Hendrick Hertzberg

Governor Scott Walker’s attack on the public employee unions of Wisconsin is the most vicious assault on labor since Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controller’s union in 1981.  In an effort to score points with his most extreme right-wing supporters, the governor wants to strip the unions of their 50-year-old right to collective bargaining—“except over base pay, which can never be increased above inflation without a public referendum. It makes union dues purely voluntary and prohibits their collection via paycheck deduction. It requires the unions to face a certification vote every year—and, to get recertified, a union must win a majority of all employees, not just a majority of those voting.”

These facts are all from Winner Rick Hertzberg’s characteristically lucid and authoritative
“Comment” in last week’s New Yorker.  In a subsequent online chat, Hertzberg exploded a number of myths about the controversy perpetuated by other reporters much less competent than the dean of American political reporters.

Hertzberg’s New Yorker colleague, Winner Dan Kaufman, also contributed a lovely blog post—“Notes on the Cheddar Revolution”—about how the current the protest was informed by Wisconsin’s (mostly) liberal past.

Sinners Arthur Gregg Sulzberger and Monica Davey attracted plenty of unwanted attention with a seriously sloppy hatchet job on the labor movement which ran on page 1 of The New York Times.  Demonstrating once again that journalists can prove almost any premise, if they’re careful to skew their interviews so that at 80 percent of the people you quote agree with you, Sulzberger and Davey tried hard to prove that union bonds were fraying in Wisconsin.

“Workers themselves, being pitted against one another, are finding it hard to feel sympathy or offer solidarity, with their own jobs lost and their benefits and pensions cut back or cut off,” the Times reporters wrote, and “away from Madison” [a notorious left-wing stronghold, of course] “many people said that public workers needed to share in the sacrifice that their own families have been forced to make.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel, David Cay Johnston, Harold Myerson

Just how far the reporters had been forced to been over backwards to make their point quickly became apparent after

1) “Union guy” Richard “Hahan,” who had worked for GM, and was described in the lead of their story as a strong supporter of the governor’s “sweeping proposal to cut the benefits and collective-bargaining rights of public workers in Wisconsin”–turned out to be a lifelong scab, who according to a subsequent correction, had “worked at unionized factories,” but never actually belonged to a union himself (also, his name was really “Hahn,” not “Hahan”).

2) Winners Richard Simon and Abby Sewell reported a couple of days later in The Los Angeles Times that the dispute had actually ignited a profound new solidarity between public sector workers and private sector union members–not only in Wisconsin, but across the country.

3) A new poll conducted by their own newspaper, The New York Times poll released a couple of days ago,  showed that most Americans supported public employee unions in their battles against newly elected Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio.  In what was perhaps the most heartening news of the week, despite the widespread Republican perception that unions are politically useful whipping boys, The Times reported that

* Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent.
* Those surveyed said they opposed, 56 percent to 37 percent, cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits.
* Sixty-one percent of those polled—including just over half of Republicans—said they thought the salaries and benefits of most public employees were either “about right” or “too low” for the work they do.

Winner David Cay Johnston of tax.com accused Sulzberger and Davey of being among the legions of reporters who were reporting “economic nonsense” as “fact”–“the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.”

Johnston is incensed because he believes that every time a reporter says the Wisconsin governor is asking public employees to increase their contributions to their pensions, they are repeating an outright lie. Here’s why:

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the “contributions” consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply “contribute more” to Wisconsin’ s retirement system (or as the argument goes, “pay their fair share” of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin’ s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.

(Sulzberger and Davey wrote that the Governor “would raise the amount government workers pay into their pension to 5.8 percent of their pay, from less than 1 percent now.” Sulzberger is the son of the current Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., who is perpetually at odds with the unions at the Times, the Boston Globe, and the rest of his newspaper properties, so it’s unlikely that the son grew up in a household where people like former U.A.W. president Walter Reuther were portrayed as revered figures by his parents.)

    On the other hand, the Sulzbergers are the last newspaper family in America that still employs a fulltime labor reporter…

Winner  Steve Greenhouse, whose reporting on Wisconsin has been characteristically fair and thororough–from a feature about the pizza parlor which delivered hundreds of pies a day to fuel protesters inside the Wisconsin state capitol building to a profile of Marty Bell, the executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, whose bare-knuckled styled helped to “transform Madison into a national battle ground over labor rights.”

Winner:  Katrina vanden Heuvel gets to the heart of the matter   in The Washington Post:  “unions…have been central to the rise and fall of the American middle class.  There is a strong corrleation between states with right-to-work laws that outlaw majority rule onunionization, a worse quality of life for workers and a more hostile climate to any progressive cause. The average worker in a right-to-work state earns $5,333 less than his or her counterpart in a pro-worker state.”

Winner: Madison’s venerable Capitol Times, now online only, has been a reliable source of hard hitting editorials like this one, and articles explaining exactly what is at stake for the Koch brothers, like this one.

Sinner USA Today gave big play to a piece comparing public and private sector wages and benefits, without adjusting for specific jobs, age, education or experience–which basically rendered all of the comparisons in the piece completely meaningless.  (Surprise! College professors and nurses make more than burger flippers at McDonald’s) while the Economic Policy institute showed how these comparisons should actually be done.
(h/t GK.)

Winner: Columnist Harold Meyerson, whose extensive coverage included this eye opening column about the GOP’s much broader efforts to undermine unions everywhere, way beyond Ohio and Wisconsin.

                                                       -30-

Lisa Sotto, Arthur Brisbane

Walfrido Martinez, Zach Wahls

Winner: Barack Hussein Obama, whose decision to instruct his Attorney General to stop defending crucial provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act is quite simply the most important presidential act in support of equal rights for gay people ever.   Combined with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Obama has now undone the two worst things Bill Clinton did to gay people during his presidency.   And with this splendid act, Obama has also  displayed exactly the kind of political courage that all of us have been waiting for since the day he was inaugurated.

One of the cases challenging DOMA was brought with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and the New York Civil Liberties Union.  ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said the president had “propelled gay rights into the 21st century, where it belongs.  Our government finally recognizes what we knew 14 years ago — that the so-called ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ is a gross violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection before the law.”

Sinners: John Woods, Richard Wyatt Jr. and Robert Quanckenboss (talk about onomatopoeia!), all members of the law firm of Hunton & Williams, which so far has maintained a stony silence in the face of allegations that it asked various security firms to suggest ways to undermine the supporters of WikiLeaks and the opponents of the Chamber of Commerce.

VelvetRevolution.us and StopTheChamber.com have now filed a complaint with the Washington, D.C. Bar Association seeking the disbarment of Woods, Wyatt and Quackenboss because of e-mails suggesting they may have advocated domestic spying, cyber stalking, spear phishing, cyber attacks, and theft.

As Forbes.com reported “Earlier this month, a trove of emails hacked from the servers of security firm HBGary Federal by the loose hacker group Anonymous revealed that Hunton & Williams had asked HBGary Federal and two other security firms to put together a proposal to address Bank of America’s fear that WikiLeaks would release leaked documents from the bank sometime early this year.”

The spectacular irony here is that all of the ammunition in the new complaint comes from e-mails stolen by Anonymous from the account of Aaron Burr, an executive of HBGary, after Burr boasted of his ability to penetrate Anonymous and identify its leaders.

As its website trumpets, Hunton & Williams is a huge multi-national firm, with “1,000 attorneys in 18 offices.”

The other huge irony which FCP has not seen in any of the coverage of this burgeoning scandal is the fact that “for the fourth consecutive time, Hunton & Williams LLP was named the top firm for privacy by Computerworld in its 2010 report on “Best Privacy Advisers.”

FCP queried Hunton managing partner Walfrido Martinez, and its privacy expert partner, Lisa Sotto, on how they thought these allegations might affect its status as “best privacy” advisor.

So far, no response to FCP’s e-mails.

The other thing lacking so far in all of the coverage is a major take-out on the rest of the activities of this sprawling firm–and how these grave allegations are affecting its attempts to recruit new lawyers.

Sinner: New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, for practicing exactly the kind of shoddy journalism he is supposedly paid to criticize.   Brisbane was outraged  that the Times identified Stephen B. Burke, the new chief executive of NBC Universal, as an “Irish Catholic.”

Brisbane reported that “Raymond G. McGuire, a reader in New York City, found “Irish Catholic” to be a “jarring” reference and that “Mr. McGuire recalled growing up in New York City from the 1940s to 1960s, ‘when its Catholic residents universally understood that the N.Y. Times was vaguely hostile to institutionalized Catholicism and deployed reporters and columnists who had little understanding of the daily lives of the city’s Catholic residents, or of the rich culture Catholics of Irish ancestry enjoyed during those years. I thought those days were past.’”

Unfortunately, Brisbane took this single reader’s allegation as gospel, without bothering to investigate whether it had any genuine connection to the truth.  If Brisbane had taken this most elemental journalistic step of checking the reader’s allegation, he would have learned that the somewhat-embarrassed-to-be-somewhat-Jewish owners of The New York Times had, for decades, been famously fawning in their coverage of insitutionalized Catholicismu in the news pages of the newspaper–especially from the ‘40’s through the ‘60’s.

And as late as 1995 the paper assigned an Irish Catholic reporter to write a hugely favorable profile of John Cardinal O’Connor, the hugely controversial head of the New York Catholic Church.

Winner: Russ Buettner, for a superb piece of investigative reporting in the New York Times about how court documents that were supposed to have been kept secret described how Fox News chairman Roger Ailes may have counseled former Murdoch publishing honcho Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators who were vetting Bernard B. Kerik for the job of homeland security secretary.  As Buettner points out, “The dispute involves a cast of well-known and outsize personalities” including several “New Yorkers who have had spectacular career meltdowns.”

Winner: Zach Wahls, an engineering student at the University of Iowa, raised by two women, who gave a brilliant speech, humiliating Iowa legislators determined to overturn the decision of the Iowa Supreme court which legalized gay marriage.  “You are voting for the first time in the history of our state to codify discrimination in our constitution” Wahls declared. “My family isn’t really so different from any other Iowan family.”  For the rest of Wahls’ brilliant indictment of prejudice, go here.

And if you missed the other best piece of oratory of 2011, watch Barack Obama’s speech after the Tuscon massacre (below)  Although it was one of the defining moments of his presidency, neither NBC Nightly News nor ABC’s World News bothered to devote a whole story to the speech the night after it was delivered. 

Joshua Lott / courtesy The New York Times

Above the Fold

     To try to inflame the public on a daily basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has impact on people–especially [people] who are unbalanced to begin with.

                   –Pima County, Arizona  Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, January 9, 2011

    It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

                    –Paul Krugman, January 10, 2011

    This morning in Arizona, this age in which this country would accept  “targeting” of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.  This morning in Arizona, this time of the ever-escalating, borderline-ecstatic invocation of violence in fact or in fantasy in our political discourse, closed. It is essential tonight not to demand revenge, but to demand justice; to insist not upon payback against those politicians and commentators who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism, but to work to change the minds of them and their supporters - or if those minds tonight are too closed, or if those minds tonight are too unmoved, or if those minds tonight are too triumphant, to make sure by peaceful means that those politicians and commentators and supporters have no further place in our system of government.

                  –Keith Olbermann, January 9, 2011

    No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen…All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

                    --Frank Rich, February 27, 2010

    A hard rain’s gonna fall means something’s going to happen.

                    –Bob Dylan

    There was nothing really surprising about Saturday’s massacre in Arizona; that was the most horrifying thing about it.

    Events like this are completely predictable in a country where so many pundits and politicians are addicted to apocalyptic rhetoric, and all serious attempts to restrict the use of firearms have been abandoned.

    Where else but America could an obviously deranged college student be thrown out of school and forbidden to return without official certification of his mental health–and then proceed directly to a sporting goods store to purchase a 9 mm Glock pistol with a 30-bullet clip.  This kind of gun, according to Brady Campaign president Paul Helmke, “is not suited for hunting or personal protection.  What it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly.”

    As Gail Collins pointed out in a crucial column today, the only reason Jared L. Loughner was able to buy that semiautomatic weapon legally was “because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004, and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it.”

    Today there is blood on the hands of all the legislators who failed to extend that law– and not just the blood of their colleague,  a federal judge,  four other dead and fourteen wounded innocents.   We can add to that the blood of tens of thousands murdered in the Mexican drug wars in the last four years–nearly all of them killed with assault weapons purchased legally on our side of the border, according to Mexican and American law enforcement officers.

  Arizona is  one of 12 “gold star” open carry states

    In a powerful  special comment on Saturday night, Keith Olbermann summarized the acts and the attitudes which contributed so much to this fatal climate–and which must now be repudiated:

    If  Sarah Palin, whose website put and today scrubbed bullseye targets on 20 Representatives including Gabby Giffords, does not repudiate her own part in amplifying violence and violent imagery in politics, she must be dismissed from politics - she must be repudiated by the members of her own party, and if they fail to do so, each one of them must be judged to have silently defended this tactic that today proved so awfully foretelling, and they must in turn be dismissed by the responsible members of their own party.

    If  Jesse Kelly, whose campaign against Congresswoman Giffords included an event in which he encouraged his supporters to join him firing machine guns, does not repudiate this, and does not admit that even if it was solely indirectly, or solely coincidentally, it contributed to the black cloud of violence that has envellopped our politics, he must be repudiated by Arizona’s Republican Party.

    If  Congressman Allen West, who during his successful campaign told his supporters that they should make his opponent afraid to come out of his home, does not repudiate those remarks and all other suggestions of violence and forced fear, he should be repudiated by his constituents and the Republican Congressional Caucus.

    If Sharron Angle, who spoke of “Second Amendment solutions,” does not repudiate that remark and urge her supporters to think anew of the terrible reality of what her words implied, she must be repudiated by her supporters in Nevada.

    If  the Tea Party leaders who took out of context a Jefferson quote about blood and tyranny and the tree of liberty do not understand - do not understand tonight, now what that really means, and these leaders do not tell their followers to abhor violence and all threat of violence, then those Tea Party leaders must be repudiated by the Republican Party.

    If  Glenn Beck, who obsesses nearly as strangely as Mr. Loughner did about gold and debt and who wistfully joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O’Reilly, who blithely repeated “Tiller the Killer” until the phrase was burned into the minds of his viewers, do not begin their next broadcasts with solemn apologies for ever turning to the death-fantasies and the dreams of bloodlust, for ever having provided just the oxygen to those deep in madness to whom violence is an acceptable solution, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by their viewers, and by all politicians, and by sponsors, and by the networks that employ them.

    And if those of us considered to be “on the left” do not re-dedicate ourselves to our vigilance to eliminate all our own suggestions of violence - how ever inadvertent they might have been then we too deserve the repudiation of the more sober and peaceful of our politicians and our viewers and our networks.

    It has hardly helped matters that hate mongers like Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are routinely treated so softly (or even warmly)  by pundits and reporters like David Carr and Brian Stelter and Bill Carter and David Gergen and James Poniewozik, and, worst of all,  David von Drehle, who wrote, obscenely,  in Time, that Beck is “tireless, funny, [and]self-deprecating…a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies — if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking.”

     And when incompetent repoters like NBC’s Mike Viqueira run clips of Sarah Palin saying that Barack Obama “wants to take all your guns away”–and then neglects to point out that this is a cold-blooded lie–they throw a different kind of fuel on the fire.  (The sad truth is,  the Obama admnistration has not done a single thing to try to encourage any kind of gun control in America.) 

    As Keith Olbermann said on Saturday, “we stand at one of the clichéd crossroads of American history. Even if the alleged terrorist Jared Lee Loughner was merely shooting into a political crowd because he wanted to shoot into a political crowd, even if he somehow was unaware who was in the crowd, we have nevertheless  for years been building up to a moment like this.  Assume the details are coincidence. The violence is not. The rhetoric has devolved and descended, past the ugly and past the threatening and past the fantastic and into the imminently murderous.”

    Yesterday, Matt Bai wrote in the Times,  “Tucson will either be the tragedy that brought us back from the brink, or the first in a series of gruesome memories to come.”

    If this is going to be the event that leads us away from the abyss, instead of plunging us to the bottom of it,  new and different kinds of courage and intelligence will be required from all of us.
 

                                                                         -30-

 Above the Fold

 “I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown: in this case, a $20 billion shakedown.”

                                                                             –Congressman Joe Barton, Texas (R)

    Let us now praise Congressman Joe Barton, representative of the 6th District of Texas, and the first Republican with the gumption to declare his supreme devotion to all corporations, foreign and domestic, now doing business in these United States.

    Now it is a fact that big business regularly rents the sentiments of congressional Democrats. But it is also a fact that corporate America owns the Republican party–lock, stock and (oil) barrel.  That was why it was so refreshing to finally hear a Republican publicly declare the love that (normally) dares not speak its name.

    Of course the House Republican leadership was appalled by this dangerous burst of candor, and immediately threatened Barton with the loss of his position as the ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee unless he immediately put this corporate cat back  into its bag.

    That was the only reason Barton retracted his remarks in the afternoon, making his previous statement “inoperable,” just the way the Nixon White House regularly did during Watergate, three-and-a-half decades ago.

    Meanwhile, the un-elected Republican establishment left no doubt that Barton’s first statement was the true Republican boilerplate, rather than the retraction that followed.

* Pat Buchanan: “Barton made a very courageous statement in my judgment..To have anyone stand up and even indirectly defend [BP] and say that they were a victim of a shakedown shows some political courage.”

* Laura Ingraham: “I think Joe Barton, before he apologized, had a legitimate point…This administration has taken a very aggressive and strong arm approach to industry across the board.”

* Fox commentator Andrew Napolitano: “That is a classic shakedown. The threat to do something that you do not have the authority to do. ”

* Newt Gingrich: “That a president is directly engaged in extorting money from a company…. What it says to the world is be very careful about investing in the United States because the political class may take the money away from you.”

* The Wall Street Journal editorial page: “Meanwhile, BP’s agreement sets a terrible precedent for the economy and the rule of law, particularly for future industrial accidents or other corporate controversies that capture national outrage. The default position from now on in such cases will be for politicians to demand a similar “trust fund” that politicians or their designees will control.  There was in particular no reason for BP to compound its error and agree to spend another $100 million to compensate the oil workers sidelined by the Administration’s policy choice to impose a drilling moratorium. BP had no liability for these costs, and its concession further separated its compensation from proper legal order.  BP deserves to pay full restitution for the damage it has caused, but it ought to do so via legal means, not under what Texas Republican Joe Barton rightly called the pressure of “a shakedown” yesterday…BP at first sounded arrogant and now is so obsequious it won’t even stand up for its legal rights. “

    In the end, the Journal concluded, “it’s hard to know who is more unlovable, BP or its Washington expropriators.”

    This wonderfully rational notion from Gingrich–that unless the Obama administration stops beating up on the big corporations, they will take all of their marbles away and simply abandon the biggest economy of the world–is exactly what you would expect from the idiot talking heads like Gingrich whom Fox News (and too often, Meet the Press) are so addicted to.

    On the other hand, one doesn’t expect this idea to be embraced by the chief Washington correspondent of the The New York Times.  The week the Obama administration finally responded to the Gulf crisis with an action which was dramatic, substantial, and genuinely great–forcing BP to guarantee that it would pay at least $20 billion to the victims of this catastrophe–Timesman David Sanger offered the very worst kind of  “on the one hand, on the other hand news analysis” –a piece that inexplicably led the newspaper.

    According to Sanger, Barton’s farcical apology (his first one) had given “voice to an alternative narrative, a bubbling certainty in corporate suites that Mr. Obama, whenever faced with crisis that involves private-sector players, reveals himself to be viscerally antibusiness.”  Sanger then followed up with a quote from a former Clinton official about how Obama risked losing the big companies he needed to revive the economy.  This made the “alternative narrative” sound like a serious idea–instead of right-wing Republican claptrap coming mostly from the likes of Gingrich and Ingraham.

    Although Sanger never quoted Gingrich in his story,  the Times reporter ended by echoing him, with this ludicrous conclusion: Obama “will have to avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.”

    WHEN TEXANS LIKE JOE BARTON DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES BY APOLOGIZING  to a foreign oil company which has just caused the greatest domestic environmental catastrophe of the 21st Century, FCP immediately asks: “What would Molly Ivins say?”–if only she were still with us to comment on the Congressman’s shenanigans.

    Fortunately, Ivins’ clips tell us exactly how she viewed the great Congressman from the 6th District.  Three and a half years ago, Ivins wrote of her delight about the way Congressman Barton was reaching  out to some of his more prosperous constituents:  

    He’s going to spend next weekend aboard a private train with lobbyists who pay $2,000 for the privilege. After a seven-hour run from Fort Worth to San Antonio, there will be cocktails, an evening tour of the Alamo, dinner and breakfast on Sunday.

    The Dallas Morning News reports the invitation reads, “During the ride, we’ll have lots of time to talk, play some Texas Hold ‘Em, and enjoy some great down home Texas food. This is about as good as it gets.”

    It’s the delicatesse of the invite that I appreciate, and I think the price is right, too — only $2K for hours of uninterrupted access to the chairman whose committee has jurisdiction over about half of what Congress does — including oil policy, pro baseball, Medicare and environmental regulation.”

    The year before that, Ivins applauded a

“no-cost sweetener to encourage oil and gas companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico – and who needs more encouragement these days than the oil companies? The poor things are making hardly any money at all. Just have the federal government waive the royalty rights for drilling in the publicly owned waters. Turns out this waiver will cost the government at least $7 billion over the next five years.” 

    And who was the prime mover behind this great good government move: Joe Barton, naturellement.

    Ivins wrote,

    I roared with laughter upon reading that Texas Rep. Joe Barton had assured his colleagues the provision of energy bill was “so non-controversial” that senior House and Senate negotiators had not even discussed it. That’s one of the oldest ploys in the Texas handbook of sneaky tricks and has been successfully used to pass many a sweet deal for the oil industry.

   “The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn’t cost anything,” Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey told The New York Times. “Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil – it’s like subsidizing a fish to swim.”

    All of which reminds us of one more sorry fact: Ivins was much more reliable about the inner workings of Washington than most of the reporters who live there.

                                                                 -30-

    Fortunately, we still have non-Washington reporter Jon Stewart to sum things up for us: