Month: April 2015

The general consensus on Hillary Clinton in the mainstream media seems to be that she’s an ultra-ambitious, risk-averse, condescending paranoid who will probably be our next president. That sounds about right, though I think it’s important to keep in mind that what makes a good candidate for the media isn’t necessarily what makes a good candidate for the people.

The media wants fireworks, and lots of them. At this point, that’s something Hillary Clinton has absolutely no incentive to provide. Is she risk-adverse? Sure, but that’s exactly the strategy you’d expect for the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination. Criticizing Clinton for not being bold enough is like screaming at a head coach to throw deep when his team is up by three scores in the fourth quarter. It might make for great TV, but it would be a truly stupid strategy,

Hillary Clinton is many things, but ‘stupid’ is not one of them.

You Deserve Hillary’s Bloodless, Condescending Campaign – The Daily Beast.

The media does a less-than-stellar job of covering American politics, but when presidential campaigns roll around, they always find a way to increase their usual level of irrelevance and asininity. Take, for example, this gem of a piece from Vox, which tries (and fails) to make a worthwhile story out of the typography Marco Rubio’s campaign is using. Or this bit of jackassery from The New Republic, arguing that Hillary Clinton should name Barack Obama as her running mate.

The thing is, this stuff is coming from media organizations that purport to be devoted to informing people about politics. Ezra Klein, the founder of Vox, claims to be a big fan of political science research – which almost universally finds that campaigns – not to mention campaign typography – matter very little.

So why all this worthless coverage? That’s pretty obvious – to pull in an audience hooked on irrelevance; an audience that, in most cases, can’t appreciate what a disservice this ‘news’ is to them. It’s one thing for this sort of stuff to come from reporters who may not actually know any better, but that’s not a true for either Vox or The New Republic.

In other words, they’re not being ignorant. They’re being manipulative. Which is why I hate presidential campaign reporting.

The only reason we know that a North Charleston, SC police officer murdered a fleeing suspect is that this unconscionable act was captured on video. The bad news is that so many other abuses aren’t filmed. While body cameras for police aren’t by any means a panacea, they have been demonstrated to significantly reduce use of force. Why, after all the incidents in recent years, aren’t they mandatory for all police?

One of the most commonly cited issues is cost. Police budgets are tight, and the expense of not only purchasing a camera for every cop, but keeping the camera data and doing all the back-end servicing and maintenance is too much. It’s not a bad point: a typical camera runs about $400, which is actually less than the costs associated with storage and maintenance, which add around $600 per year. In other words, an extra $1000 per year, per officer. (Actually, that’s slightly inflated, as all of the cameras wouldn’t have to be replaced every year. But it’s a nice round number, so let’s stick with it.)

But that’s peanuts for the federal government. There are around 920,000 sworn officers in the United States authorized to use force, federal, state, and local. But again, just to make the numbers nice and clean, lets round up to 1 million. Outfitting them with cameras and providing the necessary storage and maintenance would cost $1 billion per year. (Though this number is surely high, as prices for mass purchases would almost certainly be lower.)

To put this in perspective, $1 billion is 0.02 percent of the 2015 federal budget. It’s less than half the cost of a single nuclear attack sub. Here’s another way to look at it: earlier this year, President Obama announced that we’d be keeping 9,800 troops in Afghanistan for another year. The Congressional Research Service has estimated that this will cost about $3.9 million per troop, per year, for a total of $38 billion. In other words, 257 fewer troops in Afghanistan means an extra $1 billion that could fund a ‘body cams for every cop’ program.

Do we care more about the security of Afghanistan than we do about American citizens? Sometimes I wonder.

It doesn’t seem possible to improve on the below photo, from the White House, and the accompanying comment, from the American Spectator, so we’re simply reposting the photo and telling you to read what the Spectator has to say about it.

Ezra Klein’s ‘explanatory journalism’ site Vox.com seems to have concluded that Trevor Noah is guilty of not meeting the high moral standards required of a Daily Show host. (A requirement I wasn’t even aware of until now.) They base this conclusion on half a dozen tweets, out of thousands that the comedian has made over the years.

Vox claims to pride itself on careful, dispassionate examination of data (really) before making conclusions. But I guess that careful, dispassionate examination of thousands of Trevor Noah tweets was just too hard, and not nearly as fun as following the pack in all of its moral outrage at Noah’s failings.