Who do you trust?

I have never trusted any government to tell me the whole truth. All my life they've lied to me. Sadly, outside of handful of responsible journalists and bloggers, now that click bait journalism has become the accepted business model, I don't trust the media to tell me the whole truth either.

I do trust Charlie Pierce. I don't always agree with him entirely, but I always listen to what he has to say because he's honest, he's smarter than me and his institutional knowledge is deep. I completely agree with him about the NSA:

...(There is simply no logical reason to take anything the NSA says on this topic in good faith.)

I would like to believe that this is not simply another salvo in the ever-escalating Toobin-Greenwald pissing contest. The issues are simply too important to get buried under a mudslide of personal pique, even though they're half-interred in that already. But, Green Room hooleys aside, Toobin here fundamentally is telling us, again, that they are all honorable men. I don't care what you think of Glenn Greenwald or Edward Snowden. In this democracy, "trust us" is not half good enough any more.

So then the question becomes, what's a concerned citizen to do? Where do we get the facts? Are we seriously supposed to trust a media that rushes to print every wild rumor, (often from an unnamed source), they can dig up in their frenzy for a ten minute exclusive on the internets? The media standard for publication is no longer are we sure this is true, it's now if it's at all plausible -- run with it and maybe make corrections later.

Take the instant matter of Greenwald's spouse and his troubling detention at Heathrow. The Guardian rushes the story to print, inciting instant mass hysteria about innocent spouses of journalists being detained for no reason. But they omitted a couple of pertinent facts. Within hours the NYT tells us Mr. Miranda was acting as a courier for secret documents between Glenn and Lynn Poitras and his trip was financed by The Guardian. Only then did The Guardian amend its story and I'm told they didn't bother to note anywhere it had been amended. So most people who read their story in the hours before that wouldn't be aware of those salient facts. This does not make for an informed public or a reasonable debate.

Meanwhile, Atrios posts today that "the lack of noise about the destruction of the hard drives has been a bit unsettling." He's referring to the Guardian's story about the UK government destroying their hard drives. Well, at least that's what the first story implied. The second story today tells us they actually destroyed the drives themselves, voluntarily, under the watchful eye of a couple of agents, rather than force the government to get a court order. Which doesn't really make sense to me on any level. But the really weird thing is this happened a month ago. Have to wonder why are they just printing it now?

It's not like this is an isolated instance and it's not confined to The Guardian. Every major story in the last few years has played out the same way. The first 48 hours (or longer) are complete chaos with conflicting reports. Anything incendiary enough to drive traffic gets posted immediately. The subsequent mitigating information is downplayed or sometimes ignored. It takes an enormous amount of effort to glean the complete story from numerous news orgs. Frankly, I'm tired of it. In fact, I'm just plain tired of the hysteria, of the in-fighting, of being told what I'm supposed to feel and do. So sorry if it makes me a bad liberal that I just watch and wait from the sidelines instead of immediately jumping into the melee but I just don't the see the point of adding to the noise.

Voice inflection is everything

Internet outrage of the moment is Michael Grunwald's loaded tweet in which he said, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

Maybe it's because I'm inclined to think the best of people unless they've proven to be vile. Maybe it's because I don't really know who Grunwald is. He's not on my regular read list. I vaguely recall reading a post of his some time back that somebody linked to that I thought was quite good. So in the absense of knowledge about his general ideology, I took it as sarcasm rather than the expression of actual murderous intent. I mean, I've seen bloggers I do follow and know well post countless requests to DIAF (die in a fire) and don't take those as serious threats either.

Of course, it's August. The news cycle is mostly trivial. The poli-junkies are bored. Many pick somewhat silly internet spats and instant outrage rules the twitter.

That tweet could have been read in several ways. Could just as easily been a diss on the drone program or subtle dig at the state of media today. Which is not to say it wasn't stupid to post it. That statement desperately needed voice inflection to make its intent clear. Maybe Grunwald really meant it murderously, (in which case I would condemn it too even though I've always found Assange to be creepy and self-interested), but I've seen nothing to suggest Grunwald is prone to violent ideation. So I guess I'll save my outrage for things that really matter rather than some awkwardly worded tweet probably posted after a couple of drinks on a Saturday night.

Either with us, OIRA against us

This is the scariest thing I've read in months. I had no idea that buried in the subterranean depths through which our federal legislation flows there exists the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (known as “OIRA”) which effectively renders all our regulatory agencies as mere figureheads. All regulations, including "rules on worker health, environmental protection, food safety, health care, consumer protection, and more" must pass through OIRA before they're allowed to go into effect. Or not.

In his revealing book, Sunstein tells us why: It is because he, Sunstein, had the authority to “say no to members of the president’s Cabinet”; to deposit “highly touted rules, beloved by regulators, onto the shit list“; to ensure that some rules “never saw the light of day”; to impose cost-benefit analysis “wherever the law allowed”; and to “transform cost-benefit analysis from an analytical tool into a “rule of decision,” meaning that “[a]gencies could not go forward” if their rules flunked OIRA’s cost-benefit test.

Cost-benefit analysis. This is what they mean when they say we need to run government like a business. Numbers on a spreadsheet weighing how many people can die of avoidable hazards without unduly diminishing the profits of Big Business interests.

Worse yet, OIRA derives its power by executive order of the President under some rather dicey premises. Said president first being Clinton, and now Obama. There's no transparency in the process. There's no accountability. No one person is accountable because everyone is responsible. This strikes me as a serious problem.

Sadly, it's unlikely to get the kind of wide play which could generate the level of internet outrage that would force it into BigTV media because, won't drive traffic. To paraphrase a popular meme among the cool kids -- too long, won't read.