I expect anyone who bothers to read this blog probably already knows this, but Constitutionally, there is a distinction between government speech and private speech. When the government speaks, among other things, it is governed by the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — this has been interpreted to extend to government generally and not just Congress.) Private citizens are not bound by the Establishment Clause.

In Knightstown, there is a large evergreen in the town square. The town decorates it with lights and such during Christmas. One of the decorations is a large cross on top of the tree. That is apparently the only religious symbol. The ACLU filed suit and the town declined to fight the suit, taking the cross down.

This has provoked outrage in the usual fashion. One of the common arguments is that not allowing the government to put up a cross is, itself, a violation of the Free Exercise clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting . . . the free exercise [of religion].”) I’m not sure if this is people being deliberately obtuse or if they simply don’t understand the distinction: private citizens have the right to exercise religion freely; government is restricted from making laws with respect to the establishment of religion. Private individuals are not restricted from establishing religion; government does not have a right to exercise religion.

If the tree and the cross had been on private ground, no lawsuit would have been filed by the ACLU (and, if it had, they would have lost). The critical distinction here is that the cross was government speech. I went to the comment section of a news article (I know, I know) and the commenters studiously ignored the distinction between government and private speech. Rather than comment there, I thought I’d just scream into the void from the friendly confines of my own blog.

This is the 75th Anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, was aimed at the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine air forces. The attack damaged or destroyed twelve U.S. warships, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned the raid as the start of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, and it was commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost 64 servicemen. However, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were not in port and so were undamaged, as were oil tank farms and machine shops. Using these resources the United States was able to rebound within six months to a year. The U.S. public saw the attack as a treacherous act and rallied strongly against the Japanese Empire, resulting in its later defeat.

Back in 2006, Kung Fu Monkey spoke to the bravery with which the Allies responded (and contrasted it to the fearful rhetoric associated with the War on Terror in 2006):

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

U.S. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

My title is taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I had a poster with an image of a smoking flag over Pearl Harbor and the words, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” It was a very powerful image for me and, since then, I’ve associated Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

We were fighting against Imperial Japan, a place where militaristic nationalists had taken control of the government and stoked notions of Japanese exceptionalism. The America fought for by the Americans 75 years ago stood for a country (in principal if not always in fact) governed by the consent of the governed where all men are created equal. The home of the brave.

We should always be mindful that, as Edward R. Murrow pointed out, “we are not descended from fearful men.” When our own militaristic nationalists come peddling fear and exceptionalism, we should strike them down just as we struck down Imperial Japan so that the dead of Pearl Harbor shall not have died in vain.

A friend of mine directed me to an article about Elon Musk and his comments about a universal income. The question has to do with technology and innovation that eliminates the need for humans to do the jobs. Musk suggested that a universal basic income or something like it might be the answer. “There’s a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” said Musk. “I’m not sure what else one would do. That’s what I think would happen.”

Earlier this year, Brian Howey asked Mitch Daniels about the shift from manufacturing to a knowledge based economy. He said:

“Every time human ingenuity has created one of these transformations, people have worried,” Daniels said. “They see what is being lost. It won’t take a third of us to grow food. What’s everybody going to do? Every time up to now, the new economy produced more opportunities than the old one did.”

But the change gripping the United States today is worrisome to Daniels.

“It’s not yet clear to me that it will create sufficient categories of new high-paying jobs,” Daniels said. “Whether there will be enough of them to support a growing population and a middle class like we’ve known, that’s what is bothering me.”

There are, as I see it, two related but wrongfully conflated issues: 1) designing an economy that continues to be productive; and 2) the notion that moral worth and economic success are more closely correlated than they really are. The first demands a lot of respect. The second is an anachronism we should try to get past.

I think we bear some cultural scars from the Cold War wherein we are overly fearful of communism and socialism. That said, the systems implemented in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe are not ones we want to live in. You don’t want a system where an oligarchy lives large, snuffs out economic innovation, and leaves people with no incentive to work and create. If you appropriate 100% of the value a person creates, why would he or she bother? On the other hand, I’m willing to bet that most individuals would do the same work for $500 million as they would do for $1 billion. At a certain level, the incentive structures provide diminishing returns. Historically in this country, taxes — even very high taxes on upper incomes — have not shut down the economy. In any case, I think there is some evidence that you have maneuverability for gathering golden eggs without killing the goose that lays them.

On the functionality argument, there seems to be room for negotiation. But the moral argument is so often a show stopper. (See, e.g. taxation = theft!) Beyond that battle cry of some libertarians, there is the more pervasive Puritan work ethic sensibility in the American electorate. If you are poor, it’s because of a moral failing. If you are rich, it’s because you worked harder or smarter. But the economy isn’t a morality play. It rewards leverage more than merit. Even so, back in the olden days, there was survival value for the community in making sure everyone was busting their ass. If you had people sitting around, the village might starve. Now, the resource situation is a little different. I posted some thoughts in response to that Mitch Daniels conversation linked above:

As I view it, we’ll be economically productive enough to create what we need to support everyone as well or better than we ever had. The problem is that our current means of allocating the benefits of that productivity doesn’t distribute those benefits in a manner that will support everyone as well or better than we have in recent memory. Traditionally, there has been some justification in telling someone that, if they weren’t producing and acquiring what they needed to support themselves, it was because they were lazy, and we ought not reward laziness. More and more, it seems to me, there are people who are perfectly willing to work; but the economy has shifted in ways that requires labor less and less. If labor isn’t something the economy needs very much, how do we go about allocating our resources in a way that doesn’t rely on labor as a proxy for merit?

This is a theme I’ve touched on from time to time (it seems to have been very much on my mind in 2012):

Fred Clark: Unemployed in the Affluent Society (10/25/11):

Galbraith discusses the Puritan origins of a moral imperative to work. Goods were vitally necessary; the loss of available labor to produce those goods was extremely detrimental to society; and, therefore, the penalty – deprivation of all or most of an individual’s income – was appropriate. The penalty was so justified that there was no moral obligation to help someone who wasn’t helping themselves by working.

Now, in a world awash with goods, the loss of an individual’s productive capacity is incidental but the penalty remains almost equally severe – even where the failure to work isn’t through sloth but through lack of obvious opportunities. And, yet, the quest continues for a moral justification to allow the affluent to settle into a comfortable disregard for those not sharing in society’s affluence.

Technology and the Future of Work (4/18/12):

This has me noodling about the nature of wealth, the nature of money, and the nature of work. I think there is an underlying premise that we can’t sustain a middle class society if we all just go around giving each other haircuts or whatever? The government can’t just give away money. Sounds reasonable, but why not? Because we have to eat and have shelter; we need someone to make the stuff. Who is going to do the hard work to farm and make stuff when they can just get free money from the government? People will stop working, you’ll have more demand than supply, money will be worthless.

But, I wonder. Automation suggests to me that these goods are easier to make. What happens if government is essentially printing money to pay for these non-tradable goods (healthcare and education, for example) and the money supply enters the economy that way instead of through the Federal Reserve?

Posner, Clark, Efficiency, and Economic Hematoma (4/23/12):

The problem is that we may not be diverting workers from more to less productive work. The workers themselves may not be engaged in any work at all. If we made a subsidy contingent on increased employment, we may well be requiring that the manufacturing be performed in a less efficient way. But, we’d be doing this to give the individual worker a basis for staking a claim to some of the value created by the production. This is less efficient, but it may be necessary so long as: a) we know of no more productive work that the individual worker can do; and b) we require work as a basis for making a claim for income.

. . .

You get an economy that’s working very efficiently. But, because the world’s necessities can be created by a relatively small percentage of the population, the vast income generated pools in relatively few places; sort of a hematoma of the economic circulatory system. To remain healthy, the body politic needs good circulation, else part of it becomes gangrenous and poisons everything else. If possible, we need to find more productive work for our citizens. Otherwise, we need to figure out some other way for allocating some part of the economic flow to idle citizens.

Liberty, Laws, and Property (8/30/12):

The libertarians I have read don’t seem to bother much with this sort of calculus when it comes to property rights. They take it as an article of faith that property rights always outweigh the corresponding restrictions on liberty. This is so, I think, because of the tendency to regard property rights as “natural rights” — something that comes not from the rational acts of humans but from the ether or something. I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of “natural rights” — mainly just hand waving references to a Creator whose mind is apparently known to those who divine the natural rights. Fact is, in the absence of law, there are no rights; just unenforceable opinions about how things ought to be.

But, I think in the coming years as the nature of work evolves, we’ll have to be more aware of the calculus underpinning our assessment of property rights and the corresponding burdens imposed thereby.

I’ll keep thinking about this. I think it plays into all kinds of major concerns: jobs, debt, taxes, the shrinking middle class, etc.

Ruminations on Labor (9/3/12):

The problem I see, this Labor Day, is that compared to recent centuries, wealth is fairly abundant, but the amount of labor necessary to create that wealth is very much diminished. And, yet, because of the history of how wealth was traditionally created, we generally tie the legitimacy of one’s claim to property to some sort of labor that goes into creating that wealth. Then, we allow (even encourage) the laborer to contract away much of that claim to an employer – someone with specialized access to tools needed to create wealth (large machines, in many cases) or maybe specialized access to the demand or markets for certain types of labor.

But, now, with the demand for labor at very low levels, the individual has very little leverage when negotiating away their claim to property (e.g. the employment contract). This leverage is further reduced by the fact that the person has certain basic needs – food, shelter, health care, etc; and, by and large, can’t simply walk away from the table in most cases. (If demand for labor is high, then you can simply go on to the next employer; if not, you have to take what you can get.)

Meanwhile, employers (those with specialized access to tools or markets) can accumulate great wealth because they can bundle together the shares of access to property traded away by the laborers (value created by labor but not retained by the laborer) and pocket that value for themselves. They’re able to do this because they are operating in an environment featuring a cocoon of infrastructure and property laws; among other things. Absent this environment, their deals with laborers (and with makers of the specialized tools and with the markets they have specialized access to) would be worth precisely nothing. Without this cocoon, you get Somalia.

If you’ve read this far, I suppose you get the idea.

An acquaintance of mine raised a complaint that’s fairly familiar and, so, seemed worth a blog post. He is questioning why some folks call him a racist for being opposed to illegal immigration. He says he’s fine with legal immigration but opposes illegal immigration. What is so wrong or racist about being in favor of enforcing the law?

My response was:

The notion of racism comes from how intensely one reacts to illegal immigration versus other kinds of law breaking. If you support Trump despite his violation of laws against discriminatory housing but then get very unhappy about immigrants who haven’t obtained the proper paperwork, it makes people think that sanctity of the law isn’t the only thing motivating your outrage.

Would you vote for a candidate who promises to permanently revoke driving privileges for anyone who has exceeded the posted speed limit? Probably not. Which raises the question about why you feel so much more passionately about violating immigration laws.

I have mixed feelings about throwing around the label “racist.” It’s sometimes warranted but it’s also a conversation stopper. On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out many times in the past, I’m an upper-middle class white guy, so my taking a more philosophical approach to the question of racism is a privilege I have that others probably don’t.

In any case, on the subject of immigration, illegality, and whether racism might motivate one’s reaction to illegal immigration, I think it comes down to evaluating that reaction as compared to other forms of law-breaking. Do you view immigrating without the proper paperwork as more like a crime that’s malum prohibitum (wrong because it’s prohibited) like speeding or more like a crime that’s malum in se (wrong in itself) like robbery? If Congress legalized the immigration in question, would you be cool with the newly legal immigrants or would you be mad at Congress? The responses to those questions and your reasons for them probably go a long way toward answering whether race is a motivating factor in your views on the subject.

I’ve been writing this blog long enough that I can now rely on that “ten years ago today” crutch and be a little bit lazy. As it turns out, my post from Thanksgiving 2006 is pretty applicable to Thanksgiving 2016:

I know Thanksgiving is, at its root, a religious holiday, and I am not the most religious sort. Nonetheless, I think it’s probably my favorite holiday (Halloween is a close second, but on a more fun, superficial level.) Regardless of my doubts as to whom my gratitude should be directed, I recognize that I have a great deal about which to be thankful. It’s good to have holiday reminding me, and everyone else, of that fact.

For starters, I have a wife I love, two healthy kids, a job, enough to eat, and a roof over my head. That’s a pretty good start. I live in a country of such bounty I have the leisure time to do something as frivolous as write in this blog while drinking an African coffee and while my daughter sits next to me, eating grapes in November. Never mind access to technology plentiful and cheap enough to make the blog work. And I live in a country where I can express my doubts about religion and speak my mind about politics without any significant fear of reprisal.

Obviously I have my criticisms of my governments’ policies, objections to the direction this country has been heading, and fears about just how much my children will have to be thankful for when they are my age, but for today, it’s worth remembering that I have much of my own for which to be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Aaron Carroll (among other things, a Professor at the IU School of Medicine) has a good column at The Incidental Economist entitled “Why the U.S. Still Trails Many Wealthy Nations in Access to Care.” He acknowledges that many people are unhappy with Obamacare. But, he notes that it has been successful in its primary objectives: expanding the safety net, reducing the number of uninsured, and regulating the non-employer provided private insurance market.

Other countries provide their citizens with much better access to health care. Most of their citizens were better able than Americans to get care promptly and do so without having to go to the emergency room. Those countries had far more primary care physicians per capita than the U.S., and their citizens were less likely to skip necessary care due to expense. And, maybe most telling, citizens in those countries were more likely than Americans to be happy with their country’s health care system.

I’m not a huge fan of how Obamacare is structured, but I have not forgotten that the pre-Obamacare system was awful as well. As Carroll says:

Perhaps most telling, when adults were asked about their views of the health care system in 2013, 75 percent of Americans said that it needed fundamental change, or that it needed to be completely rebuilt. This percentage was higher than for any other country surveyed, Canada included. Primary care physicians feel similarly. Yet years after the Affordable Care Act was passed, Americans are still litigating whether to return to the previous system.

Access was a problem before. Access is a problem now. Americans can’t seem to have a discussion on how to make that better. Without that, it’s hard to see how things will improve.

Other countries have figured this out. A better health care system is possible. We need to identify the problems with Obamacare, see how other countries have addressed similar problems, and pass legislation to make those changes. For the moment, many lawmakers are choosing not to make things better.

It’s ridiculous that, wealthy as our country is, healthcare is in such a state (and has long been in such a state) that — in Indiana’s campaign for governor, John Gregg is being attacked for having state-paid insurance due to his having been a legislator for many years. We regard health insurance as some kind of decadent luxury that a legislator could obtain only through the rankest corruption.

Like I said, it’s not just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking that we should have a system where health insurance is affordable and actually provides access to health care. It’s being done with greater and lesser success in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K., should we choose to study them.

This one hurts. Cowboy Bob has passed away at the age 0f 73, apparently of a heart attack. There was a time, probably when I was 4 or 5, when Cowboy Bob’s corral was my favorite show.

From 1970 to 1989, Bob hosted the afternoon cartoon show on WTTV Channel 4. He appeared first as the host of the “Chuck Wagon Theatre” before it became known simply as “Cowboy Bob’s Corral.”

For a generation of Hoosiers, Cowboy Bob was an after-school companion who entertained with his cast of TV characters. Cowboy Bob also educated and engaged his audience subtly on issues like fire safety.

I remember one time my family and I were on vacation in Maryland. I didn’t really understand about how channels worked when you when you traveled far away. (Nor, apparently, had I learned to be polite). Family members were sitting in my aunt and uncle’s house watching football. At 3:00 (I think), I went to the TV and changed it to channel 4. No Cowboy Bob! (And not a lot of happiness from the people watching the game.) It was a bad day. That’s when I learned that Cowboy Bob didn’t play on every TV around the world. The world’s loss. And our loss now that Bob Glaze has passed away.

Here on the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, I thought I’d repost my thoughts from the occasion of the tenth anniversary.

With our cultural fixation on numerology, it seems especially obligatory to comment on the anniversary of 9/11 because it is the tenth.

I was every bit as shaken by the event as everyone else; struck by the juxtaposition of gratuitous destruction and peaceful cool, blue fall skies of that morning. After that, there was the chaotic nature in which information flowed in. The Internet was a little different then than it is today; not quite as opaque as it was in, say, 1995; but you still had to know where to go for quick information. I got a lot of my information from The Well; a bulletin board system of sorts with a lot of reliable posters from all around the country, primarily on the coasts.

The drive home was a little surreal. I confess I cried a little bit. I forget what all moved me that much – probably, it wasn’t the death of strangers. I’ve seen that on any number of news reports over the years and read about even greater numbers of deaths in history books without feeling the least bit emotionally involved. I think it was more a sense that things in this country were bound to change for the worse. But, I don’t know how much of that sense is actual memory and how much of that is memory colored by the fact that things did change for the worse. Aside from getting emotional, the rest of what I recall from the drive home was that the roads were pretty quiet — but, that’s not unusual in the back country roads from Lafayette to Monticello — and, before I got out of Lafayette, the Family Express on North 9th Street had jacked up its prices in response to the attacks.

When I got home, I was given a lesson in media consolidation. Every channel had coverage of the attacks; and, each channel would use the feed from its parent company’s news division. So, I found out that MTV and CBS were tied together, for example. Up and down the channel list, you would probably get one of five or six news broadcasts.

Shortly after the attacks, I also remember being uneasy about the number of people on the news programs saying some variant of “everything changed” on 9/11. Or, maybe, “irony died” on 9/11. Kind of weird stuff from, I suspected, people who wanted irony to die or everything to change and were projecting their desires on the event. But, aside from that, there was this incredible unity. I remember having hopes that we, as a country, would use the event to get behind something god almighty big and make our generation memorable. I don’t think I had anything specific in mind; but something on the scale of the moon landing was probably bouncing around in there.

I recall being extremely touched by the gift of 14 cattle by Kenyan Maasai herders. More than anything, that demonstrated that the World was almost entirely on our side following those attacks. I also recall being moved by Jon Stewart’s speech when the Daily Show came back on the air. We were starting to shake off the stunned reaction.

It’s hard telling what, if anything, might have been possible with Americans unified and the World in our corner; but I think it’s fair to say that we squandered the moment. We all wanted vengeance; but the just thing to do isn’t always the smart thing to do. In the end, our response to 9/11 hurt us far worse than the event itself did or than al Qaeda had the power to. Pearl Harbor represented the tip of Imperial Japan’s spear. 9/11 was al Qaeda going all-in and sucker punching us.

I supported the invasion of Afghanistan; though, in retrospect, that might not have been the height of wisdom. We’re still there. We wouldn’t be the first empire that went to Afghanistan to die. But, it was Iraq that was the height of monstrous stupidity. Without 9/11, you couldn’t sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people.

So, here we are, ten years later; economically spent and lacking optimism. It’s hard to remember how things were prior to 9/11. During the late 90s, the Internet boom made us feel like we were creating something phenomenal. Energy was high. Jobs were easy to come by. Infrastructure was not crumbling.

We can’t blame 9/11 for everything, of course. The dotcom buble was bursting; the housing bubble was still inflating, but the trajectory was pretty well set. Wall Street was stacking its house of cards higher and higher. Our industrial base was already being hollowed out. But, it seems to me, our reaction to 9/11 was a force multiplier. We increased our expenses enormously without bothering to budget for them. Government credibility, not at a high water mark anyway, was demolished. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “War on Terra” became punchlines.

It’s entirely appropriate that we honor the first responders of 9/11 as brave and regard the deaths of the folks in the Pentagon and World Trade center as tragic. But, for me, the nobility of the people who acted that day and the solemnity of the occasion is tainted by all that followed.

Think Progress has a piece indicating that East Chicago is “poised to become the next Flint.” The EPA says soil in the area has been contaminated with toxic levels of lead and arsenic since at least 2014. According to the piece, it’s more likely that this problem, or at least its origins, is more like 50 years old.

In 1920, U.S.S. Lead set up shop along the town’s central Calumet River and began churning lead dust, arsenic, and other chemicals into the atmosphere. Around the same time, Anaconda Lead Products opened a few blocks north of U.S.S. Lead and did the same.

In 1973, U.S.S. Lead began dismantling car batteries to recover lead parts. Discarded materials saturated the soil with battery acid. Anaconda Lead has a shorter legacy?—?after shutting down in 1936, the factory’s buildings were demolished and cleared, leaving only lead-rich soil in its wake.

Low income housing was then put in the area. In 1985, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management tested former Anaconda locations and found places with lead levels at 11,000 parts per million. The EPA’s maximum level is 400. In the early 90s, U.S.S. Lead declared bankruptcy. In 1992, the EPA proposed that the area be declared a Superfund site. No action was taken on this proposal until 2009.

It appears that the low income housing facility is now being shut down due to environmental contamination. The shutdown is related to a change in the CDC’s threshold for acceptable lead levels in children.

Occasionally, I feel compelled to take random shots at libertarians. This is one of those times. I think I’m hardest on them because I used to consider myself one. The philosophy is superficially alluring, and I think I’m angry that it doesn’t hold up in the real world. So, what’s the libertarian solution to this situation? For years, it appears, U.S.S. Lead was externalizing the costs of its activity — not necessarily because of anything malicious; just because that’s how business was done back then. Maybe we didn’t really even appreciate the danger. But, the fact remains that its commercial activity resulted in lead contamination — contamination that reduces the value of the real estate and impairs the health of the community. The contamination is a cost. But, because the company was able to impose that cost on unwitting members of the community and on future generations, it did not have to incorporate that cost into the price of its product. The company and its consumers enjoyed a windfall — essentially receiving a subsidy from the community and future generations.

Broadly speaking, I suppose some libertarians might consider that sort of contamination and involuntary subsidy a form of theft; a deprivation of liberty for the people who get sick. But, I think it’s more common for libertarian-minded people to rail against the EPA, regulations, and the heavy hand of government. What’s the solution here? Screw the future? Let people get sick and die?

As a practical matter, I think environmental concerns are a good example of why regulatory schemes are necessary. Safeguards that work well with more traditional property concerns (e.g. court proceedings for trespass) just don’t work that well with environmental situations where boundaries are more porous and damages are more insidious. (The corporate form is another issue at work here. Libertarians ought to hate the corporate form — it’s a government fiction designed to limit personal responsibility. But, mostly I don’t see libertarians speaking out on this issue. And, in this case, we see it at work — the individuals who profited from the transgressions of the lead company will be able to retain those profits while cleaning up the contamination and dealing with the health consequences will be someone else’s problem.)

I don’t have a good solution to this problem but felt like I ought to highlight it. I saw these two stories in close proximity, and they struck me as related:

1. Who Lies More: Clinton or Trump? The answer is Trump. In fact, it’s so clearly Trump that the headline is a problem. But the reader is not provided the answer until the 17th paragraph. The headline should have said “Trump lies more than Clinton.”  (I went to the comments section on WLFI’s Facebook page, and it was clear that no one commenting there had read anything but the headline.) The story should have then led with the news that the Trump assertions vetted were false 85% of the time while Clinton’s was in line with “a typical politician” (and that number should have been provided). Trump’s statements received the lowest truthfulness rating 63% of the time compared to 14% for Clinton. But, this was buried below roughly equivalent amounts of ink (or pixels, I guess) on various challenges to truthfulness about the candidates in the news. And then the article went on to state that, despite the huge disparity in dishonesty by the candidates, the public perception was that the two were approximately equal in their dishonesty.
2. The Summer of the Shill by Matt Taibbi. He argues that media loses credibility when they appear to be in the tank for one candidate or the other. He laments that practically all non-conservative cable last week was consumed by stories that aren’t favorable to Trump. He argues that the media’s job “is to grope around promiscuously for stories on all sides, like dogs sniffing fire hydrants.” When you lose independence, you lose credibility

It seems very difficult for the media to convey independence while, at the same time, being able to avoid projecting a false equivalence. And I think the problem has to do with traditional media not being able to convey emphasis very well. You see the first story about the public perceiving Clinton & Trump as being roughly equivalent in terms of honesty but, if you run the numbers, Trump is lying constantly, egregiously, and without compunction. Meanwhile, Clinton’s lies are more sporadic, less dramatic, and more often defensible. You’re not going to get that sense if your news outlet is determined to be independent or objective by devoting similar amounts of time or column inches to stories critical of both sides. Under that model, you’ll hear about Clinton’s e-mails again along with as many of Trump’s outrages of the day as they can squeeze in. Perversely, you might think that Clinton’s lies are *more* serious because (having nothing else very interesting to report), the media outlet reports on the e-mail problems again and again and again. Meanwhile, Trump is giving the media a fire hose of material, meaning that no one thing gets as much attention.

So, what to do? It’s no secret that I think Trump would be catastrophic for the country while I think that Clinton has more ordinary political flaws. That’s my bias, and it helps me be comfortable with the media’s recent approach to hammer Trump and not be too concerned about devoting equal time to Clinton criticism. But, I do recognize the problem.

I tend to think the answer has something to do with media outlets being explicit about their biases while, at the same time, being as honest as they can about the facts they report. The pretense of pure objectivity is too easily exploited by our political system.