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NYT columnist Michael Powell slams NYT columnist Thomas Friedman

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 17:03:00 +0000

Michael Powell, a columnist on New York City for the New York Times, tweet-slammed fellow New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for a column he wrote about how the decline of the middle class is a contributing factor to why there are now "so many popular street revolts in democracies," such as Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Chile and the United States.

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Here's what Friedman wrote:

A second factor is the way middle-class workers are being squeezed between a shrinking welfare state and a much more demanding job market. For so many years, workers were told that if you just work hard and play by the rules you’ll be in the middle class. That is just not true anymore. In this age of rapid globalization and automation, you have to work harder, work smarter, bring more innovation to whatever job you do, retool yourself more often — and then you can be in the middle class. There is just so much more stress on people in, or aspiring to be in, the middle class, and many more young people wondering how they’ll ever do better than their parents.

Too few leaders are leveling with their people about this shift, let alone helping them navigate it. And too many big political parties today are just vehicles for different coalitions to defend themselves against change rather than to lead their societies in adapting to it. Normally, this would create opportunities for the opposition parties, but in places like Turkey, Brazil, Russia and Egypt the formal opposition is feckless. So people take to the streets, forming their own opposition.

Who’s held accountable for Iraq?

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

After 10 years, $2 trillion spent, an estimated 1 million civilians casualties, and almost 37,000 U.S. troops deceased or injured, one of the biggest enduring stories of the Iraq War has to be how little the debacle changed anything in the United States (or, arguably, in Iraq).

Millennials will save us!

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 19:00:00 +0000

It’s November 2004 in the nation’s election battleground, the swing state of Ohio. It’s raining hard as voters, many fed up with the Bush administration and looking for a chance to express themselves, are coming out to vote. Lines are particularly long in Gambier, Ohio, a small town of about 2,000 people. Gambier’s major industry is Kenyon College, which sprawls through the heart of town. Like many small liberal-arts colleges, Kenyon was a bastion of youth activism in the 1960s and ’70s. But in 2004, although the Kenyon campus is a beehive of intellectual activity, political and social activism are no longer the hallmarks of the college experience.

Many freshmen and sophomores are thrilled to be voting for the first time, especially in such a hotly contested election. One in particular, then 19-year-old freshman Matt Segal, heads to the polling place at 6 a.m. and votes quickly. He stays to volunteer at the polls, but he soon sees long lines forming, forcing people to wait for hours for their turn in the booth. Those who stick it out will, in some cases, end up waiting for 12 hours or more. That Election Day, the last person finally cast their ballot at 4 a.m. “It was injustice,” Matt tells me years later; I can still hear his outrage. “I was frustrated, but I was also energized. I said, 'We’ve got to do something about this. This isn’t the way democracy was sold to me.'"

Hack List No. 10: New York Times

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:15:00 +0000

This year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals. The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are hurting America over the next two days -- stay tuned! (Previous Hack List entries here, here and here.)

The New York Times is America's Last Newspaper, and because of that it is the recipient of a lot of grief that it doesn't always entirely deserve. Conservatives think it's the Daily Worker. Liberals blame it for Iraq and Bush's second term. Young people refuse to pay to read it.

The truth is, it is a good newspaper. It has great reporting that it spends a bunch of money on. It has a crossword puzzle. It has David Carr.

Arne Duncan rejects Tom Friedman’s nomination for secretary of state with a joke from the Onion

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:41:00 +0000

In a New York Times column yesterday, Thomas Friedman nominated Education Secretary Arne Duncan to take the post of secretary of state, saying, "Duncan is not seeking the job and is not the least bit likely to be appointed. But I’m nominating him because I think this is an important time to ask the question of not just who should be secretary of state, but what should the secretary of state be in the 21st century?"

Duncan shrugged the fan-boy nomination, saying,"Last week, the Onion said I was going to become a male stripper." He added, "The Onion is probably more accurate than Tom Friedman."

In other words: Thanks, but no thanks.

h/t ABC News

The biggest losers (pundit edition)

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney weren’t the only ones with something on the line last night -- America’s greatest treasures, its political pundits and talking heads, had their reputations at stake as they waited to find out if their predictions and prognostications turned out to come true. Unfortunately for a lot of them, especially for many on the right side of the political spectrum, things didn’t go so well. But fortunately for them, being good at predicting things seems to not be a requirement of being a paid political predictor, so their jobs are probably safe. Here’s your guide to fine men and women of the Sunday shows and the opinion section who will likely see zero negative impact for their false prophecies.

Mitt Romney is going to win!

This was, of course, the biggest class of pundit losers, and includes almost every conservative Tweeter, blogger, columnist, and TV analyst. Almost all, en masse and despite the polls, predicted a Romney win. And what do these pundits know that the polls don't? Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan explained, “All the vibrations are right.” How so? Romney is “stealing” the thing while “we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data." Her evidence: “yard signs” (there were apparently more for Romney than Obama), big Romney rallies, and “a person who is helping [Romney]” told her.

The value of Tom Friedman

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:51:00 +0000

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

In The New York Times today, Tom Friedman argues that the only thing that could save Syria is if that country is lucky enough to have the U.S. do to it what the U.S. did to Iraq, and in the process, says this:

And, for me, the lesson of Iraq is quite simple: You can't go from Saddam to Switzerland without getting stuck in Hobbes — a war of all against all — unless you have a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition. In Iraq, that was America.

Just on the level of basic cogency, this makes absolutely no sense. Friedman says that a country will be "stuck in Hobbes -- a war of all against all -- unless" it has America there. But Iraq did have America there, and -- as Friedman himself points out just a few paragraphs later -- it got "stuck in Hobbes," precisely because America was there ("Because of both U.S. incompetence and the nature of Iraq, this U.S. intervention triggered a civil war in which all the parties in Iraq — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — tested the new balance of power, inflicting enormous casualties on each other and leading, tragically, to ethnic cleansing that rearranged the country into more homogeneous blocks of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds"). He literally negates his own principal claim -- a country that overthrows its dictator can only avoid Hobbes if it has a U.S.-like force occupying and controlling it -- in the very same column in which he advances it.

Thomas Friedman: America’s escalator is broken and only Mike Bloomberg can repair it

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:24:00 +0000

Thomas Friedman, globe-trotting superstar New York Times columnist and America's foremost Big Thinker, noticed recently that America is Broken, and by "America" he means an escalator, in a parking garage, at the train station in Washington. There is only one man who can fix this escalator that represents America: Famed escalator repairman and billionaire mogul Mike Bloomberg.

I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.

And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs.

Hack List Alums: Where Are They Now?

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:20:00 +0000

You can think of these guys as retired from the Hack List (like a Hall of Fame) or as simply to dull to rip into at length for a second time, but these 2010 Hack List veterans did not actually improve their game in 2011.

Pat Caddell (Last year: Number 27.)

The fake Democratic pollster is repeating himself, and somehow it just gets dumber every time.

Jonah Goldberg (Last year: Number 7.)

In March Jonah Goldberg literally wrote "meh" instead of rebutting an argument, in his nationally syndicated political column.

Thomas Friedman (Last year: Number 3.)

Thomas Friedman continued to, domestically, demand a centrist third party that acted exactly like our current centrist Democratic party. But his best work, as always, concerned foreign lands. What other columnist would have the balls to go to the scene of a popular revolution and "quote" a native pleading with the wise American columnist to explain what he thinks is going on in her country?

Paul Krugman and the art of calling out a colleague

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:57:00 +0000

The New York Times opinion section, like the Senate, has this rule where you aren't allowed to call out a colleague by name when you think he or she is full of shit. As in the Senate, this rule is silly and anachronistic and enforces a strained phony cordiality at the expense of honesty. It doesn't ever stop Paul Krugman, though, who simply responds to his columnist peers' dumb arguments without ever referring to them by name.

For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he's actually arguing (like, for example, "people often don't intervene when they see something horrible happening" is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible '60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks' "actual" point is that "Blue inequality" is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while "Red states" have the real authentic American inequality.)