Crumbling Infrastructure - 125 Year Old Pipe Suspected In Harlem Blast Highlights A National Issue

I'll just repeat what I said last week, and last month, and last year, and the year before that. Money is cheap. People need jobs. Our infrastructure (including transit, water, sewer, electric, broadband, and apparently gas) is woefully inadequate.  If only someone in power would tie these facts together.

Gas Leak Found in Main Next to East Harlem Explosion Site

Federal investigators found a leak in a 125-year-old gas main adjacent to one of the two East Harlem buildings that exploded last week, confirming what many suspected was the cause of the blast that killed eight people and injured 58 others.

We need a new WPA and CCC in this country.  We have the resources: borrowing capacity, legions of unemployed, and no end of worthwhile work to be done.  We never seem to lack for money when it comes to bombing or invading some other country.  When will we focus our attention on improving this one?

Glenn Greenwald > Tom Ricks

Tom Ricks' authoritarianism is certainly creepy.  But honestly I have pretty much ignored him since I read Fiasco (new in hardcover no less) and realized halfway through it was a novel-length combination puff-piece* on David Petraeus and hit-piece on Ray Odierno. 

Haven't had much use for him since.

Objectively Pro-Putin

Ricks claims that Greenwald and Snowden are "profiting" from Russia (how that's happening is rather obscure) and therefore, if they fail to loudly denounce events in the Ukraine, they are objectively Pro-Putin. Greenwald refuses to bow to his demands because well ... bowing to such a demand is unethical in itself (and useless.) Anyone who requires you to denounce someone else to prove that you are not a sympathizer is playing an authoritarian power game and giving them the "denunciation" they demand will never fully satisfy. We have a long history of witch hunts both real and metaphorical in this country. One of the defining characteristics is this requirement that one prove one's loyalty to the group. You may recall that the way they used to do it was to strap the accused witch to a chair and throw him or her into the water. If the accused floated to the top and lived he or she was obviously guilty. If he or she sank to the bottom and drowned, she was not. I think we can all see the problem with that. Ricks is free to think what he wants about Greenwald and Snowden's political beliefs and if he has some evidence that they have signed on to Vladimir Putin's Ukraine agenda, as a top journalist I'm sure he can figure out a way to prove it. Otherwise this is just another example of a certain strain of creepy social coercion that rears its head in our culture from time to time and should be resisted by anyone who believes that administering loyalty oaths and demanding intellectual conformity, whether it comes  from a church, the government or one's social group is antithetical to a free society. One would think that journalists would be at the top of that list of resistors, but if there's one thing I've learned in the past few years it's that there are no greater enforcers of elite membership rules than political journalists.

* A sloppy, wet euphemism right there.

Flashback: Moyers Probes US Media's Iraq Failures

It doesn't get any less enraging with time.  It's good to remember that the "good" papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post were among the foremost enablers of Bush and Cheney's shameful illegal adventure.  Re-read Greg Mitchell's excellent review, which I have excerpted liberally from below:

When Bill Moyers Probed Media and Iraq

"The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in  its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear on April 25, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal."  While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility. The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses." Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that." At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.  But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war. We didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way."                                                             

Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas, I don't think we followed up on this." Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way, explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn't seem ridiculous." Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light." Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'" Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, "Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails." Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters "do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something." But Moyers gives credit to my old friend,  Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press,  for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003. The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with "plagiarism." Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a "quick war" with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote "a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war." The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration's case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would "editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times." Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply. The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then Moyers explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter."

The kicker, of course, is that Gerson was immediately hired for a plum columnist position at the Washington Post.  Meritocracy!

Hillary 2016 Already Drawing Crazies and Smear Merchants Like Flies

I wasn't particularly politically astute in the 1990s, but even then I could tell these charlatans were full of crap.  Unfortunately there was no Media Matters back then. Hell, Brock himself was actually part of the right-wing conspiracy in those days.

The professional haters 2016 reunion tour

Media Matters has helpfully compiled a list of 1990s right wing Clinton haters for all you kids so you'[ll know who you're dealing with when they start turning up in the media once the 2016 campaign kicks in. It's already started on Fox, but I fully expect to see some of these people appearing elsewhere as well: Fox News hosted the "professional dirty trickster" who founded an anti-Hillary Clinton group with the acronym "C.U.N.T." The day before, it was the attorney who pushed fabricated anti-Clinton stories in the 90s. Last month, it was the woman who has suggested the Clintons may have had her husband killed.

On 538: Nate Silver Should Listen To Paul Krugman

I loved Nate's poll work over the last few big election cycles.  I hope the wizard will take some constructive advice from the professor.

Further Thoughts on Hedgehogs and Foxes

"It's true that I haven't changed my views on macroeconomics very much in the face of experience since 2008 — although I did mark down my views about the risks of outright deflation. But the reason I've pretty much stayed with the macro framework I already had in 2008 was the fact that the framework, you know, has worked — I made predictions about interest rates and inflation that were very much at odds with what a lot of people were saying, and I was right. And right there you have an important lesson about what it means to take data into account. It very much does not mean changing your views all the time — if you have a model of how the world works, and the model is working, stability in what you say reflects respect for the data, not inflexibility. If I have spent the past 5+ years insisting, over and over again, that in a liquidity trap budget deficits don't crowd out private spending and expanding the Fed's balance sheet doesn't cause inflation, that's because they don't. And if I return to those points many times, it's because too much of the world still doesn't get it. Now, about FiveThirtyEight: I hope that Nate Silver understands what it actually means to be a fox. The fox, according to Archilocus, knows many things. But he does know these things — he doesn't approach each topic as a blank slate, or imagine that there are general-purpose data-analysis tools that absolve him from any need to understand the particular subject he's tackling. Even the most basic question — where are the data I need? — often takes a fair bit of expertise; I know my way around macro data and some (but not all) trade data, but I turn to real experts for guidance on health data, labor market data, and more."

Unlike Judy Miller, Krugman has been time and again "proved fucking right", as Miller famously claimed regarding her WMD fabulism in terms the Grey Lady would never deign to print.

76th Precinct Stepping Up Traffic Enforcement

Steps in the right direction.  There is certainly more to be done; I've seen plenty of obnoxious driving (speeding, weaving, blown stop lights, etc.) on Court Street and other local roads.  And of course there is the ongoing nuisance condition of the Court-Atlantic intersection, particularly Trader Joe's related parking and delivery issues.

With eyes on Vision Zero, Traffic Enforcement Rises in the 76th

With dangerous corridors like Atlantic Avenue in our neighborhood, the Cobble Hill Association is well aware that its residents frequently have pedestrian safety issues in mind. We are glad to see a renewed focus on safety by many agencies under Vision Zero and want to thank our own officers in the 76th precinct who have increased enforcement by 186%.  As mapped by WNYC, in February of 2013, they distributed a combined 22 tickets for speeding, failure to yield to pedestrians and failure to stop at traffic signal. This year that total went up to 63 tickets.

The 78th has been getting some great press for the solid work.  I hope to see more like this from the 76th.

More Progress: deBlasio Settles Another Bloomberg Era Discrimination Suit

The bottom line is, Bloomberg should have settled these suits.  Unfortunately it wasn't in his nature to do so.  But it's the right thing to do and kudos to deBlasio for doing the right thing.  This wasn't a close call to an objective legal observer.

De Blasio Settles FDNY Discrimination Suit for $98 Million

Ending a court battle that lasted through a term and a half of Bloomberg, the third major leftover lawsuit he's settled so far, Mayor de Blasio today agreed to pay $98 million in back pay and benefits to roughly 1,500 members of the Fire Department who claimed discrimination.

There's a "bigger man" joke in there somewhere.