Mike was a public servant and a podcaster. The government warned he couldn’t do both
Media coverage of President Biden’s first speech to Congress |
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President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP, Pool) |
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President Joe Biden, approaching his 100th day in office, delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night. He spoke for more than an hour, painting an optimistic picture of America despite crises involving a pandemic, political divide and racial tensions. He talked about sweeping changes to the economy and infrastructure, the education system, expanding the government's role. He talked about guns, race, immigration, health benefits for Americans, prescription drug prices and much more. Here’s the speech, minus a few of Biden’s off-script ad-libs. So how did his speech play out according to the coverage? NBC’s Kasie Hunt smartly noted, “This speech and being in this room could not be more different than a year ago.” Actually, it was a little more than a year ago, as Hunt pointed out, that then-President Donald Trump gave a “raucous” State of the Union speech that made just a brief mention of something most of us had no idea how horrific it would be: the coronavirus. As the country begins to emerge from the pandemic, many saw the hopefulness of Biden’s words. ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, co-anchor of “This Week,” said, “He’s really trying to bring the country together. It was a Make America Feel Good night, Make America Feel Pride night, and trying to talk directly to people which is, of course, Joe Biden's strength. But he was also talking to the rest of the world.” MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace also mentioned Biden’s strength of connecting with people, saying, “His connections to the people in this room — I’m not even sure that all of them are deserving of them — but he does not care. He gives to them the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of his goodwill. I thought it would be a hard speech to make optimistic, he did.” CBS News’ Nancy Cordes said Biden “was swinging for the fences” in an effort “to remind Republicans that there are some elements of his plans that they support as well.” But ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl likely nailed it when, after praising the ambition in Biden’s speech, said, “... I don’t think Republicans heard much of anything in this speech that they will be able to work with. They heard an agenda for the next hundred days and beyond, that includes even more spending than what we saw in the first hundred days — tax increases across the board on upper-income Americans and businesses that Republicans absolutely will not support. I don’t think there will be any support for those proposals. Not to mention what he was talking about on comprehensive immigration reform, gun control, police reform is probably the one area where there is a real chance for bipartisan agreement, but not much in here that Republicans will latch on to at all.” Also on ABC, contributor Chris Christie was especially critical, saying, “The words of this speech sounded like what you would hear from a 15-year-old if you gave him a credit card with no credit limit on it. Except the words came out of the mouth of an adult who should know better.” The Republican responseSouth Carolina Sen. Tim Scott gave the Republican response. CNN’s Abby Phillip said, “This was an extraordinary partisan speech for Tim Scott, especially, I thought, on the issue of policing, which is something that he is actively right now working with Democrats on. He really, strongly criticized Democrats on the issue in a way that I thought was surprising given that he apparently finds it worthwhile to actually work with them.” Philip added the speech sounded like “what any other generic Republican would say in this particular moment. But Tim Scott, who is trying to have a slightly different brand, it didn’t really seem to fit him. That was the part that was slightly disjointed for me.” CNN’s Dana Bash noted that Scott is the lone Black Republican senator and yet criticized the Democrats’ stance on voting restrictions in places such as Georgia. CNN’s Van Jones criticized Scott for blaming Biden for dividing the country. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Jones said. Then Jones added this: “(Scott) lost a lot of African Americans, by the tens of millions, when he said ‘America is not a racist nation.’ Look, you can say we’re getting better, you can say we’ve come a long way. But when you look at these numbers and you look at these statistics, it is still very clear that this country is still struggling with racism and we still have racism showing up in almost every institution. So I thought he did himself a disservice by jumping that shark.” Jones, however, added that Scott is the best the Republicans could put up to respond to Biden. Working overtimeBiden’s address did run a little long. Long enough that he even closed by saying, “Thank you for your patience.” According to this tweet by C-SPAN, Biden’s speech ran 64 minutes, 58 seconds. That’s the longest first speech to Congress among all presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. The longest before Biden’s was Trump’s first speech to Congress in 2017. That was 60 minutes, 12 seconds. The shortest? Reagan’s 32-minute, 40-second speech in 1981. A limited crowdIt was strange to see so few people in the House chamber, but that was necessary because of COVID-19. Instead of the 1,600 or so which normally attend such speeches, only 200 or so were permitted Wednesday night. As he opened his speech, Biden even made mention of the unusual circumstances. And, while of course, the need for a limited crowd is a serious matter, Washington Post media writer Paul Farhi had a pretty good line when he tweeted, “The near-empty chamber at the Capitol makes this seem like a Spring Training presidential address to Congress.” Most networks also reminded us that the scene Wednesday night was much different than the last time Americans watched proceedings from the House chamber. That was Jan. 6, when an insurrection overran the Capitol. True to formAs pointed out by The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona, these were two actual chyrons on screen during Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News prior to President Biden’s speech on Wednesday. First: “Awaiting Biden Admin Propaganda On Cap Hill.” Second: “Expect Climate Change Propaganda In Biden Speech.” Oh, speaking of Carlson’s show, Rudy Giuliani is expected to be on Carlson’s show tonight, presumably to talk about Giuliani’s Manhattan home and office being raided by the Justice Department on Wednesday — although, because it’s Carlson’s show, who knows? As far as post-speech coverage, Fox News went about how you would expect with Ben Domenech leading the criticisms, calling Biden’s speech “a political blip, immediately forgotten.” And Sean Hannity called Biden “very weak, very frail, cognitively struggling.” Hannity also talked with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is still rambling on about a story that has already been debunked when he said Biden is “going to control how much meat you can eat.” It should be noted, however, that Fox News’ Chris Wallace said, “I think this is going to be a popular speech with the American public.” Meanwhile, MSNBC’s coverage also was what about you’d expect, with anchor Brian Williams effusive in his praise, saying the speech was, “unspooling an ambition that was Rooseveltian in size and scope.” Powerful wordsThis, from ABC “Nightline” co-anchor Byron Pitts: “It seems that the president made clear tonight that he believes you can bridge America's racial divide with legislation. Think about that, this president mentioned white supremacy and terrorism in the same sentence.” Just the factsPolitiFact fact-checked Biden’s speech. Here’s the story from PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson, Victoria Knight, Amy Sherman and Miriam Valverde. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said, “My early assessment is that this was, in general, quite a factual speech. But it was not perfect.” Dale added, “Now the prepared text that Biden most recited was quite good. There were some claims that certainly can be disputed, have some debatable nuance to it, but there was certainly not a ton in that prepared text that was flat-out false. Where Biden was false a couple of times was when he ad-libbed. This is a bit of a problem with President Biden. He is given a solidly-researched text then he decides to start ‘Joe Biden talking’ and he sometimes gets himself in some fact-check trouble.” A moment to remember
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We saw something that we have never seen before in the history of the United States. Two women — serving as vice president and speaker of the house — next to the president during a speech in the House chamber.
ABC News’ David Muir said, “History already being made this evening … the moment that the vice president, Kamala Harris, arrived there in the chamber, being brought up to the dais. And the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, who made history herself, the first woman speaker, and, of course, all the history … that Kamala Harris has made. And the two of them now stand there together.”
Biden even opened his speech by saying, “Madam Speaker and Madam Vice President. No president has ever said those words from this podium. It’s about time.”
Why can’t auditors understand that they are meant to change behaviour?
The FT has reported this morning that:
Big accounting firms have asked the UK industry regulator to pause quality inspections of their work for a year if they agree to audit high-risk companies listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Accountants said their work for new clients should be exempt from scrutiny because of the difficulty of auditing a company for the first time and fears of being censured for mistakes, according to people who attended talks between the regulator and the firms.
The plea came as accountants said increased public scrutiny and fines for audit failures meant high-risk companies would struggle to find auditors with the experience needed to sign off on their accounts.
Sports Direct and Boohoo both turned to midsized firms with little experience of auditing big listed companies after leading auditors refused to review their accounts amid concerns over the retailers’ governance.
Senior auditors from large accounting firms asked for leniency on a call with the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), people who attended said.
The call was attended by representatives of the Big Four accountants — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — and their main challengers BDO, Grant Thornton and Mazars.
The FRC rejected an initial proposal from one firm that audits of new clients should be completely exempt from annual quality inspections, one senior auditor said.
“There’s got to be some safe harbour,” the auditor said, adding that unless the FRC gave firms leeway after they took on difficult audits, “the best thing for us to do is to swerve it”.
Another auditor who attended the talks said that if the supervision of audits was too strict in the first year “you put people off higher-risk audits, and that’s not a good outcome”.
An alternative suggestion was that the FRC could inspect the audits of new or potentially high-risk companies but that the results would be excluded from the audit firms’ published grades, people on the call said. This would allow the watchdog to identify areas for improvement while shielding auditors from public censure for shortcomings.
One person described the talks, which took place in January, as “exploratory” and “brainstorming”. The discussions were expected to resume after the FRC asked firms to formulate more concrete proposals, attendees said.
Last year’s annual quality review by the FRC found that one in three audits by the top firms fell short of expected standards, which the regulator called “unacceptable”. The UK government is consulting on a shake-up of corporate governance and audit rules in an effort to improve trust in companies.
The FRC, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, BDO, Grant Thornton and Mazars all declined to comment.
LSE rules require companies to file audited annual accounts or face having their shares suspended or delisted. Companies that cannot persuade a major auditor to check their accounts because of governance concerns will be forced to turn to smaller firms with less experience of auditing big companies, auditors at large firms said.
FTSE 250 miners Ferrexpo and Petropavlovsk called on midsized accountant MHA MacIntyre Hudson after Deloitte and PwC resigned from the audits respectively in the past two years.
Accountants have been fined £75m for shortcomings in the three years to March 2020, FRC figures show. The tally for 2020-21 is yet to be published but will include a record £15m fine handed to Deloitte for failings in its audit of Autonomy, the former FTSE 100 software company.
KPMG is awaiting the outcome of the FRC’s investigation into its audits of Carillion, the collapsed outsourcer.
Economic news reporting suffers from bias toward richest Americans Academic Times. Underlying study: Whose News? Class-Biased Economic Reporting in the United StatesAmerican Political Science Review (HJR)
Former Coca-Cola Employee Convicted of Stealing $120 Million Worth of Trade Secrets to Sell in China. “A Chinese-born American chemist was found guilty on April 22 for her role in a scheme to steal trade secrets worth an estimated $120 million from American companies for the purpose of setting up a Chinese company that would manufacture the product for the global market.”
*Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis*
Although they did not know it at the time, the seamen of the USS Cony and other ships of the Randolph group were moments away from being killed or shipwrecked by the tremendous waves that a nuclear explosion would produce. Savitsky’s torpedo carried a warhead with 10 kilotons of explosive power. If dropped on a city, that would suffice to kill everyone with a half-mile radius. Moreover, the torpedoes’ nuclear warheads were designed to create shock waves that would topple or incapacitate ships. The 20-kiloton load tried by the US Navy in the Baker underwater test in 1946 produced waves up to 94 feet high. The Soviets tested their T-5 torpedoes near Novala Zemlia in the Arctic in 1957 but never released the results. Any ship hit by the torpedo would almost certainly have been destroyed, while the rest of the Randolph group would have suffered significant damage.
That is from the new book on this topic by Serhii Plokhy. An excellent book, with much more on the Soviet side than any other source I am aware of.
How a Chinese Surveillance Broker Became Oracle’s “Partner of the Year” Intercept
In epic hack, Signal developer turns the tables on forensics firm Cellebrite ars technica. Bill B clears his throat:
The difference is that Cellebrite isn’t painting themselves as the ironclad defender of personal privacy.
With very few exceptions software is buggy, hence hackable.
Signal marketing promises “secure messaging.” It’s a promise they simply cannot keep. It doesn’t matter how many personal endorsements they get.
EU outlines ambitious AI regulations focused on risky uses Associated Press
CISA gives federal agencies until Friday to patch Exchange servers Bleeping do
Tyrannosaurus rex walked surprisingly slowly, new study finds CNN
Global chip shortage spreads to toasters and washing machines FT. That’s a damn shame
Junk Just Keeps Notching Records Heisenberg Report
Lego Heirs’ $20 Billion Fund Says Future of Offices Is Unclear Bloomberg
The internet is breaking. Here’s how to save it. Dan Kaminksy, Cyberscoop. RIP Dan Kaminsky.