Lazy crazy days of Summers

Well. On top of having averted an air strike by the US and another chemical weapons strike by Assad inside of Syria this week, here's more good news from inside the Beltway.

Former White House economic adviser and Treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers has withdrawn his name as a candidate for Federal Reserve chairman...

I couldn't be happier. He would have been a disaster in that spot. Of course, I don't suppose we'll get Janet Yellen either. Certainly not if President Obama really believes the banking industry is just fine. It's not. It's still very much broken.

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Team Yellen

Considering the ongoing dismal state of our so-called economic recovery, it's rather clear the Fed's monetary policy under Bernake was (as the kids say) all fucked up and bullshit. So now that we got rid of Helicopter Ben, Obama has a clear choice. It's between the Bankster's best friend, Larry Summers or the Bankster's greatest fear, Janet Yellen. Joseph Stiglitz is on Team Yellen. So am I because:

The controversy over the choice of the next head of the Federal Reserve has become unusually heated. The country is fortunate to have an enormously qualified candidate: the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen. There is concern that the president might turn to another candidate, Lawrence H. Summers. Since I have worked closely with both of these individuals for more than three decades, both inside and outside of government, I have perhaps a distinct perspective…

Whoever succeeds Ben S. Bernanke as the Fed’s leader will have to make repeated judgment calls about when to raise or lower interest rates, the levers of monetary policy.

Two elements enter into these judgments. The first is forecasting. Wrong forecasts lead to wrong policies. Without a good sense of direction of where the economy is going, one can’t take appropriate policies. Ms. Yellen has a superb record in forecasting where the economy is going — the best, according to The Wall Street Journal, of anyone at the Fed. As I noted earlier, Mr. Summers’s leaves something to be desired.

Of course, the galling reality is Summers will most probably get the job because, the damnable Boy's Club. This is why we can't have nice things.

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Breaking: Jay Carney is good at his job

Which is more than can be said for Yahoo!'s hit piece on the PressSec. Sure slow news cycles breed some lame non-stories to feed the insatiable maw of the 24/7 media beast, but this interactive compilation of Carney's verbal tics is dumber than the most inane BuzzFeed list ever posted.

I'm down with Wonkette's critque. The interactive is pretty much just an excuse for unjustified mockery. It serves no useful informational purpose. A comparison between former PressSec "evasions" might have had some value, but not much. Every PressSec does this. It's in the job description. I would have found an interactive of how times the media elite asked the same damn question in one briefing after Carney has already answered it the first time much more enlightening.

I imagine this is supposed to taken as lighthearted mockery meant to while away the summer doldrums but there's an underlying meaness to these pieces that's vaguely disturbing. I watch these journos on the twitter, ever alert for the "phrase of the day" they can turn into a snark competition. What you rarely see is much focus on the substance of what Carney, or Obama, say about the policy.

The snark barely masks the media's dislike of this administration. It's hard not to think the media hates them because they're too good at their jobs. Neither Obama nor Carney often deliver easy soundbytes that can be quickly transformed into a click-baiting fauxtroversy. Makes the journos work harder. Which is not to say journos are lazy but they do love an easy narrative.

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Pseudoscoop of the day: secret email addresses

Another big AP scoop. Administration appointees maintain "secret email addresses" if by secret you mean a separate unpublished intra-office address they use to conduct agency business. AP is not buying the reasoning that they do this to avoid having to filter out extraneous public contacts from their accounts while they engaged in critical communications required to do their job. Because you know, nobody else does that, anywhere. Not ever. And never have before. If by never you forget to mention it was a common practice for years in the Bush administration.

Leaving aside that omission, do you know anybody know who doesn't have at least two accounts, even when they're not highly visible public figures? I don't. Furthermore, AP has no evidence of any misconduct involved in the use of the private addys. They aren't in widespread use. In fact AP found only a few of the employees have them at all. They appear to be mainly confined to the agency heads. There's no evidence they're being used to circumvent public records laws. All the AP has here is allegations from "Republicans in Congress" and the "Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank." Plus their own gut feeling that the very existence of such accounts "drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions."

I find that rather hilarious, in a sardonic laugh kind of way. In fact, I seem to remember Bush administration White House staff using effectively illegal accounts with the practical result of circumventing public records laws. And then somehow managed to "lose" millions of them having to do with major policy decisions and deceptions of the Bush tenure. Many important electronic records were never recovered. What I don't remember is any great outcry from AP demanding accountability then.

But leaving history behind, the AP did manage to get the private address for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. They were asked not to publish it, but they decided to ignore that request "because the secretary is a high-ranking civil servant who oversees not only major agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services but also the implementation of Obama's signature health care law." I imagine having her private address inundated with crazed emails from crackpots every time Beck or Malkin or whoever sic their hordes of flying monkeys on her won't be interfering with her ability to conduct the business of the people at all. So great journalism in service of the public interest with that bold revelation guys.

What's most amusing about this little outrage is I see these journos bitch all day long on the twitter about having to deal with angry trolls who blast them with unwanted communications. Willing to bet they all have private addresses as well that they use to conduct their work. Maybe in the interests of media transparency, they'd like to give those out to the public... I didn't think so.

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How big is media surveillance under Obama

I'm as unhappy as the next guy about government surveillance on journalists and private citizens but I sure wish the media had been this focused when the Bush administration was doing it illegally. Even the NYT is verging on scaremongering about Obama's DoJ. I mean the hed screams US Leaks Inquiries Show How Wide a Net is Cast. About midway through the article it admits, "It is not clear how often the government has obtained reporters’ communications records."

The only person they could get on record for the story is one government guy whose life was ruined under the Bush administration for allegedly leaking about warrantless wiretaps -- on everybody. Meanwhile here's an interesting twist to the Rosen saga.

On Saturday, a Fox News executive said that the notice had gone to News Corp., its parent company, on Aug. 27, 2010, but that Fox News was not told until Friday. The executive said they were still trying to sort out how the notice fell through the cracks.

You might have thought this would be something the parent corp would have brought to their news station's attention right away. Kind of convenient they suddenly discovered it after the AP got all sorts of steam out of their surveillance. And again, in these Obama era cases it's not about wholesale spying on the population or the media. As the government states, "law enforcement officials said the leaks were alarming because someone had shared information while overseas intelligence operations were still under way."

If somebody can show me where any of these stories exposed government misconduct, I'm happy to join in the outrage but so far all I see is a few journos outing active counter-terrorism operations in countries that do pose a danger to our national security, effectively shutting them down because of the exposure. I don't feel so well served by that kind of traffic baiting journalism.

I have to agree with Kevin Drum about this hue and cry over this.

Something about the Rosen case just doesn't add up. But a lot of people don't seem to be taking the possible outing of an intelligence source very seriously. They're acting as if the DOJ prosecution is over a completely meaningless story. That might be, but I think a bit less circling the wagons, and a bit more serious questioning, might be in order here.

I often watch these big journos on the twitter. They hate Obama, not for his politics but because he doesn't treat them with the respect they believe they deserve. Sadly, I don't believe the vast majority of them deserve the respect. They aren't informing the public. When he does hold a presser, they leap to find a single phrase out of hundreds of words and manufacture some kind of fauxtroversy out of it. They skip most of the salient points he makes about policy. Too boring. Doesn't bring in the eyeballs. Maybe if they showed the POTUS the kind of respect he deserves, they would get some in return.

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Nobody loves the IRS

Personally I prefer to call it a ginned up psuedo-scandal, but Josh is right about the politics of the IRS mess. GOP will be dining out on this one through 2014 and probably longer. This is Grade A prime rib for the angry base. No investigation, no irrefutable hard evidence will ever convince them they haven't been persecuted by the evel soshulist fascist liberal Dimmocrats to steal their First Amendment rights.

God save us if somehow this gets tied directly to the White House for real. Everybody loves a scandal and hates the IRS. The mass outrage will drown out everything else for months. Maybe years.

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Blame Congress for the IRS mess - Updated

Once you cut through the self-serving noise over the IRS psuedo-scandal, a few things become clear. Tea Party groups weren't really being targeted for their political beliefs. They were being asked to prove why they deserved a big tax exemption. And let's be real, if the name of your group stands for Taxed Enough Already, you're begging to be tied up in paperwork.

As I said before, I think most of the smaller groups were run by grifters who saw a prime opportunity to profit personally from the fear and anger of misinformed conservatives. More than one of them has been exposed as a fraud since the Kochs laid down that astroturf.

Also, I've seen no evidence President Obama had anything to do with it. He's not checking in with the IRS daily to give them a list of targets. He has no knowledge of their day to day operations. Anybody really think the CEO of a major corporation knows the intimate details of every manager's work day? It defies logic.

IRS was doing its job under the rules that Congress gave them, which were not at all clear. This is the smartest thing I've read about this so far. The real IRS scandal is in who was allowed to operate without challenge:

If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work. For example, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the Koch Brothers, was an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives. In every meaningful sense, groups like Americans for Prosperity were operating as units of the Republican Party. Democrats organized similar operations, but on a much smaller scale. (They undoubtedly would have done more, but they lacked the Republican base for funding such efforts.)

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way. As Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”

The real problem is the IRS was wasting time chasing the small fry while the big fish were allowed to freely cheat the system. President Obama can't fix that. Only Congress can, by making the rules clearer.

Update: Charlie Pierce has more on why the blame for this IRS mess is on Congress.

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