Permanent link to MTA daily media news

The Zombie Bank Monster Mash, by Mark Fiore (click here to play the animation)

All the President’s zombies (by Paul Krugman)
Ben Bernanke’s testimony over the past two days gives us our best clue yet about where the administration and the Fed are going with bank rescue. And the answer seems to be … nowhere… As long as capital injections are seen as a way to bail out the people who got us into this mess (which they are as long as the banks haven’t been put into receivership), the political system won’t, repeat, won’t be willing to come up with enough money to make the system healthy again.

Now, the details: Treasury to give banks unlimited refills (McClatchy)
Taking the wraps off its much anticipated bank-rescue plan, the Obama administration on Wednesday announced that it will provide a virtually unlimited solvency guarantee to the nation’s 19 largest banks.

The Banks’s Rigged Stress Test (by Dean Baker)
Read it and weep. The NYT tells us that the baseline scenario for the stress tests is that the unemployment rates rises to 8.4 percent and home prices fall 14 percent. The worst case scenario is that unemployment rises to 8.9 percent and house prices fall 22 percent. Okay, unemployment will almost certainly reach 8.0 percent and possibly 8.1 percent in February. It might cross 8.5 percent in March. The worst case scenario is that it hits 8.9 percent by the rest of the year? Remember, this is the same crew that told us that there was no housing bubble…

These stress tests indicate that our economic policy makers are still in a serious state of denial. Why isn’t the media ridiculing them and telling the public that the folks making economic policy still don’t understand the economy.
Well, Dean, it’s because the media don’t understand the economy, either.

Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz: Obama Has Confused Saving the Banks with Saving the Bankers (Democracy Now)
We get reaction to President Obama’s speech from Nobel economics laureate and former World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz says the Obama administration has failed to address the structural and regulatory flaws at the heart of the financial crisis that stand in the way of economic recovery. Stiglitz also talks about why he thinks Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan is wrong and that Obama’s plan to keep a “residual force” in Iraq will be “very expensive.” On health care, Stiglitz says a single-payer system is “the only alternative.”

Pres[i]dent Obama puts astronomical $4 trillion price tag on new budget (New York Daily News)
President Obama unveiled a staggeringly huge budget this morning, telling the country it will take almost $4 trillion to run the U.S. next year. That will be a whopping $1.75 trillion more than the President expects the government to raise in revenue, creating the largest federal deficit in real dollars since the country was fighting World War II. The giant numbers are due in part to Obama administration’s decision to print all of the red ink, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and national emergencies, which the Bush administration left out. “This budget is an honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go,” Obama said in releasing the outline of his massive spending plan. “For too long our budget has not told the whole truth about how precious tax dollars are spent.” In spite of the gusher of spending, Obama insisted he’s being tight-fisted. He said he’s scouring the budget for waste and targeting popular but unnecessary programs for elimination.

Policy shift will avert $9 trillion deficit-Orszag (Reuters)
President Barack Obama’s budget director said on Thursday that without a shift in policies the U.S. deficit would reach $9 trillion over the next decade. White House budget chief Peter Orszag said the Obama administration’s budget outline reflects costs for the war in Iraq and other items that were previously not included in the budget. “All told we are showing $2.7 trillion in costs in this budget that were excluded from previous budgets and I think that is a mark of the honesty and responsibility contained in this document,” he said.
Excellent.  This is the kind of explaining that needs to be done, but that Democrats have avoided for so long.  The only way to fight the right’s mighty propaganda machine is to explain, educate, and debunk.  Then do it again.  And again.  And again.  And never, ever stop.  The Clintons are the absolute best at doing this.

Highlights of Obama’s proposed fiscal 2010 budget (McClatchy)
Here are some highlights of the $3.55 trillion fiscal 2010 budget, which President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday.

Gallup: Big Majority Thinks Obama Moving At Right Speed (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Still more polling out today shows the public wants President Obama to think very, very big and has the stomach for Obama to try to get a great deal done — right now. The latest: Gallup finds [Wednesday] that a surprising total of 69% think that Obama is either moving at the right speed or not fast enough in addressing the nation’s problems… Of that 69%, 59% think he’s moving at about the right speed, and 10% think he’s not moving quickly enough. Barely one fourth think he’s going to fast. Separately, the poll finds broad public support of Obama’s spending levels, which have been attacked relentlessly by Republicans in recent days.

Obama Budget Would Create $634 Billion Health-Care Fund (Washington Post)
President Obama [released] a budget … that creates a 10-year, $634 billion “reserve fund” to partially pay for a vast expansion of the U.S. health care system, an overhaul that many experts project will cost as much as $1 trillion over the next decade.

Obama Creates a Fund for Health Care Reform (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
I’m hopeful in a manner born of desperation, but I’m also very afraid this will be a squandered opportunity to do the right thing, and give the moneyed interests another dozen years like the ones they got by killing the 1995 proposal. Check out the article and decide for yourself whether this signals a willingness to get serious about health care, or whether he’s going to cave in to the corporate interests who put him in the White House.

Pushed To the Margins, Finally (by Joe Conason)
At the brink of global ruin, [perhaps]  now Americans will look abroad and notice that other countries provide quality care to all of their citizens, spending less than half what we do and achieving better outcomes. In the coming decades, countries in Europe, as well as Canada and Japan, will be able to invest their resources in energy and education, while we try to figure out how to borrow enough to keep our hospitals open. What they all have in common is that they do not devote a huge proportion of their health spending to the profits of insurance companies — and they negotiate budgets with health providers, such as pharmaceutical companies. The superior performance of these alternatives is at long last coming to the attention of the mainstream media, which has so long ignored it.

As always, Congress will resist change on behalf of the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies, preferring to do nothing. But perhaps in the coming years, the public will realize that such feckless politicians should be told to go do nothing somewhere else.

Bill Clinton: Why Obama Will Succeed At Health Care Reform (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
In my interview with Bill Clinton, the former President also talked at some length about why he’s certain that President Obama will succeed at his vow in his speech to tackle health care reform this year. Clinton’s basic take: The recognition that the health care system is a disaster is now overwhelming; there’s been a major cultural shift towards government activism; the Congress is more willing to tackle reform; and the opposition is in disarray and has run out of arguments. “It’s a better than 50-50 chance he’ll succeed,” Clinton said.

Six in Ten Americans Want Access to Medicare (by masslib at Alegre’s Corner)
Obama has a huge opportunity to solidify his legacy early on as one of America’s great Presidents.  Only in times of turmoil do Presidents get to achieve great things, and here we are in one of those times.  Public opinion on health reform continues to shift, and the winds argue for universal access to Medicare… Deep public dissatisfaction with the current health insurance system is evident in a new poll showing that 64% of Americans support expanding Medicare as a choice for anyone who wants an option to the private insurance market. The poll numbers illustrate unease with rising premiums, diminishing benefits and loss of health coverage when a job disappears…

The poll also finds a clear majority choose Medicare for All over our current private for-profit system, and Americans view public health coverage more positively than private insurance.

President Obama to Propose Medicare Premium Increase for Top 5% of Recipients (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
To partially fund the Health Care Reserve Fund, another new source of revenue — or tax hike — the President will propose applying the same income standard for premiums for Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) that applies already to Medicare Part B (doctors’ visits). That is to say, right now couples who make more than $170,000 a year… This will impact the top five percent of Medicare recipients, the Obama White House anticipates, or about 1.5 million people, and will raise $8.1 billion over 10 years. This would start in FY 2011.

Obama to Seek Higher Tax on Affluent to Pay for Health Care (New York Times)
President Obama will propose further tax increases on the affluent to help pay for his promise to make health care more accessible and affordable, calling for stricter limits on the benefits of itemized deductions taken by the wealthiest households, administration officials said Wednesday… The president will also propose, in the 10-year budget he is to release Thursday, to use revenues from the centerpiece of his environmental policy — a plan under which companies must buy permits to exceed pollution emission caps — to pay for an extension of a two-year tax credit that benefits low-wage and middle-income people.

The combined effect of the two revenue-raising proposals, on top of Mr. Obama’s existing plan to roll back the Bush-era income tax reductions on households with income exceeding $250,000 a year, would be a pronounced move to redistribute wealth by reimposing a larger share of the tax burden on corporations and the most affluent taxpayers.

Budget Expects Revenue From Limits on Emissions (Washington Post)
Today, the White House [unveiled] a budget that assumes there will be revenue from an emissions trading system by 2012. Sources … said it would direct $15 billion of that revenue to clean-energy projects, $60 billion to tax credits for lower- and middle-income working families, and additional money to offsetting higher energy costs for families, small businesses and communities.

Center for Public Integrity Reports Boom in Climate Change Lobbying (Legal Times)
The number of lobbyists working to influence policies regarding climate change has exploded over the past five years, increasing by as much as 300 percent, according to a new report by the Center for Public Integrity.

52 Million Tuned In to Watch Obama’s First Address (Advertising Age)
Rash Report: Speech Draws 40% More Than Bush’s Last State of the Union

Top Democrats brush off the president on earmarks (The Hill)
Leading Democrats on Wednesday appeared to brush aside President Obama’s suggestion that they sacrifice earmarks in the federal budget, arguing Congress knows better than “faceless bureaucrats” how to spend taxpayer money. The pushback came just hours after the president, during his address to a joint session of Congress, implored lawmakers to help put the nation back on a path to fiscal health.

House to Approve Thousands of U.S. Budget Earmarks (Bloomberg)
Washington’s respite from congressional pet projects known as earmarksappears to be over. President Barack Obama , who insisted on keeping his economic stimulus package free of money for lawmakers’ projects, may soon be faced with a bill stuffed with thousands of them.

House Kills Move to Examine Campaign Contributions’ Links to Earmarks (CQ Politics)
House Democrats killed a resolution Wednesday that would have called for an ethics committee inquiry into the relationship between campaign contributions and earmarks.

Reid increased congressional budget to allow GOP to maintain its staff levels. (Think Progress)
The Huffington Post reports that the congressional operations budget has been increased to $4.4 billion “because Senate Republicans wanted to retain previous staff levels” — despite losing 20 percent of their seats last year and railing against government spending recently. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) discussed the issue at a press conference today: “We had a situation — you should direct that question to Senator McConnell because we had trouble organizing this year. He wanted to maintain a lot of their staffing even though they had lost huge numbers. And the only way we could get it done is to do what we did.”

Obama might target Lockheed Martin’s F-22 for defense cuts (McClatchy)
President Barack Obama may have Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor fighter jet in his sights as a prime target for cutting big-dollar defense programs.
Lots of these military boondoggles need to be scrapped.

Sen. Byrd questions Obama’s use of policy ‘czars’ (New York Times)
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who for decades has battled White House power and championed congressional clout, is questioning President Obama’s appointment of “czars” to oversee key policy areas, including energy and climate. “The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances,” Byrd wrote in a letter to Obama. “At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.”
I have to say that although I don’t like the pushback on earmarks, I am glad to see that Democrats refuse to march in lock goose-step, the way the Republicans did for eight years.

Leahy announces hearings on Bush investigations set for next Wednesday. (Think Progress)
Speaking on the Senate floor [Wednesday] morning, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) reiterated his call to hold a truth commission to investigate Bush wrongdoings, and announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee would hold hearings on the matter next Wednesday. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) rose after Leahy to support the call for investigations into “this past carnival of folly, greed, lies, and wrongdoing.” “If we blind ourselves to this history, we deny ouselves its lessons,” he said, warning that such an investigation will not be comfortable or easy.

Pelosi criticizes Truth Commission as inadequate, advocates criminal prosecutions (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
In an interview [Wednesday] with Rachel Maddow … House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly advocated the need for criminal prosecutions, not merely fact-finding… Leahy’s overt argument against prosecutions — no matter what his “Truth Commission” finds — is nothing more than an attempt, by definition, to place the President above and beyond the rule of law. Whether she’s sincere or not about it, it’s at least good (and potentially productive) to see Pelosi being critical of such a lawless posture from the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman.

Jamiol’s World

Pelosi: Thirty to fifty thousand ‘residual troops’ in Iraq is too many. (Think Progress)
President Obama is expected to announce this week that he will withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by August 2010, but reports say he will initially leave a residual force of 30,000 to 50,000 troops to “train the Iraqi military, conduct targeted counterterrorism operations and protect American personnel and assets.” Yesterday on the Rachel Maddow show, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made clear that she wanted far fewer residual troops than this.
Click through to watch the video.

EXCLUSIVE-Guantanamo abuse has worsened since Obama -lawyer (Reuters)
Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards “get their kicks in” before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees. Abuses began to pick up in December after Obama was elected, human rights lawyer Ahmed Ghappour told Reuters. He cited beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-forcefeeding detainees who are on hunger strike. The Pentagon said on Monday that it had received renewed reports of prisoner abuse during a recent review of conditions at Guantanamo, but had concluded that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
I am thinking that the Pentagon can’t be trusted when it comes to Guantanamo.

Obama Supports Telecom Immunity (by Steve at The Left Coaster)
Well, I’ll say one thing for Obama: he’s making it easy for someone in the party to run at him from his left in 2012. Eric Holder and Leon Panetta are doing little if anything to show any change in direction from Bush on domestic surveillance and executive privilege, nor does the administration show any interest in holding people accountable for past illegalities. And now in office, they sanction telecom immunity… Progressives will have to accept that Obama plans to allow no room to his right when it comes to national security, even if it means disappointing progressives and pissing on the Constitution.

OBAMA TALKS ABOUT FINANCIAL REGULATIONS (First Read, MSNBC)
[Wednesday], the president met with Treasury Secretary Geithner, chief White House economic adviser Larry Summers, and the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee to begin work on a new set of regulations to monitor a modern banking system… “While free markets are the key to our progress, they do not give us free license to take whatever we can get, however we can get it,” he said. “But let me be clear: The choice we face is not between some oppressive government-run economy or a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. Rather, strong financial markets require clear rules of the road, not to hinder financial institutions, but to protect consumers and investors and ultimately to keep those financial institutions strong.”

SEC Says Investment Management Firm Swindled Millions (Legal Times)
It may not amount to the multibillion-dollar investment schemes orchestrated by Madoff or Stanford, but the SEC has filed a complaint against another investment manager.

Texas financier accused of fraud owes IRS $104 million, too (McClatchy)
Texas billionaire financier R. Allen Stanford was in a heap of hot water with federal authorities even before the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges Feb. 17 accusing him of running an $8 billion ”massive ongoing fraud” at his financial empire.

US January new home sales slump to record low (Reuters)
Sales of newly built U.S. single-family homes slumped to a record low in January, while prices fell to their weakest level in five years, according to a government report on Thursday that highlighted the continued distress in the housing market.

Child Citizen Protection Act would give leeway on deportations (McClatchy)
Gloria Gonzalez-Garcia’s family was torn in two Dec. 2. Her husband, Jose Alfredo Garcia, was arrested by Mineral Wells police, and his status as an illegal immigrant quickly got him a one-way ticket to Mexico. He was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported the next day. It didn’t matter that he had been paying taxes, buying a house or taking care of his daughters, who are American citizens because they were born in the U.S… Garcia’s abrupt deportation is an example of how tens of thousands of parents are separated from their children when immigration law catches up with them.

ABC News: Obama to Seek New Assault Weapons Ban (ABC News)
The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said [Wednesday]… Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.

Locke’s China work complicates bid (Politico)
Locke’s post-gubernatorial efforts to drum up business for an array of companies in the rapidly expanding Chinese market may require steps to reconcile with the administration’s ethics policy… The problem is that Locke, a partner in an international law firm’s China division, has advocated for Microsoft, Starbucks, and banking, timber and shipping interests in recent years, raising potential conflicts for him as head of a department charged with promoting U.S. trade around the globe.

Burris Son Got Job from Blago (Political Wire)
The son of embattled Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) “is a federal tax deadbeat who landed a $75,000-a-year state job under former Gov. Rod Blagojevich five months ago,” the Chicago Sun-Times has learned. “Blagojevich’s administration hired Roland W. Burris II as a senior counsel for the state’s housing authority Sept. 10 — about six weeks after the Internal Revenue Service slapped a $34,163 tax lien on Burris II and three weeks after a mortgage company filed a foreclosure suit on his South Side house.”

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen — A Democrat — Might Reject Portions of Stimulus (Dissenting Justice)
Democratic Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen recently announced that he might reject portions of the stimulus budget. If he actually follows through with this action, he would join several Republican governors who have indicated that they will reject stimulus money allocated to their states. Bredesen complains that in order for states to receive federal money that Congress has allocated to increase the level of unemployment benefits, states must apply a new formula, which, if utilized, would increase the number of beneficiaries in Tennessee. Bredesen says that the overall expansion of unemployment benefits would put additional pressure on the state’s already constrained budget.

Bill Clinton: GOP’s Only Hope At Comeback Is To Go Along With Obama (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Yet another installment from my interview with Bill Clinton: I asked the former President if the Republican Party has any hope at a comeback anytime soon and what they needed to do to make it happen. Clinton said the GOP is in such a deep hole that their only prayer is to go along with President Obama’s agenda now and try to articulate a reality-based alternative vision over the long term.

Bunning’s statements, feuding create concerns in GOP (McClatchy)
Republican insiders are hedging their bets on the fate of Sen. Jim Bunning’s 2010 re-election bid as the rift between Kentucky’s junior senator and GOP leaders widens.

Colorado state senator says HIV testing for pregnant women rewards ‘sexual promiscuity.’ (Think Progress)
[Wednesday], Colorado State Sen. Dave Schultheis (R) caused outrage by announcing that he would vote against a bill requiring HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease “stems from sexual promiscuity” and he doesn’t think the government should reward “unacceptable behavior.” 

Anti-Obama Author Still Questioning Obama’s Citizenship (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Jerome Corsi, author of the anti-Obama book “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” remains (shockingly) unconvinced by the president’s first month in office. Speaking in the halls of the Conservative Political Action Committee conference here in Washington D.C., the libertarian author, who caused a brief campaign stir with the publication of his book, said that multiple questions and concerns remain, on everything from Obama’s politics to his citizenship…

“It is not going off the table because people care about the Constitution. And it is in the Constitution that a president needs to be nationally born,” he [said]. “It is not settled. Barack Obama has not released his natural birth certificate. I don’t know what is on that document. I’m not a mind reader. But I know that politicians of note do not hide documents unless there is something embarrassing that they don’t want seen. And a birth certificate should be a mundane certificate. Obama could make this issue go away.”
There’s apparently a suit by another American soldier in Iraq—oh, and Phil Berg wants Obama deported as an illegal alien.

The Media Continue to Ignore Welfare for Citi Shareholders (by Dean Baker)
The NYT piece on bailout III for Citigroup looks like it was written by Citi’s lobbyists. The piece never once points out that the government has handed tens of billions to Citigroup for almost nothing. The article even includes a bizarre statement to discourage those who oppose welfare for the super-rich: “Nationalizing Citigroup outright would be a huge challenge, given the company’s size and international sweep. In countries like Mexico, for instance, a state-controlled bank might run afoul of local ownership regulations.”

This could almost be a line in a comedy routine — Mexico is going to keep the United States from putting a bankrupt bank in receivership. It’s too bad that the NYT didn’t identify anyone who made such a statement, we all could ridicule this person until they faded from public life.
Sort of like George Bush attacking Iraq because fanatical Muslims from Saudi Arabia and based in Afghanistan attacked us.

Paging Will Bunch … Will Bunch to the white courtesy phone … (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
During an online discussion [Wednesday], Washington Post reporter Perry Bacon touted “the Reagan years” as an example of “low spending by the government”… This is complete bunk.  Federal government spending increased under Ronald Reagan.  Increased significantly more than it did under, for example, Bill Clinton. It’s obvious why conservatives tell fairy tales in which the wise and noble Ronald Reagan kept government spending in check: they think it helps their political and ideological fortunes.  It’s less apparent why reporters like Perry Bacon repeat these myths.

Lauer to Santelli: Gibbs “wasn’t threatening you” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
This is very new—having mainstream media mavens telling the truth when confronted by right-wing anger.

Shuster, Gross “bust” the “myth” that “nationalization is a form of communism” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Beck contrasts CEOs spending taxpayer money on private jets, Feinstein flying in husband’s plane (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Media: Meet Gov. Bobby Jindal, Washington Outsider (try to contain your laughter) (by Karl Frisch at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Over the past few days I’ve seen some in the media describe Gov. Jindal [as] an outsider devoid of any connection to those unpopular Congressional Republicans. There’s one small problem with that description. It just isn’t true.
Click through for the details of Jindal’s Washington ties.

Right-wing media fracture over Jindal (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Even before Rush Limbaugh announced his unwavering support for Jindal Wednesday afternoon, lots of far right  were furious with Jindal’s performance… But then Limbaugh announced that kind of talk was off limits for conservatives… GOP bloggers didn’t take too kindly to those marching orders. Hot Air thought it was obvious Jindal blew his big night, and wondered what was wrong with admitting that… The headline for the Riehl World post: “Is The Limbaugh Era Nearing An End?” We can dream, can’t we?

Brzezinski gushes about her “crush” Rush Limbaugh: “I love Rush. I do…we’re emailing” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Limbaugh To Convene A ‘Female Summit’ To Figure Out Why Women Hate Him (Think Progress)
Women don’t really like Rush Limbaugh. On Feb. 23, Public Policy Polling released findings showing that only 37 percent of women hold a favorable opinion of the hate radio host, compared to 56 percent of men. As Jill Zimon notes, Limbaugh brought up this poll yesterday on his radio show, noting that it was one of the largest gender gaps Public Policy Polling has seen on any issue it has polled in the past year. His solution? To convene a summit of women to find out why they dislike him.
I’d like to see the “Nine to Five” ladies put in charge of this summit.

Limbaugh, touting “Female Summit” to address his “huge gender gap,” excludes anyone “who’s had a…chop-a-dick-offa-me” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Oh, then I guess the the “Nine to Five” ladies won’t be invited.

Sanford: Rush Limbaugh is an ‘idiot.’ (Think Progress)
In an interview with the website Real Clear Politics, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) was asked about the “view that perhaps Republicans are rooting for President Obama to fail.” This question was a clear reference to Rush Limbaugh, who infamously said, “I hope Obama fails.” Sanford responded in unequivocal terms: “SANFORD: I don’t want him to fail. Anybody who wants him to fail is an idiot, because it means we’re all in trouble.” In the past, Limbaugh has attacked other Republicans who have expressed hope for President Obama to succeed, declaring that they are “drinking the Kool-Aid… they’re afraid of being called racists.”
Make that a Big, Fat Idiot, as senator-elect Al Franken told us.

Right-wing TV hosts gain viewers since Obama victory. (Think Progress)
“Conservative talk hosts, or at least those who anchor Fox News Channel’s lineup, are enjoying a solid post-election bump,” Variety reports. Fox News saw its daily viewership increase by 24%last month, compared to Feb. 2008. Bill O’Reilly was up 33% (3.6 million viewers) in February compared to the previous year. Sean Hannity rose 38% (to nearly 2.8 million). And newly-minted right-wing talker Glenn Beck “has doubled his timeslot.” Liberal hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow posted gains of 32% and 134%, respectively, in total viewers since one year ago. “But both programs experienced ratings erosion versus last month.” Olbermann was down 4% and Maddow was down 8%.

David Sirota Launches Campaign For MSNBC Gig (FishbowlDC, Media Bistro)
“As many of you know, I’ve appeared on MSNBC many times as a guest with my friend Rachel Maddow, and appear regularly on other networks. I also have a syndicated newspaper column, two bestselling books and a blog, thanks in no small part to all of your support over the years. So, after a lot of scratching and clawing (and help from you), my work is starting to get out there. And in all of those forums, I try to focus on the economic and political issues important to regular folks – the issues that get short shrift by so much of the media. Over the years, I’ve worked with so many of you – you’ve given me ideas, provided leads for stories and critiqued me. It’s improved my work so much, and now we have a chance to take it to the next level – and if we do, our work together will only intensify.”
Just what we need is another misogynistic Obot at MSNBC.

Unions File Complaint To Strip Anti-Labor Group’s Tax Status (by Sam Stein, the Huffington Post)
Two of the nation’s largest unions have filed a joint complaint with the IRS, urging the agency to revoke the tax-exempt status of two organizations for engaging in partisan political activity. The AFL-CIO and Change to Win submitted their complaint to the IRS on Thursday, officials told the Huffington Post. The two unions allege that Rick Berman’s Center for Union Facts and Bernie Marcus’ the Marcus Foundation violated rules regarding their tax status by explicitly endorsing and trying to raise money for Republican senatorial candidates in the 2008 election. Berman, in a comment to the Huffington Post, downplayed the threat to his organization’s tax status as nonexistent and political “theater.”
Good.  More of this, please.  Right wing stink tanks have been getting away with blatant Republican partisanship for many years, while retaining their tax exempt status.

Accountability Now: a Latte Rebellion? (by Pacific John at Alegre’s Corner)
A group of largely net-centric liberals is forming a counterpart to the conservative Club for Growth, the group that finances primary challenges against moderate Republicans. Accountability Now includes: MoveOn, SEIU, Color of Change, Democracy for America, 21st Century Democrats and BlogPAC. FireDogLake’s Jane Hamsher and Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald will serve in advisory roles, while Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos will conduct polling, with analytical help from 538.com’s Nate Silver.
I want nothing at all to do with any organization that includes MoveOn, Markos Moulitsas, or Jane Hamsher.  I guess I’ll have to take their link off my website.

Media Matters for America headlines

NY Times drew false equivalence between Will and Gore

MSNBC’s Brewer, Watson aired Gingrich’s gratuitous Twitter attack on Pelosi

O’Reilly advanced falsehood that “the Democrats in charge of the finance committees” resisted regulating mortgage industry

Politico falsely claimed that Santelli’s “rant” criticized “careless banks”

Fox & Friends’ Carlson allows guest to misrepresent speech to claim Obama engaged in “class warfare”

O’Reilly latest to advance UAW pay falsehood

Confronted with the truth, Hannity refused to back down from debunked mouse, LA-Vegas rail falsehoods

FCC fines small telcos on customer info rules 
The Federal Communications Commission has slapped more than 660 small telecommunications companies with a total of $13.3 million in fines for failing to certify that they’re keeping their customer information safe. The FCC’s action is part of its attempts to tighten the rules governing customer information.

UK rules out charges against Pentagon hacker
British prosecutors said on Thursday they would not bring charges against a computer expert accused by a U.S. attorney of the “biggest military hack of all time,” dealing a blow to his bid to avoid extradition.

Finns urged to check Web, curb guns after rampages
Finnish authorities should monitor the Internet more effectively and tighten licensing of firearms to prevent more gun massacres in schools, a government commission said on Thursday.

‘Die Hard’ Director Is Allowed to Withdraw Plea
A judge has allowed John McTiernan to withdraw his guilty plea in a case that involved the wiretapping of Hollywood celebrities.

Ex-editor: The pay/no-pay issue already has been resolved by consumers
“Readers will not pay for online news content provided by traditional mass-market news organizations,” writes former Spokesman-Review editor Steve Smith. “For traditional newspapers, the genie is out of the bottle. No organization can hold on to its information long enough to make it a viable commercial commodity in the digital world. Once published anywhere or in any way, the information is out there, for free, for everyone.”

“Read for free, pay for print or stuff” model delivers revenue
The New Yorker has successfully employed the model, says Michael Josefowicz.

FT Aims New Subscription-Only Digital Pub At China Investors (Paid Content)
The Financial Times is set to launch a new website and e-newsletter called China Confidential next week. The new publication is in keeping with the UK business paper’s focus on offering more premium digital content. And since world markets are continuing to flail, China still looks like a comparatively solid place to invest… The FT’s model of mixing free and premium content has recently gained currency as a way to save newspapers as advertising shrinks. But this example is even more resistant to emulation by general market papers—if only because it will be almost exclusively marketed to investment professionals and analysts, who will be able to cover the subscription cost through their work.

Gawker Absorbs Defamer: Business Model Lessons (by Mac Slocum at Poynter Online)
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton has rolled the L.A.-ceGawker Media founder Nick Denton has rolled the L.A.-centric gossip site Defamer into his company’s flagship blog, Gawker.According to Silicon Alley Insider (which engaged in some recent rolling-up of its own), Defamer’s absorption will boost traffic for Gawker and make it easier to attract those all-important media buys. “Scale matters — both for marketing to readers and advertisers,” Denton is quoted as saying. “The dream of micropublishing is dead!” Sounding micropublishing’s death knell is an exaggeration, but Denton is correct in one respect: sites that rely on page-view-based advertising are in trouble. The CPM rates — even good CPM rates in the $50 to $100 range — don’t scale. You can’t support a staff of 50 writers, with accompanying overhead and benefits, on a page-view model.

So what can be done? Two things:
1. Advertising-dependent Web publishers should stay intentionally small…
2. Build products with natural scarcity and treat advertising as a secondary revenue stream.
Click through for more detail.

“It’s easy to imagine an online-only Post-Intelligencer staffed with as few as 20 people”
“Officially, both inside and outside the P-I headquarters, all plans for the online-only P-I are discussed in purely hypothetical terms — if at all,” writes Eli Sanders. “But it’s increasingly hard to imagine that an online-only launch isn’t going to happen.”

Earnings Call: Cablevision: We Can Better Manage Newspapers’ Transition To Digital (Paid Content)
Despite Cablevision’s Q4’s loss CEO Jim Dolan insisted that the company is weathering the recession pretty well and … the company will maintain its dividend payments at its current level to investors… When the company bought Newsday, many observers questioned Cablevision’s thinking. For one thing, the business is going through an existential crisis. Secondly, what does Cablevision know about newspapers anyway? Addressing those issues, Rutledge said that the company was well aware of the troubles of the newspaper industry. But Cablevision continues to believes that it can better manage the industry’s transition from print to digital and use it to align and strengthen its own services.
It occurred to me while reading this that a cable television company could put newspaper content right there on the teevee, making it accessible to people who don’t do the internets.

“Twitter first to publish dramatic crash pictures”
The social networking site Twitter again stole a march on traditional media when it was the first outlet to publish dramatic pictures of the Turkish Airlines crash. Moments after the plane crashed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on Wednesday morning the news was appearing on Twitter, CNN International correspondent Errol Barnett said. “This is a story that broke on Twitter first and continued to unfold from there. Eyewitnesses were posting comments about the shock of seeing the plane ‘dive’ and amazement of passengers walking out of the wreckage,” Barnett said.

Hearst to Use Citizen Journalists From Helium
Online writing community Helium Inc. will provide local and lifestyle stories written by its citizen journalists to the Hearst Newspapers chain. The deal gives Hearst’s newspapers access to Helium’s marketplace of freelance writers.

NYT: We were misled about Dating a Banker Anonymous
Had the nature of the “tongue in cheek” blog been made clear at the outset, says a Times editors’ note, “the article would have described it accordingly, not as a support group.”

Callaway: Newspaper industry’s old names will be replaced with new online heroes
While it sometimes feels like we’re all in Detroit in the news industry these days, the darkness sweeping over legendary news organizations masks a new era of innovation that will bring tremendous opportunity, says David Callaway. “By all means, mourn the passing of great names, just as we do in other industries. But look for the new channels from which all the talent that made them great will flow.”

It’s NYTCo’s Turn To Complain About Aggregators (Paid Content)
The dispute between Michael Wolff’s news aggregator Newser and the NYTimes.com over the method of linking by the former to the latter is a little surprising, considering the similarities it has with the NYTCo’s recent court case in Massachusetts… Shortly after posting a NYTimes.com item about the death penalty and the recession, Wolff was a sent a letter from the NYTCo’s legal department ordering him to take down a link that included a photograph with the company’s trademark “Gothic ‘T’” logo without permission. This could be a problem for Newser, since all the aggregated stories that appear on its home page feature graphical links to the original article and a logo from the news source.

NY Times Cuts Frequency of T Magazine
In a sign that even its most promising titles are falling on hard times, The New York Times is scaling back the number of issues it publishes of T, its fashion and lifestyle supplement. After appearing 15 times last year, the struggling newspaper company is scaling back T’s frequency to 12.

Earnings: Washington Post’s Profit Drops 77 Percent; Display Ads Up 10 Percent (Paid Content)
So what if the Washington Post Company is continuing its $2.15 dividend, unlike the New York Times Company and Gannett? In this jittery market, that’s not enough to compensate for a 77 percent drop in net income for Q408 and investors spent the morning saying so, sending the stock down more than $14 to $370.71, nearly 4 percent, in post-earnings trading. The education and publishing company—in revenue determined names it might be called KapCo instead of WaPo— reported a 3 percent rise in revenues, to $1.16 billion from $1.125 billion in Q407.

Gannett slashes dividend by 90%, to 4 cents per share
It had been 40 cents. Gannett will save about $325 million annually with the dividend cut — the first in the company’s history.

Hearst’s San Antonio Express-News cuts 75 newsroom positions
“Incremental staff and budget cuts, we are sorry to say, have proven inadequate amid changing social and market forces now compounded by this deepening recession,” editor Robert Rivard tells his staff. “No one is being asked to leave the Express-News today unless you so choose. March 20 will be the final day for those whose jobs are being cut.”

Denver newspaper unions agree to wage and benefit cuts that average 11.7%
The Denver Newspaper Agency sought $18 million in concessions as part of a broader $35 million cost-cutting package. It’s not clear if the tentative agreement, reached early Wednesday, meets that $18 million goal.

Tribune Tower Pulled Off the Market
Tribune Co. has scrapped plans to put the Tribune Tower up for sale because of cratering real estate prices and the company’s bankruptcy filing. The sale of major assets like Tribune Tower and the Times Mirror buildings in Los Angeles were part of Sam Zell’s strategy to pay down Tribune’s debt load.

MediaNews’ Singleton Watching SF Chronicle Situation ‘With Interest’
William Dean Singleton, whose company owns nearly every daily newspaper in the Bay Area outside of the San Francisco Chronicle, remained mum on whether he would be interested in the Chronicle following Hearst’s announcement that it may sell or close the paper.

Anderson News Hit With Lawsuits
The situation at magazine wholesaler Anderson News keeps getting worse. A little more than two weeks after ceasing “normal business activity” and laying off much of its staff, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based company has been slapped with at least two lawsuits.

Coming Soon: Streaming-Only Subscriptions From Netflix (Paid Content)
It was probably inevitable. Netflix is now planning to offer its streaming-video service, which has been a hit among consumers, as a stand-alone option. CFO Barry McCarthy told attendees at the Jefferies Internet and Media conference that the company was “likely to do that in the foreseeable future,” according to Reuters—though he made a point to note that the company was still committed to its rental-by-mail business.

Revenue Drops 31% at DreamWorks Animation
Despite the success of “Kung Fu Panda,” the company did not meet analysts’ expectations for the quarter.

WGA to Determine If Jay Leno Broke Strike Rules
Comedian Jay Leno appeared before his own union’s trial committee Wednesday to address charges that he broke guild rules during last season’s writers strike. The NBC late-night host announced on the air that he was penning his own monologues while the strike was still in full swing.

ABC Made $72 Million on 26 Minutes of Oscar Ads
ABC sold 26 minutes of advertising time for about $72 million in its Feb. 22 Academy Awards broadcast, the most since 2004, TNS Media Intelligence says. The high number of sales came despite General Motors and L’Oreal, two major sponsors, pulling out.

New NBC Reality Series for Jerry Seinfeld
Jerry Seinfeld is reteaming with NBC to launch his first reality series. The comedian’s project is tentatively called The Marriage Ref and features celebrities, comedians, and athletes who will judge couples in the midst of marital disputes while recommending various strategies to resolve their problems.
Because what the world needs more of is narcissistic celebrities showing off their narcissism.

Springpad: An Intelligent Online Notebook for Everything (Mashable)
Online notebooks are a dime a dozen, with Evernote at the head of the class and at least 17 other eager alternatives close behind. So, do we really need another one competing for our online filing needs? We’ll leave the answer to that question up to you, but we certainly think that Springpad, an online notebook that collects and manages tasks, web notes, and events in a super clean and user-friendly Web interface, is worth a nice long look. The site, which launched in beta last November, adds a few fresh features to the mix.

TrialPay can help you get freebies online
With the economy in the dumps, you might hesitate before buying discretionary goodies like video games or pizza. But what if you could get those things for free by doing something you might already be inclined to do?

comScore: Light PC Internet Users Are 30 Percent More Likely than Heavy PC Internet Users to Access Mobile Internet Content
comScore, Inc. … today reported the results of the first study of its cross-media panel of PC and mobile Internet users in the U.S., finding that  light PC Internet users are 30 percent more likely than heavy PC Internet users to use their mobile devices to  access Internet content. In total, 42 million people used their mobile devices in October 2008 to access news and information content on the Internet, an increase of 57 percent from October 2007.

Search Spending Expected To Rise, But What About The Clicks? (Paid Content)
A pair of reports from eMarketer and The Kelsey Group paint a rosy picture of the search advertising market over the next four years—with double-digit increases in spending for both web-based and mobile search. It’s not surprising, given the instant gratification (and perceived ROI) marketers get from paid search ads.

Google Deploys Ads In News Results; Shutters “Shared Stuff” Bookmarking Service (Paid Content)
If cost-cutting and boosting revenues are the keys to thriving amid a recession, then Google has proven it’s adept at doing both. The latest push to generate more revenue is by running search ads against Google News results, much like it has done with ads in image search, Google Earth and Google Finance

Mark Cuban: Will Mobile Devices Replace Laptops? (Paid Content)
An interesting discussion over on our sister site mocoNews.net, where Mark Cuban gave us permission to publish a post about the mobile future that first appeared on his Blog Maverick. An excerpt ( keeping Mark’s punctuation):

“I would love to be able to ditch my laptop and desktop and only have a single, pocket sized device.  If I could carry my Sidekick or ITouch with me and when I set it on my desk, or even walk into a hotel room, it immediately makes a connection with my monitor or HDTV , my full size keyboard and either with a usb cable or wirelessly, lets me connect to a thumbdrive or some external hard drive.  If by carrying this little device, a full computing environment could be recreated and I didnt feel like I was giving up something dumping my laptop and desktop, I would be its 1st lifetime customer.  My digital and computing world would immediately be revolutionized.”
Yes, Mark, that is exactly what’s going to happen.

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Gibbs: “Danger” if Obama does too little (Politico)
Robert Gibbs just wrapped up an hourlong briefing with about 100 House press aides in Rayburn building, laying out the high points of President Obama’s speech — and handling questions on how to spin the address… When the Q & A began, someone asked Gibbs how to handle the question: “Is the Obama administration trying to do too much at once?” The answer, according to Gibbs: “The danger is trying to do too little, not too much.”
Good!  That’s the attitude we need.  Maybe Obama is finally listening to Krugman.  One of my objections to Obama has been that as my senator, he was way too timid.

Because for the Village, it’s a “game” (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair. Media Matters for America)
Note the name of [last night's] Anderson Cooper program at 10 pm, following Obama’s address to Congress about the nation’s ongoing economic crisis, which features cascading job losses, faltering banks, and a cratered housing market:  

Obama’s Rx: Innovation (Chicago Tribune)
Promising an overhaul of the nation’s policies on education, energy and health care, President Obama vows the present economic crisis “will not determine the destiny of this nation.”

Full text of Obama’s speech (McClatchy)
Remarks of President Barack Obama to Congress, as prepared for delivery.

Fact check: Obama glosses over some realities (AP)
In delivering his to-do list, the president’s assertions deserve scrutiny

Obama Speech: The Applause Lines, The Laughs, The Cool Reactions (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
President Obama’s address before Congress on Tuesday night was heavy on optimism, short on numbers, filled with lofty rhetoric and lined with emotion. It also was punctuated by repeated (and repeated, and repeated) interruptions for applause; some from the bipartisan chamber, some strictly from Democrats and one or two by a rowdy group of Republicans. (The final count: Obama was interrupted 65 times for applause, according to Fox News, and received 37 standing ovations, reports the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.)
Click through for Sam’s highlights.

Polls: Obama Won The Night (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Instant public surveys on Barack Obama’s address before Congress showed, by in large, that the public was incredibly receptive to his speech, regardless of political party.

Bill Clinton Schools Obama, Obama Takes Notes (by masslib at Alegre’s Corner)
Everyone who knows anything about the markets and consumers, knows the markets and consumers react poorly to pessimistic leaders.  Here was Bill Clinton February 19th via ABC News: “‘I like the fact that he didn’t come in and give us a bunch of happy talk. I’m glad he shot straight with us.’ But he added, ‘I just want the American people to know that he’s confident that we are gonna get out of this and he feels good about the long run.’ ‘… Here is Obama [on] February 24th: “‘The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation… Tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.’”

I actually believe that *could* be true, provided we make the right investments now, like regional highspeed rail in regions with significant intellectual assets, Medicare for All, and green energy, but I’m not holding my breath.

Embracing the Base (by Steve at The Left Coaster)
Riding high approval ratings from the public, Barack Obama used [Tuesday night’s] speech before the world and a joint congressional audience to forcefully lay out an optimistic vision for the country. Simply put, Obama was bold, ambitious, and confident at a time when such an attitude is critical, and he may have broken through… And there was nothing centrist about it. Any agenda that includes calls for passage of health care reform this year; energy independence measures built on alternative sources and conservation; and education reforms, all funded by reducing the cost of war in Iraq and restoring the Clinton-era tax rates is a progressive agenda.

Obama: Health reform ‘will not wait another year.’ (Think Progress)
During his address [Tuesday night], President Barack Obama … delivered this pledge, eliciting a roar of approval: “I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process. Once again, it will be hard. But I also know that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and our conscience long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.”
Sounds great.  Now let’s see some action.

Thoughts about the speech… (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Did you notice how tepid the response was when Obama brought up Social Security during his speech? I find hope in that palpable sense of unease…
Despite the populist tone, the fact remains: Obama’s bailout plan nationalizes the losses incurred by the banks but privatizes the winnings…
“Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.” Won’t happen — not unless you define “save” broadly…
“I understand that when the last administration asked this Congress to provide assistance for struggling banks, Democrats and Republicans alike were infuriated by the mismanagement and results that followed. So were the American taxpayers. So was I.” Then why did he support the bailout? Why didn’t he oppose handing so much power to Paulson?…
“The United States of America does not torture.” But we’ll still outsource torture…
It’s easy to recite applause lines. Not so easy to cough up details. His talk of deficit reduction was, under present circumstances, silly.

Obama Takes Jab At Bush Policies: ‘A Surplus Became An Excuse To Transfer Wealth To The Wealthy’ (Think Progress)
President Obama took a jab at Bush’s disastrous economic policies: “[W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.” Indeed, when Bush entered office in 2001, he inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion. He bequeathed a budget deficit of over $1 trillion to President Obama.

How Social Security “Reform” Was Used to Launder $1.7 Trillion into Tax Cuts for the Wealthy (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
David Cay Johnston on Lou Dobbs
Click through to watch the video.  As I’ve been saying for years, Bush gave my retirement money to Bill Gates.

Freeing Up Resources… for More War (by Norman Solomon)
Obama didn’t mention the additional number of U.S. troops — 17,000 — that he has just ordered to Afghanistan. But his pledge that he “will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people” and his ringing declaration, “We will not allow it,” came just before this statement: “As we meet here tonight, our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy.” Get the message? In his first speech to Congress, the new president threw down a 90-month-old gauntlet, reaffirming the notion that committing to war halfway around the world — in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan too — will make Americans safer. With drumrolls like that, the mission could outlive all of us.

The Case That Wars Fuel U.S. Economic Booms (by Mark Ames, editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, the eXile, writing at AlterNet)
The Republican right unintentionally raised a very serious issue, but no one seems to want to call them on it, not even their own supporters. The can of worms they’ve opened leads to this: what if America’s booms and busts are tied not to monetary policy, taxation levels or government regulation, but rather to our success or failure as an imperialist war machine? What if our wealth is a consequence of our ability to plunder the world’s wealth, often by default thanks to our competitors’ suicidal behavior?
Maybe Obama has bought in to THIS right-wing myth, along with some of the others that he has spouted.

Anti-War Groups Will Back Obama’s Troop Withdrawal Delay (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
President Obama is reportedly preparing to announce that he will order American combat troops to be out of Iraq by August of 2010, a deadline that’s months later than the one promised during the campaign. But don’t expect the leading anti-war groups to make any noise about it. Antiwar leaders I spoke with this morning left little doubt that they’ll support Obama’s time-line.
I really have to wonder if they’d have extended the same courtesy to Hillary.

Like Having Medicare? Then Taxes Must Rise  (by David Leonhardt, New York Times)
Americans have made it clear that they want a certain kind of government, one that can field a strong military and also maintain popular programs like Medicare. Yet we are not paying nearly enough taxes to maintain those programs. Even major changes to the health care system — the single most important step for closing the budget gap — will not close it entirely. Taxes must rise, too. This is a point on which serious Democrats and serious Republicans agree, even if they do so with euphemism. “We are on an unsustainable path,” says Peter Orszag, Mr. Obama’s budget director. Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has said, “Revenues are going to have to go up.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Dan Crippen, budget experts who advised the McCain campaign, have quietly acknowledged the same.

Fortunately, the coming tax increase does not have to be economically ruinous. Despite all the scary stories you’ve heard, the evidence that higher taxes necessarily cripple an economy is somewhere between thin and nonexistent.
Of course, those of you who have been reading liberal blogs have known for a long time that the two largest tax increases in history have resulted in great economic booms.  But does the right wing care about that?  No.  See below for what the right wingers are planning now, presumably inspired by Rick Santelli’s crazed rant on CNBC.

American Tea Party (Pajamas TV, thanks to Monday Morning Clacker)
America is on the brink of another revolution. In a new American Tea Party, citizens across the USA are beginning to protest giant government programs that reach deep into their pockets. These programs create huge economic burdens on American families and threaten their livelihood now and into the future.

Santelli and the White House (by Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review)
Rick Santelli continues to make a fool of himself, touring the media to defend his call for a “tea party” over the homeowner bailout…  Not content with his soon-to-be-expired fifteen minutes of fame, Santelli went on [G. Gordon] Liddy’s radio show and complained that the White House was threatening him and/or his family, somehow… Now, Liddy knows about threats from the White House, having plotted to assassinate columnist Jack Anderson, and he knows about other kinds, having encouraged listeners to shoot ATF agents in the head (“Head shots, head shots…. Kill the sons of bitches”), but the idea that the White House press secretary “threatened” Santelli is nuts, and irresponsible.

Here’s that “threat” from press secretary Robert Gibbs: “I’ve watched Mr. Santelli on cable the past 24 hours or so. I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives but the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgages, stay in their jobs, pay their bills, send their kids to school.” Poorly phrased, maybe, but Gibbs is clearly saying that Santelli is out of touch with regular people. A fair point, considering that Santelli thinks traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange represent a “cross-section of America” and that people who can’t pay their mortgage are “losers.” And here’s a question: Why is a CNBC editor going on a show with a convicted felon on the outer fringes of American public discourse?

The Impact on a President of Reading Citizens’ Letters (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
Following up on our story about how President Obama reads 10 letters a day from citizens so as to stay in better touch with the concerns of the American people, historian Robert S. McElvaine writes at the Huffington Post that President “Obama is adopting a practice that served President Franklin D. Roosevelt well during the Great Depression…. A look at FDR’s experience with letters from the public suggests that President Obama — and the nation — may benefit substantially from the adoption of the practice by the new president”
Yes, but who chooses the letters, and what criteria do they use?

DoD officials vow secrecy on budget (Defense News)
The Obama administration has directed defense officials to sign a pledge stating they will not share 2010 budget data with individuals outside the federal government. In an undated non-disclosure agreement obtained by Defense News, the administration tells defense officials that “strict confidentiality” must be practiced to ensure a “successful” and “proper” 2010 defense budget process. The secrecy pact comes as dozens of Bush-era Pentagon appointees remain on the job, asked to stay on by the Obama administration until replacements are confirmed to ensure continuity during wartime.

Bernanke: Crisis Could End in ‘09 (Washington Post)
Fed chief details frail economy but says 2010 will be year of recovery if government actions work.

Bernanke: You Say Nationalization, I Say Partnership (Real Time Economics, Wall Street Journal, thanks to Economist’s View)
“Call it a public-private partnership,” Mr. Bernanke said. “It’s not nationalization, because the banks would not be wholly owned or probably not even majority owned by the government. The government will be a shareholder, along with private shareholders.”

Should We Assume the Worst? (The Balance Sheet, The New Yorker, thanks to Economist’s View)
we don’t want policymakers to assume the worst about the future when shaping economic policy. Nor do we want them to assume the best. Actually, we don’t want them to assume anything. Instead, we want them to come up with the most accurate forecast of the future they can, and to adopt the economic policies that make the most sense given that forecast. There’s no doubt that this is an incredibly complicated process, because the future that someone like Bernanke is trying to predict is a future that’s shaped by his own decisions. But that doesn’t mean the answer is for the Fed to say “things are going to be incredibly awful,” if it believes that they most likely won’t be.

Why did we “loan” Citi $45 billion when we could have bought them for $20 billion? (by lambert at Corrente)
And when I say “we,” I most definitely mean “they.” Dean Baker asks that question, and some other good questions: “The government originally lent $25 billion to Citigroup at below market interest rates in the first wave of TARP lending. In December, it lent another $20 billion and guaranteed $300 billion in bad assets. (The guarantee was almost certainly worth more than $30 billion annually, given the quality of the assets.) On that day, $20 billion would have been sufficient to buy Citi in its entirety on the stock market.”
Of course, if we had bought Citi outright, we might still have needed to inject additional capital to keep it going.

More Banks Behaving Badly (Tim Duy’s Fed Watch, Economist’s View)
[A]t tmz.com: “Northern Trust, a Chicago-based bank, sponsored the Northern Trust Open at the Riviera Country Club in L.A. We’re told Northern Trust paid millions to sponsor the PGA event which ended Sunday, but what happened off the golf course is even more shocking.:… Not to worry; Northern Trust received only $1.6 billion in TARP money, but didn’t ask for it.  It was just taxpayer money anyway – you know, little people.  They also laid off 450 people, but, again, little people, so also no worries. More evidence that the US response to the financial crisis has degenerated into a sad joke.
Click through for details of the bad behavior.

How bank bonuses let us all down (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University , writing in the Financial Times, U.K., thanks to Economist’s View)
[The] mismatch between the bonus payment frequency (typically, one year) and the time to blow up (about five to 20 years) is the cause of the accumulation of positions that hide risk.. As traders say, they have the “free option” on their performance: they get the profits, not the losses… I was involved in trading for 21 years and I can testify that traders consciously play the free option game. On the other hand, I worked (in my other job as risk adviser) with various military organisations and people watching over our safety. We trust military and homeland security people with our lives, yet they do not get a bonus. They get promotions, the honour of a job well done and the disincentive of shame if they fail…

This is prompting me to call for the nationalisation of the utility part of banking as the only solution in which society does not grant individuals free options to look after its risks. No incentive without disincentive. And never trust with your money anyone making a potential bonus.

Group of Rich Americans Sues UBS to Keep Names Secret in Tax Case (New York Times)
UBS was sued on Tuesday in a Swiss federal court by wealthy American clients seeking to prevent the disclosure of their identities as part of a tax-evasion investigation by the United States Justice Department. The lawsuit accuses UBS and Switzerland’s financial regulator, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or Finma, of violating Swiss bank secrecy laws and of conducting what Swiss law considers illegal activities with foreign authorities. It also named Peter Kurer, the chairman of UBS, and Eugen Haltiner, the chairman of Finma, as defendants… UBS is the world’s largest private bank and Switzerland is the world’s largest offshore tax haven, with trillions of dollars in assets.
Only the little people pay taxes, you see.

Obama To Target Tax Havens In Budget (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
As part of the budget that he will introduce this Thursday, President Barack Obama will call for the closure of tax havens that allow companies to pay greatly reduced tax rates, an administration official tells the Huffington Post… By calling for the elimination of tax havens in his budget, Obama is following through on a promise he made repeatedly throughout the campaign and one he has discussed as president. “If you closed loopholes you could actually lower [other corporate tax] rates,” he said at Monday’s fiscal responsibility summit. “That’s an area where there should be the potential for some bipartisan agreement.”

Miami banker who gave away $60 million gets front-row seat to Obama speech (Miami Herald)
Leonard Abess Jr., the Miami banker who quietly gave $60 million of his own money to his loyal staff of 399 current and 72 former workers, plans this evening to be watching President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress from first lady Michelle Obama’s box.

Aflac CEO gives up $2.8 million bonus (McClatchy)
Aflac Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dan Amos will forgo a $2.8 million bonus he earned last year, the company announced Monday.

Leahy Takes Bush Truth Commission To Senate Floor (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to discuss the possible outlines of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. Stating that he is in discussion with members of Congress, outside groups, and even the White House, Leahy boiled down his argument to one very rudimentary question: “How can we restore our moral leadership and ensure transparent government if we ignore what has happened?” “I share that desire to move forward, and to reestablish ourselves as a Nation dedicated to the rule of law, respected and trusted throughout the world,” he said, according to prepared remarks. “We also know that the past can be prologue unless we set things right.”

Burris refuses to resign despite plea from Durbin (AP)
Sen. Roland Burris refused to resign on Tuesday, rebuffing a call from the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat who made it clear that the embattled Illinois lawmaker has little hope next year of winning the seat vacated by President Barack Obama. “I told him that under the circumstances, I would resign,” fellow Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin told reporters after an hour-long meeting with Burris. “He said, ‘I’m not going to resign.’”

Vitter: Even though I didn’t resign, Burris should. (Think Progress)
[Tuesday], Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) called on Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) to resign his Senate seat. Despite his own refusal to resign after admitting to being a former patron of the “DC Madam”, Vitter dismissed the notion that his demands of Burris are hypocritical. “I honestly don’t know anybody who would compare these situations. They are dramatically different,” Vitter said. 

GOP hates earmarks — except the ones its members sponsor (McClatchy)
Republicans are expected to deliver a daylong rant Wednesday against Democratic spending legislation, yet the bill is loaded with thousands of pet projects that Republican lawmakers inserted.

Palin to reimburse Alaska for family’s travel expenses (McClatchy)
Gov. Sarah Palin has agreed to reimburse the state for the costs of nine trips for her children. An agreement announced Tuesdaysettles an ethics complaint filed in October.

Bush charging $150,000 and private jet travel for speeches. (Think Progress)
Now that Bush has officially joined the lecture circuit, it seems he’s seeking to make good on his hope to earn “ridiculous” money. The Dallas Morning News reports that he’s charging $150,000 per speech and demanding a private jet to take him to the speech venue… He does give the locals a discount, charging Dallas gigs a scant $100,000.

When news anchors Twitter (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Everyone benefits because we learn invaluable information: “WH menu: lobster bisque w beignets, seared Virginia bass w leeks and pot, pound cake w fruit compote and lemon sorbet about 2 hours ago from TinyTwitter GStephanopoulos GeorgeStephanopoulos

Will’s “final thought” on Obama speech: “I don’t know when men started to hug each other, but hug they do, and look at that” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
George Will is just plain weird.

Andrea Mitchell contrasts McCain’s return to Senate with Gore, who “grew the beard, gained weight, whatever he did — ended up winning the Nobel Prize” (video  at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Beck, self-proclaimed “thinker,” claims Arctic sea ice melt occurring because “heat rises” (video  at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Another Swipe From Obama At ‘Cable Chatter’ (by Mark Knoller, Political Hotsheet)
It’s not “press coverage” that bothers President Obama. It’s “cable chatter.”

Funding for solar power?  Sounds like something Hitler would do. (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Holman Jenkins didn’t like Barack Obama’s comments about developing renewable energy sources: Put away the “energy independence” conceit. This notion, a favorite of Tojo and Hitler, was debunked by Churchill, who reasoned that true energy security came from a diversity of suppliers, not the foolish pursuit of self-sufficiency.

Gingrich’s Bold New Idea: Using Twitter To Mock Democrats (Think Progress)
Conservatives love Twitter. Many have embraced it as the future of the Republican party’s outreach to young people. Prolific Tweeter Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) has said that such technology is “the next revolution that’s going to take back the Congress.” [Tuesday] night, former House speaker Newt Gingrich — an inspiration to GOP congressional leaders like Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) — promised to use conservatives’ favorite new social media tool to “liveblog at http://newt.org on the obama/jindal speeches at 9pm, i will twitter and they will appear there as well, join us.” For the most part, he didn’t talk about any of the bold, new ideas he’s been promising. Instead, he used many of his tweets to attack both President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Will media repeat Jindal’s false attack on Obama, or correct it? (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
According to Ben Smith, Bobby Jindal will accuse Obama of pessimism [Tuesday night], saying: “A few weeks ago, the President warned that our nation is facing a crisis that he said ‘we may not be able to reverse.’ Our troubles are real, to be sure. But don’t let anyone tell you that we cannot recover – or that America’s best days are behind her.” Smith didn’t mention this, but Jindal’s claim is false.  Obama didn’t say “we may not be able to reverse” the crisis; he said if we continue to do nothing, it may reach a point where it cannot be reversed.  And he didn’t say “we cannot recover” or that “America’s best days are behind her.”  Simply didn’t happen.

Limbaugh Defends Jindal, Warns Conservatives They Are ‘Making A Real Mistake If They Go After’ Him (Think Progress)
The response across the political spectrum to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R-LA) speech last night has been overwhelmingly negative. Even the most enthusiastic conservative talkers had harsh words for Jindal, calling it “cheesy,” “insane,” and “not his greatest oratorical moment.” But Jindal still maintains one key supporter — Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show this afternoon, Limbaugh leaped to Jindal’s defense.

Limbaugh: “too many” Americans “have become a nation of wusses, of punks” (video  at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

At Politico, only Dems are to blame (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
John Harris and Mike Allen report on how the volatile stock market often reacts negatively when politicians discuss public policy. But in the article, Politico reporters only point the finger at Dems for making traders nervous with recent Beltway comments, not Republicans, even though Republicans have been uniformly trash talking Obama’s recovery plan.
Not only that, Bush had his own experiences with markets crashing after he spoke.

The WashPost finally profiles a liberal blogger (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Well, that only took seven years. Liberal bloggers have been causing a stir–and making news–since 2002, but from what I can tell based on previous research, today’s Post feature is on Pam Spaulding and her influential site, Pam’s House Blend, marks the first time the newspaper has devoted a feature-length, Style-section profile to an A-list liberal blogger.

The NY Post, Race and Cowardice (by Rod Dreher, a conservative columnist for the  Dallas Morning News)
Was the chimp cartoon Sean Delonas drew for the New York Post a racist provocation?… The Delonas controversy erupted on the same day U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a speech describing America as a “nation of cowards” too afraid to have “frank conversations” about race. Is he insane? When people have their jobs and even their lives threatened for crossing invisible lines of racial sensitivity, you’d be crazy to take that risk. If Holder really wants to show bravery, he’ll stand up for Sean Delonas, instead of contenting himself to chastise his countrymen for not running marathons across minefields.
Click through for Dreher’s own experience in being hounded for a less than important reference deemed to be racist by those who make their living from deeming unimportant references to be racist.

Fox News’ Kiddie Porn Collector Layered Like An Onion (FishbowlDC, Media Bistro)
When Aaron “Triple-threat” Bruns wasn’t busy producing political coverage or trading kiddie porn over the Web, the multi-faceted [former] Fox Newser was dabbling in soft-core porn. If you are truly disturbed, you can check out the NSFW pics of Aaron’s Bruns of steel here.

LA Times Joins the Hillary Media Makeover (Dissenting Justice)
The media are covering Hillary Clinton in an all new light. She has gone from evil to brilliant and balanced overnight!… [N]ow, the Editors of the LA Times (who endorsed Obama over Clinton) have joined the rebuilding effort: “Rather than lecturing China about greenhouse gas emissions, Clinton urged the government not to make the mistakes the United States and Europe had made, effectively taking partial responsibility for the problem…” Beat ‘em up, build ‘em up.

ZOMG! POTUS is a Racist! (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
From last night’s Sad State of the Union address: “…People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway..” As we learned last year from certain people who shall remain nameless, blaming the financial crisis on bad loans is racist.  So how is what Barack Obama said in his Sad State of the Union address materially different from this?: “Loose standards were set up to expand home ownership to folks who couldn’t pay home loans back and to improve the odds of high compensation for its CEOs.”

I believe the technical term used in the accusation against us was “racist, ratfucking bullshit of the Right.”

The Business Press and the Cult of Personality (by Elinore Longobardi, Columbia Journalism Review)
The birth and death of false idols in the business press is a strange and important phenomenon. Strange because it keeps happening. Important because it is a symptom of a serious weakness in coverage. It reflects the fact that the press is clinging to an old narrative, built around Wall Street Masters of the Universe. This narrative persists despite the fact that recent events have demonstrated that the system suffers from fundamental flaws no lone individual can fix. And thus, while never ideal, this habit is now especially pernicious. To think that any one person can right a corporation as drenched in subprime as Merrill is to fundamentally misunderstand the financial crisis.
The cult of personality pervades our entire culture.  It was responsible for Obama’s presidential nomination.

Film producers buying ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ kids new homes. (Think Progress)
Last month, it was revealed that the child stars of “Slumdog Millionaire” were still living in “grinding poverty,” despite the enormous success of the film. The Daily Mail reports today Danny Boyle and Christian Colson, the director and producer, respectively of the Oscar-winning movie, are working with a Mumbai housing association to move the children into new “bricks and mortar flats” in the coming months. They will also hire a rickshaw driver to take the kids to school. “These children are special and have won laurels for the country and we want to felicitate them,” said Amarjeet Singh Manhas, chairman of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority.

The Great Broadband Scam (by David Rosen)
Why the Recovery Plan Will Fail to Meet America’s Broadband Needs

In Innovation, U.S. Said to Be Losing Competitive Edge (New York Times)
The U.S. ranks sixth among 40 countries and regions for innovation, a nonpartisan group noted in a report.
Of course we are.  All concern for the long term has been replaced by the maximum gain for today, and today only.

Citing Cost, States Consider Halting Death Penalty (New York Times)
Ending capital punishment is part of a trend in which states are trying to cut the costs of fighting crime.
Not because it’s immoral.  Because it’s too expensive.

Report critical of sex education in Texas schools (McClatchy)
The overwhelming majority of Texas schools use scare tactics and spread myths in place of teaching basic sex and health information that students can use to protect themselves and others, according to a report released Wednesday by watchdog group Texas Freedom Network.

Colorado state senator compares being gay to committing murder. (Think Progress)
On the floor of the Colorado state senate on Monday, Republican Sen. Scott Renfroe equated “homosexuality as a sin with murder” during a debate on a bill that would allow same-sex partners of state employees to be covered by health care benefits. “I’m not saying this (homosexuality) is the only sin that’s out there,” said Renfroe. “We have murder. We have all sorts of sin. We have adultery. And we don’t make laws making those legal, and we would never think to make murder legal.”

“‘Infantilising’ The Human Mind” (by Turkana at The Left Coaster)
No, this isn’t about Republicans. It’s about social networking sites. The Guardian talks science: “Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.” I don’t like the idea of using this warning as justification for government censorship, but I do consider it important.
It all started with the PR/advertising explosion.

Media Matters for America headlines

• Media quote Jindal without noting he is misrepresenting Obama’s comments

• Updated Report: Economists comprised only 6 percent of guest appearances discussing stimulus on cable news, Sunday shows

• Wash. Times claim that Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were “completely unrelated” contradicted by bipartisan Senate report

• Ignoring FDIC, ABC’s Stark says bank nationalization happens “in socialist countries” and is “not supposed to happen” in the U.S.

• Cavuto purported to “correct” Obama with corporate tax falsehood

• On Hannity, Dietl promoted Social Security falsehood

• AP falsely reported Obama called Social Security “the single most pressing fiscal challenge we face by far”

• CNN slams Pelosi for “living the dolce vita” in Italy while giving Afghan leg of trip only brief mention

• The Hill uncritically repeated NRCC’s mouse falsehood

• Limbaugh falsely claimed that taxes on “most small businesses” would increase if Bush tax cuts on wealthiest Americans expire

• Boehlert: Unhinged in 30 days: The right-wing media’s Obama era implosion

UK blocks publication of Iraq war discussions. (Think Progress)
The British government said today that it will not “publish records of cabinet discussions on the legality of invading Iraq in 2003, despite a tribunal ruling in January that it should release them.” Justice Secretary Jack Straw blocked the request made under the Freedom of Information Act, saying that release of the records would “risk serious damage to Cabinet government.” Previously released government documents revealed that former Attorney General Peter Goldsmith had “cast doubt on the legal grounds for war” just days before then-Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered British troops to invade Iraq.

The Cable TV Model for News Online (by Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune)
News organizations that generate significant original content should band together for their own survival and sell group subscription packages for unlimited access to their stories, photos, videos, archives, and other offerings.
Eric, you’ve been on my mailing list for years.  And for most of those years, I’ve been talking about aggregation of payment for online content.  Recently, I’ve compared it several times to paying for cable TV.  But I didn’t see an acknowledgment in your column.

Lauren Rich Fine: Micropayments? Won’t Work. Here’s A Better Plan For Newspapers (by Lauren Rich Fine at Paid Content)
[I]t becomes increasingly clear that newspapers are in dire straits. They won’t all survive, nor by the way, should they all. Newspapers’ unwillingness to grasp what is before their very eyes has been at the core of their current woes—but even if they had gotten it, the challenge would still be enormous. Years ago, the Chicago Sun-Times probably had it right when it tried to offer very-low-cost web-site creation and hosting for local small businesses. It could still be done. Newspapers could be the local ad network that is so sorely missing from the mix. Newspapers could offer free PDF-like versions of their paper daily and only distribute a day or two a week. Newspapers could prove they are the best editors by pouring all their limited resources into great local stories and investigations, while complementing it with links to the best content on the web.

Currah: Kitemarks Could Help Save the News Business (by Paul Bradshaw at Poynter Online)
In the recent Reuters report, “What’s Happening to Our News,” an “investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the U.K.,” author Andrew Currah explores the situation facing U.K. publishers. He offers three broad suggestions for moving forward: kitemarks, public support and digital literacy education. Owen Amos explained recently in the U.K. Press Gazette that a digital kitemark (somewhat similar to the digital watermark concept), would “differentiate quality journalism from the noise of the Web. …[It] could be visual and electronic — for example, via embedded metadata.”

Currah’s adaptation of the kitemark idea seems to have stirred up some fuss. In the first of a series of e-mail exchanges, I asked Currah how kitemarks might make a difference in how people consume newspapers — and how they could work in practice.
Click through to read Currah’s response.

Could a $2M online news org replace Chicago’s dailies?
Chi-Town Daily News founder and former Chicago Tribune reporter Geoff Dougherty says yes. He described his plan at Sunday’s discussion on the state of Chicago journalism. “People flat out didn’t believe it,” he writes. “It sounds like a lot of journalists and news observers are convinced it takes tens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars to run a robust local news organization. Trust me: It doesn’t.”

The New Breed of New Media Researchers (by Rory O’Connor)
Unlike face-to-face, ‘offline’ social networks, online social networks lend themselves to easy group formation. The looser, more extensive social ties that result then lead to the delivery of more diverse — and ultimately more trustworthy and credible — news and information.
Not if ideology is allowed to trump truth, Rory, as is the case with so many blogs.

Minnesota papers get $238,000 grant to retrain journalists
The Minnesota Job Skills Partnership program has given the Duluth News Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the University of Minnesota’s journalism school a total of $238,000 to help retrain the newspaper staffs. As part of the grant, the two papers and j-school will collectively contribute $469,330, mostly through in-kind contributions of staff time for training.

Baltimore Reporter Loses Job Over Altered Video of Fox’s Gibson
A television reporter has lost his job after doctoring a video to make it appear that Fox News Radio host John Gibson had made a racial slur. In the video, which was picked up across the Internet, Gibson seemed to be comparing Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey with a “bright blue scrotum.”

Private Equity Group Revises Media Forecast From Five Percent Growth to Slight Decline
Veronis Suhler Stevenson today revised its annual five-year communications industry forecast (2008 to 2012) to show a 0.4 percent decline in overall media spend in 2009, down from the 5.4 percent gain the private equity firm previously forecasted.

Will Murdoch end up owning NYT and LAT?
It’s been previously reported that Rupert Murdoch’s dream is to own the New York Times, but Variety’s Dade Hayes reports the media mogul has been talking about a play for the Los Angeles Times, too.

Hearst May Sell or Close SF Chronicle
The owner of the San Francisco Chronicle has set out to purge the payroll and slash other expenses in a last-ditch effort to reverse years of heavy losses. If it can’t reduce expenses dramatically within the next few weeks, the Hearst Corp. said it will close or sell the Chronicle.

Philly News Execs Will Skip Raises
Bankruptcy lawyers say three Philadelphia newspaper executives will roll back their 2008 raises while the company tries to shed debt and stay afloat. Chief Executive Brian Tierney’s 38 percent pay hike in December has boosted his salary to $850,000.

FT Goes One Up On France: Offering 3-Day Work Week and Other Options (Paid Content)
As parent Pearson and the Financial Times continue to try to save costs after some buyouts, layoffs and salary freezes, the pink paper has now done one better than France on the work week: It is offering employees a couple of options, including a three-day week in the summer, reports DJN. “The first is extended annual leave receiving 30 percent of pay, the other is to work a three- or four-day week between June and August, and the third is the option to buy up to seven days annual leave,” a spokesperson said. This offer is for FT staff across all worldwide offices, the company said.

Washington Post profit falls 77% in fourth quarter
A large impairment charge drove down net income. The Post Co.’s newspaper revenue dropped 13% in the fourth quarter, while revenue from the education division climbed 13% and cable TV revenue was up 11%.

SF Chron Cost-Cut Target Equals 47% of Staff
If the San Francisco Chronicle had to slash enough payroll to offset the more than $50 million operating loss threatening its future, nearly half of its 1,500 employees would be dismissed. To wipe out a $50 million loss, let alone make a profit, the paper would have to eliminate 47% of its entire staff.

A.H. Belo to lay off 100 more at Providence Journal
The newsroom will lose 18 full-time positions by March 6. || Denis Horgan: Hartford Courant is laying off people by phone.

P-I’s Thiel now wishes he had taken a woodshop class in high school
Post-Intelligencer sports columnist Art Thiel figures if his paper closes, “I could be a pretty good pool boy for a wealthy widow.” He tells Rick Anderson: “Anybody who has to go through a job thing like this, you finally get done cursing all the forces. You realize this just may be the change you needed, even if you don’t know what you’re suited for. I just wish I would have taken a woodshop class in high school.”

‘Economic Gales’ Sweep Liz Smith Out Of The NY Post
You know times are extremely, badly, very tough when even Liz Smith is falling victim to the Recession! The Times City Room blog reports that Thursday will be the gossip doyenne’s last! Apparently currently nefarious editor Col Allan informed her in a letter earlier this month that her contract would not be renewed due to “unprecedented economic gales.”

Des Moines Register gives fired cartoonist’s work to University of Iowa
Brian Duffy, who was dismissed from the Register about three months ago, says: “The editor felt that I wasn’t important enough, or my work wasn’t important enough to keep me at the newspaper, yet she wants to keep my legacy alive by donating all of my work to the University of Iowa.” He’s hired an attorney to try to retrieve his original sketches.

The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now
While the changes in the new Kindle are fairly minor, they’re exactly what was needed to turn a very good electronic book reader into an even better one.

Rodale: Brand-Building Bellwether
The lousy advertising climate notwithstanding, Rodale’s Steve Murphy is still bullish on ad-supported print. The president and CEO of the company that publishes Prevention and Men’s Health is prepping a new slew of consumer and ad-supported spinoffs for 2009.

Conde Falling Fast
Conde Nast is reeling more than its rivals, as luxury-goods retailers hoard their ad dollars. Many of Conde’s venerable titles are down 30 percent in ad pages so far in the first quarter. Start-up mag Portfolio is down a staggering 60 percent, while Wired is off 57 percent.

Hallmark Magazine Folds
Hallmark has announced it is shuttering both Hallmark magazine as well as its accompanying Web site. “The decision was reached after a comprehensive analysis of the current business and trends facing the magazine publishing industry as a whole,” said Hallmark’s CEO.

B-to-B Magazine Revenues Plummet 13.1 Percent in Q4
Advertising revenue for b-to-b magazines plunged 13.1 percent during the fourth quarter of 2008, leading to an overall slide of 7.3 percent, according to numbers released by American Business Media’s Business Information Network. Advertising pages fell 9.6 percent for the year.

CJR gets MacArthur grant to study relationship between magazines and their websites
CJR says its survey — funded with a $230,000 grant — “will shed light on the road blocks to and the opportunities for achieving the best editorial and business practices for magazines and their websites.”

The Lure of Sirius: Tax Losses
Some investors are baffled why media titans John Malone and Charles Ergen are competing to throw money at Sirius XM Radio Inc., the money-losing satellite-radio company that was perilously close to bankruptcy. But in fact, the company’s most valuable asset could be precisely all the money it has lost.

S&P Downgrades Clear Channel Debt (Paid Content)
No big surprise here, but Standard & Poor’s has downgraded the debt ratings on Clear Channel Communications. It cites steep earnings declines, saying Clear Channel is in danger of violating its debt covenants during the second half of this year. As we reported recently, Clear Channel has been taking steps to service future debt payments by tapping a $2 billion credit facility and making significant layoffs. Ironically, the additional $1.6 billion in debt it recently tapped contributed to the downgrade, according to S&P.

The Republic Project Puts Musicians in Control of Their Content (Mashable)
The Republic Project, officially launching next week…, is a new company that’s hoping to remix the standard mode of operation in the music industry by giving artists a more direct way to sell their music and engage with fans. Even though artists can already leverage existing social sites like Kyte to produce their own branded online and mobile presence, the Republic Project appears to go one step further by targeting artists who want the independence to market, sell, and retain the rights to their records.

Essentially with the Republic Project, artists will have their own platform where they can sell their albums directly to fans, create and monetize their own video content, blog, and participate in artist and fan chat sessions. Debut artists include Tim Myers, Dexter Freebish, Steriogram, and Still Time.

Imeem Lets You Sync Your Music Library With Your Android Mobile (Mashable)
As more and more native iPhone apps for streaming music pop up in the iTunes app store, Imeem’s mobile offering continues to evolve in feature-set while remaining firmly cemented to Google’s Android platform. Fresh on the heels of Last.fm’s Android release, the newly revamped Imeem mobile app, available today, now includes MyMusic, which gives users access to their personal Imeem music library for on-the-road streaming. Imeem mobile music lovers can also create their own stations based on the artists and songs that they favorite, as well as share tracks with friends via email.

Nearly Half of Web Users Have Illegally Downloaded Music
Almost half of web users have used illegal file sharing sites, with Limewire (34%) and BitTorrent (25%) the most popular. In a survey of over 1,000 consumers, 46% have used a peer-to-peer site (P2P), but 53% have never knowingly downloaded music illegally, according to research by Tiscali.

Schumer Grills Azoff At Hearings On Live Nation Merger (Paid Content)
In his opening remarks during Senate hearings on the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger…, Schumer “made no secret of my opposition to this merger,” saying it represented “monopolistic behavior plain and simple.”… One interesting factoid that emerged during the hearings is that if the merger goes through, Live Nation would gain access to all sorts of proprietary information from competitors that also use Ticketmaster. Most of the competitors use the company for everything from selling tickets to marketing shows.

News Corp ‘Rescues’ Best Picture ‘Slumdog’
“Slumdog Millionaire,” the big winner at this year’s Academy Awards, almost didn’t get distributed. The film, made for about $15 million with a cast of unknowns, was picked up by News Corp.’s Fox Searchlight after Time Warner closed its small-picture divisions.

VUDU Offers Download-To-Own HD Movies
Digital on-demand movie provider VUDU has begun allowing consumers to own some of the high-definition movies and documentaries downloaded from the company’s online store.

Preliminary Ratings Show Oscar Numbers Up
An estimated 36.3 million people watched this year’s Academy Awards, an increase of more than 4 million from last year’s least-watched Oscars ceremony ever. While ABC was heartened by the larger audience, there are still only two Oscar telecasts on record with fewer viewers.

Fox Reveals Development Slate Early To Advertisers
Fox is the first broadcast network to give agencies a comprehensive presentation of its programming plans, though NBC shared its updated slate at the Super Bowl with those advertisers attending. Official development meetings, traditionally held in March, were wiped out last year as a result of the writers’ strike.

CW Fashions Its Strategy Around Women
Can a cable network make it as a broadcast network? That’s the difficult question that CBS and Warner Bros. seem to be posing with CW. Rather than chase the same relatively broad audience that every other network does (adults 18-49), CW is now locked into a cable-like demo of woman 18-34.

Cable companies want a way to win with online TV
HBO on your PC? It could happen sooner than you think. Wary of the growing number of consumers watching TV shows online for free — and yet reluctant to upset viewers by yanking shows from the Internet — the nation’s largest cable operators are in talks with media conglomerates to take back control. They would create a platform to release cable TV shows online, but exclusively for paying subscribers.

If Cable Companies Start Streaming Shows, What Would It Mean For Consumers? (Paid Content)
As we and others have reported, cable operators are exploring the idea of negotiating streaming rights into their carriage agreements with cable networks. If that becomes a reality, what would it mean for consumers? Giving cable companies another service to charge for can’t be good for viewers, right? Well, it’s not quite that simple. Here are the upsides:
—Consumers could finally get a universal set-top box that converts internet video into high-quality TV viewing.
—There would be more programming available.

Earnings: Discovery Revenues Flat, Ad Revenues Up 6 Percent (Paid Content)
In another sign that cable advertising is holding up better than broadcast advertising, fourth-quarter revenues at Discovery Networks were flat versus the same period 2007, at $904 million, while ad revenues were up 6 percent. The results were boosted by growth at the U.S. networks, but weighed down by declines from its international networks.

DirecTV, DISH ask U.S. lawmakers for rural incentives
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The right incentives would make satellite television companies willing to extend local service to underserved and rural areas, senior executives of DISH Network Corp and DirecTV Group Inc told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Why Hulu Is Winning the Online Video Race
Unlike YouTube, Hulu has legal access to great content. YouTube has lots of content, but from the perspective of advertisers much of it is utterly worthless. Nobody wants to tout their brand amid user-generated videos that could turn out to be almost anything.

Hulu A Better Business Than YouTube? Not So Fast (by Rory Maher at Paid Content)
What makes YouTube’s business better than Hulu is its ability to use its massive audience to pursue different revenue streams—that includes not only various types of advertising but also, say, selling products. If YouTube were to include a “buy this” button on some of its videos (that referred viewers to a product they could buy online and tied into a video they were viewing), revenues from affiliate fees from the sale of those products could easily double the size of the business at no additional cost… So even if YouTube isn’t profitable now, it could add an extra $150 million in revenue by basically snapping its fingers. And because there are no hosting costs, that is pure profit. Suddenly YouTube’s business doesn’t look so bad after all.

Africa: Blogging About Startups, Innovation And Entrepreneurship (by Ndesanjo Macha, Global Voices)
If your main source of news and information about Africa is the mainstream media, then you are less likely to know about groundbreaking innovation and entrepreneurship that is taking place on the continent.

Observer Kills Media Mob Blog (by Matt Haber, New York Observer)
Media Mob is no more. Make no mistake, observer.com will continue to bring readers breaking media news and analysis from our brilliant, tireless, attractive, and humble media team, but these stories will no longer exist under the old rubric.

News Corp’s Slingshot Labs Launches First Public Project: Gossip Site DailyFill (Paid Content)
Another day, another celeb site—this time from News Corp internet incubator Slingshot Labs. Snarky DailyFill, which has been up in beta since November, officially launches Tuesday. It’s the first public project for Santa Monica-based Slingshot Labs, started last year by News Corp to create and launch quick, low-cost online businesses that can be profitable early on… Content partners for the celeb site include News Corp. sib New York Post’s Page Six, which shut down its standalone gossip site last March after less than four months. Other publications such as Elle, US Weekly, Gossip Girls and Splash News also provide a steady flow of content. The consistently snarky tone comes from Chris Case, one of the original writers for Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect and the editorial lead for the site. The approach is paying off demographically: 49 percent of its users are male.
Because what the world needs more of is snark.

Create Your Own Private YouTube With Fliggo (Mashable)
Fliggo is a new social media site, funded by Y Combinator, that offers anyone the possibility to create a video sharing site or a video blog. The process is simple: create an account with Fliggo, choose a name (in the form of name.fliggo.com) and a description for your site, and choose whether you want a video sharing site, a video blog or a very minimal site just for posting videos for others to see.

Earnings:  MSLO’s Online Revenues Down 18 Percent; Overall Numbers Down Considerably (Paid Content)
Martha Stewart’s brand lost more than a bit of its shine in Q408, as consumers moved towards cheaper brands in the deepening recession. Mainline: Revenue was $72.9 million in Q408, compared to $118.5 million in Q407.

Ballmer Stirs The Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Pot, Yet Again (Paid Content)
And so the Microsoft-Yahoo dance begins again … Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told analysts at a strategic update/mid-year outlook presentation today that he still wanted to pursue some sort of search deal with Yahoo. According to ZNET, Ballmer wants to find a way for the two companies to “pool their resources” to take on Google; he said Microsoft was unlikely to gain search ground this year on its own. He said he understands investors want to see better results from Microsoft’s search and ad properties. “I don’t want to wind up being known as the Jerry Yang of this market in a different way,” Ballmer said. Ouch.

Veronis Suhler Issues New 2009 Ad Forecast; Digital Still Up, But Not By As Much (Paid Content)
Citing a worse-than-expected economy in 2009 Veronis Suhler issued an update to its 2009 ad industry forecast earlier today that, unsurprisingly, expected traditional media to fare much worse than digital media.  However, even digital media projections came down significantly and overall US advertising now expected to decline -0.4 percent in 2009 versus previous forecasts of 4.9 percent growth.

How Glam Made Money Off Twitter During The Oscars (Paid Content)
ABC didn’t live-stream the Oscars, and the network is trying to keep video clips from last night’s show off YouTube, in favor of its own Oscar.com (per MediaMemo). But Glam Media figured out a way to make money from the buzz. Hosting a Twitter widget is a no-brainer these days, particularly for a mega event like the Oscars. Glam, though, offered marketers the chance to sponsor a filtered or edited version of the message stream during the awards ceremony. As VentureBeat notes, the ad network’s editors chose which tweets showed up in the stream and purged those that were inappropriate or off-topic, making it safer for brand advertisers. Aveeno sponsored last night’s Twitter widget; Glam says it plans to expand the service, dubbed gWire, to include FriendFeed and Facebook streams for future events.

One-Second Superbowl Ads for Miller High Life Produce Spike in Sales
Miller High Life’s one-second Super Bowl ads that weren’t created a sales bump that definitely was. Sales of High Life popped 8.6% during the week after the Super Bowl vs. the same period a year earlier, and they were up nearly 5% during the week before the game.

Interview: Scott Howe, MSFT’s Ad & Pub Group: ‘Display Is Not The Problem; The Scoring Methods Are’ (Paid Content)
Over the past few years, Microsoft, like Yahoo, has placed a big bet on display’s rising power to propel it as an online ad mover. Lately, though, the display space has seen nothing but struggles as the economy has worsened. Meanwhile, search has been looking ever-more healthy. In both his presentation and in conversation afterwards, Howe sought to address the pessimism surrounding display. Mostly, Howe wanted to get across a message: Microsoft is trying to refine its own strategy in the face of display’s heavy pressures.

Google pays for e-mail outage with 15-day credit
Google Inc. is making amends for an e-mail outage by giving 15 days of free service to businesses,government agencies and other subscribers who pay for an expanded version of the product.

Warning: Google Talk Phishing Scam Spreading Like Wildfire (by Adam Ostrow at Mashable)
Gmail is now being attacked by a phishing scam that is spreading like wildfire. I became alerted to it when I received IMs from three people I hadn’t talked to in some time within a matter of minutes – one a marketing exec at a prominent startup – with typical phishing jargon “check this out!” with a link to a tinyurl that when clicked, points you to a site called ViddyHo. Apparently, the site sends out the message to all of your Google Talk contacts.

Google backs Europe case against Microsoft browser
Google Inc. is joining forces with European regulators in an attack on Microsoft Corp.’s dominance of the Web browser market, injecting more bad blood between two of computing’s richest and most powerful companies. The latest assault on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, announced Tuesday, comes as Google is trying to expand the usage of its own Web browser, a 6-month-old product called Chrome.

Microsoft explores educational link to video games
The software company, which publishes “Gears of War,” is studying the reactions of avid gamers to see whether video gaming can promote learning skills that carry over to the classroom. “We want to figure out what’s compelling about the games,” said John Nordlinger, head of gaming research for Microsoft. “If we can find out how to make the games fun and not make them so violent, that would be ideal.”

In Silicon Valley, Recruiters Are Sending Out Their Own Résumés
Evidence suggests that the recession has slammed technology company recruiters particularly hard.

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

You say goodbye, I say halo (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Remember when AP ran a photo similar to this one [below] featuring Dear Leader George Dubya? Remember how the progblogs (correctly) screamed for weeks about that gross exercise in Messianic imagery? Do you think any progs will complain about this? Naw. It’s very, very different, y’see.

Gregg plan at center of summit debate (MSNBC)
Sen. Judd Gregg was one of more than 120 members of Congress and economic experts attending a White House summit on fiscal responsibility yesterday… Most of the debate, Gregg said, centered on the Conrad-Gregg bill, a proposal by Gregg and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., chairman of the Budget Committee. The proposal would have a bipartisan task force of Democratic and Republican senators and members of the administration hash out policy and then send it to the floor of both Houses for a yes or no vote, with no amendments or debate…

“Fixing Social Security is a shared, bipartisan goal, and it can be accomplished right away,” Gregg said. “I believe this is the right place to start.” [Emphasis added.]

Poll: Majority Doesn’t Want Obama To Be Bipartisan (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
You routinely hear it asserted that the public wants bipartisan comity in Washington, but some striking numbers buried in the internals of the new New York Times poll find that in the current context, precisely the opposite is true:

“Which do you think should be a higher priority for Barack Obama right now — working in a bipartisan way with Republicans in Congress or sticking to the policies he promised he would during the campaign:
Working bipartisan way: 39%
Sticking to policies: 56%

So a sizable majority wants Obama to pursue his policies with our without Republican support. Meanwhile, a huge majority says that Republicans should emphasize working with Obama in a bipartisan way over pursuing their policy ideas:

Democrats Resisting Obama on Social Security (New York Times)
Mr. Obama considered announcing the formation of a Social Security task force at a White House “fiscal responsibility summit” that he [convened] on Monday. But several Democrats said that idea had been shelved, partly because of objections from House and Senate leaders… Liberal Democrats are already serving notice that they will be equally vehement in opposing any reductions in scheduled benefits for future retirees. But any solution, budget analysts said, must include a mix of both approaches, though current beneficiaries would see no change.

See How That Works? (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
Obama starts talking about reforming Social Security.
The progressive wing pushes back.
Obama backs off. (For now.)
Let’s do this more often.

News, comment, and entertainment (by Avedon Carol at The Sideshow)
Baby-Boomers didn’t just pay for their parents’ retirement during their working lives, but also for their own, thanks to Ronald Reagan giving us the biggest tax hike in American history – on payroll taxes. I paid for those benefits, Mr. Obama. Why are the people you invited to that conference trying to steal them?

Obama Gets Push-Back on Social Security “Reform” (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
The same advisers who keep pushing to bring this up, from OMB chief Orszag on down, will keep pushing. Stay vigilant. There’s a crying need for education of some of our elected officials on Social Security. I was flabbergasted by this quote from an alleged Democrat: “…is it a nice-to-have or a have-to-have?…” I would modestly submit that any program which reduces the number of seniors in poverty from 48% to 8% is a have-to-have. Thirteen million seniors owe their access to adequate food, clothing, shelter, AND dignity to Social Security. You don’t want that many people voting in the 2010 election right after they’ve been plunged into poverty, Congresswoman Tauscher, now do you?

Democrats Make Obama Retreat on Social Security (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
[The] bad news is the fauxgressive NeoRepublican Obama administration hasn’t given up, they’re just moving the SS task force idea to the back burner.  Social Security “reform” isn’t dead, it will be back sooner or later, just like Jason Voorhies. So keep those pitchforks and torches handy, you’ll need them again.

Health care costs to top $8,000 per person (AP)
A new government report on medical costs paints a stark picture for President Barack Obama, who is expected to call for a health care overhaul in a speech Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress.

The Problem is Health Care, Not Entitlements (by Marie Cocco)
Now that so many of us have been whipsawed financially, it is time to wipe the term “entitlement reform” out of the political dictionary. The phrase is a monument to the dark art of disinformation. Its premise is that federal “entitlements” — that is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — are bankrupting the country and weighting down generations of younger Americans with the extraordinary burden of caring for their aging parents and grandparents… “Social Security is the most fiscally responsible part of the entire federal budget,” says Nancy Altman, who served as a top aide to Alan Greenspan when the 1983 commission headed by Greenspan really did have to avert an imminent crisis. “Social Security is in surplus for the next two decades.”…

Rather than feed the myth that Social Security is part of an entitlement “crisis,” Obama should seize this moment to debunk it… [T]he public has to understand what the problems really are. At the moment, it doesn’t. That’s partly because the current dire economic circumstances are likely to require years of deficit spending just to keep the downturn from worsening. But it’s also because we’ve been bombarded with false claims and over-the-top warnings about Social Security and Medicare that often have come from those who are ideologically opposed to these programs anyway. When it comes to entitlements, the last thing we need is an “entitlement commission.” What we really need is a truth commission.

Obama Budget: Billions On Health Care For Reform This Year (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
President Barack Obama’s first budget will call for tens of billions of dollars to be devoted to health care, in an effort to help ensure that major reform of the current system is considered within the year. A senior administration official tells the Huffington Post that the president will provide “many billions of dollars” over a “ten-year period” to fund health care in the upcoming budget, to be introduced Thursday. As confirmed by the official, the money will provide a pool of resources to help shore up the health care system on the benefits and coverage side. With that in place, the administration is hoping that Congress will push through a legislative overhaul for the health care system within a year.

Santelli Claims The White House Is Threatening Him: ‘My Kids Are Nervous To Go To School’ (Think Progress)
CNBC’s Rick Santelli appeared on at least two radio programs today to promote his “rant” against President Obama’s housing program. On G. Gordon Liddy’s radio program, Santelli called attention to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s response to his tirade. He cropped a quote from Gibbs to suggest the White House was pursuing a campaign of intimidation against him.
Oh, puh-leeze!  Not even Rahm Emanuel is that evil.  But if you repeat a lie often enough, people may just believe it.

Santelli’s “Tea Party” Illustrates Press Failure (by Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review)
We know that some half of all subprime borrowers actually qualified for prime mortgages, with better terms, lower interest rates and lower payments, but were fraudulently put into more expensive ones by brokers who were incentivized with bonuses by the Countrywides of the world. But the vast majority of people, and I’ll bet you just about every last one of the commenters on my Santelli post yesterday, don’t know that… The boiling anger we’re seeing by citizen against fellow citizen is understandable given that the press still hasn’t fully told the story of the boiler rooms, “the crooked heart of the credit crisis,” as Audit managing director Dean Starkman called it.

That this burst of outrage erupted after homeowners got a (relatively meager) bailout rather than after Wall Street and the banks got their trillions ($10 trillion by Bloomberg’s count) with repeated trips to the trough illustrates as clearly as I’ve seen it the failure of the press to fully portray the real cause of this catastrophe.

2,488,298 Santelli Rant Views… And Counting (WebNewser)
That’s how many views Rick Santelli’s rant has gotten so far since it went online last Thursday. Most of the views, 1,815,680 as of this morning, went to the original clip on CNBC.com. The other 670,000+ were from versions on YouTube.
The right is in the process of capturing the anger that people feel over the collapse of the financial system.  Whether they succeed in turning that anger against “losers,” whatever Santelli meant by that term, rather than the banksters, will depend on how well the Democrats fight back.  If past is prologue, Democrats will wimp out and Republicans will make significant gains in 2010.  That’s because Democrats refuse to play the role of educator.  They refuse to debunk Republican spin and lies.  I’m still convinced that it’s because too many Washington Democrats have, themselves, bought into the Republican mythology.

Republicans Follow Newt’s Playbook (Political Wire)
“Republicans are hatching a political comeback by dusting off a strategic playbook written nearly two decades ago,” Politico reports. Three key themes: “Unite against Democrats’ economic policy, block and counter health care reform and tar them with spending scandals.” In 1994, Republicans used this same strategy to complete a historic takeover of Congress.

Limbaugh: Obama’s fiscal rhetoric is “female-based,” like saying “No Michelle, that dress does not make you look like a sausage” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Morris: Obama heading fiscal responsibility summit is “like Mike Tyson heading the non-violence summit” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

On Hannity, Coulter calls Santelli “my new hero and who I want to run for president” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Norah O’Donnell asks: “is America becoming a socialist nation?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Beck suggests U.S. on course to make same “mistake[s] that Germany made during Weimar Republic” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Scarborough advances Obama “most liberal” Senator and “center-right” country myths (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Discussing economic plan, Limbaugh says “I think there is an anger and a rage on the part of Obama and his wife” (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Limbaugh also says: “I think there is a desire to punish the people they think have made life so tough for those who they think are suffering and have not won life’s lottery.”

Michael Steele Threatens To Withhold RNC Funds From GOP Senators Who Backed Stimulus (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
On Fox News, Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele said he was open to withholding RNC funds from the three GOP Senators who backed President Obama’s stimulus package:

CBS News’ New Right-Wing PR Chief: “I Never Said Democrats Are Evil” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
CBS News kicked up a big controversy over the weekend when the news broke that the network had hired as its new public relations chief one Jeff Ballabon, a conservative Orthodox Jew who helped Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004. Things got hotter when liberal Jewish activist Ira Forman wrote on The Huffington Post that he recalled Ballabon saying that Democrats are “inherently bad people” when the two debated each other in New York a decade ago. HuffPo’s piece also pointed out that Ballabon once called President Obama “incredibly dangerous.” Ballabon, whose new title is CBS News’ senior vice president for communications, is denying he ever said those things about Dems, however.

“I never said Democrats are evil,” he told me by phone just now. “My mother is a Democrat.” Asked whether he would have any impact at all on editorial content at CBS, Ballabon said: “No.” But Ballabon wouldn’t comment further, and he declined to say whether he still thinks Obama is “incredibly dangerous.”
He’ll fit right in.

Study: Network TV Favored GOP in ‘92-’04 Presidential Elections (Indiana University Newsroom)
Release: A visual analysis of television presidential campaign coverage from 1992 to 2004 suggests that the three television broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — favored Republicans in each election, according to two Indiana University professors in a new book.
And Republicans won consistently during those years.  It’s no coincidence, my friends.

The same prejudice—rich people (Republicans) are inherently good, poor people (Democrats) are inherently bad, enters in to the way the automobile companies are being treated, vs. the banks, by Congress and the administration:
Why Bankruptcy For Autos But Not Banks? (by Barry Ritholtz, thanks to Anglachel)
Banks must be saved at all costs, but GM and Chrysler must go the bankruptcy route. The only explanation in treating the two industries so radically differently is an overt hostility to Unions on the part of many.

Obama to address Congress, nation on economy (AP)
Barreling ahead on a mammoth agenda, Barack Obama is ready to offer a detailed sketch of the first year of his presidency, casting the nation’s bleeding economy as a tangle of tough, neglected problems. In a prime-time speech from the House of Representatives, Obama will make his case Tuesday that much more has to be done to turn around the economy — a message he knows he must explain.

White House: Obama still confident in Geithner (AP)
The White House says President Barack Obama still has confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, despite the withering criticism that has come Geithner’s way over the government’s plan to rescue the financial industry.

Obama’s Goal: Halving the Budget Deficit by 2012. Really? (by Robert Reich)
The President’s message on fiscal responsibility — that he’ll cut the current one by half by the end of his first term — is smart politics right now, but it may be dumb politics by November of 2012, and doesn’t make much economic sense regardless… [W]e’ll probably have to have a second stimulus. And if the second isn’t enough, a third. And so on… [So] what happens when and if it’s 2012 and the economy continues to need boosting? That promise could be a huge liability… [R]emember that when it comes to deficits and debt, the real issues over the long term are (1) the ratio of debt to GDP (we’re still under 50 percent, which ain’t bad, considering all the spending that’s been going on; at the end of World War II it was substantially above 120 percent). And (2) whether and when we’re back to growing the GDP, which is the most reliable way of improving the ratio.

Cut the Military Budget–II (by Barney Frank, writing in The Nation)
I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.

Sadly, self-described centrist and even liberal organizations often talk about the need to curtail deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that have a benign social purpose, but they fail to talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good. Obviously people should be concerned about the $700 billion Congress voted for this past fall to deal with the credit crisis. But even if none of that money were to be paid back–and most of it will be–it would involve a smaller drain on taxpayer dollars than the Iraq War will have cost us by the time it is concluded, and it is roughly equivalent to the $651 billion we will spend on all defense in this fiscal year.

House Democrats propose $410B spending bill (AP)
House Democrats unveiled a $410 billion spending bill on Monday to keep the government running through the end of the fiscal year, setting up the second political struggle over federal funds in less than a month with Republicans.

U.S. Economy: Consumer Confidence Drops to Record Low (Bloomberg) — U.S. consumer confidence fell to the lowest level on record in October as stocks plunged and banks shut off credit, raising the risk spending will collapse. The Conference Board’s confidence index tumbled to 38, lower than forecast and the worst reading since monthly records began in 1967

Danger, Gordon Brown! Danger! (by Mike Flugennock at Stop Me Before I Vote Again)
Perhaps the Brits could send a bit of this rage across to us, as they gave us the gift of the Beatles and Stones… although a comparison to The Who or Slade might be more appropriate… “Police are preparing for a ‘summer of rage’ as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.”

Bulls get back in the game (MarketWatch )
Stocks higher in early trading after Monday’s big sell-off that took S&P to lowest level since 1997 as Bernanke testifies before Congress.

Home sales down 18.5% over year
Home prices in 20 major cities drop 2.5% in December from the prior month and were down a record 18.5% from the final month of 2007.

Could US Have Worse ‘Lost Decade’ Than Japan? (CNBC)
“We did suffer a lot of the same symptoms that Japan did,” said Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, in an interview with Erin Burnett. But what worries Roach the most? “The bubbles that have burst in the U.S. have ended up infecting the biggest sector of the U.S. economy, the American consumer, which at its peak was 72 percent of the U.S. GDP,” he said… “The bubbles in Japan only infected the capital spending sector, which at its peak was only 17 percent, so we really have a bubble infection that is four-times as bad as the Japanese one, and that’s a worrisome sort of hangover to deal with,” he said.

Fed May Need to Recast TALF on Commercial Real Estate  (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve may need to loosen the terms of a new $1 trillion credit initiative aimed at averting a meltdown in commercial mortgage-backed securities, analysts and industry representatives said. The Fed would prop up the CMBS market by lending against the securities for a five-year term rather than three years, and taking as collateral existing debt rather than just new bonds, they said. The Fed hasn’t said when the program, the Term Asset- Backed Securities Loan Facility, will begin accepting the debt.

Stress test could lead to some bank nationalization (MarketWatch)
U.S. banks that fail a looming government stress test of their financial viability could be forced to accept government investment, pushed into shotgun marriages or simply nationalized if the institution’s situation is bad enough, regulatory observers said.

Bank regulators pledge more help, reject nationalization (McClatchy)
Amid growing concerns that the U.S. government may be forced to take over large parts of the banking system, five federal regulators issued a joint statement Monday announcing the creation of a special lifeline to keep troubled banks afloat, but they rejected outright nationalization.

U.S. Clears Path to Bank Takeovers (Washington Post )
The Obama administration yesterday revamped the terms of its emergency aid to troubled financial firms, setting a course that could culminate with the government nationalizing some of the country’s largest banks by taking a controlling ownership stake. Administration officials said the change, which allows banks to repay the government with common stock rather than cash, is intended to give banks more capital to withstand a continued deterioration of the economy, and not to nationalize the banking system.
So which is it?  Are they rejecting nationalization, or paving the way for it?  Or are they SAYING they reject nationalization, but preparing, just in case?

M.C. Escher, Economist (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)

AIG Seeks More US Funds As Record Loss Looms (CNBC)
American Insurance Group, the insurance giant that is 80-percent owned by the US government, is in discussions with the government to secure additional funds so it can keep operating after next Monday, when it will report the largest loss in U.S. corporate history, CNBC has learned. Sources close to the company said the loss will be near $60 billion due to writedowns on a variety of assets including commercial real estate. That massive loss is likely to spur downgrades in its insurance and credit ratings that will force AIG to raise collateral that it doesn’t have.

Bank takeovers would leave shareholders in the cold (McClatchy)
The government’s blueprints for the banking industry have a lot to say about protecting the taxpayer and the struggling homeowner. But they offer virtually nothing for the banks’ shareholders, many of whom once planned to use those investments for dreams like college, retirement or down payments.
Yes, well, that’s what happens when you make a bad investment.  You lose money.  That’s what capitalism means.

Obama to Announce Iraqi Troop Withdrawl (Political Wire)
President Obama “plans to withdraw most of its troops from Iraq by August 2010,” 19 months after his inauguration, the AP reports.  “The withdrawal plan would fulfill one of Obama’s central campaign pledges, albeit a little more slowly than he promised. He said he would withdraw troops within 16 months, roughly one brigade a month from the time of his inauguration.” Obama is expected to make the announcement this week.

Administration Draws Fire for Report on Guantánamo (New York Times)
The Pentagon official who inspected the Guantánamo Bay prison at the behest of President Obama and declared its conditions humane described himself Monday as a “fresh set of eyes” who had been given free rein to go about his work. But detainees’ lawyers and human rights groups ridiculed the 85-page report that the official, Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, sent to the White House this weekend. They called it a public relations gesture by the new administration to try to quiet criticism of the prison while officials work to close it within a year.

“There is no basis to believe, other than his say-so, that this was an independent report,” said Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Coming in the early days of the Obama administration, the exchange was notable for its similarity to the back-and-forth during the Bush years over what the Guantánamo prison is really like.

Guantanamo detainee arrives in Britain, renews torture claims (McClatchy)
Binyam Mohamed, a gaunt-looking, bearded man wearing a cream sweater, white tennis shoes and a white skullcap, stepped off a chartered jet at a British air base Monday after a 10-hour trip from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, closing a dark chapter in his life that he claims included torture.

U.S. May Set Greenhouse Gas Standard for Cars (Washington Post)
The Obama administration is considering establishing national rules for regulating greenhouse gas emissions for automobiles, according to White House officials, a move backed by both auto manufacturers and some environmentalists… “The hope across the administration is that we can have a unified national policy when it comes to cleaner vehicles,” Browner said at the Western Governors’ Association meeting in Washington.

Obama’s Auto Team Drives Imports (Political Wire)
The Detroit News reports that “vehicles owned by the Obama administration’s auto team could reflect one reason why Detroit’s Big Three automakers are in trouble: The list includes few new American cars.” “Among the eight members named Friday to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry and the 10 senior policy aides who will assist them in their work, two own American models.”

Senate confirms Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary. (Political Wire)
Today, the Senate voted 80-17 to confirm Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary. The vote is a defeat for anti-worker conservatives, who have been stalling her nomination since Obama nominated her on Dec. 19.

Obama close to naming ex-Washington governor Locke for Commerce (McClatchy)
Former Washington Gov. Gary Locke, the nation’s first Chinese-American governor, will likely be named secretary of commerce, an administration official and Capitol Hill sources confirmed Monday.

Burris’ Allies: He Hasn’t Ruled Out 2010 (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Allies of Roland Burris insist that the embattled Senator has not ruled out running for election in 2010. Under public and private pressure to vacate the seat, Burris is still keeping his political options open. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Bud Jackson, the Senator’s former communications guru and current voluntary political and legal adviser, said that the staff had “not made any decision about 2010, either ruling it in or ruling it out.”

Female candidates line up for 2010  (Politico, thanks to Alegre)
A slew of formidable female candidates, mostly Democrats, are lining up to run for the Senate in 2010, enough to raise the prospect of a surge of women into a chamber that currently has just 17 women senators… “This is really unprecedented for leading female candidates jumping in,” said Karen O’Connor, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. “It really is a landmark year because there’s a farm team now,” O’Connor said. “Now you have mayors, congresswomen, secretaries of state; they’re waiting in the wings, and they’re not going to sit back any longer.”

Quinn Will Run for Election in 2010 (Political Wire)
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who took office after the Illinois legislature ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich (R), told Lynn Sweet that he would run for election in 2010. Said Quinnn: “I have no reason not to run. I think I am doing a good job today. I anticipate I will continue to do that. Stabilizing the ship of Illinois is vitally necessary. I think even in the first three-and-a-half weeks we’ve done a decent job of turning a page in an unhappy chapter in the state’s history.”

Sen. Bunning apologizes for Ginsburg cancer remark (AP)
Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning apologized Monday to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for saying he believes she could die within a year from pancreatic cancer. At the same time, his planned bid for a third term in 2010 may have gotten tougher with one of Kentucky’s top Republicans saying he has not ruled out a possible run.

Ginsburg Goes Back to Work (Political Wire)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is expected to be in attendance when the Supreme Court returns from a three-week break today, the AP reports. Ginsburg had surgery for pancreatic cancer on Feb. 5.

Legal Experts Propose Limiting Justices’ Powers, Terms (Washington Post)
For starters, the group proposes a form of term limits, moving justices to senior status after 18 years on the court. The proposal says that justices now linger so long that it diminishes the likelihood that the court’s decisions “will reflect the moral and political values of the contemporary citizens they govern.” To get around the Constitution’s prescription that justices serve for life, the group would let justices stay on the court in a senior role — filling in on a case, perhaps, or dispatched to lower courts — or lure them into retirement with promises of hefty bonuses. It would set up a regular rotation on the court by providing for the nomination of a new justice by the president with each new two-year term of Congress. If that results in more than the current nine justices, only the nine most junior would hear cases.
You bet, though ten years sounds better to me than 18.

D.C. Circuit Grants Obama (Another) Extension in Subpoena Case (Legal Times)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Monday gave the Obama administration another week to decide its course in a case involving one of President George W. Bush’s most expansive claims of executive privilege. The briefing schedule has changed three times in the last two weeks, after two motions by the Justice Department for more time to allow for an out-of-court settlement in the House of Representatives’ lawsuit against former White House counsel Harriet Miers and chief of staff Joshua Bolten. The Justice Department now has until March 4 to file its opening brief in the case.

Rove ignores House Judiciary Committee subpoena (Think Progress)
Pursuant to a subpoena issued earlier this month, Karl Rove was due to appear for a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee today. But as CongressMatters reports, despite being “expected” to appear this time, Rove was a no show. Contacted by ThinkProgress, the House Judiciary Committee confirmed the report of Rove’s absence. Days before leaving office, “Bush’s White House counsel, Fred Fielding, sent letters to Rove, Miers, and Bolten, instructing them to continue to ignore congressional demands for information about anything they did while at the While House.”

Sanford Offers Unemployed South Carolina Resident ‘Prayers’ Instead Of Stimulus Funds (Think Progress)
Following the lead of a number of his fellow Republican governors, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) has given some indication that he will not accept some of the money slated for South Carolina in the $787 billion economic recovery bill President Obama signed into law last week… On C-SPAN’s Washington Journal [on Monday], Sanford received a call from a Charleston resident who said he lost his job because he has been taking care of mother and sister, both of whom have serious illnesses. The caller told Sanford he is “wrong” to decline the money. “A lot of people in South Carolina are hurting. And if this money can come and help us out we need it.” In response, Sanford could offer him only his prayers:

Bush turns down greeter position at a Dallas hardware store. (Think Progress)
Earlier this month, Elliott’s Hardware store in Dallas offered former President Bush a job as a part-time greeter. “We think it would be a great fit for him as he settles back into life in Dallas,” the store’s owner said. Bush showed up at the store on Friday “lookin’ for a job,” he said to some of Elliott’s employees. Bush ended up turning down the offer but continued on his quest for “flashlights and batteries.” [Click through to watch] a local Dallas news report.
That’s too bad.  Really.  He’d be very good at that job.

Bush launches speaking tour, promoting his policies that were ‘controversial at times’ but ‘kept the country safe.’ (Think Progress)
As the Dallas Morning News reported earlier this month, George W. Bush’s first post-presidency address will be in Canada on March 17. The closed event is being billed as “a conversation with George W. Bush,” during which he will “share his thoughts on his eight momentous years in the Oval Office.” Politico reports that Bush has already scheduled at least 10 more speeches this year, in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He is now represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau.

Times Editors Cut From Story Their Own Reporter’s Debunking Of GOP Mouse Tale (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
As I noted here yesterday, the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue. It turns out, however, that earlier drafts of the story did describe the claim as “misleading” — but Times editors removed that description from the copy, leaving the assertion to stand on its own. An email from the author of the story to a reader confirms this.

Rupert Murdoch personally apologizes for controversial cartoon. (Think Progress)
News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch issued a rare apology today for the controversial chimpanzee cartoon that ran in the New York Post last week. In the statement, he took full responsibility for the cartoon, saying the “buck stops with me,” and called the decision to run the cartoon “a mistake”.

Ryan Lizza’s People Magazine love letter to Rahm Emanuel (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has written a very lengthy profile of Emanuel – almost 5,300 words — that is so reverent, one-sided, and glorifying that it is hard to believe it wasn’t written by Emanuel himself.  In fact, much of the piece consists of Emanuel praising himself and Lizza writing it all down uncritically.  It’s almost impossible to walk on the streets of Washington, DC, without bumping into a vehement critic of Emanuel, but Lizza doesn’t manage to include any comments from any of them.  Instead — like a writer from People Magazine wanting to ensure continued access — he confines himself to quoting only Rahm’s best-est friends…

Rahm, you see, is — as his good friend Stan [Greenburg, with whom Rahm lived rent free for five years] put it — “not an ideological Democrat.  He’s not ideologically liberal.  He comes out of Chicago politics, which is more transactional.”  He gets things done.  Every political slogan of the Obama White House –pragmatism over ideology; we’re problem-solvers not partisans – magically weaves its way into Lizza’s narrative paean to Rahm… Lizza just let Emanuel speak without any real challenge.  He wasn’t on a mission of examining claims from powerful government officials in order to allow their truth to be assessed (i.e., journalism), but instead devoted himself to transmitting and endorsing those government claims without scrutiny (i.e., stenography and propaganda).

Sean Penn, Naomi Watts Attached to Valerie Plame Film (E!)
Sean Penn is in talks to join the cast of Fair Game, about the government-orchestrated outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame. Penn would play Plame’s husband. Doug Liman is set to direct and Naomi Watts is attached to play Plame.

Chuck Todd reveals that Chris Matthews doesn’t stand for anything (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Well, not technically. But boy, it sure sounded that way. It’s from a US News & World Report item about Todd discussing why Matthews decided not to run for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania (one of the great non-stories of our time): “…It was a childhood dream to be a senator, but he didn’t know what he was going to do if he got there.”… Matthews, who has been inside the Beltway for going on, what, four decades, who once worked on the Hill and has been commenting, non-stop, about politics for countless years, had no idea what he’d do if he were a senator.

Coulter on Hannity: “Nobody cares about our grandkids, that’s why nobody cares about global warming… they can get their own planet” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Because bipartisanship is the most importnat issue facing the country right now, cont’d (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
ABC headline: “A Strong Start for Obama – But Hardly a Bipartisan One”. As we noted before, the press always judged new presidents on whether or not they were able to pass their early legislative initiatives. But with Obama, the press, artificially obsessed with the issue of bipartisanship, has changed the rules and decided it’s how those bills get passed is what’s key. And if Republicans in Congress, or Republicans voters, are somehow not happy, than Obama is to blame. In other words, all Republicans have to do is disapprove, and Obama has failed.

Shuster to Rep. Issa: “Congressman, there is no project for a train from California to Las Vegas. You Republicans know better.” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Matthews calls Jindal’s “train from Disneyland to Las Vegas” claim “cartoon talk,” “stupid talk” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America )

Shelby Backs Off, Newspaper Stands By Story (Political Wire)
Though Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) backed away from his comments questioning President Obama’s citizenship, Cullman Times editor Derek Price emailed Ben Smith to say that his reporter affirmed to him that “we reported Shelby’s comments on Obama’s birth certificate accurately and completely… We stand by our story.”

Religious Groups Rally Against Hawaii Civil Unions Measure (American Constitution Society)
Thousands descended on Hawaii’s Capitol grounds [Sunday] to protest the legislature’s consideration of a bill that would provide equal rights to gay couples who enter into civil unions. The protestors, The Honolulu Advertiser reported, represented religious organizations, from local churches, temples, synagogues and mosques… The civil unions bill is intended to provide many of the same rights afforded to heterosexual couples who marry in Hawaii to same-sex couples.

When Asked Whether He Would ‘Consider’ Gay Civil Unions, Steele Replies, ‘What Are You, Crazy?’ (Think Progress)
[Sunday] night, actor Sean Penn and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black both won Oscars for their work on “Milk,” which told the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official. [Monday], the right wing expressed its disgust that the movie received such acclamation. On his radio show, Mike Gallagher slammed Penn for ignoring “the majority of Americans” by supporting gay marriage rights, saying it went against America’s “fundamental values.” Gallagher asked guest Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican Party, if he thought the party “ought to consider” something like civil unions. Steele replied immediately, “No, no, no,” adding, “What are you, crazy?” He made it clear that the party would not budge on gay rights:

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Obama Tells Mayors to Spend Stimulus Wisely (AP video)
Invoking his own name-and-shame policy, President Barack Obama warned the nation’s mayors Friday that he will ‘call them out’ if they waste the money from his massive economic stimulus plan.
It’s interesting that the shot below, edited into the very beginning of the video, is not an expression that Obama had on his face during the clip.  What would the “Lie To Me” folks say about this expression—that it reflects disgust?  Scorn?  Is the AP trying to portray Obama as the National Scold?

He’s even hired an enforcer:
Official: Investigator to lead stimulus oversight (AP)
President Barack Obama plans to announce Monday a former Secret Service agent who helped expose lobbyists’ corruption at the Interior Department as his pick to oversee the $787 billion economic stimulus plan. Obama is set to name Earl Devaney as chairman of the new Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board, an administration official said Sunday. Vice President Joe Biden also will be given a role coordinating oversight of stimulus spending.

Obama aims to cut US deficit in half by 2013 (Reuters)

* Obama plans to raise taxes on wealthy, cut Iraq spending
* Obama wants to cut deficit to 3.0 percent of GDP
* Obama moves to fulfill campaign tax cut promise
* Bush tax cuts to be allowed to expire on schedule

Obama Bans Budget Gimmicks (Political Wire)
“For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller,” the New York Times reports. “The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear.”

Obama’s deficit plan based on optimistic assumptions (McClatchy)
In order to achieve his goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half, to $533 billion by 2013, President Barack Obama would need cooperation from Congress; the U.S. and world economies; Iraqi political and militia leaders; Afghan warlords and politicians; and perhaps even Iran, China and Pakistan.

Facebook, CNN and Obama: The Reunion (Mashable)
In what both brands hope will be another successful melding of mainstream and social media, CNN and Facebook are set for a rerun of their successful live streaming partnership during the Presidential Inauguration. On Tuesday evening, President Obama’s address to Congress will be live streamed online by CNN, accompanied by live updates from Facebook: discuss Obama’s address with your friends or view all the status updates from Facebook viewers. Facebook users can RSVP for the event here.

Health reform on the backburner? (AARP, via email)
The buzz around in Washington is growing louder – and the news is not good. It’s becoming clear that some members of Congress want to put health reform on the backburner until at least 2010.  But with medical costs rising fast, Americans need action on health care now. President Obama is outlining his priorities when he addresses the nation tomorrow night.  Will you join me in calling on the president to put health care reform at the top of his list? Click here to ask President Obama to make health reform a top priority in his speech tomorrow.

Reform health care — and leave Social Security alone (by Joe Conason, Salon)
An iron rule governing summit meetings, at least in foreign relations, is that the outcome must be determined before any actual encounter occurs. But no such sensible precondition appears to have been applied to the fiscal responsibility summit called by President Barack Obama to convene at the White House on Feb. 23. Instead, he will host a broad assortment of advocates and interests carrying a heavy freight of studies, prejudices and definitions, each seeking to advance an agenda that may bear little resemblance to the president’s own priorities.

While Obama may hope this cacophonous occasion will help educate Americans about the budgetary and tax issues we must confront over the coming decade, the summit risks serious distortion by both mainstream media coverage and right-wing propaganda… To get what he wants from this summit, the president should be prepared to brush back the slashers and privatizers and insist that they talk about the need for a healthcare system that is less expensive and more equitable.

Sitting at Obama’s table: The Secret Health Care Talks (by katiebird at  The Confluence)
Does anyone else want to burst into tears when they read about millionaires trying to make health care affordable? “Health Care Industry in Talks to Shape Policy”… Not once in the article is there a definition of “affordable” — which makes me doubly (if possible) skeptical of the eventual plan. But, then lets look at who’s doing the talking: “The 20 people who regularly attend the meetings on Capitol Hill include lobbyists for AARP, Aetna, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Business Roundtable, Easter Seals, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and the United States Chamber of Commerce.”

[W]here is someone from PNHP or the California Nurses or anyone supporting HR676 (Medicare for Everyone)? Is there a single uninsured person there?  Someone who’s under-insured?  Someone spending more on health insurance than they are on their mortgage? Looking closely at that list, it’s looking like the millionaires are discussing Health Care as a way to bail out the insurance industry.
And why are the meetings secret?  It was supposedly so horrible when Hillary had closed meetings.

House Democrats Target 12 Republicans on Stimulus Vote (Political Wire)
A dozen House Republicans are targeted in a new House Democratic political campaign that criticizes the GOP lawmakers for opposing President Obama’s economic stimulus package, CNN reports.
I wish they’d spend that money to do some of the educating Joe talks about above, instead of trying to unseat difficult to unseat Republicans.

A Message To Obama: Study Mandela (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
“I would advise [Obama] to read the Mandela chapter very closely,” said [pollster Stan] Greenberg, discussing his newly released book, “Dispatches From The War Room,” which documents his work with five prominent world leaders. “Obviously you had a big crisis and big transformation then. There were new electoral alignments and [Mandela] had high popular support and some big achievements. And yet, even there, when people are desperate, you can lose their support.”

Obama And Michelle Ask Progressive Groups For Help Driving White House Agenda (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
At a private White House cocktail reception last night for leaders of major progressive groups, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle appealed to these leaders and signaled that their groups would play a key role in driving the big progressive changes at the heart of the White House’s legislative agenda, an attendee tells me. The message was that these groups would be valuable as a kind of progressive outside “echo chamber,” as the attendee puts it.
It’s what I’ve been working for, for almost eight and a half years, but I’ve always thought it should be independent of a particular politician.  I’ll work toward a progressive agenda, but I won’t work toward an Obama agenda.

The Gatekeeper (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
From a New Yorker article on Rahm Emanuel: “… They have never worked the legislative process,’ Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy—produced a package that wasn’t large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. ‘How many bills has he passed?’”

He has a point – and yet, no. Our job is to push as hard from the left as we possibly can, so that when they split the difference in the legislative process, we’re a lot closer to the left than the right. That push from the left is also encouragement for Obama to go over the heads of the politicians and trust more in the American people. To lead… Rahm is about the art of the possible. Leadership focuses on making the impossible possible. There’s room for both in this administration.

Obama nixes plan to tax motorists on mileage (AP)
President Barack Obama on Friday rejected his transportation secretary’s suggestion that the administration consider taxing motorists based on how many miles they drive instead of how much gasoline they buy. “It is not and will not be the policy of the Obama administration,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters, when asked for the president’s thoughts about Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s suggestion… Gasoline taxes that for nearly half a century have paid for the federal share of highway and bridge construction can no longer be counted on to raise enough money to keep the nation’s transportation system moving, LaHood told the AP.

Obama will not immediately repeal Bush tax cuts. (Think Progress)
The New York Times reports [Sunday] that President Obama plans to “set a goal this week to cut the annual deficit at least in half by the end of his term,” in large part through withdrawing from Iraq and raising taxes on the wealthy. Obama, however, will not immediately repeal the Bush tax cuts, instead letting them expire on their own in 2010… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in January that she was “urging” Obama to immediately repeal the Bush tax cuts, which she said were “the biggest contributor to the budget deficit.”

Exposing Republican stupidity (by Bruce Bartlett, a supply side Republican, thanks to Economist’s View)
It appears from leaks about Obama’s budget that the scenario I have long envisioned will finally come to pass. Republicans will be forced to deal meaningfully with the Bush tax cuts, which Obama apparently plans to allow to expire at the end of next year. Republicans wrote this legislation with expiration dates as a trick to avoid budget rules that make it difficult to enact permanent tax cuts. Now they are going to say that this constitutes the largest tax increase in history even though their own legislation bequeathed it.

I hope Obama stands firm; not because I want taxes to rise, but because it exposes Republican stupidity. They could have had permanent—and more effective—tax cuts in the first place if they had been willing to negotiate with Democrats. They refused to do so and deluded themselves that they could just extend their tax cuts forever. They were wrong.

Obama Accused of Running Perpetual Campaign (Political Wire)
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R), a former RNC chairman, told CNN that President Obama’s recent travel is an indication that the new president is already running for reelection. Said Barbour: “He’s going to those places for a reason. I mean David Axelrod, who’s his campaign consultant/manager/guru really is one of the brightest, most capable people in American politics. And so this is what we’ve become accustomed to, the perpetual campaign.”
Did any Republican complain about Bush doing exactly the same thing?  No?  I didn’t think so.

Meet the new boss: same as the old boss (Not Your Sweetie)

Bagram prisoners have no rights? (by Joan Walsh, Salon)
After the Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees had the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, four Bagram prisoners tried to challenge their detention in U.S. District Court in Washington. The prisoners say the American military had detained and interrogated them without any charges and without letting them contact attorneys. According to AP, the suit was filed by relatives on their behalf; that was their only access to the legal system. The Bush administration defended against the suit by claiming all Bagram detainees have been deemed “enemy combatants” who had no right to U.S. courts. [Friday,] lawyers for the Obama administration decided to embrace the Bush defense.

“They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law,” the ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz told AP. “The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney who represents one of the Bagram detainees. “We all expected better.”

Was Binyam Mohamed brutalized at Guantanamo in the last month? (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
Credible allegations of mistreatment arise for the same time period that the Obama DOD self-servingly proclaimed Guantanamo to be in compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

Taguba backs commission to investigate Bush-era abuses. (Think Progress)
 Last summer, former Abu Ghraib investigator ret. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said that the Bush administration had “committed war crimes” and needed to be “held to account.” Yesterday, 18 human rights organizations, former State Department officials, and former law enforcement and military leaders — including Taguba — signed onto a letter asking the President to create a non-partisan commission to investigate the Bush administration’s torture policies. In a new interview with Salon, he explains why.
Click through for a link.

Obama Expands Missile Strikes Inside Pakistan (New York Times)
With two missile strikes [last] week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government. The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft.

Operation Uptick: Obama Launches Afghan Surge (by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque)
And so it begins: the great Obama “surge” in Afghanistan. Before withdrawing a single soldier from Iraq, Barack Obama is throwing 17,500 more troops into the boiling Afghan cauldron… Most of the new troops are apparently going to be sent on a fool’s errand to eradicate the only means of support of poor Afghans: the opium crop. Previous such efforts by American forces and their allies have produced nothing but more poverty, anger, extremism and support for the insurgency. And whatever the mission, increased troop levels and military action have led invariably to steep rises in civilian casualties – which, in turn, produce more poverty, anger, extremism and support for the insurgency… Another day, another killing, another enemy created. And much, much more of this to come.
Remember that Afghanistan is Where Empires Go to Die.

Afghanistan has the smell of South Vietnam in 1965 (by Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy)
U.S. commanders are stuck fighting a losing war in a landlocked country with long and insecure supply lines through Pakistan, where rebels and thieves pounce on the vulnerable convoys almost at will — and more troops will need more supplies. To put it bluntly, Afghanistan today has the smell of South Vietnam in early 1965, just as the U.S. began ramping up for a war that would last a decade and cost the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and as many as 2 million Vietnamese before it ended in our defeat. It’s just one more incredible mess that President Obama has found waiting on his desk, and he understandably appears to want to tread very, very cautiously into this uncharted minefield.

Afghanistan – 8 years later: More of the Same But Worse (by Pacific John at Alegre’s Corner)
Joe Galloway [see above] and his cohorts at McClatchy DC were the only organization that got the Afghanistan and Iraq stories right in the critical months following 9/11, during which a dazed President Bush allowed military professionals to pursue the actual threat in Afghanistan, and let his political ideologues redirect the central priority of government to an irrelevant war in Iraq… It’s not a coincidence that Galloway and Rescorla understood national security far better than the Bush team, because they had a clear, non-ideological view of recent history. They defied the American cultural tendency to dismiss the past with, “that’s history,” “water under the bridge.”

Now that we have a Democratic President who has made a career campaigning against the past, I worry that he dismisses the lessons he needs know.

Savage: If McCain announced Afghanistan troop surge, “the rotting fruit on the jungle floor in all of these left-wing groups … these old hags … would be screaming and throwing pig blood in the Congress” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Steve Bell

*Rudyard Kipling

Frenetic Clinton hits Asia running (Boston Globe, thanks to Alegre)
At the Jakarta airport in Indonesia, she beamed as she was serenaded by rows of singing, swaying schoolchildren. Later, she visited the headquarters of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, waving and smiling broadly when hundreds of employees chanted “Hee-ler-ry,” Hee-ler-ry” as she entered.

Fannie Mae Rescue Hindered as Asians Seek Guarantee (Bloomberg)
Asian investors won’t buy debt and mortgage-backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac until they carry explicit U.S. guarantees, similar to those given on bonds issued by Bank of America Corp. or Citigroup Inc. The risks are too great without a pledge that the U.S. will repay the debt no matter what, according to Hideo Shimomura, chief fund investor in Tokyo for Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management Co., and other bondholders and analysts in Japan, China and South Korea interviewed by Bloomberg. Overseas resistance may hamper U.S. efforts to hold down home-loan rates and shore up the nation’s largest mortgage-finance companies.

Clinton Urges China to Keep Buying U.S. Treasury Securities (Bloomberg)
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged China to continue buying U.S. Treasury bonds to help finance President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, saying “we are truly going to rise or fall together.”

Clinton Paints China Policy With a Green Hue (New York Times)
Declaring that “we hope you won’t make the same mistakes we made,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited China to join the United States in an ambitious effort to curb greenhouse gases, as she toured an energy-efficient power plant in Beijing on Saturday.

Hillary Clinton China visit blamed for the detention of activists (The Telegraph, U.K.)
Before travelling to the People’s Republic on Friday for a two day visit, the new American Secretary of State, said she would not let the issue “interfere” with efforts to resolve the global economic crisis and combating climate change. Human rights groups claimed her comments lifted the pressure on Beijing to address the issue, making it easier for the Chinese to justify fresh restrictions on dissidents.

China expresses relief over Clinton visit (AFP)
Hillary Clinton’s trip to Beijing has come as a relief to China after the US secretary of state steered clear of human rights and other sensitive issues to focus on cooperation between the world powers.

Citi presses US to take 40% stake (Financial Times, U.K.)
Citigroup is pressing the US government to agree on a new capital injection that would increase the authorities’ stake in the troubled bank to about 40 per cent but stop short of an outright nationalisation. The talks come after Citi’s shares slumped last week as investors feared it would be nationalised.

WSJ: Citi and U.S. Government in Talks to Convert Preferred to Common (Calculated Risk)
Citi’s market cap is around $10 billion, so it seems the government is getting a poor deal if the $45 billion in preferred is converted into only 40% of Citi’s common stock.

Banking on the Brink (by Paul Krugman)
Lately the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has been seizing banks it deems insolvent at the rate of about two a week. When the F.D.I.C. seizes a bank, it takes over the bank’s bad assets, pays off some of its debt, and resells the cleaned-up institution to private investors. And that’s exactly what advocates of temporary nationalization want to see happen, not just to the small banks the F.D.I.C. has been seizing, but to major banks that are similarly insolvent. The real question is why the Obama administration keeps coming up with proposals that sound like possible alternatives to nationalization, but turn out to involve huge handouts to bank stockholders…

The Obama administration, says Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, believes “that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go.” So do we all. But what we have now isn’t private enterprise, it’s lemon socialism: banks get the upside but taxpayers bear the risks. And it’s perpetuating zombie banks, blocking economic recovery. What we want is a system in which banks own the downs as well as the ups. And the road to that system runs through nationalization.

U.S. Tries a Trillion-Dollar Key for Locked Lending (New York Times)
Simon Johnson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said many people might take a dim view of the TALF program because it provided government subsidies to investors like hedge funds. Investors who borrow from the Fed could enjoy annual returns of 20 percent or more.

The TALF trough (by Owen Paine at Stop Me Before I Vote Again)
Obie plans to lend a trillion bucks to pathological profit hogs — at 2% — allow 20 to one leverage — cover most losses — privatize “returns of 20 percent or more” — assume almost all the downside risk. Wow. I want in on that caper. Wouldn’t you?

Bailed out banks scamming fees from unemployment benefits (by lambert at Corrente)
AP: “For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there’s a new twist to their financial pain: Even as they’re collecting unemployment benefits, they’re paying bank fees just to get access to their money.”

Nationalization fears (by Paul Krugman)
So everyone agrees that fears of nationalization are driving bank stocks down. That’s probably true, but those fears have to be carefully interpreted. We are not talking about fears that leftist radicals will expropriate perfectly good private companies… What’s happening now is a growing sense that the federal government, in return for rescuing these institutions, will demand the same thing a private-sector white knight would have demanded — namely, ownership.

On Nightly News, CNBC’s Liesman explains that “nationalizing a bank” is “a normal process, it’s basically how a bank goes bankrupt” (Think Progress)

Hope and Trust, and the Mini Depression (by Robert Reich)
Financial stocks are in free fall because no one trusts financials any longer. A sell-off in bank, housing, insurance and other financial stocks has accelerated in the wake of Geithner’s bailout plan because the administration raised expectations too high that the plan would cure troubled banks. Yet it has become clear (even to Alan Greenspan) that the only way anyone is going to trust what they see on bank balance sheets is if bank regulators take over troubled banks, at least until those balance sheets are washed clean.

The non-prodigal son (by Michael J. Smith at Stop Me Before I Vote Again)
[F]rom the Boston Globe: “Bailout lament: What about me? Many who played by rules see unfairness…” The other day on NPR — I was driving at the time, that’s my excuse — some “economist” was trying to explain this problem away. One of Mr Carpenter’s fellow-elders had called in with precisely the Carpenter complaint: Where’s the justice here? The “economist” gabbled and stammered… Finally the “economist” came up with his answer: it’s not about justice, it’s not about fairness, it’s not about keeping the promises the system made. It’s about saving the “system” itself…

The moral authority is now shot. It’s clear what the “system” was about in fact. It wasn’t about rewarding virtue. It was about rewarding speculation. Saving the system means: let’s keep people speculating, at all costs. Virtuous or not, they must stay in the game. Or all is lost.

Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime (by Eliot Spitzer)
Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers’ ability to repay, making loans with deceptive “teaser” rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Charles Lemos Poisons The Well (by myiq2xu at The Confluence)
Former PUMA Chuckie Lemos is now blogging over at MyDD and he had this to say about the Rick Santelli video [in which he rants about bailouts—click through to watch]: “…Rick Santelli is heir to this legacy laced with racist overtones.  Note the promo before the rant in the video link at CNBC. CNBC has an upcoming special entitled The Rise of America’s New Black Overclass.  Fear mongering, it’s worked before so let’s try it again. It’s back to the 1970s for the GOP and their rabid white ethnics.”… [T]here is a major problem with Chuckie’s argument:  Santelli didn’t say anything remotely racist. I’m not defending Santelli, I’m criticizing Chuckie for using a right-wing tactic to delegitimize opponents… Rather than address Santelli on the merits, Chuckie accuses him of racism, thereby rendering anything Santelli says invalid… [T]he only racism I see is Charles Lemos’ bigoted statements about “white ethnics.”
Santelli ranted against “losers”.  So who’s the racist, the guy who rants against losers—or the guy who assumes that all losers are black, and therefore that ranting against losers is ranting against blacks?  And by the way, did Santelli rant about bailing out the loser bigwigs who ran the banks into the ground?

Matthews to Santelli: “You’re up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. It’s quite a team” (County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Look who passes as a “populist” to the media elite (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Yep, the CNBC reporter who [Thursday] claimed the all-white, all-male traders surrounding him on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange represented a cross-section of America… [T]he out-of-touch press[anointed] Santelli a “populist,” following his rant against the Obama housing recovery plan and how the president was leading the country down the road to communism.
Click through for a link to Santelli’s biography.

Kurtz: “Santelli may or may not have a populist point, but isn’t he supposed to be a reporter?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

All those rich people shouldn’t have taken out mortgages they couldn’t afford (by lambert at Corrente)
Bloomberg: “Luxury homeowners are falling behind on mortgage payments at the fastest pace in more than 15 years, a sign the U.S. financial crisis that began with the poorest Americans has reached the wealthiest…” How much you want to bet that “shared sacrifice” won’t apply to these guys, and that, very quietly, a way will be found to rescue them?

Obama administration tries to kill White House e-mail suit (AP)
The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails. Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

CREW RESISTS WHITE HOUSE’S PUSH FOR EMAIL LAWSUIT DISMISSAL (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington)
Today, CREW filed its opposition to the White House’s motion to dismiss CREW’s lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to recover millions of missing emails and install an effective electronic archiving system. The White House is arguing that because it has re-examined the problem and restored a limited number of emails, CREW’s claims should be dismissed. As CREW explained in its opposition, the latest White House analysis does not answer the fundamental questions of how many emails are missing, what caused the problem and whether it has been fixed.

Reversing Bush Position, U.S. Now Supports U.N. Measure Condemning Discrimination Based On Sexual Orientation (Think Progress)
Last December, France and the Netherlands co-sponsored an unprecedented U.N. declaration calling for a worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality. Sixty-six countries signed the nonbinding declaration, including most of Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico. However, the United States joined China, Russa, the Vatican and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in refusing to support the measure… But as with a number of other important issues, the new Obama administration has come with a change in attitude and a new position… While the measure faced resistance and eventually failed, U.N. Dispatch’s Mark Leon Goldberg notes, “Still, it’s relieving to see that the United States is now back on the side of the enlightened on this issue of basic human rights.”

Ginsburg’s cancer has not spread, court says (AP)
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer was found at the earliest stage and has not spread beyond her pancreas, the court said Friday.

Keyes Challenges Obama’s Citizenship (Political Wire)
Alan Keyes (R), who was defeated by Barack Obama in their 2004 U.S. Senate race, challenged Obama’s citizenship in a fiery video, the Los Angeles Times reports. “This simmering dispute, occurring online and in e-mails coursing daily across the Internet, seems unlikely to evaporate any time soon.”

Shelby Doubts Obama Citizenship (Political Wire)
Alan Keyes isn’t the only one keeping alive rumors that Barack Obama isn’t a natural born citizen. At an event last week in Alabama, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) answered a question from a constituent in a way that indicates he still holds doubts, according to the Cullman Times. Said Shelby: ”Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president.”

Doctors Slam U of C Hospital (by Gabriel Spitzer, Chicago Public Radio, thanks to InsightAnalytical)
The organization singles out the hospital’s Urban Health Initiative, which diverts some patients away from the ER. It’s supposed to make the system more efficient by freeing up ER staff to treat the most urgent cases. But the doctors group likens it to dumping unprofitable patients… The Urban Health Initiative was developed in part by First Lady Michelle Obama when she was an executive at the hospital. A U. of C. spokesman called the doctors’ criticism… “way off-base,” and said the hospital hasn’t cut back on emergency care.
So THAT’s why they paid Michelle so much money—to help them dump poor patients on other hospitals.

HHS Spot? Lots of Smoke/Mirrors, Few Hard Leads (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
A couple of stories pouring cold water on the Sebelius candidacy:
1) she hasn’t discussed it with Obama…
2) she doesn’t want to move to DC (ok, this one has been around for a while, but it’s been reinvigorated)

Too late for ex-Burris backers to cut and run (by Carol Marin, Chicago Sun-Times)
None of this had to happen. Democrats could have taken the appointment power out of Blagojevich’s hands in December when he was arrested and provided for a special election. But no. Even reformer Quinn bailed out on that idea — until he jumped back on board Friday. Durbin calls this mess a “Blagojevich burlesque,” but that gives too much credit to Blagojevich and not nearly enough blame to Durbin and the Democrats who early on caved in and countenanced Burris. It’s too late to cut and run.

Burris chief of staff resigns (by Alex Koppelman at War Room, Salon)
Darrel Thompson, who was on loan from Harry Reid’s office, is leaving the embattled Illinois senator behind and returning to his old job.

AP Interview: Reid pushing for climate change bill (AP)
Saying it’s time to “take a whack” at climate change, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he plans to push for Senate action on global warming by the end of summer.

Supporters Upbeat About Bill to Give D.C. a Vote in Congress (Washington Post)
Supporters of D.C. voting rights believe that they are on the verge of their biggest victory in at least 30 years as the Senate prepares to take up a bill this week creating a full House seat for the District.

RAHM’S ‘RENT’ IS JUST THE TIP OF ETHICS ICEBERG (By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, New York Post)
NEWS broke last week that Rahm Emanuel, now White House chief of staff, lived rent- free for years in the home of Rep. Rosa De Lauro (D-Conn.) – and failed to disclose the gift, as congressional ethics rules mandate… Emanuel is a multimillionaire, but lived for the last five years for free in the tony Capitol Hill townhouse owned by De Lauro and her husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. During that time, he also served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee – which gave Greenberg huge polling contracts…

Emanuel never declared the substantial gift of free rent on any of his financial-disclosure forms. He and De Lauro claim that it was just allowable “hospitality” between colleagues. Hospitality – for five years? Some experts suggest that it was also taxable income: Over five years, the free rent could easily add up to more than $100,000. Nor is this all that seems to have been missed in the Obama team’s vetting process. Consider: Emanuel served on the Freddie Mac board of directors during the time that the government-backed lender lied about its earnings, a leading contributor to the current economic meltdown.
To all of you who used Dick Morris’ lies about Hillary during the primary—here’s payback.

Abramoff Scandal Yields More Charges (Washington Post)
A former legislative aide to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) was accused yesterday of accepting more than $25,000 worth of meals and event tickets from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for helping his clients. Ann M. Copland, 52, was charged in U.S. District Court in Washington with one count of conspiracy to commit honest-services fraud. The charge came in a criminal information, a document typically filed by prosecutors when a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.

Prosecutors alleged that Copland, who worked for Cochran for 29 years until last year, used her position to try to persuade unidentified members of the legislative and executive branches to take actions, including “inserting, protecting, removing” items in spending bills. At the time, Cochran was a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he is now the ranking Republican.

Bunning Predicts Ginsburg Will Die Within Nine Months (Political Wire)
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) “predicted over the weekend that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would likely be dead from pancreatic cancer within nine months,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reports. Bunning said Ginsburg has “bad cancer. The kind that you don’t get better from.”

Web pages mocking Bush rank higher than his library site in online search results. (Think Progress)
Last December, the Bush Library foundation paid a cybersquatter $35,000 for the rights to the web domain name www.GeorgeWBushLibrary.com. A web development company originally paid less than $10 for the rights to the site. However, since the purchase, the library’s website is having trouble getting noticed on internet search engines… Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land, an industry blog said the site is “below average” for building web traffic and “probably failing” in efforts to raise money because of its low ranking.

New Jobs Elude Bush Appointees (Political Wire)
“The jobless rate is hanging high — for many of the roughly 3,000 political appointees who served President George W. Bush. Finding work has proved a far tougher task than those appointees expected,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Only 25% to 30% of ex-Bush officials seeking full-time jobs have succeeded… That is much, much worse than when Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton left the White House.”

The Bushes—The Next Generation:
George P. Bush Rips Charlie Crist As ‘D Light’ For Supporting Stimulus (Think Progress)
Delivering a speech before the Young Republican National Federation yesterday, George P. Bush — the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — ripped current Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) for being a “D light” (Democrat light). “There’s some in our party that want to assume that government is the answer to all of our problems,” Bush said. “I’m not going to name any names,” he added, but told the crowd, “You know who I’m talking about.” He clarified later: “Afterward, Bush said he doesn’t think Crist is a fiscal conservative and that he may have hurt himself with some Republicans for his appearance with Obama and his support of the stimulus plan.”

Jindal Rejects $90 Million In Recovery Funding That Would Have Benefited 25,000 Louisiana Residents (Think Progress)
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal announced his intention to oppose changing state law to allow his Lousiana citizens to qualify for the second two unemployment provisions. Jindal said the state would only be accepting money to increase the unemployment insurance payments for those who currently qualify for unemployment insurance. In all, Jindal turned away nearly $100 million in federal aid for his state’s unemployed residents.

Nagin On Jindal: Presidential Ambitions Clouding His Stimulus Judgment (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
The distribution of the stimulus package is creating a complicated set of political circumstances for Republican Governors who opposed the measure: stick to their fiscal-conservative stance or grab a much-needed piece of the pie? The equation is even more complex for Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. The up-and-coming Republican could — like all governors — use the money to shore up state budget needs. But he also has his eyes on higher political office, an ambition which seems to be compelling him to decline the stimulus aid on ideological grounds. On Friday, the state’s highest profile mayor, New Orleans Democrat Ray Nagin, called out Jindal for putting political ambitions above gubernatorial priorities.

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Landrieu: Jindal Wrong To Reject Recovery Funds For Unemployment Insurance (Think Progress)
On Friday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) announced that he would reject nearly $100 million in unemployment insurance funding from the federal government. In doing so, Jindal ensured that at least 25,000 unemployed Lousiana residents would not be eligible for unemployment insurance. In response, Louisiana’s Lt. Gov., Mitch Landrieu (D), said that “Jindal needs to choose whether to represent the state of Louisiana or be the spokesman for the national Republican Party“:

Quote of the Day (Political Wire)
“Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: I’ll take it. I’m more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn’t want to take this money.” — California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), interviewed on This Week, about some Republican governors saying they will not take money from the recently passed economic stimulus package.

Asked why he may turn down money from stimulus plan, Sanford says “[A]t times it sounds like the Soviet grain quotas of Stalin’s time” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Rep. Cao Faces Potential Recall Petition For Toeing GOP Line And Voting Against The Stimulus (Think Progress)
Earlier this month, New Orleans’s new congressman Joseph Cao (R) stated that he would vote for the economic recovery package. “I believe that more likely than not, I will vote for it because the 2nd Congressional District needs a stimulus package,” he said. Even on the day of the vote, Cao was telling reporters that he was “leaning yes.” In the end, however, Cao succumbed to GOP arm-twisting and voted against the package. The Republican party’s chief deputy whip stood near the freshman lawmaker during the entire vote, and Cao admitted that the leaders had applied some “pressure” on him to vote no, so that they could boast 100 percent opposition from their party. BayouBuzz.com reports that many of Cao’s constituents are now angry and may launch a recall petition:

Ridge: We were wrong to torture (BBC, U.K.)
America’s first homeland security secretary has accepted some criticisms of the US “war on terror” made in a recent report by legal experts. Tom Ridge told the BBC that the report’s attacks on extended detention and torture were justified. But he also said the US had been dealing with a new kind of threat. The report the International Commission of Jurists said anti-terror measures worldwide had seriously undermined international human rights law.

Fleischer: On Iraq, ‘Saddam was the big liar.’ (Think Progress)
In an interview set to air over the weekend on CNN’s D. L. Hughley Breaks the News, Ari Fleischer admits that the Bush administration was wrong to claim that Saddam Hussein had WMD in the lead up to the Iraq war, but still insists that Saddam was at fault for the war. “Saddam was the big liar here,” Fleischer concludes.
Well, it IS  comedy show.

Condoleezza Rice agrees to a three-book deal (AP)
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has agreed to a three-book deal with Crown Publishers, starting with a memoir about her years in the administration of President George W. Bush… The deal is worth at least $2.5 million, according to two publishing officials with knowledge of the negotiations.

Politico, incapable of spotting irony (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Maintaining its drumbeat of relatively pointless articles about the new Obama administration, Politico thinks it’s a big deal there are no CEO’s inside the new cabinet… Hmm, Bush appointed three former CEO’s to run the Treasury Dept. (i.e. to help run the economy), and now the Obama administration has to try to undo the extraordinary damage done to the economy during the Bush years. But Politico still thinks it’s weird that Obama’s not following Bush’s lead.

Nice job on the Stimulus, Madame Speaker.  But shouldn’t you be changing some diapers? (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
US News & World Report’s Washington Whispers page [featured] a poll asking readers who they would prefer to run a daycare center for their kids: First Lady Michelle Obama, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. And no, the poll doesn’t offer the obvious fifth choice: “Why the hell would anyone ask this question?”

Chris Matthews, fully reinvented: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
Chris Matthews has reinvented himself to fit his network’s new pro-Dem slant. But the analysts simply had to laugh at what he said Wednesday night. You see, Hillary Clinton works for Obama now–and for this reason, respect must be paid. Clownishly, Matthews gushed as he honored her with the “Hardball Award”–”the first to go to a woman,” he clownishly said. But he brought the analysts out of their chairs as he closed with a failed recollection: “…I never gave Hillary Clinton credit for the guts it took for her to run for the U.S. Senate.”…

Matthews never gave Clinton credit? Good lord almighty–too funny! In fact, he trashed her remorselessly during that period, starting in late 1999, when her plan to run began clear. During this same period, he was relentlessly trashing Candidate Gore as a gender-confused liar and crackpot; no criticism was too stupid or inaccurate to voice on that front. At the time, of course, the career liberal world–a gang of cowards–sat back and let him engage in this conduct. Today, the career liberal world sits back again and let him reinvent in this way.

Savage declares desire to order Barbara Walters “to stand outside of the Lincoln tunnel from 3am to 6am in fishnet stockings for the rest of” her life (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Because bipartisanship is the most important issue facing the country right now (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
No, really. That’s what Steve Thomma at the McClatchy-Tribune News Service suggests in his preview of Obama’s upcoming primetime address this week before Congress. Forget the fact that the Dow is down to nearly a decade low and host lost almost 50 percent of its value in the last six months. Or that jobs are being shed at an historic rate and there’s even talk of nationalizing our banks. That’s not what really matters to the Beltway press corps. None of that trumps the all-important issue of whether Obama can successfully court Republicans… Can you spell d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t?

Quinn agrees with caller that Democrats “took over the country without firing a shot,” adds “so did Hitler” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Lambro calls Corsi — who wrote Kerry & Obama smear books — a liberal blogger (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Look, it isn’t hard to understand why conservatives don’t want to claim Corsi as one of their own; he’s a nut and a liar and a bigot. But he’s their nutty lying bigot.

D.C. Police Believed Close to Arrest in Levy Case (Washington Post)
D.C. police are seeking an arrest warrant against a Salvadoran immigrant in connection with the eight-year-old slaying of federal intern Chandra Levy, one of the most famous unsolved homicide cases in Washington history, according to law enforcement sources.
One of the commenters said, “Remember when Fox was ‘all Conduit all the time’”

My reply:  It wasn’t just Fox, and it wasn’t just Limbaugh. The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream outlets were just as bad. They drove Gary Condit from office. I didn’t like his politics and I didn’t like his taking advantage of such a young woman, but the media frenzy over Levy’s disappearance was absolutely unconscionable.

And all the while that Americans were distracted over this silly mess, the entire intelligence community was running around with its hair on fire, screaming that our country was about to be attacked by fanatics. Not one word about that was reported in the media, and 9/11 was the result.

Lobbyist’s Libel Suit Against NYT Ends
The suit, filed by Vicki Iseman, the Washington lobbyist who the paper has linked to John McCain, was settled without payment and The Times did not retract the article. In an unusual agreement, however, The Times is letting Iseman’s lawyers give their views on the suit on the paper’s Web site. Politico: “It is a retraction of the implication,” said Rodney Smolla, an attorney for Iseman, “that Ms. Iseman had this unethical, romantic relationship with Senator McCain.”

New York Post Apologizes for Chimp Cartoon
“Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon … was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill,” reads an editor’s note. “But it has been taken as … a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.”

NAACP Wants NY Post Editor and Cartoonist Fired (AP)
The head of the NAACP on Saturday urged readers to boycott the New York Post, calling a cartoon that the newspaper published an invitation to assassinate President Barack Obama. Benjamin Todd Jealous called on the tabloid to remove editor-in-chief Col Allan, as well as longtime cartoonist Sean Delonas.

Christopher Hitchens Beat Up By Lebanese Thugs During Street Brawl
The assault on Christopher Hitchens’ body continues — he’s been waterboarded, body-waxed, and suffered through countless hangovers. In the latest incident, Hitchens sustained gashed knuckles and bruises in a vicious street brawl with shoe-shopping thugs on Valentine’s Day night in Beirut.
Hitchens REALLY needs to stop drinking.

Seoul: N. Korean missile can hit US bases (CNN)
Stalinist North Korea deployed new medium-range ballistic missiles and expanded special forces training during 2008, South Korea’s defense ministry reported.
“Stalinist North Korea”?  STALINIST?  Is this a news report?  It’s not marked as a commentary.

NYU Student Protest Over, Student Demands Not Met (AP)
Dozens of New York University students were suspended Friday after barricading themselves in a school cafeteria to draw attention to their concerns about tuition costs, the school’s investments and other issues. The last protesters left the Helen & Martin Kimmel Center for University Life on Friday afternoon, university officials said. The protest began about 10 p.m. Wednesday. It was unclear whether any students would face charges, a police spokeswoman said.

George Mason U. elects man as homecoming queen (AP)
George Mason University students have elected a drag queen as homecoming queen. Student Ryan Allen beat out two women for the title at the 30,000-student school in suburban Washington, D.C., famous for its run to the Final Four a few years back. Allen competed under his drag queen persona of Reann Ballslee.

Foreign service employees overwhelmingly favor extending benefits to same-sex couples. (Think Progress)
Earlier this month during a town hall meeting with State Department employees, Secretary Hillary Clinton expressed “real concern” that same-sex partners in the foreign service aren’t offered the benefits that are provided to heterosexual couples. A new poll conducted by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) found that a significant majority of the department’s employees agree. When asked if AFSA should “advocate for official recognition and benefits for same-sex domestic partners of Foreign Service members,” 71 percent said yes while only 17 percent opposed.

Utah state senator to lose his committee chairmanship after homophobic diatribe. (Think Progress)
[Last] week, documentary film makers released the audio portion of an interview with Utah state senator Chris Buttars (R), who called gay people “the greatest threat to America going down,” labeled homosexuality “a sexual perversion,” and compared gays to alcoholics. [Friday], the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Buttars’ Republican colleagues have decided to kick him out of the state senate judiciary committee:

Better things to do. (by J –SOM at Liberal Rapture)
Cowards? Are we cowards about race?… I would LOVE to talk about race. A lot. For extended periods. The trouble – from my white male perspective – is that whenever a conversation about race is initiated it ends up being, in fact, not a conversation about race at all. Thoughtful people who do not [toe] a party line by spewing a litany of victimology bromides are quickly slapped down as “racist”. This ends the conversation… [Attorney General Eric]Holder called us “cowards” which is not exactly an invitation to speak freely. Nor was the relentless double think of the Obama Pods last year. It is amazing and important to have a biracial candidate – but IF YOU DO NOT SUPPORT HIM YOU MUST NOT DISCUSS RACE AND YOU MUST BE A RACIST…

That is what happened last year. Openly… Calling me a coward doesn’t even make me angry. It is worse than that. It makes me shut people like Holder out. Or off – as the case may be. Feel free to jabber on about what a victim you are and what a coward I am. I have much more pressing things to attend to.

Media Matters for America headlines

• In reported response to Will controversy, Wash. Post ombudsman compounds global warming misinformation

• Wallace says mouse falsehood “supposedly … debunked” — so where are the Fox News corrections?

• Wallace claimed Holder, confirmed 75-21, “got into office by the skin of his teeth”

• NYT advances false claim that recovery bill contains spending for “marsh-mouse preservation”

• The Hill, UPI uncritically reported false GOP claim that Dems steered recovery money to ACORN

• O’Reilly falsely claimed Frank advocated that “poor people ought to be given mortgages ’cause everybody has a right to a house” 

• CNBC’s Kudlow said housing plan “hurt[s]” Americans while benefiting Fannie and Freddie — but government holds majority shares 

• MSNBC twice aired Santelli’s criticism of administration foreclosure plan without substantive response 

• Myths and falsehoods about the 2010 census and the Obama administration 

• Discussing financial crisis, Buchanan baselessly blamed lending in “minority communities” 

• Hannity falsely suggested lawmakers cited inCQ article on PMA campaign funds are “all Democrats” 

• Citing AP, Baier mentioned only Democrats “embroiled in ethical issues” 

• On Beck, Byrnes smeared CO solar energy company as “socialist” 

U.S. Lawmaker to Push Repeal of E-Gambling Ban (PC Magazine)
A senior Democratic lawmaker will push legislation this year to repeal a U.S. ban on Internet gambling that has hurt trade ties with the European Union, a congressional aide said. “The bill introduction should happen in the next month,” a spokesman for House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said. On Thursday, Reuters reported the EU could file a complaint about U.S. enforcement of the gambling ban at the World Trade Organization.

Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police (CNET)
Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

Download Tax Gains Momentum, Picks Up A New State (Paid Content)
Facing massive budget shortfalls, states are scouring every nook and cranny for revenue sources. Wisconsin has found one in the digital realm. Following New York’s lead, the cheese state will tax web downloads, according to the web site the Register. The 4 percent tax will kick in Oct. 1, 2009. Some are dubbing it the “iPod tax,” but it affects all “digitally delivered entertainment services, including music, movies, e-books, greeting cards, ringtones, and many other downloadable items,” according to the Register. (The state has a $600 million budget deficit.) New York State passed a similar bill in April that taxes all downloads, including pornography.

Court finds Calif. video game law unconstitutional (Reuters)
A U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday that a California law restricting the sales and rental of violent video games to minors and imposing labeling requirements is too restrictive and violates free speech guarantees. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the labeling requirement unfairly forces video games to carry “the state’s controversial opinion” about which games are violent.

Judge Dismisses Google Street View Case
A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Pennsylvania family against Google after the company took and posted images of the outside of their house in its Maps service. The suit drew attention because it sought to challenge Google’s right to take street-level photos for its Maps’ Street View feature.

The Endangered News (by Michael Miner, Chicago Reader)
The public has trouble accepting the idea that news could be in danger. There’s so much news — and noise masquerading as news — that people think the problem isn’t guaranteeing the flow of news but getting away from it once in a while.

It’s Not Newspapers in Peril; It’s Their Owners (by Nat Ives, Advertising Age)
Newspapers themselves still earn decent profits. Their owners, on the other hand, are variously posting huge losses, at least on paper; watching their stock prices plunge; and, crucially, struggling to make payments on debt they took on under projections that didn’t pan out.

Should the Ford Foundation Buy the New York Times? (by Bruce Bartlett)
Foundations, universities, think tanks and even political parties might sponsor publications. For example, Harvard University might buy The Boston Globe. They could run these publications without expectation of profit and a least keep alive the basic journalistic function.

Locking Up the News Sites (by Jon Fine, Business Week)
Out of all the imperfect scenarios available, the least imperfect version looks to me like this: A bunch of news organizations get together, create a site walled off from the prying Web-crawlers of Google, charge subscription fees, and split these fees and any ad revenue.

Times Now Dominates Foreign-Affairs Beat in D.C. (by Harry Jaffe, Washingtonian)
Newspapers are shedding reporters, closing bureaus, and ceasing to publish on some days, but the New York Times appears to be sparing little expense on diplomatic coverage out of Washington. The paper seems to have the strongest stable of veteran foreign-affairs writers.

Time Warner to Spin Off Cable Arm
Time Warner Inc said on Thursday it will spin off Time Warner Cable, sketching out more details to a plan unveiled in 2008 to split the company’s media content and distribution businesses. The separation will be completed by the end of the current quarter through a “spin-off distribution.”

NYT Suspends Dividend; Even 6 Cents Per Share Was Too Much (Paid Content)
Now The New York Times Company will see how much support it really has from its non-employee family shareholders: the board of directors voted today to suspend the quarterly dividend for Class A and Class B shares. (The family trustees say full support; see the statement below.) It’s all about keeping as much cash as possible in an increasingly tough ad market—and an even tougher credit market. The decision follows last quarter’s dividend cut to $0.06 from $0.23 in Q308.

Philly newspaper owner files for Chapter 11 (AP)
The owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday in an effort to restructure its debt load. Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., owned by Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, is the second newspaper company in two days, and fourth in recent months, to seek bankruptcy protection. “This restructuring is focused solely on our debt, not our operations,” chief executive officer Brian P. Tierney said in a statement. “Our operations are sound and profitable.”

Journal Register Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy (Paid Content)
The Journal Register Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Saturday… According to the filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, the company reported debt of nearly $700 million against assets between $100 million and $500 million… The troubled company publishes the New Haven Register, 19 other dailies, and 159 non-daily publications, in greater Philadelphia, Ohio, Connecticut, Michigan and new York. In addition to 196 websites, the company owns the JobsInTheUS online classifieds network.

WaPo Working With Roger Black on Redesign
The Washington Post is undergoing a remarkable shrinking act, with some sections folding and others taking on more complicated identities. Making it all happen will require some tweaks to the paper’s design. That’s where renowned design guru Roger Black comes in.

The Media Baron and His Soft Spot
Rupert Murdoch, as much old-fashioned press baron as 21st century multimedia mogul, faces a depressing reality: his lifelong fondness for newspapers has become a significant drag on the fortunes of his company, the News Corporation.

Oxford American Saved by Anonymous $100K Donation
After months of negotiations with the IRS over thousands of dollars owed in unpaid taxes, non-profit literary magazine the Oxford American Friday received a much-needed surprise: a donation of $100,000. “It was an extraordinarily generousl gesture,” publisher Warwick Sabin said.

Time Inc. Settles With Source
Time Inc. is back in business with wholesaler Source Interlink Cos., and it could be just a matter of time before fellow publishers patch up their relationship with Source. Time Inc. said it reached a multi-year agreement with Source to distribute its magazines without an additional per-copy fee.

MPA Loses Two More Members to Recession
The Magazine Publishers of America has lost two more members, New York magazine and American Media, to tough business conditions. The exits compound the surprising dropout by Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., which recently decided against paying the membership dues.

Bollywood triumph: ‘Slumdog’ claims 8 Oscars
Hollywood has met Bollywood at the Academy Awards, and the makers of Oscar champ “Slumdog Millionaire” hope it’s a sign of future melding between the U.S. dream factory with its counterparts in India and elsewhere in the world. A tale of hope amid adversity and squalor in Mumbai, “Slumdog Millionaire” came away with eight Oscars, including best picture and director for Danny Boyle. The low-budget production was a merger of India’s brisk Bollywood movie industry, which provided most of the cast and crew, and the global marketing reach of Hollywood, which turned the film into a commercial smash, said British director Boyle.
If Hollywood concentrated on making good movies, instead of going mostly for hugely expensive box office blockbusters, they’d make less on each picture, but might make more money overall.  Not to mention putting a lot more people to work.  I feel the same about book publishing.  The industry is destroying itself by trying only for best sellers.

ABC Cuts Oscar Ad Rates
This year, Oscar is a little less golden. The ABC network, in a move that reverses years of escalating prices and underscores the worsening economy, has shaved the cost of a commercial for Sunday’s annual Academy Awards show, one of TV’s most-watched programs.

Cable Firms Look to Offer TV Programs Online
Top cable-television providers and TV networks are exploring a sweeping solution to the threat of online video: putting large numbers of cable shows online, but accessible only to cable subscribers. The operators hope the new Web services, which could launch this year, will attract new subscribers.

Earnings: TheStreet Posts $100k Net Loss; Revs Fall 17 Percent (Paid Content)
While the recession has been great for financial news’ companies audience numbers, that traffic hasn’t translated into profits and revenues.  TheStreet.com’s Q4 is a prime example, as the company posted a $100,000 net loss as revenues slid 17 percent to 16.5 million. Last year, the company had modest profits of $4.7 million ($0.16 per share).

Company Developing One-Stop Digital Mag Shop
eMagazines, a spinoff of Valuemags.com, is set to launch an “agnostic” marketplace for digital editions. The online marketplace is slated to launch in March with titles from Hearst, Bonnier Corp., Advanstar, Meredith, and Nylon.

Yahoo Returns to its Roots: Annoying Ads (Mashable)
Remember why Google AdSense became so popular in the first place? It was because the folks at Google had realized that flashing banners, animations and images don’t work that well in the context of a search result listing. Thus, they created very simple text-based ads that weren’t all that different from the search results itself; it worked great, and everyone (including Yahoo) had done pretty much the same thing. Now, Yahoo thinks that this strategy has run its course, and they’ve introduced a new kind of search ads - Rich Ads. These enable publishers to add images, videos, and custom search boxes to their search ads – precisely the sort of thing that stopped working several years ago.

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Sorry to have abandoned you for the last week.  I needed to take some time off.  Sometimes I get so discouraged that I just can’t make myself do the day’s research.  I’ve spent almost eight and a half years tirelessly promoting the work of others, with almost no return.  It’s just too much to handle sometimes.

Their turn to protest.  I wonder if they were kept out of the president’s view, as the Bush protesters were.
More than 500 protest Obama’s arrival (East Valley Tribune)
Presidential protesters made their voices heard in chants and signs Wednesday outside Dobson High School… They held their signs up high: “Don’t tread on me,” “Spend all you want, I’ll pick up the tab,” “I’ll keep my freedom! You keep the change!” “Free fertility drugs now.” And “B.O. smells and so does Socialism.”

GOP governors consider turning down stimulus money (AP)
A handful of Republican governors are considering turning down some money from the federal stimulus package, a move opponents say puts conservative ideology ahead of the needs of constituents struggling with record foreclosures and soaring unemployment. Though none has outright rejected the money available for education, health care and infrastructure, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho have all questioned whether the $787 billion bill signed into law this week will even help the economy.
Turn down the money.  Uh huh.

Kit Bond Touts Effects Of Stimulus Bill He Voted Against (Think Progress)
Last week, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) slammed President Obama’s recovery and reinvestment plan… “Unfortunately, this bill stimulates the debt, it stimulates the growth of government, but it doesn’t stimulate jobs,” Bond insisted. However, [this week] Bond is touring Missouri to tout the very stimulus plan he railed against. In a press release, Bond boasted about an amendment he included in the bill to provide more funding for affordable housing — and that will create jobs… Bond is not alone in trying to reap the political benefits both from voting against the bill and from bringing much needed funding to his district.

Assumptions (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
WaPo’s Michael Shear…: “Because the Republicans largely abandoned the stimulus bill, the Democrats are the ones that will own it — for good or ill.”… Democrats may “own” the stimulus, but Republicans share ownership of the fact that it wasn’t bigger.  If the stimulus doesn’t work, and insufficient spending turns out to be the reason, Republicans will own a large share of the blame.
Yes, but what the American people believe about who may be at fault depends almost entirely on what’s said by the media mavens who are constitutionally predisposed to blame Democrats for everything that’s bad, and to praise Republicans at all times.

Insufficient Boldness (by Simon Johnson, a Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, writing at The New Republic)
[A] definite advantage of [Obama’s homeowner rescue] plan is that it should help unblock the problem of securitization trusts. Housing loans that were “bundled” together into mortgage-backed securities have been hard to restructure, because no one has clear authority to negotiate on behalf of thousands of dispersed investors… The Obama plan is certainly better than the inaction that preceded it, and it signals that some unproductive ideology has quietly dropped away. Unfortunately, it feels like being vaccinated only after already contracting a disease; you would much rather be offered a potential cure. That cure would be expensive–particularly if it involved more money to support the modification of non-Fannie/Freddie mortgages–and it might not work. But there is little to be gained at this stage from being insufficiently bold.

A Step in the Right Direction (by James Kwak at Baseline Scenario
I agree that the main concern is that the plan does not go far enough. This is because the main proposal for struggling homeowners is to provide cash incentives to lenders… So I think that the Obama team has to be ready to sweeten the pot later – or take other, more aggressive measures – if this plan does not have the desired effect. Of course, if they were going to do that, they wouldn’t announce it now (because you don’t want lenders just to hold out for the next round of larger bonuses). So maybe that is the plan. But on balance I think most of what is in the plan is helpful. If only it had come, say, twelve months ago.

Recovery.gov (Political Wire)
The Obama administration set up a web site to show how the economic stimulus money is spent, state-by-state.

Obama Allies Launch New Ad Touting Stim Package As “First Step On Road To Recovery” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
A Democratic operative sends over the new ad that Obama’s allies on the left — AFSCME and the labor-backed Americans United for Change — have just launched touting the benefits of the stimulus package President Obama signed… The ad touts the stim package as “the first step on the road to recovery.” This forward-looking formulation is yet another reminder that the political war over the package is only just starting. In the months ahead, Obama and Dems will be working to solidify public perceptions that the bill is righting the economy, while Republicans try to cast it as failing.
Click through to watch the ad.  We’re on the right track with ads like this, but it may not be enough.  The right wingers are way ahead of us in outlets and spokespersons, some of whom will lie and make hugely inaccurate comparisons to demean their opponents.  See below.

Fox & Friends asks: “Are we headed towards Socialism?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Hannity declares recovery bill “a liberal hijacking of the American way of life” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Special Report takes a “fair and balanced look” at whether the recovery plan is “socialism” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Doocy claims “administration is talking down the economy” so that “anything up is up” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Cunningham suggests Obama should “resign the Presidency” if stimulus fails (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Right.  The way Bush did when we saw that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Michelle Malkin takes photo with man holding swastika Obama sign (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
The man with the sign isn’t professing his affinity for Nazis.  He isn’t even identifying himself as a Nazi.  The swastika in question has a circle around it forming an O and the rest of the sign reads “BAMA”.  Get it?  Obama is a Nazi.

Stop the Democratic Suicide (by Michael Lind, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
[T]he Obama administration has seemed more concerned with reassuring Wall Street that it will be protected against Main Street hotheads than in disciplining Wall Street on behalf of Main Street Americans who have lost jobs, homes, and savings… Given the opportunity, Republicans can once again tap a reservoir of resentment… By stigmatizing Great Society programs as special-interest giveaways, the Republicans built an alliance of conservatives and populists that marginalized liberalism and governed America for a generation. Don’t think that they can’t do it again.
At least we have a few more people fighting back now.  See below.

Jewish group rips Washington Times for invoking Nazism (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Aaron Keyak of the National Jewish Democratic Council assails the Washington Times for invoking Nazism in an editorial critical of health care provisions in President Obama’s economic recovery plan.  

Shuster gives GOP ad on “Democrats’ Wasteful Spending Bill” an “F on the facts” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

MSNBC’s Carlos Watson tells Scarborough that Scarborough and Limbaugh “made it difficult” for stimulus bill to be bipartisan (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Fed Leaders Issue Bleak Forecast (Washington Post)
It could take years for the nation to fully bounce back from the recession, according to new projections by leaders of the Federal Reserve, who indicated that even once the economy starts expanding again, it will be an “unusually gradual and prolonged” recovery.

“Worst Is Yet to Come:” Americans Standard of Living Permanently Changed (Tech Ticker, Yahoo Finance)
There’s no question the American consumer is hurting in the face of a burst housing bubble, financial market meltdown and rising unemployment. But “the worst is yet to come,” according to Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, who believes American’s standard of living is undergoing a “permanent change” – and not for the better as a result of:

     • An $8 trillion negative wealth effect from declining home values.
     • A $10 trillion negative wealth effect from weakened capital markets.
     • A $14 trillion consumer debt load amid “exploding unemployment”, leading to “exploding bankruptcies.”

“The average American used to be able to borrow to buy a home, send their kids to a good school [and] buy a car,” Davidowitz says. “A lot of that is gone.”

And Now Homeowners (by Robert Reich)
The two most important features of the administration’s plan to help homeowners are (1) its support for amending bankruptcy laws to allow judges to modify mortgages. This will give homeowners bargaining leverage with mortgage servicers (and give the servicers more leverage with securitized creditors on up the line) to get better terms; and (2) a massive expansion of the government’s commitment to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — allowing F&F to buy more mortgages by increasing the government’s guarantee against losses to $400 billion

Mortgaged Home, Sweet Mortgaged Home (by dakinikat at The Confluence)
Obama announced more details on his bailout plan that was focused more on borrowers instead of the lenders.  He released a four page fact sheet here… The bill is supposed to help s many as 9 million households in fending off foreclosures:
• Allows 4 million–5 million homeowners to refinance via government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Establishes $75 billion fund to reduce homeowners’ monthly payments.
• Develops uniform rules for loan modifications across the mortgage industry.
• Bolsters Fannie and Freddie by buying more of their shares.
• Allows Fannie and Freddie to hold $900 billion in mortgage-backed securities — a $50 billion increase

Housing repair (The Economist, U.K.)
By itself, the plan is unlikely to turn the tide. In combination with the stimulus, the bank rescue, and the collapse in home construction, it has a chance. Still, what would have been really nice to see would have been a comprehensive plan to get borrowers out of ownership without forcing them into bankruptcy or rushing waves of new foreclosures to market—an own-to-rent programme, for instance. Defaults are an immediate concern, but for the long-term health of the economy, lingering debt is going to be an issue. If foreclosure rates slow, but households continue to battle to get their heads above water by drastically cutting spending to pay down debt, recovery will be a long time coming.

Citi closes near 52-week low, housing plan falls flat (MarketWatch)
Citigroup shares fell about 14% on Thursday and ended near a 52-week low, pacing broad declines among banks and financial stocks as investors remained dubious of a series of unprecedented government plans to reinvigorate the nation’s economy and financial system.

Flashback: Just Days Ago, Conservative Lawmakers Said It Was ‘Essential’ To ‘Go Right At The Housing Problem’ (Think Progress)
During the congressional debate over the economic recovery package, Republican lawmakers voiced their opposition to the bill by complaining that it did not focus on housing. For instance, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), who voted against the economic recovery bill, said: “…We have a lot of problems, but we need to fix the underlying cancer, and that is the housing crisis.”… [But] House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) signaled his opposition to Obama’s housing plan before even seeing the details of the legislation. Will his fellow conservatives follow in his footsteps and soon forget their concerns about the addressing the “root cause” of the economic crisis?

Limbaugh dubs Obama’s housing plan the “Rezko Rescue Plan” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Obama’s housing plan: The Michelle Malkin critique (by Andrew Leonard at How the World Works, Salon)
Just a few days ago, Republican politicians were criticizing Obama’s stimulus plan by observing that the root problem facing the economy was the housing crisis. But on Wednesday, they smoothly switched to criticizing Obama’s housing plan because any relief for homeowners runs the risk of rewarding people who don’t deserve help. Republicans, reported the Wall Street Journal Wednesday afternoon, are “wary that the plan would benefit homeowners who made rash decisions or committed fraud to obtain their mortgage.”…

Malkin’s prescription is the so-called suck-it-up strategy. Do nothing, and housing prices will eventually fall to their proper floor. Only then can a true recovery get under way. She doesn’t appear to entertain the possibility that inaction could lead to a disastrous “overshoot” in which housing prices fall far below whatever the “appropriate” price should be, leading to vast financial misfortune for millions of people who never took out a dodgy subprime loan or attempted to flip a house or mislead a mortgage lender as to their finances… It might seem ridiculous to take a bomb thrower like Michelle Malkin seriously, but go ahead, turn on Fox News and start counting the number of times you hear the word “socialism” in a single day. That’s their story, and they are sticking to it.

What planet does Greg Mankiw live on? (by lambert at Corrente)
Not planet Earth: “I certainly do not want the government deciding who deserves credit and who does not, what kind of investments are worthy of financing and what kind are not. That is a big step toward crony capitalism, where the politically connected get the goodies, and economic stagnation awaits the rest of us.” Last I checked, real wages have been flat for thirty years, and the average American is poorer today than in 2001. Meanwhile, Hank Paulson hands his golfing buddies two trillion dollars, and we still don’t know where it went. And it looks like the Pentagon looted their own billions from Iraq. And that’s before we get Halliburton.
Crony capitalism? CRONY CAPITALISM????!!!!!!!!!!  After all these years of shoveling money into the pockets of the already rich at the expense of the rest of us?  But this is typical for right wingers.  Whatever nefarious thing they’re doing, they accuse others of doing.

Fucking Raping You to Death: The Real Fun Begins (by Arthur Silber at the Power of Narrative)
Now, we get to serious payback time for the ruling class. You don’t know what real pain is yet. It’s almost certain we’ll all find out very, very soon. Michael Hudson: “The Obama bank bailout is arranged much like an IMF loan to support the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the Treasury supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial institutions…” Mike Whitney: “In truth, Geithner did us all a big favor on Tuesday by exposing himself as a stooge of the banking industry. Now everyone can see that the banks are working the deal from the inside…”

Needless to say, none of our leading commentators (or leading bloggers) will spell this out for you in the way Hudson and Whitney do. That’s because all such “authorities” are propagandists for this corporatist system… So who are you going to believe? The ignorant and/or lying voices of the system that’s killing you…, or your own lying eyes? Most Americans have never chosen to credit their own eyes, since that would require independence and courage unknown to them. So they willingly blind themselves and enthusiastically embrace what they regard as their own stupidity. “Oh, it’s so complicated!,” they whine. “We have to trust the experts!”

The Geithner delay (by Paul Krugman)
The WaPo reports that Tim Geithner realized late in the day that the approaches to financial rescue originally developed by the Obama team weren’t workable — hence the vagueness of last week’s announcement. In a way, that’s encouraging: we were spared Hankie Pankie II. But it’s a bit alarming that it took so long for the team to figure out the problems — and that they apparently spent a long time going down a route that led to a dead end. Many of these issues had been hashed out in public discussion last fall, when Paulson made his play… So what the WaPo report seems to suggest is a worrisome insularity. Geithner and Summers are smart guys — but they need to get out more.

Bernanke: Nationalizing banks, if it’s necessary, won’t last long (McClatchy)
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday that there would be drawbacks to the federal government nationalizing banks and the Obama administration remained committed to “return them to private hands” quickly if nationalization became necessary.

GM, Chrysler seek more gov’t aid, to cut more jobs (AP)
General Motors and Chrysler said Tuesday their request for federal aid ballooned to a staggering $39 billion — only months after receiving billions in loans — in new plans that envision massive job losses and intense restructuring to survive a deepening recession.

For media elites, their class slip is showing (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Headline from ABC News…: “More Billions for GM, Chrysler? Auto Beggars to D.C.” We’re having trouble remembering headlines that have depicted Wall Street bankers as “beggars” when they lobbied from government bailout help. Then again, in recent months the press has been pretty open about its contempt for middle class autoworkers.

WSJ Examines Workers’ Uphill Battles In Federal Courts (American Constitution Society)
The Wall Street Journal today reports on job-discrimination cases in the federal courts, highlighting a recent study published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review (HLPR), the official journal of ACS. The study by Stewart Schwab, dean of the Cornell Law School, and Kevin Clermont, a Cornell Law School professor, finds that “the federal courts disfavor employment discrimination plaintiffs, who are now forswearing use of those courts.” The Journal article notes, “A battery of recent studies show that employees who sue over discrimination lose at a higher rate in federal court than other types of plaintiffs.”

Orszag Emerges as Key Player (Political Wire)
Budget director Peter Orszag’s “emergence as a central figure and key negotiator in the Obama’s economic policy team has come as a bit of a surprise to watchers of the administration,” Politico reports. Of his work on the economic stimulus bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “In my mind if there is hero in all of this it is Peter Orszag. He was wonderful.”… “Now Orszag is preparing for the biggest week of his career, with a ‘fiscal responsibility’ summit Monday and the release of Obama’s first budget Thursday. He’s signaling that the moves in the stimulus package are just a hint of what to come in a budget that will begin in earnest the arduous process of health care reform.”

The Gathering Storm: Social Security. (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
Obama packed his economic adviser team with people like Jeffery Liebman, a Social Security privatizer, and Peter Orszag, who’s been proposing benefit cuts and similar major changes to the basic structure of Social Security… Orszag has his grubby mitts on the wheels of government already. He’ll be writing the Social Security “reform” proposal the administration will be presenting at the February 23 “fiscal responsibility summit”, which will conveniently short-circuit congressional deliberation of this matter by creating a commission  that will draft and present the legislation for a no-amendments-allowed, up or down vote. Obama huddled with 44 blue-dog Democrats this week to line up support for this already.

Jane Hamsher has recovered from her swoon enough to start a ruckus on this topic… And Digby is coming around, too. Remember how she got scared by the venom of the Obama internet police… Digby’s got her courage back, and her post [Tuesday] is worth quoting, as usual… “…They must be thinking that they can either buy cooperation from wingnuts (a losing proposition) or that they need to appease certain moneyed interests, which is just frightening.”… This is no time for niceties. I’m never going to vote for anyone who supports this POS raid on the Social Security trust fund… Rigging the caucuses and the RBC may have worked last year, but it isn’t going to save the people who vote for this travesty.

Stop Baby Boomer Bashing: Protect Social Security and Medicare (by Dean Baker)
Given the massive loss of wealth incurred by the baby boom cohorts that are nearing retirement, it would be reasonable to think that President Obama and Congress are trying to develop plans to ensure that they can still enjoy a secure retirement. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. There are reports President Obama is considering establishing tasks to examine Social Security and Medicare with an eye toward making cuts in both programs… The idea of taking away Social Security benefits from baby boomers was always outrageous. After all, this is a generation that has paid into Social Security at the current 12.4 percent tax rate for almost their entire working life and will be forced to wait until age 66 or even 67 to get full benefits. Their average returns are projected to be lower than the generations that follow and far lower than the generations that preceded them.

Big Unions Unlikely To Fight House Dem Leadership’s Slow-Down Of Employee Free Choice (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
The big labor unions are unlikely to fight a decision by the House Democratic leadership to defer to the Blue Dog Dems in the House and let the Senate vote first on the Employee Free Choice Act, I’m told by several senior labor officials… The House Dem leadership’s perspective is irking some labor officials, because they’d hoped for the House to pass a strong version up front, and because letting the Senate go first could push back the bill’s timing. But instead of fighting the decision, labor officials are saying they’ll almost certainly accept it.
Yep, we’ve got to satisfy those Blue Dogs, no matter how many people suffer.

America on $195 a Week (by Sasha Abramsky, whose new book, Breadline USA, is due out in May from PoliPoint Press, writing at Mother Jones)
In essence, the nation’s biggest employers of unskilled labor often leave workers having to feed from the public trough. In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer’s California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Wal-Mart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.

Supporting Our (Closeted) Troops (American Constitution Society)
Since being enacted in 1994, over 12,500 lesbian, gay and bisexual personnel have been discharged from the U.S. military for their sexual orientation… Under the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, military recruiters and authorities are banned from asking about a soldier’s sexual identify. However, soldiers are required to hide their sexual orientation from public view unless they are heterosexual… While on the campaign trail, then Sen. Obama pledged to end gay discrimination in the military. However, more recent indications have been that Pres. Obama is in no rush to put this policy to rest.

Obama’s War on Terror May Resemble Bush’s in Some Areas (New York Times)
In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone. The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine… These and other signs suggest that the administration’s changes may turn out to be less sweeping than many had hoped or feared — prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies.

Obama’s Top Lawyer Says Obama Doesn’t Want To “Weaken” Presidency (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
President Obama’s top lawyer, White House counsel Gregory Craig…, addressing the question of whether the Obama White House will uphold Karl Rove’s claims of executive privilege as he seeks to avoid revealing information about the scandal surrounding the firing of U.S. Attorneys, said this: “The president is very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened. But he is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency.”… That seems to signal at least the possibility that the Obama team will buy into the Bush team’s framing of the issue, which is to paint any “weakening” of the Presidency — even one that rolls back Bush’s expansions of executive power — as automatically undesirable and something that “undermines” the Presidency.

Obama’s embrace of Bush/Cheney “terrorism policies” (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
If — as virtually all Bush critics agree — the Bush presidency ushered in a massive and dangerous expansion of executive power, isn’t it necessary, by definition, to scale back some of those powers – i.e., to “undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency” — if those abuses are to be reversed?… A genuine reversal of the last eight years — meaning something more than just sand-papering the roughest edges — will come not from having a kinder-hearted and more magnanimous leader, but only from a restoration of the legal and Constitutional framework that makes a President’s magnanimity irrelevant, since his powers are exercised transparently and with real checks and limits.

Obama sending 17,000 troops to Afghanistan (AFP)
President Barack Obama approved the deployment of 17,000 more US troops toAfghanistan, a surge in numbers promptly welcomed by the Kabul government Wednesday as it battles a Taliban insurgency.

U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Says Troop Level of 60,000 Will Be Needed for 3 to 4 Years (Washington Post)
The United States will have to keep about 60,000 troops in Afghanistan for at least the next three to four years to combat an increasingly violent insurgency, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said yesterday, warning that 2009 will be “a tough year.”

US to press allies for more Afghanistan troops (AFP)
The administration of President Barack Obama will expect NATO allies to up troop levels in Afghanistan ahead of elections there in August, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Wednesday.

A ‘fraud’ bigger than Madoff (by Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, U.K.)
In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme. “I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.
Joe Cannon reminds us that General Petraeus supervised the “reconstruction” project.

Investment Manager Stanford Was Big-Time Campaign Contributor (Capital Eye)
Between its PAC and its employees, Stanford Financial Group has given $2.4 million to federal candidates (including both candidate committees and leadership PACs), parties and committees since 1989, with 65 percent of that going to Democrats. Stanford and his wife, Susan, have given $931,100 out of their own pockets, with 78 percent going to Democrats… Stanford Financial Group has spent a total of $4.8 million on lobbying efforts since 1999, primarily on issues related to money laundering, financial services and banking. Last year the firm’s lobbying spiked by more than 300 percent, totaling $2.2 million, by far the most it has ever reported spending.

Stanford paid for Sen. Cornyn’s ‘travel expenses’ to Caribbean. (Think Progress)
Texas financier Allen Stanford was recently accused by the SEC of engaging in “massive, ongoing fraud” at his Houston investment firm. Bloomberg notes that Stanford “cultivated his image by shuttling politicians in corporate jets.” One politician he was particularly close to was Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)… Cornyn has issued a response to the revelations: “No one is above the law and prosecutors should follow the facts, wherever they may lead.” Stanford contributed heavily to former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), the Bush Inaugural Committee, and a host of other prominent leaders of both parties.

Earmark Scandal Breaking (Political Wire)
There’s a potentially big story brewing on Capitol Hill…  Apparently 104 members of Congress of both parties — 42 Republicans and 62 Democrats — secured earmarks for a lobbying firm linked to Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) in a single bill. The earmarks were inserted in a bill Murtha controlled as the defense appropriations subcommittee chairman. The firm’s executives and clients are among Murtha’s biggest sources of campaign contributions. 

Siegelman To White House Counsel: Don’t Compromise With Rove (by Sam Stein at The Huffington Post)
Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, who was arrested on corruption charges alleged to be politically-motivated, offered a critical reaction to news that Obama’s chief counsel, Greg Craig, was considering cutting a deal with Rove in exchange for his testimony.

“This is not a matter involving civil damages. It is a matter of high crimes, abuse of power, the subversion of our country’s constitution and of our individual rights and liberties,” Siegelman wrote the Huffington Post. “There should be no deal cut with Karl Rove that would provide him with any immunity whatsoever. There is too much at stake. U.S. Attorneys were fired because they wouldn’t take on political cases and the DOJ was used as a political weapon to destroy people Karl Rove wanted out of the way. For Rove not to be held accountable means others in the future will feel more free to abuse power.

Deal for Rove? (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
No way. Call Conyers at 202-225-5126.

What Could Holder be Thinking (by Salmo at Corrente)
The US Attorneys, including the replacements Bush/Rove installed to be good Bushies, are being asked to stay on. I’m ok with Fitzgerald for a lot of reasons. However, this includes such notables as Mary Beth Buchanan and Alice Martin. Not only are they not being investigated for possible prosecution (Martin’s role in the the Siegelman case is one of the things Conyers wants to question Rove about, for example) but they are not even being fired. The opportunity to pick up the remains of Carol Lamm’s prosecutions are being passed by; Jerry Lewis gets a pass. Politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of Democrats are ok, it seems.

Buncha Bigots (by Cinie, an African American, at The Confluence)
Eric Holder, America’s first African American Attorney General under America’s first black President, said in a speech to Department of Justice employees celebrating Black History Month, that we are a “nation of cowards“  because we don’t like to talk candidly about race.  This is wrong on so many levels… We, as a nation, have never had a Native American much of anything politically significant, either; the same is true for many other racially diverse groups.  And, as we all know, our history regarding women’s history, contributions, and employment issues, not to mention those of LGBT people living openly, and people living with disabilities, is woefully deficient… When it comes to equality and diversity, let’s all just shut up and do the damned thing.

Pat Buchanan lectures AG Holder on how to talk about race (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Barnicle, Taibbi suggest Holder was “doing bong hits” before race speech (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Scarborough “flummoxed” by Attorney General Holders’ comments about social segregation, responds “maybe we need busing instituted for church service” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Megyn Kelly: ‘Addressing Racial Ills…Strikes Fear Down The Spines Of Many Conservatives’ (Think Progress)
Part of conservatives’ “fear,” according to Kelly, is that Holder would change the DOJ’s focus on voting rights. “The Bush administration was all about voter fraud, some of the Democrats more about voter registration rights,” she said. She’s right: As former head of the DOJ’s Voting Rights section Joseph Rich detailed, under Bush the DOJ “notably shirked” its traditional duty of protecting minority voting rights… Even after Bush’s DOJ made “voter fraud” a “top priority,” between October 2002 and September 2005, just 38 cases of voter fraud were prosecuted nationally — “and of those, 14 ended in dismissals or acquittals, 11 in guilty pleas, and 13 in convictions.” Yet, according to Kelly, diverting resources to a crime that exists only in the right wing’s imagination is entirely “reasonable.”