Great article by Jonah Goldberg.  Anyone can make a mistake -- even a so-called "professional" journalist.  But, how is it that Brian Ross even thought to look for the Colorado psycho on the Colorado Tea Party website in the first place?

Brian Ross’s Brain Cramp

By Jonah Goldberg

July 25, 2012 12:00 A.M.

If ABC News does fire Brian Ross, he could always find a job working for Aaron Sorkin.

Ross, a veteran investigative reporter for ABC News, blew it Friday morning when he suggested that the Aurora, Colo., shooting suspect, James Holmes, might be connected with the Tea Party.

“There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes,” Ross ominously informed Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos, who thought the news “might be significant.”

Or it might not.

Actually, it definitely isn’t significant. The fiftysomething tea-party Holmes, we soon learned, wasn’t the same guy as the twentysomething mass-slaying suspect.

Brent Bozell of the conservative watchdog outfit the Media Research Center calls Ross’s statement a “brazen attempt to smear the Tea Party.”

And other conservatives, particularly tea-party members, have every right to be angry. The list of calumnies and distortions about them is too lengthy to recount here. They’ve been cast as dangerous, racist, fascistic, and murderous.

The most famous example is the seemingly instantaneous effort — ginned up by partisans but given ample credence by the mainstream media — to turn Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect in the 2011 Tucson shootings that killed six people and wounded former representative Gabrielle Giffords, into a right-wing golem conjured by Fox News, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party.

That said, I still don’t think Bozell & Co. are quite right when they see Ross’s “reporting” as deliberate. For that, Ross would have needed to know what he was saying was untrue. I have to believe Ross didn’t want to get the story wrong.

It would be nice to know if Ross checked to see if there were any Jim Holmeses around Aurora who were connected to the Occupy Wall Street movement or any who were Muslims. Or was the Tea Party simply the first place he looked? And if so, why?

One possible answer is that even allegedly “objective” journalists follow certain narratives based on their own unspoken ideological assumptions. For instance, when a Muslim shouting “Allahu akbar!” mows down colleagues at Fort Hood or tries to blow up strangers in Times Square, the reflex is to seek proof that it was an “isolated incident” or a “lone wolf.”

But when a white non-Muslim shoots up a political rally or a movie theater, the media reflex is to prove their suspicions of sinister right-wing plots. Going with your gut can be great advice for sleuthing out stories, but awful guidance for reporting them.

Which brings us to Sorkin, the creator of HBO’s The Newsroom, perhaps the most execrable pop-culture agitprop since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. In Sorkin’s fantasy show about a news program that breaks with the media herd, smugly liberal reporters almost always have the right instincts.

Sorkin accomplishes this in part by giving himself the benefit of hindsight, by setting Newsroom in 2010. Hence, when the Times Square bomber is apprehended, the news team congratulates itself for choosing to do the “boring version of the story” in which the “system worked” and the terrorist “acted alone” — something they couldn’t possibly have known yet.

Meanwhile, the real story for Sorkin’s fantasy journalists is exposing the pernicious threat of the Tea Party (and its James Bond–villain backers, the Koch brothers) as they peacefully unseat incumbent Republicans in primaries. Holding the actual government accountable isn’t a big priority for Sorkin’s Fifth Estate because, after all, the system works when liberals run it. The job of the media is to keep a weather eye on the existential threat from the American Right.

That’s a great way to do journalism when you’re playing make-believe and cherry-picking two-year-old facts to suit your ideological agenda. It’s quite another thing when you’re a real reporter working in real time. Ross learned that lesson the hard way in what amounted to an audition for The Newsroom. We can only guess at Ross’s motive for his mistake, but if the media followed Sorkin’s advice, we can be sure we’d see a lot more like it.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review online, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

"If self-reverence were a crime, [Obama] would be facing a life sentence."

Great editorial from the San Diego Union Tribune

Presidential busts: The worst of all: Barack Obama (2009-?)

He took office at a time when the U.S. economy was on its worst slide in 75 years, but pushed policies using borrowed money that were more meant to preserve government jobs than broadly help the private sector where the great majority of Americans work, ensuring the jobs crisis continued.

He railed against the heavy spending and big deficits of his predecessor, but blithely backed budgets that had triple the deficits ever seen in American history.

He promised a smart, sweeping overhaul of the U.S. health care system, but ended up giving us a Byzantine mess promoted to the public with myths: that offering subsidized care to tens of millions of people would save money; that people would keep their own doctors; that access to care wouldn’t change; and that rationing would never happen.

He promised a more sophisticated approach to the economy than that of his predecessor, but had so little common sense that his health law actually gave businesses a big financial incentive to discontinue providing health insurance to their employees.

He offered hosannas to genius entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs in his prepared remarks, but when speaking off the cuff betrayed his faculty-lounge view of the world, saying of businesspeople, “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.”

He swore to bring overdue oversight and honest accounting to the corporate world, but made flagrantly dishonest claims about General Motors paying back its government loans that would have triggered a criminal fraud investigation in the private sector.

He promised to set a high new standard for ethics in the White House, but used a baffling claim of executive privilege to shield his embattled attorney general from the repercussions of a cover-up involving the death of a federal law enforcement officer.

He denounced his predecessor for permitting harsh interrogation tactics with suspected terrorists, but once in office somehow concluded that a better, more moral approach would just be to use drones to assassinate such suspects without getting any information from them.

He presented himself as a shrewd student of Washington politics, but once in office displayed a counterproductive standoffishness to many Democratic lawmakers eager to embrace him, never developing the broad range of personal relationships that often mark a successful presidency.

He ran as a unifying force who would bring in a new era of civility and racial healing to Washington, but once in office embraced ugly, Chicago-style political hardball that saw nothing wrong with his supporters’ loathsome practice of depicting opposition to his policies as being driven by racism.

He constantly offered praise for the wisdom and insights of the American public, but reacted to the broad discontent over Obamacare, high unemployment and vast deficits by saying it was a failure of his administration to properly explain its glorious record to a confused populace – not a predictable reaction to his struggles and ineffectiveness.

And in December 2011 – at a time in which one-quarter of American adults who wanted full-time work couldn’t find it, after a year in which the federal deficit was a staggering $1.3 trillion – here was what Barack Obama had to say for himself in a CBS interview: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president, with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln.”

Unbelievable. If self-reverence were a crime, our current president would be facing a life sentence. For the good of America, let’s pray we have someone else in charge of the federal government come Jan. 20, 2013.

Tragedy Strikes – And Leftists Shame Themselves
July 23, 2012 - 4:30 am - by Andrew Klavan

“Of that which we cannot speak,” the philosopher told us, “we must pass over in silence.”

As of this writing, twelve people are dead because of the theatre shooting in Aurora, Colorado.  One was a six year old child, Veronica.  Three were young men who threw themselves over their girlfriends and saved their lives.  There was an Air Force veteran.  A devoted Dad.  All of them were people who went out to enjoy the communal pleasure of a big movie opening, and should be at home right now, bragging about being the first on their block to see The Dark Knight Rises.

Of all the commentary that has followed this disaster, one remark by a public figure has struck me with its truth.  The star of the film, Christian Bale, said in a statement, “Words cannot express the horror that I feel.  I cannot begin to truly understand the pain and grief of the victims and their loved ones, but my heart goes out to them.”  Readers of this blog will know I don’t usually turn to movie actors to find wisdom, but Bale got it exactly right.  I don’t understand.  My heart goes out.  Words cannot express.  That is literally all one can rightly say.

And yet within minutes of the news first breaking, celebrated leftists, smelling in the blood of innocents some chance for political advantage, began to appropriate the corpses of their fellow citizens for soapboxes.  ABC “newsman” Brian Ross slandered an innocent man in the hope of using the killings to perpetuate the media lie that the Tea Party movement is violent.  Lefty politicians like Senator Frank Lautenberg and Mayor Michael Bloomberg began to beat the drum for anti-gun laws, despite the fact that Aurora already has stringent gun control.  Brain-dead celebrities like Bill Maher and Cher found in the shattering grief of their neighbors a tremendous chance to insult America and Mitt Romney.

Does the ABC News team think a dead six year old is a prop for their disinformation campaign?  Do Senator Lautenberg and Mayor Bloomberg think a community’s trauma is nothing more than a political opportunity?  Do Bill Maher and Cher think anything?  Do they know anything even exists outside the wonderlands of their own narcissism?

What these lefties reveal in moments like this — and they reveal it again and again — is that human beings — real live actual human beings with individual lives and desires and dreams and fears — do not mean a thing to them.  Not a thing.  To them, the Aurora massacre is not about the dead and the mourning, it’s about getting one in on the Tea Party!  It’s about getting their hands on the Second Amendment!  It’s about getting off a sarcastic remark!  The victims and their families are just convenient stepping stones on the path to where they want to go.

I do not hear anyone on the right talking like this.  This sort of moral vacuity is a product of the leftist philosophy – a philosophy that does not understand the worth of individuals, that does not conceive of each person as being a point and purpose in and of himself.  We’re all just theoretical pieces in the puzzle of their perfect world.  Never mind that we may not fit where they want us to.  If we’ll just give them the power to push and push us enough, why, we’ll surely snap into place and, ah, what a beautiful life it will be then.  It’s a way of thinking that deadens you to other people’s pain.

Twelve people are dead.  A six year old child.  Ordinary guys with the hearts of heroes.  Sons and daughters.  Lovers.  Friends.  Is it too much to ask of these chattering elites that they refrain from grandstanding on our neighbors’ bodies?  Offer your condolences.  Express your grief.  Then shut your fat flapping faces.  You’re not going to improve the situation.  You’re not going to prevent it from happening again.  You’re not going to do anything but show yourself to be so much less than what, with all your power and wealth and privilege, you really owe it to us to be.

"Ultimately, Mrs. Clinton cannot be held accountable for the failures of a president she understood (earlier and better than most) as a lightweight.  But the choice to serve him was hers, and the administration's foreign policy record is hers, too.  It's a record that looks good only because it is set against the backdrop that is the Obama presidency in its totality."

Great column by a great columnist, Bret Stephens.

The Hillary Myth
Can anyone name an achievement to justify the adulation of our secretary of state?
By BRET STEPHENS

Suddenly we're supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton is a great secretary of state.

Eric Schmidt of Google calls her "the most significant secretary of state since Dean Acheson." A profile in the New York Times runs under the headline "Hillary Clinton's Last Tour as a Rock-Star Diplomat." Another profile in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine is titled, wishfully, "Head of State." The two articles are so similar in theme, tone, choice of anecdote and the absence of even token criticism that you're almost tempted to suspect one was cribbed from the other.

The Hillary boomlet isn't a mystery. She never lost her political constituency. In the cabinet she looks good next to Janet Napolitano and bright next to Joe Biden. She looks even better next to her boss. Democrats belong to the party of hope, and Barack Obama is hope's keenest disappointment.

So Mrs. Clinton is back, resisting appeals for her to run in 2016 the way Caesar rejects the thrice-offered crown. No doubt she would have made a better president than Mr. Obama. But is that saying much? No doubt she's been a hard-working and well-briefed secretary. But that isn't saying much, either.

What would make Mrs. Clinton a great secretary of state is if she had engineered a major diplomatic breakthrough, as Henry Kissinger did. But she hasn't. Or if she dominated the administration's foreign policy, the way Jim Baker did. But she doesn't. Or if she had marshaled a great alliance (Acheson), or authored a great doctrine (Adams) or a great plan (Marshall), or paved the way to a great victory (Shultz). But she falls palpably short on all those counts, too.

Maybe it's enough to say Mrs. Clinton is a good secretary of state. But she isn't that, either.

Mrs. Clinton is often praised for her loyalty to her boss, even when she loses the policy argument—as she did over maintaining a troop presence in Iraq.

Loyalty can be a virtue, but it is a secondary virtue when it conflicts with principle, and a vice when it's only a function of ambition. Cyrus Vance resigned as Jimmy Carter's secretary of state when the president, facing a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, authorized a disastrous rescue operation in Iran. Would that make Vance a lesser public servant than Mrs. Clinton?

Mrs. Clinton is also given high marks for her pragmatism. But pragmatism can only be judged according to the result. Is the reset with Russia improving Moscow's behavior vis-à-vis Syria? Has a "pragmatic" approach to China moderated its behavior in the South China Sea? Is the administration's willingness to intervene on humanitarian grounds in Libya but not Syria a function of pragmatism or election-year opportunism?

What about the rest of the record? It would be nice to give Mrs. Clinton full marks for the Libya intervention, except she was an early skeptic of that intervention. It would be nice to give her marks for championing the Syrian opposition, except she has failed to persuade Russia, China or Mr. Obama to move even an inch against Bashar al-Assad. It would be nice to give her marks for helping midwife a positive transition in Egypt. But having fecklessly described Hosni Mubarak as a "friend of my family" in 2009, it's no wonder Egyptians take a dim view of the Obama administration.

Then there's Iran. In the administration's fairy tale/post-facto rationalization, the U.S. was getting nowhere internationally with Iran under George Bush. Then Mr. Obama cunningly offered to extend his hand to the mullahs, knowing that if they rejected it the U.S. would be in a better position to act internationally.

Nearly everything about that account is false. The Bush administration was able to win three U.N. Security Council votes sanctioning Iran, against only one for this administration. The "crippling" sanctions Mr. Obama now likes to brag about were signed against his wishes under political duress late last year. Since then, the administration has spent most of its time writing waivers for other countries. Even now, negotiations with Tehran continue: They serve the purposes of a president who wants to get past November without a crisis. They also serve the mullahs' purposes to gain time.

Now Iran is that much closer to a bomb and the possibility of a regional war is that much greater. The only real pressure the administration has exerted thus far has been on Israel, whose prime minister is the one foreign leader Mrs. Clinton has bawled out. She should try doing likewise with Vladimir Putin.

Ultimately, Mrs. Clinton cannot be held accountable for the failures of a president she understood (earlier and better than most) as a lightweight. But the choice to serve him was hers, and the administration's foreign policy record is hers, too. It's a record that looks good only because it is set against the backdrop that is the Obama presidency in its totality.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

What if the NFL Played by Teachers' Rules?


Imagine a league where players who make it through three seasons could never be cut from the roster.

By FRAN TARKENTON

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?

No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.

Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers' salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn't rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they've been teaching. That's it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you're demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation's children.

Inflation-adjusted spending per student in the United States has nearly tripled since 1970. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we spend more per student than any nation except Switzerland, with only middling results to show for it.

Over the past 20 years, we've been told that a big part of the problem is crumbling schools—that with new buildings and computers in every classroom, everything would improve. But even though spending on facilities and equipment has more than doubled since 1989 (again adjusted for inflation), we're still not seeing results, and officials assume the answer is that we haven't spent enough.

These same misguided beliefs are front and center in President Obama's jobs plan, which includes billions for "public school modernization." The popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. We've been spending billions of dollars on school modernization for decades, and I suspect we could keep on doing it until the end of the world, without much in the way of academic results. The only beneficiaries are the teachers unions.

Some reformers, including Bill Gates, are finally catching on that our federally centralized, union-created system provides no incentive for better performance. If anything, it penalizes those who work hard because they spend time, energy and their own money to help students, only to get the same check each month as the worst teacher in the district (or an even smaller one, if that teacher has been there longer). Is it any surprise, then, that so many good teachers burn out or become disenchanted?

Perhaps no other sector of American society so demonstrates the failure of government spending and interference. We've destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out. As one of my coaches used to say, "You don't get vast results with half-vast efforts!"

The results we're looking for are students learning, so we need to reward great teachers who show they can make that happen—and get rid of bad teachers who don't get the job done. It's what we do in every other profession: If you're good, you get rewarded, and if you're not, then you look for other work. It's fine to look for ways to improve the measuring tools, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Our rigid, top-down, union-dictated system isn't working. If results are the objective, then we need to loosen the reins, giving teachers the ability to fulfill their responsibilities to students to the best of their abilities, not to the letter of the union contract and federal standards.

Mr. Tarkenton, an NFL Hall of Fame quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants from 1961 to 1978, is an entrepreneur who runs two websites devoted to small business education.

"An incontrovertible truth: One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn't"

Obamanonics vs. Reaganomics
One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn't.
By STEPHEN MOORE

If you really want to light the fuse of a liberal Democrat, compare Barack Obama's economic performance after 30 months in office with that of Ronald Reagan. It's not at all flattering for Mr. Obama.

The two presidents have a lot in common. Both inherited an American economy in collapse. And both applied daring, expensive remedies. Mr. Reagan passed the biggest tax cut ever, combined with an agenda of deregulation, monetary restraint and spending controls. Mr. Obama, of course, has given us a $1 trillion spending stimulus.

By the end of the summer of Reagan's third year in office, the economy was soaring. The GDP growth rate was 5% and racing toward 7%, even 8% growth. In 1983 and '84 output was growing so fast the biggest worry was that the economy would "overheat." In the summer of 2011 we have an economy limping along at barely 1% growth and by some indications headed toward a "double-dip" recession. By the end of Reagan's first term, it was Morning in America. Today there is gloomy talk of America in its twilight.

My purpose here is not more Reagan idolatry, but to point out an incontrovertible truth: One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn't.

The Reagan philosophy was to incentivize production—i.e., the "supply side" of the economy—by lowering restraints on business expansion and investment. This was done by slashing marginal income tax rates, eliminating regulatory high hurdles, and reining in inflation with a tighter monetary policy.

The Keynesians in the early 1980s assured us that the Reagan expansion would not and could not happen. Rapid growth with new jobs and falling rates of inflation (to 4% in 1983 from 13% in 1980) is an impossibility in Keynesian textbooks. If you increase demand, prices go up. If you increase supply—as Reagan did—prices go down.

The Godfather of the neo-Keynesians, Paul Samuelson, was the lead critic of the supposed follies of Reaganomics. He wrote in a 1980 Newsweek column that to slay the inflation monster would take "five to ten years of austerity," with unemployment of 8% or 9% and real output of "barely 1 or 2 percent." Reaganomics was routinely ridiculed in the media, especially in the 1982 recession. That was the year MIT economist Lester Thurow famously said, "The engines of economic growth have shut down here and across the globe, and they are likely to stay that way for years to come."

The economy would soon take flight for more than 80 consecutive months. Then the Reagan critics declared what they once thought couldn't work was actually a textbook Keynesian expansion fueled by budget deficits of $200 billion a year, or about 4%-5% of GDP.

Robert Reich, now at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that "The recession of 1981-82 was so severe that the bounce back has been vigorous." Paul Krugman wrote in 2004 that the Reagan boom was really nothing special because: "You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump."

Mr. Krugman was, for once, at least partly right. How could Reagan not look good after four years of Jimmy Carter's economic malpractice?

Fast-forward to today. Mr. Obama is running deficits of $1.3 trillion, or 8%-9% of GDP. If the Reagan deficits powered the '80s expansion, the Obama deficits—twice as large—should have the U.S. sprinting at Olympic speed.

The left has now embraced a new theory to explain why the Obama spending hasn't worked. The answer is contained in the book "This Time Is Different," by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Published in 2009, the book examines centuries of recessions and depressions world-wide. The authors conclude that it takes nations much longer—six years or more—to recover from financial crises and the popping of asset bubbles than from typical recessions.

In any case, what Reagan inherited was arguably a more severe financial crisis than what was dropped in Mr. Obama's lap. You don't believe it? From 1967 to 1982 stocks lost two-thirds of their value relative to inflation, according to a new report from Laffer Associates. That mass liquidation of wealth was a first-rate financial calamity. And tell me that 20% mortgage interest rates, as we saw in the 1970s, aren't indicative of a monetary-policy meltdown.

There is something that is genuinely different this time. It isn't the nature of the crisis Mr. Obama inherited, but the nature of his policy prescriptions. Reagan applied tax cuts and other policies that, yes, took the deficit to unchartered peacetime highs.

But that borrowing financed a remarkable and prolonged economic expansion and a victory against the Evil Empire in the Cold War. What exactly have Mr. Obama's deficits gotten us?

Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

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