Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Lee Judge (permission to post this cartoon has been requested)

Payback time for AIG: Treasury, Congress go after the bonuses (McClatchy)
In an effort to quell a mounting furor, the Treasury Department said late Tuesday that it would require American International Group to repay the government more than $165 million in bonuses doled out last week to the executives blamed for driving the firm to insolvency.

No Easy PR Fix For AIG’s Bonus Blowback (by Michael Bush, Advertising Age)
Even PR pros are shaking their heads at the blundering giant insurer, which is fast becoming not only the poster boy for financial-industry greed, but also a company seen as too arrogant or stupid to keep out of its own way.
I’m thinking that what Liddy said below is not going to help his case.

AIG chairman says retention payments distasteful (AP)
The chief of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday to skeptical congressional interrogators that the company’s multibillion bonuses to employees were “distasteful” to many Americans including himself and that “I share that anger.” Lawmakers from both parties expressed fury over the company’s behavior.
I understand there were “Fire Geithner” protest signs in the audience for this hearing.  If anyone finds photos or stills of those signs, please point me to them.

GOP congressman calls for Geithner to resign or be fired (On Politics, USA Today)
Rep. Connie Mack, R-Fla., called today for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to resign or be fired. His spokeswoman, Stephanie DuBois, says that “to the best of my knowledge” Mack is the first member of Congress to do so.

Daily Show: IndigNation! Populist Uprising ‘09 – The Enragening
Protestors attempt to teabag the White House, Jon blames the media, and Glenn Beck cries.

The Tipping Point? (by James Kwak, thanks to Economist’s View)
$165 million, of course, is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total amount of bailout money given to AIG in one form or another. Yet it may turn out to be the $165 million that broke the camel’s back. The AIG bonus saga neatly encapsulates many of the problems that we have identified with the financial system and with the bailout to date… However, this scandal may yet serve a purpose… Perhaps the AIG bonus scandal will force the administration’s hand toward the decisive action that we need.

Wednesday: He thinks this is funny?? (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
Dana Milbank at WaPo wrote a piece yesterday about the outrage building against the protected lifestyles of the rich and finance.  He tells of a moment in the White House when Barack Obama addressed the issue.  I won’t even go over the obvious point that Obama, Geithner, Summers and Congress should never have allowed the bonuses to happen in the first place while union workers were forced to negotiate their compensation in *their* contracts.  Here’s the thing that has me steaming: “As the president read from his teleprompter yesterday about ‘this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat,’ he developed a tickle in his throat and tried to clear it. ‘Excuse me,’ he joked. ‘I’m choked up with anger here.’”

Obama Received a $101332 Bonus from AIG (Right Side Politics Examiner, a conservative website)
Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group in the form of political contributions according to Opensecrets.org. The two biggest Congressional recipients of bonuses from the A.I.G. are - Senators Chris Dodd and Senator Barack Obama. The A.I.G. Financial Products affiliate of A.I.G. gave out $136,928, the most of any AIG affiliate, in the 2008 cycle.  I would note that A.I.G.’s financial products division is the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps and “misjudged” the risk.

Obama Administration: We Didn’t Find Out About AIG Bonuses Until This Month (by Jake Tapper at Political Punch, ABC News)
Sources in the Obama administration Tuesday said that despite previous media reports administration officials did not know until a couple weeks ago that the officials of the controversial AIG Financial Product Division were set to receive $165 million in bonuses on March 13.

A Troubling Fumble (by Steve at The Left Coaster)
[W]hat really gets me mad is how badly the Obama administration has handled this mess. After trying to spin the mess over the weekend as a contractual matter that cannot be broken (a bogus claim that the tone-deaf Larry Summers should never have made), the administration was forced to lamely backtrack and take on a populist tone over the last two days to stay ahead of the pitchforks. It harms the administration’s whole agenda and reputation for competence… I don’t buy the story that Obama just found out about these problems last week. If he really did just find out about them on Thursday, why did he let Summers and Geithner say over the weekend they can’t do much about them because of contract law, when it was his own Treasury Department that made sure of that in the recovery bill?

Much difficult work lies ahead to get the economy righted, including forcing Congress and Main Street to swallow some unpalatable additional bailouts, all of which has been undermined by this duplicity.

Rahm: Obama Believes AIG Mess Is A “Big Distraction” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel offers an intriguing glimpse into President Obama’s thoughts about the AIG furor: “‘As angry as the president is at the news about A.I.G., which he learned Thursday’, Mr. Emanuel said, ‘his main priority is getting the financial system stabilized, and he believes this is a big distraction in that effort.’” Without polling on the question, it seems best to reserve judgment on how damaging the AIG mess is to the White House. Many news orgs and commentators have been asserting as outright fact that public outrage is a huge political problem for Obama without, you know, any empirical evidence of this. Obviously it’s very possible that it’s a major problem. We just don’t know for sure one way or the other yet.

That said, the AIG mess isn’t just some sideshow. And it seems like an odd move for the White House to describe it as a “distraction” at a time when Republicans are moving aggressively to paint the Obama administration as weak and passive on AIG in order to position themselves as the heroic defenders of the taxpayers here.

Occam’s Anger (by Natasha Chart at Open Left, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
Union employees’ contracts don’t matter, banking employees’ contracts supercede the federal government’s 80 percent ownership stake in AIG and the expressed will of the President and the legislature… There are only two explanations for this persistent pattern of screwing working class interests. One is that the most politically connected people in the country know less about what’s going on than we do. The other is that things are unfolding as they want and expect, but they’ll pretend to be outraged if that seems necessary. And we, we are supposed to believe the accident of naivete option. Right. And that bruised up neighbor who lives in the house with all the screaming fights, she falls down the stairs a lot.

Can the AIG Honchos Get Their Bonuses From a Bankrupt Company? (by Dean Baker)
Like the rest of the media, the Post was anxious to tell the public that there is nothing that can be done to prevent bonuses from being paid to AIG executives. Did they really give this a huge amount of thought and talk to the experts before reaching this conclusion? How about breaking off the financial unit from the rest of AIG and then take away the government life support? The highly valued executives can then try to get their bonuses from a hopelessly indebted company that has debts that exceed its assets by tens of billions of dollars. That should provide good entertainment for us all.

Anger Management (by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post)
Has Obama’s failure to block the bonuses “dealt a sharp blow to his young administration,” as the WP says? Or is the NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin right when he says: “If you think this economy is a mess now, imagine what it would look like if the business community started to worry that the government would start abrogating contracts left and right”? One thing’s for sure, as the NYT reports: “There was angry finger-pointing across Washington on Tuesday, as Congress, the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve all sought to avoid blame.” Which is Washington’s main industry.

Finding A Scapegoat (by dday at Hullabaloo)
Good to see that the Treasury Department is so concerned about the AIG bonus babies that they are throwing Chris Dodd to the wolves to deflect criticism… Under a Dodd-written amendment, the Senate version of the stimulus bill included executive compensation limits for all recipients of TARP money, only to have the amendment stripped of retroactivity and applied strictly toward future payouts, after negotiations with none other than Tim Geithner and Larry Summers… This wasn’t a small behind-the-scenes fight, it was a major contention in the stimulus debate, subject of several articles. Obama’s economic team didn’t want limits on executive compensation, and Dodd did. The Administration won, and now in the midst of this furor they’re trying to rewrite history by putting Dodd and themselves in opposite roles.

The President brought this upon himself through his hirings. But if he wants to find a way out, he could stop the practice of his team blaming others and start living up to his own rhetoric.

House GOP’s AIG plan simply recycles what Obama is already doing. (Think Progress)
[Tuesday], Reps. Erik Paulsen (R-MN) and Leonard Lance (R-NJ) introduced legislation that would direct Treasury Secretary Geithner to “recover AIG executive bonuses, increase transparency in bailout funds, and detail for taxpayers the communications between the Administration and AIG.” While Republican Leader John Boehner touted the legislation as the “two-pronged House GOP response to AIG revelations,” it seems to be a rehash of what President Obama is already doing to address the issue…

Greg Sargent writes that the legislation appears to be “an effort to position the Republicans as the ones who are leading a populist rebellion against AIG and are trying to wrest those bonuses back.” In reality, it appears that the House Republicans are just playing catch up.
The Republicans have been winning the PR battles for a very long time.  It remains to be seen whether the Democrats can wrest control of those fights.

Discussing AIG bonuses, MSNBC’s Francis says “I’ve heard a lot of backlash from people saying what about Nancy Pelosi’s plane” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
See how they grab control of the food fight?

Fox & Friends allowed GOP strategist to claim Obama is “bankrupting our economy” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Gaffney in Wash. Times: “[I]t increasingly appears” Obama “will be embracing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood” (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
From Frank Gaffney’s March 17 Washington Times column.

On Cavuto, Newsmax’s Ruddy claims Obama, like FDR, “couldn’t improve the economy, so he started this class warfare thing” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

McConnell misleadingly suggests he favored Wall Street salary caps. (Think Progress)
[Tuesday] afternoon on CNN, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pretended as though he had favored capping the salaries of bankers whose firms accepted TARP funds, claiming that his position has been that bailed-out companies “are going to have to operate in a different sort of way.” When host Wolf Blitzer asked whether Congress should have passed salary caps on bailout recipients, McConnell acts as though he had been in favor of such a proposal: “We certainly had a chance with the amendment by Senator Snowe to prevent this kind of bonuses from being paid…”

McConnell is certainly right: Congress did have a chance to pass salary caps. However, he opposed such a move at the time, telling ABC News, “I really don’t want the government to take over these businesses and start telling them everything about what they can do. … We have to resist the temptation to basically dictate to these businesses how to run every aspect of their operation.” On CNN [Tuesday], McConnell accused AIG of “trying to have it both ways.”
Click through to watch the video.

Wyden: My Bill Could Have Prevented AIG Mess (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Senator Ron Wyden said on Tuesday that the furor surrounding AIG’s bonus payments could have been avoided had the Obama White House and members of Congress simply backed legislation that he and Sen. Olympia Snowe introduced more than a month ago. In an interview with the Huffington Post, the Oregon Democrat noted that during the crafting of the stimulus package, he and his Republican colleague from Maine introduced a provision that would have forced bailout recipients to cap their bonuses at $100,000. Any amount paid above that would have been taxed at 35 percent. The language made it through the Senate, but during conference committee with the House, it was inexplicably removed…

Looking back, Wyden laments the missed opportunity, saying that it remains unclear who got the language stripped — “it didn’t die by osmosis.”… Moreover, Wyden says frankly, the Obama administration should have been better prepared to handle what was an inevitable political train wreck.

The Real AIG Scandal (by Eliot Spitzer, Slate)
It’s not the bonuses. It’s that AIG’s counterparties are getting paid back in full.

Helping his buddies at AIG?
Bank of America CEO says bank might pay back TARP funds early (McClatchy)
Bank of America Corp. could pay back its $45 billion in government capital by late this year or early next year depending on the economy, chief executive Ken Lewis said in an interview Tuesday with the Charlotte Observer.

GM chief: Automaker might not survive bankruptcy (McClatchy)
Facing a March 31 deadline for the government to accept its restructuring plan and provide more taxpayer rescue money, General Motors Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner said Tuesday that a forced bankruptcy could spell the end of the storied carmaker.
Ho, hum.  Another day, another threat of bankruptcy.

Prosecutors charge Madoff’s accountant with fraud (AP)
Bernard Madoff’s longtime accountant was arrested on fraud charges Wednesday, accused of aiding the man who has admitted cheating thousands of investors out of billions of dollars in the past two decades. The charges against David Friehling, 49, come as federal authorities turn their attention to those who they believe helped Madoff fool 4,800 investors into thinking that their longtime investments were growing comfortably each year. Friehling is the first person to be arrested since the Madoff scandal broke three months ago.
More tumbrils!  More knitting needles!  Sharpen the blade!

Commentary: Hard times are payback for skewed priorities (by Mark Greene, an executive search consultant in the renewable energy industry, writing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram)
When I graduated from college in the late ’80s, the word in the marketplace was not to say, “I’m a people person” – the kiss of death. Business, we were led to believe, wasn’t about people. It was about revenue streams and profit margins and return on investment. This was the advent of the MBA tsunami. Business, I’m happy to report, is, in fact, about people – the people you hire, the people you retain, the people you buy from and sell to. It is the workers who perform the labor and who add the value to capital that built our middle class, who fueled our growth and prosperity through their sweat and efforts, and who now are being idled in recent record numbers, who made America what it was until recently. What we’re suffering is a world economy led astray in pursuit of personal wealth, trying sluggishly and belatedly to align itself with the newly revealed reality…

This country is hurting badly for a lack of well-trained workers who create value, coupled with a disgusting surplus of those who talk about it, measure it and try to manipulate it. And we’ve rewarded these latter unconscionably – to the detriment of us all… America has gone through the last decade and more paying virtually nothing for our excesses in upward wealth redistribution, warmongering, financial deregulation, environmental depredation, and disdain for the other 95 percent of the world’s population. Most critically, the education and viability of the working class in this country have been totally ignored. Downsizing and merging and offshoring have made a handful of Americans very wealthy at the expense of the country as a whole. It’s simply time to pay the piper.

Comment at Calculated Risk
America is a debt ridden economy with horrendous disparities of wealth and power, a society which has spent a generation living off the capital of previous investment, with minimal interest or aptitude in actually maintaining existing infrastructure. A country dominated by media dreams of fame or celebrity leading to wealth, with never a bad ending or undeserving reward.  But how can any reasonably intelligent American citizen talk about ‘profitability’ for the financial industry while trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds are being spent to preserve that same industry from bankruptcy – or worse.

Commentary: The news media meet the poor (by Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, writing in the  Miami Herald)
The media have discovered the poor, some of them anyway… [I]t’s the newly poor who are the news… As for the tens of millions of pre-existing poor – the security guard whose factory job was shipped abroad, the people who haven’t been paid well since the last recession, the former mechanic on disability, the people who mop your office, pick your tomatoes, do your dry cleaning – their situation wasn’t newsworthy before and isn’t newsworthy now, not compared with the discarded executive who’s losing his 7,000-square-foot home or the Ph.D. who passes out shopping carts at the Wal-Mart…

[T]he new poor are great copy. Many are educated and well-spoken. Chastened but determined, they’re people with whom middle-class media audiences can identify. Plus, they fit easily into a tragedy narrative, the fall from exalted status provoking pity and terror. Underlying their condition is an infuriating story: They played by the rules, worked hard and consumed hard, kept up their end of the American bargain, and suffered an unreasonable and unjust fate. So they do get covered, but despite what FAIR suggests they still aren’t really the media’s main focus in covering the recession. Instead, the media overwhelmingly do what they do best, report on officialdom – market mavens, business owners, policy-makers, lenders and the like – not on the people whose personal calamities constitute the real history of this economic disaster. So let’s see more coverage of the new poor. Maybe the rest of the country’s disadvantaged will benefit from a trickle-down of a different sort, of compassion.

Protestors in Vermont demand single payer (by DCblogger at Corrente)

Why Oh Why Can’t We Have Real Healthcare? (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
Scenes from Obama’s traveling  healthcare forum: “…a good share of the crowd in this liberal state – as well as about 200 protesters outside – enthusiastically cheered for Canadian-style government-run healthcare, or at least an option to buy into a public insurance plan like Medicare.” Obama has said it is not politically feasible to get rid of private insurers, but in his campaign he proposed letting people choose to buy into a public insurance option – something insurers view as potentially fatal to their business… Corporate Dems like [Massachusetts’ Deval] Patrick and Obama are quite insistent that we do everything possible to preserve the existence (and profit margins) of insurance companies – which is no real solution at all.

Health care overhaul cost may reach $1.5 trillion (AP)
Health policy experts say guaranteeing coverage for all Americans may cost about $1.5 trillion over the next decade. That would be more than double the $634 billion ‘down payment’ President Barack Obama set aside for health reform in his budget.

Sounds like a bargain (by lambert at Corrente)
Sounds like a bargain, to me. $1.5 trillion over 10 years, saving $350 billion a year, nets out positive (if, and only if, the guarantee is single payer). By contrast, we spent two trillion dollars on the banksters in one year, with no visible result at all (except richer and more arrogant banksters).

Malpractice (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
Wouldn’t it be great if all these malpractice “reformers” actually looked at reforming medical practices – instead of trying to limit patients’ ability to recover damages from bad medicine? But of course, Dems will always see the solution in light of insurance company interests: “…The Obama administration and key congressional Democrats are taking a hard look at the nation’s medical malpractice system as part of a broader health care overhaul.”
Here we go with more right-wing crap from the Obama administration.  There are 100,000 deaths a year from medical malpractice.  But there are very few deaths per year from airplane accidents, and that’s because we investigate openly the causes of airplane accidents and create regulations to prevent future ones.  We don’t police the doctors, and they don’t police themselves.  So we should penalize the people injured by these unregulated doctors?

Physician, heal thy system (by Rahul K. Parikh, M.D., writing at Salon)
[A]mid all the talk about reform, what hasn’t received a great deal of attention is that this new era of responsibility begins with us, the doctors themselves… Take a look at the following map, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which shows the variation in Medicare spending per capita, in 2006, across the U.S. In this country, we spend an average of $8,000 per person on healthcare, more than any other place on earth. Now, if we were to overlay a map of the quality of care that patients receive over the map of per capita spending, we would see that those areas with the highest per capita spending perform most poorly. Pouring money into the healthcare system doesn’t necessarily translate into effective treatment…

With Obama’s increased investment in comparative tests, hospitals, doctors and patients could reap huge savings at no expense to quality care. Obama’s plan also includes sticks along with carrots. He will be prodding hospitals to provide better care by reducing payments to them when patients are readmitted with complications from their original hospital stay. Will doctors buy it? Are we ready to change?… At some point, the president and his healthcare team will have to stare doctors down. That’s not going to be easy, as the AMA has a long history of winning political battles in Washington when it’s concerned about its own. But while there is a generation of doctors who resist the inevitability of what’s to come, I can assure you that there’s a new and forward-thinking class of physicians who understand and yearn for the reforms Obama is promising.

Locke’s Confirmation Hearing Begins (Political Wire)
President Obama’s third choice for Commerce secretary — former Washington Gov. Gary Locke (D) — will appear at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee this morning. 

Obama judicial pick will test pledge to end confirmation wars (McClatchy)
President Barack Obama held out his first judicial nominee on Tuesday as evidence that he wants to end the political sniping over judges that marked much of the past eight years. In a statement, Obama praised David F. Hamilton of Indiana, his pick for the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, for “a history of handing down fair and judicious decisions.” Separately, a senior administration official involved in the selection process said Hamilton, who turns 52 this year, embodied the president’s desire for nominees with “intellectual credentials” and bipartisan appeal but also “a sense of how people live” and “the ability or experience to understand the plight of real people,” something Obama had spoken about on the campaign trail.
More right wingers in the courts?

Another Blue Dog Dem Confirms He’ll Vote Against Employee Free Choice (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
We already have Blue Dog Dem Dan Boren confirming on the record that he’ll vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. And now we have a second. Mississippi Dem Rep. Travis Childers’ office just confirmed to me that he will vote against the measure, which is designed to make it easier for unions to organize and is far and away labor’s top priority… The rub here is that Childers, unlike Boren, didn’t vote against the measure in the last Congress, because he wasn’t in Congress at the time. Childers, in theory, was gettable for the pro-Employee Free Choice forces. So the optics of this one aren’t great for the pro-EFCA camp.
Remember when I kept asking last year why it was supposed to be a good thing that Obama could attract conservatives to vote for the Democratic Party?

Pwogs nix winning stwategy (by Michael J. Smith at Stop Me Before I Vote Again
“A group of liberal bloggers say they are teaming up with organized labor and MoveOn.org to form a political action committee that will seek to push the Democratic Party further to the left…. [T]hey are planning to recruit candidates to challenge the more centrist Democrats now in Congress, known as ‘blue dogs.’ …The new organization is in many ways the liberal equivalent of the Club for Growth, a conservative group that has financed primary challenges against Republicans it deems insufficiently dedicated to tax cuts and small government. Organizers of the new group, called Accountability Now, bristle at the comparison, saying they will not provide an issues-based litmus test for candidates. They say they will mainly support primary challenges when there is clear evidence that a lawmaker is out of step with his constituents…”

The interesting angle to this story is precisely the indignant rejection, by this Ladies’ Home Improvement Society, of the proven winning strategy exemplified by the Club For Growth — and by extension, the whole armies-of-the-night post-Goldwater movement that certainly did succeed (whatever you may think of the result) in becoming a force to be reckoned with in the Republican Party… The Little Old Ladies In Tennis Shoes (LOLITS) didn’t mind destroying the Republican Party if they couldn’t take it over… [They were] True Believers. By contrast, Moulitsas et al. seem so tepid and mild that one wonders why they bother at all.

Obama Urges Door-To-Door Canvassing For His Budget (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
President Barack Obama released a new video Wednesday morning through his campaign-offshoot organization, Organize for America, asking viewers to rally in support of his proposed budget. The video, sent to the 13-million-strong email list by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, has the president declaring: “We must rebuild our economy on a foundation that lasts. And that is exactly what the budget I submitted to Congress is designed to do.”
Click through to watch the video.

Five Obama Myths (Political Wire)
In an interesting op-ed, former RNC spokesman Alex Conant concludes that “much of the conventional wisdom about Obama is wrong.” He lists the five biggest misconceptions:
1. Obama is bold. “Actually, he is overly cautious.”
2. Obama is a great communicator. “Cut away the soaring rhetoric in his speeches, and the resulting policy statements are often vague, lawyerly and confusing.”
3. Obamaland is a team of rivals.["Obama does try to bring political foes into the fold when it’s convenient, but his team is primarily made up of political friends."]
4. Obama is smooth. “Despite being deliberate, Obama is surprisingly gaffe-prone.”
5. Obama has a good relationship with the media. “Working with the hundreds of reporters who covered the Obama campaign last year, I was struck by how many of them would quietly complain about Obama’s borderline disdain for the press.”
As an Obama watcher since 2004, I agree with this assessment.

Obama Makes his March Madness Picks (by Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller at Political Punch, ABC News)
President Obama has chosen Louisville, North Carolina, Memphis and Pittsburgh in his Final Four bracket.
And in the women’s tournament, Mr. Obama, which are your picks?

Darlin’ Arlen (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
Always playing the angles! “Sen. Arlen Specter said Tuesday that he will not run for reelection in 2010 as a Democrat, but might run as an Independent. The Pennsylvania Republican has been under tremendous pressure from the GOP base since being one of just three Republicans to vote for the Democratic-led stimulus package last month. He said in an interview with The Hill that the role of the Republican Party in Washington is too vital for him to switch to the Democratic side.”

New GOP Talking Points: Obama Administration Is “Most Politically Obsessed White House In History” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
A Republican sends over a new set of GOP talking points for House conservatives — privately circulated this week to scores of GOP press secretaries on the Hill — that blasts the Obama administration as “radical” and “reckless” and the “most politically obsessed White House in history.” The talking points also make the claim that “the only approach that has not been tried is the conservative approach.” The talking points represent the first major move this cycle by House conservatives to create united conservative messaging front, according to Roll Call.
Up is down.  Black is white.  The sun rises in the west.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Political Wire)
“That would be the Chicago approach to governing: Strong-arm it through. You’re talking about the exact opposite of bipartisan. You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement and throwing them in the Chicago River.” — Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), quoted by the Washington Post, on the Obama administration’s plan to use the budget reconciliation process to pass health care and energy initiatives.
Yeah, boy, you didn’t see any steamrolling when REPUBLICANS were in charge, no sirree!

With filibusters, Senate GOP thinks ‘it’s more important that Democrats, not Republicans, be consistent.’ (Think Progress)
Earlier this month, all 41 Senate Republicans sent a letter to the White House, threatening to filibuster if President Obama didn’t consult with them on judicial nominees. As ThinkProgress noted, the filibuster threat was a stunning reversal from the GOP’s claims during the Bush administration that filibustering judicial nominees was unfair and unconstitutional. The Washington Times reports [Tuesday] that the Senate GOP believes it’s “more important that Democrats, not Republicans, be consistent” on the issue.

Inexcusable (by paradox at The Left Coaster)
I’m a day late on the Meghan McCain/Laura Ingraham imbroglio… Ingraham, unsurprisingly, stooped to a new low in regressing to pre-teen years by calling McCain fat. Meghan McCain, admirably, told her to kiss her generously cushy cosseted ass. John McCain, in a nauseating evolution of betrayal, couldn’t even defend his own daughter against this terrible personal public onslaught, but to me the story doesn’t end there… Where the hell are Meghan’s Republican sisters in all this, not just her father? Nowhere, not that I can see. A vicious radio talk show host attacked the daughter of last year’s GOP nominee and not one Republican elected female comes to her defense?
My comment: Yes, and too bad so many of Hillary’s Democratic sisters abandoned her last year when she was being viciously attacked.

Hagel rips Cheney’s claim that Obama is making the U.S. less safe: ‘That’s ridiculous!’ (Think Progress)
Last night on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow asked former Sen. Chuck Hagel about former Vice President Cheney’s recent claims that President Obama is making the American people “less safe” by raising the “risk to the American people of another [terrorist] attack.” Hagel called Cheney’s comments “ridiculous” and “folly,” concluding “I’m sorry the Vice President said that“.
Click through to watch the video.

Quote Of The Day: Bush Describes Himself As “Authoritarian” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened.” – Former President George W. Bush, at a fundraiser in Canada 

Danner: Revealing The Truth About Torture Is ‘Debilitated…By The Practices Of The American Press’ (Think Progress)
On Sunday, journalist Mark Danner revealed a previously secret International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, which concluded that “the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives ‘constituted torture,’ a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law.”… Appearing on CSPAN’s Washington Journal [Tuesday] morning, Danner took the press to task for engaging in a “semantic debate” over whether the U.S. committed torture under the Bush administration. “One can continue to talk about torture is in the eye of the beholder, etc etc, but frankly, nobody of any legal reputation believes that,” said Danner. Later in the interview, he added that he was “frustrated by the practices of the press” that are “interfering with a clear debate”.
Click through to watch the video.

Not my fault (by Jeff Jarvis)
“Criticism of CNBC is way out of line,” NBC head Jeff Zucker said at the BusinessWeek media summit at McGraw-Hill’s headquarters just now. “Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn’t make it so.” He argued that “you’re already seeing a backlash” against the backlash against news media “in terms of people saying, ‘let’s stop beating the press.’” The press didn’t cause us to go to war in Iraq, he said; a general did. The press missing the financial crisis didn’t cause it. “Both are absurd,” he said. Really? I think that says that the press has no importance and no role in public policy.

CNBC hires former Bush flack Tony Fratto. (Think Progress)
[Tuesday], CNBC discussed a congressional proposal to create a systemic risk regulator for the financial industry. To analyze the feasibility and necessity of such a regulator, CNBC introduced one of its newest “contributors,” Tony Fratto, who most recently served as former President Bush’s Deputy Press Secretary. But rather than comment on the merits of the systemic risk regulatory plan, Fratto simply claimed that Congress is “dangerously” motivated to over regulate by a thirst for “vengeance” stemming from the current financial crisis…

As Pat Garofalo explains at the Wonk Room, Fratto is far from a reliable voice on the economy. Last year, Fratto first claimed that no one was predicting a recession and then argued that admitting the U.S. is in a recession was “relatively irrelevant.” Garofalo asks CNBC, “Was Phil Gramm unavailable?”
Click through to watch the video.

CNBC’s Woes May Open the Door to Its Competitors (by Jon Friedman at Marketwatch)
I suspect Jon Stewart’s criticism will wind up having far-reaching effects on the dynamics of business-news television.CNBC has lost some of its prestige and now has some serious work to do to repair its image.

Glenn Beck on Why He’s No Rush Limbaugh (The Daily Beast)
Recovering alcoholic, staunch libertarian and — according to detractors — occasional wacko, Glenn Beck has become a star at Fox News. Here Beck talks about RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s right to be pro-choice, AIG’s right to pay huge bonuses, and his suicidal impulse while hospitalized last year.
They like ‘em crazy at Fox.

David Frum: “What the hell is going on at Fox News?” (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
David Frum is not amused by Glenn Beck: “There’s always been a market for this junk of course. Once that market was reached via mimeographed newsletters. Now it’s being tapped by Fox News…” Frum seems to be under the impression that Glenn Beck’s blend of stupid and crazy is some sort of departure from Fox’s previously high standards.  If only that were so.

O’Reilly and Miller belittle leaked ICRC report which reportedly concluded torture was conducted at CIA “black site” prisons (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

The Husband Of Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren’s Is A ‘Protector Of The Palin Brand’ (Think Progress)
Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza revealed one of the reasons that Van Susteren may have so much interest in and access to Palin. It turns out that her husband, John Coale, is one of “the figures charged with guiding Palin’s political image in Washington”:
That’s not really news, Think Progress, readers of MakeThemAccountable have known of this association since last June or July.

Ranting about his “fervent anti-ethnic holiday position,” Dobbs asks if there is “an Asian ethnic holiday … you know, St. Jin-Tao-Wow?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Well, there’s a Chinese New Year celebration here in Chicago, Lou, which you might enjoy.

Dobbs apologizes for claiming U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is “interested in… Mexico’s export of drugs and illegal aliens to the United States (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Media Matters for America headlines

• Ignoring Bush Treasury role, Politico reported that Republicans “feel they have a free shot at the Democrats” over AIG

• Limbaugh defends AIG from “lynch mob”

• Media ignore Bush Treasury Department role in last year’s AIG bailouts, notwithstanding bonus packages

• Beck falsely asserted that U.S. does not fingerprint foreign visitors or collect rapists’ DNA

• Stephanopoulos ignored McCain’s reversal on AIG bailout during Twitter interview

• Fox, Drudge falsely assert Dodd put “bonus protections” into stimulus bill

• NY Times disappears Bush Treasury Department from article on AIG bonuses

• The Hill repeats baseless claim that small businesses will have to provide health insurance under Obama

• CNN’s Gergen forwarded small business falsehood

• Boehlert: Rampage Nation: The press no longer cares about epic gun violence

• Hannity falsely claimed that under Pelosi, Republicans “can’t offer amendments”

Another 158 TV stations to kill analog early
Regulators have cleared 158 TV stations around the country to shut down their analog broadcast signals before June 12, when the remaining full-power stations will end theirs. Most of the stations going early are in smaller markets and don’t broadcast any of the four major commercial networks. Exceptions include the NBC and ABC affiliates in Denver, which are shutting analog on April 16.

Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11000 a day
The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks. Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites. The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA – an anti-abortion website.

Man accused of hacking for nude teen pics
U.S. authorities have arrested an Irish-born military contractor suspected of hacking into the computers of teenage girls around the world and threatening to post their personal information online unless they sent him revealing photos.

Group aims to create new revenue models for newspapers
The people behind RevenueTwoPointZero don’t believe news orgs should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy. “Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way – by earning it from advertising.” They’re meeting this Saturday to come up with new revenue models.

Source CEO: Pay Your Editors, Charge for Your Content
“Content is not free,” said Source Media CEO Jim Malkin, talking not only about the growing debate over paid content online, but about the people that produce that content, too — specifically, editors. “They like to eat, they like to be fed,” Malkin said. “We have to pay them.”

“Paid content in some fashion is just inevitable”
“The idea that the price of advertising would slowly creep up enough on the web that it would be a profitable business is obviously turning out to be not anywhere near the case,” says departing Time Inc. managing editor Jim Kelly. “Micro payments would not work for me. As some people have pointed out, it works for iTunes because it’s something you can listen to it over and over again, and, as good Tom Friedman is, I wouldn’t want to read the same column over and over again.”

Ibarguen: “What needs to happen is a great deal of experimentation”
“Some of it is happening in the industry,” says Knight Foundation CEO and former Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibarguen. “I wish a lot more of it had happened when newspaper companies were making considerable profits only a few years ago, but it didn’t.” PLUS: More from last night’s “NewsHour” panelists Lauren Rich Fine and Dave Hunke.

Jim Kelly on Time Inc.’s Future — And His Own
“Micro payments would not work for me,” the outgoing Time Inc. editorial chief said. “As some people have pointed out, it works for iTunes because it’s something you can listen to it over and over again, and, as good Tom Friedman is, I wouldn’t want to read the same column over and over again.”

Newspaper Sites See Big Gains in Uniques
More than half of the top 30 newspaper Web sites gained double-digit percentages of visitors in February, according to new data from Nielsen Online. The number of unique visitors grew 36% year-over-year to 8.4 million at the Los Angeles Times.

“We’re doing better than any other newspaper I know,” says El Diario editor
One reason for that, according to executive editor Alberto Vourvoulias: “Many of our readers don’t have desk jobs, which means they don’t spend all day in front of a monitor checking up on websites to see what the latest news is. And, therefore, they take the paper into the office, share it with the people they work with, take it home at night and share it with their families.”

Crain Communications Lays Off 150; Cuts Salaries 10 Percent Companywide (Paid Content)
Business trade publisher Crain Communications has laid off 150 staffers and sliced salaries across the board by 10 percent, sources tell paidContent. No word on which magazines or whether the business side or the editorial side is bearing the brunt of the cuts.

Money manager who forced Knight Ridder sale retires
Bruce Sherman, 61, told his clients …earlier this month: “I am proud of the track record of the firm since our inception. However, I am also disappointed that recent results have not been what you have come to expect during what can best be described as an extraordinarily difficult environment.”

Study: A newspaper’s closing has a measurable impact on political engagement
Assessing the consequences of the closing of the Cincinnati Post, Princeton researchers found that fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the incumbents had a better chance of being returned to office.

Closure of Tucson Citizen Delayed
The Tucson Citizen will be published on a day-to-day basis while negotiations are completed with two interested buyers. The negotiations will not be completed by March 21, the date Gannett had set to close the Citizen if it hadn’t sold, but the paper will remain in operation in the interim.

In Seattle, the World Still Turns, a Beacon in Memory of a Lost Newspaper
For some, the P-I Globe is the finest landmark in Seattle, surpassing even the Space Needle. When aglow at night, it seems to float upon the cityscape, the continents highlighted in green against the dark blue, the motto — “It’s in the P-I” — rotating in red letters five and eight feet high.

Will Seattle Post-Intelligencer Be Profitable Online?
Print Edition Faced $14 Million Loss, but Web Version Could Cost Just a Third of That

Finally, besieged newspapers get a defender in Congress
Just hours after the final edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer rolled off the presses Tuesday, Sen. Patty Murray said that without newspapers serving as watchdogs no one would track local school boards, uncover scandals like Watergate or the Walter Reed Medical Center or give a voice to the vulnerable and mistreated.

Novels join online library of documents at Scribd
Scribd Inc. is opening a new chapter by adding hundreds of books to its rapidly growing Web site for sharing documents.

Kindle Followup (by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones)
[A] suggestion: publishers should start sending review copies of books via Kindle.  Cheaper for them, more convenient for us.

Amazon Faces Suit Over Kindle
Cable programmer Discovery Communications Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming Discovery owns a patent to technology used in Amazon’s Kindle . The suit cites a patent to an encryption system for e-books and asks for triple damages as well as a “continuing royalty.”

Made-to-order magazine lets readers choose
Time Inc. is experimenting with a customized magazine that combines reader-selected sections from eight publications as it tries to mimic in printed form the personalized news feeds that have become popular on the Internet. Called “mine,” the five-issue, 10-week experiment also aligns readers with the branding message that its sole advertising partner, Toyota Motor Corp., has for its new Lexus 2010 RX sport utility vehicle: It’s as customizable as the magazine carrying its ads. The magazine is free, but the print edition is limited to the first 31,000 respondents, while an online version is available for another 200,000.

AdAge Cuts Frequency to Avoid Layoffs
The weekly trade magazine Advertising Age – like all the rest of us! — is having a little trouble with, well, advertising. But the magazine is doing something not everyone is doing: cutting down the number of issues it prints per year from a 2006 high of 50 down to 43 or 44.

Some magazines launched during the boom deserved to go under
It’s not the good titles that are dying. “Magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are,” writes Gabriel Sherman. “New magazine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put simply, there are too many mediocre magazines.”

CBS Gets Applause From Wall Street
Like most media stocks, CBS shares have slumped badly amid the recession. That’s true even though the company’s core TV network is going full blazes and scored the season’s No. 1 new show with the crime drama The Mentalist. Now, Wall Street may finally be changing its tune.

NBC Finds How Difficult Being Fourth Really Is
A big challenge of being a fourth-place network is getting the attention of viewers even when you have something new or intriguing, as NBC learned last week. Two shows that premiered on the network barely moved the Nielsen Media Research needle.

No Smooth Ride on TV Networks’ Road to Diversity
Did television actually made any progress last fall in better reflecting the audience it serves — and will viewers see a return to old, monochromatic ways in the coming season? Among the pilots under development for next season, few have cast blacks or Hispanics as lead characters.

More women are being promoted to news anchor
As TV stations lose well-paid male veterans, they turn to younger female anchors to cut costs and draw viewers, reports Johnny Diaz. The head of Hofstra’s j-department tells him: “Young women can look more mature than men of the same age. The fact is that the average woman coming out of school, if you dress her up and put makeup on, she looks like an adult. The average guy coming out of school looks like he’s coming out of puberty.”

Site mixes music, social networking and games
Music fans who want to mix games and social networking while listening to songs on the Internet now have a site called Loudcrowd, created in part by developers behind “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero.”

Prince launches online subscription service
After a year of diligently working to scrub the Internet of all unauthorized related music, photos, video and any other content not offered directly by him, Prince has launched a fan subscription service called Lotusflow3r.com

Elvis memorabilia offered in online auction
Elvis Presley memorabilia including a performance jumpsuit and a grand piano he played at Graceland went on auction on Monday in a demonstration of his commercial appeal 31 years since the King left the building.

Marvel Comics Will Put Characters in Online Games
There are some businesses and organizations that seem to be not only surviving the economic downturn, but even thriving: Liquor stores, movie theaters, libraries, and now online video games.

Game Downloads: Beyond The Hype (Paid Content)
Digital distribution has turned the music and print-media industries on their heads, and by most accounts, the video-game industry is next. Big-name publishers like Activision and EA are increasingly tacking on extra chapters and new levels to games, and expect to make big money off this downloadable content. But for all the hype, there are still some major obstacles blocking digital distribution of video-game content on a massive scale: speed, the limited storage capacity of consoles, and the return on investment publishers get for developing the content.

AOL Leaps Into Original News Content With PoliticsDaily.com
New Media is about to meet Old Media. But not in the way you’d think. AOL is about to launch a politics site, hiring well-respected political journalists to do reporting and analysis, and thus moving the Time Warner division more aggressively toward becoming a producer of traditional news.

AOL hires three writers for its new politics site
Joining the AOL venture, which launches next month, are Carl Cannon, Walter Shapiro, and Patricia Murphy. “AOL is investing in a big way in news and in old school journalism,” says site editor Melinda Henneberger. The goal is “quality news sites that have zero aggregation, original content, that pay writers a living wage, and that pay bloggers.”

MTV Networks Looks to Expand Programming Reach Online
MTV Networks is in conversations with a number of online distribution partners to expand the reach of its programming online. A natural next step would be to strike a distribution deal with a social network such as MySpace.com, which is one of many online portals with which MTV is having conversations.

MySpaceID: Massively Improved and Integrated on Yahoo’s Home Page (Mashable)
MySpaceID will now pull in a member’s full profile to support streaming of user activities from MySpace to any site on the Web, it now integrates with OAuth and OpenID, and developers can get access to new MySpaceID SDKs. Also big news is that MySpace has partnered with Yahoo to support MySpaceID login on Yahoo’s home page.

RateADrug: Get the Real Scoop on Prescription Drugs and their Side Effects (Mashable)
The site allows users to share their own experiences with different prescription drugs, ranging from Ambien, to Zoloft, to yes, Viagara. And, the feedback is extremely detailed, providing average scores (on a 0-100% scale) users have submitted for each possible side effect, like weight loss/gain, drowsiness, or dry mouth. Each drug also has a comment area, where you can get details on user’s ratings and highly specific side effects.

Report: Local Businesses Spend Billions Online—Mostly On Non-Advertiser Marketing (Paid Content)
Small U.S. businesses spent about $6.7 billion last year for online marketing efforts, with only a fraction going to online advertising, according to a report by local media researcher Borrell Associates. The report, Main Street Goes Interactive…, advances the case that Borrell has made before: local advertising, the kind that has traditionally spent small individual amounts on newspaper classifieds and Yellow Pages is up for grabs. Unfortunately, content publishers have a tough time prying their marketing dollars for more general advertising purposes.

Text Ads On Twitter Raise Some New Questions (Paid Content)
[T]he micro-blogging service has kicked off another round of speculation about its potential revenues by rolling out text ads on profiles. The ads are in-house for now, pointing users to the Twitter search page, or the new Twitter widget, but it’s not a stretch to imagine third-party text ads in their place. The house ads do raise a number of questions: Would they run on a cost-per-click (CPC) or impression basis? We’ve seen that Twitter isn’t a great direct-response tool for retailers yet, and companies tend to use CPC ads to drive sales or other conversions. But if the ads ran on impressions, would it make the most sense for them to only show up on popular profiles? Would there be a minimum follower count to be eligible, and, of course, would heavily trafficked accounts get a cut of the revenue?

Lastly, there’s the question of targeting, as in, how would Twitter determine an ad’s relevance? By mining the user’s tweet stream for a theme? By gauging the interests of his or her followers? We’ve got a call in to the company for some answers, and will keep you posted when we hear back.

AOL Completes Separation From Google’s DoubleClick (Paid Content)
As new Platform-A President Greg Coleman indicated last month when he shuffled the decks at the AOL ad unit, the company has finalized its shift away from Google-owned DoubleClick’s ad system to AdTech, the German ad serving company AOL acquired in May 2007.

New iPhone software has copy-paste, no Flash
Apple on Tuesday unveiled next-generation iPhone software with copy-paste and multimedia messaging features but no sign of much-coveted Flash for digital video.

Apple Introduces More Ways for iPhone Developers to Make Money (Mashable)
According to the AP, “software developers now will be able to create applications that have items for sale within them, such as electronic books or additional levels of a video game.” The latter idea is perhaps most interesting, as it introduces the concept of a subscription to the hundreds of popular games offered on iTunes. This allows developers to continue to offer their applications at low initial prices like 99 cents or $1.99, but earn additional revenue on the backend.

Did Google Chrome Just Get Even Faster? (Mashable)
One of the few Google products that isn’t a perpetual beta, Google Chrome, has just gotten a beta branch, which lets users get a taste of things to come. So, what does a Google Chrome beta bring? Speed, and lots of it. According to Google, it’s 25 percent faster than the stable build of Chrome, which is nothing short of amazing given that Chrome is already blazing fast. Other new features are form autofill, full page zooming and autoscroll, as well as a way to get a side-by-side view by dragging out tabs to the side of the browser window.
I would really like to see a multiple-instance clipboard attached to a browser, and it should be compatible with MS Office.