It should not surprise us that Judge Roy Moore supporters and others on the extreme right have taken to lambasting the Washington Post. When it comes to credible news outlets, to quote Jon Stewart, the Roy Moores of the world “got nothing.”

If you are a progressive, if you are a moderate, you have a wide range of local and national media outlets that present empirical evidence and provide skilled analysis. The Washington Post may now be the flagship publication because it has almost unlimited resources thanks to the ownership of Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame.

But obviously the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other newspapers and magazines are constantly providing credible journalism. When it comes to electronic media, there is PBS, NPR as well as CNN, MSNBC and CBS. Then there are the exclusively on-line newspapers such as the Huffington Post.

If you’re a Roy Moore supporter in Alabama, a follower of Steve Bannon and Breitbart, a member of the Tea Party, you have to feel that you are consistently being piled on by this national media.

Yes, this credible media makes mistakes, witness the writings of Judith Miller of the New York Times on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but by and large they apply the type of thinking reflective of the Enlightenment that has been a cornerstone of America democracy throughout its history.

It’s possible that if the Founding Fathers were still amongst us, one of their biggest disappointments would be the disdain that so many Americans have for using empirical evidence as the basis of reaching conclusions. Part of the dissonance between the Founding Fathers and those currently on the right wing is that the Fathers tended to be skeptical of literal interpretation of the Bible. To many on the right, a literal interpretation of the Bible (when convenient) provides a respite from the challenges of rational thinking.

If there are few in the land of Roy Moore who want to, or are capable of, providing rational analysis of contemporary events, then the people are truly at a loss. If it is more important to the people to believe that they are a persecuted minority, then what they might read in the Washington Post, etc.  just further reinforces their notion of being the little people who are kicked around.

What is interesting and equally sad is that many other minorities seem to be able to cut through the B.S., correctly identify their oppressors, and develop strategies to improve their situations. The civil right movement was based on a commitment to the values delineated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There was a minimal amount of “poor me” and a great deal more emphasis on self-improvement and building bridges with one-time and even current oppressors.

Irony of ironies may be that white Southerners who historically have berated and discriminated against African-Americans now see a landscape in which more and more African-Americans are reaching the American dream and thriving in an information society. At the same time, so many on the right, particularly those who are white, just seem flummoxed by the way the world operates. Their frustration leads to resentment towards the main branches of this information society including such credible media points as the Washington Post.

As upsetting as it can be to have one of our fifty states seriously considering sending the likes of Roy Moore to represent them in the United States Senate, it is also saddening. It is even understandable that those who are so left behind modern society would rather fight for non-separation of church and state, fight to protect a likely sexual abuser, fight for someone who seems incapable of trying to advance the economic and human rights interests of the people of Alabama, than to see Roy Moore as he is and cast him aside for someone more modern.

Reconstruction has had its successes, look at Atlanta. But there is still so far to go.

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Republicans often like to see issues in black and white with no room for shades of gray. This means that they cannot accommodate luck or happenstance or even nuance in describing why or how something happens. One of the best examples of this myopic vision by Republicans is the way Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham responded to the unfortunate attack on Benghazi, Libya in September 2012. They took an event that literally occurred in the dark and to which there were no clear answers and then made an absolutist interpretation, with a paucity of facts to substantiate it.

Some Republicans have been trying to blame the Obama Administration for the recent Boston Marathon bombings. It’s possible that their accusations of an administration failure in gathering and utilizing intelligence is valid, if and only if, they support the near absolute suppression of our right to privacy. Republicans hate the government doing any kind of snooping, unless it helps them make an argument from which they may gain politically.

Washington Post journalists Greg Miller and Sari Horowitz recently wrote a most revealing article, Boston case highlights limitations of U.S. counterterror network. They outline many of the new steps that U.S. intelligence agencies have taken since 9-11 to coordinate retrieval of and access to information. However, they limit their investigations when the privacy rights of likely innocent citizens are at risk.  They are walking a tightwire, and they have to do it very delicately.  They state:

It has been more than a decade since the United States began building its massive counterterrorism infrastructure, an apparatus that has been reconfigured several times in recent years after a series of near-miss attacks.

The strike in Boston marked the first time that a terrorist bomb plot slipped past those elaborate defenses and ended in casualties in the United States. Whether that outcome represents an intelligence failure is already the focus of a multi-agency review as well as a heated political debate.

The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.

In Boston, some of those factors were as fundamental and elusive as timing and luck.

“When this happens, there’s sort of an automatic response to find a linkage to failure,” said Andrew Liepman, who served as deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last year. It’s perfectly reasonable to look into whether there were breakdowns, Liepman said. “But that massive counterterrorism infrastructure works amazingly well to protect the country. We need to get used to the idea that it isn’t foolproof.”

In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the obstacles for U.S. authorities ranged from a misspelling on an airplane boarding pass to the apparent refusal of Russian authorities to go beyond their initial tip. Ultimately, however, perhaps the best chance to detect and disrupt the plot fell into a six-month span on the calendar, the near-empty space between when the FBI stopped watching Tsarnaev and when he is alleged to have begun laying the groundwork for the Boston plot.

The details that have emerged so far suggest there are still institutional gaps that could be fixed to bolster the nation’s counterterrorism system. But the bombings also exposed a less-reassuring reality: Even when defenses function as designed, they can be undermined by factors beyond their control.

As Miller and Horowitz say, sometimes it’s luck; sometimes it’s factors beyond intelligence officials’ control. These factors raise their heads as stopgaps when protecting the right to privacy is endangered without sufficient evidence to justify it.

What happened in Boston was terrible. But with three people killed and hundreds injured, it was nowhere near the carnage of 9-11,  in which nearly three thousand people were killed and many more thousands injured. It is the only case since 9-11 of American citizens being killed in an act of terrorism that seemingly has foreign connections. We should be most thankful that we went eleven and a half years between such events. The many successes that our intelligence communities have are often invisible and also accomplished under considerable duress. Their work and bravery should not be demeaned by baseless Republican fishing expeditions, whose sole purpose is to place specious blame on the Democratic Party.

It is true that we must be vigilant with how our intelligence agents and policy-makers handle themselves in the fight to control terrorism. There are obviously a myriad of mistakes. The element of bad luck comes in when the universe of government mistakes intersects with the universe of attempted terrorist attacks (see image below). We do our best to minimize those intersections from happening. When they do, it is not an indictment of the whole intelligence network. Rather,  it is usually something that fell between the cracks at a most unfortunate time. We need to try to correct this, but also learn to live with it as we do with other misfortunes that are going to happen from time to time regardless of what we do.  It’s no time for Republican lame chatter.

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Fully understanding economics is definitely above my pay grade, but I have plenty of company with that, including the best of our economists, the ones who are humble. So as another fallible observer of the American economy, I’ll try to make a little sense of three recent additions to our body of economic knowledge.

1. On June 2, we learned that the recent trend of creating approximately 175,000 private sector jobs in the American economy was broken when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 54,000 new jobs in May. To put that in perspective, if one company, McDonald’s, had not hired 60,000 in May, we would have had negative job growth.

2. The Washington Post, with Bloomberg Business, reported a new study on where the jobs are four- and-a-half years after the recent (or current) recession began in December 2006.

3. Fareed Zakaria, a gentleman who has a remarkable ability to make sense of both foreign affairs and economics, has penned an article in TIME Magazine called, “The Future of Innovation: Can America Keep Pace?”

The United States seems to live in a duality of the 24-hour news cycle and the four-year presidential cycle. In the case of the poor job figures for May 2011, the emphasis turned to presidential politics. Had the political strength that Barack Obama had built since the beginning of last year’s Lame Duck session of Congress hit a bump on the road? Republican geniuses like Mitt “I Believe in America, and I’m Running for President” Romney asserted the America is “inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” Maybe he’s Kenyan, learned the metric system first, and has difficulty converting to the British system of measurement that is commonly used in the United States. He seems to be blind to the damage that Wall Street has done to the American economy. Their mischief ratcheted up when the government loosened the reins of oversight and allowed the financial moguls to drift so many miles further into unfettered capitalism that they had traveled well over the horizon and were no longer in sight.

The dip in employment growth may be caused by something as benign as inexplicable cycles, to structural problems that have been created with bi-partisan failure to consider jobs as the key issue facing Americans. Republicans continue to grasp the misbegotten idea that if the wealthy have more money, they will use it to hire more American workers. Their failure to do so is why the stock market is benefitting them by being close to pre-recession figures, where employment has plateaued at a level well below December 2006 figures. Since this recession began, five college classes have graduated, each facing a job market far more daunting that what existed when their parents entered the job market.

Upon taking office, President Barack Obama worked with Congress to fashion a $700 billion stimulus package. Assessments of it range from the utterly absurd position of many Republicans, “The stimulus has created no new jobs” to the timidity of most Democrats, “We cannot afford another stimulus.”

As Tulane Professor Melissa Harris-Perry stated, the stimulus was very effective when money went directly from the federal government to individual Americans. One of the prime examples was the “cash for clunkers” program, which provided real economic benefits to individuals who traded in gas-guzzling cars for newer, more fuel efficient ones. The stimulus has been ineffective when states such as Florida simply refuse the money out of some arcane principle, or when states take the money and embed it in their entrenched bureaucracies. What is needed is another stimulus, perhaps two, that have the federal government directly creating jobs, as was the case in Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”

The Washington Post with Bloomberg Business piece analyzes job changes in a variety of sectors since the recession began. Perhaps the sector that is truest to free-market capitalism is mining and logging, where employment has almost directly followed oil prices. There have also been increases in education and health service, but it is not clear whether the newly hired are truly teachers or medical practitioners, as opposed to bureaucrats. Manufacturing is way down and clearly will not recover without New Deal-type remedies. Jobs in construction are down nearly 30%, a reflection of our housing crisis and the lack of investment by businesses. Recovery will not occur without more engagement from the visible hand of government stimulus.

Fareed Zakaria is deeply concerned about America’s decline in innovation. He points out that a recent study of innovation in forty countries from the period of 1999 to 2009, the U.S. came in last. This is a far greater concern than month-by-month employment figures.

Let’s hope that the employment figures for June skyrocket. Whether they do or don’t, the bottom line remains, we have serious structural problems that are unlikely to be solved until we have dramatic action. George Bush showed with gratuitous tax cuts and two unnecessary wars that the federal government was big enough to create many of our current problems. Now is the time to show, as FDR did, that the federal government is the only entity big enough to solve these problems. As citizens, we must give the federal government that mandate.

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