How the Journal editorialists measure Murdoch

Felix Salmon and Joe Nocera have effectively exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Wall Street Journal editorial board's aggressive defense of Murdoch and News Corp.  But leaving aside the apologists' they-did-it-toos and  it-wasn't-so-bads and we-know-our-boss-for-an-honest-man modes of denial, let's focus for a moment on the editorial board's expression of its true credo (my emphasis):

Our readers can decide if we are a better publication than we were four years ago, but there is no denying that News Corp. has invested in the product. The news hole is larger. Our foreign coverage in particular is more robust, our weekend edition more substantial, and our expansion into digital delivery ahead of the pack. The measure that really matters is the market's, and on that score Mr. Hinton was at the helm when we again became America's largest daily.

To be fair, this market fundamentalism from the Journal's opinion wing long predates the Murdoch takeover.  In an odd way, it suggests good faith in their defense of bad faith practices The market was measure for every scandal the Journal editorialists explain away even as the paper's top-notch reporters were breaking them. They pooh-poohed, in turn, the equity research scandal, the options back payments scandal, the insurance broker kickback scandal, and the subprime mortgage scandal. They were relentless in defense of corrupt investment bankers and analysts, corrupt insurance brokers, corrupt top executives and boards, and corrupt mortgage underwriters.

What's next for Sheila Bair?

Joe Nocera has a wonderful debriefing of just-retired FDIC head Sheila Bair, who fought the good fight on behalf of depositors, mortgagees and taxpayers in the runup to the financial meltdown and throughout it -- fighting unsuccessfully to rein in subprime lending and for effective mortgage modification, and successfully for strong resolution authority in Dodd-Frank to wind down failing megabanks.  Throughout, she was an advocate for market accountability -- that is, for bank bondholders and mortgage holders to absorb a portion of the losses caused by mortgages gone bad and banks gone bust. Nocera also credits her with staving off U.S. adoption of Basel II, the loophole-ridden standard for bank capital requirements that enabled European banks to put themselves in even worse shape than American ones.

Perhaps the article is spun this way, but as Bair delivers her own postmortem it's hard not to speculate about her future:

Decay...decline...yada...we're fine (?)

Taking a cue from E.J. Dionne, Andrew Sullivan asks his readers to weigh in as to moments when they "realized we were late imperial Rome," adding, "Personally, I think it was some moment between the Congress's assent to torture in 2006 and when Sarah Palin was selected as a serious vice-presidential nominee in 2008."  The results are (by definition) impressionist:

The Clinton impeachment, hands down.  The long list of ridiculous investigations leading up to it were bad enough, but taking a step designed to remove an elected President over a personal affair showed that the view of politics over country now ruled the day.  The proceedings were political Kabuki Theater at its basest.

Well, maybe -- though I also must admit, net admirer of Clinton though I am, that I feel the force of Sandy Levinson's assertion that Clinton's "cold-blooded lying" (ultimately admitted) to constituents and Cabinet set an perhaps equally troubling precedent.


I am wary, though, of the decline narrative. It's hard to take the measure of an era, or put bounds around a given set of years as an "era," and harder yet to peg that era within a longer narrative. "You are too shallow, Hastings, much too shallow,/To sound the bottom of the after-times" (Henry IV, Part 2, IV ii). That's true for all of us.

I do fear that the U.S. has lost political functionality in two waves, one coming in with the Gingrich Congress in 1994 and the second with the Bush torture crew. The first destroyed norms that enabled the parties to work together, however adversarially; the second severely weakened our civil liberties and abused the powers of the executive branch.  Still, U.S. politics has probably been in dysfunctional mode more often than not since founding; the one virtue of our democracy is self-correction, and I'm hopeful for another round of that under Obama's stewardship. (I admit though that there too my faith goes wobbly; I am susceptible to the Krugman view of the Obama administration, damned repeatedly by half measures and failure to strongly rebuff GOP lunacy. See, for example, Joe Nocera's frustration today with Obama's failure thus to take a stand for Elizabeth Warren to head the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.)

Against false equivalence on Medicare

Last week, the Times' Joe Nocera wrote that he finds it “discouraging” that “Democrats are going to make hay over the very idea that Republicans were trying to mess with Medicare” in response to Representative Paul D. Ryan’s plan to voucherize the program.

One of the five letters published in response today is mine. Needless to say, I don't like the false equivalence.  And the five taken together are a classic full-spectrum set of responses.  Full-spectrum of Times readership, that is: not one is in favor of implementing the Ryan plan as designed.    And come to think of it, very few Americans -- very few Republicans -- are.