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"As some Republican senators have said publicly -- that if we kill Obama on this, and we destroy this, and we defeat his, that will drive a stake through his political heart on this administration. I just find that about as irresponsible of a thing as I can think of." -- Former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NEB). 10.23.09 “The military is in a war against the White House -- and they feel they have Obama boxed in .... they think he's weak and the wrong color. Yes, there's racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it's true and we all know it." -- Seymour Hersh 10.23.09 "To listen to Dick Cheney, who was the mastermind of the most failed decade of foreign policy that this country's had at least in my political lifetime, perhaps my whole lifetime, perhaps my parents' lifetime too, to listen to him when they talk about dithering... when their mistake was to attack Iraq and lose sight of Afghanistan... eight years of failure of [Hamid] Karzai, implicitly is eight years of failure and dithering by that administration." -- Sen. Sherrod Brown (video) on Dick Cheney’s "dithering" claim.
"Make no mistake, because of the gross mishandling of this war by past civilian leadership, there are no great options for its handling today." -- Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on the Bush White House's Afghanistan decision-making. 10.26.09 “The center of gravity (of the Republican Party), I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties.” -- Bill Kristol 10.27.09 |
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IN THIS ISSUE
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1. CNN Poll: GOP favorable rating lowest in a decade The Republican Party's favorable rating among Americans is at lowest level in at least a decade, according to a new national poll. Thirty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, with 54 percent viewing the GOP negatively. Paul Steinhauser 10.23.09 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/23/cnn-poll-gop-favorable-rating-lowest-in-25-years/ 2. Support for Public Option at All Time High The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows support for a government-run insurance plan at its highest level since the debate began with 48% in favor of the idea while 42% oppose it. That's a 10-point swing from August, when 47% were in opposition and 43% were in favor. "In another question asked a different way -- is it important to give people a choice of a public option? -- a combined 72% answered that it was either 'extremely important' or 'quite important,' while just 23% said it was 'not that important' or 'not at all important.'" 10.27.09http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/27/2109332.aspx 3. The public option is dead! (Or so they said…) Behold, the collective genius of the "news" team at Fox, declaring the public option dead time after time after time. 10.27.09 http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/002293/ 4. From the DAILY GRILL
5. Rise Of The Conservative Media (video) A new video demonstrates how the conservative echo chamber operates in the age of President Obama, using distortions, lies, and smear tactics to shape public opinion and influence national policy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQnmxW-UyKo 6. Public Option Annie (video) America's Health Insurance Plans Pollster Interrupted By Singing Troupe Of Protesters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMuZWSvlIMY&feature 7. From MEDIA MATTERS
8. The Colbert Report: George W. Bush's Motivational Speech (video) 9. Jon Stewart: From Here to Neutrality (video) John McCain asks the government to stay away from the Internet with the Internet Freedom Act of 2009. http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-26-2009/from-here-to-neutrality 10. Mark Fiore: “Balloon Bank” (animation) http://www.markfiore.com/political/balloon-bank 11. “Going Rouge: Sarah Palin – An American Nightmare” (video) The most honest, revealing account of the Palin story to appear this fall? You betcha!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4n1WOS4eQc&feature 12. Grayson v. Broun on the Constitution (video) GOP Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia introduced yet another amendment to deny all funding to ACORN. Rep. Alan Grayson took the five minutes allotted to him to question Rep. Broun about "the Constitution" and, specifically, "bills of attainder," which the Constitution prohibits. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKz5ZHM8kFM&feature 13. Maggie Fox: Healthcare system wastes up to $800 billion a year The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday. The report found that:
10.26.09 http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE59P0L320091026 14. Georgia Republicans Send Political Mailer Disguised As ‘Official’ Census Survey A local Georgia news station, reports that the Georgia Republican Party is sending out a political mailer disguised to look like an official U.S. Census survey. The news station learned of the scam when a voter called the station saying she was “upset” that Georgia Republicans would send out such a mailer, given that many Georgians, especially senior citizens, will not realize that it’s a political ploy and not an actual Census survey. Zaid Jilani 10.23.09 http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/23/georgia-republicans-send-census/ 15. John McCain Unveils Bill To Block Net Neutrality Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) became the Republican Party’s lead man on technology issues (and probably made Glenn Beck a happy man) by introducing the “Internet Freedom Act.” This legislation would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from making sure that Internet service providers don’t create a pay-for-play system where they could selectively block or slow content and applications. Amanda Terkel 10.24.09 http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/24/mccain-internet-freedom/ 16. Geraldo Rivera Slams Lou Dobbs (video) Lou Dobbs is almost single-handedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZNQ6bTEOwY&feature 17. From PolitiFact.com: Fox fails to check claim to see if it was correct Beck and others repeat the FALSE claim that White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard was once the political director for Bertha Lewis, chief organizer of ACORN. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/30/steve-doocy/beck-and-others-repeat-claim-white-house-political/ 18. The new Republican obstructionism on Obama's judicial nominees It's still early in President Obama's first term, but not too soon to conclude that the president's effort to "put the confirmation wars [for judges] behind us" is not going well. Only three of his 22 lower court nominees have been confirmed so far. The latest one, Roberto Lange for a federal district court in South Dakota, was cleared last week after waiting for three and a half months (including three weeks on the floor). The slow pace of the president's nominations is part of the problem. But the larger issue is a new form of obstructionism in the Senate. It seems clear that Senate Republicans are prepared to take the partisan war over the courts into uncharted territory—delaying up-or-down votes on the Senate floor for even the most qualified and uncontroversial of the president's judicial nominees. If this continues, it will worsen an already serious problem of vacancies on the federal courts. And it will discourage from ever entering the confirmation process precisely the type of nominees both parties should want. Doug Kendall 10.26.09 http://www.slate.com/id/2233309/ 19. FRONTLINE The Warning (video) Long before the meltdown, one woman tried to warn about a threat to the financial system. http://video.pbs.org/video/1302794657/ 20. CNN Poll: 6 in 10 back 'cap and trade' Sixty percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey say they favor "cap and trade," a Democratic sponsored plan in which the federal government would limit the amount of greenhouse gases that companies could produce in their factories or power plants. Thirty-seven percent oppose the proposal, which would penalize companies that exceed greenhouse gas limits with fines or by making those businesses pay money to other companies that producer smaller amounts of pollution. 10.27.09 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/27/cnn-poll-6-in-10-back-cap-and-trade/ 21. The World's Best Medical Care? (video) http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2009/10/the_worlds_best.html 22. Organizing for America’s Health Reform Video Challenge (videos) Voting in the Health Reform Video Challenge is now open - help choose the winning ad that will air on national television. http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hrvcratings 23. Ann Telnaes: Former Bush advisor Karl Rove criticizes WH for attacking its critics (animation) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/cartoonsandvideos/telnaes/telnaes10202009.html 24. Early reports: Job gains signal stimulus impact States have reported using stimulus money to create or save more than 388,000 jobs so far this year, buttressing the Obama administration's claim that the $787 billion plan has had a significant impact on the economy. Brad Heath and Matt Kelley 10.27.09 http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-10-27-jobs_N.htm 25. DeFOX America Don't let Glenn Beck's blackboard dictate the people's agenda. http://defoxamerica.com/ 26. Valerie Jarrett on media distortions (video) "We're calling everybody out,. This isn't anything that's simply directed at Fox. We want the American people to have a clear understanding. There's so much at stake right now, we really don't have a lot of time for nonsense and distortions." http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2009/10/27/cb.sot.jarrett.fox.news.cnn |
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1. Leslie Savan: Hoaxville USA Ah, the dog days of autumn, when the media are full of hoaxes because nothing much else is going on. Last Thursday, the Heene family of Colorado gave us a homemade version of the movie Up!, sending their six-year-old into the wild blue yonder of the garage attic while their UFO-shaped balloon led authorities on a wild goose chase across our TV screens. A day earlier, four House Republicans called a press conference to demand an investigation into the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a civil liberties lobby, for supposedly trying to "infiltrate" the Capitol with Muslim intern spies. This dastardly threat was uncovered by a stalwart young American who had grown a beard, read up on Islam, and passed himself off to CAIR as a Muslim convert committed to their goals. Once inside, he (the son of a co-author of the book Muslim Mafia, with a foreword written by Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC), the leader of the intern-busters) discovered that CAIR was actively involved in...lobbying. Of course, that's nothing (so far) compared to the pimp-and-prostitute sting of ACORN, in which a couple of white conservative activists dressed like Huggy Bear and Sweet Lips and asked unsuspecting employees how to lie to the IRS and set up a prostitution ring of underage girls from El Salvador. The two hidden-camera filmmakers may have been outrageously fake, but they had real results, leading Congress to vote to ban federal funding for the community outreach group. This gaggle of hoaxes merely points up the bubbling stew of hoaxes that the 24-hour news cycle is, day in, day out, feeding to us. It's common knowledge that a lot of the stuff on cable, as the White House has said specifically of Fox News, isn't news. Instead it's composed largely of stunts, shticks, and switcheroos, adding up to a grand political punking of the People. 10/21/09 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/486953/hoaxville_usa
2. Joan Walsh: Dick Cheney's losing his old black magic Ooooh, Dick Cheney's back, just in time for Halloween! In a Wednesday speech at Frank Gaffney's far-right Center for Security Policy, Cheney blasted President Obama for being "afraid" to make a decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan, insisting the White House "must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger." Cheney had the audacity to say the Obama team merely implemented the Bush-Cheney strategy when they sent 21,000 more American soldiers to Afghanistan in March. Where do I begin? How does a man who spent much of his vice presidency hiding in a secret bunker get off accusing the president of being "afraid"? How does a guy who got five deferments from service in Vietnam, because he famously had "other priorities," call someone else a coward? (Still, Chickenhawk Cheney had no problem sending other people's children off to die in needless wars.) How does a guy who dropped the ball on the Afghan war, letting Osama bin Laden escape and the Taliban retrench, blame someone else for "dithering" on Afghanistan? 10.22.09 http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2009/10/22/cheney/index.html 3. Joe Conason: Criticizing Fox News isn't "Nixonian." But Fox News is With outraged Washington journalists and Republican politicians crying "Nixonian!" over the public scuffle between the Obama White House and the Fox News Channel, what began as a mundane spat is turning into a cosmic jest. Somewhere, Nixon himself is enjoying a mordant laugh to hear this shrill defense of his old servant Roger Ailes, the television wizard whose deceptive campaigning ushered him into the presidency more than 40 years ago -- and who then became the living symbol of everything negative and nasty in American politics during the two decades that followed. To understand what is going on today, it is essential to remember that where Ailes came from, "Nixonian" was not an insult but a badge of honor -- and seething hatred and even persecution of the press, rather than mere criticism, was a way of life. Whatever the merits or defects of the strategy pursued by Obama's communications office in pushing back against Fox News, the furious backlash inside the Beltway is badly overwrought. Mainstream defenders of the conservative cable channel suddenly seem to be afflicted with a strange amnesia, causing them to forget not just the numerous episodes of partisan distortion that have permanently pocked its reputation, but the dirty war against the press and the First Amendment that was waged by the Nixon gang in the late '60s and early '70s. That lost memory does a disservice to journalism and history. 10.23.09 http://www.salon.com/news/fox_news/index.html?story=/opinion/conason/2009/10/22/fox_versus_obama
4. Steve Benen: Right falls for 'thesis' hoax.... Right-wing pundit Michael Ledeen published an item this week on Barack Obama's "college thesis," which Obama allegedly wrote as a student at Columbia 25 years ago. Leeden cited some website, which ran a piece in August.
Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh picked up on Leeden's report, blasting Obama for the alleged paper. The first sign of trouble was when Joe Klein noted that he's never seen or written about Obama's college thesis, and has "no idea where this report comes from." The second sign of trouble was when one stopped to notice that Obama didn't write a senior thesis (though he did write a thesis-length paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament). The third sign of trouble was when one clicked on the link that Leeden provided as support and found the word "satire." Yes, Leeden and Limbaugh got all worked up, trashing the president for a paper he didn't write in college 25 years ago, relying on a satirical blog post. And for real entertainment value, notice what Leeden and Limbaugh did when they realized they'd fallen for a dumb joke -- they blamed Obama anyway. 10.24.09 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_10/020600.php 5. Peter Dreier: The war on ACORN For 40 years, the community organizing group ACORN has been a strong and effective voice for low-income Americans. It has registered more than a million citizens to vote. It has provided counseling and other assistance to help Americans buy and keep homes. It has fought on behalf of working people for fair treatment by employers, banks, mortgage companies and payday lenders. It played a leading role in organizing the victims of Hurricane Katrina to gain a voice in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. But few Americans had heard of ACORN until last fall, when Sen. John McCain and then-Gov. Sarah Palin began attacking the organization for "voter fraud." Soon, more than 80% of Americans knew about the group, according to polls. In the last month, Fox News, and then the rest of the media, have broadcast videos of several ACORN staffers advising people posing as a pimp and prostitute to lie on their tax returns. Now people know ACORN for that too. It was wrong that workers registering voters for ACORN submitted false names. And it was wrong for ACORN employees to offer the advice they did to the posing couple. But the organization took swift action in both cases, notifying election officials in the first instance and terminating employees in the second. The attack on ACORN is not really about bogus names on voter forms or about staffers encouraging people to lie on their tax forms. Rather, it is part of a broader conservative effort to attack progressive organizations and discredit President Obama and his liberal agenda. Over the years, ACORN has made powerful enemies. Many businesses oppose the group's efforts to raise wages for the working poor. Banks, mortgage companies and payday lenders have fought ACORN's campaigns to strengthen regulation of the financial industry. Business groups have funded anti-ACORN websites, such as rottenacorn.com, that aim to destroy the group's credibility. Republicans have long opposed ACORN's success at registering low-income, mostly minority voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats. A healthy democracy requires that the voices of the poor be heard in the corridors of power. That's what ACORN has been facilitating, more successfully than any other community group, since the 1970s. If ACORN's enemies are able to defeat this feisty group, it won't just be the organization's 500,000 members who will suffer. Our democracy will suffer too. 10.22.09 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dreier22-2009oct22,0,6070708.story To contribute to ACORN click HERE. 6. Adam Howard: The 'Beneath the Presidency' Routine The far right's latest attack line on President Obama is not as subtle as they think it is. By calling his administration's war of words with Fox News "beneath the presidency" --conservatives hope to add fuel to the fire of a potent and potentially racist, ideological effort to delegitimize the president. They've employed this tactic earlier but less histrionically when Obama became the first sitting president to appear on The Tonight Show and again when he courted the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, but it's really taken off with regards to the Fox News fight. Whether you believe the president is right or wrong to challenge Fox News (I happen to agree with Slate's Jacob Weisberg, I believe he's right), it's pretty petty and profoundly ironic that the very people who excused George W. Bush's frequent malapropisms, carefree warmaking and authorization of torture as bold leadership now hope to marginalize Obama for publicly rebuking Fox News. As Amanda Terkel of Think Progress points out:
Perhaps it's the fact that Obama has yet to suffer any mortal political wounds to date as president and his approval rating has yet to dip below 50 percent that has the right behaving so badly. Or perhaps, unlike say with the Olympics, Obama may be barking up the right tree by making the authenticity of Fox News the topic du jour. What is irrefutable is the fact that the likes of Dana Perino, John Boehner and Chris Wallace have no business lecturing anyone on how US presidents ought to behave. 10/26/09 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/488260/the_beneath_the_presidency_routine 7. Lee Siegel: Cheney Blood Lust There is something Greek about the Cheney family’s obsessive persecution of President Obama. Ancient Greek, that is. It recalls the vindictive persecution of the House of Atreus by the Furies in Aeschylus’ great trilogy of tragic plays, The Oresteia. The Cheneys’ Fury-like pursuit of Obama is relentless, irrational, and unforgiving. First Dick Cheney, on three separate occasions, declares that Obama is making the country more vulnerable to terrorist attack, accuses the president of using the economic crisis as a pretext to expand the government, and agrees with a conservative talking head that Obama is “telegraphing weakness” to the terrorists. Then his eldest daughter, Liz, proposes on Fox News that in the wake of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the president send the mother of a fallen soldier to Oslo to accept the award on behalf of the U.S. military—as if it was Obama, and not her father, whose stupidity and greed has sent thousands of Americans to their death in Iraq. And recently, Cheney’s youngest daughter, Mary, announced the creation of an international consulting firm that will, no doubt, facilitate any and all opposition to the slightest Obama initiative. And just this past Wednesday there was Dick Cheney himself, the chief Fury, publicly accusing Obama of putting at risk American troops in Afghanistan by “dithering,” charging that Obama is “afraid to make a decision,” and saying that the president is endangering the American “homeland.” Cheney’s public belittling of Obama, his near-seditious claims that Obama is working against the country’s best interests and allowing America’s enemies to gain the upper hand—such vengeful attacks by a previous vice president, let alone by any former high elected official, against a sitting president are without precedent. You feel that in Cheney’s grim zeal he is not simply refusing to leave the stage, but reliving his glory days fighting the good Manichaean fight against absolute evil—this time against a president who is, in Cheney’s mind, the moral extension of the shadowy terrorists he pursued while commandeering the White House. Then, too, perhaps Cheney was so used to bending to his will the emotional weakling he served under for so long that his drubbing of Obama is simply the only way he knows how to relate to a president. There is something primitive—something along the lines of magical thinking—about the way the former vice president projects his psyche onto reality. 10-22-09 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-22/cheneys-blood-lust/ 8. Paul Krugman: After Reform Passes So, how well will health reform work after it passes? The experience in Massachusetts, which passed major health reform back in 2006, should dampen conservative hopes and soothe progressive fears. Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage. It is, to be frank, a bit of a Rube Goldberg device — a complicated way of achieving something that could have been done much more simply with a Medicare-type program. Yet it has gone a long way toward achieving the goal of health insurance for all, although it’s not quite there: according to state estimates, only 2.6 percent of residents remain uninsured. This expansion of coverage has tremendous significance in human terms. The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently did a focus-group study of Massachusetts residents and reported that “Health reform enabled many of these individuals to take care of their medical needs, to start seeing a doctor, and in some cases to regain their health and control over their lives.” Even those who probably would have been insured without reform felt “peace of mind knowing they could obtain health coverage if they lost access to their employer-sponsored coverage.” And reform remains popular. Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed. Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state’s physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed. So, if the Massachusetts experience is any guide, health care reform will have broad public support once it’s in place and the scare stories are proved false. The new health care system will be criticized; people will demand changes and improvements; but only a small minority will want reform reversed. 10.26.09 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opinion/26krugman.html
9. Howard Fineman: What’s So Hot About Snowe? In case the White House hasn't noticed, Republicans in Congress are engaged in what amounts to a sitdown strike. They don't like anything about Obama or his policies; they have no interest in seeing him succeed. Despite the occasional protestation to the contrary, the GOP has no intention of helping him pass any legislation. Snowe may very well end up voting for whatever she and Democrats craft, but that won't make the outcome bipartisan any more than dancing shoes made Tom DeLay Fred Astaire. Nor would Snowe's vote mollify the GOP grassroots: they don't think of her as a Republican anyway. The notion that she is inspiring other Republicans to join the cause of reform falls apart when you see who is falling in line. A few prominent Republicans indeed said nice things about the Senate Finance Committee bill—the one on which Snowe was the only Republican vote. But that praise, from former GOP Senate lead-ers Bob Dole and Howard Baker and former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, loses its impact once you realize that all three of them work for major Washington law firms, whose clients include most of the big corporate players in the health-care industry. Theirs is rented bipartisanship, on retainer or billed by the hour. 10.24.09 http://www.newsweek.com/id/219382/ 10. Bill Scher: Public Option: This Is How It's Supposed To Work In 1993, there was no significant progressive movement putting positive pressure on the Clinton Administration. Many naively assumed having a Democratic president and Congress was enough, the hard work was done, and we could kick back with a Crystal Pepsi and let democracy work its magic. We learned the conservative minority had many tricks up its sleeve, and was able to smear and fear to death any attempt at major progressive reform. The election of a uniquely compelling figure in President Barack Obama threatened to bring back some of that complacency. A false notion persists in some corners that the President should be able "ram through" any legislation he likes. But Obama himself has always stressed that real change is too hard to be accomplished by one person, even the President. Without a progressive movement pushing good ideas, debunking conservative information and countering special interest pressure, any attempt at reform will suffer the right-wing meat grinder, spooking even the biggest congressional majority from acting. 10.26.09 http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104426/public-option-how-its-supposed-work 11. Juan Cole: Obama's foreign policy report card Why can't the administration of President Barack Obama get the word out about its policy successes? President Obama campaigned on an ambitious platform of withdrawing from Iraq, engaging Iran on its nuclear program and persuading the Pakistani government to take on the Taliban and al-Qaida. Despite the charge by critics from both the right and the left in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize that he has accomplished little so far, in fact he has already set in motion significant change on several of these fronts -- despite the enormous domestic tasks that have inevitably preoccupied his administration. Yet you'd never hear about these successes from the mainstream media. When Obama came into office in January, 142,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq, conducting regular patrols of the major cities. His Republican rivals were dead set against U.S. withdrawal on a strict timetable. He faced something close to an insurrection from some of his commanders in the field, such as Gen. Ray Odierno, who opposed a quick departure from Iraq. Moreover, Obama assumed the presidency at a time when Iran and the U.S. were virtually on a war footing and there had been no direct talks between the two countries on most of the major issues dividing them. In February, the government of Pakistan virtually ceded the Swat Valley and the Malakand Division to the Pakistani Taliban of Maulvi Fazlullah, allowing the imposition of the latter's fundamentalist version of Islamic law on residents, and Islamabad had no stomach for taking on the increasingly bold extremists. Eight months later, it is a different world. While it is still early in his presidency, and there is too much work unfinished to give him an overall grade, it's already apparent he's outperforming his predecessor. 10.26.09 http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/10/26/obama_report_card/ 12. THOMAS FRANK: Obama Is Right About Fox News Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution. There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source. And the Newseum in Washington, D.C., establishes the profession's legitimacy with a memorial to fallen scribes, thus drawing an implicit connection between the murdered abolitionist editors of long ago and the struggling outfit that gave you this morning's page-one story about cute pets in Halloween costumes. But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit. As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago, after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed it for following "a talk radio format." The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list." Of course, the network's chairman, Roger Ailes, was an adviser to Mr. Nixon in the 1968 presidential campaign; his signature innovation back then was TV commercials in which Mr. Nixon answered questions from hand-picked citizens in a town-hall style setting. To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears. 10.28.09 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703574604574499671746743510.html
13. Paul Begala: Traitor Joe It's journalistic shorthand to note a politician's party identification and state after his or her name. For example: Jane Doe (D-NY). And so Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman is identified as (I-CT). But the “I” does not stand for "Independent." It stands for "Insurance Industry." Lieberman says he will join a Republican filibuster against President Obama's health-insurance reforms. You could see this coming from a mile away—actually from 15 years away. In 1993 and 94, Lieberman consistently opposed President Clinton's reform bill—which did not have a public option. In case you're keeping score at home, Lieberman will filibuster the Obama plan, which has a public option, and he opposed the Clinton reform plan, which did not. Anything that protects consumers, it seems, is a bridge too far for Sen. Lieberman. Even before then, when George H.W. Bush was trying to pass a capital gains tax cut for the idle rich, Sen. Lieberman didn't think he was doing too much. No, Sen. Lieberman joined with Republicans and voted in favor of special breaks for the Paris Hilton class. He led the fight against Securities & Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt's accounting reforms, which were designed to rein in corporate abuses. Apparently Clinton and Levitt were just doing too much. Sen. Lieberman is always there when we don't need him. Don't ask him to do more than that. It's just too much. 10.27.09 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-27/traitor-joe/ 14. Robert Borosage: The New Red-Ink Scare We've got a new red scare. Forget Glenn Beck; the fear isn't that America is going red, it's that it is in the red. Conservatives in both parties are raising alarms about deficits and government spending. Well, get over it. If we are going to generate growth and shared prosperity out of the mess we are in, expanded public investment must be a centerpiece of the new economy. In today's Washington, this verges on heresy. The chattering classes are raising a clamor about Obama's deficits. The growing fixation, fanned by conservatives in both parties, may well cripple any short-term recovery. Worse, the wrong-headed debate could well undermine the reforms vital to the new economy we need to build out of the ruins of the old. Both parties still pay tribute to false idols that should have been discarded in the recent economic collapse. Republicans rail against everything Obama, chanting, "Where are the jobs?" while calling for rolling back the stimulus, abandoning health care reform, cutting spending and, no surprise, more tax cuts. They seem to have learned nothing from the crisis. Sure, they claim that they have put aside their fiscally wastrel ways, blaming it all on Bush, and have become born-again fiscal conservatives. But this leaves them in the bizarre posture of arguing that "deficits don't matter" when the economy is growing, but are unacceptable when the economy is sinking. Step on the gas when the economy is already racing and on the brake when it is sputtering. The perpetually tanned leader of House Republicans, John Boehner, clearly believes that Americans have neither memory nor common sense. The continued high disregard that most Americans have for Republican legislators suggests otherwise. 10/28/09 http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104427/new-red-ink-scare
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