The Big, Big, Big, Big Deal

The Paris COP 21 talks have produced a global agreement to reduce carbon emissions in an unprecedented accord that covers 195 countries.  Well, 194 countries if you, like me, believe that Republicans will never allow the agreement to be ratified in the United States.

With the sudden bang of a gavel Saturday night, representatives of 195 countries reached a landmark climate accord that will, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change.

Delegates who have been negotiating intensely in this Paris suburb for two weeks gathered for the final plenary session, where Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, declared it approved.

With that, the delegates achieved what had been unreachable for two decades: a consensus on the need to shift from carbon-based fuels and a road map for the 195 nations to do so.

Though the deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for, it set the table for more efforts to slow the slide toward an unlivable planet.

The deal resolves the main GOP talking point: that without cooperation and carbon emission limits from China and India, any deal was worthless and would only serve to cost US jobs.

At its heart is a breakthrough on an issue that foiled decades of international efforts to address climate change. Previous pacts required developed economies like the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but exempted developing countries such as China and India.

The new accord changes that dynamic, requiring action in some form from every country. But the echoes of the divide persisted during the negotiations.

Delegates received the final draft of the document Saturday afternoon, after a morning when the text was promised but repeatedly delayed. They immediately began parsing it for language that had been the subject of energetic debate, in preparation for a voice vote on whether the deal should become law.

All evening, tense excitement was palpable. The delegates rose to their feet to thank the French team, which drew on the finest elements of the country’s traditions of diplomacy to broker a deal acceptable to all sides.

France’s European partners recalled the coordinated Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people and threatened to cast a shadow over the negotiations. But, bound by a collective good will toward France, countries redoubled their efforts.

Now of course comes the part where Republicans (and oil and coal state Democrats) block the deal from ever being binding in the US, which will assure other countries will fail to follow the deal too, and like Kyoto, it all becomes meaningless.

We had a good run on Earth, but the Paris COP 21 talks will almost certainly be seen as our last chance getting away from us.

That is if there's anyone left to care about the history of humanity.

Dozens Of Wrongs Don't Make A Right

Welcome to post-Paris attack, post-San Bernardino attack America, where crimes against Muslims are definitely on the rise and in a few short weeks rhetoric on the right has led to things like arson at mosques.

A fire that broke out Friday afternoon at the Islamic Society of Coachella Valley was contained to the lobby area without anyone being
injured. According to the imam of the mosque it appeared to be the result of a firebombing.

The Riverside County Sheriff's department said the call came in as possible arson. They believe that it was an intentional act potentially resulting in a hate crime. A person of interest was identified and has since been detained.

The fire was reported at 12:09 p.m. at the 1,800-square-foot building located at 84650 Avenue 49. Cal Fire Riverside reported that crews contained the flames to the lobby area at 12:46 p.m., but there was smoke damage throughout the mosque.

Reymundo Nour, president of Islamic Society, told City News Service that he was out of town at the time of the attack but received reports from his
staff.

``Someone threw what seems to be a Molotov cocktail-like device and it exploded inside the building around the reception area,'' he said.

People were inside at the time, but no one was injured, he said. The fire broke out about an hour before an afternoon prayer session was to begin.

Muslim shop owners are getting beat up,  mosques are being defaced and vandalized, there have been dozens of incidents since November 11th, and hey, events like this have been happening since before then too, even right here in Kentucky.

Both Paris and San Bernardino were terrible events perpetrated by cowards, and there's no valid comparison of rampaging murder that killed 14 or in the case of Paris, more than 160, to simple assault or vandalism.

But the latter is something we as a country have direct power over, and it needs to stop.

Last Call For Three Percent Short Of Sane

Our old friends the Three Percenters are back, and they're more than happy to tell everyone who will listen that they will protect us from The Scary Brown Beturbaned Horde.

The Three Percenters have expressed concerns about national security in waging anti-Muslim activities this year. It's unclear whether they've also been influenced by the provocative speech of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump following the deadly Paris attacks.

"We will interfere with every move they (Muslims) make towards taking over our country," Dallas protest organizer David Wright said in response to questions the Associated Press sent to his personal Facebook page. "We are ready to fight back if they come at us violently." 

Wright, who plans to protest Saturday at a different mosque, hasn't advertised the "Three Percenters" name in his activities. But he claimed membership in comments on Facebook and told the AP he was a leader in a Texas chapter. A second Facebook profile appends the Roman numeral "III" to his name, as do other Three Percenters, and features a black "III%" patch as a background photograph. 

The Three Percenters movement began in 2008, galvanized by President Barack Obama's election, followers and researchers say. The name comes from the disputed percentage of colonials who armed themselves and fought the British during the American Revolution. 

The number of Three Percenters is unclear partly because anyone can ascribe to the movement. The man credited as the founder has claimed 3 million on his blog. One national Three Percenters' Facebook group has about 12,000 members, including people from all 50 states. 

Followers appear to consist mainly of white, male, conservative gun owners who believe the nation has been pushed to a tipping point by socialists in government aiming to disarm them, strip their constitutional rights and take their property, according to groups that track anti-government movements.

Yeah, a group of folks calling for open, armed revolution against the government, but after seven years they haven't quite pulled the trigger yet on their national movement.  Go figure.

It's a lot easier to bully Muslims however, and these guys are all about standing outside mosques with AR-15s in open carry states and daring somebody to do anything about it, because they are manly, manly patriots.

I'm tired of these idiots, personally.  I wish they would either start their revolution or shut up, one or the other, so we can be done with it all.

Brokered Your Heart

As much as I respect WaPo's Robert Costa as one of the few sane and real journalist voices covering insane Republicans, even Costa has to at some point realize he's being mushroomed (fed crap and kept mostly in the dark) on this "brokered convention" nonsense.

Republican officials and leading figures in the party’s establishment are preparing for the possibility of a brokered convention as businessman Donald Trump continues to sit atop the polls in the GOP presidential race. 

More than 20 of them convened Monday near the Capitol for a dinner held by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, and the prospect of Trump nearing next year’s nominating convention in Cleveland with a significant number of delegates dominated the discussion, according to five people familiar with the meeting. 

Weighing in on that scenario as Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listened, several longtime Republican power brokers argued that if the controversial billionaire storms through the primaries, the party’s establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight in which the GOP’s mainstream wing could coalesce around an alternative, the people said. 

The development represents a major shift for veteran Republican strategists, who until this month had spoken of a brokered convention only in the most hypothetical terms — and had tried to encourage a drama-free nomination by limiting debates and setting an earlier convention date. 

Now, those same leaders see a floor fight as a real possibility. And so does Trump, who said in an interview last week that he, too, is preparing.

Because of the sensitivity of the topic — and because they are wary of saying something that, if leaked, would provoke Trump to bolt the party and mount an independent bid — Priebus and McConnell were mostly quiet during the back-and-forth. They did not signal support for an overt anti-Trump effort. 

But near the end, McConnell and Priebus acknowledged to the group that a deadlocked convention is something the party should prepare for, both institutionally within the RNC and politically at all levels in the coming months.

This is a 100% bluff in response to Trump's 100% bluff that he's going to run a third party campaign. Both Trump and the GOP establishment are full of crap here.  If the GOP leadership had some magic by-law that rendered primary/caucus votes to be null and void, they would have used it long before now.

This is all for show, because it keeps people interested, and those who back the GOP leaders in Washington will donate to the RNC, and those who don't will donate to Trump, and both sides win in this case.

Besides, Trump winning primary states is exactly what's going to happen.  Trump knows it so he won't drop out of the GOP side.  The GOP knows it so they can't cut him off yet.

It's a game, and Republicans are happy to play.  Sadly, so is our media.

Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

I'm not surprised by this Kentucky Medicaid poll finding by the NY Times in the least.

More than seven in 10 residents of Kentucky want their new governor, Matt Bevin, to keep the state’s expanded Medicaid program as it is, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. And more than half of respondents described Medicaid as important for themselves and their families, underscoring the program’s substantial reach in the state and the challenges Mr. Bevin may face if he seeks to scale back or modify it. 

Mr. Bevin, a Republican who took office Tuesday, is an opponent of the Affordable Care Act who earlier this year called for reversing the Medicaid expansion on the grounds that it was unaffordable for the state. He has since backpedaled to say he will seek changes requiring Medicaid enrollees to have “skin in the game,” such as by charging them monthly premiums. 

“I do not intend to re-enroll people at this same level going forward,” Mr. Bevin said in a news conference after his election. 

Yet the Kaiser poll, conducted Nov. 18 through Dec. 1, found that 63 percent of Kentuckians have a favorable opinion of their state’s Medicaid expansion. Support for the expanded Medicaid program was significant even among Republicans, of whom 54 percent said they would prefer to keep Medicaid as it is rather than scale it back to cover fewer people. Of respondents who voted for Mr. Bevin last month, 43 percent said they preferred keeping the program as it is now. 

“This is a very poor state and people here can’t even afford to buy food,” said one respondent, Daryl Tackett, 57, a Republican in Harrodsburg, Ky., who said he did not vote in the election. “I don’t want him to take the Medicaid away because there’s too many people that needs it.” 

Bevin will do it anyway, because the majority of the people who voted for him want to cut Medicaid, and the people who didn't vote for him don't matter. And people like Mr. Tackett here don't want him to take Medicaid away, but he sure as hell didn't bother to try to vote for Jack Conway in order to keep it, now did he?

I mean, what are the people who will be hurt by Bevin's promised massive budget cuts do in November 2019, vote?

What makes you think they would do that?  I'll tell you what there Daryl, maybe you should have voted.

StupidiNews!

• After nearly 48 hours of deliberation, jurors found former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holzclaw guilty on multiple counts of raping poor minority women.
• Syrian opposition groups have come to the negotiating table to discuss peace as long as President Bashar al-Assad steps down as part of a political transition solution.
• The FBI is searching a lake in San Bernardino in connection with last week's deadly shooting, officials say the search could take several days.
• Time is running out for Congress to come up with a solution to Puerto Rico's debt crisis before January 1, as the island is running out of cash quickly.
• Online gaming service Steam is taking measures to deal with the hacking and pillaging of more than 75,000 user accounts a month for tradeable digital loot.

Last Call For Naming The Problem

There's reams of evidence that "black sounding names" are discriminated against, in job hunting, in the classroom, by local government officials and in getting bank loans. No surprise then that the internet economy of stuff is the same goddamn way.

The lack of anonymity on Airbnb may lead to persistent racial discrimination, a working paper from Harvard Business School found. Renters with names that sounded African American had a harder time booking reservations on the site than those who had white-sounding names, according to the study. 

Researchers set up 6,400 fake profiles of Airbnb guests and assigned them stereotypically white or black names, based on Massachusetts birth certificate data from the 1970s. None of the guest profiles had identifying pictures. They used the accounts to request bookings with hosts in five cities: Baltimore, Dallas, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Airbnb hosts decide whom they want to rent to; requests from white guests got “yes” responses 50 percent of the time, vs. 42 percent for black applicants. The researchers controlled for a variety of factors, such as the host’s gender and ratings, and the “race effect,” as the paper described it, persisted. 

“Life is tough if you’re a black guest on Airbnb,” said Ben Edelman, an associate professor at HBS and one of the study’s authors. “Particularly when you compare it to the baseline of the way things used to be. If you’re a black guest, you just make a reservation at the Marriott.”

For its part, Airbnb says it doesn’t support discrimination. “Airbnb is one of the most open, trusted, diverse, transparent communities in the world,” a spokesperson said in a statement sent to Bloomberg. “We respond quickly to any concerns raised by hosts or guests, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination on our platform.” 

The paper comes from the same researchers who in 2014 discovered racial discrimination against hosts. That study found nonblack renters could charge 12 percent more, on average, holding everything else constant. The differential in the new study is less stark, but still statistically significant, Edelman said. “Anything more than zero is something we should aspire to fix,” he said.

And I'm willing to bet that Pedro and Lourdes, or hey, Sayeed and Fatima?  Same problem, varying degrees.  Just another microaggression in a country full of them, where the default is white, and white is good.  The internet economy didn't fix racism, it just made it more efficient, and you don't even have to leave your house for it anymore.

America, baby.

That Would Explain A Few Things

In talking about changing median incomes, Five Thirty Eight's Ben Casselman gives us a Pew Research chart that goes a long way towards explaining the "take back our country" folks on the right:



Seems pretty clear to me why younger white folks without four-year college degrees (who have seen their median incomes drop by 15-20% from where their parents were at that age) are increasingly drawn to taking the country back 50 years, huh.

So yeah, if you're a thirtyish white guy without a bachelor's degree, you're in much worse financial shape than your parents were 20-25 years ago at that age and especially compared to your grandparents 45-50 years ago.

If you're black however, even as rough as things are now, they're still better than they were in the 70s.

This explains a lot about the GOP.

Speculation Nation

It's too early to tell what the motive for Colorado Springs shooter Robert Dear really was, I mean it's not like the guy is going to tell the world he's guilty and that he shot up the Planned Parenthood clinic there because of the really reprehensible series of debunked videos claiming the organization sold dead babies for profit.

Robert L. Dear Jr. was charged with 179 counts on Wednesday, including first-degree murder, in connection with the deadly shooting rampage last month at a Planned Parenthood clinic. 

Bearded, unkempt and cuffed at the legs and arms, Mr. Dear frequently disrupted the proceedings in state court here, shouting out declarations of anger and defiance. 

“I’m guilty. There’s no trial. I’m a warrior for the babies,” he yelled at one point. “Let it all come out. The truth!” he yelled at another. 

As Judge Gilbert A. Martinez discussed a pretrial publicity order, Mr. Dear shouted: “Could you add the babies that were supposed to be aborted that day? Could you add that to the list?” 

It was the first in-person appearance in court for Mr. Dear since his arrest on Nov. 27 after the attack on the clinic, which left three people dead and nine wounded. He was arrested by the police after a tense, hourslong, nationally televised standoff.

No, we may never know the motive behind this.  Meanwhile, back to your regularly scheduled dose of daily fearmongering against Muslims, black people, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and anybody else who isn't a real "Murican.

StupidiNews!

• House Republicans will release a report today accusing President Obama of violating federal law bypassing Congress with a 2014 prisoner exchange for captive Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
• Police in Buena Park, California are investigating the defacement of a Sikh temple in Orange County with anti-Muslim graffiti as a hate crime.
• Mudslides, widespread power outages affecting thousands, and two dead are all being blamed on heavy rainfall in the Pacific Northwest, some areas have seen more than a foot of rain.
• OPEC says crude production rose to its highest level in three years last month as the oil cartel seeks to drive non-OPEC exporters like Canada and the US out of the market with low prices. 
• The FDA has approved civilian use of a military syringe-like device that injects dozens of tiny sponges into gunshot wounds to prevent blood loss.

Last Call For Hell Freezing Over

Meanwhile, in a late Both Sides Do It 2015 Hall of Fame submission, Sen. Ted Cruz, the prime beneficiary of the "At least he's not Trump" theory of GOP nomination, went on NPR this morning to tell liberals that all those climate scientists are all stupid and wrong, not like Ted Cruz.

CRUZ: So let me ask you a question, Steve. Is there global warming, yes or no? 

INSKEEP: According to the scientists, absolutely. 

CRUZ: I'm asking you. 

INSKEEP: Sure. 

CRUZ: OK, you are incorrect, actually. The scientific evidence doesn't support global warming. For the last 18 years, the satellite data - we have satellites that monitor the atmosphere. The satellites that actually measure the temperature showed no significant warming whatsoever. 

INSKEEP: I'll just note that NASA analyzes that same data differently. But we can go on. 

CRUZ: But no, they don't. You can go and look at the data. And by the way, this hearing - we have a number of scientists who are testifying about the data. But here's the key point. Climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big government politician who wants more power. Why? Because it is a theory that can never be disproven. 

INSKEEP: Do you question the science on other widely accepted issues - for example, evolution? 

CRUZ: There is a fundamental difference, which is in the name of global warming, you have politicians trying to impose trillions of dollars of cost on the world. In the I-95 Corridor, among the Washington elite, global warming is very popular because it makes you feel good about caring for the world. But I'll tell you, you know who I'm concerned about? I'm concerned about the single mom waiting tables right now, who for seven years of the Obama economy has been trapped in stagnation. Her wages have been stagnating. It's harder and harder to make ends meet. And what the Washington elites are trying to do is double her energy bill. 

INSKEEP: Do you question other science, like evolution? 

CRUZ: Any good scientist questions all science. If you show me a scientist that stops questioning science, I'll show you someone who isn't a scientist. And I'll tell you, Steve. And I'll tell you why this has shifted. Look in the world of global warming. What is the language they use? They call anyone who questions the science - who even points to the satellite data - they call you a, quote, "denier." Denier is not the language of science. Denier is the language of religion. It is heretic. You are a blasphemer. It's treated as a theology. But it's about power and money. At the end of the day, it's not complicated. This is liberal politicians who want government power. 

INSKEEP: You know that your critics would say that it's about power and money on your side. Let's not go there for the moment. But I want to ask about this. I want to ask about facts. 

CRUZ: But hold on a second. Who's power - but let's stop. I mean, if you are going to... 

INSKEEP: Energy industry, oil industry, Texas... 

CRUZ: If you're going to toss an ad hominem. 

INSKEEP: OK, not meaning to be an ad hominem. But you know. You know there are economic interests on all sides of this. 

CRUZ: If you're going to toss an ad hominem, then let's actually respond because there's not a moral equivalency. You say it is about power and money. I'm trying to keep power with the American people. I'm trying to keep power with the single mom waiting tables not to drive up her energy bills. I'm trying to keep power with the teenage immigrant, like my dad was, washing dishes. Now, how is that about power and money other than keeping Washington out of their lives and making it easier for people to achieve the American dream? That's who I'm fighting for.

I like Steve Inskeep.  I listen to him daily.  But Cruz just stomps the hell out of him here and Inskeep does nothing to try to stop him.  Inskeep tries to ask Cruz about facts and seconds later is apologizing to Cruz for making an ad hominem argument, and then Cruz immediately goes on to make an ad hominem argument.

If you want to know why Republicans are winning the battle for hearts and minds in America over global warming, and dragging everyone else down into the depths of cynicism and apathy so that nothing gets done, this interview is a perfect example.

Inskeep not only accepts Cruz's idiotic framing, he apologizes for trying to bring the interview back to facts and ends up on trial himself in the court of Ted Cruz's bonkers opinions.

Amazing stuff here, this is a professional Gish Gallop done by a talented liar, and Inskeep, a veteran journalist and interviewer with decades of experience, is completely helpless.

Multiply that by millions of interaction over years and you see why and how we have America a country where we're calling scientist liars and Republicans can stand bravely against a global conspiracy instead of being laughed off the planet.

Yes, Presidents Can Bar All Immigrants From A Country

As Temple University law professor Peter Spiro explains over at the NY Times, the President does indeed have pretty overwhelming authority in determining who can enter the country as an immigrant, and setting criteria for that.  And should a Republican reactionary (you know, any of the GOP 2016 candidates) end up in the White House, they will have broad powers to do just that.

The court has given the political branches the judicial equivalent of a blank check to regulate immigration as they see fit. This posture of extreme deference is known as the “plenary power” doctrine. It dates back to the 1889 decision in the Chinese Exclusion case, in which the court upheld the exclusion of Chinese laborers based on their nationality. 

Unlike other bygone constitutional curiosities that offend our contemporary sensibilities, the Chinese Exclusion case has never been overturned. More recent decisions have upheld discrimination against immigrants based on gender and illegitimacy that would never have survived equal protection scrutiny in the domestic context. Likewise, courts have rejected the assertion of First Amendment free speech protections by noncitizens.
Nor has the Supreme Court ever struck down an immigration classification, even ones based on race. As late as 1965, a federal appeals court upheld a measure that counted a Brazilian citizen of Japanese descent as Asian for the purposes of immigration quotas. 

In the context of noncitizens seeking initial entry into the United States, due process protections don’t apply, either. This past June, the court upheld the denial of a visa for the spouse of an American citizen based on the government’s say-so, with no supporting evidence. 

The courts have justified this constitutional exceptionalism on the grounds that immigration law implicates foreign relations and national security — even in the absence of a specific, plausible foreign policy rationale. The 1977 Fiallo case, for instance, involved a father seeking the admission of his out-of-wedlock son from the French West Indies — hardly the stuff of national interest. 

Indeed, contrary to the conventional understanding, President Trump could implement the scheme on his own, without Congress’s approval. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president the authority to suspend the entry of “any class of aliens” on his finding that their entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” President Obama has used this to the better end of excluding serious human rights violators.

In other words, Presidents have long had this power.  The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, later amended in 1965, has given the President power to exclude immigrants for national security reasons.

Expect Republicans to demand that President Obama issue blanket denials of all immigration from "terrorist" countries, something that of course would be horrific and would most likely generate major reprisals and economic sanctions, an issue that would suddenly disappear on January 20, 2017 should a Republican president be sworn in.

Or, you know, maybe we'll just stop taking immigrants from certain countries because we'll have elected an awful, fascist Republican to the White House.

America: A One Act Play

Looking forward to things like this happening over and over again the next forever here in The Donald's America. Coming to a city near you:

Two Austin women said over the weekend that they had experienced anti-Muslim hate speech at a local cafe, and that other customers sat in silence as they were “humiliated.” 

KTBC reported that the two Muslim women, Leilah Abdennabi and Sirat Al-Nahi, said that they had hoped to enjoy Sunday lunch at Austin’s popular Kerbey Lane Cafe. 

“My friend and I just experienced Islamophobia in Austin,” Abdennabi wrote in a Sunday Facebook posting. “This is the first time this has happened to me in Austin.
Leilah, a Chicago-born Palestinian-American, explained that she found her friend “crying and upset” inside the restaurant. 

“Apparently while I was parking some man next to her said something’s about things about my driving and that I should just ‘go back to Saudi Arabia’,” she wrote. 

The man went on to ask if Al-Nahi “had a gun” and then said that she should “just shoot him,” the women recalled. 

“I literally couldn’t believe he said that and I asked him to repeat what he had just said,” Al-Nahi added in a separate Facebook post. “I couldn’t believe what he said and I guess I hoped someone would have the humanity to acknowledge it because their silence hurt just as much as his words.” 

The women said that the restaurant’s host eventually made a “pathetic attempt to deescalate the situation” by seating the man, but the damage had been done. 

“They chose to seat the racist guy who just made a girl cry right in from them, rather than us,” Al-Nahi wrote. “When we spoke to management, they basically said they were sorry it happened, but they can’t do anything.” 

Abdennabi said that the pair decided to leave because they no longer felt welcome. 

“As we were leaving I told the people watching ‘Just so you know, we were told racist things and this restaurant doesn’t feel the need to address it because who cares about us?'” she noted. “Another white guy shouted ‘Nobody.'” 

“We left,” Al-Nahi added. “Because it was true.”

The cast changes from time to time, but America was born from racism and it thrives today, we just find new groups to hate, punish, hurt, and oh yeah, kill.

StupidiNews!

• Afghan officials say eight civilians and all three gunmen were killed in a Taliban attack on Kandahar's airport on Tuesday evening.
• The FBI will launch a new system to track victims of police violence after admitting British newspaper The Guardian had better data than the agency on the number of civilians killed.
• A new study finds that a record number of American renters are paying 30% or more of their income for rent, and more than 11 million are paying 50% or more.
• Manufacturing giant Dow Chemical is in talks with rival DuPont to create the world's second largest chemical company in a possible $115 billion mega-merger.
• A bipartisan Senate bill requiring tech firms to report online terror activity is being taken off the back burner in the wake of recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.

Last Call For The View From Nowhere

Steve Benen makes an excellent catch on why Republicans constantly and consistently get away with their behavior as he notes Charlie Rose's interview with Hillary Clinton:

Which leads us to the 2016 election cycle and Hillary Clinton’s confrontation with the same question the president heard in the last cycle. Consider this exchange from Tuesday between the Democratic frontrunner and CBS News’ Charlie Rose. 

ROSE: A lot of people think the biggest problem for America is Washington. And that’s reflected in some of the politics that we see. 

CLINTON: Yes, that’s true. But look at the way our Founders set it up. They set up this separation of powers. And they made it really difficult to get things done. And some years it’s really hard. We’re in one of these periods where we have a minority within the other party that doesn’t believe in compromise, doesn’t believe in reaching consensus – 

ROSE: But there you go attacking them. That’s not the way to do it! 

CLINTON: No. Because part of what you have to do is make it clear to everyone else who is in that party that there is room for negotiation. 

Clinton’s answers were important, but not quite as illustrative as Rose’s line of questioning.

Note Rose's response to what, as Benen points out, are all true statements by Clinton.

Pointing out the objective truth, that there is a subset of Republicans that do not believe in reaching a consensus, is a "partisan attack" in Rose's mind and he says so.

In other words, we have a Beltway journalist who believes telling the objective truth about the GOP is a partisan attack.

Benen:

Note that everything Clinton said happens to be true. Objectively, by any fair measure, there’s a significant contingent among congressional Republicans that “doesn’t believe in compromise” and “doesn’t believe in reaching consensus.” I’m hard pressed to imagine any observer, of any ideological stripe, making the case that Clinton’s wrong about this. 

But as it happens, for some, it doesn’t matter if what Clinton said is true. If you’ve ever wondered why so many media professionals cling to the “both sides are always to blame, facts be damned” narrative, this offers a powerful hint: to acknowledge simple truths about many congressional Republicans sounds like an “attack,” and must therefore be avoided.

It's always "both sides do it".  And both sides always means "Democrats are to blame".