Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch Heads To Australia As Fox News Faces Headwinds

 NPR

DAVID FOLKENFLIK

Fox Corp.'s Lachlan Murdoch 

Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images

Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corp. CEO and executive chairman, has departed Los Angeles and returned to Australia with his wife and children, according to three people with ties to the Murdoch family.

His move comes at a time when the company's most profitable property is confronting daunting challenges: Fox News currently faces two new defamation lawsuits from election machine and software companies seeking combined damages of $4.3 billion.

The network is accused of hosting and amplifying false claims of a conspiracy to rig the 2020 general election against former President Donald Trump. (Fox News denies the allegations and said it's proud of its coverage.)

MEDIA

Dominion Voting Systems Files $1.6 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox News

Fox News' opinion stars have been among the former president's top advocates, advisers and apologists, on and off the air.

Yet the top-rated cable news network is straining to appeal to Trump loyalists to stave off sharp drops in ratings. Many viewers peeled away after the elections in reaction to the network's coverage of President Biden's win.

Murdoch's children are now enrolled in school in Sydney, Australia's largest city, and the family is expected to stay there at least through the start of the next school year.

Many Americans as well many executives have scattered to alternate locations to ride out the pandemic. The company has not explained to employees how Murdoch intends to run the company a half-world away. Fox Corp. released a brief statement Tuesday evening: "Lachlan continues to split his time between Los Angeles, New York and Sydney as he has for years. Our businesses all are thriving, even as we, like most organizations, have predominately managed our teams and communicated by zoom for the last 12 months."

POLITICS

Election Tech Company Sues Fox News, Giuliani And Others For $2.7 Billion

Lachlan Murdoch is the elder son of the founder of the family's media empire, Rupert Murdoch; the elder Murdoch is executive chairman and Lachlan is co-chairman of News Corp., the family's newspaper and book publishing company.

Though effectively controlled by the Murdochs, the two companies are publicly traded, and Fox Corp. currently has a market valuation exceeding $21 billion. Fox owns the Fox News Channel, Fox Business, Fox Sports and the Fox broadcast network, among other properties.

By far, the most important property in Fox Corp.'s portfolio is Fox News Media, which also includes the conservative paid streaming platform Fox Nation. It generates more than $2 billion in profits annually, reportedly more than 80% of the parent company's profits.

Murdoch is running a far smaller empire than his father did: Two years ago, the family sold off the vast majority of its Hollywood and entertainment holdings in a deal valued at more than $71 billion and refashioned the prior company around live news and live sports.

It also gave up its controlling stake in a huge British-based satellite television company, Sky, which was obtained by Comcast.

MEDIA

With Trump's Loss, Murdoch's Fox News Faces Wrath And Tough Choices

Lachlan Murdoch was born in London; his father and his wife are native Australians, and the family retains close ties there. Indeed, in 2005, then just 33, Murdoch resigned from a top job in New York City helping to oversee the family's corporation and moved to Sydney even though he was his father's anointed successor.

Murdoch was frustrated by what he saw as Rupert Murdoch's unwillingness to prevent corporate machinations against him by some of his top executives, including Peter Chernin, then president of the company, and the late Roger Ailes, head of Fox News. Rupert Murdoch wanted Lachlan to learn to fight and win his own battles.

Lachlan Murdoch struck out on his own in Australia, with modest success. His younger brother, James Murdoch, ascended to be the new apparent successor to Rupert Murdoch. (All the C-suite politicking inspired the HBO hit series Succession.)

Yet Lachlan Murdoch returned to his father's side when James was tripped up by the family's British tabloid scandals a decade ago, and he rejoined the fold as co-chairman of the companies in 2014, taking on increasing stature.

James, never comfortable with the conservative tilt of the company's tabloids and Fox News, resigned his remaining corporate positions last summer. He has been critical of their coverage of climate change, the push for racial equity, and Trump.

MEDIA

James Murdoch Quits Family Media Empire News Corp After 'Disagreements'

Lachlan Murdoch still retains control of an Australian media company called Nova Entertainment, built around radio properties.

Even at the age of 90, his father is still seen as a defining force at Fox and News Corp., making Lachlan Murdoch's own influence in piloting the larger family's holdings tough to discern.

Fox News remains a huge success, but one with unanswered questions about its path forward at a time of growing competition. The conservative news channel Newsmax, for example, enjoyed a strong boost in ratings for a few months.

But in March, Fox News reclaimed the ratings lead after falling behind CNN and MSNBC in January.

To the anger of Trump and many of his supporters, Fox News was the first major news outlet to project that Biden would win Arizona. Its reporters also debunked many of the false claims of voter fraud found on its opinion shows.

In recent weeks, Fox has sought to appeal tangibly to disaffected viewers. It hired former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as a co-host and Lara Trump, a daughter-in-law of the former president who is considering a run for the U.S. Senate, as a contributor.

Under Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, Fox forced out its political director, Chris Stirewalt, who helped to affirm the decision to project Arizona for Biden; its Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, left, too, along with more than a dozen news-side digital journalists.

BUSINESS

Fox News Media Cancels 'Lou Dobbs Tonight'

Opinion shows have been given more prominent slots at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., which were previously led by news anchors, and news programs now contain extensive segments based on exchanges taken from the network's leading opinion shows.

That said, Fox News executives permanently pulled star Fox Business host Lou Dobbs off the air a day after the Smartmatic elections software company sued for $2.7 billion. Earlier this month, the Dominion voting machine company sued for $1.6 billion.

Both companies said that Dobbs, several prominent colleagues and frequent Fox News guests, including Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, had defamed them in baseless claims of conspiracy to falsify election results. (In responding to the lawsuit publicly, Fox has noted segments from its reporters refuting or casting doubt on their claims; prime-time star Tucker Carlson also laced into Powell over failing to provide evidence.)

Fox has come in for sharp condemnation for the rhetoric of some of its stars and guests ahead of the Jan. 6 protests that turned into a siege of Congress.

"I think we're very happy with where we're positioned," Lachlan Murdoch told investors at an event staged by Morgan Stanley earlier this month. "It's, you know, insane to think that we would have the center and right of the political sort of news and opinion and analysis on our own. And we welcome that competition."

He said Fox would not change its focus.

"We think that's where America is," Murdoch said. "Seventy-five million people voted for a Republican president, sometimes in spite of his ... his personality at times. And so they believe in those politics and they feel strongly about those political and policy positions. And that's what we represent. And so you know, we're going to stick to the center-right. We think that's where our audience is."

Tucker Carlson Dared Question a Trump Lawyer. The Backlash Was Quick.

The president’s allies quickly closed ranks behind Sidney Powell and her pro-Trump conspiracy theory, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.

Sidney Powell, an election lawyer for President Trump, has laid out a conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked and millions of votes were stolen from the president.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

NY TIMES

By Jeremy W. Peters
Nov. 20, 2020

For more than a week, a plain-spoken former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell made the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist” interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal millions of votes from President Trump.

She spoke mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio. Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the fourth-largest talk radio audience, and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her patriotism and courage.

So it came as most unwelcome news to the president’s defenders when Tucker Carlson, host of an 8 p.m. Fox News show and a confidant of Mr. Trump, dissected Ms. Powell’s claims as unreliable and unproven.

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

The response was immediate, and hostile. The president’s allies in conservative media and their legions of devoted Trump fans quickly closed ranks behind Ms. Powell and her case on behalf of the president, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.

“How quickly we turn on our own,” said Bo Snerdley, Mr. Limbaugh’s producer, in a Twitter post that was indicative of the backlash against Mr. Carlson. “Where is the ‘evidence’ the election was fair?”

The backlash against Mr. Carlson and Fox for daring to exert even a moment of independence underscores how little willingness exists among Republicans to challenge the president and his false narrative about the election he insists was stolen. Among conservative media voices and outlets, there’s generally not just a lack of willingness — they have proved this month to be Mr. Trump’s most reflexive defenders.

For months before the election, as Mr. Trump spread disinformation about the reliability of mail-in ballots, Republicans largely avoided contradicting him and insisted that his concerns about fraud were not entirely unreasonable. And in the weeks since election night, when Mr. Trump falsely declared himself the winner and then refused to accept President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, the acknowledgments that the race is settled have come mostly from former officials like President George W. Bush, or from a few current office holders, like Senator Mitt Romney, who have not been afraid to air their differences with Mr. Trump.

The same fear that grips elected Republicans — getting on the wrong side of voters who adore Mr. Trump but have little affection for the Republican Party — has kept conservative media largely in line. And that has created a right-wing media bubble that has grown increasingly disconnected from the most basic facts about American government in recent weeks, including who will be inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 2021.

In the hours after Mr. Carlson’s monologue, word of which spread quickly across social media, Mr. Trump’s supporters not only went after Mr. Carlson but also Fox News. The network has become a source of particular frustration with many on the right after taking a more skeptical view of Mr. Trump’s claims about voter fraud and refusing to reconsider its call on election night that Mr. Biden would win Arizona.

That decision, which proved correct, deeply angered the president and led him to start promoting some of Fox’s smaller competitors on cable like Newsmax and One America News Network as more suitable alternatives for his large and loyal following.

Roosh Valizadeh, a writer and podcast host who supports the president, summed up the anger aimed at Fox by many on the right, saying, “As long as Tucker Carlson works for Fox News, he can’t be fully trusted.”

All week on networks like Newsmax and OANN and talk radio programs, the president’s supporters have been given a steady diet of interviews with Trump allies, campaign officials and news stories that promote allegations of fraud with little or no context.

One lawyer who is assisting the Trump campaign in its efforts, Lin Wood, went unquestioned this week on Mr. Levin’s show when he made the fantastical claim that Mr. Trump had won the election with 70 percent of the vote. A story that OANN broadcast on Friday afternoon falsely declared, “The state of Michigan is back in play,” giving credence to Mr. Trump’s extraordinary but almost certainly unsuccessful efforts to delay certification of the vote in Detroit.

Republican officials have remained mostly measured and muted in their response, even after the conspiratorial and unsubstantiated claims floated by Ms. Powell, Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team at a news conference on Thursday. Republicans like Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who said that Ms. Powell’s accusations were “absolutely outrageous,” were the exception.

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review and sometimes critic of the president who called his refusal to concede “absurd and sophomoric,” said that whether it was a Republican politician or a talk-show host, breaking the will that many Trump supporters have to believe he is the rightful winner was extremely difficult.

“They want it to be true,” Mr. Lowry said. “On top of that, there’s an enormous credibility gap and radical distrust of other sources of information. And that’s compounded by the fact that the president has no standards and is surrounded by these clownish people who will say anything. It’s a toxic stew.”

Mr. Lowry added that he thought Mr. Carlson’s words were “admirable” and had told the Fox host so himself. “It’s one thing for people who’ve been opposed to Trump all along, or mixed, to say something like that,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s another thing for a leader of the populist wing of the conservative movement to call it out.”

A question for conservative media that are more independent of Mr. Trump is how much of the market the unabashedly pro-Trump media dominates in the future. Some scholars said they expected that audience to be substantial.

“Drudge and Fox can try to pull back from the abyss,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies conservative media. “But the audience is going to get what it wants and reward those who give it to them.”

Mr. Carlson is no ordinary Trump critic. He has been one of the president’s most aggressive defenders in prime time, especially when it came to standing up for Mr. Trump as he attacked African-American politicians, athletes and the racial justice activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. He has also generally bought into the disproved notion that voter fraud is a widespread problem — a popular position with Mr. Trump and on Mr. Carlson’s network.

He has not been shy in criticizing aspects of the president’s policies he disagrees with, whether the bombing raid in Iraq that killed Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, or Mr. Trump’s failure to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously when it started spreading last winter. But he has never gone out on a limb like this, with the president and his followers so besieged.

Mr. Carlson, no doubt aware that many in his audience, including possibly the president himself, would not like what they were hearing, walked a fine line on Thursday night. He insisted that he and his producers “took Sidney Powell seriously,” and that he had invited her on the show to present her evidence.

P.S.

 Carlson on Friday once again challenged Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell (right) to produce evidence proving her allegation that millions of votes cast in favor of the president were fraudulently switched. The Fox News host responded to Powell, who earlier on Friday accused Carlson of being 'very insulting, demanding, and rude.' Powell made the comments during a phone-in appearance on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business Network show. 'We've heard from a lot of people about that segment, including people in the White House and people close to the president,' Carlson said on Friday, referencing his remarks on Thursday about Powell. 'Like us, they have concluded this election was not fair. Like us, they are willing to believe any explanation for what happened,' Carlson said. He then added: 'Like us, they have not seen a single piece of evidence showing that software changed votes.' Carlson said that while it 'might have happened,' no evidence has been produced to prove it happened. 'And by "they," we are including other members of Donald Trump's own legal team. They have not seen Powell's evidence either - no testimony from employees inside the software companies, no damning internal documents, no copies of the software itself, so that's where we are.'

The National Security Agency, Narcissism, and Nationalism

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY DAILY BEAST

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made it clear in a public statement while visiting the White House: no more drones! Never mind that his predecessors reportedly signed off on the not-so-secret CIA drone program blowing away jihadist bad guys and, all too often, bystanders in the remote mountains near Afghanistan.

Even the intelligence operations of the redoubtable New York City Police Department are under fire.  A coalition of 125 civil rights, religious and community groups has just written to the U.S. Department of Justice to demand a federal investigation of the surveillance activities the cops conduct in New York’s Muslim communities.

In the 1980s the intelligence community in the United States already had difficulties with the sheer volume of stuff it collected. “It now produces so much information, such an all-sources glut of words, images and electronic data that the number of intelligence officers who can understand it all, who see the overall pictures, is rapidly declining,” Knightley wrote. [Philip Knightley’s classic study, The Second Oldest Profession, about spies and spying in the last century.]

As James Bamford pointed out back in 2009 in great detail in his book The Shadow Factory, when global communications moved from wires and satellites to undersea and underground fiber optic cables carrying millions of calls and emails at a time, the whole business of intelligence gathering shifted its emphasis to what’s called “collection first.”

It was no longer practical or indeed possible to put alligator clips on the landline of a terrorist. He was using the Internet for his emails and his phone calls. So, virtually all data moving through the fiber optic lines that crisscross the globe has to be sucked into the NSA’s computers, then sophisticated filters (many of which were developed by the Israelis, as Bamford points out) are used to sift the torrent of communications until only a very narrow range of suspect ones actually are monitored.

How do you figure out what phones or email accounts to target? You look at who’s communicating with whom, and that information is to be found in the metadata that the NSA has collected from the major Internet service providers and other communications companies.

 Steward A. Baker, a former general counsel at the NSA and assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security when it was formed after the attacks on the United States, notes that this may be shocking to some, but it’s perfectly legal in the United States, since “the Supreme Court has held that such records are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, since they’ve already been given to a third party,” the private company, which then shared that information with the U.S. government. “Google is the real Big Brother,” as people in the intelligence community like to say.

N.Y. TIMES

The angry protests from Germany’s chancellor over the National Security Agency’s monitoring of her cellphone and France’s furor over the collection of data about millions of its citizens have obscured a new reality: The digital age has merely expanded the ability of nations to do to one another what they have done for centuries.

But at the same time, it has allowed the Europeans, the Chinese and other powers to replicate N.S.A. techniques.

France has long been considered one of the most talented powers at stealing industrial secrets and intellectual property, intelligence officials say, although in recent years it has been pushed to the sidelines by the Chinese. Their daily cyberattacks have worked their way into the Pentagon and gotten them the blueprints for the F-35, the most expensive fighter jet in history.

The Russians have a reputation in the intelligence community for taking their time to infiltrate specific communications targets. “They are a lot more patient than the Chinese,” one former American intelligence official said recently, “and so they don’t get caught as often.”

The Israelis are well known for cooperating with the United States on major intelligence targets, mostly Iran, while using a combination of old-fashioned spies and sophisticated electronic techniques to decipher Washington’s internal debates, the officials say.

A surveillance drone.



While it is tempting to dismiss the latest revelations with an everyone-does-it shrug, American officials now concede that the uproar in Europe about the N.S.A.’s programs — both the popular outrage and a more calculated political response by Ms. Merkel and France’s president, François Hollande — may have a broader diplomatic and economic effect than they first imagined.

In Washington, the reaction has set off a debate over whether it is time to put the brakes on the N.S.A., whose capabilities, Mr. Obama has hinted, have expanded faster than its judgment. There are now two groups looking at the N.S.A.’s activities: one inside the National Security Council, another with outside advisers. The president all but told Ms. Merkel that “we don’t have the balance right,” according to one official.

“Sure, everyone does it, but that’s been an N.S.A. excuse for too long,” one former senior official who talks to Mr. Obama often on intelligence matters said Friday. “Obama has said, publicly and privately, that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it. But everyone has moved too slowly in moving that from a slogan to a policy.”

In Europe, where Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande demanded Friday that the United States open negotiations on a “code of conduct” that would limit surveillance, there is a sense that the steady stream of revelations may give them an upper hand. Ms. Merkel keeps repeating the phrase that the Americans must “restore trust.” One way the French and Germans intend to do that is to seek some form of inclusion in the inner circle of American intelligence allies, or at least for a deeper intelligence alliance.

Demonstrators with tape over their mouths take part in a protest against government surveillance on October 26, 2013 in Washington, DC.

PETER BEINART DAILY BEAST

 I spent Wednesday afternoon meandering across the web, looking at how the American media were covering allegations that the National Security Agency had spied on yet another foreign leader. “Don’t Tap My Phone,” screamed the banner headline at Huffington Post, above a grim-faced German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Obama to Merkel: We’re Not Spying On You,” announced the lead story on msnbc.com. Then I tacked right, to see how the websites of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Red State, National Review, and The Weekly Standard were handling the story. They weren’t. None of them featured the allegations at all, though it had been the subject of a Jay Carney White House press briefing just hours before.

This is part of the reason America is struggling as a superpower: our nationalists don’t give a fig about the nationalism of anyone else. American conservatives sometimes say that unlike American liberals, who believe in surrendering power to global institutions, they believe in the nation as the sole legitimate source of authority in international affairs. And that’s true when defending our nation’s prerogatives. Had news broken that Germany was tapping our president’s cell phone, Limbaugh would be musing about fire-bombing Dresden again. But the American right is indifferent, if not hostile, to non-Americans defending their nation’s honor. NSA spying on foreign leaders is only the latest example. In Colorado, they’re now issuing drone-hunting licenses so Americans can shoot down any airborne spy planes that trespass their property. And yet there’s scarcely any sympathy on the right for the Pakistanis and Yemenis who are upset that the U.S. sends drones over their countries, though those drones regularly kill people.

This isn’t American “exceptionalism”—the belief that the U.S. is fundamentally different, and better, than other nations. It’s what the international relations scholar John Ruggie has called (PDF) American “exemptionalism”—the belief that America need not play by everyone else’s rules. The notion isn’t completely absurd. As a superpower, which many smaller countries look to for protection, the U.S. does have special burdens that may sometimes require a special freedom of action. It’s easy for Belgium to say it won’t take military action without United Nations approval. It’s harder for the U.S., the country that gets disproportionately blamed if a Security Council deadlock prevents it from stopping genocide or protecting an ally from harm.

But American foreign policy has been most successful when the U.S. has been more, rather than less, sensitive to other countries’ pride. A good example is the Marshall Plan, which the United States funded but let the nations of Western Europe design, even though they organized their postwar economies in ways that looked socialistic to American eyes. Another is NATO, which at least in theory meant that the U.S. had obligations to smaller, weaker European nations, not just the other way around.

Obama called Reinhold Niebuhr his favorite philosopher

In the unipolar era that followed the Soviet Union’s demise, the U.S. didn’t show this kind of deference very often. Many conservatives, and some liberals, thought it didn’t need to. But that unipolar era is ending. In a world where other countries have more power relative to the U.S., it’s increasingly dangerous to believe we can do things to them we would never tolerate them doing to us. Many decades ago, the man sometimes called Obama’s “favorite theologian” argued that the “pride and self-righteousness of powerful nations are a greater hazard to their success than the machinations of their foes.” It would be nice if Obama remembered that, if even if Fox News won’t.

UPDATE
 

European leaders are mad and President Obama knows it. After NSA leaker Edward Snowden broke the news that the U.S. is keeping tabs on leaders of European countries, even those who are U.S. allies, President Obama ordered a review of who we’re snooping on and why. Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said, “We wanted to ensure we’re collecting information because we need it and not just because we can.” Germany and France have demanded that the U.S. put a stop to eavesdropping on leaders, companies and law-abiding citizens. The U.S. already has a no-spying agreement with Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia.

Read it at CBS News

October 26, 2013 11:57 AM

 

AFFORDABLE CARE AND MEDICAID

PAUL KRUGMAN N.Y. TIMES

For now, the big news about Obamacare is the debacle of HealthCare.gov, the Web portal through which Americans are supposed to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges. For now, at least, HealthCare.gov isn’t working for many users.

It’s important to realize, however, that this botch has nothing to do with the law’s substance, and will get fixed. After all, a number of states have successfully opened their own exchanges, doing for their residents exactly what the federal system is supposed to do everywhere else. Connecticut’s exchange is working fine, as is Kentucky’s. New York, after some early problems, seems to be getting there. So, a bit more slowly, does California.

In other words, the technical problems, while infuriating — heads should roll — will not, in the end, be the big story. The real threat remains the effort of conservative groups to sabotage reform, especially by blocking the expansion of Medicaid. This effort relies heavily on lobbying, lavishly bankrolled by the usual suspects, including the omnipresent Koch brothers. But it’s not just money: the right has also rolled out some really lousy arguments.

And I don’t just mean lousy as in “bad”; I also mean it in the original sense, “infested with lice.”

 

Before I get there, a word about something that, as far as we can tell, isn’t happening. Remember “rate shock”? A few months ago it was all the rage in right-wing circles, with supposed experts claiming that Americans were about to face huge premium increases.

It quickly became clear, however, that what these alleged experts were doing was comparing apples and oranges — and as Ezra Klein of The Washington Post pointed out, oranges that, in many cases, you can’t even buy. Specifically, they were comparing the premiums young, healthy men were paying before reform with the premiums everyone — including those who previously couldn’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions — will pay under the new system. Oh, and they also weren’t taking into account the subsidies many Americans will receive, reducing their costs.

 

Now people are signing up for policies on state exchanges and, to a limited extent, on the federal exchange. Where are the cries of rate shock? Anecdotal evidence, which is all we have so far, says that people are by and large happily surprised by the low cost of their insurance. It was telling that when Fox News eagerly interviewed some middle-class Americans who said they had been hurt by the Affordable Care Act, it turned out that none of their guests had actually checked out their new options — they just knew health reform was terrible because Fox News told them so.

 

      

Now, about those lousy Medicaid arguments: Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act did strike down one provision, the one that would have forced all states to accept an expansion of Medicaid, the already-existing program of health insurance for the poor. States are now free to reject that expansion. Yet how can states justify turning down a federal offer to insure thousands of their citizens, one that would cost them nothing in the first year and only trivial amounts later? Sheer spite — the desire to sabotage anything with President Obama’s name on it — is the real reason, but doesn’t sound too good. So they need intellectual cover.

 

Enter the same experts, more or less, who warned about rate shock, to declare that Medicaid actually hurts its recipients. Their evidence? Medicaid patients tend to be sicker than the uninsured, and slower to recover from surgery.

O.K., you know what to do: Google “spurious correlation health.” You are immediately led to the tale of certain Pacific Islanders who long believed that having lice made you healthy, because they observed that people with lice were, typically, healthier than those without. They were, of course, mixing up cause and effect: lice tend to infest the healthy, so they were a consequence, not a cause, of good health.

The application to Medicaid should be obvious. Sick people are likely to have low incomes; more generally, low-income Americans who qualify for Medicaid just tend in general to have poor health. So pointing to a correlation between Medicaid and poor health as evidence that Medicaid actually hurts its recipients is as foolish as claiming that lice make you healthy. It is, as I said, a lousy argument.

 

And the reliance on such arguments is itself deeply revealing, because it illustrates the right’s intellectual decline. I mean, this is the best argument their so-called experts can come up with for their policy priorities?

Meanwhile, many states are still planning to reject the Medicaid expansion, denying essential health care to millions of needy Americans. And they have no good excuse for this act of cruelty.