His bark is worse than his bite.
Just a year ago, Fox News Channel was considered a pariah in many Democratic circles. But it appears that the cable news network is no longer on the outs.
Fox may indeed be more unfair to Democrats than Republicans (and I believe this to be the case), but some would say that this simply makes up for the unfairness that Republicans have had to endure from CNN and MSNBC. It is unfortunate that those doing the squawking on this, do not oppose bias per se, but only bias against their views and their candidates.
At what point are we going to get past this myth that news reporting should be unbiased? At what point are we going to realize, in postmodern fashion, that neutrality is impossible? At what point are we going to insist that all news should be reported, not in an unbiased way, but in a fair way? It is indeed possible to be biased and fair at the same time.
I try hard to be “fair and balanced” when I look at these kinds of things, but I have to confess that, in this long election season, my patience is running out with the left-wing and right-wing political extremists, who in their self-righteousness, believe that their views should be taken more seriously than the views of everyone else.
Fox, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Washington Times, is a conservative counterestablishment institution designed to ape the functions of the real thing, doing double duty by firing up the troops with custom-crafted ideological spin, "analysis" and phony scholarship while confusing the rest of the world with nonsense disguised as news.
The question of Fox's malevolence is settled. What remains is a disagreement among liberals over an appropriate response. Some argue that liberals ought to refuse to participate at all because it is impossible to do so without playing by Fox's fixed rules. But by sitting it out, the counterargument goes, they are shutting themselves off from cable's largest audience, and inviting the accusation of fear and wimpiness.
As John Edwards explained when announcing his withdrawal from a Fox debate, "There's just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending to be objective." He also noted that he had appeared on the network more than 30 times. Edwards is right. The proper response to a Fox attack disguised as a question is, "Well, Brit, I appeared on this biased show of yours to set your viewers straight about the BS you and your fellow right-wingers have been handing them. Now here's the truth..."
UCLA physicist David Saxon, right, was one of 31 faculty fired from the University of California in 1950 for refusing to sign a "loyalty oath." Could such a thing happen today?
If requiring Americans to sign a loyalty oath as a condition of employment sounds like a relic of the 1950s, that's because it is. But several states, including California, still require loyalty-oaths from public employees. Wendy Gonaver, an American Studies lecturer at Cal State University in Fullerton, found out the hard way that California still takes the law seriously.
Now I appreciate Cal State's desire to follow the law; the California Constitution does prescribe the text of the oath, and says "all public ... employees, ... except such inferior officers and employees as may be by law exempted, shall, before they enter upon the duties of their respective offices, take and subscribe the following oath or affirmation." But surely there are times to interpret laws as requiring substantial compliance rather than strict literalism. Even the precedent that Cal State's Human Resources director JoAnne Hill cites as supposedly requiring the exact text of the oath (see the article for more on that) seems to take this view: It rejected the applicant's modified oath only after stressing that the modifications were not "surplusage" or "innocuous or merely expository," but rather "ma[d]e equivocal the essential oath preceding [the applicant's personal statement]." Likewise, the venerable principle that laws should be interpreted in a way that minimizes possible constitutional problems (here chiefly First Amendment problems related to compelled speech) counsels in favor of reading the law to provide some flexibility. In light of this, letting Marianne Kearney-Brown sign the entire oath, simply with the addition of a term, seems sufficiently consistent with the state mandate.
True, the Supreme Court has held that it doesn't violate the First Amendment to require certain narrow loyalty oaths, including support-and-defend oaths, for government employees. But the Court's justification was precisely that these oaths "do[] not require specific action in some hypothetical or actual situation"; they embody "simply a commitment to abide by our constitutional system ... [and] a commitment not to use illegal and constitutionally unprotected force to change the constitutional system."
The very concept of "loyalty" is painfully elusive. It is defined entirely by a state of mind. Does it mean "my country, right or wrong"? Can a citizen oppose government policies - including a war - and still be "loyal"? Can a citizen be a pacifist and still be "loyal"?
Loyalty oaths reverse the essential relationship between the citizen and the state in a democratic society. As the Framers of our Constitution understood, the citizens of a self-governing society must be free to think and talk openly and critically about issues of governance. In a regime of loyalty oaths, it is the government that defines which thoughts and which ideas are permitted.
Dissenting views, nonconforming views, are deemed "disloyal." The very existence of such oaths reflects an utter lack of confidence in the American people. Nothing so dangerously corrupts the integrity of a democracy as a lack of faith in its own citizens.
John McCain's health plan? Personally find a cure for all diseases in his secret White House laboratory.
While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been duking it out over which government-sponsored health plan will help more Americans, John McCain this week quietly unveiled his own, more market-driven plan. His proposal: Include health benefits in taxable income -- but provide tax credits of $2,500 to single people and of $5,000 to families to let them choose and buy their own insurance instead of relying on employers.
Although you might not guess it from McCain's gloss, the "tax benefit" in question goes to employees, not employers. Companies can deduct money spent on employee compensation as a business expense whether it takes the form of wages or health benefits. But since the government does not treat employer-provided health insurance as taxable income, there's an artificial incentive for employees to prefer compensation in that form, rather than the cash equivalent. If both kinds of compensation were treated the same, most employees presumably would prefer the money; employers would respond by ditching health benefits and offering higher wages instead. Equal tax treatment could be accomplished either by taxing the health benefits as income or, as McCain seems to be proposing, making the money an employee independently spends on health insurance tax-free as well.
McCain himself says "employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged" for the "many workers" who "are perfectly content" with the status quo. Maybe this is just his way of reassuring people that changes in the compensation mix would be driven by employee preferences. But the main economic rationale for eliminating the health-benefit tax preference is to make employer-provided medical coverage the exception rather than the rule; otherwise we would still have a system in which medical coverage is both artificially expensive, since patients have little opportunity or incentive to economize, and insecure, since losing a job often means losing health insurance.
Government health insurance, like large employer health insurance, is based on a simple concept: Risk pooling. The more of us in this together, the more our health risks will average out among the population. When I'm sick, many more will be well, and so the group will be able to bear the costs of my illness. Moreover, the greater the size of the pool, the greater our ability to negotiate better deals, demand fairer treatment, and generally find market strength in numbers. In contrast, McCain would like to take the health-care system in the opposite direction, toward an individual market where individuals seek coverage without the protection of large insurers or the government. Thus, the core of McCain's health-care proposal is a tax credit designed to ease people out of employer insurance and help employers pull away from offering coverage. McCain would give individuals a $2,500 tax credit and families a $5,000 tax credit meant to help them seek cheaper coverage options, such as health savings accounts, in the private market.
If you're young and unlikely to get sick, these accounts are a good deal, as you'll pay lower premiums. If you're not as demographically and genetically blessed, they're a bad deal, as you'll pay much more out of pocket for your care. They are, in other words, the logical extension of the modern health coverage marketplace: They're health insurance for people who don't need health care.
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