Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Better than I could have said it:

Paul Krugman has a great blog post in the NY times:

The trouble with Sanjay Gupta

So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.


This is how I have felt many times in my life. The well dressed, empty thought mouthpiece says assuredly: "there is nothing to this", for example all the city councilors when we filed the open meeting law case, or currently when they claim the city budget is under fire.

I was right about the Open Meeting Law violations, and they were wrong. The city budget as Steve W has shown numerically many times is not under some great distress and the proposition 2.5 increases will make up for the loss of state aid, with a slight bit of belt tightening maybe a couple percent, maybe none if fuel prices remain low, and the exodus from the Boston Public Schools continues.

The fact that City Hall will not release actual numbers should tell you who is telling the truth and who is hiding things.