Get Hoffa

On September 26, 1960, in his first debate with Richard Nixon, JFK said:  "I'm not satisfied when I see men like Jimmy Hoffa - in charge of the largest union in the United States - still free."

Hoffa responded:  "What was he really trying to say? That if elected president he will put Hoffa in jail without trial? Or that he will insist upon an indictment, trial and conviction regardless of the merits?"

After his election JFK appointed his brother Robert F. Kennedy as Attorney General.  RFK appointed a special unit informally called the "Get Hoffa Squad."  Victor Navasky wrote that "Robert Kennedy allowed the pursuit of justice to look like the pursuit of Hoffa. `You can't have even-handed justice and personal justice at the same time,' [former Atttorney General] Ramsey Clark comments."

Social Media and the Affordable Care Act

Buzzfeed reports:

The Obama administration is ramping up a plan to use the federal government’s social media accounts and websites to help convince millions of Americans, including those who “mistrust government,” to sign up for health insurance through Obamacare, according to a confidential administration presentation obtained by BuzzFeed.

The White House last Tuesdayhosted government agency social media directors and Chief Technology Officers in a summit aimed at coordinating communications around a central administration goal of President Obama’s second term: persuading people without health insurance to sign up for it. The meeting was led by Tara McGuinness, the White House communications pointperson on Obamacare implementation. The document obtained by BuzzFeed is a handout authored by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and its authenticity was confirmed by the White House.

Leveraging the government’s hundreds of social media accounts is part of a massive campaign-like operation to put Obamacare front-and-center in the minds of millions of Americans the White House needs to sign up for insurance in order to make the the health care law work. The White House bristles at the comparison to a political campaign, saying that similar efforts were mounted when the government rolled out Medicare Part D under George W. Bush. The White House also stresses that a main online focus will be on placing information about Obamacare on websites frequented by targeted groups.

 

Coverage of Same-Sex Marriage

The Pew Research Center reports:

In a period marked by Supreme Court deliberations on the subject, the news media coverage provided a strong sense of momentum towards legalizing same-sex marriage, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. Stories with more statements supporting same-sex marriage outweighed those with more statements opposing it by a margin of roughly 5-to-1.

In the coverage studied, the central argument among proponents of same-sex marriage was one of civil rights. Arguments against were more varied, but most often voiced the idea that same-sex marriage would hurt society and the institution of traditional marriage.

Almost half (47%) of the nearly 500 stories studied from March 18 (a week prior to the Supreme Court hearings), through May 12, primarily focused on support for the measure, while 9% largely focused on opposition and 44% had a roughly equal mix of both viewpoints or were neutral. In order for a story to be classified as supporting or opposing same sex marriage, statements expressing that position had to outnumber the opposite view by at least 2-to-1. Stories that did not meet that threshold were defined as neutral or mixed.

Many of the events themselves during the period studied, such as announcements by politicians and state legislation, reflected movement towards same-sex marriage. Polls show the nation's views have been shifting as well, though there remains significant opposition with 51% of the public in support of legalizing same-sex marriage versus 42% opposed, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.[1]

This news media focus on support held true whether the stories were reported news articles or opinion pieces, and was also the case across nearly all media sectors studied. All three of the major cable networks, for instance, had more stories with significantly more supportive statements than opposing, including Fox News.

In addition to the main set of news media, this study also examined same-sex marriage coverage in three other media segments: Twitter, the Huffington Post - which has a dedicated microsite to "Gay Voices" and produced so much coverage that it was examined separately from the rest of the news media - and a mix of LGBT news outlets.

Twitter postings on the subject were nearly evenly split between support and opposition for the measure, aligning much more closely with public opinion than with the news media. Coverage on the Huffington Post, on the other hand, was even more tilted towards support of same-sex marriage than the rest of the news media. Indeed, 62% of the 365 stories on the site were dominated with statements of support - very close to the level of support in the LGBT news outlets studied.

Knowledge and Polarization

Many posts have discussed polarization and public knowledge.  A new study reports:

Do one’s political leanings blind people to the facts? Judging from decades of polling, the answer is sometimes yes—partisanship appears to lead some people to claim as facts things that aren’t particularly factual.

For example, national surveys have found that Democrats are more likely to say that inflation rose under Ronald Reagan while Republicans say that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration. Some 81% of Democrats but 33% of Republicans in an April 2011 New York Times/CBS News poll said Obama was born in the U.S.

What explains these partisan gaps? Political scientists from Yale University and the University of California-San Diego think they may know. Their working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found significant numbers of Democrats and Republicans actually know the correct answer to these questions—or know that they don’t know—but choose to give pollsters the incorrect response in order to cast their party in a favorable light or stick it to the opposition.

In fact, the researchers found that they could cut the partisan gap by more than half if they offered survey respondents a chance at a monetary reward for answering questions correctly. And when they gave respondents incentives to acknowledge that they don’t know the right answer, the partisan knowledge gap nearly disappeared.

Confidence in Newspapers and TV News

Gallup reports:

Americans' confidence in newspapers fell slightly to 23% this year, from 25% in 2012 and 28% in 2011.

The percentage of Americans saying they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers has been generally trending downward since 1979, when it reached a high of 51%.

Newspapers rank near the bottom on a list of 16 societal institutions Gallup measured in a June 1-4 survey. Television news is tied with newspapers on the list, with 23% of Americans also expressing confidence in it. That is up slightly from the all-time low of 21% found last year. The only institutions television news and newspapers beat out this year are big business, organized labor, Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), and Congress.

Americans' confidence in television news was highest, at 46%, in 1993, when Gallup first asked about it. The question does not indicate the specific type of television news, meaning respondents could be thinking about anything ranging from cable news channels to local news when answering the survey.

War, Taxes, and Limited Government

George Will says that metaphorical "wars" on vice can hurt the cause of limited government as much as literal military conflicts.

So argue David B. Kopel and Trevor Burrusin their essay “Sex, Drugs, Alcohol, Gambling and Guns: The Synergistic Constitutional Effects.”

Kopel and Burrus, both associated with Washington’s libertarian Cato Institute, cite the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act, which taxed dealings involving opium or coca leaves, as an early example of morals legislation passed using Congress’s enumerated taxing power as a pretext. In 1919, the Supreme Court held that the law “may not be declared unconstitutional because its effect may be to accomplish another purpose as well as the raising of revenue.”

Its “effect”? The effect of suppressing the drug business obviously was its purpose. Nevertheless, the court held that even if “motives” other than raising revenue really explained Congress’s exercise of its enumerated power, the law still could not be invalidated “because of the supposed motives which induced it.”

“Supposed”? The court’s refusal to reach a reasonable conclusion about the pretext Congress used in this case for trespassing on territory reserved to the states enabled the federal government to begin slipping its constitutional leash. In 1922, Chief Justice William Howard Taft warned that Congress could seize control of “the great number of subjects” reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment by imposing a “so-called tax” on any behavior it disapproved of: “To give such magic to the word ‘tax’ would be to break down all constitutional limitation of the powers of Congress and completely wipe out the sovereignty of the states.”

Martin Luther King as Preacher

The New York Times reports on Jonathan Rieder's new book about Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

As America nears the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech in August, Dr. Rieder has become one of the most astute scholars of Dr. King as a preacher. In two consecutive books developed over nearly 20 years of research, Professor Rieder has immersed himself in the subject of Dr. King as a pulpit minister who shaped his theology in sermons delivered to black congregations.

The public Dr. King, Dr. Rieder argues, cannot be understood without understanding the preacher’s talking black talk to black folk. Dr. Rieder’s new book, “Gospel of Freedom,” traces the evolution of both the “I Have A Dream” speech and the “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King’s most renowned written work, through years of his obscure sermons....

Dr. Rieder’s book stakes very specific turf in the corpus of King scholarship with its relentless focus on Dr. King the preacher. By doing so, as Mr. Forbes pointed out in his comments, Dr. Rieder is restoring the overtly religious element to Dr. King and the freedom movement. While African-Americans readily grasp the link, many white liberals diminish or ignore it out of discomfort with religion being granted a role — even a positive one — in political discourse.

“The image of liberal secular King misses the essential role of prophetic Christianity,” Dr. Rieder, a professor of sociology at Barnard College in New York, said in a recent interview. “Jesus wasn’t just an interesting historical figure to King. He saw Jesus as a continuation of the prophets. He has a powerful association with Jesus.”