Truth Is Not An Absolute Defense
Against anything outside of a court
Links are at the end, in the dock.
I confess all that writing about all that global warming shit got to me, and I’m still digging out. Where will the grandkids find a safe harbor? (Nowhere near a harbor, probably.)
“The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.”
The “reverse ferret” owes something to Orwell: “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
The gambit got its name from one of Rupert Murdoch’s editors at The Sun, then and now one of his most profitable newspapers.
In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”
One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenoweth wrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.
Writing at The Intercept, Ryan Grim says that Murdoch’s summary dismissal of Tucker Carlson is a prime example of the reverse ferret in action.1 One could reasonably argue that in this instance Murdoch and his Fox News honchos barreled head-on into the wall before pulling the reverse ferret out of their pockets, but this is far from the first time that the old lizard’s practices have cost his company a bunch of money in the short run, and prominent personalities or executives their jobs, and in every instance the project has rolled on with whatever prompted the about face never to be mentioned again.
Election denialism is dead at Fox and Carlson doesn’t exist. Grim elides the upcoming Smartmatic lawsuit and the one from former producer Abby Grossberg, which will keep the topic and Carlson in the news, but at this point we have no reason to think that Fox won’t survive this crackup by finding and profiting from some other way, with some other voice, to engorge their devotees’ grievances.
“The Murdochs,” Grim concludes, “will not save us from the Murdochs.”
It’s possible, likely even, that Grim wrote the piece just so he could repeatedly say “reverse ferret.” It’s otherwise a bit thin.
“They could walk around the train, perhaps a mile out of the way; she could keep her 8-year-old son home, as she sometimes does; or they could try to climb over the train, risking severe injury or death, to reach Hess Elementary School four blocks away.”
ProPublica is back on the train beat,2 a few weeks after their story on long train derailments.3 Hess Elementary is in Hammond, Indiana, a grim, formerly industrial suburb of Chicago. Long trains, loosely defined as trains more than 1.5 miles long, routinely block the rail crossing many of the school’s students use to get to school.
The trains also block emergency services vehicles, police cars, school buses, and people trying to get to work. The fire department eventually built and operates fully-crewed stations on both sides of the track after being repeatedly forced to take long detours while responding to calls.
People in cars and trucks can go around the trains; doing so is inconvenient, and dangerous for people on the other end of emergency calls, but it’s easier than hoofing it around, and it doesn’t involve children clambering over or scooting under the couplings between cars, gambling that the train won’t start moving while they’re crossing it.
States have tried to regulate train lengths but invariably lose in court on interstate commerce grounds—only the feds have regulatory authority, and they’re not doing anything. Likewise, states and municipalities have been unable to stop trains from blocking crossings, or even to penalize the rail companies for doing so.
The industry has also sued to block more modest measures. In Hammond, for instance, police used to be able to write tickets for about $150 every time they saw a train stalled at a crossing for more than five minutes. Instead of paying the individual citations, Hammond officials told ProPublica, Norfolk Southern would bundle them and negotiate a lower payment.
“We weren’t getting anything,” McDermott, the mayor, said, “but it made our residents feel good.” An Indiana court took the industry’s side — as many courts in other states have done — ruling that only the federal government held power over the rails. “We can’t even write tickets anymore,” the mayor said. “It was more of an illusion, and we can’t even play the illusion anymore.”
Rail companies like Norfolk Southern (and kindly billionaire Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern) own Congress and have a long-term lease on the U.S. transportation department, which in the case of both the long trains and trains routinely blocking rail crossings refuses to even collect data that might lead to stronger regulations.
Add in all the industries which rely on rail—agriculture, petrochemical, durable goods manufacturers and so on—and the executive and legislative branches face an overwhelming lobbying and campaign contribution machine aimed at preventing anything which might impact rail and industrial profits.
Most if not all of these industries are also implicated in the congressional and executive branch resistance to doing anything substantive about global warming, which, damnit, I wasn’t going to write about.
Ah well.
“If just one major news organization were willing to buck the trend and tell its audience what is really going on, without the false equivalence, that might be enough.”
Dan Froomkin remarks on the dominant approach to reporting on the debt ceiling standoff.4
Under the headline “Biden Faces His First Big Choice on Debt Limit,” New York Times reporter Jim Tankersley writes today that the issue “has put President Biden on the defensive, forcing him to confront a series of potentially painful choices at a perilous economic moment.”
Sure, Biden says he won’t negotiate, but “business groups, fiscal hawks and some congressional Democrats” want him to make a deal. So Biden, Tankersley writes, “faces a cascading set of decisions as the nation, which has already bumped up against its $31.4 trillion debt limit, barrels toward default.”
But the nation is not “barreling toward default,” nor is it “careening,” or even “drifting” there. It is being pushed there by Republicans.
If McCarthy shoots the puppy, it’ll be Biden’s fault rather than the puppy shooter’s.
Elsewhere, we learn that a single wealthy guy has erected a large network of local “news” sites where Republicans can plant stories favorable to their campaigns and agendas.5
The top Republican campaigns in Illinois used a private online portal last year to request stories and shape coverage in a network of media outlets that present themselves as local newspapers, according to documents and people familiar with the setup.
Screenshots show that the password-protected portal, called Lumen, allowed users to pitch stories; provide interview subjects as well as questions; place announcements and submit op-eds to be “published verbatim” in any of about 30 sites that form part of the Illinois-focused media network, called Local Government Information Services.
Brad Timpone, a Republican operative and former broadcaster, owns the sites and according to the Post, is talking with various disgusting parties about taking the concept nationwide. With the rolling extinction of local newspapers, he has a big hole into which he can insert his Trojan horse-like sites.
Ah well.
Musica!
All of these bands owe a lot to punk, with the exception of the languid Drab City.
Taraka, “Welcome to Paradise Lost;”6 Knife Wife, "Family Party;"7 Screaming Females, "All At Once;"8 ShitKid, "Sort Sjterne!;"9 Drab City, "Good Songs For Bad People."10
That, Comrades, is all there is
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Take care, be well, don’t think about the climate.
During the Obama administration, when the debt limit ploy came up, Obama reportedly considered using Sec. 4 of the 14th Amendment to, in essence, argue that the debt limit legislation was unconstitutional and to order the Dept. of the Treasury to just borrow the money and pay the bills. He decided against it, it was reported, because Lawrence Tribe, his former constitutional law professor, advised against it. Recently, it has recently been reported, Tribe has changed his mind. I would love to see Biden take that route and have written him and my senators asking them to do so. The Supreme Court would, I think, have a tricky time trying to devise a legal obstacle to the Treasury doing as it was told. There's nothing in the constitution saying the Supreme Court is the only branch of government entitled to decide what is constitutional. There is only Chief Justice John Marshall's court saying so.