On Friday, Reps. Howard McKeon (R-CA) and Elton Gallegly (R-CA) were named as recipients of discounted mortgage loans from the now-defunct Countrywide Financial Corp., previously the nation’s largest mortgage lender before being bought out by Bank of America.

Reps. McKeon and Gallegly both claim they did not know their loans were processed through the so-called “Friends of Angelo’s” VIP division, a reference to Angelo Mozilo, the former head of Countrywide whom TIME magazine named as one of its “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” report.

The two California Republicans join Democratic Congressman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY) as the three of four House members identified by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as having had loans processed through Countrywide’s VIP loan program.  Rep. Towns also says he was unaware that his loan had been routed through Countrywide’s VIP loan division.   The fourth House member the Committee has identified as having received a discounted loan has yet to be publicly identified.

Rep. McKeon’s spokesperson, Alissa McCurley, says Rep. McKeon was “shocked and angry” when he learned his $315,000 mortgage loan had been processed through Countrywide’s VIP loan division.  Ms. McCurley stated that Rep. McKeon, who serves as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, “had no knowledge of the Friends of Angelo designation” and “has never met or spoken to Angelo Mozilo.  Mr. McKeon is going back trying to figure out what Countrywide did to this loan 13 years ago.”

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Predictable. From AFP:

Time magazine named the collective “protester” around the world as its person of the year Wednesday, citing the change brought by street demonstrations from Arab countries to New York.

The shared honor for protesters beat the traditional individual contenders, who included Admiral William McCraven, commander of the US mission to kill Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.

“There’s this contagion of protest,” managing editor Richard Stengel said on NBC television.

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[As the Republican nominee begins his opening statement, President Obama reflects.*]

I

Ooooh . . . he speaks, the right’s Orion!

Expel your foul dis-charges—phew!

Could glares steal breath, Paulie Ryan,

‘Bout now you’d be turning blue!

Huh?  Big spending cuts are needed?

Ah, Fed tax rates mustn’t rise.

And these . . . “facts” I’ve not conceded?

Why?  They’re falsehoods, damn your eyes!

II

In the past we’ve had discussions–

“Paul–thanks for coming!”—I must bear

Rants on Market repercussions,

Treas’ry futures, budget snares.

Our job outlook’s pathetic; rarely

Has it been this bad, I think.

Want a deal to face this squarely?

Want emetics in your drink? (more…)

Background: a few weeks back Time magazine published, as its cover story, an article by Richard Stengel on the Constituion.  Reading it, I was stunned to discover fourteen clear factual errors in his piece, and I have been on a bit of a crusade since then to force Time to either correct or retract the article.  And in the process I have been examining how other media outlets and organizations have treated Stengel.

Now, on the right we have the Federalist Society, a group of generally conservative scholars and other interested citizens devoted to the preservation of the Constitution.  So the left decided it needed an organization like this too, so someone formed the American Constitution Society (ACS), meant to be a liberal alternative to the Federalist Society.  (This shouldn’t be confused with the National Constitution Center, which by all appearances is an unrelated entity.)  They state on their website that:

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) promotes the vitality of the U.S. Constitution and the fundamental values it expresses: individual rights and liberties, genuine equality, access to justice, democracy and the rule of law. The abiding principles are reflected in the vision of the Constitution’s framers and the wisdom of forward-looking leaders who have shaped our law throughout American history.

So they seem to care about the Constitution itself, or at least that is the implication.  So I found it curious that their website presented Richard Stengel’s piece on the Constitution without any criticism.  Go ahead, read their blog entry announcing Stengel’s piece.  It’s not long.  If they aren’t endorsing it (and it sure sounds like they are), they are definitely promoting it and without the slightest hint of criticism.

But even worse than that, they actually quote from this passage, again without a word of criticism:

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So as regular readers know, after finding fourteen clear factual errors in Richard Stengel’s June 23rd Time magazine cover story* on the Constitution, I have been on a crusade to embarrass the magazine until it corrects or retracts that story.  I have explained that I consider its publication to be a scandal, both because it appeared as the cover story and because who the author is:

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

So I wrote an email to David Eisner, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, asking (1) what Stengel’s role was in the Center, and (2) whether they had an official statement about this whole mess, particularly correcting Mr. Stengel’s inaccuracies.

Well, on Friday afternoon, I got this email in response:

from    David Eisner [email omitted]

to         edmd5.20.10@gmail.com

date     Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 4:26 PM

subject Response to email

Dear Mr. Worthing,

Thank you for your email regarding Rick Stengel’s Time magazine cover article on the Constitution. As you’d imagine, the article has stirred up a lot of thoughts from people who care deeply about the Constitution, many critical and many supportive.  I’m sure you’re aware that the issues you raise go to the center of many of the most important current debates around how we view the Constitution.

We’re working to bring some of those thoughts and issues together and will share them on our blog http://blog.constitutioncenter.org in the coming days.

Best,

David E

David Eisner

President and CEO

National Constitution Center

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

- Thomas Jefferson

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To give a quick review, on June 23, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story* for Time Magazine rife with factual errors.  On June 29, I published a piece here recording fourteen clear factual errors in that story.  I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared at Time Magazine as its cover story, and ever since I have been crusading to embarrass them into a correction.

But what is also embarrassing is that other media outlets have treated Mr. Stengel as though he was an expert on the Constitution.  Consider, for example, this blurp for a show on NPR entitled “Talk of the Nation” that aired on July 4:

In the fierce debates over health care, Libya, debt, gay marriage and other issues, Americans have been getting a lecture on the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of its authors. Andrea Seabrook speaks with Richard Stengel of Time magazine and Yale law professor Akhil Amar about the political divide over the Constitution and how an 18th-century document applies in a 21st-century world. [emphasis added]

Now, I may not like Professor Amar personally, and I may vehemently disagree with him on many points, but I think it is fair to consider him an expert on the Constitution.

But as the other “expert,” we have Richard Stengel. Really, Andrea Seabrook?  You actually read that article, and thought he was an expert? Because it is important to stress that many of these errors are obvious to any lay person.  You don’t need three years of law school to know it is simply incorrect to say “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”  You only have to know that there is such a thing as the First Amendment or the Second.  Nor do you need complicated legal instruction to know that it is incorrect to say that the Constitution is not law—most people learn in elementary school that the Constitution is the supreme law of this land.  And one doesn’t need a particularly deep understanding of the Constitution to become concerned when one sees Stengel declare that “[i]n drafting the 14th Amendment, Congress … wanted to emancipate blacks and allow them to vote.”  I consider it fairly common knowledge that it was actually the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery, and the Fifteenth that outlawed racial discrimination in the franchise.  These errors should have been obvious to anyone reading Stengel’s piece, and utterly undermined any claim he could make to be an expert.

A reasonable radio host, doing due diligence, would have realized that they only had two options with Mr. Stengel.  She could either grill him about the serial inaccuracies in his article.  Or, she could drop him as a guest entirely and find a true expert on the Constitution to replace him.

And while they were at it, they could have added a conservative expert on the Constitution to balance the debate.

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About a week ago I published a post at Big Journalism outlining fourteen clear factual errors in Richard Stengel’s essay on the Constitution.

I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared in Time magazine, a once-respected publication.  For instance, in the article he stated remarkably that “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”  I have dubbed this scandal “Stengel-gate.”

I also considered it scandalous because of who the author, Richard Stengel, is:

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

It has been about a week and the story has even appeared on Fox News.  And yet there is apparently no correction, no retraction of the story, or even a defense of it.

So frankly in an effort to keep the heat on, I decided to explore the other end of the scandal: what on earth was he doing working at something called the National Constitution Center?

I plan to spend several days discussing that issue and to kick it off, I decided to write a letter to its current President and CEO, the man holding the position that Richard Stengel once occupied: David Eisner.

So on Tuesday night, I wrote to him directly.  You can see the letter I wrote below the fold (the format is slightly altered by wordpress itself).

I do not know if he will respond or how he will respond.  But whatever his reaction is, even a non-response, will reflect on him and his organization.  And that in and of itself is noteworthy.

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Yesterday, Scott Brown caved, and the Senate passed its “financial reform.” That story is at the top of every news web site.

But what the establishment media didn’t tell you – unless you waded through the details in a select few news articles or saw this fairly balanced short article in the Washington Post – is that Wednesday evening,  hours after the first cloture vote failed and hours after  I informed BigGovernment.com readers about an effort by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), to narrow the scope of what I have been calling the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s A Bank Bill, Democrats blinked and Vitter’s amendment passed without objection by voice vote.

Vitter’s amendment to the so-called “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” gives a precise meaning to the term “financial company” – changing the definition from Dodd’s original language of “substantially engaged in activities in the United States that are financial in nature” to that of the much stricter “predominantly engaged.” And his amendment precisely defines “predominantly engaged” as a business that makes no less than 85 percent of its revenue from financial activities.

As a result of Vitter’s measure that passed during the brief 24-hour period of most of the GOP standing together in opposition (along with Democrats Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold for their own reasons), a very important change was made.

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What is the most important issue facing the American people today? Until late last Fall, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, the presidents of our major universities, and the editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, WNBC, and the like –  not to mention the scientific establishment in the United States – were as one in telling us that global warming was a profound threat to our well-being and that of the rest of mankind. And John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and sadly, in the end, a hapless George W. Bush were willing to lend the hysterics a measure of aid and comfort.

In the United States Senate, the indomitable James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma was very nearly alone in standing up to denounce the whole enterprise as a hoax, and in turn he was himself denounced by all right-thinking people as a scoundrel and a fool. There were, of course, scientists proficient in meteorology who entertained grave doubts, and some of them made a great fuss, but they were soon denied federal funding for further research, and young entrants into the profession quickly learned that if they wished to have successful careers it was incumbent on them to join the chorus who denounced global-warming skeptics as lackeys of the fossil fuels industry. The global-warming cabal was to the liberal democracies of our time what  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his disciples were to biology in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.

When he became President, Barack Obama pledged to “roll back the specter of a warming planet” and “restore science to its rightful place,” implying – graceless as always – that the administration of George W. Bush had suppressed inconvenient scientific truths in the interests of ideology. In fact, Obama seems not to have understood what he was saying, for a specter is “an apparition inspiring dread,” and it is one of the principal functions of science to dispel illusions of this very sort; and, instead of debunking “the specter of a warming planet” and restoring “science to its rightful place” thereby, he embraced that specter and sought by way of inspiring dread in the American people to railroad his compatriots into subjecting the entire economy to the supervision of the administrative state.

(more…)

Ben Bernanke is Time’s person of the year, Howard Dean takes up arms against the Senate health care bill, and Megan McArdle says we all have a moral obligation to pay our mortgages, whether it makes financial sense or not. We’ll discuss all that and more on today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, a daily podcast from The New Ledger on politics, policy and the marketplace with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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Related Links:

Heartland: Dean Opposes Health Care Bill
AmSpec: Dean Wants to Kill Bill
Bloomberg: Bernanke is Time’s Person of the Year
McArdle: New Breed of Deadbeats

Francis adds: I couldn’t agree more with McArdle, because (contrary to popular opinion) I believe deeply in traditional moral norms. But I also believe in pointing out the macro consequences of such behavior.

She’s pointing out macro consequences of a different kind with her story about Memphis. But that just made me think of Argentina and Mexico, the poster children for sovereign moral hazard. These countries (and others) have a history of stiffing global banks every few years. Do they end up like Memphis? Of course not. Bankers always come around offering more later.

The whole country won’t become like Memphis, not with Congress and the Administration pursuing a reflate-even-at-the-cost-of-moral-hazard policy, and with the Fed tacitly supporting that policy. If people who can afford to pay off mortgages on inflated property values continue to do so, then they will have shouldered the collapse of the housing bubble. McArdle implicitly believes this is a good and right outcome. I don’t disagree in the slightest, but it does mean that we’re facing years of economic underperformance.

Yesterday, Washington Post columnist and former Bush II speechwriter Michael Gerson played a long slow violin solo over the death of the mainstream media. There’s nothing new in his piece. Dazed with panic as the circle of financial ruin closes in, we’ve heard this song many times before from our ink-stained dinosaurs. And true to form, Gerson can’t break the mold. It’s all there, the rose-colored glasses, denial, and a heaping helping of rationalization.

Once again, from that familiar MSM perch where one can look down their nose at the great unwashed who just don’t understand the magnificent tradition of journalism they’re about to lose, Gerson blames We the People for no longer wanting  to pay for our news and choosing partisan sources “that reinforce and exaggerate … political predispositions.”

How absurd. (more…)