Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Poll questions can be biased, especially on immigration (where, as with welfare, the results are very sensitive to changes in wording).“But when you ask the same question over time,” notes Mark Krikorian, “you get a sense of trends, and these don’t look good for the anti-borders crowd.” He has the details. …

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“That’s not a starting point for dialogue with conservative voters. That’s more like a middle finger … You couldn’t pick two more resonant issues for Republican primary voters than immigration and Common Core. … Jeb says to them, ‘Not only do I not agree with you, I don’t agree with you at all — and I don’t really respect your views on it.'” [E.A.]

Good sum-up of Jeb Bush’s message — from, yes, Tucker Carlson — in this Tampa Bay Times article …

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My robot will eat your wage subsidy: Don’t think the Earned Income Tax Credit plus more easily-licensed hairdressers is an adequate response to the Rise of the Robots, in which  “super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task,” as James Pethokoukis puts it.  …. (Won’t robots make pretty good hairdressers? They’ll also probably write think pieces with falsely optimistic policy recommendations.) . … Pethokoukis shies away from confronting the potential social disaster of having the vast majority of Americans effectively on the dole, or employed in fake WPA-like makework,  as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. … P.S.: The solution is definitely not more immigration. ... [via Drudge]

9 Is O’Malley a One-Punch Knockout?

‘I was hopin’ you wouldn’t ask me that one, Guv’nor. That’s where my case falls completely to the ground’:  Byron York reports that ex-Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is enough of a serious challenger to Hillary that the Cinton camp is issuing vague, ominous threats. But how dirty do the Clintons have to play to beat O’Malley? Under his administration, Maryland was supposed to show that a state with a Democratic governor committed to Obamacare could make it work. Instead, he implemented it so badly the state had to give up on its site and start over a year later. People were forced to re-enroll. Seems like he’s a feisty challlenger who can be knocked out with one punch. And we know what the punch is. And he’s leaning into it, running in part on his skill as a “manager.” What am I missing here? …

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Just when I thought I was out …: Tucker Carlson goes on RCP‘s “Changing Lanes” to defend spiking Daily Caller pieces critical of Fox News, which employs him as a Fox & Friends co-host. I’m sick of this fight too, so I’ll be quick. 1) Tucker’s “rule” has the virtue of honesty. Better blatant than latent. 2) But he wasn’t transparent about it when he hired me — he didn’t tell me. Nor did he tell me about this seemingly significant “rule” in the years I wrote for him, before he spiked the column.  (I wrote at least 3 earlier Fox-trashing items. A mid-level editor gave me some guff for a couple of them but didn’t take them down or talk about a “rule.”) 3) I would hope that if Tucker had told me about the Rule I wouldn’t have taken my blog to his site. Who knows? 4) The Rule is not sustainable. We’re about to enter a media driven Republican presidential primary in which Fox is accused, not without basis, of favoring Jeb Bush. Daily Caller reporters can’t write about that? Insane. 5) Note that if you “can’t trash Fox on the site,” that means everything Daily Caller writes about Fox is suspect (of being BS) since they are presumably leaving out any bad parts, even if true. 6) Would Fox really insist on this “rule,” or is Tucker just being unnecessarily chicken? It’s not a conflict if Fox can tolerate criticism! I suspect they can’t, and Tucker is not being paranoid.

Update: Mediaite says it

has reached out to Fox and they told us explicitly that there has been no mandate [not to criticize it] whatsoever. Also from what we’ve been able to glean from others inside Fox, no one there really cares whether The Daily Caller criticizes them or not.

I’m skeptical. Fox’s PR department is famously aggressive and attentive. (“Fox watches very carefully what’s being said about them in the media. People assume Fox isn’t watching what’s being said about it, but it is,” a former Fox producer told the Washington Examiner.) One question left to ask Tucker — if anyone’s still interested in this incident (doubtful) — is whether anybody at Fox contacted him about the piece the morning he spiked it. I don’t know the answer.

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Undernews from the Underworld? Part 1 of Breitbart’s “Why Harry Reid’s Home Exercise Accident Story Does Not Add Up” seems to have vanished from the site’s home page. Just when I was starting to get convinced! But there’s this, which I assume is the eagerly awaited Part II….  [Why get convinced? Everybody’s mocking it-ed. I dunno. There’s a lot of unpersuasive doubtcasting in the initial Breitbart piece: Is it really an argument against Reid’s account that his shower door “is not sturdy enough to be used as the anchor for an exercise band”? Seems like that is Reid’s story. But on sober reflection can you see how he’d get injuries that severe by being hurled against those cabinets, if that’s really what the room looks like? I can’t.  No doubt there is some explanation. … P.S.: A reenactment would help! Don’t need to allow cameras. … P.P.S.: It’s not like Reid wouldn’t lie or Vegas has no stories of previously hidden intrigue.] …

58 Walker’s Nails on the Amnesty Blackboard

Gov. Walker’s spokesperson talks about what his (still vague) immigration policy might look like:

Yes, at the minimum, there needs to be penalties put in place. In addition to securing our borders, the federal government must enforce our laws, penalize those who break the law including paying back taxes … [E.A.]

“Back taxes”? Yikes. By now that is a reverse dog whistle that tells you a politician is out to con anti-amnesty voters by pretending to collect “back taxes” from soon-to-be-amnestied illegals. The claim is usually a fraud, as it was in the defunct “Gang of 8” bill. But even if it wasn’t, the back-taxes issue just isn’t that important. (Implementing E-Verify, building a fence and a visa-tracking system, and getting the courts to uphold them are important.) You wouldn’t bring up “back taxes” unless your top priority was crafting some kind of legalization plan and selling it to the Republican base with a few symbolic, poll-tested “tough” provisions.

A real anti-amnesty politician probably wouldn’t talk at all about what, exactly, illegals would have to do to get legalized. He’d focus on what it takes to stop future waves of illegal immigration. Put the Gang of 8 talking points in a drawer.

P.S.: In the he said-she said dispute between the Walker campaign and the WSJ — about whether Walker said at a dinner that illegals would “eventually become eligible for citizenship”– does anyone believe Walker didn’t say it? It’s not that bad if he did — depends on what “eventually” means (i.e. what has to happen between now and then). Even “Enforcement First” concedes that legalization may come second. Talking about “back taxes” and mocking Romney (which the WSJ also says Walker did) are much worse signs.

I’m under no illusions about where Walker’s heart lies. But I’ll settle for faking it. An insincere embrace of Enforcement First is better than no embrace, especially if it proves to be the key to Walker’s success. Insincere positions that get votes have a way of becoming, if not sincere positions, the actual positions that go into effect.

P.P.S.: Daily Caller‘s Neil Munro, for one, isn’t buying the recent Walker immigration toughening (largely because he leaves the door open for admitting the millions of additional legal immigrants and guest workers that businesses “job creators” want). …

P.P.P.S.: Munro seems to be leaving the Caller for Laura Ingraham’s new web site. Good get for her. The thing about Munro is that while he can talk your ear off in a near-unintelligible stream of words, he is an energetic reporter with an unusual nose for what the next angle of a story is, often seeing things that the herd (myself included) miss. And he’s really fast. …

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Means-testing — You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet: The much-lauded bipartisan “doc fix” bill seems to contain only a very mild version of the most obvious fix for the Social Security and Medicare budgets — namely means-testing (shaving the benefits of the affluent).  The bill would nick seniors with incomes over $133,500 ($267,00 for a couple) with mild increases in their Medicare premiums. Of course, very few seniors make that much — they tend to be beyond their high-earning years. The latest means test would only hit the top 2% of them.  Imagine how much we’d save if we nicked the top 30%. There’s a lot more means-testing yet to go. …

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Is Immigration now a No-Go Zone for the MSM? is it possible to write a take-out on Ted Cruz’s strategy for winning the 2016 GOP presidential nomination without mentioning, even once, his opposition to delusional establishment Amnesty-First schemes for legalizing the current illegal immigrant population — and the potential for that opposition to a) help him cut down GOP rivals and b) appeal to the moderate white working class voters he’d desperately need in a general election? You would think the national political correspondent for the New York Times would not make that mistake. You would be wrong. …

It’s not a mistake, of course. The  establishment press really doesn’t want to talk about immigration. It’s like a sore spot in a relationship:  ‘If we ignore it maybe it will go away and nobody will be upset.”  So large mysterious things happen — the Department of Homeland Security is threatened with a shutdown, maybe Ted Cruz starts to get traction — without apparent explanation. Perhaps it’s the result of global warming, or Mercury is in retrograde [No-ed..] …

This seems to be the next big thing in cocooning: Don’t confect positive trends (like the popularity of amnesty) or downplay unfavorable trends (like opposition to amnesty). Just ignore the whole business completely. I predict trouble. …

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Fox’s Kurtz says Tucker Carlson’s “No-Trash-Fox” rule “helps undercut his site’s independence.” … Those Fox people are vicious! First they scare Carlson into performing demeaning acts. Then they shoot him for doing it. Next they’ll bill him for the cost of the bullets. …

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Rules: Emailer R suggests that New Republic, under Marty Peretz, had a “No-Trash-Gore” rule similar to Tucker Carlson’s “No-Trash-Fox” rule at Daily Caller. That was not my experience. True, Marty had his areas of … concern. But I remember several times trying to quit on principle — there’d be all that good publicity, plus no deadlines for a while — only to have Marty or his editors at the last minute graciously relent and publish. So annoying.  People at TNR argued with Marty a lot — you never had to worry that he was secretly mad at you. But he also had an academic’s tolerance for wild contention. Seems quaint now. …

P.S.: The Washington Monthly under Charlie Peters was different. TWM, as others have noted, wasn’t a forum for ideas. It was a forum for Charlie’s ideas. If you wanted to get your piece published you pretty much had to convince Charlie it was right, on policy as well as facts. But you knew that was the deal going in (plus Charlie has sound judgment). And once he had something he wanted to say Charlie was fearless about saying it even if it might offend people who could do him lots of favors — which he, in fact, repeatedly did. (I do remember he had a “One Block Rule,” which is he would avoid angering neighbors he actually had to see in the morning when he went out the front door.)  Perhaps as a result, Charlie did not get rich off his magazine– even lawyer-rich. But he didn’t seem to need to. [Also quaint?-ed You said that …].

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I semi-worshipped Danny Schechter in his “News Dissector” days, during Watergate.  R.I.P.

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Michael Brown, who helped write the 1966 song “Walk Away Renee” for the Left Banke, has died at age 65. An appreciation here. … [Obvious question: How did the bass player feel about all this?]

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Fear of Fox II: Washington Examiner‘s T. Becket Adams does a good job documenting Fear of Fox on short notice. It’s not just Tucker Carlson! Profile in Courage award to Daily Caller‘s Betsy Rothstein. … P.S.: Adams notes that Fox’s role in the media ecosystem is important for writers on the right, for ideological as well as professional reasons. They can get your question asked at White House press conferences. But I don’t think Carlson wants to avoid criticizing Fox mainly because he values its ability to amplify conservative stories (including Daily Caller stories). I think he wants to avoid criticizing Fox because, as he says, he works there, and either feels an obligation to them (or just wants to keep the gig). …

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DON’T SPIKE ME, BRO! Welcome to the new, Twitterized kausfiles.com.  Tweets and blog items in the same stream.  Why do this? 1) I spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter. 2) Twitter was and is killing blogging. What used to be the fun short blog items are now tweets, leaving only the duller, long items for blogs — a drift toward dreariness accelerated by the need to attract links by writing Important Posts, and by Google’s apparent decision to favor longer posts in its search results (on the highly questionable theory that short posts are inherently less informative). I always thought readers preferred shorter items. The hell with Google.

This new format should, in theory, put the fun items back on the blog. It will also allow 140 character tweets to be expanded into longer items. Best of all, from my point of view, none of these items will have to have a big, joke-killing headline — my main beef with the WordPress-based blogs I’ve been writing ever since the tragic Slate redesign of 2008. The result should look more like kausfiles’ blog originally looked, back in the day.

We’ll see. Experimentation is ongoing. I just learned, for example, that if I try to modify a tweet on this site it causes a break in the space-Twitter continuum that destroys everything on kausfiles. So I won’t do that! Tweets will appear here unchanged — though some will be deleted, sometimes to be later expanded and reposted as items.

Please let me know in the comments of any problems or suggestions.  My thanks to John Keegan of PressHarbor for putting this all together.

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Fear of Fox: It’s true that broadcast networks always had concentrated star-making power. They could make you. But could they break you? The key to Fox’s “make or break” power on the right would seem to be the disappearance of non-TV ways to make a good living as a pundit.  It’s harder and harder to feed your family as a plain old mid-list book author, for example. Book sales and lecture fees increasingly hinge on TV exposure. (The New Yorker may also have star-making power — it’s the non-TV exception that proves the rule! You don’t see many trenchant critiques of David Remnick either.) [Response to @RD_Mullin]

140 Fox Makes It Easy for Amnesty

[Note: I posted this on Daily Caller. They took it down, saying I couldn’t “trash Fox” on their site. I quit Daily Caller. Reposting the item here without changes.]

Axelrod’s Wish: On page 424 of his recent memoir, Obama’s former top strategist David Axelrod describes running into Fox chieftain (and immigration amnesty supporter) Rupert Murdoch at a dinner in the fall of 2010:

During the dinner, Murdoch, who was seated beside me, insisted that the president had to move on immigration reform. ….

“But the solution has to be comprehensive,” I said. “We can’t just attack a piece of the immigration problem. And you know, there’s one big thing that you can do to help, and that is to keep your cable network from stoking the nativism that keeps us from solving this.” [Emphasis added]

Four years later, Axelrod may be getting his wish. Most of the mainstream broadcast and cable networks avoided giving excessive coverage to the recent congressional fight over the Department of Homeland Security, which was all about Republicans trying to block Obama’s executive amnesty by attaching restrictions to DHS funding. NBC Nightly News went a step further and avoided mentioning the immigration issue even when covering the funding fight — treating the threat of a DHS shutdown as if it were some sort of out-of-the-blue natural disaster.

But it’s one thing for Dem-friendly NBC to go to bat for Obama’s causes.  It’s another if Fox does it too. Fox is supposed to be the feisty opposition network. You’d think it would wage a rousing campaign against Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which are surely wildly unpopular among its viewers, both because of their ends (de facto legalizing of illegals) and their means (presidential overreach).

You’d think that.  But you would be wrong.

Fox didn’t editorialize in favor of Obama. It just covered other issues. This is a proven pro-amnesty posture, pioneered in the spring of 2013 when the “Gang of 8” amnesty bill snuck through the Senate while conservatives were distracted by a seeming trifecta of Obama scandals (IRS/Benghazi/seizing AP reporters’ phone records).  Given the unpopularity of amnesty with a large swath of voters, any publicity given to the issue is likely to result in an intimidating blizzard of phone calls to the U.S. Capitol, complete with threats against Republicans who might be primaried from the right, Cantor-style. Corporate pro-amnesty lobbyists need peace and quiet to work their influence on Republicans in the face of this GOP-base opposition. No stoking!

That’s what Fox delivered. What makes me so sure? I’ve got proof! Or close to it.  Here is a list of the lead story each day on Megyn Kelly’s “Kelly File” show from January 14 (the day the House sent the Senate a DHS bill with a “rider” blocking Obama’s amnesty) until March 3, the day the House finally caved and passed a “clean” DHS bill. (I picked Kelly File because it seemed the high-viewership show likely to best express Fox News Channel’s id. Bill O’Reilly is powerful and egomaniacal enough to go rogue.) I’ve also noted when immigration was discussed, even if it wasn’t the main story — which (spoiler) it never was:

1/14 — ISIS

1/15 — ISIS

1/16 — ISIS

1/19 — State of the Union

1/20 —State of the Union/Terror. (Obama veto threat over immigration is mentioned)

1/21 — Iran (Later in the show, Gov. Perry is interviewed and immigration is discussed)

1/22 — Terror (Yemen)

1/23 — Israel

1/26 — Blizzard/Terror

1/27 —Terror/Israel

1/28 — Terror (Later in the show, Sen. Sessions is interviewed and the immigration fight is discussed at some length)

1/29 — Terror/Taliban

1/30 — Terror/Taliban (Immigration later mentioned in passing by a pundit)

2/2 — Terror

2/3 — Terror (ISIS)

2/4 — ISIS (Immigration by Muslims mentioned later in the show by Gov. Jindal)

2/5 — Terror

2/6 — Terror

2/9 — Terror (ISIS) (General Dempsey in passing mentions open borders as a security issue)

2/10 — Brian Williams/Terror

2/11 — Yemen/Terror

2/12 — Yemen/Terror

2/13 — ISIS

2/16 — ISIS

2/17 — ISIS (Federal court decision on immigration and Senate filibuster discussed later in the show)

2/18 — ISIS (Federal court decision discussed later in show)

2/19 — ISIS (Appeal of federal court decision discussed briefly later in show)

2/20 — ISIS, Feds fear right-wing radicals (Funding fight discussed later in the show)

2/23 — Terror (Mall of America threat) (Senator Lee gets to give anti-amnesty funding pitch in second half of show)

2/24 — “American Sniper” Trial

2/25 — ISIS

2/26 —CPAC convention/ISIS

2/27 — CPAC convention (Jeb Bush immigration pitch discussed. Mention of House funding vote but not that it was about immigration. Segment on possible “Dreamer” murderer)

3/2 — Netanyahu (Mid-show discussion of federal court case, “Dreamer” murder case, Jeb Bush position.)

3/3– Netanyahu (Brief mid-show mention that “the standoff over funding the Homeland Security Department is over.”)

I sense a pattern! For this entire period, Kelly File was basically ISIS and Terror, with a few off-lead excursions into the DHS funding fight, usually when absolutely necessary (as when a federal judge blocked Obama’s executive action). Even some discussions of the federal court decision failed to mention the parallel Congressional funding fight. In fact, immigration was discussed as the underlying issue in the funding fight only 6 times over the whole 34 show period — and only 3 times in the crucial 20 show period that followed the Senate Dems’ initial filibuster of the Republican DHS proposal. These were the weeks when anti-amnesty organizations were desperate for some outfit like FOX to apply pressure on possibly wavering Senate Dems. Instead they got more ISIS.  I would suggest that the near-exclusive obsession with Middle Eastern terror is difficult to justify by the inherent news value of the subject, let alone its value to Fox viewers. You’d think the network would want to take a break if only for variety’s sake.

The semi-hysterical focus on ISIS in itself played into Obama’s hands, of course, since the Democrats’ were making a ‘how-can-you-shut-down-Homeland-Security-with-all-this-horrible-terror’ argument. Technically, Democrats were the ones blocking a Homeland Security funding bill with a filibuster– but FOX was not about to emphasize that. “Filibuster” was mentioned only 2 times on Kelly File during this whole 48-day period (three if you count Senator Lee’s attack on “obstruction”). It was mentioned only 17 times on the entire Fox News Channel (plus nine uses of the word in relation to other issues, such as Keystone or Iran sanctions, or general chat show pundit-to-pundit admonitions to stop “filibustering”).

This isn’t what actual coverage designed to alert and inform opposition to Obama on the issue would look like.  It would be more like: “Good Evening. Day 7 of the Democratic filibuster of Homeland Security Funding … ”

Even if Fox had done that, Republicans wouldn’t have succeeded in blocking the executive amnesty. Obama could have vetoed any bill they got to his desk, and the votes aren’t there for an override. The best the anti-amnesty side could realistically have hoped  for would have been some embarrassing defections by Democratic senators like Donnelly, Manchin, Heitkamp and McCaskill (who in fact defected on one procedural vote).  As Frank Sharry of pro-amnesty advocacy group America’s Voice pointed out, even a few key-vote defections would have punctured the Democrats self-presentation as a unified pro-legalization brand, and made opposition to executive amnesty bipartisan.

The main significance of Fox’s immigration tamp-down, though, was as a precedent — a dry run for how Murdoch’s network might ease the way for a legislative amnesty down the road (especially if, as is quite possible, the courts void Obama’s executive actions).  If Fox gets away with it this time, there will be no opposition news network next time either.

P.S.: Whom to blame? It’s tempting to be sophisticated and point a finger at young FOX producer types who might be doing what they think the boss wants (as opposed to what the audience wants). That sort of thing happens in large organizations — the nervous aides are more autocratic and intolerant than the CEO. My sense, though, is that FOX is a pretty tightly run outfit. It’s run by the man who built it, Roger Ailes.

That seems to be Rupert Murdoch’s judgment.  Remember Axelrod’s anecdote — the one where he lobbies Murdoch to do what has now been done. I didn’t tell you how it ends. Here is how it ends:

Murdoch shrugged. “You’ll have to talk to Roger about that.”

0 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit!

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9 No Union Left Behind!

The Trouble With “Local Control”: Ruben Navarrette of the San Diego Union-Trib argues that, for all the high-profile rhetoric from President Obama and his education secretary about getting rid of bad teachers–talk that’s agitated the National Education Association–the fine print of the administration’s proposed No Child Left Behind revisions puts the unions back in the driver’s seat by “rolling back the involvement of the federal government in favor of more local control”:

You remember local control. That’s the governing principle that essentially handed the power over the system to teachers unions because they contribute so much money to the campaigns of labor-friendly school board members. The unions in turn put the job security of their members ahead of the educational well-being of students, and thus helped put our public schools in bad shape. You see, local control isn’t the solution; it’s one of the problems.

I’ve been arguing that Obama’s national Democratic party is less beholden to the unions than our state Democratic party. That’s true. But it still may be a little like arguing that the Mark Sanford is less creepy than John Edwards. … 1:02 A.M.

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3 ‘Face It, You Are That Guy’

A suprise mystery guest on the Ricochet podcast tells me the bitter truth. (It comes after the 55 minute mark.) … 6:55 P.M.

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Teachers’ unions = layoff by seniority. In average districts, that just means losing lots of good teachers, instead of losing the least effective teachers. But in big cities like New York, where there’s been an influx of young, idealistic Teach for America types, it’s a tragedy. The best get laid off while mediocre ed school graduates from the 70s teach your children. … What if you tried to run a baseball team and had to lay off by seniority as opposed to performance? … P.S.: It’s not as if school districts have to choose between layoffs-entirely-by-seniority and layoffs-entirely-by-merit. It would be easy to devise a system in which everyone who was an “OK” teacher got laid off by seniority, but the worst 10% got laid off first. But that deal would never be negotiated because today’s teachers’ unions (unlike the old self-disciplining ‘professional’ teachers’ unions) seem to exist to protect the worst 10%. …  7:05 P.M.

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More on Unions–The Too Little, Too Late Problem: Even when unions eventually agree to necessary concessions, the tooth-pulling process of negotiation often results in a fix that’s too little, too late–and that cuts only the minimum necessary, leaving no margin for error or unforeseen events (like recessions). … Taxpayers who have followed the fortunes of General Motors and Chrysler are all too familiar with this phenomenon. But the same thing has happened in Los Angeles–where the city kept giving raises and adding jobs even as a recession loomed. When the downturn hit and revenues dropped, it took a year to negotiate cuts with the municipal unions. Now the city is up against it, facing the prospect of huge abrupt job cuts–and proposing a 28% utility rate hike to milk extra revenue from hard-pressed residents. … Phil Willon reports. … 7:23 P.M.

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