StrangeSox

They couldn't, but that's thanks to garbage centrist and center right Democrats!

Lol if you don't become increasingly leftist as you age and better understand the world around you. Not everyone practices FYIGM politics. More seriously, that pearl of wisdom isn't true. People's political beliefs sort of ossify in their mid twenties or so usually depending on what is going on in the world around them. They'll largely hold these beliefs as they get older, so you get generational tides if political alignment rather than "everyone gets more conservative as they get older and make money." I'd also peep the gigantic gender chasm opening up for younger women. Not that it wasn't already, but the GOP is becoming almost entirely the party of white men.

Guess which party! I forget how many open Nazis are running as Republicans this cycle, it's hard to keep track.

This seems like a bad idea

as long as you never make them actually rank/promote posts and turn this into the dumpster fire that is reddit

Not on the field but all the CTE stuff and the indirect stuff like severe depression and suicide has led to a lot of bad press and potential liability for the league.

It's not a lack of criticism, necessarily, so much as it is taking the words of whichever powerful people have decided they want to talk to him at face value and presenting them as "the facts." He doesn't so much dig as he waits around to find people who want to tell him their version of the story, and then he dutifully prints it. Why should it be up to the reader to have to synthesize this information rather than the journalist? Why should Woodward be excused for printing others' self-serving tales uncritically even when those tales are directly contradicted by other publicly known information? I really recommend you read the NY Review of Books essay I posted in its entirety, and it applies to more than just Woodward.

They're both access journalists telling a story via unnamed sources, at least Wolff is honest about what he is and what he writes and is willing to burn that access when necessary. Lack of analysis of the information you've gathered is bad journalism, and it's important to note that there is a difference here, a very substantial and important one, between analysis and opinion commentary. Letting the cards fall where they may without bothering to check the validity of any of those cards or whether they contradict other known cards is doing a disservice to anyone who reads your work. It's stenography, not journalism. This is a pretty classic criticism of the work that Woodward engages in and the fundamental problems it has. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/09/19/the-deferential-spirit/?pagination=false Note that this criticism is nothing new as that particular article is about Woodward's book on the '96 elections. Really, read the whole thing, because it's still very relevant to the press/media today and some pull quotes don't do it justice. The stories he tells are determined by who is willing to sit down with him and tell him their thoughts. He'll then take those at face value and repeat them as if they are simply "the facts." Access journalism is a type of journalism, and maybe it has it's place, but it's certainly not superior to actual analytical and investigative reporting. It shouldn't be seen as a good, 'unbiased' thing to simply repeat the claims of the powerful people who talk to you and that adding thoughtful analysis to those claims somehow tarnishes the work, makes it 'slanted'.

Now that Pruitt's corruption has forced him out, the investigators are on to the next deeply corrupt Trump Cabinet member

Yeah basically if you don't like what Wolff did you shouldn't like Woodward either. Uncritically repeating claims isn't exactly reporting "facts" but it does help the people making those claims to legitimize them. It's like nowadays with AP and Reuters and WaPo etc. sending out push notifications or headlines with "TRUMP SAYS MUELLER PROBE CORRUPT, CAMPAIGN SPIED ON" Yes, it is a fact that Trump said those things, but merely reprinting his claims without pointing out the baselessness of them is irresponsible and shody journalism. The same can be said for a lot of Woodward's books. If he does nothing but uncritically reprint officials' claims while giving them the cover of anonymity, what good is that really doing? It's not adding a slant to do some actual journalism and to evaluate the claims that are made. Access journalists maintain their access by making sure they never go too hard after their subjects, though, or otherwise they'll lose the access. That's the thing I appreciate about what Wolff did--he went in, got a whole lot of information, and then willfully burned any possible future access by sharing all the information. That's not anything Woodward could ever be counted on to do.

Kinda sorta, most of the push back was "oh how dare he!" rather than actual factual rebuttals. He was presenting the story as "how this or that particular source viewed and believed things to be" rather than some sort of notion of 'objective truth' https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/fire-and-fury-is-the-perfect-postmodern-white-house-book/550397/ If you do ever read it or some excerpts while keeping that firmly in mind, it's an entertaining read. I at least appreciate that he was willing to burn his access to write out the details rather than acting as a friendly PR arm that never dares to criticize *too* much lest he lose his precious access (Maggie Habberman, looking squarely at you). As for Woodward, as this Atlantic review pointed out, he engages in a similar style to Wolff as he also relies heavily on unnamed sources to tell his narratives.

Fire and Fury was 100% accurate though

Mike Duncan's History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts are good if you like history stuff. History of Rome starts out a bit rough on audio quality for the first 10 episodes or so before he got better equipment and figured out what he was doing, but the history stretches from the founding of Rome to the exile of Romulous Augustus in 476 AC. Revolutions is his current podcast. He's got different "seasons" where he focuses on a different revolution, Starts with English Civil War, then American, French, Haiti etc.

only a matter of time until it's a majority of the GOP that's actively in support of foreign interference in our elections as long as it's in their favor just in time for this:

This is just one person's opinion but I think psychologically damaging children permanently is bad

This is incorrect. Piketty and Saez studied this a number of years ago and found that the inflection point is actually up around 70%! The US corporate tax rate has never been anywhere near this, briefly peaking out around 52%.

Restoring the corporate tax rate to sane levels wouldn't crush her district. Accepting that framing is corporatist and deserves to be criticized.

Right, most research, especially any basic research, comes out of NIH funded labs not private enterprises. If you want to quibble with the cost projections for M4A are when they're coming from a group that's strongly ideologically opposed to M4A, I'm not sure what numbers you'd ever expect. Medicare has much lower overhead and higher approval ratings than private insurance. You'd also unburden so many businesses from also having to manage health care plans as they currently do and give people more freedom to strike out on their own or even just change jobs without having to worry about their health insurance going away or substantially changing. You'd also eliminate the need for doctor's office and hospitals to spend so much time and effort just handling the myriad of insurance companies and claims out there. This isn't some magical hypothetical. It's what every other major country does for less money than we spend and with better outcomes and covering everyone rather than leaving a substantial portion of their population to languish. Maternity mortality is increasing in this country, ffs! Spend some time taking to people in other countries about health care, and they will be almost uniformly horrified by the details of the US system. There's a reason no one is clamoring to emulate it.

It's just amazing that this country has to keep having these conversations as if a single payer health insurance plan is some wild new hypothetical program that's never been tried. It has, in different forms in different countries, and the results are all better than our system. And we provide single payer for the elderly and it works well in this country! We already provide it for the population that needs the most and the most expensive health care!

You've missed the point. The Mercatus Center study, which is not going to be providing favorable calculations for the cost of Medicare for All given their ideological bent, came up with the estimate of $32T over ten years. If you take that number at face value and compare it to what projections of our national healthcare spending under the status quo over ten years will be, M4A is cheaper! We will spend more for worse outcomes and 30 million fewer people covered with our garbage privatized system. The VA is unique in the population it treats and how it is run. M4A isn't a VA or NHS style plan where the government would actually operate the health care providers. It's an insurance plan. And even with that said, Medicare remains a very well run and popular program and the VA has higher favorability ratings than private insurance care even with its problems. Attempts to "fix" the VA via privatization have failed thus far.

The US has more money per person than those other countries, though. We could afford it if we wanted to. We already spent much more per person annually than those countries, and our outcomes are worse.