Category: media

The Wall Street Journal:

You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.

Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.

The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.

The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.

Let’s take them in order. The first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else — e.g., getting businesses to invest and create jobs—becomes next to impossible.

People also start voting with their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has stated that one of her goals is to attract 10,000 families to move to Baltimore. Good luck with that after Monday night.

It’s not that we don’t know what to do. Rudy Giuliani proved that in New York City, which he helped to revive in the 1990s starting with a revolution in policing that brought crime rates to record lows. A good part of this was policing in areas that had previously been left to the hoodlums.

His reward (and that of his successor, Mike Bloomberg, who built on Mr. Giuliani’s policies) was to become a villain of the liberal grievance industry and a constant target of attack. Few blue-city mayors elsewhere have been willing to take that heat.

Or take the economy. In the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the idea was that the federal government could revitalize city centers with money and central planning. You can tell how that turned out by the office buildings and housing projects that failed to attract middle-class taxpayers. Baltimore’s waterfront is a gleaming example of this kind of top-down development, with new sports stadiums that failed to attract other businesses.

The latest figures from Maryland’s Department of Labor show state unemployment at 5.4%, against 8.4% for Baltimore. A 2011 city report on the neighborhood of Freddie Gray — the African-American whose death in police custody sparked the riots — reported an area that is 96.9% black with unemployment at 21%. When it comes to providing hope and jobs, we should have learned by now that no government program can substitute for a healthy private economy.

Then there are the public schools. Residents will put up with a great deal if they know their children have a chance at upward mobility through education. But when the schools no longer perform, the parents who can afford to move to the suburbs do so — and those left behind are stuck with failure. There are many measures of failure in Baltimore schools, but consider that on state tests 72% of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, 45% in reading and 64% in science.

Our point is not to indict all cities or liberals. Many big-city Democrats have worked to welcome private investment and reform public education. Some of the biggest cities — New York, Boston and San Francisco — have also had inherent economic advantages like higher education and the finance and technology industries.

But Baltimore also has advantages, not least its port and one of the nation’s finest medical centers in Johns Hopkins. If it lacks the appeal of New York or San Diego, that is all the more reason for city officials to rethink their reliance on high taxes, government spending and welfare-state dependency.

For a time in recent decades, it looked like the reform examples of New York under Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg and the growth of cities like Houston might lead to a broader urban revitalization. In some places it did.

But of late the progressives have been making a comeback, led by Bill de Blasio in New York and the challenge to sometime reform Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. This week’s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It’s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, “broken windows” policing, and education choice.

The only Milwaukee mayor to have done anything on the specific issue of Milwaukee education was John Norquist, who became a backer of Milwaukee school choice. That cannot be said of his successor, Tom Barrett. As for Milwaukee’s economy, in March the state unemployment rate was 4.6 percent (lower than the national rate of 5.5 percent); in Milwaukee it was 7.3 percent.

John Nolte is more specific about Democrats’ role in Baltimore:

Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.

In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.

Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.

Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.

Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.

You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.

Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence. …

Democrats and their never-ending grievance campaigns; their never-ending propaganda that government largess is the answer; their never-ending caves to corrupt unions; their never-ending warehousing of innocent children in failed public schools — that’s a Democrat problem, not America’s problem.

I might believe Baltimore was an American problem if the city was interested in new ideas and a new direction under new leaders. But we all know that will never happen. After Democrat policies result in despair and anarchy, Democrats always demand more of the same, only bigger.

Milwaukee is represented, if you want to call what she does representation, in Congress by U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D–Milwaukee). I’d call Moore a joke, but that would be an insult to jokes. The only good thing that can be said about Moore is that she is in the minority party of the House of Representatives.

Speaking of the House, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R–New York) rebuts Hillary Clinton’s lie-filled speech about Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.:

In her critique of the police and the criminal justice system, Sec. Clinton shamefully cited Ferguson and Staten Island. This is some of what she ignored:

– In Ferguson it is now indisputable that Michael Brown was a criminal who robbed a convenience store and attacked Police Officer Wilson; and that Police Officer Wilson acted properly to protect his own life. We also know that the cacophony of media stories of “hands up” and “don’t shoot” were lies. Why didn’t Sec. Clinton use her forum as an opportunity to express her sadness and regret to Officer Wilson and his family for the slanders he endured?

– In Staten Island Eric Garner was not capriciously arrested for “selling cigarettes on the street”, as Sec. Clinton claimed. He was arrested because minority business owners went to the African-American NYPD Chief and demanded Garner be arrested because he was disrupting their businesses. The arrest was supervised by an African-American NYPD Sergeant and a Grand Jury exonerated the police. As a New Yorker why did Sec. Clinton misrepresent the actions of the NYPD? Why didn’t she take this opportunity to thank the NYPD for the thousands of African-American lives they have saved in the past 25 years and the risks they take each day?

Sec. Clinton also says police should not spend money on “weapons of war” ignoring the fact that there was war in the streets of Baltimore on Tuesday evening and it took the military to restore order with “weapons of war.”

What occurred in Baltimore is a tragedy. If a full investigation shows that police acted improperly, they must be prosecuted. But that should not be used by politicians as an excuse to rewrite history or ignore reality.

If Sec. Clinton were being honest about addressing race relations in America, she would have pointed to the progress made in New York City by the policies of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD which reduced the murder rate by 80% and provided the good people in inner city neighborhoods such as Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant the opportunity to revitalize and grow their communities – unlike Baltimore which has a murder rate 8 times higher than New York.

Instapundit adds:

The rioting in Ferguson and Baltimore isn’t driven by poverty, race, or even police brutality.  It’s driven by progressive culture, which teaches that successful business people “didn’t build that,” accepts abortion/divorce/children out of wedlock as normal behavior, proclaims that poor children (particularly minorities) cannot succeed, that police and authority in general are the “enemy,” and that law is rigged against minorities.  Urban music, “leaders” like Al Sharpton, and a Democrat strategy of balkanizing Americans through identity politics–echoed daily by mainstream media–has created a culture that has no respect for the rule of law.  In the eyes of progressives, the American Dream is dead, and they are literally dancing on its grave.

Until this progressive culture changes (if it ever can) or is marginalized politically, we will have lawless behavior every time these destructive, sociopathic cultural expectations are reinforced by tragedies like the deaths of Michael Brown or Freddie Gray.

The problem, as noted here earlier this week, is that Milwaukee voters appear uninterested in change.

Option 1 in the continuing battle of the Republican Party and the media is the approach of Rich Galen:

Rand Paul’s official campaign began with a speech on Tuesday.

By yesterday he had been in arguments with two reporters.

First he went at it with the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie. Guthrie, according to National Journal.

“You once said Iran was not a threat,” Guthrie said to Paul. “Now you say it is. You once proposed ending foreign aid to Israel. You now support it, at least for the time being. And you once offered to drastically cut defense spending but now you want to increase it by 60 percent.”

At that time Paul tried to interrupt and said,

“Before we go through a litany of things you say I’ve changed on, why don’t you ask me a question: ‘Have I changed my opinion?’”

After Guthrie tried again, Paul said:

“Listen, you’ve editorialized. Let me answer a question. You ask a question, and you say, ‘Have your views changed?’ instead of editorializing and saying my views have changed.”

That is a difference without a distinction, if you ask me, which Rand Paul did not.

Later in the day, he got cranky again, this time with an AP reporter who asked him about his position(s) on abortion.

According to The Hill newspaper, “AP reporter Philip Elliott’s interview with Paul became heated after Elliott pressed the presidential candidate to say whether victims of rape should be able to get abortions.”

Paul told Elliott:

“I gave you about a five-minute answer. Put in my five-minute answer … The thing is about abortion – and about a lot of things – is that I think people get tied up in all these details of, sort of, you’re this or this or that, or you’re hard and fast (on) one thing or the other.”Not bad for the first 24 hours of the campaign.

Some Republicans have made a living arguing with reporters. During the 2012 cycle, Newt Gingrich would wait for a moderator to ask a “gotcha” question so he could launch into a tirade.

The GOP audiences stomped and cheered but Rand Paul is no Newt Gingrich when it comes to baiting reporters.

There used to be a saying in politics, “Never argue with the guy who buys his ink by the barrel.”

Given the number of on-line outlets, former Governor Tom Ridge has updated that to:

“Never argue with the guy who buys his bandwidth by the gigabyte.”My background is as a press secretary. When I was doing that I wasn’t the “Communications Director” with a staff of thousands. When I was Dan Quayle’s Senate press secretary I was it. Same thing when I was press secretary to Newt with he was Republican Whip. My successors were also one-man shows.

Having been press secretary to Quayle and Gingrich and having run GOPAC you might think that reporters would have crossed the street rather than have to say “hello” to me in Washington.

That has never been the case because I have lived by three rules:

First, “Don’t sell out your boss to curry favor with the press.” They will treat you like cops treat a stool pigeon. They’ll use you until you have nothing for them, then they’ll lose your number.

Second, “You don’t have to know everything about everything.” Some of the smartest responses I’ve ever given to reporters have been the ones where I said “I don’t know,” rather than trying to pretend I was on the inside of everything.

Third, “Don’t lie.” You don’t have to tell a reporter everything you know; and you can be slippery with an answer, but if you lie you will, sooner or later, get caught and your credibility will be shot.

Part of being a good press secretary is to brief your boss on what questions might be asked, and how you recommend they be answered.

Even the best press secretary won’t catch them all, but by having your boss prepared, over time, reporters will come to appreciate the effort.

To battle reporters all day every day is exhausting for the candidate and for the staff and, because they buy their bandwidth by the gigabyte, if they can’t make your boss look bad in an article, they can do it in a blog. If not in a blog then in a Tweet.

Dealing with reporters is just another skill candidates have to develop.

Approach number two comes from Jon Gabriel:

This new generation of GOP hopefuls understands what only Newt Gingrich knew in 2012. If you want a chance at the White House, you need to beat the other candidates and you need to beat the press.

Mitt Romney, decent fellow that he is, tacitly accepted the press’ claims of objectivity, even if he didn’t believe it in his heart. Romney grinned and nodded at reporters from CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC, even though their initials could have been DNC.

Right-leaning partisans watched moderator George Stephanopoulos concoct the fictional “War on Women” and moderator Candy Crowley actively support Obama during live debates. Many of us spent 2012 yelling at our TVs and laptop screens, “the press isn’t neutral. They’re on the other side!”

Coming of age during the Obama years, the 2016 candidates know all too well that the press is as much of an opponent as the rival campaigns. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Scott Walker all know that the mainstream media despises them. This new breed acts accordingly by questioning the press and their flawed premises.

After Planned Parenthood spent all yesterday attacking Sen. Paul, two reporters coincidentally asked him if he would accept any exemptions on abortion. Come on, senator: is there no limit to your cruel oppression of women? Paul knew the fix was in and responded accordingly.

“Here’s the deal — we always seem to have the debate waaaaay over here on what are the exact details of exemptions, or when it starts,” Paul said, moving his hand to one side. “Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it okay to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus? You go back and you ask Debbie Wasserman-Schultz if she’s okay with killing a seven-pound baby that is not born yet. Ask her when life begins, and you ask Debbie when it’s okay to protect life. When you get an answer from Debbie, get back to me.”

Paul knows that Democrats rarely get questions about whether they support partial-birth abortion, if gender selection is acceptable, or if parental consent should be required. The press naturally doesn’t want to put their candidates on the hot seat, so why ask them hot-button questions? Instead, just let the Republicans sweat and damage their chances among low-info voters. To his credit, Paul didn’t play along with this old game; he questioned the premise and threw it back in the reporters’ faces.

Instead of waiting for her newsroom allies, Wasserman-Schultz released a huffy statement. “Here’s an answer,” the DNC Chair wrote. “I support letting women and their doctors make this decision without government getting involved. Period. End of story.”

She forgot to mention that Obamacare ensures government is intimately involved with this life-or-death decision, but I appreciate the clarity. To use Paul’s phrasing, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Democratic National Committee are okay with killing a seven-pound baby in the uterus. She doesn’t care when life begins and has no intention of protecting the life of any baby in the womb, even if it’s a minute from being delivered. The baby can be killed anytime and for any reason. Period. End of story.

I hope the other GOP candidates are taking notes. They need to stop trying to placate the reporters who hate them and go on offense for a change. Like Gingrich and Paul, use a little verbal jujitsu to trip up the Democrat-Media Complex. Beltway liberals are wildly out-of-touch with the average voter’s values and concerns. Use that to our advantage.

In two minutes, I came up with several questions to ask of Hillary Clinton and her supporters. It’s only fair that moderate voters know her answers:

• “Do you believe that Officer Darren Wilson racially profiled Mike Brown? Explain.”
• “Will you have a gender-neutral bathroom in the White House? Why isn’t there one now?”
• “What made you finally agree with Dick Cheney that same-sex marriage should be legalized?”
• “How much should taxes be increased to combat climate change? Did your record-setting number of State Department trips contribute to the problem?”
• “Should we increase immigration while African-American unemployment is at record highs?”

Have at it, press corps; prove your neutrality. And Republicans, prove that you’ll be able to handle the hostile press if and when you get to the Oval Office.

One of the comments on Gabriel’s piece mentions option 2.5:

But when dealing with adversarial media, you should never agree to an interview without your own camera recording the whole thing and reserving the right to publish it in its entirety.

I first heard of this strategy on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in the 1980s and used it in my own take-down of one of their attack reporters in a front page hit piece in 1992.  (Keep hitting “Next” for the transcript and a link to the audio recording.)

It doesn’t reach the low-information people, but forever discredits the “attack reporter” and the outlet which employs him or her.  Further, it alerts others potential victims to do the same.

It is also intensely entertaining.

I’d like to see a candidate, ideally all of them, make regular postings on YouTube with “What I said” versus “What you saw”.

Of course, it’s never been clear to me that a candidate’s going to war with the news media helps that candidate’s standing with undecided, independent voters.