Monday, January 23, 2017

HOW MUCH FADE AWAY CAN THE NATION PUT UP WITH?

By Dominique Paul Noth

Tillerson proves far from stoppable
One part of me was hardly surprised that the three GOP senators who expressed severe reservations about Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State – worrying that his coziness with Russia was unsettling and so was ExxonMobil’s record of running its own foreign policy in contravention of US sanctions – wound up agreeing to vote for him, which assures his choice. Lindsay Graham, John McCain --  and even Marco Rubio after aggressive questioning --  caved.

Also worried that the extraordinary turnout of women and men on the Saturday after the inauguration – around the globe as well as in major US cities, probably totaling more than 4 million – may slowly drizzle away as all those temporarily united groups argue about the best way to proceed and as Trump sits in the catbird’s seat grabbing the headlines for (maybe he is) undoing and (maybe he is just) delaying as much of Obama’s policies as he can, whether good for the people or not.

Note how quickly he halted the lower mortgage rates at FHA for poorer middle class home buyers. 


Notice how he threw a monkey wrench into the entire Obamacare system by telling his agencies not to enforce regulations about mandates  and anything that vaguely fits the definition of financial hardship for echelons of the health system. In doing this, he basically threw a scare into the whole system without mandating change, simply allowing his minions to lax required coverage and upset the applecart of the health insurance industry.

Note how, claiming he was saving taxpayers’ money, he froze hiring of new federal workers, which was nonsensical since if these were not good workers he was locking them in place while preventing the hiring of more people

No, what I noticed is how even the media is bowing to the new boss in the White House.

Part  of this is understandable. I, too, want to give the new administration a chance to see if some off-putting policies and exaggerated issues have some merit, whether infrastructure will be built,  manufacturing  jobs will return (or are we simply giving the rest of the world an edge in technology?) or whether we are about to embark on an unneeded but overdue trade war (we are certainly not the biggest and yet have to prove we are the best trading nation in the world). How we signal cooperation should not mean abandoning the basic standards of truth-telling.

When faced with press secretary Scott Spicer’s bald-faced pivot that he was talking Saturday about the world TV and Internet audience for the inaugural (while he was actually detailing  with false remarks and false D.C. transit reports the lower in-person crowd turnout), the media at best mildly criticized. 

Rather than confronting Spicer as a liar, they seemed glad that he stuck mainly to business and a more pleasant tone while still deflecting any suggestion that he was in error.  In reality, his falsifying of transit records was bigger – and not as immediately corrected –as the mistaken MLK bust report from one TIME magazine reporter who quickly retracted (and whose apology Spicer actually accepted before his boss instructed him to get mad).

In arguing that they didn’t want to waste time on trivialities, the media allowed Spicer to ride the trivialities as if they were factual. 

It was much as Kellyanne Conway has been handling the media, making the term Conwaying a synonym for evasive lying. She even mildly threatened that the Trump administration was going to force a new relationship with the press --  an acceptance of whatever crazy  version of “alternative facts”  they come up with (though the term “alternative facts” is likely to disappear in embarrassment).

The GOP willingness to go along has a lot to do with the tradition of giving the president free rein on his cabinet picks, though some of the strangest ever are waiting in the wings (Ben Carson for HUD, Scott Pruitt for EPA, Tom Price for HHS, Andrew Puzder for labor  and my favorite example of unpreparedness, Betsy DeVos for education secretary).  One could argue that except for Jeff Sessions, who is likely to be the most regressive attorney general in history, the other cabinet choices offered little opportunity for meaningful opposition.  But even conservatives must be horrified by some of the exhibits in the wings.

The media tolerance may have a bit to do with retaining access to the seat of power, though frankly the press should be the most aggressive skeptics and clearly was also reacting to the low regard Trump has helped engender in public reaction to the press. Standing up, they think, will not win them friends (I don’t agree). 

But the enthusiastic defiant millions that marched Saturday – and again Monday --  worry me the most.  Will they now go home in satisfaction they’ve done their bit for a better world?  Or will they go to work on changing America back into their vision (both urban and rural) of the values and language that have distinguished our country despite its flaws?

In Wisconsin, I’m already seeing the pressure to organize into new groups despite the abundance of existing progressive groups that have been fighting for a foothold.  There is something inspiring about this new wave of groups and something disturbing as well, as if the existing groups had let them down and no longer deserve support.  

Is Wisconsin Jobs Now passé? Or should it give way to another group. Hasn’t Working Families Party done good – or have they just gotten in the way of the old Democratic Party, which is struggling to revitalize itself? Come to think of it, can the Democrat Party win these marchers over?

Is there wisdom in the call from Citizen Action of Wisconsin (itself a progressive entity) to form new groups under the umbrella Our Revolution?

Some veteran progressives are frankly tired of being asked to join yet another new group every time they turn around. Others are intrigued if this is a new way to harness the energy unleashed in gargantuan terms by reaction to Trump’s inauguration.

Since the GOP is firmly  in charge in D.C., much of that energy centered on the D.C. march is heading home with a vengeance – even in states the Republicans long felt they had a vise on, like Wisconsin.

“Indivisible” is only one of the national groups determined  to make angry citizens focus back on their home states where the conservatives have had something of a free hand. The ACLU also publicly believes it will take a “pincer movement” of enormous action on the ground combined with litigation.

Another developing group based in D.C., though it has been around since 2014, is the State Innovative Exchange (SIX), which is also concentrating on changing the statehouses by helping legislators introduce progressive legislation – sort of an answer to ALEC without the unsavory private-public secrecy that right-wing organization relies on.

“There’s a lot of blue in the red,” noted Stephanie Schriock president of Emily’s List, a long-term progressive group that seeks out women to support. Schriock says it saw  500 women sign up to run for office in the hours after the march.  She was speaking about how,  even if you look on the political map,  there are a lot of liberal pockets and isolated independent thinkers in regions we assume are conservative.

Will this fizzle? Will it take hold? Let’s clear  away the euphoria and put feet firmly on Earth.   If you marched Saturday, or wanted to, the pressure to create more believers is now on you.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 


Sunday, January 8, 2017

MADDOW REVEALS LIAR OF YEAR – AND HIGH TIME!

By Dominique Paul Noth

Media euphemism used without permission.
There has been a longstanding reluctance within the news media – only slightly broken of late.  Never use “lie” and “liar” about candidates for presidential office – or even for lower offices.

Strange isn’t it?   There’s a concession that every politician exaggerates, obfuscates or at worse deals with falsehoods. Yet there has been some sort of gentleman’s agreement to avoid distemper, which translates into not telling the unabashed truth about the oral attacks even as the assaults grow more hysterical. Indeed, it is often the liar who takes the stage to accuse his opponent of lying (hello, Ron Johnson), which makes the term “liar!” even  more suspect.

Media watchers tend to use euphemistic phrases like Pinocchios, Half True, Half False and  in painfully obvious cases Pants on Fire.  But historically  not lie and liar.  You have to go all the way back to the 19th century to find the Mark Twain quote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” which he attributed to a British politician, Benjamin Disraeli. (The British Parliament has proven more open to wit than the American editorial page.)

I grew up as a journalist in that forced civility – like film-makers under the old 1930s Production Code who had to find ways to suggest sex without saying sex. Now I both appreciate the restraint and resent the failure to know when to throw restraint  aside.

We journalists frankly enraged much of the public in the 2016 presidential campaign when the country had entered a bombastic balloon of accusations and insults that warranted being called out by their rightful name – and we didn’t. We went through more than a year of false equivalency – sure, he said that, but didn’t she say something? Sure he drips venom and untruths at every rally, but what about her emails, her health, those suspicious people gathered around her?

Twenty years from now, I suspect, most people and certainly historians will be hard pressed to identify what horrible things she did. Especially compared to the actual words that fell out of his mouth with such ease.

Many news sites decided, as the Wall Street Journal recently admitted it did, that it was not their place to call out Donald Trump for falsehoods but to lay both sides out for the citizens to decide themselves. In other words, it  defended its own cowardice. 

If  one side attacks, just find someone on the other side to invent context. Kellyanne Conway is always at the ready.

While WSJ is clearly afraid of offending its audience, as are many TV outlets,  advertising agencies haven’t been this squirrely for decades, taking more liberties with the veracity of their content than the TV and sports news that surround them.  Even when forced by federal regulations,  pharmacology companies  whip through or run in smallest print the contra-indications of every new medicine. Banks and insurance companies promise they are much nicer than the other guy.  “I approve this message” does not mean that accuracy will follow. Macy’s helps Gimbels only in old movies.

The media no longer feels obliged to call a snake  a snake, just to be delicate about  how it describes the snake.

Rachel Maddow
Thank God for Rachel Maddow.  On her MSNBC show Jan. 6, she brought what’s left of that wall tumbling down, referring to Trump’s interpretation and pretense about the national intelligence assessment 12 times as lie, lying or liar – overtly, blatantly, bluntly lying in a way she said that sent shivers down the spine of a practiced news observer.  The video is here.

She did not exaggerate and it was past time someone ripped the emperor’s clothes off.

Just remember what the intelligence assessment didn’t do that Trump claims it did  – explore whether the hacking, the supplying to Wikileaks of selective Democratic  staff emails, the propaganda and planted stories,   including claims of Hillary’s poor health, crookedness and even depression, had a decisive effect on the election. Not their call, the agencies said.

Since voting machines weren’t hacked despite the messing with election boards, Trump backers can always claim the voters rose above the propaganda and decided for themselves – that the surrounding noise did not influence how they voted. What do you think they are – stooges?

This is what obviously concerns Trump and why he so desperately fights the obvious analysis.  The revelations cast doubt on the legitimacy of his election, even though the intelligence  agencies didn’t go there.  Yet his big lie was saying they did, that they exonerated him.  That was not in the agencies’ purview. 

A smaller lie was claiming the Republican National Committee computers were too protected to be hacked while the report indicates they were hacked  but the Russians didn’t act on the material the way they did the Clinton stuff. So here’s  another demonstration that Trump was what Putin wanted – not from the start perhaps, where animosity to Clinton’s objections to his 2011 shenanigans set Putin off. That alone revealed she was quite an influential secretary of state.

On the  petty level of egotistical businessman, you can understand Trump’s concern.  Maybe he didn’t honestly win as he keeps saying he did.  But as a president he cannot afford to be so ego centric.
  
The intelligence agencies did not say he won by hook and crook, but now that  question should certainly be there for the general public, those who voted for and against.

How much of the Russian assault was swallowed wholesale by the media and the public?   Where came the media false equivalency to find balance where there was not – deleted emails as an equal error to Trump’s swiftly  moving litany of the ludicrous and licentious, suggesting that her world-honored charitable foundation was no cleaner than his much sued concoction?

Thinking voters now have to ask themselves: Was it a desire for change that triggered them or a rejection of Hillary’s competence inspired by all the false reporting?  There are no do-overs, but there deserves to be self-examination.

Hillary  says she’s not a natural politician, just a competent leader. Trump is clearly a born salesman in a peculiar American tradition.  But many voters looked past the bulk of what he says and does to decide they didn’t want another damn Clinton, even one quite different than hubby.  But if 1% of the Trump voters were misled by the Russian blitz, Clinton would easily be president.

As hard as it is for Trump to admit a good portion of the public may have been duped,  it’s going to be harder for that public to acknowledge its own foolishness.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 


Friday, January 6, 2017

NO NO ANNETTE OPPONENT! ANOTHER BLOT ON WISCONSIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Annette Ziegler, sady unopposed
Gathering information about the pending April 4 election I was struck by the biggest failure of 2017 for  the moderate and  liberal cultures  that still dominate the state --  to field ANY opponent to Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler, despite the puny legal ability reflected in her 10 years of decision-making. 

Several things about the Ziegler Zeitgeist jumped out at me, aside from how her race 10 years ago introduced the big campaign money game that has now become standard in supreme court races ($6 million back then). Or that before she could help change the financial disclosure rules on the high court, her favoritism as a judge in Washington County rulings toward the banking interests of her husband forced the state high court itself to reprimand her.

The big thing that jumped at me involves how little the public seems to know of her own writings after 10 years.  If they only went back to her concurring opinion in July of 2015 to shutting down the John Doe II investigation, they would have a better idea of the paucity, naval gazing and near paranoia of her decision-making process. 

In that opinion she relied on blatantly biased sources from the raided right-wing side about home searches that started formally at dawn --  6 a.m. Oct. 3, 2013. The descriptions she cited several times came from what today we describe as “fake news” opinion outlets. They painted the home raids falsely as nighttime searches paramilitary style or extraordinary predawn searches.
Building a rhetorical outrage over the treatment of these “average citizens” who all had ties to the highest echelons of Gov.  Scott Walker’s staff, Ziegler ignored that there was contradictory audio evidence revealing how professionally and politely the home searches were executed as well as evidence (including reporters at the scene) that there were secrecy reasons for some urgency to seize computer files.

It is one thing to be married to a conservative view of the world. It is quite another for a judge to be married to his or her own facts, and this opinion is a breathtaking example of that tendency.

So on many grounds, including common sense more than the partisan realities of this self-emasculating court, Zeigler should have had an opponent.

Something else jumped out at me. Money does cow values in Wisconsin. There were many efforts to recruit an opponent, but the need for cash to compete was the decider, several of the candidates approached admitted to me.

Ziegler who comes from a well heeled family is sitting on $200,000 in her campaign war chest, has months of fund-raising to go if she wants and has access to lots of third party support if she had been facing an opponent. “What's for certain is that conservative court candidates can count on massive outside support in any case,” journalist Bill Lueders emailed me.

Lueders, a noted leader in state political corruption exposure,  pointed out in a 2015 story that  WMC and Wisconsin Club for Growth together “provided an estimated $8.3 million for ‘issue ads’ helping elect Ziegler, Michael Gableman, David Prosser and Patience Roggensack — well more than the $3.2 million spent by these candidates’ own campaigns.” And this was before the arrival of Rebecca Bradley.

Don’t think an awareness of those coffers hasn’t affected the thousands of Wisconsin lawyers, legal academics and judges from who could be plucked candidates far better on paper than Ziegler. Any of them would face a runaway truck of money and pointed partisan scrutiny. Tsk tsk if you will at such fears about submitting to public service, but then think of putting your own family through such a hostile environment. 

The state court is a special kind of scraping sandpaper. It now tilts destructively conservative, as even true conservatives will admit, giving state government far too free a hand and resulting in court rulings that are comic book exercises in solipsism – where the personal opinions of a narrow mind interpret every important statute before it.

With the collusion of the governor, the GOP state legislature, the attorney general and the large corporations that not only help write the laws but depend on the court to uphold them, justice doesn’t have much of a chance.

And in opposing such machinery, the Democrats do have a recent history of getting ferociously ideological in their own right.  The 2016 race against Walker pet Rebecca Bradley provided a clear and cruel example.

She was only one of three candidates in the February primary and some hoped she could be eliminated there. The more leftist forces understandably rallied around Joanne Kloppenburg believing with some justification that she was robbed in a close 2011 election notable for decisive ballots found for David Prosser days after the election.  Other advocates  centered in Milwaukee felt passionately about the forward-looking record and warm personality of a Milwaukee jurist.

As I wrote at the time “The really qualified --  Milwaukee court veteran Joe Donald and appeals judge veteran Joanne Kloppenburg -- will split the intelligent and truly passionate  vote, leaving only one of them  standing Feb. 16 to face Bradley, who has just been assured of a gigantic war chest.”

An unseemly war of factions broke out not against Bradley but among the Democrats. Donald, whose intellectual gifts and breakthrough leadership along with an easy folksy manner, was also the epitome of the collegiality that existed in the Milwaukee circuit court system, where judges were courteous to each other despite ideological differences. 

Because he had been polite to Bradley when she was first appointed to the Milwaukee bench, the leftist forces behind Kloppenburg seized on that to color him as weak and too conservative – in an election that really required the public to feel the humanity and versatile thoughtfulness of a judge ahead of any strident politics.  Kloppenburg won big in the primary and she was a naked target to the Bradley attack that April built around her leftist support. And while she came close against Prosser, she was flattened by Bradley, easier to attack than Donald would have been.

Despite the history of self-destruction, there is a  developing myth that it is only the disorganization of the state Democratic Party responsible for the Ziegler free ride  this time around.  I don’t disagree that the Democrats are historically disorganized about developing a bench and figuring out campaign funding in the wake of Act 10, though I might argue that judicial candidates are not usually in their wheelhouse. These are technically nonpartisan elections.

Bryan Kennedy
I’m also a fan, and have been since he was a union leader and candidate, of   Bryan Kennedy, mayor of Glendale who is making noises about running for state party chair and is using the Ziegler case as a prime example.  “This is a failure of the Democratic Party to provide the kind of infrastructure that would encourage liberal/progressive Supreme Court justice candidates to run,” he writes. “If I were chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, I would be working to build year-round infrastructure to help our members get elected to nonpartisan offices in the spring elections.”

Martha Laning
But I’m also familiar with Martha Laning, who has been running the state party for only a year or so and has clearly stepped into a hornet’s nest of reorganizing and encouraging local activists, fielding even more blame in the wake of the  abysmal failures of 2016, many of which predate her election. 

The party does suffer from a long-term  lack of a bench and follow-through for certain positions. It is getting long in the tooth.  Judicial races are particularly disorganized largely because law associations play such a large role. In Milwaukee April 4, there is one circuit court contest that pits two progressive candidates against each other and another where a Walker appointee to the bench who was defeated last time around is running unopposed for another branch.

The Democrats deserve blame. They’ve taken far too long to listen and get busy with grassroots organizations and activists in 72 counties that  have different concerns and interests than can be met by a one-size-fits-all ideological program, and here is where Laning says she’s trying. 

Keith Ellison during UWM event
Kennedy is the out-front style of leader while Laning is more the backroom financial figure – the sort of split the Democrats are also seeing at the national party level. There the Sanders forces are praising Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison --  who actually visited UWM  last summer gathering a small crowd of somewhat indifferent students speaking for Clinton --   and other candidates such as Tom Perez, the Latino secretary of labor who has a strong financial and administrative record.

Laning is fielding abuse for not working fast enough but  can’t be accused of not working on the problems, particularly a 72 county blitz that is long overdue and that a gerrymandering lawsuit may finally put some teeth into. But anger and the desire for a more public face of action is lifting Kennedy in the public mind.

I would have thought the existence of Trump along with the loss of Russ Feingold – plus the fact that Hillary Clinton holds almost three million more votes nationally and the majority of the country is coping with a minority party in charge – would galvanize the Wisconsin citizenry into corrective action as early as the spring election, which is usually a time when the GOP dominates.

I remain amazed that the local conservative districts around the state seeing their schools and rivers weakened and their incomes and job stagnate have not yet seized pitchforks and marched into action.

But the injury is still abstract nationally (Trump is not yet in office) and seductive locally,  particularly among those who think Walker and his state minions have lowered their tax burden and are still on their side. The sometimes shrill rhetoric on the other side has done little to persuade them the way facts on the ground should.

There has long been a curious sheeplike and blindly optimistic side to America. There has been a tendency to seek scapegoats for personal problems and put faith, as the Wisconsin Supreme Court does, in which plaintiffs have the most money. So if there’s going to be a revolution, April 4 won’t lead this sort of  “Do You Hear the People Sing.” 

A chance at redemption by voting for Tony Evers
Even now the spring election  offers a chance for the citizenry to redeem itself.  The absence of having to defend Ziegler means the  right wing third party money will be concentrated on state schools superintendent Tony Evers – and that’s where the liberal/progressive forces should also concentrate.  Evers is  a true educator who remains the lone independent voice in state government, able to work with the governor and still confront him on those devastating education cuts and wrongheaded policy, while fighting for public education and even successful charter schools. 

Meanwhile two candidates, both voucher supporters emboldened by the likelihood of voucher fund guru queen  Betsy DeVos becoming federal secretary of education, are prepared to coalesce big money against Evers whichever survives the primary.

This is the only statewide contest of consequence, though there are interesting local judicial and school board races and the like. If the Ziegler follies are a prime example, it will take a real outrage the community has not yet demonstrated to save his job and our children’s future.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.