Bill Moyers, Hypocrite

I make it no secret that I strongly dislike Bill Moyers.

What bothers me most about Moyers is how he presents himself as compared to the reality of what he is.

As Commentary Magazine describes:

Moyers is among the most sanctimonious individuals on television (quite a feat, given the competition). He presents himself as a champion of good government, an intrepid voice for integrity and honesty, ever on the lookout for people who would degrade our public discourse or act in a dishonorable manner.

I'd add to that that he's always pushing himself as an independently minded "journalist" who's only interested in the truth.

But the reality is that Moyers is a partisan hack. That doesn't mean he doesn't occasionally bring some important issue to light or that he's always wrong. But he does have an agenda. It's liberal. And his typical modus operandi is trying to make Republicans look foolish or corrupt.

And, this week, we're reminded that Moyers has been doing this since his days of working for the Johnson administration. Specifically, the Washington Post is reporting that:

Even Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members. Moyers said by e-mail yesterday that his memory is unclear after so many years but that he may have been simply looking for details of allegations first brought to the president by Hoover.

A 2005 Wall Street Journal article sheds additional light on this:

Only a few weeks before the 1964 election, a powerful presidential assistant, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a men's room in Washington. Evidently, the president was concerned that Barry Goldwater would use that against him in the election. Another assistant, Bill Moyers, was tasked to direct Hoover to do an investigation of Goldwater's staff to find similar evidence of homosexual activity. Mr. Moyers' memo to the FBI was in one of the files.

When the press reported this, I received a call in my office from Mr. Moyers. Several of my assistants were with me. He was outraged; he claimed that this was another example of the Bureau salting its files with phony CIA memos. I was taken aback. I offered to conduct an investigation, which if his contention was correct, would lead me to publicly exonerate him. There was a pause on the line and then he said, "I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?" And then he rang off. I thought to myself that a number of the Watergate figures, some of whom the department was prosecuting, were very young, too.

And that's who Moyers is. Not a open minded "journalist." A man with an agenda to smear conservatives. Wether it's alleging a scandal without any evidence or trying to "out" gays in 1964, it's all for the same purpose with Moyers.

And, of course this "outing" business isn't the only example of Moyers acting badly during the LBJ years. As Mark Hemingway notes:

Moyers and J. Edgar Hoover worked together to illegally bug Martin Luther King jr. as well as leak unflattering information about political enemies to the press.

And, returning back to returning to the fore-quoted Commentary Magazine article:

Mr. Moyers was a key figure in the creation of the notorious “Daisy” ad, dubbed by the New York Times at the time as “probably the most controversial TV commercial of all time.” The ad featured a young girl plucking daisy petals as a countdown leads to her annihilation in a nuclear blast. The message was clear: this was the fate of the earth if Barry Goldwater were elected.

Moyers was, and is, a hypocrite and political hatchetman. He is no journalist.

“Let them eat pork”

This was too good to pass up (because, you're wrong Senator Schumer, the American people do care) .

The Day TV Died

Earlier this week, February 17th was supposed to be the end of analog TV broadcasting. But, that's all gotten pushed back until at least March 14th.

But today, February 20th, is the day that "TV of the future" died for me. Moving from analog broadcasting to digital is nice and good, but for the last 2 1/2 months I've been watching TV a different way - using software called Boxee to watch the shows provided by Hulu all on my AppleTV.



So, I've been watching TV streamed over the internet from the comfort of my couch. It has been fantastic. For the most part it's been everything I could have hoped. A broad selection of shows, all on-demand, with pauseable playback and "limited commercial interruption."

A few weeks ago I was home sick all week and I plowed through all three seasons of The Practice that Hulu has available. It was a huge improvement over the old days of avoiding boredom by suffering through whatever broadcast TV was showing (I'll take The Practice over Judge Judy any day).

But, that's all changed today. By demand of their content providers, Hulu has stopped allowing streaming to Boxee. You can still watch Hulu via your web browser, but no longer via Boxee.

This is a really bone-headed move by content providers. As another blogger puts it:

What will these Boxee users do instead of watching on Hulu? My guesses are:

1) Tivo/DVR the shows. Result: Ads are skipped altogether. No cable viewing.
2) BitTorrent. Result: Ads are non-existant. No cable viewing.
3) Doesn’t watch the show. Result: This hurts the media companies in several ways. Ads are not seen and no cable love because the show is not seen. The show ultimately becomes less popular, ad space is less valuable, less DVD box sets are sold, less syndication monies, etc., etc.

If you're a fellow Boxee+Hulu user (or, now, perhaps an ex-Boxee+Hulu user like me), I'd really encourage you to lodge a ranty complaint over on Hulu's blog. I'd really like to show Hulu and their content providers that this is no way to treat their users, and this is a big mistake.

Who Said It?

Genuine bipartisanship assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained — by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate — to negotiate in good faith.

If these conditions do not hold — if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so — the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this 'compromise' of being 'obstructionist.'

No, it's not some bitter Republican congressman after being left out in the cold, unable to actually provide any meaningful input to the "stimulus".

That quote belongs to President Obama. Ironic, no?

Of course the ordeal we've just witness involved so many pages of legislation passed in such a short time, there was no chance we could have really had "an exacting press corps" or "an informed electorate." And it will be no surprise when we realize the "true costs [were] buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars."

(h/t Mark Hemingway @ NRO's The Corner).

Stimulus Link Roundup

Things worth reading about the Stimulus that I didn't manage to work into my last post.


What's In The Bill
- Michael Grabell, ProPublica: The Stimulus Plan: Where the Money Would Go
- Karen Yourish & Laura Stanton, The Washington Post: Taking Apart the $819 billion Stimulus Package


How We Got In This Mess In the First Place
- John B. Taylor, The Wall Street Journal: How Government Created the Financial Crisis; Research shows the failure to rescue Lehman did not trigger the fall panic.
- Scott S. Powell, Barrons: The Culprit Is All of Us; The government's meddling got us into this mess.
- Julia Finch, The Guardian: Twenty-five people at the heart of the meltdown ...


Why It Won't Work
- Stephen Dinan, Washington Times: CBO: Obama stimulus harmful over long haul
- Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator: It Still Won't Work
- Mario Rizzo, ThinkMarkets: The Macroeconomic Knowledge Problem
- Russell Roberts, Cafe Hayek: Corrupt
- The Daily Beast Big Fat Story: Six New Stimulus Woes


What's Hiding In the Bill
- Betsy McCaughey, Bloomberg: Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan
- James C. Capretta, NRO's The Corner: The House’s Hidden Employer Mandate


What Should We Be Doing Instead?
- Alex Adrianson, Heritage InsiderOnline Blog: The Case for Free Market Solutions to the Economic Crisis
- Russell Roberts, NPR: Economists Offer 2 Takes On Obama Stimulus Plan
- Russell Roberts, Cafe Hayek: Inconceivable.


And, finally, the Wisdom of Hayek:

The theory [...] which I contend is largely the product of such a mistaken conception of the proper scientific procedure, consists in the assertion that there exists a simple positive correlation between total employment and the size of the aggregate demand for goods and services; it leads to the belief that we can permanently assure full employment by maintaining total money expenditure at an appropriate level. Among the various theories advanced to account for extensive unemployment, this is probably the only one in support of which strong quantitative evidence can be adduced. I nevertheless regard it as fundamentally false, and to act upon it, as we now experience, as very harmful.

- Friedrich August von Hayek, in hisNobel Prize Lecture. (h/t Don Boudreaux)

Final Plea Against The Largest Spending Bill In History

With Obama about to sign this thing at an invitation-only event tomorrow, I'm days, if not weeks, late to post this, but here it goes:  Here are my arguments for why H.R 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the "Stimulus" and gaining recognition as the "Generational Theft Act of 2009" is a really bad idea.


1. $787 billion (that's billion with a B!) is a lot of money.

And all that money has to come from somewhere. The government can either raise it by taxing or taking on debt. Or they can print more money. No one (or few people) are talking about the negative effects of these three possibilities. If we print more money, we get inflation. Borrowing more puts our credit rating at risk and leaves future taxpayers to have to cover the principal and the interest. And raising taxes moves capital from the private sector (the sector we are trying to stimulate!).


2. $787 billion is a lot of money.

OK, so, I repeat myself. But I want you to understand how big that number is. It's $787,000,000,000.00. If you had a pile of that much money in one dollar bills and you stacked it, you'd get about a fifth of the way to the moon. (So, it's literally an astronomical number).

If you had one second for each dollar in that sum, you'd have enough seconds to make up about 24,325 years. Humans started writing things down only 6,000 years ago. 24,325 years is a lot of seconds.

Put yet another way, with Obama's $500,000 executive salary cap now in place, using the $787 billion, you could hire 1,574,000 executives. That's a lot of fat cat executives making a cool half million a year.

Finally, the "Stimulus" costs about $5,700 per taxpayer. How many ways can you think of of how you might prefer to spend $5,700?


3. The government has a really poor track record.

Question: How well did the government do at spending vast sums of money on the Iraq War, Katrina recovery, and Boston's Big Dig?

Let's go ahead, and for the sake of argument, propose that by magic the Congress has really out done themselves here and only a mere 1% of this bill is going to get lost to fraud. But wait, 1% would be nearly 8 billion dollars. Add together the Gross Domestic Product of Nicaragua and Belize. You'll come to about 8 billion. More realistically (based on, say, Katrina figures), we'll see fraud and other waste eat up something like 12% of this bill. So, maybe $100 billion. Yes, billion.

Add on top of this the fact that the government wants to spend much of this as quickly as possible, and we're just setting ourselves up for poor oversight and fraud, waste, more fraud, and more waste.


4. The government doesn't have the information it needs.

Let's guess that between members of Congress, their advisors and the President and his advisors we've had 2,200 people work on this bill. Let's further suppose each of these people had equal weight in putting together the bill such that each person allocated the same amount of money within the bill. That means they each had to allocate more than $350 million. Now consider how you would allocate $350 million dollars - more than a third of a billion - to best help our economy. You probably have no idea. Neither, I'm sure, do they. It's just too much money to know how to precisely use it well. There's too much going on in the economy for an individual to know enough to make meaningful macroeconomic decisions like this. (Note: Arnold King expands on this argument better than I do, here.)

By contrast, when we interact with the economy as private citizens, amazing things happen. We all know our individual niche needs and desires and we can use the information we each individually have to produce some amazingly complex, but still largely efficient, systems. In fact, there are even rewards for being more efficient. But, when a relatively small number (say 2,200 instead of 300 million) are calling the shots they lack this information and these rewards for efficiency.

And to make matters worse, this bill was rushed. The bill was debated for less than an hour in the House to limit input from the Republicans. The pre-conference version of the bill was finalized less than 72 hours before the Senate voted on it. (And, if you could read the bill's legalese at a pace of one page per minute, it would take you more than 16 hours just to read the thing.) And if you divide the bill's cost by the number of seconds spent working on it, you come to one million dollars per second. How do you adequately put in safeguards for prudent spending when the rate is $1,000,000.00 / second?!


5. History says it won't work.

Despite (or because of) the massive spending of the New Deal, the Great Depression lasted ten long years. The Pelosi/Reid/Bush "Stimulus Checks" of last year haven't made a dent in this current recision. Neither have the hundreds of billions used under the TARP program.

Or, looking outside the U.S., Japan spent the 1990s trying to revamp their economy by Keynesian style defecit spending on infrastructure. It didn't work.

And finally, if you look at the historical data - government spending does not create jobs.


6. It's not stimulative.

At least not most of it. Most of it is useless pork. (Here are some more examples.)

Most seem to be putting the "stimulative" portions of the "stimulus" at about 20% of the bill. It makes you wonder why we aren't passing this bill instead.

And for the claims (falsehoods?) about how we, absolutely, positively, must pass this NOW and get money moving NOW, almost half the bill's spending doesn't take place until after 20 months.

Bruce McQuain of QandO puts it well when he terms the bill as "Long On Pork And Relief - Short On Stimulus And Jobs".