“We know that some of our tastes are established early in development. In one experiment, mothers played certain musical pieces (pieces from Vivaldi, songs by the Backstreet boys, and so on) to their babies in the womb and didn’t play those pieces again until the babies’ first birthday. This experience had an effect –the one-year olds tended to prefer the music that they had heard before they were born.” (p. 127)

The next big fight in Congress revolves around extending the Bush tax cuts. Unlike issues like climate change or stimulus, where the public does not accept the Democrats’ basic analysis of the problem, on the tax cuts the Democrats hold the whip hand. The question is whether they emerge with a political win, a public policy win, or both.

Let’s review a few basic facts about the Bush tax cuts. When Republicans took control of government in 2001, their top priority was reducing tax rates on high income earners. Since tax cuts for the rich were unpopular, they had to pair those cuts with middle-class tax cuts in order to make them politically salable. That’s how they pressured Democrats into supporting them. By packaging the whole thing together, they could accuse Democrats of opposing tax cuts for the middle class if they voted no.

Now, ten years later — and what a decade of bountiful economic growth we’ve enjoyed with the energies of investors and entrepreneurs finally unleashed from restrictive Clinton-era tax rates! — the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire. Republicans want to extend the whole thing. Democrats just want to extend the parts that benefit people who earn less than $250,000 a year.

Now, here’s the underlying dynamic. Raising taxes on the middle class is unpopular. But raising taxes on the rich is wildly popular. The truth is that neither party cares very much about the portion of the Bush tax cuts that benefit the middle class. Republicans just threw that in to sell the upper-bracket tax cuts, which is what they care about. Democrats might prefer a more progressive tax code with lower middle-class taxes, but most of them would rather have the revenue instead. But Democrats promised not to raise taxes on people earning less than $250,000 a year — a promise they felt they had to make in order to win. And they can’t break that promise without suffering political consequences.

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t want to pass an extension of the middle-class Bush tax cuts without the upper-bracket tax cuts. That would leave the federal tax code more progressive than it was under Bill Clinton — you’d have a combination of Clinton-era tax rates on the rich and Bush-era tax rates on the middle class. Conservatives have been fretting about such a result for more than a year, warning ominously about a country in which half the population pays no income tax. (They’d still pay other taxes, but the central Republican goal is to minimize the progressivity of the tax code.)

So we’re down to a game of chicken. Here’s why the Democrats hold the whip hand. They can pass an extension of the middle-class Bush tax cuts through the House. If Republicans let the bill pass, then they’ve lost their leverage to extend the unpopular Bush upper-income tax cuts. If they filibuster it, then Democrats can blame them for raising taxes on middle-class Americans. It would let Democrats out of their pledge. (Hey, they tried to keep the middle-class tax cuts.) Then nothing would pass, and we’d instantly revert to Clinton-era rates across the board.

What kind of effect would that have on the deficit? A huge one:

[graph appears in the article-- at http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/76563/how-fight-the-tax-cut-wars]
That dark orange stripe is the portion of the deficit attributable to the Bush tax cuts. That would be wiped out. Ending the tax cuts would basically solve the medium-term deficit problem.

The key factor here is that, just as Republicans got to frame the debate in 2001 by combining the tax cuts into an up or down vote, Democrats can frame the debate now by separating the policies Republicans pretend to care about from the ones they actually care about. Republicans want to have a vote on the whole collection of Bush-era tax cuts. Democrats shouldn’t give it to them. You hold a separate vote on the middle class portion and dare them to oppose it.

This seems to be the plan:

“The Senate will move first, and it will be a test to see whether Republicans filibuster” to block the bill in a bid to also win tax cuts for higher earners, said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the House Democrats’ re-election effort.

“If you can’t get it out of the Senate, then you take it to the election,” Mr. Van Hollen said in a recent interview. “You say to the American people that Republicans want to continue to hold middle-class tax relief hostage for an extension of tax breaks for [the well-to-do]. That will be the debate.”

Letting Go
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

by Atul Gawande
The New Yorker, August 2, 2010

This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run—and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do—our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. We don’t want anyone—certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace—to limit them. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Is there any way out of this?

In late 2004, executives at Aetna, the insurance company, started an experiment. They knew that only a small percentage of the terminally ill ever halted efforts at curative treatment and enrolled in hospice, and that, when they did, it was usually not until the very end. So Aetna decided to let a group of policyholders with a life expectancy of less than a year receive hospice services without forgoing other treatments. A patient like Sara Monopoli could continue to try chemotherapy and radiation, and go to the hospital when she wished—but also have a hospice team at home focussing on what she needed for the best possible life now and for that morning when she might wake up unable to breathe. A two-year study of this “concurrent care” program found that enrolled patients were much more likely to use hospice: the figure leaped from twenty-six per cent to seventy per cent. That was no surprise, since they weren’t forced to give up anything. The surprising result was that they did give up things. They visited the emergency room almost half as often as the control patients did. Their use of hospitals and I.C.U.s dropped by more than two-thirds. Over-all costs fell by almost a quarter.

This was stunning, and puzzling: it wasn’t obvious what made the approach work. Aetna ran a more modest concurrent-care program for a broader group of terminally ill patients. For these patients, the traditional hospice rules applied—in order to qualify for home hospice, they had to give up attempts at curative treatment. But, either way, they received phone calls from palliative-care nurses who offered to check in regularly and help them find services for anything from pain control to making out a living will. For these patients, too, hospice enrollment jumped to seventy per cent, and their use of hospital services dropped sharply. Among elderly patients, use of intensive-care units fell by more than eighty-five per cent. Satisfaction scores went way up. What was going on here? The program’s leaders had the impression that they had simply given patients someone experienced and knowledgeable to talk to about their daily needs. And somehow that was enough—just talking.

The explanation strains credibility, but evidence for it has grown in recent years. Two-thirds of the terminal-cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive-care unit. Two-thirds enrolled in hospice. These patients suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. Moreover, six months after the patients died their family members were much less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.

by Dean Baker
Beat the Press Round-up, July 7, 2010

In her column bashing AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus complains that Trumka got angry at the suggestion that the retirement age for Social Security be raised in response to the increase in life expectancy in recent decades. Apparently, Ms. Marcus did not know that the retirement age has been raised already. In 1983, Congress voted to raise the normal retirement age from 65 to 67 over the period from 2002 to 2022. Ms. Marcus seems unaware of this 27 year-old law.

Marcus also implies that Trumka believes that the country’s fiscal problems can be solved exclusively by taxing the rich. This is not true. Trumka and the AFL-CIO have consistently been strong proponents of measures that would make the U.S. health care system more efficient, such as a public health insurance option and negotiated prices for prescription drugs.

Such measures would make health care much more affordable for both the public and private sector. If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, the United States would be looking at huge long-term budget surpluses rather than deficits. It is difficult to understand how Marcus could have missed this aspect of Trumka’s political agenda.

by Paul Waldman
The American Prospect, July 27, 2010

The latest installment in our never-ending “conversation” about race is underway, thanks to the Shirley Sherrod affair. But before we get to the week’s developments, a bit of history.

In June of 1988, George H.W. Bush started telling a very scary story about his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Or rather, not so much about Dukakis, but about a man named Willie Horton. Horton, a prisoner in Massachusetts, had skipped from a furlough while Dukakis was governor and victimized a young couple, raping the woman and assaulting the man. There were some key points of the story Bush left out: The furlough program had been started by Dukakis’ Republican predecessor, and Dukakis had ended it, for instance. Horton’s name also wasn’t actually “Willie” but William, and he had never been known by the name the Bush campaign was using. Bush also didn’t mention that “Willie” Horton was black and his victims white, but he didn’t have to — Horton’s menacing mug shot would soon be shown hundreds of times on the news, and the couple were available for interviews.

For Willie Horton to become a national figure, Bush had to have a conversation with his advisers, among them Roger Ailes, currently the head of the Fox News Channel, and legendary operative Lee Atwater. They told Bush about Horton and explained how in their focus groups, white voters went positively nuts when they heard the story and turned against Dukakis. The advisers asked Bush for permission to make Willie Horton one of the pillars of their campaign. Bush said yes.

Almost no one who knew him thought that George H.W. Bush harbored personal animus toward black people. But the contents of his heart didn’t matter when he made that decision, and they don’t much matter to history. Bush was neither the first Republican nor the last to decide that the path to victory lay in picking at the scab of race, in order to make white voters feel afraid, or angry, or resentful. And here we are again, with a group of conservatives — not a presidential candidate this time, but what we might call entrepreneurs of racial division — doing all they can to convince whites that they are threatened by dangerous, vengeful blacks.

The modern history of this tactic dates to Richard Nixon, who employed the “Southern strategy” meant to cut into the Democratic Party’s working-class base. By moving attention away from class divisions and onto racial divisions, Nixon would convince white voters that elitist Northern liberals were taking from them and giving to undeserving blacks. It would play out again and again, in ways symbolic and substantive, from Ronald Reagan’s imaginary “welfare queens,” to Willie Horton, to Newt Gingrich’s crusade against “midnight basketball.” The white-hot center of this argument is the idea that advancement by racial minorities necessarily involves taking something away from whites. “You needed that job,” said the infamous “White hands” ad from Jesse Helms’ 1990 campaign, “but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.”

When Andrew Breitbart posted on his website an out-of-context video snippet meant to fool people into believing an Agriculture Department official was discriminating against white people, he didn’t have to wonder whether the story would move outward from his hateful little corner of the Internet. Fox News, he knew, would unwrap it like a longed-for Christmas present and move it quickly into heavy rotation on its calliope of racial resentment. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would bellow their indignation. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio hosts would spend hours plumbing the depths of this latest outrage against oppressed white people. And within a day or two, the story would slither its way up the media ladder to the broadcast networks and major newspapers.

Breitbart knew it, because even before Barack Obama took office, the most venomous voices on the right were telling white voters that this man preaching understanding and reconciliation was conning them, hiding his inner Huey Newton, inevitably to unleash the fury of black rage upon them. And not just him — his wife, too. Remember how conservatives spread the false rumor that Michelle Obama had once referred to “whitey” in a speech? Remember how they tried to use her college thesis to prove she was a black nationalist? Remember how National Review put a picture of her looking angry on its cover, under the headline “Mrs. Grievance”?

Despite the fact that there is no subject the White House would like to talk about less than race, it has become a positive obsession for some on the right. When Glenn Beck, the conservative media star of our time, said that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred of white people,” it was only his most-publicized foray into race-baiting; it’s actually a regular feature of his rhetoric, which includes lots of talk of “reparations” — taking money from white people to give to black people. “Have we suddenly transported into 1956, except it’s the other way around?” Beck recently asked. “Does anybody else have a sense that there are some that just want revenge?”

Reparations is a major theme these days for Rush Limbaugh, too, with every Democratic program he doesn’t like characterized as an effort to stick it to white folks. He tells his listeners that “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations.” It makes sense, because as Limbaugh had told them before, “the days of [minorities] not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang.”

Beck and Limbaugh may be the two loudest voices, but it comes from multiple directions, including media bottom-feeders like Andrew Breitbart. Look at the controversies that have animated them since Obama took office: Van Jones, ACORN, Sonia Sotomayor’s alleged animosity toward white people, the phony New Black Panther voter intimidation story — and next month there will probably be another. In every case, the message to whites is the same: You are the victim. You are not the racist — they are the racists, and you are the victim of their racism. You are the oppressed, the held down, the kept back. If you see a black person or a Hispanic get a position of power, you’d better watch out, because they’ll be coming for you.

To be clear, what I’m talking about here isn’t racism, it’s race-baiting. For all I know, Breitbart is positively bursting with love for all humanity. But what we can say for sure is that he is a professional race-baiter, just like Beck and Limbaugh. What they are inside is unknowable and irrelevant; it’s what they do that is so vile.

There are no doubt many Republicans of good will who are made sick by the racial poison their ideological comrades pour into our national bloodstream. Perhaps some will be able to do what George H.W. Bush could not 22 years ago: say to those who come forward with the latest bit of race-baiting, “No. We will not do this. I know it works, and I know it may help us politically. But it demeans us and harms this country we always say we love so much. It is wrong. And we will not do it.”

To give you an idea of the topic, I will simply quote here the first (rather long!) sentence:

Have you ever wondered why people who are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to protect the United States against any possible threat from an external enemy, nonetheless say we can’t afford to sacrifice much of anything to combat the threat of climate change that could make our world, and our country, less livable?

You can HEAR the commentary, just as it was broadcast over the radio, at this site:

By Samuel Charap
Washington Post, July 23, 2010

The bill on President Dmitry Medvedev’s desk that expands the powers of the KGB’s domestic successor would seem to confirm our worst fears about Russia’s political development. But the story of how it got there shows that Russia’s political transformation is still unfolding and reminds us that the United States has a role to play in shaping it.

The proposed law would give the Federal Security Service (FSB) authority to issue warnings to individuals whose actions, though not illegal, “create the conditions for a crime.”

Human rights activists and opposition groups have condemned the legislation, citing fears that the powers will be used to preemptively silence the government’s political opponents. Memorial, Russia’s leading rights watchdog, has noted the similarities between the bill and a 1972 decree that allowed the KGB to warn citizens not to engage in “anti-social activities that contradict the state security of the USSR,” even if those activities did not violate laws. The “warnings” were used to intimidate Soviet dissidents.

Medvedev is unlikely to veto the measure, as he has taken credit for proposing it, dashing misplaced hopes that he is some sort of liberal foil to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel. So is this yet another nail in the coffin of Russian democracy?

Perhaps. But that’s not the whole story.

As bad as it is, the bill could have been a lot worse. During the legislative process, rights groups succeeded in getting removed provisions that would have allowed the FSB to publish its admonitions, to summon a person to receive a warning and to impose prison sentences of up to 15 days as punishment for refusal to appear. A mechanism to appeal the warnings was also inserted.

This episode demonstrates that politics, however warped, still exists in Russia, and that civil society, however marginalized, still plays a role in public life. While far from fully democratic, Russia is not a one-party dictatorship.

The policy challenge for the United States is how to foster those trends that might lead Russia toward a more open political system while counteracting those that might take it in the other direction.

Some argue that the Obama administration’s major expansion of government-to-government engagement (the “reset”) on issues it considers top global challenges, such as preventing the proliferation of nuclear materials and stabilizing Afghanistan, makes the situation worse. They contend that this engagement implies an endorsement of the Kremlin’s limits on domestic freedoms and empowers a government that is irreconcilably hostile to those freedoms.

But done right, engagement with Moscow could be important to influencing Russia’s development in positive ways.

First, improved ties increase the chances that the United States can express concerns about what’s happening in Russia without the discussion devolving into a shouting match. The past decade has shown that a climate of antagonism between the governments makes discussions of these issues impossible. Whether such discussions lead to change is another question, but having them is a good thing, especially when the alternative — public finger-wagging — creates more backlash than progress.

Second, engagement undercuts the “fortress Russia” developmental model, which closely links greater confrontation with the United States to ever tighter political controls, a closed economy and domination in the former Soviet region. It deprives the Kremlin of the specter used to justify its turn away from open politics: the West as the enemy at the gates.

With that bogeyman gone, it is no longer credible to label any nongovernmental organization (NGO) that receives Western funding part of a “fifth column” or to equate pro-Western policies with treason. Engagement creates space for those groups to operate domestically and for thosearguments to be heard. It also increases Russian citizens’ exposure to the United States and its political system, through increased travel, trade or more frequent positive coverage on (tightly controlled but widely watched) TV news.

Finally, successful governmental engagement will, over time, raise the cost to the Kremlin of actions that would undermine ties. If Moscow has something to lose, it might (or at least has more incentive to) think twice.

Robust engagement with the government must not entail ignoring difficult issues and must be complemented by direct engagement with society. On this score, the Obama administration says the right things and is trying new ideas, such as holding parallel civil society meetings during presidential summits, but its delivery has been somewhat lacking.

by Robert Creamer
Huffington Post, July 23, 2010

The first rule for Democratic success this November is the immutable iron law of politics: if you’re on the defense you’re losing. Who ever is on the offensive almost always wins elections.

That’s why Democratic victory requires that this election cannot simply be a referendum on the speed with which Democrats have been cleaning up the economic mess created by the Republicans and their allies on Wall Street. It must be a choice between Democrats who are charting a new path forward out of the economic ditch and the failed economic policies of the Republicans that drove us into that ditch in the first place. Democrats must make it clear that if the Republicans once again get their hands on the keys to the economy, those same, reckless failed policies will result in yet another economic catastrophe.

It’s fine, for instance, for Democratic office holders to explain the details of the Health Care bill. After all, the more that people know about it, the more they like it. But that explanation should not constitute the be all and end all of the Democratic health care message. We have to challenge the Republicans — who have been bought and paid for by the insurance companies — to justify their vote against preventing those companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. We have to challenge them to explain their proposals to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers for private insurance.

The same goes in every arena. And it is doubly important because voters vote for people — not policy positions. Voters want leaders who are strong and self confident — not leaders who spend their days in a defensive crouch. They want leaders who stand up straight and defend their deeply held values — not leaders who bob and weave.

The thing we have to remember most is that Democratic positions on the issues – and the values that underlie them — are very popular. Voters generally respond very favorable to candidates who stand up for those values — for average Americans not the wealthy and special interests.

This all seems obvious to normal people who size up candidates. Unfortunately it is often less obvious to the sometimes risk averse consultant class that has so much to say about the way political campaigns are organized.

But all they need to do is take a careful look at the polling that makes the importance of staying on the offensive ever so clear.

Here for instance are some of the questions that have scored well in raising serious concerns about Republican swing district candidates in polling I’ve seen over the last month. The first two are particularly powerful among senior citizens that make up a big chunk of swing voters in many key districts.

* Candidate A took hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the insurance companies and now he supports abolishing Medicare and replacing it with vouchers for private insurance.

* Candidate D took tens of thousands from Wall Street Banks and now he supports privatizing Social Security and replacing a guaranteed benefit with investments in the stock market.

* Candidate E takes thousands of dollars in contributions from defense contractors and refuses to vote against wasteful and ineffective defense projects.

* Candidate F receives hundreds of thousands in donations from wealthy supporters. He is all in favor of spending hundreds of billions on tax cuts for the rich, but he refuses to support money for unemployment benefits to laid off workers or preventing states and local government from laying off teachers, firemen, and police.

* Candidate Y took $500,000 from the health insurance companies and then voted against banning discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.

* Candidate J took $250,000 from the health insurance companies and then voted against stopping insurance companies from imposing lifetime or annual caps on coverage and dropping people when they get too expensive to insure.

* Candidate F took $50,000 from the health insurance companies and then voted against stopping insurance companies from charging women more than men and denying coverage to pregnant women because it was considered a pre-existing condition.

* Candidate U used every excuse to vote against requiring that Members of Congress like him are covered under the health care reform law just like everybody else.

* Candidate Z took $100,000 from the oil industry and refuses to support legislation that would break the stranglehold of foreign oil that leaves us more and more vulnerable to our enemies that control our oil supplies.

These are the kinds of questions that Democrats need to force onto the agenda this fall. They apply to almost every incumbent Republican, and most challengers. These statements symbolize the fundamental differences between Democrats and the Republican candidates who want to return to the failed economic policies of the Bush era that favored the interests of Wall Street, big Oil and the insurance industry — not the interests of everyday Americans.

If we take the offensive, Democrats may lose some seats this fall, but we definitely do not need to lose control of sizable majorities in either House of Congress. If we take the offensive, Conventional Wisdom will spend the evening of November 2 scratching his head and wondering how he could have been so wrong. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

What do you think a comparison of the two sets would reveal?

Here’s what I think it would show: compared with the era of campaigning, since Inauguration Obama has virtually stopped showing us who he is at the feeling level, the human level.

In the campaign, Obama was often playful. He sometimes spoke in colorful language that expressed something of his own personhood. He gave us frequent glimpses of his feelings. Week after week, in his orations at post-primary rallies, he would give his audience a clear view into the basic energy at his core.

In other words, he allowed the American people to experience him as a human being, at the feeling level.

As president, by contrast, he is almost continually “presidential,” which in this case means formal and stiff. He seems to be caught in some image of a role –the dignified president– and thus presenting himself in a way that prevents us from seeing his own true self and thus from feeling a connection with him at the human level.

Why does this matter?

It matters because people’s openness to communication from another is determined –or so I suspect– less by the cogency of that communication’s content than by their feeling of emotional openness to the person who’s doing the communicating. Without that feeling connection, the message may be “heard” but it will not “register” strongly.

And sure enough, poll after poll, on issue after issue, shows that the president’s version of things is being overpowered by the version put forward by his political enemies. This despite the fact that his opponents’ version consists largely of lies and distortions while Obama’s presentation is substantially responsible and true.

Consider two of our greatest, most transformational presidents: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both these presidents became palpable emotional presences to their publics, and in both cases, their leadership was magnified by the feelings of the people for their president.

I’ve been arguing here for more than a year that President Obama has been allowing his power to slip away because of his refusal to fight back against those who have been willing to use any fear-mongering lie to weaken him and make him fail. I still believe that to be true. But if, for whatever reason, it is not in this president’s repertoire to fight back strongly, here is another route by which Obama might strengthen himself:

I’d love to see him loosen up. Be playful. Show us more of himself at a level of feeling and spontaneity. Show us more of who he really is at the human level.

All these things would allow the American people to feel closer to him than they do now with this formal “presidential” demeanor. And feeling closer, the American people would hear his voice as if it had been amplified. With his message coming across “louder,” it would begin to register more deeply.

If by simply sharing with us more of his humanity –as he did before he became president– he’s able to shape more powerfully the public understanding of the issues, his ability to achieve his political goals will be correspondingly magnified.

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, July 26, 2010

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year’s election.

The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle.

Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,” but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.

There were no “death panels” in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow “the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.” That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on “the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.” Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” she told Politico’s Ben Smith. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.” Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He’s a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.” This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense — and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.