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Trump Isn’t Enforcing His Plan to Avoid Violating the Emoluments Clause

by EldenSargood Posted on May 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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In January, Donald Trump’s lawyer said that the Trump Organization would donate any profits earned at Trump hotels from a foreign government to the US Treasury. The move was supposedly an attempt to stay on the right side of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits US government officials from taking gifts or benefiting from foreign governments. Ethics experts noted that the pledge, issued by attorney Sheri Dillon, did not truly address this violation of the Constitution. Trump needed to divest his ownership of the hotels, they contended. And now new documents released by congressional Democrats show that Trump is not taking even his insufficient effort seriously.

Because Trump still owns his hotel properties and companies that operate hotels, anyone—a person or business here or overseas, or a foreign government—can directly line the pockets of the US president simply by reserving rooms or renting out conference or banquet facilities at a Trump hotel. Since the inauguration, several foreign governments have rented space at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC, and foreign diplomats have reported being approached by Trump hotel staff soliciting business.

To address the emoluments issue, profits from these sort of transactions involving foreign governments are supposed to go to the US Treasury. But it’s hard to determine what counts as profit. And under the plan developed by Dillon, the calculation of profit would be made by the Trump Organization itself, without independent oversight. And there would be no auditing to ensure that all money from foreign governments was covered.

How does the Trump Organization determine which foreign funds ought to be donated? Not too assiduously, it appears. The House Oversight Committee several weeks ago asked the Trump Organization for information on this process. In response, the company sent the committee a nine-page pamphlet that instructs staff at its properties on how to handle this matter. The pamphlet indicates that the Trump Organization is not enthusiastic about gathering this information and doesn’t want its guests bothered by any efforts to comply with the Emoluments Clause.

The pamphlet notes that the hotels should not calculate the profit from foreign patronage but rather estimate it. After all, it says, calculating the actual profit would take a lot of effort: “To attempt to individually track and distinctly attribute certain business-related costs as specifically identifiable to a particular customer group is not practical, nor would it even be possible without an inordinate amount of time, resources and specialists.”

The pamphlet presents a formula by which managers can estimate how much money should head to the US Treasury. In one example, a hotel that earned $10 million in revenue but had $8.5 million in expenses would be considered to have a profit of 15 percent. If it took in $500,000 from foreign governments, it should donate 15 percent of that revenue—that is, $75,000—to the US Treasury. (This basic formula does not take into account the complexities of actual transactions. For instance, what if a foreign government bought $1 million in services from a Trump hotel that was only breaking even? This would certainly benefit Trump, but none of these funds would end up being donated.)

When it comes to identifying foreign revenues, the pamphlet tells Trump hotel staff not to try too hard, for that could annoy the customers: “To fully and completely identify all patronage at our Properties by customer type is impractical in the service industry and putting forth a policy that requires all guests to identify themselves would impede upon personal privacy and diminish the guest experience of our brand.” So, the pamphlet points out, the Trump Organization will not try to identify customers who do not inform the hotel that they are representing a foreign government.

The pamphlet, which you can read in full below, was released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee along with a letter sent to the Trump Organization on Wednesday morning. The letter, signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings, the senior Democrat on the committee, complained that the company had failed to fully explain how it would avoid violating the Emoluments Clause.

In the letter, Cummings scolded the Trump Organization for its seemingly lackadaisical approach. “This pamphlet raises grave concerns about the President’s refusal to comply with the Constitution merely because he believes it is ‘impractical’ and could ‘diminish the guest experience of our brand,'” he wrote. “Complying with the United States Constitution is not an option exercise but a requirement for serving as our nation’s President.”

The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

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Trump Org Pamphlet on Foreign Profits (PDF)

Trump Org Pamphlet on Foreign Profits (Text)

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Trump Isn’t Enforcing His Plan to Avoid Violating the Emoluments Clause

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Behold the Greatest Budget Gimmickry of All Time

by YvonneDigiovann Posted on May 22, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a helluva weird story from Jim Puzzanghera of the LA Times:

The House Republican legislation scaling back Dodd-Frank financial regulations would reduce federal budget deficits by $24.1 billion over the next decade….Would reduce federal spending by $6.9 billion from 2018 through 2027….The bureau received $565 million in the 2016 fiscal year….The House Republican legislation would reduce the bureau’s funding to $485 million in 2018, and the CBO estimated that Congress would keep annual funding at about that level, adjusting for inflation, over the next decade.

So the bill would (a) reduce funding by $800 million, (b) reduce spending by $6.9 billion, and (c) reduce deficits by $24.1 billion. How do we get from $800 million to $24.1 billion?

I’m glad you asked! And trust me, you’re going to love the answer. Here’s how it breaks down:

This is a work of art. The savings come almost entirely from two places: eliminating the Orderly Liquidation Fund and modifying the way Dodd-Frank agencies are funded. Here’s the impressive part: neither of these things actually saves any money.

The OLF is funded entirely by the financial industry. If the government has to liquidate a big bank, it foots the bill and then recoups the money via a fee on the banking sector. However, the money has to be spent immediately, while it gets recouped over time. So it’s possible that, say, the feds would spend $10 billion to rescue a bank in 2027, but all the money would be recouped in later years. That counts as a $10 billion deficit in the the ten-year window 2018-2027.

So CBO guessed the probability of the OLF being used in each of the next ten years, along with the possible cash flow imbalances, and then calculated the expected value. They came up with $14.5 billion. CBO acknowledges that this estimate has “considerable uncertainty,” and that’s true. More to the point, though, the whole thing is just gimmickry. Using the OLF will cost the government nothing (or close to nothing), but expenses might fall inside the ten-year window while revenues fall outside the ten-year window. That’s all.

Then there’s the agency funding. It gets reduced $800 million, but somehow that becomes a deficit reduction of $9.2 billion. This one is even more impressive. Two agencies are affected—NCUA and CFPB—which currently get their funding from outside sources. This means their outlays count as “direct spending.” Under the Republican law, their funding would come from Congress and be subject to annual appropriations. For some reason—and I admit this remains inscrutable to me—reducing “direct spending” and replacing it with the same amount of appropriated spending counts as deficit reduction even though CBO assumes that actual funding levels won’t change.

This is the immaculate conception of congressional legislation. It doesn’t actually reduce spending more than trivially, but thanks to obscure budget gimmicks it gets scored as a $24 billion reduction in the ten-year budget deficit. It’s magic! Maybe it’s the power of the orb at work.1

1You all know what this refers to, don’t you?

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Behold the Greatest Budget Gimmickry of All Time

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In 2002, the IEA Predicted Solar Was Going Nowhere. And in 2003. And 2004. And 2005…

by Robert Michaels Posted on May 22, 2017

Mother Jones

Every year the International Energy Agency publishes the World Energy Outlook, which, among other things, forecasts the growth rate of solar PV installations. The 2016 edition even included a whole “special focus” on renewable energy. Presumably this means they took an extra careful look at their solar PV forecast. Here it is:

That looks…odd, doesn’t it? Solar PV has grown at a pretty fast clip over the past decade, but the IEA assumes the growth rate will suddenly level out starting this year and then start to decline. And this is their optimistic scenario that takes into account pledges made in Paris.

What can we make of this? Auke Hoekstra provides some context:

Every single year, the IEA projects that solar is a passing fad and its growth rate will level out that year. And every single year, solar continues to grow anyway. But the next year the IEA makes the exact same forecast. It’s almost as if they have some kind of hidden agenda here.

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In 2002, the IEA Predicted Solar Was Going Nowhere. And in 2003. And 2004. And 2005…

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Drunk Driving Followup: The Mystery Solved!

by VedaReiter Posted on May 20, 2017

Mother Jones

Yesterday I wrote about the mystery of drunk driving: if stricter laws and harsher punishments really are responsible for a decline in drunk driving, why is it that alcohol-related fatalities have only declined at the same rate as every other kind of road fatality? Is it possible that all those laws have been useless?

I got several good responses, which confirmed that there’s a bit of a mystery here but pointed out that my data only went back to 1994. This misses the significant drop in drunk driving during the 80s and early 90s. Then I got an email from Darren Grant, an economics professor at Sam Houston State University, pointing me to a paper that decomposes exactly what happened and when. Grant’s paper, which relies on a microdata-based model of traffic fatalities, concludes that it’s legitimate to use the percentage of all road fatalities that involve alcohol—which has been flat for many years—as a proxy for the amount of drunk driving. It also breaks down the reason for the decline in drunk driving during the 80s and 90s. Without further ado, here is his chart:

There are several takeaways from this:

During the 80s and early 90s, drunk driving decreased significantly.
By the mid-90s, the level of drunk driving flattened out and has been flat ever since.
The effect of laws on drunk driving has been pretty modest. That’s the red band in the chart. Stricter laws are responsible for only a small fraction of the total decline.

There’s potentially some good news here. Grant concludes that the biggest effect by far has been from social forces, namely the increased stigma associated with drunk driving. If you discount demographics, which we have no control over, social stigma accounts for about half the drop in drunk driving. This suggests that what we need isn’t so much stricter laws, but a revitalized campaign to even further stigmatize drunk driving. I’m on board with that.

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Drunk Driving Followup: The Mystery Solved!

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This Policeman Says He Was Fired for Not Shooting a Man

by SherrilBaskin Posted on May 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Police reform advocates have demanded in recent years that officers face consequences for using excessive force, especially in shootings. But a new lawsuit alleges that a former Weirton, West Virginia, police officer was disciplined for doing the opposite. During an incident last May, Officer Stephen Mader decided not to shoot an armed suicidal man. Police brass determined he showed poor judgment during the encounter. Soon after, Mader was fired from the town’s police force. Now he is suing the city for wrongful termination.

The lawsuit, filed May 10 against the city of Weirton by Mader’s attorney along with the ACLU of West Virginia, accuses the department of firing Mader to buttress its defense of another officer who did shoot the man. In an emailed statement to Mother Jones, Weirton’s mayor’s office declined to comment on the suit, adding that the “the city hasn’t received a copy of the lawsuit or been made aware of any allegations.”

According to the lawsuit, on the evening of May 6, 2016, Mader responded to a 911 call from a woman who reported that her ex-boyfriend was at her home and had threatened to kill himself. Mader—a veteran of the Marines—was a rookie officer at the time. When he arrived at the scene, he encountered Ronald Williams, a 21-year-old African American man, standing outside the home with his hands behind his back. After initially refusing to show his hands, Williams brought them to his side and revealed that he was holding a handgun. Mader demanded that Williams drop it, but he refused and told Mader to shoot him.

During the encounter, Williams was visibly despondent but not aggressive, the lawsuit says. Mader says he determined that Williams was attempting to commit suicide-by-cop and—believing that he was not a threat—decided not to shoot him. As Mader tried to talk him down, two other officers arrived on the scene. Williams then raised his gun, and one of the officers shot him in the head, killing him. The officers later determined that Williams’ gun was unloaded.

Mader was fired the next month following an investigation into the incident. Weirton’s city manager told local media after Mader’s dismissal that he was fired because of two other incidents that took place earlier in the year. In the termination letter, the Weirton police chief wrote that Mader displayed “difficulties in critical incident reasoning” and had failed “to meet probationary standards of an officer.” The letter does not refer to Mader’s encounter with Williams or other incidents. But in an accompanying memo, a police captain accused Mader of “negligence” during the May 6 incident because he “failed to engage the suspect” and eliminate a threat, forcing another officer to shoot Williams in order to protect his ex-girlfriend, her child, and other officers on the scene. A prosecutor also determined that the officer who shot Williams—and who remains on the force—was justified in doing so.

According to his lawsuit, it was Mader’s responsibility to decide for himself what kind of force to use based on his own assessment of whether Williams posed an imminent threat. Department protocol—and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution—barred him from using deadly force in any other circumstance. The suit also argues that the department’s decision to fire him encourages other Weirton Police Department officers to use force in incidents where it may not be necessary by sending the message that they could lose their jobs if they don’t. “What I think it shows—and this is a problem I think we have throughout the country—is that because you can use deadly force, you should use deadly force,” Mader’s attorney Tim O’Brien told me. “And what this case is about is that an officer should be entitled to exercise that discretion based on facts known to that officer.” The same can be said of officers who choose to shoot, O’Brien noted, but the same Fourth Amendment standard applies.

General de-escalation training for police and more precise training on dealing with individuals in a mental health crisis have been increasingly adopted by police departments around the country in recent years, but the training is still not widespread. Just 16 states mandate de-escalation training for police officers, according to a recent investigation by AMP Reports. West Virginia is not one of them. Among those states that do require it, some require as little as one hour of training per year.

Mader says he received some de-escalation training in the Weirton police academy, but he mostly drew on his military training during his encounter with Williams. There is little research on whether military veterans—which account for nearly 20 percent of of all police officers nationwide, according to a recent Marshall Project investigation—are more or less likely to use force. A recent Pew Research survey found that cops who were veterans were slightly more likely to say they had used force than their non-veteran peers.

Mader told me he believes Williams might still be alive if he had had more time to talk to him before other officers arrived on the scene. O’Brien agreed, and said that while the case is about a single officer, it has implications for policing nationwide “and the context in which we have arrived in this society where it has become almost second nature to accept the fact that a first option is to shoot and kill a citizen. It’s become much more the norm than perhaps it should be and that’s what we need to evaluate.”

You can read the full lawsuit here.

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This Policeman Says He Was Fired for Not Shooting a Man

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People Who Were “Fat Shamed” as Kids Are More Likely to Be Obese as Adults

by ChanelChavarria Posted on May 10, 2017

Mother Jones

Despite recent pushback, fat shaming—making people feel bad about their weight—remains a robust pastime among Americans. Indeed, a notorious practitioner recently became president of the United States. New research suggests that all the teasing and tsk-tsking in service of the thin body ideal may have the opposite effect—it can lock people into a spiral of poor body image and eating disorders.

The latest: A study from University of Connecticut, University of Minnesota, and Harvard researchers, based on a 15-year project tracking a group of students in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area from their mid-teenage years to their early 30s, analyzes the “behavioral, psychological, and socioenvironmental factors related to dietary intake and weight-related outcomes in adolescents.”

Back in 1999, the project enrolled what the researchers call an ethnically and economically diverse group of 4,746 adolescents, assessing their body weight and surveying them about their experiences with weight-related teasing, from both school peers and family members. Perhaps not surprisingly, girls reported being the target of teasing at a slightly higher rate than boys—45.1 percent versus 37.1 percent. Girls reported being teased at home at a much higher clip—29.4 percent of girls said they were teased by a family member, compared with just 13.5 percent of boys. As for teasing from school peers, 30.2 percent of girls and 23 percent of boys reported it.

In 2015, the project managed to get 1,830 of the original participants, by then most of them around age 30, to take a detailed survey. It polled them regarding their body weight and height—to determine their body-mass index, a rough way to gauge obesity rates. Other topics included their propensity for binge eating, embarking on weight-loss diets, as well as “unhealthy” weight-loss methods (like fasting and diet pills), and their attitudes about their bodies.

The researchers adjusted the results (summarized here) to account for potentially confounding factors like their body-mass index back in 1999. While studies that rely on self-reported data always have to be eyed skeptically, this one paints a sad picture: Both women and men who were fat-shamed as adolescents were almost twice as likely to be obese as adults than people who weren’t teased. They were also likely to eat in response to emotional stress and report negative body self-image. Two other apparent legacies of adolescent teasing showed up in women but not men: a higher tendency to have dieted in the past year, and to have engaged in “unhealthy weight control efforts,” like fasting and taking diet pills.

Interestingly, just as girls in the original group reported much more teasing at home than boys did, the impact of fat shaming from family members seemed to hit them harder. Boys who were teased at home but not by peers carried no negative effects into adulthood, but for girls, having been teased at home was strongly associated with bad outcomes as adults, including negative body image.

The new paper echoes a similar 2016 study by German researchers, and comes on the heels of a 2016 study by UCLA researchers finding an association between weight stigmatization in middle school and higher rates of body dissatisfaction, social anxiety, and loneliness in junior high, and a 2013 one finding that two-thirds of teenagers enrolled in a pair of national weight loss camps had been harassed about their weight at school—including, quite often, by teachers and sports coaches.

The message here seems clear: Fat-shaming kids—at home and in the schoolyard—is toxic.

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People Who Were “Fat Shamed” as Kids Are More Likely to Be Obese as Adults

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"I Want Americans to Know That Guantánamo Happened Not to Monsters, but to Men"

by DangHONGPHUC Posted on May 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Courtesy of Lakhdar Boumediene

Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir were part of the “Algerian Six,” a group of men rounded up in Bosnia on the unproven claim they had plotted to bomb the American Embassy in Sarajevo. The two were beaten, shackled, blindfolded, and transferred in January 2002 to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base—where they languished for seven years without charges under torturous conditions. Boumediene went on a 28-month hunger strike and was force-fed through a broken nose. The strike, he told me, “was the only thing I could control. Going hungry was hard, but it would have been harder to do nothing at all.”

On his behalf, Boumediene’s lawyers sued the federal government in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court’s landmark 2008 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush established the right of Guantánamo detainees to use American courts to challenge their captivity. In a new book, Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantánamo, Boumediene and Ait Idir give their account of what happened inside America’s most notorious and opaque military prison, and offer readers a window into the horrors of America’s war on terror.

Mother Jones: What did you want an American reader to understand about Guantánamo?

Lakhdar Boumediene: I want Americans to know that Guantánamoâ&#128;&#139; happened not to monsters, but to men. Innocent men. Family men. I had two little girls, and I missed most of their childhoods. I hope our book will open some people’s eyes, and maybe even convince some people to be less violent and more thoughtful.

MJ: Your Supreme Court case gave Guantánamo inmates an avenue to challenge their detention. Why was it important to bring your case to the American justice system?

LB: If my lawyers hadn’t argued my case all the way to the Supreme Court, I would still be in Guantánamoâ&#128;&#139;. So I didn’t really have a choice. But I’m glad my name stands for the principle that everyone has the right to force the government to justify his imprisonment.

MJ: You describe your cell as akin to “a cage at a zoo.” Can you talk a bit more about the conditions you witnessed at Guantánamo?

LB: At the very beginning, they hadn’t even built a jail with cells. We were held outdoors in cages, with scorpions crawling around and the sun beating down on us and buckets to go to the bathroom in. The stench was awful. Eventually, they built an actual prison, but the conditions were still horrible. Most of the guards made it their business to make our lives miserable, attacking us and our religion. But the hardest thing was just the uncertainty, not knowing if I would ever see my wife and children again, even though I knew I was innocent.

MJ: You spent more than two years on hunger strike. What led you to do it?

LB: I was tired of being treated as less than a man. Every aspect of my life at Guantánamoâ&#128;&#139; was controlled by the military. What I ate and drank, when I ate and drank, when I slept, when I walked, where I walked. That was wrong—I was an innocent man. I was a man like them. I decided I would not eat their food unless they would treat me as a human being. They had their orders, I made my decision. I controlled my hunger strike. They could force-feed me—and I knew they would; I never wanted to die—but they couldn’t make me actually swallow their garbage. I felt like I had to do something to protest the unfairness of the situation.

MJ: What’s your single most unforgettable memory from Guantánamo?

LB: There’s so much that I wish I could forget: The beatings. The force-feedings. The heartache of not knowing if my wife and children were safe. The pain of seeing my friends tortured. But I’ll also never forget what it was like to hold my wife and children again, to know that I was home, to know that I had managed to survive.

MJ: Both you and Mustafa detail horrific abuse from guards at Guantánamo. Had Americans known what was happening, do you think there would have been an intervention?

LB: I hope so. That’s part of why I wanted to share my story. I don’t think most Americans were happy about the abuse—they just didn’t know about it. Of course, that’s partly because they chose to look away. Next time, I hope they won’t.

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"I Want Americans to Know That Guantánamo Happened Not to Monsters, but to Men"

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Macron Campaign Hit With "Massive and Coordinated" Hacking Attack

by ElviraEJKC Posted on May 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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A massive trove of documents purporting to contain thousands of emails and other files from the campaign of Emmanuel Macron—the French centrist candidate squaring off against right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen—was posted on the internet Friday afternoon. The Macron campaign says that at least some of the documents are fake. The document dump came just over a day before voting is set to begin in the final round of the election and mere hours before candidates are legally required to stop campaigning.

At about 2:35 p.m. ET, a post appeared on the 4chan online message board announcing the leak. The documents appear to include emails, internal memos, and screenshots of purported banking records.

“In this pastebin are links to torrents of emails between Macron, his team and other officials, politicians as well as original documents and photos,” the anonymous 4chan poster wrote. “This was passed on to me today so now I am giving it to you, the people. The leak is massvie and released in the hopes that the human search engine here will be able to start sifting through the contents and figure out exactly what we have here.”

The Macron campaign issued a statement Friday night saying it was the victim of a “massive and coordinated” hacking attack. That campaign said the leak included some fake documents that were intended “to sow doubt and misinformation.”

The Macron camp compared the document dump to last year’s hacking of emails associated with Hillary Clinton. The US intelligence community has concluded that Russia was responsible for the Clinton hacks. “This operation is obviously a democratic destabilization as was seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” the Macron statement said.

The timing of the leak is particularly noteworthy. Under French law, candidates and their campaigns cannot speak to the media or do anything in public in the 24 hours before the start of Sunday’s election. The Macron campaign’s statement was issued three minutes before the deadline.

It’s unclear when the files originally appeared on the internet. The official Twitter account for WikiLeaks—the group that released the Clinton emails last year—tweeted a link to a page where the Macron data was hosted at 1:13 p.m. ET.

“Fully analyzing the hacked documents to verify that they are genuine will take some time, but from what I’ve seen so far, it looks very serious,” said Matt Tait, a former information security specialist for the GCHQ (the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency) and CEO of Capital Alpha Security.

In February, Macron said he had evidence his campaign had “suffered repeated and multiple attacks from hackers” and that “many come from Ukraine.” At the time, the Macron campaign blamed the Russian government for the attacks, a claim the Kremlin denied. The campaign suspected the attacks were coming their way because of Macron’s tough stance on Russia. Le Pen, on the other hand, has taken a much more favorable stance toward Russia.

Earlier on Friday, according to the New York Times, the Le Pen campaign claimed in a statement that its campaign website had been the victim of “regular and targeted” attacks, and that a hacker “close to extreme-left circles” had been arrested.

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Macron Campaign Hit With "Massive and Coordinated" Hacking Attack

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Trump Advisor Accidentally Raises Middle-Class Taxes

by StanleyBryant Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here is Gary Cohn—supposedly one of the “smart ones” in the Trump administration—explaining the president’s tax plan:

The median income in the United States today is … about $56,000. You take the $24,000 away from the $56,000, you’ve got taxable income of $32,000. At a 10% rate that’s $3,000 of tax. If you have one or two or three children and we give you $1,000 tax credit, you could end up with a—you know, very marginal, single-digit tax rate to no taxes whatsoever. That, to me, is a middle-income tax cut because you’re going to owe no taxes potentially.

“Potentially” is doing a lot of work here, as David Kamin explains:

Cohn forgot to mention the fact that our tax system, as it is currently written, provides what are called “personal exemptions” to families….The plan Trump presented on the campaign trail would eliminate these personal exemptions….So when you take into account the elimination of personal exemptions, families aren’t actually getting much tax relief after all. In fact, if that family has two or more kids, they’d actually face a tax increase under the Trump plan described by Cohn.

Here this is in chart form:

This should come as no surprise. The problem is that the average family pays most of its taxes at the state and local level, and via payroll taxes. Their federal income tax rate is already “very marginal, single-digit tax rate to no taxes whatsoever,” so it’s all but impossible to cut it. This is from the Tax Policy Center:

The bottom 40 percent pays no federal income tax at all and the average middle-class person pays 6.4 percent of their earnings in federal income taxes. If you focus solely on the federal income tax—as Republicans always do—you can’t help the middle class much. Even in theory, the only people who really benefit are high earners.

Of course, you can still do a little to help middle-class workers—but only if you’re careful. Cohn wasn’t careful, so he ended up increasing middle class taxes. It’s an easy mistake to make.

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Trump Advisor Accidentally Raises Middle-Class Taxes

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The Conservative Beef With ESPN Is All About Curt Schilling

by DelilaATPK Posted on May 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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ESPN has been losing viewers for a while now, and there are various theories to account for it. Maybe millennials just aren’t into sports that much. Or maybe cord cutting of all types is the culprit. Or maybe ESPN has gotten too liberal.

That last one is a favorite among conservatives, and I don’t really get it. I’m not a heavy ESPN viewer, but I watch enough to have some sense of its political leanings. And I haven’t really discerned much. Mostly they seem to call games and then argue about whether Tom Brady can play football into his fifties. You know, sports stuff.

But today, Paul Hiebert at the polling firm YouGov presents this chart:

First off, I’m impressed that YouGov has been polling this question since 2013. I wonder why?

In any case, this chart suggests that the problem isn’t liberalism in general, but the fact that ESPN fired Curt Schilling. The Caitlyn Jenner thing hurt for a few months, but by April of 2016 all was forgiven and Republican support of ESPN was back to normal. It was the Curt Schilling affair that killed them. Just to refresh your memory, here’s the Facebook meme he shared that was the final straw:

This was after Schilling “shared a meme that compared extremism in today’s Muslim world to Nazi Germany in 1940 and told a radio station that Hillary Clinton ‘should be buried under a jail somewhere,’ in apparent violation of an ESPN policy on commentary relating to the presidential election.”

So politics is part of the answer after all. But not a slide into liberal politics. Conservatives were mad because Schilling engaged in venomous conservative politics, and eventually ESPN fired him before he did something that could get them sued. Conservatives are always the victims, aren’t they?

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The Conservative Beef With ESPN Is All About Curt Schilling

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