Your response to chammy is extremely derisive. chammy is correct: the headline IS click bait, as I found out when I clicked on in it and read the post. And your defense of Sahil sounds very, very defensive. The headline is misleading since it implies something that didn’t happen and because the judge can never really make it happen.
To paraphrase you: What is insulting to us as readers is a headline that doesn’t accurately reflect the contents of either the post or the action/event it refers to. TPM has been doing this more and more. As a longtime supporter/reader of TPM I really hate to see you going down this path. I would suggest it’s time for you, Josh, to get real, drop defensiveness and “police” your headline writers. You are losing respect among TPM’s readership.
I’m shocked that there have been no cries of “judicial activism”. Just shocked. And stunned.
Sure ain’t click bait, just like the boss man tell it. Fascinating peak into world of crackpot Bush-appointee judge.
Josh: I don’t know whether Sahil wrote the headline, but the headline states something contrary to fact, since the judge’s order did not overturn Obama’s E.O… If you think that doesn’t matter, then I am very disappointed in you. That isn’t to say that this judge and the ruling he wrote are not terrible examples of a politician in robes, bringing in matters that were not even before the court. They were and an article pointing that out is perfectly legitimate. But why not a headline that conforms to the facts, like “Judge Who Called Obama Actions Unconstitutional Is No Stranger To Controversy”?
And unfortunately, Josh, this is far from the first case of a TPM headline that was either factually incorrect, bore little relation to the article or both. That really ought to be something you should work to improve.
However this isn’t an article about the ruling, it’s an article about the judge who made the ruling. I personally didn’t interpret the headline as weighing in on the ruling in the slightest.
To me, the headline conveys the content of the article, specifically, that this judge has a lot of issues. I think that’s good for us to know, frankly, and I appreciate the reporting myself. The phrase :Judge Who Axed" I take as just a terse way of identifying which judge the article is talking about. I suppose the headline could have read “Judge Who Weighed In On Obama Immigration Actions Is No Stranger To Controversy” but that seems pretty nit-picky to me.
Can it be “click bait” and still convey important information? Is that perhaps the best use of click bait?
Seems to me there’s a lot of baggage being carried over this particular author, and it gets projected onto everything, and so everything with this individual’s name on it is viewed with a jaundiced eye and elicits complaints. Some of that critique may be warranted, I don’t know – I have no dog in that fight. But in this case, as far as headlines go, this isn’t among the worst by any stretch of the imagination.
Does a non-binding opinion by a judge “axe” the President’s EO on immigration?
I also remember Schwab having a hair trigger temper. My Dad made the fatal mistake of saying he voted for Carter in front of him. Nastiness ensued…
I thought maybe it ‘torched’ it…or ‘skewered’ it…or ‘roasted’ it. Maybe "slammed’ it. Definitely not ‘axed’ though.
The kind of man you want on the bench.
Sahil is among the best reporters TPM has ever hired. So is Brian Beutler, who I was sorry to see move on. This judge was a transparent political appointee because the Bush folks thought he would make political decisions. They got what they wanted. Radical Centerist doesn’t understand the law. No, the opinion doesn’t touch the EO because there is NO executive order yet and the case before the court had nothing to do with deferring prosecutions. It just got headlines that allow the Right-wing Wurlitzer to SAY Obama’s acts are “unconstitutional.” Which is, of course, the purpose of the exercise. Facts simply no longer matter to these people. They just make it up as they go along.
Sahil Kapur omitted the fact that this ruling doesn’t touch the EO in his article about the ruling and the headline on that piece is : Judge: Obama’s Immigration Action Is Unconstitutional.
I generally like Sahil and Brian (when he was with TPM). His pieces are thoughtful and he actually appears to write the articles rather than cut and paste from The Hill and attach a byline from the “author”. I made this criticism the other day and Josh said I was taking a cheap shot. Not sure what is going on with him, but as a long time reader (since he ran the blog from DC I believe a million years ago) and have been commenting for the last four+ years, he seems to have gotten increasingly defensive as of late. I quote his full response to my comment.
This is a cheap shot. TPM has always mixed original reporting - which we
do vast amounts of - with aggregating and picking up nuggets of
information from other publications. This is the best way to
cover the news in a complex news ecosystem with multiple niches. We
don’t whine when they pick our own reports. The piece cites the Hill’s
report in the first paragraph. Find someone else to pick on. The Hill
does not own this news.
Schwab, Yoo, Bybee, etc. Bush sure knoew how to pick some quality lawyerin’.
While I have no issue with Sahil, others are accurate in saying that Obama’s Executive Action was not “axed.” The Opinion and Order really has no effect on the EA at all other than that one judge in a judicial opinion called it unconstitutional. Radical Centrist seems to understand this perfectly.
Dude should be removed from the bench, pronto. Then, he should face his state bar on charges of violating professional and judicial ethics. I’m not exaggerating here either. His behavior is everything that ruins the professional respect and public perception of lawyers, judges, the practice of law and our judicial system as a whole.
There are only 677 authorized Federal District Court judgeships*, twenty three of which are currently vacant and twenty of which have nominees awaiting confirmation, each of whom wields immense power simply by virtue of the the kind of cases within a federal judge’s jurisdiction, the relative scarcity of federal judges and the fact that all of their opinions are published. The bad ones thus tend to stand out. A lot.
*The actual number of sitting federal judges is slippery, however, because a judge who goes on “senior status” frees up his seat for a new nominee and yet theoretically can end up with close to full case load if he wants to take it and the chief judge of the district wants to give it to him.
I think Josh is right on actually. Criticize the writing and proofreading, criticize the presentation, criticize missing or misrepresented information, criticize the spin, criticize the adoption of tricks like “click-baiting” etc., but there’s absolutely no need for us to get personal about the authors and Josh is 100% right to defend his employees and co-workers that way. These guys are doing us all a service on a daily basis with their reporting and the forum they’re providing and we come here to get informed and vent in a (mostly) constructive manner. The least we can do is be civil towards them as people who appear to have largely the same interests, positions and political leanings. We’re on the same team, as it were, so try to keep the criticism constructive, an effort to make TPM better, not tear down teammates.
Besides, our wrath and outrage is better directed towards folks like Schwab, who deserve it, and it produces a lot more fun and hilarious commentary than does attacks on the articles’ authors…AND…they let me post my shit on here without a filter, so I have to appreciate that. Can you imagine if I said half the shit I or most of us say here in a crowded room?
$0.02
Thanks for the factual information. Appreciated.
Controversy #6: He sent Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong) to prison for 9 months.
Indeed. His judicial career should go up in smoke.