Media Matters, the George Soros-backed legion of liberal agit-prop shock troops based in the nation's capital, has declared war on Fox News, and in the process quite possibly stepped across the line of legality.
David Brock, MM's founder, was quoted Saturday by Politico promising that his organization is mounting "guerrila warfare and sabotage" against Fox News, which he said "is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”
To that end, Brock told Politico that MM will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests ..." Murdoch is the founder of Fox News and a media titan with newspaper, broadcast, Internet and other media countries around the world.
There is nothing in the Politico article to suggest that Brock, who was paid just under $300,000 in 2009, according to the group's most recently available tax return, plans to ask the IRS to change his organization's tax status as a 501(C)(3) tax-exempt educational foundation.
Being a C3 puts MM in the non-profit, non-commercial sector, and it also bars the organzation from participating in partisan political activity. This new, more aggressive stance, however, appears to run directly counter to the government's requirements for maintaining a C3 tax status.
Since Brock classifies Fox News as the "leader" of the Republican Party, by his own description he is involving his organization in a partisan battle. High-priced K Street lawyers can probably find a federal judge or a sympathetic IRS bureaucrat willing to either look the other way or accept some sort of MM rationale such as that it is merely providing educational information about a partisan group.
But in the IRS application for 501(C)(3) tax-exempt educational foundation status, Section VIII, Question I asks the applicant: "Do you support or oppose candidates in political campaigns in any way?" (Emphasis added).
Under Brock's definition of Fox News, it appears he is setting MM on a course of actively opposing all Republican candidates. Brandon Kiser at The Right Sphere blog argues that this new statement of MM's mission means it must change its tax status.
Beyond the partisanship issue, explicitly declaring that your purpose as a tax-exempt non-profit public foundation is to interfere with the commercial interests of somebody else's legal business enterprise falls nowhere within the scope of purely educational activities.
The official purpose of MM, according to its 2009 tax return, is to "notify activists, journalists, pundits and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and take direct action against offending media institutions."
At another point much later in the same return, MM's purpose is more succinctly described as being "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the media."
Besides Brock, who is MM's CEO, Eric Burns, who is the organization's president, received just under $260,000 in compensation in 2009. Burns has since left MM to form Bullfight Strategies, a media consulting firm.
For the complete Politico piece, go here. And for additional analysis, check out Ed Morrissey's balanced assessment here.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Keynes Vs. Hayek, The False Debate | The New Republic
Keynes Vs. Hayek, The False Debate | The New Republic
Keynes Vs. Hayek, The False Debate
- May 2, 2011 | 10:26 am
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The right-wing Mercatus Center has another, wildly popular Keynes vs. Hayek rap. David Frum notices the moment when it slides right past the central issue:
The conservative insistence on pretending that central planning is the issue has rendered conservatism mute and useless (when not actively counter-productive) on the actual burning question of the day: How do we recover most rapidly from the worst economic calamity to hit the US since World War II?
To this, the modern Keynesians have an answer. To this, the modern self-described Hayekians don’t. And one of the fascinating sub-themes of the two Keynes-Hayek raps is the way they obscure the modern self-described Hayekians’ lack of an answer to Keynes’ urgent question.
Thus for example, from Round 2:
KEYNES
so what would you do to help those unemployed?
this is the question you seem to avoid
when we’re in a mess, would you just have us wait?
Doing nothing until markets equil-i-brate?
HAYEK
I don’t want to do nothing, there’s plenty to do
The question I ponder is who plans for who?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many and not by the few.
Look what’s happened here: Keynes ask Hayek what he would do. Hayek says, “there’s plenty to do” – and then immediately switches back to a highly generalized discussion of central planning.
Hayek was a forceful and persuasive critic of central planning. But Keynesian fiscal policy is not about central planning, or even an argument for larger government at all. It's an argument for counter-cyclical budget policy, with higher deficits during severe recessions, and surpluses to pay off those deficits during sustained expansions. This policy is perfectly compatible with any level of government and does not require higher aggregate levels of debt than maintaining a regular balanced budget.
The conservative insistence on viewing stimulus spending to counter the most dire economic crisis in seventy years is one of the many pathologies that have overtaken conservative thought. I think several things are at work. First, the Bush administration's profligacy left structural deficits that mushroomed to huge levels when the economy slowed, causing many conservatives to mistakenly associate the long-term growth debt with temporary stimulus. Second, the Obama presidency, which really did have long-term ambitions to reshape policy on climate change and health care, and which was ushered in on the shoulders of what may be a slowly more liberal electorate, raised fears of a long-term leftward shift. Conservatives failed to distinguish this, too, from temporary stimulus to fight the recession. And third, conservatives recognized that poor economic performance offered their best chance to regain power, and this made them more receptive to do-nothing arguments that neither party had paid attention to for decades.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Editorial: A Tale Of Two Recessions And Two Presidents - Investors.com
Editorial: A Tale Of Two Recessions And Two Presidents - Investors.com
Editorial: A Tale Of Two Recessions And Two Presidents
Growth: It's been nearly two full years since the recession officially ended, and the economy is still struggling to get off the ground. It didn't have to be this way.
When the Commerce Department released its estimate for first-quarter growth — a meager 1.8% — President Obama's chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, at least conceded that "faster growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the downturn."
And granted, the economy needs to expand by at least 2.5% just to keep up with growth in the labor force. So at 1.8%, we're essentially losing ground, a fact that last week's 429,000 initial jobless claims underscores. But what Goolsbee didn't acknowledge is that the economy could be growing at a much faster rate, and would be if it weren't saddled with Obama's reckless policies.
How do we know this? Compare the two worst post-World War II recessions. Both the 1981-82 and the 2007-09 downturns were long (16 months and 18 months, respectively) and painful (unemployment peaked at 10.8% in 1981-82 and 10.1% in the last one).
What's dramatically different, however, is how each president responded.
Obama massively increased spending, vastly expanded the regulatory state, and pushed through a government takeover of health care. What's more, he constantly browbeats industry leaders, talks about the failings of the marketplace and endlessly advocates higher taxes on the most productive parts of the economy.
In contrast, Reagan pushed spending restraint, deregulated entire industries, massively cut taxes and waxed poetic about the wonders of a free economy.
The result? While the Reagan recovery saw turbocharged growth and a tumbling unemployment rate, Obama's has produced neither. Consider:
• GDP. In the seven quarters after the 1981-82 recession ended, the economy cranked out quarterly growth rates that averaged 7.1%. Under Obama, GDP growth has averaged a mere 2.8%. (See chart at right.)
• Unemployment. Under Reagan, the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.5% by this point in the recovery. Under Obama, it's still stuck at 8.8%.
• Long-term unemployment. There were far fewer long-term unemployed by this point in the Reagan recovery; just 18% of the unemployed had been without a job 27 weeks or more. Under Obama, that figure is an astonishing 45%.
• Consumer confidence. By this point in the Reagan recovery, the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index had hit 100. Today, the index stands at just 65.4.
• Deficits. Under Reagan, the federal deficit was trimmed to 4.8% of GDP by 1984. Under Obama, the deficit is expected to climb to 10.9% of GDP this year.
Obama and his defenders like to say he inherited the worst downturn since the Great Depression and that things would have been worse still had he not acted. But the recession was almost over by the time he took office — and officially over just six months after that.
So while Obama's policies had little to do with bringing an end to the Great Recession, they've had everything to do with producing what is by far the worst economic recovery in the past 70 years.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The American Soviet - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online
The American Soviet - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online
Our 21st-century political correctness can have us behaving like 20th-century denizens of Leningrad or Moscow.
The American Soviet
Our 21st-century political correctness can have us behaving like 20th-century denizens of Leningrad or Moscow.
The security forces of Bashar Assad — a thug whom Hillary Clinton deemed a “reformer,” and with whom Barack Obama was determined to restore diplomatic relations — are slaughtering hundreds in the streets of Syria’s major cities. I know that the Turkish government will express no outrage. It will not help to sponsor a flotilla of private ships to sail into the port of Latakia to protest the government-sponsored barbarity. European “human rights” activists will not fly into any Arab city to board a freighter, Gaza-style, that would bring humanitarian assistance by sea to those being blown apart by the Assad regime. I know that.
Recently, Palestinian teenagers, in service to a Palestinian terrorist organization, massacred — in the literal sense of the word — the Fogel family of Israel, a savagery replete with the throat-slitting of toddlers and infants. The Palestinian police authority — U.S. trained and equipped — just shot down Jewish worshippers at Jacob’s Tomb. This comes amid the Palestinian Authority’s commemoration of the 2002 Passover Massacre of 30 Israeli civilians, apparently a national moment of honorific reflection on the West Bank. Yet I know that no one in Europe and few in America will protest to the Palestinian Authority, which the West subsidizes, that it seems to commemorate butchery in its midst.This week President Obama ordered Predator drone attacks against Libya, as NATO and American forces began re-targeting the Qaddafi clan personally. I know that there will be no outcry that the U.S. is a party to targeted assassinations of a foreign leader and his family, an act once deemed illegal for an American administration. I also note that the use of Predator assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased fourfold since January 2009, and that we have blown up five times more suspects in the last 27 months than we did in the prior 96 months. I know that the U.N. and the Arab League are both praised by the Obama administration for authorizing us to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and ignored by the administration when we must go far beyond a no-fly zone to end the Qaddafi regime, which we seek to destroy even as we declare that is not our aim. And I know there will be no outcry from the American Left over a third Middle East war against an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation (even though this one posed no threat to the security of the United States), over the complete bypassing of the U.S. Congress in launching that war, or over the efforts to blow up a foreign leader and all in his vicinity. I know that.
The past week a sensationalized video of a transgendered female in extremis went viral on the blogosphere. Two young African-American women beat her senseless at a McDonald’s restaurant. The African-American staff is shown in the clip as mostly passive bystanders to the brutality. Yet I know this nationally viewed abhorrence is not a teachable moment about much of anything. Unlike the Professor Gates mix-up, this public spectacle will not be used by the president to warn us about the wages of incivility or the need for a new racial tolerance and understanding. Nor will there be, among the homosexual community, much of a national Matthew Shepard moment seeking to present the public beating as a symbol of a wider hatred of the sexually ambiguous among us. There is about as much chance of a Hollywood movie about the incident as there is of a sequel to Rendition. At best, we are to accept such violence as inevitable, as the powerless sometimes thrash out against the more privileged classes and races; at worst, these are the tragic wages of prior oppression that must be contextualized and constructed in the proper narrative of the centuries.
So what are we to make of the past week’s news?
We are living in another Soviet, a 21st-century sort in which we nod to official pieties and mouth politically correct banalities while in our private lives, for our safety, well-being — and sanity — we conduct ourselves according to altogether different premises. In the Soviet Union, the anonymous masses turned out to hear boilerplate praise for socialist comradeship, while those of them who were lucky enough to have a car took off the windshield wipers when they parked it — accepting both that their utopian state could not supply affordable replacement auto parts and that their comrades would steal almost anything they could from other suffering subjects.
In our version of the Soviet, we know that Israel is supposed to be culpable and that we are asked to praise the “aspirations” of the Palestinians, but if we were to go to the Middle East we most certainly would not stay in Gaza or the West Bank or visit unescorted a Christian shrine. We would wish to dine with people like the Fogels, but not their killers or the people who ordered them to kill. We are also to understand that the Arab and Turkish worlds abhor Israeli violence, and so we nod our assent; but privately we know that the issue is really Jews, not savagery per se, and that an Arab dictator can murder 1.000 Arabs with less worry about Western condemnation than an Israeli soldier can shoot one Arab on the West Bank in self-defense. Publicly we accept that tiny Israel, a country of 7 million, is an overdog, the foreign-policy equivalent of the demonized “them” here in America, the people who make over $200,000 a year — too successful, too Western, too unquestioning of their culture. Privately, we sort of admire Israel’s courage and understand that anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism, and demographic calculus construct Arabs as sympathetic victims and Israelis as neo-colonialists.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Ten Rules for 5G Warfare - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review
Ten Rules for 5G Warfare - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review
Ten Rules for 5G Warfare
Dear President Obama,
Welcome to 5G warfare. There's a war going on in America today: an information war, being waged digitally. It's not physically violent — but it's culturally, socially, and economically violent. And its ultimate goal is that of any war: political defeat.
4G war was network against state. Think Al-Qaeda vs America. 5G war is network against network, market against market, community against community. And the problem is that the right has a network, and are utilizing it to learn the art of 5G warfare — but you don't, and you aren't.
To win this war, you've got to become a master not just of politics — but of network economics. I've studied in detail the handful of 5G wars that have taken place so far, between corporations, investors, and states.
Here are ten rules for fighting a 5G war.
1. Speed it up. Use tools that transmit information orders of magnitude faster: as close to real-time as possible. Your enemies use email. Use Twitter, Facebook, and iPhone Apps instead.
2. Microchunk it. Small resources, like messages, are more efficiently transmitted and utilized than big ones. Your enemies use lengthy, wordy messages — seriously inefficient communications. Try 140 character Tweets instead.
3. Meta-attack. You're attacking with "facts." But facts don't matter, because your enemy doesn't value information like you do. Life expectancy's smaller in the States? So what — according to your enemies, you can't trust facts from Cuba (or France). So you have to attack not with "facts", but with meta-information about how to value facts. Start with meta-information about how to value insurance rationally — over a lifetime, not a day, for example.
4. Anti-defend. You can't defend a centralized structure against a network attack in the traditional sense (just ask Twitter). But you can anti-defend against a network attack, by decentralizing your own resources to the edges — something that, in physical warfare, is a big no-no. When resources are spread and replicated across as broad, diverse network of your own as possible, if one node goes down, the others stay up. A few blog posts at Whitehouse.gov do not constitute a networked anti-defense — but a thousand every day across the WWW might begin to.
5. Darwinian counterattacks. What happens after a networked offense? A counter-attack: the remaining nodes link up, share resources, and then launch a portfolio of different counterattacks. The fittest ones — those most threatening to the enemy — survives. It's like what hedge funds do, except it's not lame. To enable a Darwinian counter-attack, you've got to offer suggestions, tools, and methods for a range of potential counterattacks.
6. Hack your enemy's weapons. In a 3G or 4G war, you can't hack the enemy's guns, bombs, or knives. In a 5G war, you can hack the enemy's information weapons — and that's an often explosively powerful tactic. "Death Panels"? Call them "Life Panels" instead, explain that old Republican Senators already benefit from them — and enjoy your rise to the top of Google.
7. Normatize it. 5G warfare is problematic because we have no Geneva conventions to enforce norms of acceptable behaviour. And so anything goes. But it shouldn't: a powerful tactic in 5G warfare is setting norms for what's acceptable and what's not. Discuss why smears and misinformation are unacceptable; make public and transparent who refuses to accept norms of good behaviour.
8. Self-organize hyperlocally. Reality Check is a good start — but it doesn't enable self-organization. People should be able to self-organize into networks linked by the information you provide, so alliances form. These networks shouldn't just be online, but offline - because in the real world, people have shared histories. They should be real-world networks that influence and counterinfluence hyperlocally: street by street, community by community.
9. Remix it. After self-organization comes the remix — just ask any bedroom DJ. You haven't given people information in an easily remixable form, that they can distribute to others dependent on what is important at the time or to a given group of people. Making the info you provide microchunked and remixable, so it can be used and reused in more and more efficient ways.
10. Attack the base. This is a controversial tactic — but it's often the key to winning a 5G war. Physical wars have to be fought on the front-lines. But information wars don't. Your best bet is to attack not the enemy's front-lines — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin — but the base of hard-liners who still oppose reform — hard, swiftly, and repeatedly, with better information faster.
The battle you're fighting today is neither the last, nor will it be the fiercest. The debate over better healthcare institutions can only meaningfully take place after today's information battle dies down. Yet, the healthcare debate is only the first of many debates about reform America must have. That's why the rules of 5G war matter.
NB — If you're a Republican, before you comment, please note that I've been highly critical of Obama in the past, and that the right wing could use these rules too :) . Thanks to Scott for the suggestion for the post title. And thanks to Ryan in the comments for reminding me of the consistently awesome Dreaming5GW and Global Guerrillas blogs, if you'd like more context.
That's it for now. Fire away in the comments with questions, criticism, or thoughts.
Monday, April 25, 2011
RealClearPolitics - Video - Herman Cain: "We Need To Go From An Entitlement Society To An Empowerment Society"
RealClearPolitics - Video - Herman Cain: "We Need To Go From An Entitlement Society To An Empowerment Society"
Herman Cain: "We Need To Go From An Entitlement Society To An Empowerment Society"
Herman Cain's economic plan: (1) lower corporate tax rates, (2) end capital gains tax, and (3) suspend taxes on foreign repatriated products.
"I believe Republicans just need to go on the offensive and explain to the American people how this is not rewarding billionaires, this is not hurting elderly people. Absolutely not. Educate the American people on how jobs are created," Cain told FOX News.
"The American people are not that stupid as the Democratic party continues to think," he added.
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