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Democrats in the House of Representatives have rolled out what they are calling a “Green New Deal.” It
is the most serious public policy offering from Generation Tide Pod Eater to ever be unveiled. It is
exactly what you would expect.
In the rollout of their deal, the Democrats released an outline that summarized their legislation. It
included such gems as “When JFK said we’d go to the by the end of the decade, people said impossible.
” You might think I left out the word “moon” and a few other choice words. You would be wrong. The Democrats left those out. There is also this one: “we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows.”
This is not the work product of serious people. This is the work product of zealots who are under the impression they have more power than they have. The Democrats’ plan calls for the elimination of fossil fuels and the embrace of 100%...
1a) Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal
offers 'economic security' for those
'unwilling to work'
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and US Senator Ed Markey (R), Democrat of Massachusetts, speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation to promote clean energy programs outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, February 7, 2019.
The Green New Deal that Democrats proposed Thursday looks to create a more environmentally sound country with economic benefits for everyone — even those who don't want to work.
An overview circulated by proponents states the plan seeks a "massive transformation of our society" that could rid the country of fossil fuels and "create millions of family supporting-wage [sic] union jobs."
But for those not interested in working, there's something in the plan as well.
The overview notes that the Green New Deal aims to provide "economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work."
While the resolution patterns itself after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which was aimed at rescuing the country from the Great Depression, the FDR plan did not include a proviso for those willingly idle. The Green New Deal seeks to shift the U.S. to all renewable energy in 10 years.
The actual resolution that outlines the Green New Deal does not include the "unwilling to work" part, but the overview document, released by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's office, does include the "unwilling" language. The overview entails the "nuts and bolts" of the plan. Ocasio-Cortez identifies as a democratic socialist.
CNBC has reached out to Ocasio-Cortez's office for comment.
1b)And that might be the easy part. According to an accompanying fact sheet, the Green New Deal would also get rid of combustion engines, “build charging stations everywhere,” “upgrade or replace every building in U.S.,” do the same with all “infrastructure,” and crisscross the nation with “high-speed rail.”
Buried in the details, the Green New Deal also promises government control of the most fundamental aspects of private life. The fact sheet explains why the resolution doesn’t call for “banning fossil fuels” or for “zero” emissions across the entire economy—at least at first. It’s because “we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast” (emphasis mine).
This is an acknowledgment that planes don’t run on anything but fossil fuel. No jet fuel, no trips to see granny. It’s also an acknowledgment that livestock produce methane, which has led climate alarmists to engage in “meatless Mondays.” AOC may not prove able to eradicate “fully” every family Christmas or strip of bacon in a decade, but that’s the goal.
Finally, the resolution is Democratic math at its best. It leaves out a price tag, and is equally vague on what kind of taxes would be needed to cover the cost. But it would run to tens of trillions of dollars. The fact sheet asserts the cost shouldn’t worry anyone, since the Federal Reserve can just “extend credit” to these projects! And “new public banks can be created to extend credit,” too! And Americans will get lots of “shared prosperity” from their “investments.” À la Solyndra.
At least some Democrats seem to be aware of what a danger this is, which is why Ms. Pelosi threw some cold water on the Green New Deal this week. They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.
1b)The Socialist That Could
Meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the secret Republican weapon for 2020.
By Kimberley Strassel
The Republican Party has a secret weapon for 2020. It’s especially effective because it’s stealthy: The Democrats seem oblivious to its power. And the GOP needn’t lift a finger for it to work. All Republicans have to do is sit back and watch 29-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez . . . exist.
AOC, as she’s better known, today exists largely in front of the cameras. In a few months she’s gone from an unknown New York bartender to the democratic socialist darling of the left and
its media hordes. Her megaphone is so loud that she rivals Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the face of the Democratic Party. Republicans don’t know whether to applaud or laugh. Most do both.
For them, what’s not to love? She’s set off a fratricidal war on the left, with her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, this week slamming the “radical conservatives” among the Democrats holding the party “hostage.” She’s made friends with Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s
Labour Party, who has been accused of anti-Semitism. She’s called the American system of wealth creation “immoral” and believes government has a duty to provide “economic security” to people who are “unwilling to work.” As a representative of New York, she’s making California look sensible.
On Thursday Ms. Ocasio-Cortez unveiled her vaunted Green New Deal, complete with the details of how Democrats plan to reach climate nirvana in a mere 10 years. It came in the form of a resolution, sponsored in the Senate by Massachusetts’ Edward Markey, on which AOC is determined to force a full House vote. That means every Democrat in Washington will get to
go on the record in favor of abolishing air travel, outlawing steaks, forcing all American homeowners to retrofit their houses, putting every miner, oil rigger, livestock rancher and gas-station attendant out of a job, and spending trillions and trillions more tax money. Oh, also for government-run health care, which is somehow a prerequisite for a clean economy.
It’s a GOP dream, especially because the media presented her plan with a straight face—as a legitimate proposal from a legitimate leader in the Democratic Party. Republicans are thrilled
to treat it that way in the march to 2020, as their set-piece example of what Democrats would
do to the economy and average Americans if given control. The Green New Deal encapsulates everything Americans fear from government, all in one bonkers resolution.
It is for starters, a massive plan for the government to take over and micromanage much the economy. Take the central plank, its diktat of producing 100% of U.S. electricity “through
clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2030. As Ron Bailey at Reason has noted, a 2015 plan from Stanford envisioning the goal called for the installation of 154,000 offshore wind turbines, 335,000 onshore wind turbines, 75 million residential photovoltaic (solar) systems, 2.75 million commercial solar systems, and 46,000 utility-scale solar facilities. AOC has been clear it will be government building all this, not the private sector.
And that might be the easy part. According to an accompanying fact sheet, the Green New
Deal would also get rid of combustion engines, “build charging stations everywhere,” “upgrade or replace every building in U.S.,” do the same with all “infrastructure,” and crisscross the nation with “high-speed rail.”
Buried in the details, the Green New Deal also promises government control of the most fundamental aspects of private life. The fact sheet explains why the resolution doesn’t call for “banning fossil fuels” or for “zero” emissions across the entire economy—at least at first. It’s because “we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that
fast” (emphasis mine).
This is an acknowledgment that planes don’t run on anything but fossil fuel. No jet fuel, no trips to see granny. It’s also an acknowledgment that livestock produce methane, which has led climate alarmists to engage in “meatless Mondays.” AOC may not prove able to eradicate “fully” every family Christmas or strip of bacon in a decade, but that’s the goal.
Finally, the resolution is Democratic math at its best. It leaves out a price tag, and is equally vague on what kind of taxes would be needed to cover the cost. But it would run to tens of trillions of dollars. The fact sheet asserts the cost shouldn’t worry anyone, since the Federal Reserve can just “extend credit” to these projects! And “new public banks can be created to extend credit,” too! And Americans will get lots of “shared prosperity” from their “investments.” À la Solyndra.
At least some Democrats seem to be aware of what a danger this is, which is why Ms. Pelosi threw some cold water on the Green New Deal this week. They should be scared. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is a freight train gaining speed by the day—and helping Republicans with every passing minute.
1c) If It Innovates, Tax It,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Suggests
Congress’s young socialist neglects the ways the public benefits from federal research funding
At a recent hearing on drug prices, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that by funding federal research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, “the public is acting as an early investor, putting tons of money in the development of drugs that then become privatized.” The American people, she complained, receive “no return on the investment that they have made.” The witness she was addressing, Harvard Medical School professor Aaron Kesselheim, confirmed the absence of “licensing deals that bring money back into the coffers of the NIH.”
Direct licensing deals between companies and government labs are rare by design—a design that has fueled American economic, military and political power for the past seven decades. This structure has been a critical engine of U.S. economic growth since the end of World War II.
The American electronics, personal-computer and biotech industries all can trace their origin to federal research. The discovery of the transistor, for example, was enabled by federal research into the band theory of solids and the science of growing pure germanium crystals. The internet, the Global Positioning System, genetic engineering, pacemakers, magnetic resonance imaging, 3-D animation in movies, the Google PageRank search algorithm, even the Siri voice assistant on iPhones—all sprang from federal research. Yet the government receives no royalties on Disney movies or iPhones.
Still, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is wrong that taxpayers get no return on their investment. The resulting growth from these inventions generates significant government revenue in the form of income and capital-gains taxes on thousands of companies and their millions of employees. Leading the world in science and technology, as well as their commercial applications, also enhances America’s geopolitical power and strengthens national security.
The goal of the federal research system has always been to transfer new knowledge and laboratory results as quickly and seamlessly as possible to private industry, which can then translate them into useful products that can boost the economy. The NIH, for example, spends $3.9 billion annually on research conducted in national labs. Biotech and pharmaceutical companies spend more than $90 billion annually on drug discovery and development.
This system took shape toward the end of World War II. Vannevar Bush, President Franklin Roosevelt’s chief scientific adviser, had mobilized the nation’s scientists in support of the war effort. FDR wrote that there was no reason that the same system “cannot be profitably employed in times of peace.”
Roosevelt and Bush understood that free markets work well for encouraging innovation, except where they fail: long-term basic research. The return on that investment is often negative. No one company could have afforded to invest in growing pure germanium crystals without knowing if there would be any benefit. No one company could have afforded to invest in the speculative science of genetic engineering decades ago. FDR and Bush solved a game-theory problem: When an investment isn’t good for any individual company on its own but could benefit the economy as a whole, the federal government should fund it.
Quantifying the “return” of that taxpayer investment, and separating the contribution of private vs. public investment, is a famously difficult problem in science policy. But as one measure, economists have attributed roughly half of the trillions of dollars in U.S. gross domestic
product growth since the end of World War II to technology improvements. Other countries, most notably China, have noticed the model’s success and adopted it. To remain the world’s leading power, the U.S. needs to invest more in federal research and to transfer its findings seamlessly to industry, Additional taxes on innovation would be a hindrance.
A lack of licensing deals between companies and national labs has nothing to do with high
drug prices, which reflect the enormous development costs—in cancer studies, for example, more than 95% of drug candidates never make it past testing. Many smart people are trying to figure out how to develop effective treatments while keeping prices low. Some of
their ideas were reviewed during last week’s hearing. None, however, involve creating more friction between federal research and private industry. Taxing iPhones, Disney movies or
cancer drugs for the federal research that enabled them won’t do anyone any good.
Mr. Bahcall is a physicist, a former biotech CEO and author of “Loonshots: How to Nurture
the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.”
1d)
AOC's Green New Deal Proposal Is One Of The Stupidest Documents Ever Written
By Ben Shapiro
On Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) released a six-page proposal for her much-ballyhooed Green New Deal. Before so much as reading it, presumably, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who happens to
be a 2020 presidential frontrunner, endorsed it:
She should have read it.
Whoever wrote the proposal is, to put it kindly, dense. Idiotic. Moronic. Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) found herself unable to pretend to take
it seriously; she said she hadn’t seen it yet, but “it’s enthusiastic and I appreciate the enthusiasm.” This, not coincidentally, is precisely what I say when I find out that my 2-year-old son has used his magic markers on his bedroom wall. When Nancy
Pelosi has to pat you on the head and tell you that your picture of a doggie – which, for the record, looks like a blob with three legs and a spaghetti sauce stain – is just great honey, you’re in trouble.
She added that the Green New Deal “will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream or whatever they call it nobody
knows what it is but they’re for it, right?”
Ouch.
For her part, AOC seems to know that she can’t declare war on Pelosi without the cagey veteran nuking her. “I don’t consider that to be a dismissive term. I think it’s a great term,” the farcical 29-year-old former bartender-turned-Congresswoman eagerly said. To which New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz correctly tweeted, “Oh, honey.”
How bad is the Green New Deal paper? Putting aside the fact that, as written, it would receive a C+ in any high school English class, it essentially articulates a magical world in which the skies rain chocolate, the world is powered by unicorn farts, and AOC dances through the gumdrop meadows to Lisztomania. The
proposal calls for the United States to be free of carbon emissions within 10 years without the use of nuclear power. It calls for every building in the United States to be replaced or retrofitted in green fashion. It calls for universal healthcare, free college education, the replacement of airplanes with high-speed trains,
charging stations “everywhere” (this is the sort of exactness the proposal contains), replacement of “every combustion-engine vehicle,” government-provided jobs, family and medical leave, vacations, retirement security, and the abolition of “farting cows.” It also calls for total “economic security” for anyone “unable or unwilling to work.”
Whether AOC plans to chain up billionaires and work them against their will or
simply engage in anti-billionaire dekulakization remains to be seen. After all, somebody will have to pay for this.
Or not. According to AOC, nobody will have to pay for this – like a timeshare you bought on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1997, this thing will pay for itself! This is a direct quote: “At the end of the day, this is an investment in our economy that should grow our wealth as a nation, so the question isn’t how we will pay for it, but what
will we do with our new shared prosperity.”
The question, guys, isn’t how to pay for the Fyre Festival – it’s what we’ll do with the free drinks, the beautiful cabanas, and the epic memories we’ll create together!
I correct myself: my two-year-old son could come up with a better, more realistic proposal than this one. It’s not actually much of a competition.
But, we’ve been told, AOC is the Fresh Face™ of the Democratic Party – So Fresh, So Face. Sadly, the intellectual content that emanates from that fresh face is indistinguishable from the product of the cows she seeks to abolish.
1e) "Good morning, Dick. I hope you are well.
I have been thinking about socialism of late and wanted to share some of my insights on the subject from my
left-of-center perspective. As always, I welcome your feedback and discussion!
I believe that socialism is a jealous form of greed. If capitalism sees what can be and strives to achieve it, socialism sees what is and strives to take it. It is vengeful and covetous, claiming domain under the specious pretense that because all do not have, none deserve.
While our great nation has longed practice re-distribution policies that establish necessary safety nets, I believe
a line is crossed when politicians demonize wealth and dismiss the merit accorded with most successes.
While I have great distaste for Trump's behavior and many of his policies, I also see hypocrisy in the "other-than'ing" liberal politicians are currently engaging in with wealthy Americans. Yesterday Robert Reich basically said anyone who has a billion dollars didn't earn it fairly and didn't deserve it. I doubt he sees the bias in his belief. I am not crying for the wealthy, but hate against a person is corrosive, whether its root is in his race, religion or social status.
Ultimately, I believe socialism will corrode our society. It will turn to ember the fire that drives our desire to grow,
to improve, and, yes, to achieve. Some of the greatest givers in our society are wealthy people and many enjoy the fruits of their generosity. To dim that flame because some of us do not have what they have is at best
counter-productive. It is un-American. And, I think, it is ugly.
End of rant. P------"
1f)" Dick,
Perhaps a good way to implement the Green New Deal would be to fund one way tickets to the country of choice....Venezuela, Russia, China....via the new “high speed rail” for Soros, Al Gore, Obama, Cortez, Sanders, Warren, Booker, Harris, Gillibrand, Abrams, Tlaib, Omar etc!
On a serious note, Cortez and her socialist anti Semites are quite scary. Unfortunately the millennial's, who
were systematically indoctrinated via their public school and liberal university education, buy her rhetoric hook, line, and sinker and of course have voting rights.
Media is very effective in spewing these messages and after hearing the message time and again from the majority of news outlets, many people buy it.
Have a great day!
B------"
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2)
by Joseph Braude
To some degree, yes—but Arabs advocating a “peace between peoples” continue to face a high barrier, and need help.
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3)
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Adam Schiff’s Collusion Exposed
Adam Schiff’s unreported contact with Fusion GPS has thrown doubt in the House’s investigation. PJ Media reports:
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the new House Intelligence Committee chairman, is facing calls to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after photos emerged of him at an undisclosed meeting (colluding?) with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, a key figure in the Russia collusion scandal.
This comes as the Democrat-led committee is massively expanding the Russia probe to include Trump’s business dealings.
The photos in question were taken at a prestigious Aspen security conference last July, The Hill’s John Solomon reported. They show Schiff wearing a “sport coat and open-neck dress shirt, and Simpson wearing casual attire,” according to Solomon, who has seen the pics.
Fusion GPS, which was hired on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump, has a long history of smearing Republicans for profit. In 2012, for instance, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as well as his donors, to literally create an enemies list.
This take hypocrisy to the next level, and Schiff’s collusion should be investigated immediately.
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4)
Last week, I led 40 United Nations ambassadors on a trip to Poland to become witnesses to the Holocaust, and then to Israel to experience the miracle of the reborn nation-state of the Jewish people.
As the Holocaust recedes into the past, the world is witnessing a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Most Western leaders condemn this bigotry when it targets diaspora Jews. But too often they disregard, dismiss or even justify Jew-hatred when it targets Jews in their national homeland, Israel.
This willful neglect of anti-Semitism against Israeli Jews poses the greatest danger to diaspora Jews, since it legitimizes anti-Semitism everywhere.
The Jewish diaspora feels besieged, more so than it has in a long time. In Europe, attitudes toward Jews not expressed since the 1930s have become commonplace, with over 80 percent of European Jews identifying anti-Semitism as the primary threat to their safety, according to recent surveys.
In 2014, relentless attacks compelled more than 1,000 French Jews to immigrate to Israel. This, even though Israel was fighting a military operation against Hamas at the time. In Britain, meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour party has described Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends” and laid wreaths at the graves of Palestinian terrorists.
Of course, the rise of anti-Semitism isn’t just a European problem. It also threatens the American Jewish community.
Here in America, there are those, like the leaders of the Women’s March, who are outspoken anti-Semites and steadfastly endorse national figures such as Louis Farrakhan, who refers to Jews as “termites” and considers Hitler a “great man.” And there are others whose bigotry manifests itself violently, such as the neo-Nazis who chanted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Va., or the gunman who slaughtered 11 Jews while they were praying at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in October.
Jews in Israel aren’t immune to violent anti-Semitism.
Hamas in the Gaza Strip is one of the world’s most virulently anti-Semitic organizations. Its charter calls for genocide against the Jewish people, and it doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. And President Mahmoud Abbas has allocated 7 percent, or $355 million, of the Palestinian Authority’s budget to bankroll the families of terrorists who attack Jews. He has stated publicly that any future Palestinian state would be free of Jews.
Instead of viewing anti-Semitism against Israelis as the irrational bigotry that it is, the world often attributes it to rational motives, part of a legitimate national struggle.
Western apologists justify violent rioters shouting “Jews, we’re coming to slaughter you!” at the Gaza border, claiming such hateful outbursts are an understandable reaction to the “occupation.” Ditto for the 17-year-old Palestinian who last year murdered Ari Fuld, an Israeli-American Jew, in cold blood.
People who would rightly condemn violence against Jews for being Jews as anti-Semitism lose their moral bearings when it comes to Israel, where political, territorial or economic reasons are offered as alibis for what is, at the core, anti-Semitism.
And when Israel is forced to defend itself, world leaders often draw a false moral equivalence between a Jewish democracy and its terrorist enemies. Naturally, they blame Israel for any resulting casualties. The inability or unwillingness to unequivocally condemn the anti-Semitic perpetrator is uniquely applied to Israel — the “Jew” among the nations.
Such biased attitudes allow the boycott, divest and sanctions movement to conceal its true goal of destroying the Jewish state. They also enable the likes of Corbyn to normalize overt hostility against Israel, something that was once considered beyond the pale in the West. Finally, elite tolerance for Israel-focused anti-Semitism has led to Jews being ostracized from supposedly “progressive” rallies in the West. You can claim that you find Zionism “creepy” when really you detest Jews.
This new form of anti-Semitism is especially pernicious, as it will bide its time until an ever-changing political climate allows it to reveal its true nature and turn on its ultimate target: the Jewish people everywhere.
It is imperative for the world to recognize that, to paraphrase the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., anti-Semitism anywhere is a threat to Jews everywhere. An attack against a Jew for being a Jew must be condemned for what it is — bigotry — regardless of whether it occurs in New York, Paris or Jerusalem.
Danny Danon is Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.
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4a)
Has the US intelligence community misread Iran’s nuclear program?
U.S. President Donald Trump seems to think so, as do certain longtime analysts.
U.S. President Donald Trump clashed with the intelligence community last week over the threats posed by Iran and North Korea, a position that has some U.S. and Israeli experts nodding in agreement.
Former weapons’ inspector David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told JNS that the U.S. intelligence community in essence told us that “Iran does not have a structured nuclear-weapons program—something we all know.”
However, he said, the intelligence community “punted on the more important questions of whether Iran is preserving capabilities to make nuclear weapons, e.g., the Atomic Archive, or working on certain activities to overcome bottlenecks in their nuclear-weapons program.”
Trump criticized the U.S. intelligence community in a Jan. 30 Tweet: “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” He also stated, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
This was after the heads of the U.S. intelligence community told the Senate that the threat from North Korea is unlikely to be resolved, and that Iran was acting according to the nuclear deal, positions that contradict Trump’s view, reported Reuters.
Emily Landau, director of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, told JNS that on Iran, the assessment’s key sentence—“We continue to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device”—is laconic, misleading and missing key information.
First, what does it mean that Iran is not working on “key nuclear weapons-development activities?” asked Landau rhetorically.
“It is indeed working on advanced centrifuge R&D under the terms of the deal,” she said. “Moreover, it is testing missiles that can carry nuclear warheads.”
“Both activities are key to having a nuclear-weapons capability, and Iran can work on them without violating the JCPOA,” she pointed out.
Interestingly enough, Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi recently admitted what Iran did regarding the Arak facility—that they poured cement into certain tubes while not disclosing the existence of other tubes they had already purchased.
Second, continued Landau, “what about all the information contained in the Iran nuclear archives that the IAEA has not even begun to check through inspections? How can the assessment be so sure about its conclusions when this information is not taken into account?”
“Finally, while the assessment does not say so explicitly, it implies, especially when taken together with its 2018 assessment, that if Iran is more or less upholding the terms of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], then the Iran nuclear threat has been dealt with effectively.”
But compliance with the JCPOA is not the barometer for assessing Iranian intentions or ambitions, she added. Indeed, the reason that Iran has an interest in sticking to the deal is because it has major benefits for the regime, such as: “It gives Iran significant sanctions relief in return for minimal nuclear concessions.”
In other words, it enables Iran to keep its nuclear infrastructure, which is in line with its continued nuclear ambitions.
Nuances between North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions
On North Korea, the assessment notes all of the steps that have been taken over the past year in the direction of reducing tensions regarding its nuclear program, but then concludes that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons, which it deems essential for regime survival.
“It is true that North Korea will most likely not give up the capabilities that it paid such a high price to secure,” predicted Landau.
Still, regarding North Korea, even though steps have been taken, explained the Israeli expert, “they are brushed aside because of continued nuclear ambitions. But for Iran, which clearly continues to harbor nuclear ambitions, the assessment regards compliance with the terms of the JCPOA as evidence of lack of nuclear ambitions.”
These are very problematic conclusions—both for not recognizing the danger that Iran continues to pose in the nuclear realm and not giving enough credit to the significant reduction in American-North Korean tensions over the past year.
Albright said that “the archive makes clear Iran intended to continue its nuclear-weapons program after ending the AMAD program [that attempted to build nuclear warheads] in 2003.”
He went on to ask: “What does the Intelligence community think of that? How does it know that certain activities do not continue today, particularly given the IAEA has not visited many of the sites mentioned in the archives?”
A report by the Institute for Science and International Security in October 2018 and authored by Albright, Olli Heinonen and Andrea Stricker, stated the new documentation seized covertly by Israel from Iran’s nuclear archive “shows that in mid-2003, Iran was making decisions about how to decentralize and disperse the elements of its nuclear weaponization program, the AMAD program and its subsidiary Project 110, which included nuclear-warhead development.
“The archive documentation shows that rather than halting its nuclear weaponization work, Iran was carrying out an elaborate effort to break the AMAD program into covert and overt parts, where the overt parts would be centered at research institutes and universities, and any effort that could not be plausibly denied as civilian in nature was left as a covert activity,” the report continued.
So, posed Albright, how does the intelligence community “view Iran’s ongoing development of missiles that would be capable of delivering nuclear weapons? Several pieces of the assessment puzzle just weren’t there.”
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5)
The Biggest Threat To Press Freedom Is The Media Itself
Major media organizations are about to be sued for irresponsibly turning innocent Covington Catholic school boys into objects of national hatred. A lack of standards threatens to open the media to all kinds of legal liabilities.
While the outrage over the Covington high school kids in MAGA hats may have
blown over online, the story is far from over. On February 1, an attorney retained by the family of Nicholas Sandmann, the 16-year-old who allegedly “smirked” at the Native American activist banging a drum in his face, released a video that succinctly explained the broader context of what happened. Suffice to say, the video is a damning indictment of how many media outlets and personalities led a social media-fueled outrage mob and wrongly rushed to smear Sandmann and his fellow students.
On Monday, Sandmann’s legal team told the Cincinnati Enquirer that more than 50 letters had been sent to various organizations and people that are likely to precede defamation and libel lawsuits. A host of elite media outlets received some of these letters, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, TMZ, National Public Radio, The Guardian, and Conde Nast. A number of prominent reporters also received letters individually, such as Maggie Haberman, Chuck Todd, Savannah Guthrie, Erin Burnett, David Brooks, and Andrea Mitchell, among others.
Media organizations and reporters have traditionally been given extremely wide latitude by courts in the name of protecting free speech, so at first glance it may seem absurd to sue America’s biggest media organizations en masse for defamation and libel. But for those who have been paying attention, for decades now, courts have been trying to balance privacy concerns with rapidly evolving technology that allows for dissemination of information at a rate that far outpaces editorial judgment. Far from endorsing a maximalist vision of what journalists are allowed to get away with, relevant court decisions have trended toward winnowing the definition of what journalists are allowed to print.
Further, the people wronged by the media in the Covington case were not public figures who have to clear a high legal bar of proving actual malice. They were, in
fact, children. Further, a majority of the public distrusts the media — and that
distrust didn’t start in 2016, despite the media trying to define this distrust as a
wholly Trump-related phenomenon.
To the extent that politicized charges of “fake news” do enter the picture, can anyone honestly say there isn’t good reason to suggest that elite media are overwhelmingly biased against certain political and religious viewpoints? The media response to public anger at the media thus far amounts to little more than a condescending chorus of complaints that half the country doesn’t know “the facts” and lacks the sophistication to appreciate the editorial worldview being foisted on them.
But that flippant dismissal could have painful consequences for the media, because media protections ultimately depend on a societal consensus that they are working
in the public interest. Put another way, if you were a lawyer who had to represent CNN and The New York Times in the Covington case, how apprehensive would you be about defending the honor and integrity of the media before a Kentucky jury?
The incident with the Covington high school students could well prove to be a
perfect storm that forever reshapes how we view media rights and responsibilities,
as well as the consequences of social media mobs. At the bottom of the Covington case is a truth the media don’t want to confront: The greatest threat to First Amendment freedoms might be irresponsible journalists.
Eroding Consensus on Press Freedoms
You don’t have to take my word for it. In 2015, Tulane law professor Amy Gajda
wrote “The First Amendment Bubble: How Privacy and Paparazzi Threaten a Free Press.” “In an age when news, entertainment, and new media outlets are constantly pushing the envelope of acceptable content, the consensus over press freedoms is eroding. The First Amendment Bubble examines how unbridled media are endangering the constitutional privileges journalists gained in the past century,”
notes the book’s jacket copy.
For decades, judges have generally affirmed that individual privacy takes a back seat to the public’s right to know. But the growth of the Internet and the resulting market pressures on traditional journalism have made it ever harder to distinguish public from private, news from titillation, journalists from provocateurs. Is a television program that outs criminals or a website that posts salacious videos entitled to First Amendment protections based on newsworthiness? U.S. courts are increasingly inclined to answer no, demonstrating new resolve in protecting individuals from invasive media scrutiny and enforcing their own sense of the proper boundaries of news.
Indeed, journalists should be required to read Gajda’s book. If they did, they would probably be mortified to discover that skirting the fringes of libel and defamation has become standard operating procedure for their entire industry.
Ramping up in the 1990s, there was a litany of cases where courts ruled against media on privacy grounds. Some of these cases involve very sympathetic plaintiffs, and one might understand where, say, the distressed mother of a murder victim who did not want to be quoted might be shown deference over Chicago Tribune
reporters, as happened in one case. On the other hand, courts also been more than willing to smack the press for violating the privacy rights of people whose behavior might court attention, such as swingers, psychics, women who flash their breasts in public, and men who appear on “To Catch a Predator.”
The simultaneous rise of the internet has caused media to stretch arguments for newsworthiness until they break. In the book, Gajda delves into plenty of legalities involving specific cases, but notes that the cases where newsworthiness has been regularly disputed by courts “can be grouped into five main categories, included
here as an overview before a closer look at specific causes of action: (1) those in which the disputed information shows, to this author’s mind, clear newsworthiness; (2) relatedly, those involving information concerning public wrongs; (3) those that seem a response to push-the-envelope media; (4) those involving celebrities in
some way; and (5) those involving nudity.”
Now think about how much content online, especially on social media, falls into one or more of those categories where the “newsworthiness” is far from clear. And it’s
not like there haven’t been warning signs that juries are more than willing to put
entire media organizations on blast.
Gajda spends a fair amount of her book discussing various controversies involving the website Gawker—again, the publication was called “Gawker” as if announcing it specialized in exactly the kind of content that courts found increasingly hard to justify. At the time “The First Amendment Bubble” was published, the lawsuit over their decision to publish Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, which was filmed without his knowledge, had yet to be resolved.
As we now know, a jury slapped Gawker with a fine so large the publication was shuttered. This should have been a warning shot across the bow for the media writ large. Instead, we’ve seen even the prestige media outlets that purport to have
higher standards than the tabloid-esque Gawker ramp up the sensationalism, increase partisanship, and willingly bully ordinary people.
‘Actual Malice’
Here some political context behind modern libel law is in order. While the First Amendment generally provides very wide latitude for the press, the more proximate reason why there are so few libel lawsuits in modern America, as opposed to, say,
the United Kingdom, is New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. This is the 1964 Supreme Court case that established the “actual malice” standard, which raised the bar for public figures looking to sue the media.
The case arose because hundreds of millions of lawsuits had been filed in the South seeking to silence out-of-state media outlets that were aggressively covering the
civil rights movement, and it’s fair to say that libel and defamation lawsuits were
being used to prevent media from shining a critical light on institutional racism.
More specifically, the “Sullivan” in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was a
Montgomery, Alabama public official suing The New York Times for running an ad
that sought to raise funds for Martin Luther King Jr.’s legal defense and the civil
rights movement. The ad was wrong in some particulars—King had only been arrested four times, not seven times as the Times ad alleged—but the general sentiment that King was being harassed was obviously correct.
Still, you can see where lawsuits such as this could portend big problems for the media. Politicians and public officials with access to the public coffers could bankroll lawsuits indefinitely in ways that could break many journalism outlets, or at least those that have fewer resources than The New York Times. So the Supreme Court made it so that public figures would have to clear a high bar to justify libel and defamation lawsuits—they couldn’t just file suit because a paper got minor details wrong, they had to prove the publication was reckless or had a personal or institutional vendetta. This helped establish a balance of power between the public officials and other powerful public figures the media is obligated to cover and hold accountable.
That balance of power mostly held for decades. But what no one foresaw, and perhaps should have, is that the media would eventually abandon the pretense of “objective journalism” and their role as a conduit for the people. Instead, the press
is using the legal deference and protections afforded them as a shield to drive their political agenda on a very broad cross-section of ideas, none of which approach the moral clarity of racial injustice in Alabama in 1964. Instead of politicians and
powerful public figures abusing their power to go after the media, we now have
media going after them, and often without provocation.
And the media writ large is so zealously invested in their self-righteousness that
they are no longer able to restrain themselves when even the lowliest of private citizens is seen as an impediment to them forcing political and cultural consensus
on the country. That’s how we got much of the media establishment punching down on a teenager whose only crime was wearing a baseball cap supportive of a duly elected president.
In point of fact, the media figures and publications who led this two minutes’ hate
are supposed to be people among us who set an example of restraint. They are professionally obligated and trained on how to reserve judgment and wait for the
facts to emerge, but time and again they are proving incapable of doing that.
Further, 16-year-old Sandmann doesn’t begin to meet any reasonable definition of a “public figure,” so the basic protection against libel and defamation that so many in the media bank on doesn’t apply here. There’s a real chance that some media
entities get taken to the cleaners in his lawsuit, and it’s hard to imagine what their defense will be.
Testing the Norms of Objectivity
Even with Sandmann’s lawsuit preceding, there might be a temptation for the media to dismiss this all as a bout of unfortunate hysteria. They will still feel secure going after Donald Trump and the other disagreeable public figures, content that they’re
still protected by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. This is probably also a big
mistake, seeing as the broader standards of what constitutes “actual malice” are
still significantly defined by cultural and political consensus. And that consensus is fraying, big time.
For one thing, the “actual malice” standard isn’t only defined by proving someone deliberately published falsehoods. It can also be a result of exhibiting a “reckless disregard for the truth.” The actual malice standard can also be established by circumstantial evidence. You don’t need a smoking gun where an editor or reporter admits he lied to hurt someone. With that in mind, let’s look at the reporting
standards the media have embraced in recent years, as embodied by a couple of notable media screw-ups.
In December 2017, CNN reported that Donald Trump Jr. received an email giving
him the hacked Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks
before they were public. MSNBC and CBS “independently” confirmed the story. It
was later revealed that the date on the email was wrong, and Donald Trump Jr.
didn’t get the emails before they were public.
CNN eventually revealed they never saw the original email, and based on the very lawyerly and suspect denials issued, it appears that the anonymous sources who gave CNN the story, as well as confirming it to MSNBC and CBS, were Democratic partisans from the House intel committee. CNN did not discipline the reporters who botched the story. There was no formal retraction. Instead, CNN rewrote the story
so it was an inane recounting of how Donald Trump Jr. got an email about a big
news event.
Last month, BuzzFeed issued a bombshell report about the president suborning perjury from his lawyer, who is cooperating with the special counsel investigation
into the president. After the report the special counsel’s office took the unusual step
of denying the report. Of the two reporters on the story, only one claims to have
seen documents supporting the report — and he has an extensive history of
fabulism.
Now I went to journalism school, albeit over 20 years ago, and I was under the impression that it was highly unethical to publish anonymously sourced stories
based entirely on the word of sources with obvious political axes to grind without seeing any corroborating evidence. I was also taught that the idea that you could accuse anyone of a felony, much less the president of the United States, without producing any supporting documentation to back your claims up was likely grounds
to have an editor fire you on the spot. Now major media do these things almost on reflex.
These are just two of many, many examples of media malpractice since Trump took office where the “bombshell” report blows up in the journalists’ faces. Instead of reflecting on how they’re abandoning basic standards and making an
unprecedented number of astonishing errors, there has been a raft of navel-gazing from media types about how Trump’s hyperbolic style and falsehoods essentially justify throwing caution to the wind and covering him as aggressively as possible.
Journalists haven’t been shy about acknowledging what’s happening. “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United
States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” wrote New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg, a few months prior to Trump’s election. “Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.” At this point, however, there’s a strong case to be made that the decision, in the words of The New York Times, to test “the norms of objectivity” has ultimately hurt their ability to hold Trump accountable.
Aside from further intensifying public distrust, the media’s defensiveness is shortsighted for a couple of important reasons. One is that when an industry is
widely perceived not to be living up to its own ethical guidelines, it’s not hard to imagine courts and juries will start deciding that this behavior is, at a minimum, reckless.
There’s no guarantee the courts won’t look at all journalists’ egregious behavior and decide to readjust libel law in such a way that shifts the balance of power away from journalists and provides more deference to the government and public figures. Notably, such a shift was being hinted at long before the phrase “President Donald
J. Trump” roiled newsrooms.
‘There is still a tendency among members of the media to view the courts in somewhat romantic terms as natural allies and guardians against overreaching
by the political branches,’ he says. ‘I’m not confident that remains a descriptively accurate view of the courts.’
‘Courts have pulled back on the reporter’s privilege, generally in the national security concept,’ adds Pozen. ‘It’s not at all clear that judges will be protective of journalists’ interests in light of the way judges have handled recent national-security-versus-open-government issues.’
The second is that the press won’t have Trump to kick around forever. When you
look at the media problems of the Trump era—the errors all uniformly cut in one political direction, the over-reliance on compromised sources, the refusal to make basic corrections and retractions, the eagerness to grant anonymity to anyone airing damaging and wholly speculative claims, and so on—these are all existing problems that Trump merely accelerated. It appears that the entire journalism industry is establishing norms that could soon be defined as running afoul of libel law.
When CNN fired three journalists in 2017 for their handling of a story on Trump confidant Anthony Scaramucci—one of very few times where a major journalistic
error covering the Trump administration met actual newsroom punishment—CNN doesn’t appear to have been motivated to action in order to protect their integrity.
The network was staring down the barrel of a $100 million lawsuit as the result of
the story. The message the media should be receiving right now couldn’t be clearer: Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Never Tweet
The final ingredient cooking up this hellbroth is social media. The cultural toxicity of social media is coming to be generally acknowledged, and why media remain somewhat uniquely oblivious to how Twitter in particular is destroying their credibility is a mystery. Media bias is hardly a new phenomenon, but once upon a time,
griping about it required carefully reading between the lines of news reports.
These days journalists treat Twitter like their private clubhouse and routinely say things that leave little doubt about their skewed political perspective, sense of entitlement, and total ignorance. (On that last point, in her rush to criticize Trump’s State of the Union speech this week, a New York Times White House correspondent tried to correct the president to explain that Jews don’t believe in heaven.)
Of course, no reporter—or anyone else for that matter—can expect to be wholly impartial, even-tempered all the time, or not have gaps in their knowledge. The question is why people in a profession that depends on personal credibility would be so eager to participate in an daily Battle Royale that seems designed to test everyone’s emotional and intellectual limits, aside from imposing finite restrictions
on how much you’re allowed to say about complicated topics to maximize contention
, over, “engagement with the platform.”
So what do journalists really get out of Twitter? As a promotional tool for the work of journalists, its utility is comparatively limited—only about 7 percent of Americans
have Twitter accounts, compared to the more than 40 percent who use Facebook. However, I suspect the percentage of journalists who are on Twitter is near universal. If you’re a journalist, Twitter provides ample opportunities for networking, and allows you to get a sense of what your colleagues are up to.
At the same time, Twitter seems to cater to journalists because getting access to insider-y thoughts of America’s top reporters is a big selling point for attracting new users. It’s probably not a coincidence that Twitter was quick to suspend accounts tweeting “learn to code” at laid off journalists in recent weeks even though the sentiment is pretty benign compared to other supposed examples of “targeted harassment” that they routinely tolerate.
From a reporter standpoint, keeping up with your colleagues isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re constantly siloed into meta-discussions started and led by journalists, it has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing reporters’ biases and catalyzing groupthink. (Indeed, my own admittedly questionable rationale for being
on Twitter is that if you are interested in media criticism, firing up Tweetdeck is like plugging straight into the Matrix and watching narratives assemble in real time.)
By now, there are a million examples of reporters all arriving at the same
conclusions or seizing on and actually publishing inaccurate information because it was disseminated on Twitter or some other form of social media. The assault on the Covington high school boys might be the ne plus ultra of this unfortunate trend.
If you’re a publisher, it’s probably worth asking what you get out of letting
swaggering reporters on your payroll go permanently unchecked on social media. A reporter on Twitter derives credibility and influence from their employer, yet on social media there are no editors and fact checkers that might curb their worst instincts
and otherwise prevent the reporter from saying things that hurt their publication’s credibility. Further, we haven’t really tested the extent to which social media use by reporters exposes a publication to legal liability. In the Covington case, it certainly reveals the mindset and motivations of reporters in a way that helps explain why so many erroneous stories were published.
Then there’s a secondary issue about determining who exactly is the “publisher” that should be held accountable on social media when a journalist tweets something?
For years now, social media companies have been trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Disseminating the news is a huge part of their business model, and they routinely make highly selective editorial decisions about what stories and statements are acceptable on their platforms, such as the aforementioned “learn to code” foofaraw, and kicking off controversial figures such as Alex Jones.
At the same time social media companies are in most practical respects in the news business, when asked about it they are adamant that they are not publishers
because that would make them legally responsible for the content they disseminate. There’s a reason Mark Zuckerberg was in full flopsweat mode testifying before Congress following the “fake news” controversy in the 2016 election, even though the actual effect of fake news has been greatly exaggerated.
Zuckerberg knew that if lawmakers started to think of Facebook as a media organization rather than an internet company, and regulated it and held it responsible the way our law would a news organization, it would threaten Facebook’s business model and potentially open them to huge liabilities. Ironically, Facebook moved to appease its political critics by further clamping down on what content Facebook allows. To name one noticeable example, Facebook has launched a partnership
with media “fact checkers” and boasts that once their media fact-checking partners declare a story false, Facebook kills 85 percent of the traffic to that story. (Such partnership is only compounding a known media problem, as media fact checkers
are routinely biased and incompetent.)
Aside from trying to have it both ways, Silicon Valley is one of the most outspokenly liberal industries in the country. Accordingly, there have been a number of major scandals relating to whether these huge tech titans are putting their thumb on the scale of political discourse. In 2016, former Facebook employees told Gizmodo they routinely censored news beneficial to conservatives, and there is lots of damning evidence to suggest that Google can’t be trusted to be a neutral information arbiter.
While no tech companies have been sent letters by the Covington attorneys yet, there’s a real chance that at some point in the future, after someone’s been libeled, defamed, or somehow hurt by social media, some enterprising lawyer is going to crack this legal nut and try and hold social media companies liable. And if you think an elitist press makes for an unsympathetic defendant when placed in front of a heartland jury, just wait until they get to pass judgment on uber-rich Silicon Valley
tech CEOs who exist in a cloud of their own esotericism and arrogance, far removed from the consequences of their philosophy of “move fast and break things.”
Sounding the Alarm
To be clear, if I sound alarmist here that’s only because I want free speech to be as robust and unfettered as possible, and I would rather live in a country where the media is too aggressive toward the powerful, rather than not enough. Even if the Covington case goes to trial and ends up deservedly holding the media to account
for turning an innocent teenager into a national object of hatred, I worry such an
outcome could set an alarming precedent.
The idea of routinely suing media companies is horrifying and could end up doing much more harm than good. However, I also happen to think the easiest and
simplest way to avoid such catastrophic outcomes is for the media to show a modicum of restraint. Rather than testing the “norms of objectivity,” media should make a good faith effort to embrace them.
However, it’s been weeks since the Covington debacle, and there’s been very little
in the way of a public accounting for what happened, which amounts to deafening silence in an industry where solipsism is something of a pastime. (Perhaps a
number of major media organizations that may end up named in the case have
legal reasons for their silence.)
For their part, conservative critics have been griping about media bias for decades and I don’t imagine that they’re about to stop now that screaming “fake news” is a winning electoral strategy. I can only hope that if the media had a good faith discussion about professional ethics and the uses of social media that is loud
enough for the public to hear, it might buy them some breathing room at a critical juncture, rather than allow public criticism of the media to intensify.
In the meantime, publishers and editors need to deal with the reality that Americans are increasingly inclined to rescind the legal deference given to media over the last
50 years. They need to take a hard look at the way newsrooms operate and at long-
term solutions for recovering the public trust, starting with enforcing more rigid standards for privacy and sourcing, as well as stricter social media policies. Just because a hotshot reporter has a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers and breaks a lot of stories, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need an editor looking over his shoulder and telling him that he should, say, refrain from tweeting about
assassinating the president.
Of course, I’ve come this far and I’m not about to stop being cynical about my profession’s inability to reform itself. It’s hard not to look at the Covington incident
and fear that I have seen the future of journalism, and it involves writing lots of
checks for libel damages with many zeroes attached.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
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