watching our selected cable shows or You Tube channels, we will become a shattered mirror. Each of us living as if the world is really just a reflection of…ourselves.

Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the rest of the world will follow us down this rathole. But if not, the decline of America won’t be as a result of an overextended empire, a reckless war, a bankrupt financial system, or a permissive culture. It will be because we gave up on reason.

The arguments about the relative merits of various plans, the depth of the problem, and even who is most to blame are almost beside the point. Certainly Atul Gawande’s take in the New Yorker’s June 1 issue in which he explained why McAllen, Texas is the nation’s second most expensive health care market is very persuasive in arguing that who pays is much less in important than in how medical care is coordinated. And in a follow-up this past week the New York Times front-paged a story about how McAllen, Texas is — shockers! — among a handful of much larger cities whose “citizens” have donated the most money to Congress in order to influence the health care debate. The story goes on to explain how the very things that Gawande identified as the reasons McAllen’s health care is so expensive have been preserved in the latest version of the House bill. Those doctors are getting a good ROI apparently. So much for reform.

Should we be surprised? Hell no. Harry and Louise may be on the side of reform this time around but the fact that they are back at all is a vivid reminder how incredibly difficult fixing our ridiculous system is. Which is where Obama’s arrogance has made things worse.

We didn’t need Hillary Clinton to tell us that if the U.S. health care system was to really be changed (and it is f*cked up: highest cost in the world producing middling results) a President had to have a war plan. The arguments from doctors, health insurance companies, free-market conservatives, Blue Dog Democrats, and Big Pharma were predictable. Their combined ability to drive the debate should have been worry #1 for the Obama team. ClintonCare was KO’d by a combination of White House hubris and a masterful public relations campaign from opponents. How could Obama not avoid following the same path?

The President apparently believed his mandate and his popularity ratings big enough to magnify his bully pulpit in such a way that he alone could counter the other side. He mistakenly thought that (as did the last Democratic President in the months after he was elected) and having a Democratic Congress was enough. But that was just silly from the start. As multiple reporters have pointed out over the past few months most Americans desperately want the health care system changed — just not in any way that will effect the way it currently works for them. I know that sounds absurd but it’s true.

Americans who have health insurance may complain about the costs but flash a little “socialized medicine” snake oil in front of them and see how fast they switch sides. That’s because even with their co-pays and premiums they don’t really pay anything like the full cost of their health care. Their employers pay a sizable chunk and then that’s subsidized by you and me through an outdated tax credit for health premiums. So Americans are paying twice as much as anyone else — it’s just hidden.

Americans without health insurance — as large and growing a group as that might be — are unfortunately less likely to vote and therefore have less political clout than those with care. So even if they buy into ObamaCare and aren’t persuaded by the RedsCare crowd, they don’t really have the juice to make a difference in the debate.

And look at all those talking heads. Last time around CNN was the only 24/7 cable news network and they actually did news. Now three networks (five if you count CNBC and FBC) spend all day talking about the news instead of the more expensive task of reporting it. Of course all of these fine people who gather to impart their wisdom have generous employer-funded taxpayer-subsidized health plans. In fact the on-air folks at NBC left their union several years back because some rebelled when the union health plan instituted premiums. Yep before 2006 they paid no premiums and they thought that was normal. That’s how out-to-lunch some of these all-day bloviators are.

So in the face of all this readily apparent information what does Obama do? Not a whole lot. His personal appeals and working with Congress aside, the President has done virtually nothing to successfully prepare for, or more importantly, preempt the predictable onslaught. His last minute prime time seminar was too lame too little too late. And so Congress slinks away for the rest of the summer having passed nothing, Obama is left to lick his wounds, and We the People are no closer to having a rational health care system.

Nice going O. The only hope we have is that he seems to learn from his mistakes. Let’s hope the horse hasn’t left the barn.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota)

It was practically his first day as a Senator (he got a late start courtesy of the razor-thin margin of victory last fall and the ensuing lawsuits) but Al Franken jumped in feet first. While every Senator from both parties is working off a party-written playbook and is assigned questions and subjects to push the greater cause, Franken managed the task with interest and aplomb and — no surprise — good humor. On a panel stuffed with stuffy old white men, Franken stood out as a sort of normal person. He didn’t take himself too seriously and gave us a pretty good idea of who Sonia Sotomayor is without having to resort to the pathetic softball questions of his Democratic colleagues. Methinks Franken is going to be a pretty good addition to the august body.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Crazyville Oklahoma)

Senator Coburn is a doctor from Oklahoma who did more to help the Democrats in these hearings than even Texan Jon Cornyn (who stepped out of central casting for the role of the Senator who just stepped off the course at his whites-only country club) or Alabaman Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (no further comment needed). Those guys are caricatures of the modern Republican Party — old, Southern, white, conservative — while Coburn is more in the Glenn Beck mode. Coburn parried with Sotomayor about abortion and guns in a way that was pure culture war. But it was his “you got some ‘splainin’ to do” joke that was the icing on the cake. Whether it was offensive or not was almost besides the point. It made Coburn and the Republicans look like they were making fun of Latinos. For a party that has essentially lost all support within the fastest-growing demographic in the US it was yet another reminder of how very very far it has to climb.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R D-Pennsylvania)

Senator Specter loooooves Supreme Court nominee hearings. Especially the part where he gets to hear himself talk and ask seemingly probing, important questions. Specter also loves to be the odd man out. The Republican who might vote with the Democrats. The Democrat who might vote with the Republicans. It’s all so very endearing but it’s not hard to figure what his game is this time around as he faces a tough fall election. Make that two fall elections. Since switching parties this spring Specter has gone from facing an almost certain loss in a Republican primary to a tough-but-winnable Democratic primary against two-term Congressman Joe Sestak and a potentially nasty general election against far-right former Congressman Pat Toomey. Specter can’t win without Democrats and independents. With the support of President Obama and Veep Biden plus a ton of cash the Democratic side of things probably won’t be too hard. But getting independents in PA means Specter has to show his, well, independence and that’s what his tough prosecutor act was all about.

Sonia Sotomayor

Roberts and Alito played their parts to a tee during their confirmation hearings, answering almost nothing while appearing to be genuine, reflective, and intellectually open. On that score (the only one that matters in these things nowadays) Sotomayor was their equal. Or maybe their better. Her elucidation of fundamental Constitutional law was really quite brilliant in its simplicity. She dodged and ducked without looking like she was dodging and ducking and she appeared the embodiment of cool. Like Obama in the campaign, nothing ruffled her and she was in control the entire time. Should she serve a long time on the court it seems likely that she will become a driving force — the liberal version of the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. We would say Antonin Scalia but Sotomayor seems too smart and modest to allow herself to become an ineffectual partisan flamethrower.

New York State Capitol

So the Albany soap opera has come to a close. Crystal and Alexis will live to catfight another day. Serena and Blair will return in the fall. And Malcolm and Pedro will assuredly be ready for more battles next session. In the meantime let’s figure out the winners and losers from the month of madness.

Losers

We’ll start with the losers because it’s easier.

Republicans

Already in a deep state of disarray and on the wrong end of the demographic pendulum, New York Republicans came thisclose to pulling off a miracle. The problem is they had to consort with a criminal (OK not a convicted criminal but still) to get there and surprise surprise he stabbed them in the back. The GOP gets no credit for trying to fix Albany and ends up with no more power than when this all started. Ouch.

Senate Democrats

It was clear when they won control last November that these guys (and gals) were waaaay out of their league. Having spent their entire careers in the minority where they had been paid to do virtually nothing (since they had no power and no real function), they ascended to the leadership without any idea how to run the place. Nothing that has happened in the last 30 days will convince anyone otherwise. Indeed now everyone knows what reporters and Albany insiders knew nine months ago.

Mike Bloomberg

This may not seem so obvious because Bloomberg kvetched about the problem plenty, echoing the sentiments of most New Yorkers. Nonetheless in having to fight for school control and the ability to raise taxes, Bloomberg was forced to draw attention to two things that may not help him much in his reelection effort. Then again he’s gonna spend $100 million bucks against a guy no one knows is even running.

Tom Golisano

Having first helped produce the Democratic win in November and then having prodded the deserting Dems into action, billionaire Floridian (nee Rochesterite) Tom Golisano has proven he can play the puppetmaster — he’s just not very good at it. Golisano wants reform but nothing he has precipitated is likely to produce lasting change. I would LOVE to stand corrected on this one.

New Yorkers

We made California look good. New Yorkers got the government they deserve. By reelecting their State Senators and Assembly members year after year New Yorkers have, like many Americans, cast aside their responsibility to elect officials who will work in the best interest of his or her constituents. Now no one can argue they don’t know what the result of this has been. New Yorkers got screwed to be sure, but honestly, don’t we deserve it?

Winners

David Paterson

The only winner here is, oddly, Governor David Paterson. Sure there will be arguments that Attorney General Andrew Cuomo will benefit in his quiet attempt to be the right Democrat for Governor in 2010 but where’s the evidence? His limited contribution was to declare that Paterson couldn’t appoint a Lieutenant Governor. Most New Yorkers will think that makes Cuomo part of the problem.

Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver might also be deemed a winner but he was already the most powerful guy in Albany before the chaos and he remains so today. And don’t talk to us about Pedro Espada. Yes he is now Majority Leader. No, it won’t keep him from being indicted.

The only person who gets any bump out of this is Paterson who made the right noises and, with his Lt. Governor move, will be perceived by the public to have created the spark that made this problem go away. That being said, winning in this case is a relative thing. Paterson had no where to go but up.