Newt Gingrich Surprised to Discover That FOX News
Isn't "Fair and Balanced"

Looks like Newt will not go gentle into that good night.

?I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,? Gingrich said during the private meeting -- to which RealClearPolitics was granted access -- at Wesley College. ?In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of FOX, and we?re more likely to get distortion out of FOX. That?s just a fact.?

CNN less biased than FOX? You don't say.

?I assume it?s because Murdoch at some point [who] said, ?I want Romney,? and so ?fair and balanced? became ?Romney,? ? Gingrich said. ?And there?s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches FOX.?

Now, Newt isn't quite so stupid that he just realized that FOX isn't an actual news organization. He's a former employee, after all, and knows FOX is a propaganda outfit. No, he's just pissed that the Murdoch Mud Slinging Machine was turned against him, instead of the Democratic Party.

And he's pissed at the GOP, too.

The former speaker also took a direct shot at the political party whose presidential nomination he continues to seek, calling the GOP ?a party that?s inarticulate.?

?The Republican Party is a managerial party that doesn?t like to fight, doesn?t like to read books,? he said.

Clearly, what Republicans need right now is an inarticulate candidate who eschews reading. Maybe there's another Bush lying around somewhere.

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Clinton Ignores Hold, Approves Humanitarian Aid
for West Bank and Gaza

The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, tried to put a hold on foreign aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It was a manifestation of the same old AIPAC-driven politics, where the US acts punitively toward one[...]

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Wanting A Quiet Place To Think, I Went To The
Houston Astros GameThe Right Mix Of Factors To Get Some Thinking Done In A Public Place

Wanting a quiet place to think in a place where I could have some space, I attended the Houston Astros game this past Monday evening. Above you see a picture I took in the second inning. With the roof open on a warm spring evening, the game was a nice and relaxing spot for contemplation. There [...]

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t-to-the-houston-astros-game-the-right-mix-of-factors-to-get-some-thinking-done-in-a-public-place/

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Racial Discrimination by Banks Is Worsening the
Foreclosure Crisis

Is there a house in your neighborhood that everybody hates to walk past? You know, the one with broken and boarded up windows, trash left to gather on the lawn, and grass so overgrown it?s becoming a habitat for rodents? If you have a house like that[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mydd/~3/yaNxEXmxY_s/racial-discrimination-by-banks
-is-worsening-the-foreclosure-crisis

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Power Failure

Americans have never felt at ease with empire, and with good reason. Running an empire often demands that we betray our republican ideals, at least for periods of time. It can also be costly in gold and in blood. So it was no surprise that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the American people leapt at the opportunity to lay down the imperial burdens we had carried since World War II. Politicians in both parties assured us that we could off-load our responsibilities onto a ?global? market mechanism, overseen by a new institution created in 1995 called the World Trade Organization (WTO). Many if not most of us said, ?Good riddance.?

The September 11 attacks soon reminded us that it wasn?t possible simply to lay down our arms. What we failed to grasp then or since was that our Cold War?era hegemony had not been based solely on military force but also on our ability to manipulate a complex cross-border industrial system built with care over decades.

America?s approach to empire after World War II was based on principles radically different from the mercantilism that had shaped the overseas strategies of the European powers. When the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations remade the political economy of the West, they did not aim solely to concentrate control and wealth in America as, say, the British had concentrated control and wealth in London. Instead, they used the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to engineer a system that distributed opportunity, wealth, and power as widely as possible while also tying nations together in a system of industrial interdependence designed to make it hard for any country to take up arms against another. 

Although most Americans believe ?globalization? is a recent phenomenon, the basic structures of today?s world were all put into place during those first two decades after World War II. In practice, this involved forcing France to share control over its coal and steel industry with Germany, an action that planted the seed of today?s European Union. It also included forcing American industrialists and workers to share their home market with Japanese industrialists and workers, and later with industrialists and workers from across East and Southeast Asia. The basic idea was to encourage peoples to focus their energies on commerce rather than conquest. When they did not do so, the idea was to be able to exercise sufficient economic power to force them to stand down, as the U.S. did when it sabotaged the 1956 French and British adventure in Suez by cutting off flows of oil and cash.

In the half-century after World War II, America was responsible for tragedies in Vietnam, Chile, Iran, and elsewhere. But given the nature of the regime we opposed in the Cold War, we achieved something remarkable. From our position as hegemon, we projected nonmilitary power across the international political economy in ways that, year after year, steadily expanded the realm of peace, prosperity, stability, and liberty. The long booms in China, India, Brazil? All, ultimately, were made in America.

What?s hard to understand now is why it?s taken so long for elites of both parties to admit that our WTO experiment went awry long ago, in the most fundamental of ways. Does Washington?s retreat from regulating international industrial, financial, and energy systems have nothing to do with the growing instability of these systems? Does the U.S. retreat from active management of the trading system have nothing to do with China?s startlingly swift rise to near-hegemonic status? In recent months, the Obama administration has begun to reposition troops and ships to meet what it views as a growing military ?threat? by China. But does such a move make sense while we continue to rely on Chinese factories for, among many other things, the great bulk of the pharmaceuticals and electronics we use every day?

For our nation, there are no questions more important. Yet almost no one asks them.

Through the heart of the 20th century, most Americans assumed that the international economy was entirely the product of political decisions. Experts wrote books explaining the workings of the industrial and trading corporations that Washington used to help govern U.S. relations with other nations. Among the best such efforts were Robert Gilpin?s U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (1975) and Albert O. Hirschman?s National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945). Other experts wrote about the political nature of the large business corporation and detailed how citizens could ensure that these institutions would serve the public interest. The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) by Adolf A. Berle (a member of Franklin Roosevelt?s ?brain trust?) and Gardiner C. Means, for example, was widely influential for five decades after its publication. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, a new model of book emerged in which the authors claimed to identify some great force acting on the human world, almost mechanically, over space and time. Rather than focus on how citizens could use institutions to achieve particular political and economic goals, these works emphasized the general helplessness of the individual, even of the nation. Important early works in this school include Kenichi Ohmae?s The Borderless World (1990), Robert Reich?s The Work of Nations (1991) and, most famous, Francis Fukuyama?s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Lately, the most popular author in this vein has been Thomas L. Friedman, especially with his 2005 book, The World Is Flat.

***

The political goals of these authors differ, often profoundly. But in practice, this metaphysical ?school? helped to obscure how the people who run a state can use cross-border business corporations to project political power into other lands. Where once we saw a network of political institutions, we tend now to see a self-governing ?market.? Where once we saw inter-nation relations, we see ?globalization.? Where once we debated how best to structure institutions to promote cooperation among peoples, we now debate how to compete.

An awakening of sorts does at last seem to be taking place. Much as the shock of 9/11 led us to rethink our military posture, the shocks of the financial crash of 2008, the Japanese tsunami of 2011, and the ongoing euro crisis are forcing us to question how our international industrial and financial systems are structured. As was true after 9/11, one result is a burst of articles and books that aim to reconnect us to some lost corner of our history?theoretically to help America?s elites to act more effectively in the world. Two of the first are Power, Inc. by David Rothkopf and Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.

Rothkopf is a longtime business consultant and author, and he worked in the Commerce Department under President Bill Clinton. In his own work?including his last book, Superclass?he has tracked closely to the metaphysical school while keeping apart from it. In Power, Inc., Rothkopf makes his case in compelling language for finding our future by looking to our past. After listing a series of recent big-think books by, among others, Friedman and Daniel Yergin, Rothkopf faults them all for a ?temporal narcissism? characterized by a tendency to focus ?primarily on the recent, rather than the remote, past.? 

 Good start. Unfortunately, the problems begin as soon as Rothkopf sketches out his thesis?essentially that ?regardless of the system we see, corporations have grown in influence worldwide and in every instance have played a role in paring away key prerogatives of the state.? This assertion is questionable on its face. It is by no means clear that private corporations in, say, China have in any significant way supplanted the central state. A more grave failing for a book called Power, Inc. is that Rothkopf never clarifies the differences between the corporations we use to govern nations and the corporations we use to govern industrial and commercial activities or, for that matter, the corporations we use to govern cities and universities. Nor does Rothkopf clearly distinguish between what makes an institution ?public? and what makes it ?private.? Is the Chinese state today the property of the Chinese people or of the lords of the politburo? Is Wal-Mart a reincarnation of the British East India Company, hence a tool of that same state, or rather, those same lords? Does the U.S. state lack the power to assert control over private corporations and banks? Or would it be more accurate to conclude that the state apparatus was essentially privatized by, for instance, Rothkopf?s superclass over the course of the Reagan and Clinton administrations? Don?t expect to find an answer, or even the question, here.

In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, seek to distill key lessons from their long experience in the politics and economics of development. Unlike Rothkopf, they ask the right questions, beginning with ?Who Is the State?? And they start with an impeccable thesis. ?Inclusive political institutions? like the open markets of mid-20th-century America, they argue, deliver better economic outcomes for the many than do ?extractive? institutions, like billionaire businessman Carlos Slim Helú?s cluster of monopolies in today?s Mexico. They then use this opposition to lay the basis for an important conclusion?that the current fashion for ?authoritarian growth? models of development, in which nations like Sierra Leone or the Congo are urged to emulate autocratic China, is wrong and dangerous. ?Growth under extractive political institutions, as in China,? they write, ?will not bring sustained growth, and is likely to run out of steam.?

Like Rothkopf, Acemoglu and Robinson also dig deep into history to prove their case. But many of their stories are recklessly reductionist. They trace America?s ?inclusive? political institutions, for instance, to a single germinating moment: the sudden, belated realization in Jamestown that a Spanish-style conquest and pursuit of gold would not pay. The authors also mistakenly conclude that it is necessary to recount almost the entire history of the world to make their case. Just one brief excursion takes us from Tiberius Gracchus to Roman shipwrecks to photosynthesis to a point 3,030 meters below the ice in Greenland over the course of a few paragraphs. 

Given the authors? ex-pressed concern about the growing fashionableness of China?s development model, a bigger problem is their failure to connect this to the collapse of America?s ability to protect the world system Washington put into place after World War II. The very concept of development was part of the much larger U.S. strategy designed in the early years of the Cold War. So, too, were the main institutions of the development regime, such as the World Bank. Yet Acemoglu and Robinson never explore whether the growing popularity of the authoritarian development model is but another symptom of China?s swift and conscious move into the power vacuum created when Washington let go the levers of empire in the mid-1990s.

America does not ever again need to micromanage the world?the system we built after World War II no longer requires such rule. But we do have to use our still-considerable power consciously. The greatest danger we face today comes not from having ceded pride of place. It comes from having dismantled the institutions and habits of thought that enabled us to ensure that no other nation-state or corporate estate captures control over the international system as a whole or concentrates sufficient power to disrupt the flow of goods and money. These two books, while looking to the past for answers, manage to jump right over the key lessons of history.

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Actually, it's pretty tough work to be Mitt
Romney's top adviser on lady issues

Ann Romney, Mitt's top policy advisor on women's issues (Jeff Haynes/Reuters)Here's what CNN contributor Hilary Rosen said that has spawned so much fauxtrage among Republicans:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we -- why do we worry about their future?

For example, Ann Romney is now Mitt Romney's top policy aide and spokeswoman on women's issues. That's tough work! And she's doing it during wartime, no less. And it's not just any old war: it's a war on women. And she's on the wrong side! I mean, would you like to defend giving employers the right to ban birth control coverage from employee insurance plans? Didn't think so! So let's cut her some slack: she's got a damn tough job. Nearly impossible, in fact.

On the other hand, Rosen's central point was obviously that Ann Romney has never had to deal with the same sorts of financial issues most women have had to face. And despite all the furor from Romneyland, that's a point that even Ann Romney herself acknowledges to be accurate. As she said earlier this morning: "I haven't struggled as much financially as some people have." Exactly! And that's the point Rosen was trying to make.

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Myths And Facts About Oil And Gasoline

Both mainstream and conservative media outlets have responded to the recent spike in gasoline prices by circulating talking points rooted in politics rather than facts. As a whole, these claims reflect the misconception, perpetuated by the news media, that changes in U.S. energy policy are a major driver of oil and gasoline prices.

What would "drill baby drill" mean for gasoline prices?

Would the Keystone XL pipeline affect gasoline prices?

Is monetary policy to blame for the recent price spike?

How do U.S. fuel taxes compare to other nations?

Could we shift to a single national gasoline blend?

Why did oil and gasoline prices fall sharply in late 2008?

If we end tax breaks for oil companies, would gasoline prices change?

Do oil companies receive the same tax breaks as other companies?

How does current U.S. oil production compare to previous years?

How much oil is coming from federal lands relative to previous years?

How have U.S. petroleum imports changed in recent years?

Is the U.S. sitting on over a trillion barrels of oil?

What would "energy independence" mean for gasoline prices?

FACT: Drilling Is Not A Solution To Gas Price Spikes

MYTH: Media Present U.S. Oil Production As A Solution To High Gas Prices.

• In recent months, all of the broadcast and cable news networks except NBC mentioned expanded domestic drilling as a factor that has or would lower gasoline prices. [Media Matters,  [The Economist,

  Number Of Drilling Rigs Has Doubled Since 2009. The Washington Post reported:

  This year, Republicans are saying Obama has not done enough to promote domestic drilling, but the U.S. [Data from Congressional Research Service, [EIA, report. In 2010, daily net imports averaged 269,000 barrels. U.S. refiners exported record amounts of gasoline, heating oil and diesel to meet higher global fuel demand while U.S. fuel consumption sank. [Bloomberg,

  CRS classified oil shale as a "Sub-Economic" resource, writing:

  After coal, oil shale represents the most abundant fossil fuel in the United States. However, despite government programs in the 1970s and early 1980s to stimulate development of the resource, production of oil shale is not yet commercially viable. The need for massive capital investment and the cost of production itself have been the major barriers. A further economic factor lies in the fact that liquids produced from oil shale have a unique chemical composition and, unlike conventional crude oil, cannot be distilled to produce gasoline, but would be primarily a source of other liquid middle distillate fuels such as jet fuel or diesel oil, fuels for which there is significant national demand. In addition, production of liquids from oil shale requires large amounts of water, an important factor since most of the resource is located in water-scarce regions of western Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Other environmental problems include the difficulty in disposing of tailings if excavation is used as the extraction process, and the production of greenhouse gases. In light of these difficulties, efforts to aid in the development of oil shale are focused on pilot projects to test alternative technologies of production. [Congressional Research Service, 12/28/11]

  Energy Expert: Oil Shale Has No Foreseeable "Commercially Viable Process." Responding to claims "that the U.S. has hundreds of billions or even trillions of barrels of oil waiting to be produced," energy expert Robert Rapier wrote at Consumer Energy Report:

  [T]he Green River formation is the source of talk of those huge oil resources -- larger than those of Saudi Arabia -- and it is a very different prospect than the tight oil being produced in North Dakota and Texas. The oil shale in the Green River looks like rock. Unlike the hydrocarbons in the tight oil formations, the oil shale (kerogen) consists of very heavy hydrocarbons that are solid. In that way, oil shale more resembles coal than oil. Oil shale is essentially oil that Mother Nature did not finish cooking, and thus to convert it into oil, heat has to be added. The energy requirements -- plus the fact that oil shale production requires a lot of water in a very dry environment -- have kept oil shale commercialization out of reach for over 100 years.

  [...]

  It is not at all clear that even at $100 oil the shale in the Green River formation will be commercialized to produce oil. In order to commercially convert the oil shale into oil, a much less energy intensive method of producing it must be found (or, one would have to have extremely cheap energy and abundant water supplies to drive the process). My prediction is that despite having an oil shale resource that may contain the energy equivalent of 2 trillion barrels of oil, the reserve will continue to be zero for quite some time because there are too many technical hurdles to overcome to realize a commercially viable process. [Consumer Energy Report, 3/26/12]

  Chevron Gave Up Oil Shale Lease. AP reported in February:

  Chevron Corp. is giving up its experimental oil shale lease in northwest Colorado, saying it wants to free up its resources for other priorities.

  [...]

  Getting petroleum-like substances out of mined oil shale is tougher than pumping oil out of traditional wells. Companies haven't found an economical way to do it in the U.S. [Associated Press, 2/28/12]

  FACT: Energy Independence Does Not Mean Low Prices

  MYTH: Conservative Media Claim That Lower Imports Equal Lower Prices.

  • Fox News Eric Bolling said: "We're dependent on foreign oil. If we were dependent on our own oil, it wouldn't matter what happens in Iran. Just like - we use a lot of natural gas here, right? It doesn't matter what's going on in Iran, natural gas prices aren't going up. If because everything we produce, we use right here in America." [Fox Business Network, Cavuto, 3/1/12, via Nexis]

  • Dick Morris said on Fox News that: "the United States now has the capacity to increase the global supply of oil that we can, in the future, completely control gas and oil prices." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 3/21/12, via Nexis]

  TIME: "The Oil The U.S. Uses May Be American, But That Doesn't Mean It Will Be Cheap." In a cover story for TIME Magazine, Bryan Walsh reported that while "reducing oil imports is good for the U.S. economy," it doesn't translate into low or stable oil and gasoline prices:

  While unconventional sources promise to keep the supply of oil flowing, it won't flow as easily as it did for most of the 20th century. The new supplies are for the most part more expensive than traditional oil from places like the Middle East, sometimes significantly so. They are often dirtier, with higher risks of accidents. The decline of major conventional oil fields and the rise in demand mean the spare production capacity that once cushioned prices could be gone, ushering in an era of volatile market swings.

  [...]

  [C]ontrary to what the drill-here, drill-now crowd says, oil companies could punch holes in every state and barely make a dent in gasoline prices. Even a more energy independent U.S. can't control prices, not with a thirsty China competing on the globalized oil market. "Energy security is fine, but it doesn't have that much meaning in a globalized economy," says Guy Caruso, a former head of the EIA. "More production adds fungibility to the world market, but we're still vulnerable to shocks in other countries." The oil the U.S. uses may be American, but that doesn't mean it will be cheap. [TIME, 4/9/12]

  Shell CEO: "We Will See Prices Going Up" As "It Gets More Expensive To Get Resources Out Of The Ground." Shell CEO Peter Voser told CNBC that "In the very long term we will see prices going up because of high demand and as it gets more expensive to get the resources out of the ground." [CNBC.com, 3/20/12]

  EIA Chief Under Bush: "We're Still Vulnerable To Any Shocks To The System" Even If We Stop Importing Oil From the Middle East. From a Politico report:

  Whether the oil is produced in the Gulf of Mexico, the Bakken formation in North Dakota or offshore of Brazil, the U.S. has to buy it at the same volatile global price. That price is susceptible to disasters that cut off production or confrontations with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz.

  Guy Caruso, who was the EIA's chief for more than six years of the George W. Bush administration, called energy independence a "political slogan."

  "Say we wave a magic wand and say we import no oil from the Middle East ... does that mean we're secure? More 'independent'?" he asked. "The answer is no because we're still vulnerable to any shocks to the system."

  Another complication is that the U.S. is unlikely to have much impact on the global oil market, no matter how much it produces.

  "The U.S. is a small producer without much flexibility in a much bigger and rapidly growing global market. There is no way that we can ramp up any sort of production enough, and fast enough, to materially swing the global market," [former BP chief scientist Steve] Koonin said. "And moreover, the cartel, OPEC, has its hand on the tap and can restore the price."

  [...]

  Koonin also noted that increased oil production in a time of high prices is a boon for the industry.

  "When you hear the international oil companies advocating for energy independence, it's really about making money, which isn't a bad thing," Koonin said. "If they produce a million more barrels a day, they're not going to change the global price much. And since they know the global price is going up, they'll just make more money.

  "There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't solve the price problem or the greenhouse gas problem," he said. [Politico, 2/23/12]

  CFR: "Problem Can Be Addressed Only By Making The U.S. Economy More Resilient To Oil Price Swings." In a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, energy expert Michael Levi wrote:

  Since oil is traded on a global market, the effects of volatility are reflected in the price of every barrel of oil regardless of its origin. This problem can be addressed only by making the U.S. economy more resilient to oil price swings, which includes -- most significantly -- lowering total U.S. oil consumption. [Council on Foreign Relations, May 2009]

  
  
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  http://feeds.mediamatters.org/~r/mediamatters/latest/~3/FHJ6lfsmNMI/201204120005

  
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Live By the Comically Biased "News" Network, Die
By the Comically Biased "News" Network

Before he had to give up the job to run for president, Newt Gingrich was (among other things) a paid Fox News commentator. Well, it looks like he won't be getting that job back:

DOVER, Del. -- During a meeting with 18 Delaware Tea Party leaders here on Wednesday, Newt Gingrich lambasted FOX News Channel, accusing the cable network of having been in the tank for Mitt Romney from the beginning of the Republican presidential fight. An employee himself of the news outlet as recently as last year, he also cited former colleagues for attacking him out of what he characterized as personal jealousy.

?I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,? Gingrich said during the private meeting -- to which RealClearPolitics was granted access -- at Wesley College. ?In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of FOX, and we?re more likely to get distortion out of FOX. That?s just a fact.?

Gingrich may have a point (I haven't been watching much Fox lately, but Newt isn't the first person to describe them as in the tank for Romney). But he probably should have seen it coming. I'm guessing that he bought all that "fair and balanced" crap, but didn't understand Fox's true nature. When you're a conservative, Fox's relentless criticism of the Obama administration and liberals in general just looks like truth-telling. But once you have a contest between conservatives, the channel's identity becomes a little clearer. Fox is part of the Republican establishment. That establishment is more complex and multi-layered than you might think, but in the end, Roger Ailes is going to shape his network's coverage to accomplish two goals: making money, and serving the interests of the Republican party. Gingrich said, ""I assume it?s because [Rupert] Murdoch at some point said, ?I want Romney,? and so ?fair and balanced? became ?Romney,? " but it's much more likely that it was Ailes, who runs the network.

Once he became a candidate, Gingrich became a threat to the GOP. Not because, as he would have it, he's such a transformational, outside-the-box figure, but because he's so widely reviled. It's one thing to have him come on your programs and call Barack Obama a socialist, but it's another thing entirely to have him running around the country tossing brickbats at the guy everyone knows is going to be your party's nominee.

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Syrian Cease-Fire Tenuous, Fragile

I think it would be a mistake to look at the tenuous success from the first day of a cease-fire in Syria and pronounce the cease-fire solved. In fact, the government isn't honoring the cease-fire. It included a provision to have the regime pull back[...]

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Think Backyard Chickens are Gross Watch This
Video on Factory Eggs

A Humane Society investigation has turned up evidence of widespread cruelty & unhealthy practices at a factory-style egg production facility. As Nicholas Kristof wrote in today's New York Times, "The police would stop wayward boys who were torturing a stray dog, so should we allow industrialists to abuse millions of hens?"

At some point, we thought it would be healthier to separate ourselves from the production of our food, sending food production to distant farms & factories. But have we gone too far? Could a few chickens in your community's yards really be any less healthy than what the Humane Society found?

It's time for communities like Arlington to lift restrictions on backyard chickens.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheGreenMiles/~3/aEAHI8mg2vA/think-backyard-chicke
ns-are-gross-watch.html

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