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I Read These Morons So You Don’t Have To

You are here: Home / Archives for I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

Sunday Pharisees Open Thread: The New Failson Falkirk Center

by Anne Laurie|  December 1, 20197:15 pm| 106 Comments

This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Religion, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Assholes, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

Jerry Falwell Jr. and Charlie Kirk had to come up with a name for their new think tank, so they just mashed up their two names and called it the Falkirk Center. https://t.co/dFVxfPaJ26

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 30, 2019

Jerry Jr. (last seen defending himself against charges of real estate fraud, self-dealing, misappropriation of funds from the university he inherited, and nightclubbing in Miami Beach) has gotten together with Charlie Kirk (founder of TP-USA, last seen bulk-buying failson Trump Jr’s ‘best seller’) have a new grift, per the Washington Examiner:

Growing concerns in conservative circles that liberals are trying to convert young Christians into socialists by distorting the Bible and U.S. Constitution have prompted Virginia’s Liberty University to form a new center to push back on the media, academics, and Democratic politicians.

The new think tank, announced Saturday in Lynchburg and previewed to Secrets, was co-founded by two key leaders in the Christian youth movement, Liberty President Jerry Falwell Jr. and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

The Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty, a combination of their names, will “play offense” against efforts by liberals to water down Judeo-Christian values in the Bible and Constitution in their bid to build support for big government, said Kirk.

“The fastest-growing religion in America is atheism and secularism and with that is the rise of leftism and statism and, as people veer away from the church and veer away from the Judeo Christian values that built our country, people are more likely to embrace statism,” he said in an interview…

It will operate under a 501(c)(3) charter and is owned by Liberty.

The plan to go on offense is similar to how President Trump operates, and it’s no coincidence that both Falwell and Kirk are leading defenders of the president.

Kirk, who stressed that it was an “honor” to work with Falwell in the bid to “organize an army of believers in faith and liberty,” said he expects to be attacked as he and Liberty’s president have for their support for Trump…

“If you want to be loved today as a political conservative, go against the president. You’ll get the best press you could ever possibly imagine. But if you want to stand for what’s right, if you want to stand for truth, defend our country, then you have to stand behind this president,” said Kirk, who has been accompanying Donald Trump Jr. during his book tour to colleges and universities to promote Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

All the failsons gotta hang together, it’s both natural affinity and a defense against their (many, legitimate) enemies.

The Falkirk Center's mission, according to Charlie Kirk, is to find out whether Jesus was a socialist. pic.twitter.com/xhHV1LWPC6

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 30, 2019

That Jesus dude notoriously condemned religious profiteering, promoted multiculturalism and sharing material goods across the community, and gave away free food and healthcare. (Also, He preferred hanging with his group of fellow believers to getting an honest job, and when one of the overworked women of the movement asked for a little help in the kitchen, slanged her off for not properly valuing the worth of intellectual labor.) So: Signs point to YES!

Falkirk “will operate under a 501(c)(3) charter and is owned by Liberty.” So Charlie Kirk will keep running fake charities to hide political activity. And Trump’s IRS ensures wealthy Evangelical donors take 100% tax write-offs. #nonprofits https://t.co/yvBiFMMNXP https://t.co/sBaytQrGWH

— Nancy Levine ?? (@nancylevine) November 30, 2019

@JerryFalwellJr and @charliekirk11 should do like Trump's buddies Lev and Igor and call it Fraud Guaranteed

— Birmingham Weekly (@BhamWeekly) December 1, 2019

Sunday Pharisees Open Thread: The New <del>Failson</del> Falkirk CenterPost + Comments (106)

Sunday Show Review

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix|  October 6, 20199:20 pm| 90 Comments

This post is in: I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

I’m driving cross country, and Sirius XM plays the audio from CNN, MSNBC and Fox, so I was able to listen to the Sunday shows. I haven’t watched them for years: as I assume most of you agree, they’re pretty damn stupid as well as wired for Republicans. Today, though, with the Trump White House and the GOP Congressional Leadership ducking the shows, it didn’t sound good for Trump. The only Republican stupid enough to go on Meet the Press, RonJon, spun up his deep state theories to a pretty unsympathetic audience in Chuck Todd. I didn’t catch the whole RonJon interview but the clips I heard were brutal, with Johnson sounding like a crank, and Todd jumping down his throat.

CNN overall, and Jake Tapper in particular, are pretty much in open revolt from the hegemony of bothsides. Tapper ended his show with a discussion of how Republicans turned on McCarthy, and used the examples of Margaret Chase Smith, who was out early against McCarthy, and Republican Majority Leader Bob Taft, who kept his mouth shut because he felt McCarthy was good for his Presidential ambitions. Jake noted that Smith’s obit led with her anti-McCarthy position, and Taft dropped dead before he could clean up his reputation. It was pretty fucking brutal and might possibly have convinced a Republican or two if any of them really did care about their reputations.

Still a lot of stupid questions, especially the “gotcha” one asking Senators whether they would vote for conviction knowing what they know today. Warren’s answer – the only smart one to that dumb question as far as I’m concerned – was a simple “Yes”. Booker and Klobuchar hemmed, hawed and hedged, ultimately wanting to say “yes” but not wanting to sound like they’re pre-judging Trump. Look, the guy has been trumpeting his guilt all over town – holding back when he’s letting fly looks weak.

I also listened to some of Chris Wallace, who’s the perfect example of how desperate people are for a Fox Newser to be somewhat reasonable that they latch on to the tiniest bit of journalistic practice like he’s the next Murrow. Wallace spent a bunch of time on the Schiff nonsense, but I admit I didn’t listen to the whole thing to avoid a traffic accident.

Overall, I guess I’m surprised that the overall tone and tenor of the shows was very negative for Trump, that (by their standards) they focused on the main issues of his criminality without getting sidetracked too far, and that there were very few hacks who would step up to defend Trump.

Sunday Show ReviewPost + Comments (90)

The Dim Possibility of Showing Some Restraint

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix|  October 4, 201911:15 am| 56 Comments

This post is in: I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

Man, I hate to give Brooks any attention, but this is about perfect:

Flyover Man, Flyover Man
Saying the things
David Brooks can
Is he real? It's not important
Flyover Man

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) October 4, 2019

David Brooks Man, David Brooks Man
Hit by his mid-life pretty bad man
Mountaineering each day
Wed his RA
David Brooks Man

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) October 4, 2019


In case you haven’t been following along, Brooks did what he usually does when everything is bleak, it’s the middle of the night, he’s all alone and the dummies might be right: he masturbates onto the page, rolls over and goes to bed.

The Dim Possibility of Showing Some RestraintPost + Comments (56)

Slings and Arrows

by Betty Cracker|  September 12, 201912:25 pm| 242 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Politics, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

So, this has kind of a coordinated feel to it, as tonight’s Democratic debate looms: Yesterday evening, Ed Rendell dropped a WaPo op-ed entitled “I like Elizabeth Warren. Too bad she’s a hypocrite.”

Rendell smarmily drags Warren for shunning high dollar donor events during the primary campaign because she did attend those type of events (including one hosted by Ed! for which he received a nice thank-you note!) when raising money for the senate and then rolled some of that money over into her primary campaign.

It’s a dog’s breakfast of an argument, IMO. Warren took a risk by eschewing big donor events during the primary. Her campaign finance chair quit over it. If she starts doing the swank circuit now, Rendell would have a point, but she hasn’t, so he doesn’t. Rendell even (stupidly) dragged President Obama into the hair-splitting:

Barack Obama, whom I consider one of the greatest presidents in my lifetime, vowed not to take any money from the political action committees of Wall Street firms in his 2008 campaign. At the same time, his campaign took in millions of dollars in contributions from individuals who worked for Wall Street firms.

But the news media basically gave Obama a free ride and didn’t point out the blatant hypocrisy of trying to win credit for shunning contributions from Wall Street firms while taking tons of money from people who work for those same Wall Street firms. Politics can make people do peculiar things.

Yeah, “politics can make people do peculiar things,” Ed, such as making you construct wholly specious arguments against better people to cover for the fact that you yourself are an old-timey bagman.

Rendell is using the same dumb argument many brainless ninnies deployed against Beto O’Rourke — implying that Beto was in the pocket of Big Oil because many of the individual folks who donated to his campaign worked for oil companies. Duh — he’s from Texas! Not too many lobstermen work in Texas.

Putting Rendell aside (with great force, please and thank you), there’s this long and prolifically sourced Politico piece that came out today that is delightfully entitled: “Why Are You Pissing In Our Face?’: Inside Warren’s War With the Obama Team.” It’s an utterly fascinating article in which many unnamed Obama administration Treasury staffers — and Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel — say Warren doesn’t play well with others. An excerpt:

The acrimonious differences between Warren and her allies, and members of the Obama team, led in part to her decision, with prodding from Obama himself, to leave the administration to run for the Senate rather than continue pursuing the leadership of the consumer-protection bureau. But they never fully abated, and now represent dueling approaches to Democratic economic policy-making, presenting the possibility that the next Democratic president will have ascended to the height of Democratic Party politics in part by bashing the previous one.

Though I recommend the Politico piece (unlike Rendell’s screed), I think that last sentence overdramatizes the schism in true Politico “let’s you and him fight” fashion. As the writer acknowledges, Warren on the trail has been complimentary of President Obama. Why wouldn’t she be? They agree on most things.

The dramatic confrontations are with people like Summers, Geithner and Emanuel. Some Democrats (your humble correspondent, for example) read those names and credited Warren for choosing her enemies wisely. It’s almost as good an unintentional Warren 2020 campaign contribution as Cramer’s “she must be stopped!” rant on CNBC the other day.

Still, the timing of all this is interesting. First lumbering griftosaurus Rendell’s hatchet job, then the moneymen have their say in Politico. If Arne Duncan drops an op-ed today, I’m going to start to get suspicious!

Slings and ArrowsPost + Comments (242)

Industrial clusters and thick labor markets

by David Anderson|  August 9, 20195:00 pm| 70 Comments

This post is in: 2020 Elections, Free Markets Solve Everything, Glibertarianism, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Both Sides Do It!, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

I’m waiting for a huge piece of code to rerun and I should not be working on a cognitively intensive revise and resubmit on a Friday afternoon, so I want to go back to what I originally went to grad school for — urban economics and economic development — for a minute to respond to a seemingly populist and really dumb proposal to strip the federal government of expertise proposed by Andrew Yang.

Washington DC feels very detached from the daily lives of most Americans. One way to change this – relocate Federal agencies that don’t need to be in DC to other parts of the country. Would save tons of money too as DC is one of our most expensive cities. https://t.co/owX9qa8yeo

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) August 8, 2019

Let’s think about Washington DC’s primary export industry as government and more specifically federal government leadership and top level analysis and management. The federal government is an industrial cluster in DC much like venture capital fueled technology firms are an industrial cluster in San Francisco-San Jose region, bio-tech is a cluster in Greater Boston and steel was a cluster in Pittsburgh. Clusters are interesting in that they are often positive feedback loops until they run into hard constraints or a massive external shock.

There is a huge literature on the positive feedback loops on economically successful clusters. One of the major drivers is that a cluster creates a rich and thick labor market. This means that at any given point, there are lots of good jobs available to anyone who is qualified to work in the cluster. People aren’t locked into a “good enough” job because that is the only job available that utilizes any specific human capital/education/tacit knowledge available to them, but that people can readily shift between positions to maximize their personal gain. In Washington DC, if someone is a research economist, there are a hundred opportunities within seven Metro stops of their current place of employment. If someone is a research economist in Sault Ste. Marie, there may be one or two within an hour of their current place of employment. The same applies for geneticists who work in Boston vs. geneticists who work in Boise.

Employment concentration creates specialization and optimization. It allows for work to be more productive as the cluster grows and the labor market becomes even thicker and deeper. This is all pretty standard.

There is another labor market point to make; large urban areas have lots of jobs that are not in the primary export industry. This could matter for me at some point in the future as I could easily see myself spending a couple of years working for either the federal government in the DC-Baltimore region or working for an entity that directly services the federal management and analysis industrial cluster. My wife has a skill set that could translate into this industrial sector but her current experience is in a general professional environment. If my options for moving to DC for federal work or Boone, North Carolina, my wife will far more readily find a good enough job in DC.

Dispersing the vast majority of the DC/Baltimore/NOVA government management and analysis cluster that has been built up over four generations is a great way to make the federal government less efficient and less attractive to top tier talent especially if the dispersion would be going to smaller urban clusters with far shallower and thinner labor markets.

Industrial clusters and thick labor marketsPost + Comments (70)

Late Night Open Thread: “Mostly Harmless”

by Anne Laurie|  August 5, 20191:44 am| 20 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, All Too Normal, Assholes, Cosplay Socialists, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

With the support of everyone at The Resurgent Gathering, with conservatives elected in statehouses and Congress across this country, with President @realDonaldTrump in the @WhiteHouse, and with God’s help, we will make America more prosperous and secure than ever before! pic.twitter.com/ElOuMhNRfm

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) August 2, 2019


Turns out Human Ham Loaf Erick Erickson is still making bank off the beanfests TBoggs once mocked as Tragic: the Gathering. Not drawing a whole lot of mainstream-media attention, which is probably as Erickson prefers.

And yet, Recrudescence: the Homecoming was only the second most pathetic political convo this weekend. Presenting: RoseBros 4Evahcon:

this should be a huge tip off that none of these people really have anything on the line. 4 more years of trump? sure, it might boost membership and heighten the contradictions. total win win. fuck DSA. https://t.co/bhGfjewcwF

— Mike McGrath (@mmcgrath42) August 2, 2019

“Not a departure from the organization’s past policy” = we aren’t personally affected by the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants/POC/women so we don’t have to change anything in response.

— Sarah Christopherson (@sarahcgchris) August 3, 2019

Doing a socialism by refusing to save the country unless you and your cool friends get all the credit

— Harkov311 (@harkov311) August 2, 2019

Glad to see the groundwork being laid for why they’re staying home in 2020.

— DSA DNC Caucus (@agraybee) August 2, 2019

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Late Night Open Thread: “<em>Mostly</em> Harmless”Post + Comments (20)

This Shouldn’t Be So Hard

by Tom Levenson|  May 30, 20192:00 pm| 173 Comments

This post is in: I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I Smell a Pulitzer!, Our Failed Media Experiment

Our Maggie Haberman is not the only reporter at the Grey Lady to use the framing of facts to create crap journalism. Kevin Carey writes on higher education from time to time at The New York Times, and in his latest he describes a new move to show which choices of majors are the most lucrative in order to deter students taking on debt for frivolities like…wait for it…social work.

Here is the lede, the nut graf and the first sentences of the body of the piece:

The Department of Education on Tuesday released detailed information showing the average amount of debt incurred by graduates of different academic programs at each college in America. This focus on programs, rather than institutions as a whole, is gaining favor among political leaders and could have far-reaching effects.

With anxiety about student debt soaring — the billionaire Robert F. Smith made headlines last weekend with his surprise promise to pay off the debts of Morehouse College’s 2019 graduating class — the program-level information has the potential to alter how colleges are funded, regulated and understood by consumers in the marketplace.

The new, more detailed debt information was created in response to an executive order issued in March by President Trump.

Other lawmakers have called for similar approaches. In February, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Education Committee and a former university president, gave a speech outlining his plans to revise the federal Higher Education Act.

There’s a lot of fig leafs within that second paragraph. “Has the potential” does a lot of work, and “consumers in the marketplace” accepts a whole conception of higher ed., that is, to put it most kindly, in dispute.

But there’s more than merely a boatload of unexamined assumptions within the piece to raise concerns.  Here, Carey clearly lays out what he thinks the story is emerging from the facts (not in dispute) that people are collecting information about income and majors (not in fact a new thing) and are doing so in the context of a phenomenon, college debt, that has economic, social, and political implications.

Carey’s story is that more data will enable policymakers and would be students to tailor decisions about money in the most efficient manner; more information will lead to better approaches to what slices of higher education gets funded and by whom.

Carey does hint that there might be something else going on around the undisputed facts (this information is being gathered and politicians are making choices):

There are still many disagreements and details to resolve. The Trump approach relies on the idea that if students have better information, choices in the higher education market will be enough to ensure quality. But there is little evidence to support this view. Even with program data, students will still be vulnerable to the deceptive marketing and aggressive sales tactics that remain widespread in the for-profit college industry.

The measures matter, too. Mr. Alexander’s plan is to evaluate programs based on loan repayment rates. But it isn’t known whether those rates are a good measure of program quality. The Obama method of comparing debt levels to student earnings, by contrast, was so accurate that many colleges pre-emptively shut down their low-performing programs before the sanctions were even applied. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now working to repeal those regulations.

Of note: these two paragraphs are numbers 17 and 18 of 20 in this piece.  Now go back up to the opening passage above: the two measures he cites as evidence for this new move to apply data to college major choice are those he here decries as likely to be ineffective, at best: Trump’s executive order, which relies on, inter alia, the market behavior of for-profit colleges, and Senator Alexander’s, which replaces a (Carey-attested) effective Obama policy with one that reeks of bullshit.

Again: I’m not arguing with Carey’s facts. I’m quite sure that if I re-reported this piece, it would check out.  But only children and John Chait (see the GoS link re Haberman above) believe that journalism is merely the accumulation of stacks of facts like pebbles in a cairn.  The order in which a reporter lays out those facts; the qualifiers and modifiers employed; and above all, the explicit choices made about which facts to emphasize (the lede!) and which to bury (paragraph 17) construct a never-neutral account of reality. Every story is shaped thusly, and it can be done well, clumsily, and, often maliciously — whether that malign outcome is intended or not.

And so it is here: it would seem to me that the story is the Trump and GOP allies are continuing to use bad or at best untested criteria to emphasize technical education at the expense of not just of the liberal arts’ ideal of students equipped for civic and moral reasoning — but of anything that bears on social life as well, all those low-paying jobs (social work!) that do not serve the machine.

More, this version of the story fits with another, larger story: the way the Trump administration and the GOP are pursuing a broad, government-and-society-wide attack on institutions and government policies that have a conception of society large than the nuclear family. The use of selectively acquired or deployed data to undermine, say, social work (hey–it’s his example, not mine!) is not a neutral assessment of the economic value of this program or that.

There’s a lot to be argued about the liberal arts, of course, and some academic disciplines and individual departments do indeed go off the rails on occasion — no argument there.  But the point I’m making here is that Carey had a choice about how to construct his story, and he decided to present it as another advance of a data-driven approach to life, and not at least highlight in his opening the gap between the rhetoric (data! economic efficiency!) and the actual measures being offered to address the alleged problem. A better edited newspaper might have caught some of this.

TL:DR Framing matters. And in this case, the choice of frame glosses a set of pre-existing beliefs never clearly stated or interrogated, while burying the actual news of more GOP taking advantage of a crisis (student debt) to achieve other goals (fucking higher ed)(..  It’s bad journalism, in other words, not because it’s wrong or even because it points to stuff I don’t like, but because it makes it harder, not easier, to understand what its facts actually mean on the ground.

Image: Gerbrand van der Eeckhout, Scholar with his Books, before 1674.

This Shouldn’t Be So HardPost + Comments (173)

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