Republican Hacks and the Journolist

The Weekly Standard editor claimed political purity in bashing Journolist, but he's on the Republican payroll

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Fred Barnes has lately lamented the betrayal of "traditional journalism" by the liberal denizens of Journolist -- the defunct listserv that conservatives have used to revive the debate over "liberal media bias." His widely quoted Journal Op-Ed noted that before Journolist, neither liberal nor conservative journalists were likely to be "part of a team," and went on to add:

"If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team."

This assertion of political purity struck me as false, coming from a journalist who has appeared repeatedly as a speaker at Republican Party events across the country -- a breach of the political boundaries of "traditional journalism" that few, if any, of the writers on Journolist, for example, would ever contemplate.

Nevertheless, it is true that Barnes has enjoyed greater credibility than other journalists on the partisan right throughout his career. After all, he is a former reporter for such publications as the Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the New Republic. He was once a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and served as one of three panelists for the first nationally televised debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984.

Now, however, there is further evidence that Barnes not only routinely helped Republicans raise money as a banquet speaker, but accepted tens of thousands of dollars from party organizations as well:

• In February 2006, Barnes was paid $10,000 plus travel expenses by Oregon's Lane County Republican Central Committee to deliver the keynote address at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner. (Thanks to Carla Axtman for research assistance.) These payments, recorded in filings with the Oregon secretary of state, were evidently made through the Premier Speakers Bureau of Franklin, Tenn., which represents other Fox personalities including Sean Hannity, Dick Morris and Mike Huckabee. Barnes is no longer listed on the Premier website, but the company did not respond to phone or e-mail inquiries about its relationship with him.

• In February 2007, Barnes spoke at the annual Lincoln-Reagan Dinner held by the Republican Party of Fort Bend County, Texas -- home of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who purchased a ticket to the event. The party organization's filing with the Texas Ethics Commission shows two payments of $5,000 each on April 26, 2007, to Premiere Speakers Bureau (with the notation "LRD 2007 Speaker - Fred Barnes") and travel expenses of $1,823. Photos of a smiling Barnes with various local dignitaries at the event, which netted a reported $70,000 for the party, can be viewed here.

• In early March 2008, Barnes served as the keynote speaker for the Republican Party of Palm Beach County at its annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Whether he received the customary $10,000 is not clear because the party's filing with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections show only a single payment of $5,500 to Premiere Speakers Bureau on Feb. 18. The committee reported net $120,000 in net proceeds from the event.

The Journolist was one great conspiracy: moderate to liberal pundits say'n moderate and liberal stuff to each other - ooooohhhh the shame of it all.

Rand Paul Confesses He is a Wacky Nihilist

Rand Paul: Controversial Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Isn't So Bad -- It Enhances The Land!

In a wide-ranging profile due out in next month's issue of Details, Kentucky's Republican nominee for Senate, Rand Paul, stands up for all the good things the controversial practice of mountain top-removal mining can do for the environment. Despite warnings from conservationists that blowing the tops off of mountains to get the precious, precious coal underneath can have a seriously negative impact on the surrounding environment, Paul says that when you really stop to think about it, losing those mountain tops is actually a net positive.

From the lengthy article, which was reported before Paul shunned the national press:

Paul believes mountaintop removal just needs a little rebranding. "I think they should name it something better," he says. "The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I've seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass." Most people, he continues, "would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it."

As he said of so many things in the past, Paul said the final decision about mountaintop removal mining (which, as Details reporter Jonathan Miles reports, has been called "the greatest environmental tragedy ever to befall our nation" by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) should rest in the hands of private landowners.

"Let's let you decide what to do with your land," Paul told the magazine. "Really, it's a private-property issue."

Coal production, of course, is one of the most important industries in Kentucky, so Paul's not likely to lose many friends in the business community by talking up the advantages of flattening Appalachia to dig up more coal. But if the people who run the coal mines might be happy with the article, the folks who actually dig up the coal might find Paul's understanding of the industry lacking a bit. Miles and Paul drive through Harlan County, Kentucky -- the front line for some of the nastiest labor battles in the history of American coal. The county was where many miners spent decades trying to win concessions from owners and help build coal mining into a middle class job. But when Miles asks about it, Paul can't seem to remember why the area is important to Kentucky:

Something about Harlan has lodged itself in my brain the way a shard of barbecue gets stuck in one's teeth, and I've asked Paul for help. "I don't know," he says in an elusive accent that's not quite southern and not quite not-southern. The town of Hazard is nearby, he notes: "It's famous for, like, The Dukes of Hazzard."

Besides being devastating to the environment and the people that live near it, the main purpose of mountaintop removal is to avoid hiring more miners because blowing the tops off mountains requires less labor.

Timeline of Proto-Fascist Breitbart's Sherrod smear

The stunning hypocrisy of Journolist's critics

The stunning hypocrisy of Journolist's critics

Nothing much can be learned from the manufactured media uproar over Journolist, except as a case study of how the right-wing propaganda machine still dominates America's daily narrative -- and how conservative journalists remain astonishingly exempt from the standards they are pretending to uphold.

Look no further than the outrage feigned by two of the nation's most prominent right-wing journalists, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard (and Fox News) and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, both of whom could barely contain their indignation over the revelation that a few hundred progressive writers and academics engaged in political discussion via e-mail. Having read a single Journolist e-mail that suggested tarring him as a "racist," Barnes suddenly detects a departure from "traditional standards" :

When I'm talking to people from outside Washington, one question inevitably comes up: Why is the media so liberal? The question often reflects a suspicion that members of the press get together and decide on a story line that favors liberals and Democrats and denigrates conservatives and Republicans.

My response has usually been to say, yes, there's liberal bias in the media, but there's no conspiracy. The liberal tilt is an accident of nature. The media disproportionately attracts people from a liberal arts background who tend, quite innocently, to be politically liberal ... Now, after learning I'd been targeted for a smear attack by a member of an online clique of liberal journalists, I'm inclined to amend my response. Not to say there's a media conspiracy, but at least to note that hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

My guess is that this and other revelations about JournoList will deepen the distrust of the national press.

Then Barnes explains why he thinks the liberal listserv represents an ominous watershed in Washington journalism:

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there's a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I've never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

My experience with other conservative journalists is that they are loners. One of the most famous conservative columnists of the past half-century, the late Robert Novak, is a good example. I knew him well for 35 years. He didn't tell me what stories he was working on nor ask what I was planning to write. He never mentioned how we might promote Republicans or aid the conservative cause, nor did I.

But it isn't so difficult to identify the "team" that Barnes signed up with long ago. It's called the Republican Party. A Google search of his name with the terms "featured speaker" and "Republican" instantly turns up numerous examples of his speaking engagements at GOP fundraising events across the country, from Palm Beach, Fla., to Eugene, Ore. (The Lake County Young Republicans even posted a few photos of a tanned, well-fed Barnes with their president and other dignitaries.)

As a Fox News star, Barnes commands fat speaking fees from trade associations and lobbying groups -- and presumably from Republicans as well. Is he on the payroll, or just cheerleading for free? That is for him to answer, but either way he is clearly on the GOP "team." Yet he flatters himself as an independent loner, while chastising the Journolisters.

Like Barnes, Fund poses as an ethical purist while fulminating about Journolist:

From 2007 until last month, some 300 liberal journalists and policy wonks exchanged ideas and commentary on a secret, off-the-record Internet email group called JournoList. It was shut down after portions leaked, leading to the resignation of Washington Post writer David Weigel last month over his intemperate criticism of conservatives he was covering.

But someone who belonged to JournoList continues to leak information from its archives, providing a fascinating glimpse into how some liberal journalists coordinate their story lines to protect their favorite politicians and ideas ...

Some of the comments will no doubt revive conservative allegations of a liberal news media conspiracy ... Apparently, many on JournoList had an agenda that had little to do with covering legitimate news stories, but instead were concerned with protecting their friends and trying to ensure they had "control of the country."

Here, again like Barnes, Fund is grossly exaggerating the meaning of the leaked Journolist posts in order to highlight a pose of injured innocence. And he, too -- along with many other right-wing journalists and media figures -- is a featured speaker at Republican gatherings across the country, from Hoboken to Oberlin to the San Francisco Bay. He covers the Tea Party movement while accepting speaking gigs sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, the corporate-backed nonprofit that is behind much Tea Party propaganda. But of course Fund is deeply shocked to learn that liberal writers would compromise their commitment to "covering legitimate news stories" by joining Journolist.

Most absurdly, Fund and Barnes, along with many other conservatives who have promoted paranoid nonsense about Journolist, seem to be suggesting that conservative journalists never, ever coordinate their messages with Republican politicians, lobbyists, policy experts and academics.

That is, to coin a phrase, a very big lie.

Specific, orderly, disciplined, ideological coordination -- and not the freewheeling blather to be found on Journolist -- has been proceeding every week for nearly two decades at the "Wednesday meetings" convened by lobbyist Grover Norquist in the Washington offices of Americans for Tax Reform.

As David Brock, who had attended those meetings, explained a few years ago in the Republican Noise Machine:

Every Wednesday morning in Norquist's Washington offices, the leaders of more than eighty conservative organizations -- including major right-wing media outlets and top Bush White House aides -- convene to set movement priorities, plan strategy, and adopt talking points. Norquist seems a cross between a Communist Party boss and a Mafia don as he presides over these strategy sessions ...

Conservative media turned out in full force for the weekly strategy meetings convened by right-wing activist Grover Norquist -- Peggy Noonan and John Fund of the Journal, representatives from National Review and the Washington Times, and a researcher for Bob Novak all checked in. The right-wing writers considered themselves part of the conservative movement "team," as Norquist put it ...

So what would Fund and Barnes say now about Norquist's famous meetings, which have included many, many right-wing journalists over the years? Maybe Barnes skipped the Wednesday meetings, but he certainly knows dozens of the regulars -- including his late pal Novak, who dispatched a lackey to take notes.

As for Fund, his claims of innocence would be hard to sustain, considering the quote attributed to him in a New York Observer story on Manhattan's offshoot of the Norquist event, known as the Monday Meeting. Ben Smith, who now blogs at Politico, described the Monday Meeting in 2004 as one of New York's "newest, quietest and most powerful political institutions."

Smith's report is worth quoting at length as evidence of the sheer fraudulence of the Journolist "scandal":

An invitation-only, off-the-record gathering ... the monthly meeting has brought together the right wing of the city's financial and intellectual elite -- among the regulars are major Republican donors and members of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board ...

The Monday Meeting offers a clue to understanding the conservative movement's success and its continued vitality. Liberals talk endlessly of building coalitions -- Senator Hillary Clinton has suggested that the left needs a meeting on this model -- but infighting, inertia and a lack of discipline have kept them from pulling off this union of ideas, money and power. The right, meanwhile, often acts like the embattled minority that it was in the days of Barry Goldwater, protecting its own and keeping disputes in the family.

"The meeting serves the Grand Central Station function," said John Fund, a Monday Meeting regular who writes a column for The Wall Street Journal 's Web site. "This is where everyone meets; this is where people coordinate, get updates and gather support for projects." ...

The inspiration for the Monday Meeting comes from Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. Mr. Norquist is an implacable anti-tax lobbyist and part-time provocateur who has won some notoriety recently by comparing the principle behind progressive taxation to the principle behind the Holocaust. His weekly Wednesday meetings of conservative activists in Washington, D.C., were an intellectual engine for the Republican takeover of the House in 1994.

Mr. Norquist, an occasional visitor to the Monday Meeting, has created a network of these gatherings around the country, most of them in state capitals. He pushed Mr. Higgins and Mr. Factor to start the New York branch.

Perhaps it is appropriate to give the last word to the American Spectator's John Tabin, who has written a striking dissent from the right-wing hysterics over Journolist:

Since 1993, Grover Norquist has held an off-the-record meeting every Wednesday where conservative activists, policy wonks, and government officials exchange ideas about policy and politics. Sometimes journalists attend. Depending on a particular journalist's ideological and partisan disposition -- which can vary quite a lot given the state of our media landscape, which includes both 'straight news' reporters (i.e. people who attempt to hide the almost-always-left-of-center opinions that shape their journalistic choices) and opinion journalists with various worldviews and temperaments -- journalists may be there to get ideas that will influence how they think about issues, or they may just be there to get perspective on how conservatives are thinking about the issues of the day.

The Wednesday Meeting has periodically been the source of breathless fear-mongering on the left about the all-powerful conservative conspiracy to control media narratives. This is, of course, absurd. Much of the hyperventilating over Journolist is equally absurd ...

Everyone who has been shown to have their work influenced by conversations on Journolist is, likewise, a commentator. That Chris Hayes tries to get perspective from other liberals before he goes on TV to opine on a topic, or that Joe Klein incorporates ideas from off-the-record exchanges into his blog posts, is not exactly earthshaking news. Commentators on the right do exactly the same thing -- it's just our emails don't get leaked because we're smart enough not to conduct these exchanges on listservs where we let the audience expand to include 400 people. This practice is a double-edged sword -- you get the benefit of idea-sharing, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into groupthink. Liberals seem more prone to the latter failing, but that's more a problem for them than for anyone else, and it's not much of a scandal ...

This brings us to the conduct of the Daily Caller itself ... [Editor Tucker] Carlson is being flat-out disingenuous when he puts the burden on Journolist members to release the context of the threads that Jonathan Strong has reported on with a gloss that the people quoted all say is misleading. Everyone on Journolist was party to an off-the-record agreement. As explained above, having people trust you to keep conversations off the record is an important part of practicing journalism. (It shouldn't be a surprise that my source, who was willing to break the agreement to the extent that he treated an off-the-record discussion as an on-background discussion, is an academic, not a journalist.) The Caller is in possession of the complete threads (I gave them too much credit when I assumed they must not be), and was not party to that agreement. If the Caller is witholding information from readers to sensationalize the narrative, as the people they're quoting all claim that they are, they are practicing tabloid journalism ...

If Tucker Carlson wants to run his website like a tabloid, he's welcome to do so -- but he shouldn't be lecturing anyone about journalistic scruples.

Reprinted in the public interests and to piss off Tucker Right-wing Propagandist Carlson.

Glenn Beck Inspires a Conservative Psycho

The CA cop shooter and Glenn Beck: Here's what we know

On July 18, Byron Williams, an ex-felon with a history of violent criminal behavior, was pulled over by California Highway Police on I-580. Williams, who was apparently intoxicated, opened fire at the officers as one approached his truck. He continued firing as eight additional officers arrived. More than 60 rounds were reportedly fired during the five to eight minute shootout; two officers were reportedly injured by flying glass after a squad cars window and windshield were shattered by gunfire. Williams was arrested and hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds.

Williams was reportedly heavily armed with a handgun, shotgun, rifle and body armor. Shortly after the shooting, a CHP sergeant said that "There is no doubt in our mind, given the body armor and the extensive amount of ammunition he had, that he was on his way to do a very serious crime against either someone or a group of people" And indeed, Williams reportedly told investigators that "his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU."

The ACLU is a very well-known entity, but the Tides Foundation, which seeks to "promote economic justice, robust democratic processes, and the opportunity to live in a healthy and sustainable environment where human rights are preserved and protected," is much more obscure.

Williams may have been a disturbed individual who was destined to explode. But the question the media should be asking is why he decided to target Tides.

According to his mother, Williams "watched the news on television and was upset by 'the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.'"

We don't know what Williams was watching, or that television played a role in his decision to target Tides. However, if it did, according to our Nexis searches, the primary person on cable or network news talking about the Tides Foundation in the year and a half prior to the shootout was Fox News' Glenn Beck.

According to our searches, since Beck's show premiered on January 19, 2009, Tides has been mentioned on 31 editions of Fox News programs, 29 of which were editions of Beck's show (the other two were on Sean Hannity's program). In most of those references, Beck attacked Tides, often weaving the organization into his conspiracy theories. Two of those Beck mentions occurred during the week before Williams' shootout.

Free speech is a wonderful thing and even Glenn Beck's incitement for people to commit murder is protected. That does not mean that Beck escapes all moral responsibility for his crazy talk and those conservative anti-American nuts he inspires.

Wing-nut Republicans use cooked up black panther controversy to scare white voters

Wing-nut Republicans use cooked up black panther controversy to scare white voters

Numerous media and political figures, including Fox News contributors and Republicans, have dismissed the Fox-hyped phony scandal surrounding the New Black Panthers Party, with the Republican vice chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission even criticizing conservatives on the commission for trying to use the case "to topple the [Obama] administration." Despite this, Fox News has hyped the manufactured scandal more than 100 times since June 30.
Media and political figures dismiss phony scandal surrounding New Black Panthers case

Thernstrom: "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers; this has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration." In a July 16 Politico article, Abigail Thernstrom, a Republican who serves as vice chair of the Civil Rights Commission and is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized the Republican-dominated Civil Rights Commission's investigation of the Justice Department's actions in the New Black Panthers case. Politico quoted Thernstrom as saying: "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers; this has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration. ... My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring [attorney general] Eric Holder down and really damage the president."

There are a few sensible republicans left in America we just don't hear anything from them over the constant shrill of the wing-nuts who have hi-jacked the Republican party.

Breitbart and Fox - Giving in to conservative spin ‘makes it worse’

Maddow to White House: Giving in to conservative spin ‘makes it worse’

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has some advice for the White House about reacting to conservative media stories: "Believing conservative spin about what's so wrong with you and then giving into that spin, is not an effective defense. In fact, it makes it worse."

The Obama administration had asked for the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod after a heavily edited video surfaced Monday on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website that appears to show her describing how she had denied help to a white family trying to save their farm. The story was quickly picked up by Fox News as an example of racial discrimination by the Obama administration.

The NAACP condemned Sherrod and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked her to resign. After obtaining the unedited video, which showed that Sherrod had been describing an incident 24 years ago in which she did successfully help the white farmers, the NAACP apologized and Vilsack said he is willing to reconsider her firing.

Considering the rapid collapse of the original Breitbart story, Maddow had some tart comments to make on the Obama administration's hasty response.

"What is not really interesting about this whole situation is that Fox News is doing this," said Maddow on Tuesday. "This is what Fox News does. This is how they are different from other news organizations. This is why the White House argued months ago that Fox should be treated as a media organization, but not as a normal news organization, because they don’t treat news the way a normal news organization treats news."
Story continues below...

"What is interesting about this story is that the Obama administration inexplicably keeps falling for it," she continued.

"Dear White House, dear administration, believing conservative spin about what's so wrong with you and then giving into that spin, is not an effective defense against that spin," Maddow advised. "Just buying it and apologizing for it and doing whatever they want you to do doesn't make the problem of them lying about you go away. In fact, it makes it worse."

Breitbart has since asserted that his real target was not Sherrod but the NAACP, which has recently called on the Tea Party movement to expel racists from its ranks. According to Breitbart's Big Journalism site, the video "features Sherrod telling a tale of racism that is received by the NAACP audience with laughter and cheers. They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. Upon hearing the cheers, Sherrod fails to offer any immediate clarification and even smiles right along with them."

Even conservative Jonah Goldberg, however, stated on Wednesday, "I think [Sherrod] should get her job back. I think she's owed apologies from pretty much everyone, including my good friend Andrew Breitbart."

Goldberg went on to express a perception of the Obama administration that was strikingly similar to Maddow's. "Meanwhile, as a matter of politics,' he wrote, "I think this episode demonstrates that this White House is a much more tightly wound outfit than it lets on in public. The rapid-response firing suggests a level of fear over Glenn Beck and Fox that speaks volumes."

I do not know that the White House is motivated by fear so much as that, unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration bends over backwards to be fair. perhaps too much so rather than waiting and fighting back against it's unhinged critics when needed.

Economics 101 - Conservatives Are Corporate Shills and Social Darwinists

It's on the economy where the real differences between left and right are clear

That fault line involves the very nature of the economy itself. If we set aside the nonprofit and household realms, then it is a crude but fair generalization to say that conservatives believe in an economy with two sectors — the market and the government — while liberals believe in an economy with three sectors — the market, the government and the utility sector.

Liberals believe that some goods and services could be provided in a purely competitive market but should not be. Instead, these goods and services should be provided to citizens by an industry organized as a publicly regulated utility, which in the terms of ownership can be private, public or a mixed private-public enterprise.

Whether an industry should be treated as a public utility depends on the nature of the provider or the nature of the goods or services themselves. If the provider is a natural monopoly, like a sewer system, then there is a case for public ownership or for private ownership combined with public price regulation, so that the monopoly does not take advantage of its power to gouge consumers. In other cases, like electricity, competitive markets might be possible, but price volatility would be too disruptive to be tolerated by consumers and businesses.

This was taken for granted by generations of moderate American conservatives as well as liberals, and it would be difficult to find European or Asian conservatives who would question this reasoning. But thanks to the success of radical libertarians in converting the American right to their own free-market fundamentalism, the idea of a distinct utility sector is now seen as a heresy by American conservatives if not by British Tories or French Gaullists. While they acknowledge a role for government, for example in defense, today’s free-market conservatives as a rule reject the legitimacy of a regulated or publicly provided utility sector in an intermediate zone between government and competitive markets. This explains the fervor with which the right seeks to privatize or deregulate services that most Americans, along with most people in other countries, think of as utilities, like local electric power companies.

The most important economic debates between left and right involve industries whose treatment as utilities is less widely accepted than sanitation or electric power. Healthcare is one such industry. What divides American progressives not only from Republican conservatives but also from center-right neoliberals in the Democratic Party is the idea that healthcare should be a publicly regulated utility that is provided as a matter of right to all citizens, not a commodity like apples or shoes that should be sold in a typical competitive marketplace. Not all liberals agree on single-payer healthcare, all-payer price controls, or other specific policies, but it is safe to say that all liberals believe that healthcare should be treated as a utility.

Finance is another industry that American liberals think should be treated as a regulated public utility, not a competitive market. For progressive Americans, the provision of basic financial services like checking and small loans to households and businesses is as essential as the provision of water and electricity. The institutions of the financial sector that provide these basic, essential services should be carved off and converted into regulated utilities, as they were before Republicans and Democrats united to tear down the New Deal regulatory system in the 1980s and 1990s. Other sectors of finance, like investment banking, can be organized as competitive markets, not public utilities, as long as the public is not called on to swallow the costs of failure.

On the other side of the debate are those who believe that healthcare and basic banking services can be provided by multiple firms seeking to maximize their profits in competitive markets. If this were true, then most liberals would have no objection. After all, the center-left, unlike the socialist left, favors competitive markets where they provide abundant goods at low cost with no danger to the public. That is why you don’t see progressives campaigning for turning apple farms or shoe factories into public utilities with prices set by law or regulators.

The problem is that competitive markets do not work well in healthcare and basic financial services. For example, most people live in areas where there are only a few nearby hospitals, perhaps only one. Free-marketeers think that “transparency” can help control costs, thanks to comparative shopping by self-interested consumers. But even if the data were easily available, do libertarian conservatives really expect someone in the throes of a heart attack to go online to check hospital rates before choosing an emergency room? Hospitals are more like local water treatment plants than they are like shops in the mall.

By contrast, in all but the smallest communities there are numerous banks, not to mention other financial institutions like credit unions. In finance, the purpose of regulation is not to prevent a natural geographic monopoly from extracting monopoly rents, but to prevent a horde of mostly small producers and some large producers from competing to fleece their customers.

No problem, says the free-market conservative. Here, too, transparency will enable comparison shopping by well-informed consumers among competing service providers. But just as people cannot be expected to compare and contrast hospital rates before choosing an emergency room, so most people cannot be expected to devote hours or days to decoding deceptive jargon contained in the microscopic print in the blizzard of pages provided by credit card companies and banks. Such "transparency" is really opacity. That is why, in the opinion of many liberals, government should directly regulate basic "utility" financial services and the fees charged for them. And just as no American liberal wants to turn apple farms and shoe factories into public utilities, so no American liberal cares if investors lose their money gambling on South American chinchilla futures, as long as the public is not expected to make them whole.

The recent reforms in healthcare and financial regulation are too market-oriented for most liberals and too utility-oriented for most free-market conservatives. But this does not imply that each side is equally dogmatic. The center-left is much more flexible and open-minded.

For example, when the conditions that made a sector suitable for treatment as a utility change, liberals do not necessarily object to deregulation. As long as telephony was based on wires, regulated telephone monopolies like AT&T made sense. When technology, in the form of wireless telephony, made a competitive market in that industry possible, few liberals objected to deregulation.

Liberals, as I have noted, acknowledge the value of competitive markets in addition to the government sector and the utility sector. But the reverse is not true. Free-market conservatives usually do not acknowledge the need for a public utility sector in addition to competitive markets and government. Instead, they tend to equate the very idea of a publicly regulated utility sector of the economy with "socialism."

"Sewer socialists" was the term coined to describe early 20th-century socialists who boasted of their publicly owned water treatment system in Milwaukee. Later the term was generalized to include progressives who favored publicly regulated utilities. While the term "socialism" is misleading, contemporary American progressives who support an expansive definition of the utility sector should take pride in the term "sewer liberal."

The definition of liberal and moderate has shifted so far to the advantage of right-wing conservatives that any attempts to protect consumers and small investors is defined as socialism. What do conservatives stand for? Dog eat dog crony capitalism. The kind of system that got us into the mess we're in now and will probably take ten years to dig ourselves out of.