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Make Them Accountable / 2009 / May

Media & Politics

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

New York Post Goes Schizo on Sotomayor (by Hamilton Nolan at Gawker)
The 
New York Post cannot contain its excitement about our new Hispanic Supreme Court nominee! The millions of Hispanic people in NYC are encouraged to pick up a copy right away, and celebrate!… Then there’s the part where the Post takes care of its natural inclination, which is to hate Sonia Sotomayor and all she stands for. Rich Lowry has Xeroxed the Republican talking points and pasted them directly in every issue of the Post, with Elmer’s; then there’s the paper’s own editorial. They’re not as sure as their own cover that this whole “Latina lady” thing is going to work out.

I am a killjoy (by Avedon Carol at The Sideshow)
I suppose I’m expected to ready myself for a fight to defend Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court nominee against an onslaught of GOP hissy-fit in which she is falsely cast as some kind of a screaming (literally) liberal rather than a mostly-conservative (though not completely insane) jurist… [F]riends, the GOP hissy-fit is just convenient cover for the sell-out Dem leadership sliding yet another corporate conservative in with the Supremes without most people waking up to the fact that that’s what they’re doing… The Dems don’t fight back against the fake right-wing outrage because it serves their purposes…

Oh, we’ve destroyed the conservative movement. The country is with us. No one likes the Republicans anymore. And yet even my favorite outraged lefty blogospheric voices are right where [Obama] wants them – defending a conservative president’s choices as he destroys liberal America once and for all.

Obama’s Anti-Roberts (by E.J. Dionne Jr.)
Republicans would be foolish to fight the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court because she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made.
All those years observing politics up close and personal, and you still don’t get it, do you, E.J.? It’s not about how conservative she is. Republicans will fight her BECAUSE SHE’S A DEMOCRAT. Wake up, please, E.J., we could use your voice in the battle to save this country from the right-wing fanatics.

‘Not a dyed in the wool liberal’ (Politico)
Some liberal legal groups are raising questions about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, citing her relatively moderate judicial record and her skimpy paper trail on crucial issues like abortion, gay marriage and the death penalty. “She is a mixed bag. I would not call her a left liberal,” Marjorie Cohn, president of the progressive National Lawyers Guild, said in an interview on Air
America.

Your Breakfast Read (by mablue2 at The Confluence)
I don’t know what type of SC Justice Judge Sotomayor would be. However, I find it aggravating that Republican Presidents are allow to choose absolute Right Wing freaks like Rehnquist, Fat Tony Scalia, Sam Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, they can confer with the likes of Chuck Dobson, but a Dem President with a super majority cannot choose a “dyed in the wool liberal”? Liberal activist are told to “get on board or get out of the way.”?
Not the exact equivalent of George Bush’s “Who cares what you think?”, but close.

On Sotomayor, Some Abortion Rights Backers Are Uneasy (by Charlie Savage, New York Times)
In nearly 11 years as a federal appeals court judge, President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, has never directly ruled on whether the Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion. But when she has written opinions that touched tangentially on abortion disputes, she has reached outcomes in some cases that were favorable to abortion opponents. Now, some abortion rights advocates are quietly expressing unease that Judge Sotomayor may not be a reliable vote to uphold Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion rights decision.

PhillyDeals: Sotomayor’s record is pro-insurer, not insured (by Joseph N. DiStefano, Philadelphia Inquirer, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla
As a federal judge, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s decisions in insurance disputes “have overwhelmingly been in favor of insurers” and against policyholders, says Philadelphia insurance lawyer Randy Maniloff, partner atWhite & Williams L.L.P. “Judge Sotomayor has been very, very insurer-friendly during her time on the bench,” Maniloff told me after reviewing a long list of her cases and appeal rulings. “Has she ever ruled in favor of a policyholder?” Maniloff asked. On Sotomayor’s docket, between insurers and their customers, “it’s insurers by a landslide,” he said.

Yet,
Discrimination Case Could Pose Problems for Sotomayor
(AP)
In 2008, Sotomayor was one of three judges on a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit who upheld a trial court’s ruling rejecting the reverse discrimination claims by 19 white firefighters, one of whom was also Hispanic. The plaintiffs claimed that the city of 
New Haven violated their rights by throwing out the results of an officers’ promotion exam in which minority candidates received disproportionately low scores.

Sotomayor and Condescending Identity Politics (by Froma Harrop)
In recounting Sotomayor’s “extraordinary journey,” … President Obama treats her as a daughter, not a colleague. His mention of her girlhood passion for Nancy Drew mysteries draws sweet laughter from the audience. And he repeatedly refers to Celina Sotomayor as “Sonia’s mom.” Could you imagine a formal nomination speech that talked of John Roberts’ mother as “John’s mom”? And would anyone note that the chief justice enjoyed “Winnie the Pooh” as a boy, which he probably did? When President Bush named his two male Supreme Court nominees, he invariably called them “Judge Roberts” and “Judge Alito.” Sotomayor is every bit as much a judge, but Obama calls her “Sonia.”
At least he didn’t call her “Sweetie.” But he did kiss her on the cheek. I don’t think he or any other president has ever done that with a male appointee for any office.

Republicans Will Not Fight Over Sotomayor (Political Wire)
Top Senate Republican strategists tell Politico that, “barring unknown facts about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the GOP plans no scorched-earth opposition to her confirmation as a Supreme Court justice.” Not a single senator has come out publicly in opposition to Sotomayor’s confirmation. Said one GOP aide: “The sentiment is overwhelming that the Senate should do due diligence but should not make a mountain out of a molehill. If there’s no ‘there’ there, we shouldn’t try to create one.”
But there will be a lot of sound and fury, nevertheless.

A 2012 Litmus Test? (Political Wire)
First Read: “Remember that John Roberts and Samuel Alito became Democratic presidential primary litmus tests — explaining why anyone with White House ambitions (Obama, Hillary Clinton) voted against them. The Sotomayor vote for Republicans thinking about 2012 might play out similarly. If you are wondering who is pondering a presidential run in 2012 among GOP senators, our guess is that the ‘no’ vote roll call will be a good starting place.”

Gingrich Comes Out Hard Against Sotomayor (Political Wire)
Newt Gingrich … twittered: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw.
Latina woman racist should also withdraw.” This was preceded by: “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman’ new racism is no better than old racism”.
Does that mean Newt is preparing for a run in 2012?

RNC’s New Media Director Re-Tweets Claim That Sotomayor Is A Racist (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Todd Herman, the director of new media for the Republican National Committee, … Re-Tweeted Newt Gingrich’s earlier Tweet claiming that Obama’s SCOTUS pick had indulged in “racism,” which is catching some flak from some media figures today… Retweeting, of course, is generally taken as a sign of agreement.

GOP bloggers remain mum about Gingrich’s “racist” attack (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
[N]early a full day after disgraced Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich labeled Sonia Sotomayor a “racist,” and after it became a very big deal, the silence throughout the right-wing media blogosphere about Gingrich’s slur has been deafening. His “racist” attack on Sotomayor has become The Story That Cannot Be Mentioned.

Limbaugh says his opposition to Sotomayor not because of race or gender, but calls her “an angry woman,” “bigot,” “racist” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Savage on “Chairman O’s pick for the Supreme Court”: “She’s a radical activist” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Buchanan claims that “it appears” that Sotomayor “believe[s] in reverse discrimination against white males” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Her decision, as we saw above, was e

Conservatives Plotting Attack on Sotomayor’s Diet to Derail Nomination (by The Cajun Boy at Gawker)
Talking Points Memo front page editor Justin Elliott noticed an odd passage contained in an article in The Hill… “Sotomayor also claimed: ‘For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir – rice, beans and pork – that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.’ This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo – pigs’ feet with chickpeas – would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.”…

This definitely beats the time Strom Thurmond tried to derail the nomination of Thurgood Marshall by saying that the robes worn by justices would fit him too tight around the crotch, thereby impairing his judgment. And no, this didn’t actually come from The Onion.

More GOP proof that she’s not fit for the bench! (by Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors)
In the shrill attempt to throw everything they can at the wall to see what sticks to damn and confuse the masses about our Socialist MAgic Negro Overlord and Re-Education Camp Counselor’s pick for the Supreme Court, this has got to be amongst the silliest: Sotomayor is unfit for the bench because she does not save enough money.

Bay Buchanan on Sotomayor: “This is an affirmative action nominee. She is not the best and the brightest.” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Rove: Attending top schools doesn’t mean that Sotomayor is smart, but it proves that Bush is. (Think Progress)
During a debate at
Radio City Music Hall [Tuesday] night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove claimed that Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor was “not necessarily” “very smart.” When host Charlie Rose noted in response that she attended Princeton and Yale Law School, Rove replied that you don’t have to be smart to attend a top school… Rove’s dismissal of Ivy League attendance is ironic considering that in an interview previewing the debate, he cited George W. Bush’s experience at Harvard and Yale to mock claims that Bush is stupid.

Rove: Sonia Sotomayor isn’t necessarily smart, but George W. Bush is (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
So, let’s get this straight: George W. Bush got into Yale because his rich daddy and his Senator granddaddy both went there. While at Yale, Bush compiled an unspectacular academic record. Karl Rove says that’s evidence Bush is smart. Sonia Sotomayor went from the projects of the South Bronx to Princeton University, where she won the school’s highest academic prize. Karl Rove says that doesn’t mean she’s smart.

Sonia Sotomayor: Dumb (by Pareene at Gawker)
What do we know about Sonia “Maria” Sotomayor, our next Supreme Court activist? She is dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. She is so dumb! It all started when Jeffrey Rosen, who is smart (he writes for The New Republic!), reported that although he knew nothing about her and hadn’t read any of her opinions, he was pretty sure that Sonia Sotomayor was pretty dumb, because some anonymous guys he talked to said so. They also said she was a total bitch! She was always talking so much and she was mean to lawyers! And that is fine, if you are smart, like cuddly teddybear Antonin Scalia, but not if you’re dumb, like poor Latina Sonia Sotomayor.

George Will doesn’t know labor relations or baseball history (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
George Will takes issue with the notion that Sonia Sotomayor “saved baseball”: “…‘Far from it. What she did was overturn in a sense, the essence, the underlies, the essential theory of American labor relations, which is the parties should slug it out because they know best and whoever wins, wins.” Really?  The essential theory of American labor relations involves management having a monopoly by virtue of being exempted from antitrust law?  That’s George Will’s idea of a fair negotiating situation in which “whoever wins, wins”? By the way, Will serves as a director of both the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres, meaning that his views on baseball labor relations are not exactly impartial.

Uh Huh (by Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
Shorter George Will: Any affirmative action that doesn’t favor white Republican men is bad affirmative action!

National Review Will Decide How Sotomayor Should Pronounce Her Own Name by John Cook at Gawker)
The National Review’s Mark Krikorian—who is, as you can tell by the unusual arrangement of consonants in his surname, himself a foreigner or maybe a Jew—writes that “putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English…and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to… the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.”…

Sotomayor was indeed a “newcomer” to this country when she was born, in the Bronx, in New York City, in 1954. Her parents (pictured here with their daughter) were also “newcomers”—in the sense that Krikiorian intends—when they moved to New York from Puerto Rico before Sotomayor was born, which they were entitled to do as American citizens, which all Puerto Ricans have been since 1917.

Who cares what Stuart Taylor thinks? (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
National Journal’s Stuart Taylor doesn’t think much of Sonia Sotomayor (for now; he’s already had to admit that some of his pre-selection criticisms of Sotomayor were “unfair.”) But it has long been clear that Stuart Taylor should not be taken seriously. See, in 1996, Taylor wrote a buzz-generating article for American Lawyer arguing that Paula Jones had a strong case against Bill Clinton. In fact, it was obvious that Paula Jones had no case against Bill Clinton. Not because it was obvious Jones was lying, but because — as Judge Susan Webber Wright ultimately ruled – even if everything Jones said was true, she had no “genuine issues” worthy of trial. Jones hadn’t even alleged any tangible harm that she suffered as a result of
Clinton’s alleged advances.

So, it isn’t just that Taylor was wrong in his assessment of Jones’ case, it’s that he was spectacularly wrong. Taylor thought Jones had a strong case; the judge ruled that Jones had no case whatsoever. That even if everything she said was true (even the things that contradicted each other) she simply did not have a valid lawsuit.
They paid the woman to harass Bill Clinton, and used her lawsuit as a means of trapping him into a lie about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

Does Michael Goldfarb have any idea what “preferential treatment” is? (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Here’s The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb: “Does anyone dispute that Sotomayor has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life? She played a role in the hiring of a dean at Princeton — how many alums got that kind of treatment while they were undergraduates?”

Well, gee, I don’t know.  How many alums won Princeton’s highest academic prize?  Goldfarb seems to think that being among a select few is synonymous with getting preferential treatment.  It isn’t. Maybe Sotomayor was chosen to serve on the advisory board on the strength of her academic accomplishments.  Or maybe the fact that she — according to Goldfarb — “launch[ed] a public campaign” to influence Princeton’s hiring had a little something to do with it.  In other words, maybe she earned it.

The WSJ’s woeful Sotomayor coverage… (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Murdoch’s Journal dutifully plays along with the GOP’s preferred narrative, not just with the “empathy” nonsense, but with the tape of Sotomayor at Duke saying the “court of appeals is where policy is made”? Without offering the slightest bit of context about the quote, the Journal states as fact that that quote will provide “ammunition” to her “conservative opponents.” This is simply the Journal bypassing actual journalism in favor of regurgitating GOP talking points.  Not once but twice.

CNN presents unfiltered right-wing spin about Sotomayor (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
CNN is running a package by reporter Jim Acosta that is full of baseless conservative spin about Sonia Sotomayor.

Sessions Goes Off-Message, Admits That Supreme Court Justices Write The Constitution (Think Progress)
One of conservatives’ biggest problems with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is over a remark she made in 2005, stating that the Court of Appeals “is where policy is made.” The right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network has called her “a liberal judicial activist of the first order” who “thinks that judges should dictate policy.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) called her 2005 comment a “problem.” Similarly, [Wednesday] morning, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) went on NBC’s Today Show and said it was “troubling”…

[Tuesday], however, Sessions appeared on MSNBC and undercut this talking point, admitting that the Supreme Court “sets the law for America.” He went even further on Fox News last night, telling Greta Van Susteren that Supreme Court justices basically write the Constitution:

GOP Stressed Gonzales’ Hispanic Roots In 2005 (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
One of the more provocative critiques to come from conservatives concerning the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has been the charge that her nomination is racial politics at its most cynical. But in the past, Republicans were eager to play up the diversity of their own nominees. She is “an affirmative action pick,” declared Pat Buchanan on MSNBC’s Hardball… Chris Matthews interrupted Buchanan to point out that the Clarence Thomas nomination seemed influenced by racial politics. And a reader notes that when Orrin Hatch took to the Senate floor to push the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, he elevated the nominee’s Hispanic roots and accused opponents of racial insensitivity.

Gregory notes that in confirmation hearing, Alito discussed bringing his “personal story…to bear as a judge” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Flashback: Alito on his immigrant background: ‘I do take that into account’ when ruling. (Think Progress)
Judge Sonia Sotomayor has come under fire from the radical right for stating that her experiences as a
Latina affect her judicial outlook. However, these same conservative critics never objected when Judge Sam Alito said virtually the same thing during his confirmation hearing, discussing how he “can’t help but think of” his immigrant family when evaluating immigration cases.
Click through to watch the video.

Gregory notes that in confirmation hearing, Alito discussed bringing his “personal story…to bear as a judge” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Single-payer mentions draw cheers at Baucus-sponsored health care talk (The Missoulian, thanks to DCblogger at Corrente)
On Tuesday morning, … Missoulians discussed health care reform at a listening session at
St. Patrick Hospital sponsored by U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. The hearing ranged broadly over the possibilities for reform, but what clearly resonated for [self employed management consultant Steve] McArthur was something Baucus’ chief of staff, Jon Selib, said a couple of times. Discussing why a single-payer system of health insurance wasn’t viable, Selib made reference to the more than 150 million Americans who are covered by some sort of employer-provided health care. “A lot of people like that,” Selib said.

When the time came for questions, McArthur stood up and asked a simple question. Looking across a standing-room-only crowd of about 275, he asked how many were happy with their employer-based health insurance. Less than 10 people raised their hands. “The number is bogus,” McArthur said. “It’s not working for 95 percent of us.” McArthur drew resounding applause. In fact, any mention of single-payer health care insurance brought raucous cheers and clapping. Any other solution to health care reform – including Baucus’ “balanced” plan that would create a mix of public and private plans – was received more coolly.

Morning Adrenaline Fix (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
The phone just rang. It was a DCCC fundraising call “to help us with our plans for healthcare reform.” I interrupted his spiel. “I won’t give the party one red cent until they come out strongly for single-payer or a public plan,” I said. “Ma’am, we are supporting a public plan…”

“No you’re not,” I said, interrupting again. “I’ve seen what Baucus is up to – a public plan that will only be triggered two years after the insurance companies don’t perform. Well, most of us don’t have two years to wait. You tell the people you work for that there are a lot of people out here who feel the same as me, and we’re not giving anything to the party until the Democratic party STOPS KISSING THE INSURANCE COMPANIES’ ASSES!

“Ma’am…”

Click.

There, now I feel better.

Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians’ Use Of Health Care Services In The United States (Health Affairs Journal, thanks to Paul Krugman)
Throughout the 1990s, opponents of the Canadian system gained considerable political traction in the United States by pointing to Canada’smethods of rationing, its facility shortages, and its waiting lists for certain services. These same opponents also argued that “refugees” of Canada’s single-payer system routinely came across the border seeking necessary medical care not available at home because of either lack of resources or prohibitively long queues.

This paper by Steven Katz and colleagues depicts this popular perception as more myth than reality, as the number of Canadians routinely coming across the border seeking health care appears to be relatively small, indeed infinitesimal when compared with the amount of care provided by their own system.

However,
Californians crossing border to Mexico for health care
(McClatchy)
Nearly a million Californians, perhaps hundreds of thousands more, cross the border to Mexico every year because they cannot afford the rising cost of health care in the United States, according to UCLA researchers.

Medicare and the VA (by Paul Krugman)
So we’ve been treated to lots of opinion pieces declaring that Medicare is doomed, doomed I tell you, and entitlements are out of control. And I had a thought. You see, we actually have a real live case of impressive cost control in health care: the VA system. The CBO reports: “Adjusting for the changing mix of patients (using data on reliance and relative costs by priority group), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that VHA’s budget authority per enrollee grew by 1.7 percent in real terms from 1999 to 2005 … compared with Medicare’s real rate of growth of 29.4 percent in cost per capita over that same period.”

So if you really think that Medicare as it is … doomed, why not propose converting it to a VA-type system as opposed to simply declaring it bankrupt and shutting it down? I mean, the standard argument — socialized medicine! loss of choice! — doesn’t seem to apply if the alternative is no health care at all. But you know that the entitlements scaremongers won’t bite on this solution — because they don’t want to make social insurance affordable, they want to kill it.

When Sallie Met Barack (by Gail Collins, New York Times, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
And then, there’s the epicenter of the college loan strangeness, the federally guaranteed loans. This is a system that goes something like this:

¶ We the taxpayers pay the banks to make loans to students.
¶ We the taxpayers then guarantee the loans so the banks won’t lose money if the students don’t pay.
¶ We the taxpayers then buy back the loans from the banks so they can make more loans to students, for which we will then pay them more rewards.
Are you with me so far? Wait, I see a hand waving back there. What’s that, sir? You want to know why the government doesn’t just lend the money out itself? Excellent question!…

“Senator Nelson is for the system as it is now,” said a spokesman for Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska. If you are a big fan of Senate stalemates, you will remember Nelson, the star of such past triumphs as The Stimulus Is Too Big. A great part of Nelson’s resistance has to do with the fact that Nelnet, a big student loan provider, has its headquarters in his state. Last year, after an investigation by the New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, Nelnet was one of several student lenders that agreed to a settlement in which it paid a fine and promised to abandon alleged deceptive marketing practices and inducements such as offering free iPods to students who signed on the dotted line.
The situation is exactly the same for health care. Our government is FORCING us to pay for insurance executives’ high salaries and for the profits of their companies.

Bill Clinton: I Should Have Raised More Hell About Derivatives Being Unregulated (by Mark Thoma at Economist’s View)
Bill Clinton gives, to use David Leonhardt’s term, an “impressively honest” analysis of his role in bringing about the financial crisis, particularly the failure to adequately regulate derivative markets:… “I should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated … although I don’t think that the Congress would have permitted anything to be done because Alan Greenspan was against it.”

Banks Want Government Subsidies to Buy Assets from Themselves (by James Kwak, The Baseline Scenario , thanks to Economist’s View)
From the headlines of the Wall Street Journal: “Banks Aiming to Play Both Sides of Coin — Industry Lobbies FDIC to Let Some Buy Toxic Assets With Taypayer Aid From Own Loan Books (subscription required, but Calculated Risk has an excerpt). I thought the headline had to be a mistake until I read the article. To recap: The Public-Private Investment Program provides subsidies to private investors to encourage them to buy legacy loans from banks. The goal is to encourage buyers to bid more than they are currently willing to pay, and hopefully close the gap with the prices at which the banks are willing to sell.

Allowing banks to buy their own assets under the PPIP is a terrible idea. In short, it allows a bank to sell half of its toxic loans to Treasury – at a price set by the bank… If this proposal has any chance of going anywhere, then Tim Geithner or Sheila Bair should come out and reject it right now.

Goldman Shareholders Suffered as Blankfein Earned $43 Million  (Bloomberg)
Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit weathered almost six hours of grilling from shareholders at the bank’s annual meeting on April 21. He had a lot of explaining to do: The company lost $27.7 billion in 2008 and stayed afloat only with help from a $45 billion government bailout. Even as his bank was floundering, Pandit in 2008 earned $38 million in salary and stock, No. 3 among the best-paid CEOs of the top 50 U.S.-based financial companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In February, Pandit told a congressional committee that, starting in 2009, he would take just $1 in annual salary until the bank is profitable again. “I get the new reality,” he said.

In the question-and-answer session at the annual meeting, one investor joked, “If you come work for me, I’ll double your salary.” Pandit, 52, standing onstage with Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons at the Hilton New York, bristled. “I don’t want to work for you,” he said and changed the subject.

Crazy Compensation and the Crisis (by Alan Blinder, thanks to Economist’s View)
Despite the vast outpouring of commentary and outrage over the financial crisis, one of its most fundamental causes has received surprisingly little attention. I refer to the perverse incentives built into the compensation plans of many financial firms, incentives that encourage excessive risk-taking with OPM — Other People’s Money… The source of the problem is really quite simple: Give smart people go-for-broke incentives and they will go for broke. Duh…

[F]ixing compensation should be the responsibility of corporate boards of directors and, in particular, of their compensation committees. These boards, … are supposed to represent the interests of stockholders, not those of managers… The unhappy (but common) combination of coziness and drowsiness in corporate boardrooms must end… For example, top executives could be paid mainly in restricted stock that vests at a later date, and traders could have their winnings deposited into an account from which subsequent losses would be deducted…[This] does not require any government action. It can be done by financial companies, tomorrow. Too bad they didn’t do it yesterday.

Israeli Settlement Growth Must Stop, [Hillary] Clinton Says (New York Times)
The Obama administration reiterated emphatically on Wednesday that it viewed a complete freeze of construction in settlements on the West Bank as a critical step toward a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. Speaking of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “He wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.” Talking to reporters after a meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, she said: “That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly.”

Iraq redux? Obama seeks funds for Pakistan super-embassy (McClatchy)
The U.S. is embarking on a $1 billion crash program to expand its diplomatic presence in
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, another sign that the Obama administration is making a costly, long-term commitment to war-torn South Asia, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Abu Ghraib abuse photos ’show rape’ (The Telegraph, U.K.)
Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.
Of course they do, and that’s exactly why they must be made public.

Mancow: Hannity Called Me After I Was Waterboarded And Said, ‘It’s Still Not Torture’ (Think Progress)
Last month, Fox News’s Sean Hannity claimed he would agree to be waterboarded “for charity… for the troops’s families.” Since then, multiple pundits have challenged Hannity to undergo the torture tactic, yet he has been unusually silent on the subject of waterboarding since. Last week, right-wing radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller stepped up to the plate and had himself waterboarded to prove that it isn’t torture. Immediately afterwards, Mancow admitted that it was “absolutely torture” and was “way worse” than he expected.

Reid acknowledges Guantanamo detainees will need to be relocated to U.S. prisons. (Think Progress)
After previously suggesting that he wouldn’t support
Guantanamo detainees being relocated to the U.S., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) acknowledged in an interview with a local news station that some Gitmo detainees will be put in federal prisons. While conservatives have baselessly claimed that “terrorists” could roam in Americans’ “backyards” if Guantanamo is closed, Reid defended the ability of the U.S. prison system to hold dangerous criminals:

Department Of Justice Hires Blog Outreach Person (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Obama’s Department of Justice has hired someone to do new media outreach for the whole department — the first time Justice has created such a role. A source confirms that Justice has tapped Tracy Russo, who did blog outreach for John Edwards’ presidential campaign, as the agency’s chief new media outreach expert. The hire reflects a recognition that some of the most important coverage of stories involving the Justice Department is taking place on the blogs.

Justice Stevens reads police interrogation dissent aloud from the bench (The Raw Story)
A decision by the Supreme Court on Tuesday easing rules on police interrogations led the oldest member on the bench to read his dissent aloud in front of the court, the first time that’s happened this term… [The New York Times] notes, “In an angry dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 1986 decision, said that contrary to the majority’s assertion, that decision protected ‘a fundamental right that the court now dishonors.’”

Dodd Closes Gap in Connecticut (Political Wire)
A new Quinnipiac poll in Connecticut finds Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) gaining on former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-CT). However, Simmons still leads by six points, 45% to 39%, in a 2010 Senate match up. Simmons led by 16 points in early April. Against State Sen. Sam Caligiuri (R), Dodd leads 41% to 39%. Said pollster Douglas Schwartz: “Sen. Christopher Dodd’s numbers are getting better but they are still lousy. He still has high negatives: About half of the voters don’t trust Dodd and disapprove of the job he is doing. And he is still behind Simmons in a general election matchup. But Dodd is an exceptionally skilled politician, and he has plenty of time. He is lucky to get this early warning more than a year before the election.”

Specter’s Lead Over Toomey Shrinks (Political Wire)
In Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, a new Quinnipiac poll finds Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) leads former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) by nine points, 46% to 37%. Specter had a 20 point lead at the beginning of May.
Said pollster Clay Richards: “Sen. Arlen Specter’s numbers have slipped since the controversy that followed his switch to the Democratic Party, but he’s still better off than he would have been if he stayed a Republican and faced a tough primary challenge from former Rep. Pat Toomey.”

Sestak Says He’s Running (Political Wire)
Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) is privately telling supporters that he intends to run for the U.S. Senate, reports TPM.  Sestak would challenge Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) in a Democratic primary.  That’s probably why he’s not returning phones calls from DSCC Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

NRSC To Ratchet Up Attacks On Reid As Washington Kingmaker (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
The NRSC is preparing a new round of attacks on Harry Reid, seizing on reports that he plans to raise huge bucks for reelection as proof that he’s beholden to Washington lobbyists and addicted to glitzy celebrity-ridden fundraisers.

No Primary in New York? (Political Wire)
Ben Smith catches interesting remarks made last night by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in which she seems to believe there will not be a Democratic gubernatorial primary in
New York next year as most political observers expect. What’s not clear, however, is who she thinks will not run, Gov. David Paterson (D) or likely challenger Andrew Cuomo (D).

Berkowitz Eyes Palin Challenge (Political Wire)
Ethan Berkowitz (D), who almost toppled Rep. Don Young (R-AK) last year, is gearing up for another statewide race — against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), if she chooses to run for re-election, according to CQ Politics. Said Berkowitz: “My sights are now on the governor’s race.” However, given Palin’s continued popularity in the state, CQ rates the race as Republican Favored.

Former Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik indicted over allegedly false statements during Bush vetting (New York Daily News)
Bernard Kerik was indicted Tuesday… The former police commissioner faces trial in
Washington on charges he lied to White House officials who were vetting him for the position of Homeland Security secretary… Kerik is charged with falsely denying to White House officials that as a public official he had any financial dealings with individuals seeking to do business with the city.
It doesn’t pay to lie to the Bush administration. Now, if you were IN the Bush administration, you were REQUIRED to lie.

The Silence of MoveOn (by Tom Hayden, writing in The Nation)
The most powerful grassroots organization of the peace movement, MoveOn, remains silent as the American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan simmer or escalate… This is no small matter. MoveOn has collected a privately held list of 5 million names, most of them strong peace advocates. The organization’s membership contributed an unprecedented $180 million for the federal election cycle in 2004-2006. Those resources, now squelched or sequestered, mean that the most vital organization in the American peace movement is missing in action.

What to do? There is no point raving and ranting against MoveOn. The only path is in organizing a dialogue with the membership, over the Internet, and having faith that their voices will turn the organization to oppose these escalating occupations.
It won’t do any good, Tom. The leadership of MoveOn decides what the members are allowed to discuss, and the members are completely unaware of what is happening. Nor do they care.

Idol Producers Stand By Outcome (New York Times)
Fox Broadcasting and the companies that produce American Idol said Wednesday that they were “absolutely certain” that the outcome of voting for the winner was not unfairly influenced by free text-messaging services offered to fans of Kris Allen, the winner, at viewing parties in Arkansas last week.

Why the Press Revolt Against Anonymous Briefings Is a Farce (by John Cook at Gawker)
The Los Angeles Times’ James Rainey sums up the traditional White House case for stripping out the identities of the briefers: “The conventional answer (also offered by the Clinton and Bush White Houses) is that staffers should be anonymous and remain in the background, so as not to distract from the president and the day’s news…” That’s nonsense. No reader would be so dazzled by Ron Klain’s name as to forget what the story they are reading is about. The real reason is basic risk-aversion: The system has been in place for years, and to change it would only allow Klain and Axelrod’s words to catch up with them later. They don’t want any reporters to be able to say, “But you said…!” a month from now.

Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism isn’t her No. 1 problem: She has shown a penchant for ‘mailing in’ columns (by Jon Friedman at MarketWatch)
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s recent plagiarism controversy isn’t her biggest problem. An accusation of plagiarism is merely a symptom of Dowd’s recent penchant for relying on clever, witty and pithy observations. What’s missing is the substance to back them up. Her approach smacks of laziness… Times editors should be concerned about what I see as Dowd’s recent penchant for “mailing in” some of her Obama-era columns. These don’t hold up to the same standards of brilliance that they reflected during the Dubya years… Maybe Obama is so bland that Dowd is thoroughly bored and can’t muster her usual biting sarcasm. If that’s the case, the Times should pull her column and let her do something else.

Pew Study: Top U.S. Papers’ Swine Flu Coverage Lacking?
The emergence of Swine Flu received less coverage by three top U.S. newspapers than it did in major dailies in six other countries, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The assessment labeled U.S. coverage “moderate” compared to foreign papers.

In Battle For Web Traffic, The Left Is Beating The Right (Thanks To HuffPo) (Paid Content)
The Dems are controlling more than just the White House and Congress. They’re also collectively winning the battle for traffic among political sites. According to the latest comScore numbers, left-leaning sites attracted 6.4 million uniques in April, while the major blogs on the right 4.8 million… The right is not without some bragging rights. Individually, the right had one more site in comScore’s top 20 political blog sites than their left wing counterparts (nine to eight), and many of the conservative sites, like MichelleMalkin.com, had enormous growth, while liberal stalwarts like DailyKos and MyDD appeared to be dropping uniques year-over-year.

There was one main reason the liberal sites collectively came out ahead: Huffington Post’s dominant 5.6 million uniques, which dwarfs the number-two site Drudge Report’s 1.7 million monthly visitors.

Miss California Carrie Prejean Hosts Fox & Friends (TVNewser, Media Bistro)
Miss California Carrie Prejean filled in as host of the first hour of Fox & Friends yesterday, discussing the Prop 8 ruling and tussling co-host Brian Kilmeade’s hair. What else? She interviewed Donald Trump, interviewed a bible study leader about freedom of religion and reflected on “The Question.”

Ex-TV Evangelist Schuller Buys Cable Network AmericanLife (Los Angeles Times)
The son of famed
Orange County television evangelist Robert H. Schuller said Tuesday he had acquired cable network AmericanLife TV from the Unification Church in partnership with a private equity fund that invests in Christian media firms.

Media Matters for America headlines

Fox Nation baselessly claims Sotomayor “Wants to Ban Guns”

Wash. Times claims “extraordinary rebuke” for Sotomayor if Ricci is reversed

Fox falsely claimed Supreme Court has never agreed with the reasoning of a Sotomayor decision

Wash. Times makes discredited claim that Sotomayor policy-making remark “runs counter to … American legal tradition”

Fox News still trafficking in birth certificate theories

Wash. Post, WSJ omit context of Sotomayor remarks, despite reporting WH “out of context” statement

CNN’s Bash reported conservative criticism of Sotomayor’s comments, but omitted their context

Myths and falsehoods surrounding the Sotomayor nomination

Arizona AG Withdraws Suit Challenging ‘Citizen’ Closure
The
Arizona attorney general’s office voluntarily withdrew an antitrust lawsuit challenging Gannett Co.’s closure of the Tucson Citizen newspaper… The May 15 lawsuit alleged Gannett conspired with Lee Enterprises Inc., owner of the city’s larger newspaper, the morning Arizona Daily Star, to close the Citizen, eliminating an editorial voice.

Entrepreneurs, Researchers Try To Save Journalism With CircLabs JV (Paid Content)
Can a new tech service that aims to package online news with social media features and a multi-tiered payment system (including subscriptions and micro-payments) save journalism? That’s the question CircLabs, a new JV between the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and a group of media entrepreneurs will try to answer when it rolls out “Circulate,” a personalized news syndication service later this year. Full details on how Circulate will work aren’t clear, but CircLabs says the service will use technology to solve two specific publisher problems: the issue of attracting “loyal” readers on both a local and national scale, and monetizing them effectively through both direct sales and advertising.

Newspaper Execs Reportedly Meeting Today to Discuss Charging for Online Content
The nation’s top newspaper executives are reportedly meeting today to discuss the possibility of charging for online content. The name of the clandestine meeting, as described by James Warren in The Atlantic, is “Models to Monetize Content” and is taking place in hotel outside Chicago.

‘E&P’ Column on Paying for Online Draws Heat — Outing Responds
Among the points: “Underpinning Outing’s article is the premise that content is not important for what it is, but for its relationship to the ‘link economy.’ That’s like saying that practicing medicine isn’t important for people, but to keep health insurers and bedpan makers in business.”

Twitter Poses Risks for Newspapers (by Ed Wasserman, Miami Herald)
The danger is that Twitter will keep reporters off the streets, and in front of their screens, that it will further skew journalism toward seeking out, listening to and serving the young, the hip, the technically sophisticated, the well-off — in short, the better-connected.

NYT Names ‘Social Media Editor’
The New York Times has announced (through Twitter and an internal memo to staffers) that Jennifer Preston would be taking over the newly created role of social media editor.
Preston told FishbowlNY that her job would be much more than acting as a Twitter cop for micro-blogging staffers.

Media Firms to Address Shareholders
Executive pay, shareholder returns and signs of a possible ad market stabilization are likely to be in focus as entertainment biggies host shareholder meetings in the next couple of weeks. “Executive pay has come down some but could still be a lightning rod,” Miller Tabak analyst David Joyce said.

Gawker VP Says Sponsored Posts Will Bring in Majority of Revenue One Day
Gawker Media’s latest advertising innovation can be expected to draw criticism. The blogging empire is temporarily welcoming a new site into its fold that’s written and paid for by HBO to promote the network’s noir vampire drama, True Blood. And the word “advertisement” won’t appear anywhere.

News Corp Hopes for Broader Ad Deal With Google
News Corp hopes to sell Google Inc access to a greater swathe of its media properties, its executives said. Senior executives at News Corp and MySpace said the company was working with Google to try and make their existing advertising deal better for both parties.

Could this week’s New Yorker determine the Globe’s fate? (by Adam Reilly, Boston Phoenix)
It’s possible. Lawrence Wright’s profile of Carlos Slim Helu tells us that star New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has unlimited travel expenses, and never really has to explain what he’s going to write about before he hits the road. It also quotes Friedman on the future of the news business, saying that, eventually, “It’s going to be us and the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and not a lot more.” Friedman also speaks of the Times partnering with another right-thinking party–perhaps New York mayor and Bloomberg News founder Michael Bloomberg.

Two Globe Unions Ratify Contracts
The unions representing Boston Globe mailers and press operators narrowly approved a contracts that will cut their pay and benefits by more than a combined $7 million, bringing The New York Times Co., closer to achieving the savings it says it needs to keep operating the money-losing paper.

Forcing your own paper out of business? (by Jeff Jarvis)
Drivers at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are threatening a strike. I could see a few interesting unintended consequences for the drivers: (A) This forces the paper out of business. They lose their jobs. (B) This forces the paper to go online only and the company takes advantage of bankruptcy to kill contracts with not only drivers but also pressmen and everyone except journalists needed for online.

As Mag Ad Pages Declined, Page Views Rose
Publishers hungry for good news can find it in their Web traffic. In recent weeks, the Magazine Publishers of America reported that across 476 sites it tracked via Nielsen, traffic to magazine sites was +7.2 percent in first-quarter-2009 versus 2008.

More Magazines Returning from the Dead
Many magazines are on financial life support right now — others have folded. But more and more of these grim stories are producing silver linings. Magazine publishers that either folded or were on the brink of bankruptcy have managed to secure outside financing to stay in business.

Could a Personalized Magazine Help Save Print Media? (by Farhad Manjoo, Slate)
When I signed up for Mine a couple of months ago, I was mainly looking for a laugh. The new magazine from Time Inc. seemed like a gimmicky, goofy effort to save a beleaguered industry. Turns out my skepticism was misguided. I’ve received two issues of Mine, and I love it.

Will Branson Go From Virgin to Playboy?
There are unconfirmed reports that Hugh Hefner is considering a $300 million offer from Virgin Media’s Richard Branson for Playboy Enterprises Inc. Those follow last week’s reports that the publisher of the iconic girlie magazine was being shopped to private-equity firms.

Taxes Snag Source Bankruptcy Proceedings
The pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that Automobile and Motor Trend publisher Source Interlink Cos. filed late last month has hit a few speed bumps. Apparently the Internal Revenue Service claims that Source owes it lots of money and is asking for a trustee to put the brakes on the deal.

Broadway Receipts Increase Slightly
Broadway musicals and plays had total gross receipts of about $943.3 million this season, a slight increase from the previous season and a record for total grosses, according to a new report.

Microsoft may help radio with Apple.
Microsoft’s decision to include HD Radio in the new Zune HD is seen as a “validation” of radio’s digital move. The company is likely to help iBiquity with its mission to get HD Radio into as many portable devices as possible — including Apple’s iPod.

Sirius “best of” outsells XM.
The satellite radio company says 544,000 XM customers have bought the Sirius package — most likely interested in Howard Stern. But just 204,000 Sirius subscribers are paying for the XM package. Major League Baseball is probably the biggest draw there.

Cigarettes in Popular Films Are Target of Health Groups
The advocacy arm of the American Medical Association unveiled a campaign intended to publicly shame movie studios for depicting images of smoking.

Music Labels Cut Friendlier Deals With Start-Ups
The changes stem from an unavoidable reality facing the music business: the economics of offering music free on the Web do not work.

Lawyer: RIAA must pay back all ”$100M+” it has allegedly collected (ARS Technica)
Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson has now gotten involved in two more file-sharing lawsuits, including the Jammie Thomas retrial in Minnesota. But it’s in the other, lesser-known case, that Nesson and a former student demand the RIAA pay back all $100 million it has collected in settlement money over the years.

Report finds TV sales staying strong in recession
Never mind the lousy economy: Flat-panel TVs are still flying off the shelves in the
U.S. and Canada… Sales had declined in the fourth quarter from the year before, and the industry was expecting to see that trend continue into this year. Sales are still declining overseas, but North American consumersseem to have a special love for big sets and are going against the flow.

Viacom Chief Sees Ad Sales Stabilizing
Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman predicted a drawn-out upfront advertising market Wednesday and reiterated that ad sales have stabilized in recent weeks. “There has been stabilization” he said. “Visibility is still low … (but) the tone is much better than it was a couple of months ago.”

ABC Network & Studio Shakeup Coming
It’s been long in the works. But now the executive shuffling and pinkslipping may be finally coming down this week — as soon as Thursday? — as Steve McPherson consolidates his power as head of ABC Entertainment Group overseeing both ABC Entertainment and ABC Studios.

NBC Hits Historic Lows
NBC set a low-water mark for TV viewership last week. The network averaged 4.4 million prime-time viewers, according to Nielsen. While it’s not the smallest ever recorded, it’s the smallest to come in a week outside of the summer doldrums of June, July, August or early September.

Is NBC Working on a Live at 5 Format Killer?
Rumors are swirling at WNBC-4, NBC’s flagship station in New York, that executives at NBC Universal are considering the creation of a daily 5 p.m. lifestyle show that could debut on affiliate stations around the country as early as the fall of 2009.

Cable Companies Ready To Take Another Swing At Ad Targeting (Paid Content)
Despite continued rumblings from regulators and lawmakers over ad targeting, the cable company consortium Canoe Ventures is ready to release its first ad-targeting product, dubbed “community addressable messaging,” WSJ reports. Canoe, which is backed by Comcast, Cablevision, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications and Brighthouse Networks, plans to roll out the ad targeting system this summer…

Aside from the lingering affects of the dismal economy, Canoe has to contend with Google TV, which has been expanding from its own “addressable TV” plans, while TiVo has also been building up its ad targeting offerings. On top of that, Canoe’s initial offering is fairly limited, at least terms of the kinds of targeting marketers like Unilever are hoping for. At the moment, Canoe can’t target individual households and the list of demographic groups available for targeting remains fairly limited.

Navify Adds Images and Video to Wikipedia Articles (Mashable)
Navify, which launche[d] in public beta [Wednesday] is essentially just an alternative interface for visualizing Wikipedia content. The kicker is that Navify not only includes article content, but also displays related images, videos, and comments associated with the original article. Here’s how it works: just visit Navify and do a standard Wikipedia search (no account required). Results are returned in tabbed form and include the full article itself, an images tab complete with photos added by Wikipedia or Navify users and those automatically discovered on Flickr, and a video tab that works exactly the same way, but pulls related video from YouTube. Navify is also supporting article comments by Disqus, so anyone can add their thoughts to Navify article pages.

Google Web Elements: Add YouTube News and Google Comments to Your Blog (Mashable)
At their Google I/O event [Wednesday], the search giant launched a new product called Web Elements aimed at making it easier for web developers to be able to embed Google products on their pages. Essentially, Web Elements is a one-stop-shop for Google’s product widgets, which until this point were often buried in odd places… Web Elements gathers together 8 Google widgets on a single page – Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and YouTube News. Configuration for many of these widgets is also much easier than it has been in the past.

Digg Content is Now Public Domain Internationally (Mashable)
Digg has just upgraded the license for all of its content – titles, descriptions, comments, everything – from public domain to Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Under the public domain license, the content was already free for anyone in the US to use for any purpose. By switching to CC0, this content is now also public property internationally. The Internet is getting more and more fragmented each day, with copyright laws altering our entire online experience depending on where we’re physically located. So, although the license change may not seem like much, it’s a welcome change and a nice gesture from Digg.

Time Warner Board Backs AOL Spinoff
The media conglomerate said it would buy out Google’s 5 percent stake during the third quarter and spin off AOL to Time Warner shareholders.

MySpace’s new CEO promises innovation
The new leaders of News Corp.’s MySpace said Wednesday they need to innovate to rejuvenate the social networking site, which has suffered from stalled user growth.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: We’ll Sell Search to Microsoft If We Get ‘Boatloads of Money’
A very brief update on the state of search talks between Microsoft and Yahoo: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz acknowledges the companies are talking, but says she would only consider selling search for a very large sum.

Twitter Gets Targeted Again by Worm-like Phishing Attack
Twitter users have been tricked into divulging their login and password details to a Web site that then spammed their contacts.

Smile and Say ‘No Photoshop’
As retouching has become more blatant and bizarre, sometimes resulting in bodies that defy the natural boundaries of human anatomy, a debate over photo manipulation has spilled into public view, with Peter Lindbergh, one of the world’s most famous image makers, leading the charge against the practice.

Microsoft adds touch screen, Web to Zune
The next generation of Microsoft’s Zune music player, due in the fall, will have a touch screen, Web browser and an HD Radio receiver.

Flip has pocket camcorder competition
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, camera makers hope it will also lead to sales for pocket camcorders resembling the popular Flip. Kodak, Sony, Creative and RCA are among the companies following the Flip’s formula.

Media & Politics

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Mario Piperni

High court pick stays on ‘real world’ message (by Tony Mauro, National Law Journal)
President Barack Obama announced Tuesday he will nominate Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit to the Supreme Court, extolling her “wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life’s journey” and setting her on course to become the court’s first Hispanic and third woman in history. Defying criticism that the empathy Obama sought in a nominee will color her judgment, Sotomayor pledged “never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions.”
Click here to watch the video of her acceptance remarks. Nico Pitney has the Cliff Notes version of her biography and rulings at the Huffington Post.

Obama’s choice of Sotomayor deserves praise (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
It is very encouraging that Obama ignored the ugly, vindictive, and anonymous smear campaign led by The New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen and his secret cast of cowardly Eminent Liberal Legal Scholars of the Respectable Intellectual Center…. Obama has also ignored the deeply dishonest right-wing attacks on Sotomayor… At his best, Obama ignores and is even willing to act contrary to the standard establishment
Washington voices and mentality that have corrupted our political culture for so long.  His choice of Sotomayor is a prime example of his doing exactly that, and for that reason alone, ought to be commended.
And that is the behavior I want more of from him. Ignore the right wing. They’re going to attack you, no matter what, so you may as well do the right thing.

Pride and Some Concerns Among Hispanics (New York Times)
In restaurants, homes and offices across the country, Hispanics responded to Judge Sotomayor’s selection with a puff of pride, some gratitude and considerable discussion. In interviews in
Miami, Los Angeles and New York, many said this kind of recognition from Washington — Democratic or Republican — was long overdue given the growing size of the Hispanic voting bloc. The hope, they said, is that her hardscrabble life and accomplishments will add prestige to the public image and self-image of Hispanics. “This is a Jackie Robinson moment,” said Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican elected to the New York Legislature. “Puerto Ricans, who have been Hispanic pioneers in so many fields in this country, have broken another barrier for all of us.”

And yet, a defensiveness could also be found. Many Hispanics seemed eager to warn Democrats that a single nomination — of a judge whom most Americans are still getting to know — might not be enough to win unending Hispanic loyalty come Election Day.
That’s the spirit! Don’t hand over your support without demanding more. ALWAYS demand more. Besides, Obama seems to respect more those who challenge him than those who kowtow.

First Latina Picked for Supreme Court; GOP Faces Delicate Task in Opposition (Washington Post)
An all-out assault on Sotomayor by Republicans could alienate both Latino and women voters, deepening the GOP’s problems after consecutive electoral setbacks. But sidestepping a court battle could be deflating to the party’s base and hurt efforts to rally conservatives going forward.
And the GOP started being delicate WHEN?

All Hat No Cattle

Limbaugh calls Sotomayor “a reverse racist,” appointed by “the greatest living example of a reverse racist” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Buchanan declares Sotomayor an “affirmative action pick” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Sen. Inhofe Concerned About the Whole Race, Gender Thing (Truthdig)
The news that known Latina Sonia Sotomayor may soon join the Supreme Court spurred an apparently alarmed Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) to hold forth in a statement on Tuesday about the need to make sure that Sotomayor will be able to mete out justice from her vaunted post without her pesky extra X chromosome or her non-Oklahoman ethnic roots mucking things up for everyone.

Hannity claims Obama “turns his back on Mainstream America” by nominating “the most divisive nominee possible,” a “radical” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Robertson calls Sotomayor “the worst;” implores GOP to “take a stand” or “kiss their chances” of regaining “power away” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Limbaugh: Obama wants an “anti-constitutionalist” on the Supreme Court (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Beck on Sotomayor nomination: “Hey, Hispanic chick lady! You’re empathetic … you’re in!” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Beck cites Hitler example to state that “empathy leads you to very bad decisions” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Beck on empathetic SCOTUS justice: “Was Solomon empathetic when he said cut the baby in half?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Why, yes, Glenn, he was. Because he knew that by pretending to expose the baby to danger, the real mother would reveal herself. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you never got the point of that story.

Glenn Beck Says Supreme Court Nominee Is a Huge Bigot (by Ryan Tate at Gawker)
Glenn Beck had an amazing transformation [Tuesday] on Fox News: In the morning, the conservative shouting head was saying Sonia Sotomayor was just your typical, politically correct Supreme Court nominee from a liberal president. By the evening, Beck had decided she was actually a dangerous racist… In mere hours, the pundit who joked that “we need a blind, deaf, handicapped Asian woman” for the Supreme Court was calling a federal judge racist.

Fox’s Hemmer responds to Sotomayor nomination with sexism: “She is reportedly domineering in oral arguments” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Limbaugh compares federal judge and former prosecutor Sotomayor to late mob boss Gotti (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Fox’s Napolitano and Kilmeade on Sotomayor: Working as A.D.A. and appellate judge not real “life experience” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
During the segment, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) corrects Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano’s false claim that Sotomayor “did not practice law, did not represent clients” and has never earned “a living other than to collect a government check.”

Meet the Citizens of Fox Nation (by John Cook at Gawker)
Bill O’Reilly and other right-wingers like to rely on the lunacy of the commenters at Huffington Post, Daily Kos and other sites to paint the whole enterprises as violent, thuggish, angry, etc. In that spirit, here’s what some loyal Fox News viewers from the “real America” had to say about Obama’s Supreme Court nominee:
Jbohn2
f**kin Mexicans
bet la raza is dancing around a hat over this one
Click through for more, if you can stand it.

Conservatives (Wrongly) Claim Sotomayor Said Latinas Are Better Than White Men (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Leading conservative commentators and news outlets have jumped on [a] 2001 Sonia Sotomayor quote … to make the (wrong) claim that she has said that Latinas are better than white men. In that 2001 speech, Sotomayor didn’t say that. Rather, she said this: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”…

Read in context, it’s clear that Sotomayor was merely saying that it’s inevitable that a judge’s personal race-based and gender-based experiences will impact judging, particularly in race and sex discrimination cases. As a result, she said, while such formative experiences can be enriching and contribute to wise decisions, a judge should also be aware of them in order to avoid being wholly dominated by them. She vowed “complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives.”

“Where Policy Is Made”: Sotomayor’s Court Comment Explained (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
The ubiquitous conservative attack on Judge Sonia Sotomayor stems from a statement she made at a conference at Duke University Law School in 2005, in which she described the role appellate justices have in forming policy. “All of the legal defense funds out there, they are looking for people with court of appeals experience because the court of appeals is where policy is made,” she said, laughing a bit through the next part: “And I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. Okay, I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I know.”…

The remarks, four years later, have hit the central nerve of the conservative psyche. Figures within and outside the GOP have already announced — even before Sotomayor was tapped to be Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court — that they would be painting her as an activist from the bench. But for legal experts, there is nothing actually controversial to what Sotomayor said. Her political crime, if there were one in this case, was speaking the truth. “She’s not wrong,” said Jeffrey Segal, a professor of law at Stony Brook University. “Of course they make policy.”
Click through to watch the video of Judge Sotomayor making the “policy” statement.

RNC fumbles Sotomayor talking points (by Aaron Blake, The Hill)
Whoops. The Republican National Committee (RNC) has apparently inadvertently released its list of talking points on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Included on the released list were a few hundred influential Republicans who were the intended recipients of the talking points. Unfortunately for the RNC, so were members of the media.
Click through to read them. There’s nothing really startling there. We saw the results above from the SECRET talking points.

But are they REALLY shooting themselves in the foot? Or are they laying the groundwork for the next Republican takeover?
HOW THE GOP WENT MAD:
(by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
[Paul] Krugman’s column is almost always essential. In part for that reason, we want to critique an off-hand remark he included in [Friday’s] piece. Yes, it’s just a throw-away comment–it forms no real part of his analysis. But we think it’s worth being clear on why this comment seems wrong: “…[R]ecent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power…” In fact, the GOP and its agents have been behaving this way for a very long time. We’d suggest they were driven mad by an excess of power–by the grinding power the party held through most of the past forty years…

From 1968 through 2008, the GOP largely controlled the narratives shaping our discourse. Democrats held the White House for twelve of those forty years. But even when Bill Clinton began a two-term reign, he was assailed by wave after wave of gong-show public attacks… This lunacy didn’t stem from a lack of power. It grew when Republicans had too much power. And let’s make sure we understand where that excess came from: In large part, it came from the willingness of the mainstream press to tolerate or repeat any GOP claim, no matter how patently crazy. In large part, it came from the refusal of liberals and Dems to resist this misuse of power…

How did the GOP go mad? They went mad in a crackpot era, the 1990s. We seem inclined to forget that era today. In that era, their madness was allowed.

Their Madness Was Allowed (by Anglachel)
The failure of the liberal response to the right-wing madness is the unspoken shadow to Left Blogistan triumphalism over the most recent elections. To understand why Obama knew himself perfectly safe to ignore the liberal blogs, you need only look at the spectacle of those blogs falling all over themselves to show that they could trash the
Clintons, too… The madness has been allowed because it has inculcated the media – from the talking heads shows to Talking Points Memo – with the fantasy that they are somehow combating the evil politicians in their smokey back rooms, yet the enemy always ends up being the Democrats… And while the hipsters hang out in their virtual bar … the madness of the right continues to be allowed.

Their hypocrisy also continues to be allowed. At least the so-called left brings out this aspect of what the right is doing, but the mainstream media almost never does.
The GOP’s Feigned Outrage
(by Thomas Frank)
For all the past year’s Democratic victories, the GOP still owns outrage, still has an enormous capacity to summon up offense, to elevate every perceived slight into an unprecedented imposition upon both the hard-working citizen and freedom itself. What really dazzles the observer, though, is conservatives’ fury over things for which they are themselves responsible.
They deflect the anger that should be focused on THEM. Really, they are masters at this.

Matt Davies

An Easy Confirmation? (Political Wire)
Looking at the politics, Mark Halperin thinks Senate Republicans will fall in line and ultimately allow Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be confirmed to fill the pending vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. “By both design and luck, Obama faces a Supreme Court-pick process that has been drained of the tension and combat that has characterized such moments in the past several decades… Most Republicans will squelch their first instinct to go to the mattresses and instead follow the President’s pathway: avoid a fight.”
Where has Halperin been living for the last 20 years?

Sessions goes On the Record , says he doesn’t remember why he opposed Sotomayor’s appeals court nomination (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
[Jeff] Sessions, who is ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also states “I’m not sure I can articulate” the difference between “what you look for for the United States Supreme Court as opposed to the United States Court of Appeals”.
That’s easy. He opposed her because she’s a Democrat.

Kyl On Sotomayor: Slow Down. Kyl On Alito: Hurry Up. (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
In reacting to the Sonia Sotomayor announcement, GOP Senator Jon Kyl said that when Samuel Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005, Dems were given some three months to consider the pick. Kyl [Tuesday] asked for Dems to extend Republicans the “same courtesy.” But back in 2006, Kyl actually hammered Dems for wanting time to consider Alito, saying that it should only take the Senate a “couple of days” to debate the choice.

Dems To Make Sotomayor Fight About The GOP (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
The emerging Democratic strategy on Sonia Sotomayor: Dems will try to make the coming fight not about her, but about the current state of the GOP. On MSNBC just now, Chuck Schumer argued that Sotomayor is a moderate and that GOP opposition will say more about the Republican Party’s extremism than it says about any of Sotomayor’s legal skills or opinions. Expect more like that.

Record Shows Rulings Within Liberal Mainstream (Wall Street Journal)
Judge Sonia Sotomayor has built a record on such issues as civil rights and employment law that puts her within the mainstream of Democratic judicial appointees… Her record in more than 4,000 cases, including those from 11 years on the Second Circuit, shows her occasional siding with corporate defendants or diverting from a standard liberal position… Although Judge Sotomayor has had a number of her decisions overturned by the Supreme Court, Judge Guido Calabresi — who taught Judge Sotomayor at Yale Law School and is today her colleague on the Second Circuit — said such reversals are typical…

Scenes From Judge Sotomayor’s Courtroom (by Gerard N. Magliocca, a law professor at Indiana University at Indianapolis)
While many have discussed her underprivileged background as a strong point for her confirmation, I think that her experiences as a lawyer and a judge are more relevant. Plenty of judges can talk intelligently about trademarks, but few have actually strapped on a bulletproof vest and taken part in law-enforcement raids on gang warehouses filled with counterfeit merchandise, as she did when she was in private practice. Many judges are knowledgeable about labor law, but few have faced a labor decision as intense as her ruling in favor of the players that ended the 1995 Major League Baseball strike.

One result of her broad experience in many different fields is a distrust of abstraction. Indeed, her stint presiding over trials in district court will help the other justices, none of whom have done so, understand the implications of their rulings on everyday litigation and criminal sentencing.

I am a conservative, and I did not vote for President Obama. It is perfectly understandable for conservatives to say that they will not vote for anyone the president picks, but at that point the debate, if you can call it that, is over. For those of us who think that intellectual rigor and fairness are the crucial factors, no matter which party the president hails from, there is no question that Judge Sotomayor should be confirmed.

Sotomayor’s Rulings Are Exhaustive but Often Narrow (by Adam Liptak, New York Times)
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial opinions are marked by diligence, depth and unflashy competence. If they are not always a pleasure to read, they are usually models of modern judicial craftsmanship, which prizes careful attention to the facts in the record and a methodical application of layers of legal principles. Judge Sotomayor … has issued no major decisions concerning abortion, the death penalty, gay rights or national security. In cases involving criminal defendants, employment discrimination and free speech, her rulings are more liberal than not.

But they reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language. Judge Sotomayor’s decisions are, instead, almost always technical, incremental and exhaustive, considering all of the relevant precedents and supporting even completely uncontroversial propositions with elaborate footnotes.
Technical, incremental, revealing no larger vision? She’s the female version of Barack Obama.

How about some diversity in courts that aren’t Supreme? (by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Salon)
Congratulations, Sonia Sotomayor. Now let’s pick some judges who aren’t white males for the lower courts too.
EXcellent question!

California Supreme Court Upholds Gay Marriage Ban (by John Cook at Gawker)
The
California Supreme Court has upheld Proposition 8, meaning that gay people still can’t get married there. But the 18,000 couples who were hitched between last May (when the court ruled to legalize gay marriage) and November (when “progressive” California voters said same-sex marriage is icky) can stay married. So by virtue of a historical fluke, some gay Californians will be barred from marriage while their gay neighbors enjoy its benefits. We can’t think of a better set-up for a U.S. Supreme Court challenge. It just makes no sense.

O’Reilly again claims that if gay marriage was legalized, “you could have married a duck” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Prop 8 Ruling a Blow to All Minorities (by Joel P. Engardio, writer, documentary filmmaker, and civil liberties advocate)
Religious supporters of Proposition 8, the voter initiative that banned same-sex marriages in
California, might feel good now that the state’s Supreme Court has ruled that the measure can stand. But will those religious groups that are celebrating Prop 8 today regret it later when they consider the precedent that’s been set? Prop 8 has made it a lot easier in California for a simple majority of voters to strip away the rights of an unpopular minority. What happens when it’s your time to be the unpopular minority?

Former Bush lawyer sues to overturn Prop 8 (by Alex Koppelman at War Room, Salon)
Same-sex marriage makes strange bedfellows. Like Theodore Olson and David Boies, whose most famous encounter to date is Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 election. Olson was on the winning side, and went on to become solicitor general under the man he helped make president of the
United States. Now the two men are on the same side of the law as counsel for plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that seeks to overturn California’s Proposition 8… Judging from the complaint, which can be downloaded in PDF form here, it appears that means the suit is intended to get the [U.S. Supreme] court to rule on the constitutionality of restrictions on same-sex marriage around the country.

AT&T May Have Swayed ‘Idol’ Results
Representatives provided free text-messaging services at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen after the final performance episode of “American Idol” last week.
There were some Christian groups behind Allen. What with the not so subtle ambiguity about Adam Lambert’s sexuality, one can’t help but wonder if these parties and the voting were some kind of anti-gay statement. The two biggest controversies over Idol voting have been when Clay Aiken, who later came out as being gay, lost to Ruben Studdard, and then this year. Odd, don’t you think?

I personally didn’t agree with the judges that Lambert was the best performer. I like a singer who elicits emotion instead of going out of his or her way to just show virtuosity, or to be outrageous. Last year, I thought Michael Johns should have won. This year, I thought it should have been Allison Iraheta. I doubt that I’ll be watching American Idol again.

However, some folks are willing to do what’s right:
Levi’s Adopts a Tie-In With a Gay Marriage Symbol
(New York Times)
In 20 company-owned stores, mannequins display White Knot ribbons, part of a campaign created by a
California digital media consultant.

Consumer confidence posts another large increase in May (McClatchy)
National consumer confidence posted its second large increase in two months, according to figures released Tuesday.

1Q home prices fall by 19.1 pct to 2002 levels (AP)
National home prices are at levels not seen since the end of 2002, but a closer look at data released Tuesday shows the worst may be over for some cities. The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller National Home Price indexreported home prices tumbled by 19.1 percent in the first quarter compared to the first quarter last year, the largest drop in its 21-year history. Home prices have fallen 32.2 percent since peaking in the second quarter of 2006.

Second Mortgage Holders Are Supposed to Get Wiped Out (by Dean Baker)
The Post reports on an effort to revitalize the Hope for Homeowners program. It notes that second mortgage holders have often objected to loan modifications because these modifications generally wiped them out. By contrast, it suggests that there is a need to “balance” the interests of holders of first and second mortgages. It would have been worth noting that holders of second mortgages are supposed to be wiped out. Under our sacred contract law, they are not supposed to get a penny unless the holder of the first mortgage is paid in full. Since first mortgage holders are losing much of the value of their mortgages, second mortgage holders should receive zero. That would be balance.

However, second mortgage holders, which are primarily banks (a.k.a. the folks that the taxpayers bailed out) are using their legal power to block modifications to extort money from the government, even though their mortgages would be worthless in the event of a foreclosure. This point should have been made clear in this article.

Crisis spurs spike in ’suburban survivalists’ (AP)
Emergency supply retailers and military surplus stores nationwide have seen business boom in the past few months as an increasing number of Americans spooked by the economy rush to stock up on gear that was once the domain of hardcore survivalists. These people snapping up everything from water purification tablets tothermal blankets shatter the survivalist stereotype: they are mostly urban professionals with mortgages, SUVs, solid jobs and a twinge of embarrassment about their newfound hobby.

From teachers to real estate agents, these budding emergency gurus say the dismal economy has made them prepare for financial collapse as if it were an oncoming Category 5 hurricane. They worry about rampant inflation, runs on banks, bare grocery shelves and widespread power failures that could make taps run dry.

Sellers beware: Even at garage sales products must be safe (McClatchy)
Selling any used cribs or playpens at your upcoming garage sale? Children’s clothes with drawstrings or zippers? Pre-1985 books? Rubber duckies or pool floaties?

A Better Life Beckons in Africa (Washington Post)
[R]ecent studies have documented the flight of immigrant professionals from the
United States to their home countries. Chinese and Indian workers increasingly say they see better opportunities and lifestyles at home. And diaspora associations of Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans and other Africans say their members — mostly from middle-class backgrounds — are joining the exodus, choosing life in the land of slow Internet connections and power outages over the pressures of recession-era America.

Beijing is caught in ‘trap’ over dollar (Financial Times, U.K.)
Chinese and western officials in Beijing say China is caught in a “dollar trap” and has little choice but to keep pouring the bulk of its growing reserves into the US Treasury, which remains the only market big enough and liquid enough to support its huge purchases… “Because of the sheer size of its reserves Safe [China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange] will immediately disrupt any other market it tries to shift into in a big way and could also collapse the value of its existing reserves if it sold too many dollars,” said a western official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

China warns Federal Reserve over ’printing money’ (The Telegraph, U.K.)
China has warned a top member of the US Federal Reserve that it is increasingly disturbed by the Fed’s direct purchase of US Treasury bonds.

Hank Paulson Admits He Doesn’t Understand Mortgage Securities (by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic)
This quote, from Newsweek’s piece on former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, strikes me as a bombshell: “Paulson–by his own admission–was not paying much attention to the way banks were slicing and dicing mortgages and selling them as complex securities. ‘I didn’t understand the retail market; I just wasn’t close to it,’ he told NEWSWEEK.” If Newsweek won’t play prosecutor, I will: “Hank Paulson, you were Goldman’s chief executive as mortgage securities boomed in 2004-5. Your earned an incredible severance, partly because of it. And you say you didn’t understand mortgage securities? How is that remotely possible?”
How frightening is THAT?

Bank bailout: The greatest swindle ever sold (by Andy Kroll, Salon)
[R]emarkably little is known about how TARP recipients have used the government aid received. Nonetheless, recent government reports, congressional testimony, and commentaries offer those patient enough to pore over hundreds of pages of material glimpses of just how Wall Street-friendly the bailout actually is. Here, then, based on the most definitive data and analyses available, are six of the most blatant and alarming ways taxpayers have been scammed by the government’s $1.1 trillion, publicly funded bailout.

1. By overpaying for its TARP investments, the Treasury Department provided bailout recipients with generous subsidies at the taxpayer’s expense…

2. As the government has no real oversight over bailout funds, taxpayers remain in the dark about how their money has been used and if it has made any difference…

3. The bailout’s newer programs heavily favor the private sector, giving investors an opportunity to earn lucrative profits and leaving taxpayers with most of the risk…

4. The government has no coherent plan for returning failing financial institutions to profitability and maximizing returns on taxpayers’ investments…

5. The bailout’s focus on Wall Street mega-banks ignores smaller banks serving millions of American taxpayers that face an equally uncertain future…

6. The bailout encourages the very behaviors that created the economic crisis in the first place instead of overhauling our broken financial system and helping the individuals most affected by the crisis.

Credit Crisis Cassandra (by Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post, thanks to Economist’s View)
A little more than a decade ago, [Brooksley] Born foresaw a financial cataclysm, accurately predicting that exotic investments known as over-the-counter derivatives could play a crucial role in a crisis much like the one now convulsing America. Her efforts to stop that from happening ran afoul of some of the most influential men in Washington, men with names like Greenspan and Levitt and Rubin and Summers — the same Larry Summers who is now a key economic adviser to President Obama. She was the head of a tiny government agency who wanted to regulate the derivatives. They were the men who stopped her.

What Are Those Chickens Doing? (by Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker)
[…] back on the roost? “‘Congress can’t figure out what it is mad about with the Fed, but it is mad about something,’ said Fed watcher David Jones.”… As I have repeatedly pointed out The Fed is not empowered to purchase instruments that do not carry the full faith and credit of the US Federal Government (except for some very limited exceptions in which maturity does not exceed six months.) But that’s all been forgotten in the name of “expedience”.  Fannie, Freddie, Bear Stearns, AIG – all have involved The Fed buying debt – not loaning against an obligation in a fully-collateralized fashion, or to use banker’s parlance, “discounting a note.” There are all sorts of rumblings coming from
China and other parts of the world. There should be. Our “regulatory institutions”, including the OTS, FDIC and The Fed itself, have been derelict in their duties – at minimum – for years.

This sort of lawlessness along with Congressional failure to hold The Fed to account set forth a great example for The Obama Administration when it decided to decree “ex-cathedra” that creditor priority in bankruptcy is no longer the statutory law of The United States. If one agency can decide on its own initiative that the law is in fact a “polite suggestion” why not two, three or four more?

Waterboard the Fed? (by Dean Baker at Comment is free, The Guardian, U.K.)
To my knowledge, no one has proposed waterboarding the US Federal Reserve. But the hostile reaction of much of the country’s political leadership to suggestions that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit the Federal Reserve Board might lead people to think that waterboarding was being called for… [T]here is no public paper trail for the Fed’s loans, even though it has more than three times as much money outstanding as does the Treasury through the Tarp. The Fed has only provided aggregate information on the amount of loans in each of its various lending programs, and general information on the terms of the loans and the types of collateral received…

[I]t is not possible to find out in detail how much money Goldman Sachs borrowed, for example, at what interest rate, and which assets it posted as collateral. The Fed has explicitly refused to make information about specific borrowers public.

Stuff the Bankers, Starve the Kids (by Robert Scheer at Truthdig)
I expected a federal government that has spent trillions salvaging the banks that got us into this mess to find the relatively minor sums needed to bail out California and other states that have been the victims of Wall Street’s dangerous games. But I didn’t count on the tough-love steeliness of President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod, who told Californians that “there’s a limit to what the government can do” when it comes to bailing out our state (as opposed to the banks). Or of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Obviously, the state has to make some very tough fiscal decisions … [given] the budgetary constraints that they have.”

Tough for whom? Not the politicians of either party. The results of such decisions are tough for the poor of America, two-thirds of whom are kids, left to the tender mercy of the states, thanks to the sweeping “welfare reform” and other programs put into place by the Clinton White House in one of that Democratic administration’s signature triangulation ploys… Bail out the banks, but not the 500,000 poor families with children served by the CalWorks program, which will be dismantled, or the 928,000 children covered by the Healthy Families program, slated for oblivion.

Obama’s Stimulus Projects Won’t Amount to Major Infrastructure Overhaul (U.S. News)
Describing the $787 billion stimulus package, President Obama evokes the 1950s construction of the interstate system, conjuring images of highways, bridges, and orange cones… But as projects are chosen, it’s becoming clear that the program may amount to little more than an infrastructure face-lift. Owing to the need for speed and to institutional obstacles, most stimulus transportation projects are small and localized… This stems from the law’s main purpose: creating jobs quickly. It prioritizes projects that will be completed within three years. Major highway construction typically takes 13 years from start to finish, reports the Federal Highway Administration.

Chrysler on Pace for Swift Finish to Restructuring (Washington Post)
[F]ederal bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez is scheduled to consider a motion to sell most of Chrysler’s assets to a new entity led by Italy’s Fiat. The judge’s approval would set up the automaker for one of the biggest and fastest bankruptcy proceedings of its kind… Chrysler has suffered few of the problems some predicted before it filed for bankruptcy. The process has resulted in only temporary setbacks to the nationwide network of suppliers, and sales have not plunged.

Experts said that’s probably because many people view the bankruptcy as a temporary stop and because the federal government guaranteed car warranties. Preliminary reports from J.D. Power and Associates suggest that May sales were roughly on par with those of April. Opposition from creditors that surfaced during the proceedings quickly evaporated, as Gonzalez wasted little time ruling against their claims. On Tuesday, a small group of Chrysler’s senior secured lenders lost its battle to halt the sale, removing the last major hurdle to today’s hearing.

U.S. Expected to Own 70% of a Revamped G.M. (New York Times)
The latest plan for the troubled automaker, which is expected to file for bankruptcy by Monday, calls for the Treasury Department to receive about 70 percent of a restructured G.M. Including the more than $20 billion that has already been spent to prop up G.M., the government will provide G.M. at least $50 billion to get the company through Chapter 11, people with direct knowledge of the situation said Tuesday. By some estimates in
Detroit, tens of billions beyond that amount may be required. The United Automobile Workers, meanwhile, will hold up to 20 percent through its retiree health care fund, and bondholders and other parties will get the remaining share. Shareholders would be virtually wiped out.

U.S. Says North Korea Will ‘Pay a Price’ (Truthdig)
The U.N. Security Council condemned North Korea for carrying out an underground nuclear test on Monday. Pyongyang responded to the criticism by test-launching two short-range missiles, after which the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, said the actions were “clearly provocative” and that North Korea will “pay a price” for them. In response to the tests,
South Korea announced it will join a U.S.-led initiative to curb illegal nuclear trade by monitoring and searching suspect ships. Seoul had resisted joining the effort, fearing it would further antagonize the North.

Petraeus agrees with Obama: It’s time to close Guantanamo and end torture. (Think Progress)
In an interview this past weekend with Radio Free Europe, Gen. David Petraeus said that he supports President Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and opposes the use of enhanced interrogation techniques:

Pentagon Releases List of Gitmo Detainees Who Returned to Terrorism (Political Punch, ABC News)
A Pentagon report released today confirms that 14 percent of the 540 detainees — or one in seven — who were released from the detainee center Guantanamo Bay have been known or suspected of returning to terrorist activities.

Did ‘returning’ terrorists become extremists in Guantanamo? (McClatchy)
One of the detainees whom a newly released Pentagon report says returned to the battlefield after he was released from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp told McClatchy last year that he was a local security leader in Afghanistan when he was arrested and became a radical Islamist only during his detention.

FNC’s Peters: GTMO detainees “aren’t human any more, they’re monsters, and… monsters deserve to die” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Army chief: US ready to be in Iraq 10 years (AP)
The Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces inIraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between the
United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012, the top U.S. Army officer said Tuesday. Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, said the world remains dangerous and unpredictable, and the Pentagon must plan for extended U.S. combat and stability operations in two wars. “Global trends are pushing in the wrong direction,” Casey said. “They fundamentally will change how the Army works.”

He spoke at an invitation-only briefing to a dozen journalists and policy analysts from Washington-based think-tanks. He said his planning envisions combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade as part of a sustained U.S. commitment to fighting extremism and terrorism in the Middle East.

White House to Merge Domestic, International Security Staffs (AntiWar.com)
President Obama announced today that he will be combining the White House staffs dealing with international and homeland security, claiming that the move would “make Americans safer.” The president will establish a “global engagement directorate” and a “National Security staff” that will deal with all policymaking related to “international, transnational, and homeland security matters.” National Security Adviser James Jones will head the staff.

Jones, a former Marine commandant, praised the move, saying that “terror around the world doesn’t recognize borders.” President Obama said the move “will end the artificial divide between White House staff who have been dealing with national security and homeland security issues.”

Shhhhhh…It’s Still a (State) Secret (The Public Record)
[I]n the same week as the President was arguing for more transparency in government and railing against the idea of protecting information “merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrasses the government” – he was invoking it yet again. In a bid to squelch a U.K. court case involving alleged British complicity with the CIA in the rendition, imprisonment and torture of a British resident, the Foreign Office presented a letter urging continuing secrecy from – yes, you guessed it — the Obama Administration.

US wants to paint the world white to save energy (AFP)
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday the Obama administration wanted to paint roofs an energy-reflecting white, as he took part in a climate change symposium in London. The Nobel laureate in physics called for a “new revolution” in energy generation to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But he warned there was no silver bullet for tackling climate change, and said a range of measures should be introduced, including painting flat roofs white. Making roads and roofs a paler colour could have the equivalent effect of taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years,
Chu said. It was a geo-engineering scheme that was “completely benign” and would keep buildings cooler and reduce energy use from air conditioning, as well as reflecting sunlight back away from the Earth.

For people who found white hard on the eye, scientists had also developed “cool colours” which looked to the human eye like normal ones, but reflect heat like pale colours even if they are darker shades. And painting cars in cool or light colours could deliver considerable savings on energy use for air conditioning units, he said.
Excellent idea. We can also put down big swaths of reflective material where glaciers used to be, since we’ve lost that sunlight reflection.

Once Considered Unthinkable, U.S. Sales Tax Gets Fresh Look (Washington Post)
With budget deficits soaring and President Obama pushing a trillion-dollar-plus expansion of health coverage, some Washington policymakers are taking a fresh look at a money-making idea long considered politically taboo: a national sales tax. Common around the world, including in Europe, such a tax — called a value-added tax, or VAT — has not been seriously considered in the United States. But advocates say few other options can generate the kind of money the nation will need to avert fiscal calamity.
Sales taxes are regressive—they hit the poorest the hardest. The best option for raising taxes is to re-institute a truly progressive income tax. The more you make and the more you have, the bigger is your stake in this country, its infrastructure, its people, and its defense. You should be proud to contribute a larger percentage of your income than those who have less.

Supreme Court says suspects can be interrogated without lawyer present (AP)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned a long-standing ruling that stopped police from initiating questions unless a defendant’s lawyer was present, a move that will make it easier for prosecutors to interrogate suspects… “It would be completely unjustified to presume that a defendant’s consent to police-initiated interrogation was involuntary or coerced simply because he had previously been appointed a lawyer,” [Justice Antonin] Scalia said in the court’s opinion.

Murtha Gets Primary Challenge (Political Wire)
Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) will face a primary challenge next year from former naval officer Ryan Bucchianeri (D), the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. Bucchianeri made headlines when he missed an 18-yard field-goal attempt while playing for the Navy football team in the early 1990s. Murtha has increasingly been investigated for earmarks he directed back to his district as well as his ties to lobbyists.

Democrats Work to Clear Field for Specter (Political Wire)
The Pittsburgh Tribune Review says that word out of Washington, D.C. is that the DSCC and “the political wiseguys from the Obama administration” plan on “visiting with” Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA). Their objective: Get him “off the stage and out of a primary race” against Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA). Sestek says he’s “received a call” from DSCC chairman Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) “but we keep missing each other.”

Analyst Who Predicted Meltdown Leaning Towards Challenging Chris Dodd (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Peter Schiff, a Connecticut-based brokerage firm owner who has been widely hailed for predicting the U.S. financial meltdown, says he’s “leaning towards” challenging Chris Dodd’s reelection next year, a move that could make the contest a nationally watched media event. “It’s better than 50-50,” Schiff told me a few moments ago, saying he’d decide in the next “two to three weeks.” National Dems say they would take Schiff seriously, because of his personal wealth and because his predictions have made him something of a YouTube folk hero.
It’s the wealth that gets them. The Party doesn’t want you unless you’re a self funder.

Burris on tape offering a check for Blagojevich (Chicago Breaking News)
A transcript of a secretly recorded phone call between the brother of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and U.S. Sen. Roland Burris was released in federal court today, a call in which Burris, then seeking the Senate seat, was recorded offering the Blagojevich campaign a campaign check.

No Improvement for Paterson (Political Wire)
According to a new Siena Research poll, New York Gov. David Paterson (D) is viewed favorably by just 27% of voters and just 15% of voters are prepared to elect him as Governor in 2010. Meanwhile, if a Democratic primary were held today, Andrew Cuomo (D) would crush Paterson (D) by a 70% to 19% margin, with even African American voters supporting Cuomo by better than two-to-one.

Judge overturns Florida election law as free speech limit (McClatchy)
A Florida campaign law requiring nonpartisan groups to register as elections groups unconstitutionally limits political free speech, a federal judge has ruled.

Liz Cheney doesn’t rule out run for office, but says she doesn’t plan to ‘right now.’ (Think Progress)
On Friday, Washington Whispers’ Paul Bedard reported that some conservatives want Liz Cheney to run for office, believing that “she’s a chip off the block!” ThinkProgress noted yesterday that Republican political guru Karl Rove has said that “she might” run at some point. Asked about the rampant speculation on Fox News today, Cheney didn’t rule out an eventual run for office, simply saying, “it’s not something I’m focused on right now.”

Frank Luntz: It doesn’t matter what Obama’s health care plan says, we’ll still call it ‘government takeover.’ (Think Progress)
In an interview with the New York Times, GOP wordsmith Frank Luntz — who recently penned a health care messaging memo instructing Republicans to attack President Obama’s health reform efforts by criticizing the deficiencies in foreign health care systems — concedes that Republicans will label Obama’s reform effort a “government takeover” of health care, regardless of the actual proposal:

Is it a correct description of the president’s plans for reform?
We don’t know what he is proposing. We want to avoid “a
Washington takeover.”

But that’s not at issue. What the Democrats want is for everyone to be able to choose between their old, private health-insurance plan and an all-new, public health-insurance option.
I’m not a policy person. I’m a language person.

Indeed, “rather than challenging the tenets of American reform proposals, Luntz establishes a straw man argument against a non-existent health plan.” As Democratic strategist Paul Begala observes in a recent retort to the Luntz memo, “Because they know they cannot win the argument honestly, Republicans are resorting to mendacity.”
And the Democrats have yet to win one of these battles. How is it that I figured out what was going on within a few months of getting involved in politics in 2000, and the Democratic Party still hasn’t found a way to successfully fight these attacks, after more than 20 years?

I Can Has Cheeseburger, thanks to All Hat No Cattle

Woodward on ‘NYT’ Ignoring Watergate Scoop: Reporting Would Have Made The Difference 
“Watergate wasn’t about a tip,” Bob Woodward told E&P Tuesday. “It was about extensive reporting and getting information you can put in the paper. They decided not to do the reporting. We get this idea that this is about one story or one source or one tip, it is not.”

Rewriting the media’s role, again, in the run-up to the Iraq War (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Sadly that’s what unfolded on NPR over the weekend, as “On the Media” looked at the press’ coverage of the supposed Cheney/Obama showdown over national security last week… See, the press had its hands tied. It couldn’t scrutinize Bush’s war policy because the Dems remained mum. Oh brother. So suddenly Beltway pundits and reporters don’t make a move until the DNC tells them to? That’s a pretty loopy/naive way to look at how news and commentary is made inside the nation’s capitol.

But more importantly it’s just dead wrong to claim that no famous Democrats stepped forward t[o] challenge Bush on the war. Or are Al Gore and Ted Kennedy not famous enough to garner media attention? In late 2002 both men made very public speeches that raised all kinds of doubts about Bush’s war plan; doubts that were proven to be quite accurate. The media’s reaction? The press sure as hell didn’t ‘glom’ onto Gore or Kennedy. In fact the press pretty much did the opposite–they ignored the buzz kill Democrats. Take a look at the ABC World News Tonight report on Gore’s September 23, 2002 speech. The report was buried mid-broadcast.

Anderson Writes About Recession’s Effects (Women’s Wear Daily)
Kurt Andersen’s late March cover story in Time, “The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?” has already been turned into a book, to be published by Random House in July. Tom Brokaw is contributing a foreword.
Ah, yes. Tom Brokaw, that famous opponent of excess.

Van Susteren Defends Her Brand (New York Times)
Greta Van Susteren responds to seemingly every perceived blemish — and lately there have been plenty. Her critics have questioned her husband’s advising of Gov. Sarah Palin of
Alaska and portrayed Van Susteren as a spokeswoman of sorts for the governor and the governor’s husband, Todd.

Media Matters for America headlines

Wash. Times, CQ uncritically report criticism that Sotomayor’s Supreme Court reversal rate is “high”

Media cite “policy” comment in falsely accusing Sotomayor of “judicial activism”

Fox’s Bream falsely suggests Sotomayor ruling in firefighters case outside the mainstream

Lowry distorts Sotomayor statement on whether “judges should transcend their ‘personal sympathies and prejudices’ “

Fox airs on-screen graphics featuring Sotomayor’s college yearbook quote of Socialist Thomas

Milbank joins smear campaign challenging Sotomayor’s intellect

Lauer falsely claims Sotomayor said appellate courts make policy rather than interpreting laws

REPORT: America: A Center-Left Nation

WSJ, USA Today advance conservatives’ distortions of Sotomayor’s Duke remark

Conservatives react to historic Supreme Court nominee by smearing Sotomayor as “racist,” “bigot”

Iran: Access to Facebook Restored
Its blocking on Saturday generated accusations that
Iran was trying to muzzle the opposition during the presidential campaign.

EU Moves Step Closer to Blanket Terms for Net Music Sales
Selling music legally online in Europe got a whole lot easier Tuesday, when French royalties-collecting agency SACEM agreed in principle to relinquish its tight grip on the handling of royalties for artists based in France.

White House to release cybersecurity review
A long-awaited
U.S. cybersecurity report, which could lay the groundwork for how the United States will fight data-network thefts of defense and corporate secrets, money and personal identities, will be released Friday.

U.S. holds journalist without charges in Iraq
Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam has been held since September. The U.S. military rejected a court order to release him, saying he is a ‘high security threat.’ No evidence has been presented.

Judges Quashes Subpoena for Journo–Citing New Shield Law 
A state judge quashed a subpoena Tuesday that sought testimony from a local television reporter, using for what was believed to be the first time a law enacted earlier this month giving journalists limited protection from subpoena.

Digital TV transition: Almost all are ready
More than three months since the digital TV transition was delayed by Congress, more Americans are prepared  for the  switch, but there are still 3.3 million of them, or 2.9 percent of households, that remain “completely unready,” according to the Nielsen Co.

Court says no exclusive cable rights in apartments
Cable companies cannot have exclusive rights to provide service in apartment buildings that they wire, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The decision from the Court of Appeals in Washington upholds a Federal Communications Commission ruling that banned the exclusive agreements as anticompetitive.
I believe this ruling applies only to rental apartments, not to condo buildings. My condo building’s board negotiates a price for all of us.

NYT’s Price Hike Can’t Hide The Real Problem: The Paper Lacks A Core Mission (by Lauren Rich Fine at Paid Content)
Dear New York Times,

Thank you for the letter describing your plans to raise home-delivery circulation rates for my region (Ohio) beginning June 1. You plan to charge me $7.40 for the shrinking Sunday edition and $14.80 for a weekly subscription—that comes to about $770 a year. You are pushing me to my limit and, as a result, I have had quite a few conversations with myself…

I want to be supportive of you, and I might even pay the higher circulation rate—for now. Maybe you could offer me some options. This might be a good time to promote the electronic version of your paper. Perhaps you could offer specific sections for a lower rate. What about the Kindle version of the paper? The new Kindle retails for $489 and a monthly subscription to the Times is $13.99; therefore, the first year costs about $657 and then is only $168 a year thereafter. While I might consider a charitable contribution to support investigative journalism, I suspect I am part of a small minority. Further, while I applaud many of your online efforts and admire many of your journalists and columnists, I am circumspect of corporate management and would be really hesitant to hand them a check.

Sincerely,
Lauren Rich Fine

Chicago Tribune Launches New ‘Huffington Post Meets Facebook’ Blog Network (by Will Sullivan at Poynter Online)
On Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune launched ChicagoNow.com in beta. The Web site, which ChicagoNow Editorial Director Tracy Schmidt described as “Huffington Post meets Facebook for Chicago” at an SND Chicago meetup two weeks ago, is currently a network of 34 niche Chicago-focused blogs. Tribune’s promo video for the site outlines plans that involve expanding to at least 80 blogs by the end of 2009. The site, which was built on the Moveable Type blogging platform, is targeted to take market share from Google, Yahoo! and the Chicago editions of The Huffington Post and ESPN.

“We really have our backs against the wall,” says Globe pressman
“We can’t go pick up tools and get a job somewhere else,” says Boston Globe pressman Stephen Sullivan. “Reporters, photographers can potentially get jobs somewhere else. But we print the printed word. That’s our trade and there’s nowhere for us to go right now.” The Globe pressmen vote today on concessions.

Magazine Devoted to Print Is Moving to the Web
Last week, subscribers to Presstime, the monthly magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, received, along with the new issue, a letter informing them that it was the last hard copy they would see. Presstime, its staff already much reduced, will continue on the association’s Web site.

More Mags Jump On The Premium App Bandwagon (by Tameka Kee at Paid Content)
Magazine publishers clearly have all that iPhone app store revenue on the brain. Just a week after People.com rolled out its $1.99 iPhone application, comes news that publishers like Time, Conde Nast and Hachette Filipacchi have plans to either release pay-for mobile apps or bundle subscription-based “premium” features to their existing free ones… The challenge lies in creating the right mix of exclusive content and premium functionality so that people will want to pay.

10 New Sitcoms Meant to Cure the Recession Blues
The networks are betting viewers want to feel better, so they’re prescribing sitcoms and in one case — the new Jay Leno show — a risky treatment.

Can a Slate site featuring Shafer on the media be far off?
Jeremy Shown complains that Slate “has developed too many new spin-off websites devoted to narrow interests and in the process starved the original Slate of the variety and quality that made it special. Channeling your content into narrow fields not only leaves the original site weaker, but creates a new site that is weak on two counts”: it’s devoted to a single topic, and it’s largely dominated by a single way of thinking about that single topic.

Digg Adds Twitter and Facebook Sharing Options (Mashable)
Although Digg’s move earlier this year to launch its own URL shortener and the accompanying DiggBar was controversial, it hasn’t stopped the company’s ambitions to be a key player in sharing content on the Web. [Tuesday], the social news site … debuted new sharing options that can be found on every story: the ability to Tweet it and the option to share it on Facebook, as well as an email to friend feature. All of these options point users to Digg’s short URL for the story, which, will result in users seeing the infamous DiggBar if they’re logged into Digg and have opted in to the feature.

So what does this move mean? Likely that you’ll be seeing a lot more Digg URLs on Twitter and Facebook, as Digg members utilize the one-click options for sharing stories they find on the site on their social network of choice. It also means that Digg’s “Shout” feature is gone, as announced at Digg’s Townhall last week. More significantly, it further signals that Twitter and Facebook have become the epicenters for sharing content on the Web. Now, Digg is just re-positioning itself to make sure it gets a piece of the action.

What Is Facebook Actually Worth?
A Russian Internet investment group is plugging $200 million into the company for about a 2 percent stake. By that arithmetic, Facebook would be worth $10 billion.

90 Percent of E-mail Is Spam, Symantec Says
Spammers seem to be working a little bit harder these days, according to Symantec, which reported Tuesday that unsolicited e-mail made up 90.4 percent of messages on corporate networks last month.

Stats: iPhone a Superior Platform for Mobile Ads (Mashable)
The iPhone might already be a superior platform for running mobile applications, but is it also a superior platform for advertisers? A new study from BrightKite and market research firm GfK NOP suggests that it might be. The numbers – published [Tuesday] by eMarketer – show that iPhone users are far more likely to recall mobile ads than users of other types of handsets. For example, on ads running on mobile websites, 28.4 percent of iPhone users were able to recall ads, versus just 10.7 percent for non-iPhone users. The stats were similar across other forms of mobile advertising, with iPhone users being more likely to recall ads via SMS, location-based services, and social networks, among other formats.
Click through for the full breakdown.

RoamBi: Make Your Excel Spreadsheets Gorgeous on the iPhone (Mashable)
A problem that almost all mobile phone users encounter is the issue of viewing complex applications and documents on the small phone screen. Say you want to look at a company spreadsheet or a set of records – how do you best view this information without straining your eyes or knocking your head into a wall? RoamBi tries to solve that problem by making spreadsheets usable – and even beautiful – on the iPhone. RoamBi takes any information you upload, like a spreadsheet or a chart, and changes it into a far more pleasing and intuitive interface.

Media & Politics

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Matt Davies

Obama’s Guantanamo Appeasement Plan (by Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild, writing at Truthdig)
Two days after his inauguration, President Obama pledged to close
Guantanamo within one year. The Republicans, led by Sens. John McCain, Mitch McConnell and Pat Roberts, immediately launched a concerted campaign to assail the new president… [N]ow even the Democrats are piling on the bandwagon… The pressure has caused Obama to buckle…

These are Obama’s five categories for disposition of detainees once Guantanamo is closed:
1) Those who violated the laws of war will be tried in military commissions…
2) Those who have been ordered released from Guantanamo will remain in custody…
3) Those who cannot be prosecuted yet “pose a clear danger to the American people” will remain in custody with no right to legal process of any kind…
4) Those who can be safely transferred to other countries will be transferred…
5) Those who violated U.S. criminal laws will be tried in federal courts…

This [last] is the only clearly acceptable part of Obama’s plan. All detainees slated to remain in custody should be placed into this category. The federal courts provide due process as required by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which does not limit due process rights to U.S. citizens: “No person … shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The federal courts are well suited to deal with accused terrorists. Indeed, federal judges who have presided over such cases say that the Classified Information Procedures Act can effectively protect classified intelligence in federal court trials.

If Mr. Obama proceeds with the plan he announced this week, he will empower those who point to U.S. hypocrisy on human rights as a justification to do us harm. Obama’s capitulation to the intelligence gurus and the right-wing attack dogs will not only imperil the rule of law; it will actually make us more vulnerable to future acts of terrorism.

Report: Reid Bucked Obama On Gitmo For Fear Of Looking “Liberal” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Adam Nagourney reports this morning on the thinking of Harry Reid, suggesting that Reid dramatically broke with President Obama’s policy of closing Guantanamo Bay because he’s worried that Republicans trying to snatch his Senate seat next year will paint him as too liberal… If Nagourney is right about Reid’s thinking, the Republicans don’t even have a candidate to run against him yet, but they’ve already gotten Reid to adopt a defensive crouch. Clearly, last November’s victory did little to impair the unerring instinct Congressional Dems have for letting Republicans set the terms of the debate on key national security issues.
Isn’t that what’s been happening for the last 15 years? Republicans scarify and scream and holler and get their way while Democrats whimper and give in?

Wallace allows Kyl to claim: “It is palpably false to suggest that the existence of Gitmo created terrorism” (County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Previously:
Memo to Chris Wallace: Military officials say Gitmo has been a “recruiting tool” for terrorists

Backlash grows against Obama’s preventive detention proposal (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
On Friday, Sen. Russ Feingold sent a letter … to Obama which, while praising some aspects of his speech, vowed to hold hearings on his detention proposal, and in the letter, Feingold rather emphatically highlighted the radical and dangerous aspects of Obama’s approach: …[A]ny system that permits the government to indefinitely detain individuals without charge or without a meaningful opportunity to have accusations against them adjudicated by an impartial arbiter violates basic American values and is likely unconstitutional.”… Feingold’s last point — that the more Obama embraces radical Bush/Cheney polices, the more entrenched they become as bipartisan consensus — is critically important, and extends to other policies as well…

[T]he hardest-core followers of George Bush can barely contain their admiration for Obama’s “counter-terrorism” policies (National Review’s Rich Lowry:  ”it’s kind of a funny debate because Obama has embraced the essentials of the Bush counterterrorism program. I think that program worked, I think it’s wise of him to do that and it, it reflects some admirable kind of flexibility and pragmatism”).

Why Obama Owes Bush an Apology (by Clive Crook, Financial Times, U.K.)
Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.
Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them.
Crook agrees with Obama’s move to the right. I do not.

What they’re saying about Obama: More worms turn (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)

Liz Cheney Reveals That Fear Of Prosecution Motivates Dad’s Media Blitz Defending Torture (Think Progress)
[Thursday] night on CNN, … Cheney’s daughter Liz revealed that fear of prosecution is indeed a motivating factor in the former vice president’s current media campaign: “L. CHENEY: I don’t think he planned to be doing this, you know, when they left office in January. But I think, as it became clear that President Obama was not only going to be stopping some of these policies, that he was going to be doing things like releasing the — the techniques themselves, so that the terrorists could now train to them, that he was suggesting that perhaps we would even be prosecuting former members of the Bush administration.”
Click through to watch the video.

Powell Hits Back At Cheney, GOP On Gitmo Closing (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Colin Powell hit back at Dick Cheney and other critics over the president’s plan to close Guantanamo Bay on Sunday. Scoffing at the notion that U.S. jails couldn’t house suspected terrorists, he said that the facility has become a blight on America’s image… “Mr. Cheney the other day said, well, we’re doing it to satisfy European intellectuals or something like that. No,” said Powell. “We’re doing it to reassure Europeans, Muslims, Arabs, all the people around the world that we are a nation of law.”

Powell Much More Popular Than Cheney, Limbaugh (Political Wire)
A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds that 70% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Colin Powell, while just 30% have a favorable view of Rush Limbaugh and 37% have a positive view of Dick Cheney.

Should a Brookings “expert” know what the presidential oath says? (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
The claim that the President takes an oath to “defend the country” — as though he’s some sort of National Security Daddy-Monarch whose supreme, overriding duty is to Keep Us Safe — is one of the most basic, common and destructive myths in our discourse.  That was the warped mindset that lay at the heart of the Bush/ Cheney/ Addington/ Yoo model of the presidency — that everything, including limitations on presidential powers and the Constitution itself, is subordinated to the sole mandate that the President do everything possible — whatever is necessary — to Protect Us All. 

Does E.J. Dionne Believe President Obama “Manipulated” Him? (Dissenting Justice)
In his most recent [column], Dionne discusses Obama’s centrist politics. Dionne argues that in order to build a political coalition to support his policies, Obama employs multiple, perhaps conflicting, messages… Dionne’s essay comes across as a very subtle and diplomatic effort of an adoring fan to criticize Obama for manipulating people with shifting rhetoric. Dionne also seems to suggest that Obama needs to take more definitive and consistent stances on policy issues because the “two-step” strategy will have clear limitations. Dionne’s analysis shows that scrutiny and support for a politician are not mutually inconsistent concepts. Perhaps other members of the media will soon discover this fact as well.

Why is truth important?
Truthiness and consequences
(by vastleft at Corrente)
Harry G. Frankfurt, of “On Bullshit” fame, from his book on truth: “Surely it is apparent… that in large part we select the objects that we desire, that we love, and to which we commit ourselves, because of what we believe about them—for instance, that they will increase our wealth or protect our health, or that they will serve our interests in some other way. Hence, the truth or the falsity of the factual statements on which we rely in explaining or in validating our choice of goals and our commitments is inescapably relevant to the rationality of our attitudes and our choices.”
Buy it: On Truth

President Has “More Effective” Method to Get Intel from Terrorists – What Is It? (by Dennis Prager, a conservative)
In his latest address – on
Guantanamo detainees – President Obama said something of extraordinary importance that seems to have been missed by the media: “I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more.I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation.”… I pray the President is right. I would love America to be able to say “America never uses brutal methods of interrogation, let alone tortures” while simultaneously obtaining information it needs from captured terrorists to save thousands of innocent people from death and maiming.

But if in fact, these methods exist, they have never been revealed. President Obama needs to share this discovery with the American people, or, if they must be state secrets, with a select few individuals from Congress and the intelligence community.
Really, Dennis, you should get out more. See below.

Interrogation without Torture (by Mary at The Left Coaster)
“We gave our word to every detainee that no harm would come to him or his family. This invariably stunned them, and they would feel more obligated to cooperate. Also, because all information led to more information, detainees were astonished to find out how much we already knew about them—their networks, their families, their histories. Some seemed relieved to reveal their secrets. When they broke, the transformations were remarkable. Their bodies would go limp. Many would weep. Most would ask to pray. These were men undergoing profound emotional and spiritual turmoil—the result of going from a belief that their destiny was to fight and kill people like us to a decision that they should cooperate with the enemy.”

Why did this method work when [Jack] Cloonan was interrogating his subjects? Well, because it was built on interrogation methods that had been shown to be effective in World War 2. As Henry Porter wrote, Major Sherwood Moran found that he could get reliable information from his Japanese prisoners of war while in the midst of the battle for Guadalcanal using humane techniques.

U.S. judge warns Justice Dept. (San Francisco Chronicle)
A federal judge in San Francisco lashed out Friday at the Obama administration for its refusal to share a classified document with an Islamic group that claims it was illegally wiretapped, and said he may declare the group the winner by default in its lawsuit against the government. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who has expressed increasing frustration with the Justice Department’s hard line in the case, raised the stakes in his latest order by suggesting he would issue a final ruling against the government and order it to pay damages.

Obama picks first Hispanic for Supreme Court (AP)
President Barack Obama chose federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court justice on Tuesday, praising her as “an inspiring woman” with both the intellect and compassion to interpret the Constitution wisely.

Justice Rollout Like an Election Campaign (Political Wire)
As President Obama prepares to nominate his first Supreme Court justice, the White House is doubtless considering not only whom to select but how best to introduce the nominee to the public, CQ Politics reports. The process of selling a high court pick — to the nation as well as the Senate — has become as elaborate as an election campaign, complete with photogenic stagecraft, polling and occasionally attack advertising. And the battle to control the message begins the minute the president announces his choice.”
It has to be a campaign, nowadays. Too bad she’s divorced. Otherwise, her husband could run from the hearing room crying, as Mrs. Alito did.

CQ’s Allen says SCOTUS pick presents “good opportunity” to rally GOP “particularly to raise money” (County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Stop, you’re Kyl-ing me (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Senator John Kyl of
Arizona … seems to think that a Justice capable of empathy is going to make decisions based on caprice. An inane assertion. Some psychologists have created therapies around the concept of “acting as if” — for example, if you act as if you are not depressed, eventually you will not be depressed. I don’t know if that idea works, but I can see that the Republicans are trying a version of it.

They are acting as if Obama were a Socialist, a Marxist, a big taxer, a feminist, a weak-kneed librul, a soft-hearted pansy. He’s none of those things, but the facts do not matter. Guys like Kyl are all about creating a perception. The Republicans believe that if they act as if Obama fit those descriptions, eventually the country will apply them to the president, despite a distinct lack of evidence.

[In comments] myiq2xu said… By acting as if Obama were really a fringe lefty, the GOP allows him to move farther and farther right without alienating the Kool-aiders.

My comment: Obama benefited from the as if phenomenon during the primary. Many people who should have known better let themselves believe he was a liberal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. It’s only fitting that the same phenomenon should come back to bite him in the ass.

myiq: The GOP is PURPOSELY pushing Obama to the right by acting as if he’s some wild-eyed far left winger. It’s exactly what they did to Bill Clinton. You’d think the left wouldn’t allow itself to be hoodwinked again with the very same trick, but you would be wrong if you thought that.

Hillary Rodham Clinton surprises Yale graduates (AP, thanks to Alegre)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made a surprise return to her alma mater on Monday, picking up an honorary degree from Yale University 36 years after earning her law degree from the Ivy League school. Graduates celebrating commencement at Yale erupted in cheers as
Clinton was introduced. In keeping with Yale tradition, the names of honorary degree recipients are a closely held secret, although word began trickling out Sunday of Clinton’s participation… She expressed hope that every graduate would “use every creative gene you have” in order to work “on behalf of the public good.”

North Korea Announces 2nd Test of Nuclear Device (New York Times)
North Korea said it had successfully conducted its second nuclear test, raising the stakes in the effort to get the nation to give up its nuclear weapons program.

Report: NKorea test-fires 2 more missiles (AP)
North Korea launched tests Tuesday of two more short-range missiles a day after detonating a nuclear bomb underground, a news report said, pushing the regime’s confrontation with world powers further despite the threat of U.N. Security Council action.

Selective Memory Alert: Forbes Article Blames Obama for North Korea’s Recent Missile Launch (Dissenting Justice)
In a stunning defiance of history, Bahukutumbi Raman, the Director of the Institute for Topical Studies in Chennai, India, blames President Obama for North Korea’s recent missile testing. In an article published in Forbes, Raman … complains that Obama, like President Carter, could create an image of the United States as “soft and confused” on foreign policy. Raman, however, fails to disclose the fact that North Korea’s “missile program” began and grew substantially during the 1980s and 1990s, while presumably “tough and coherent” Republicans and a Democrat occupied the White House.

Gates Says Taliban Have Momentum in Afghanistan (Wall Street Journal)
American public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves “a perceptible shift in momentum,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview. Mr. Gates said the momentum in
Afghanistan is with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country. The defense chief has been moving aggressively to salvage the war in Afghanistan… “People are willing to stay in the fight, I believe, if they think we’re making headway,” he said. “If they think we’re stalemated and having our young men and women get killed, then patience is going to run out pretty fast.”

Netanyahu Backs Settlement Expansion (Truthdig)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet he would not oppose the “natural growth” of settlements, saying, “There is no way that we are going to tell people not to have children or to force young people to move away from their families.” Israeli settlements are widely seen as a hindrance to the peace process.

Obama: “We’re Out Of Money” (video, Real Clear Politics)
Barack Obama tells C-SPAN’s Steve Scully: “Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.”

LOLFed

State of Paralysis (by Paul Krugman)
Last week Bill Gross of Pimco, the giant bond fund, warned that the U.S. government may lose its AAA debt rating in a few years, thanks to the trillions it’s spending to rescue the economy and the banks. Is that a real possibility? Well, in a rational world Mr. Gross’s warning would make no sense. America’s projected deficits may sound large, yet it would take only a modest tax increase to cover the expected rise in interest payments — and right now American taxes are well below those in most other wealthy countries. The fiscal consequences of the current crisis, in other words, should be manageable.

But that presumes that we’ll be able, as a political matter, to act responsibly. The example of California shows that this is by no means guaranteed. And the political problems that have plagued California for years are now increasingly apparent at a national level. To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore. And that party still has 40 senators.

After throwing the banksters their trillions, Obama throws the states and health care under the bus (by lambert at Corrente)
So, if we’re “out of money” why aren’t we taking immediate advantage of the savings that single payer would bring? Single payer has overhead of 3%. The health insurance companies take 30% in CEO compensation, profit, and the administrative expenses of denying people care. Going from 30% to 3% saves at least $350 billion a year. But Obama doesn’t want to do that. The only conclusion possible is that for Obama, we’re out of money for some people, but not for others. Can anybody think of a distinguishing factor?

Mr. President, Show Me the Stimulus Money (Marketwatch)
Three months after the passage of a much ballyhooed stimulus package aimed at resuscitating the economy and creating jobs, precious little federal money has actually been paid out.

S.C. high court sets stimulus suit deadline (McClatchy)
The S.C. Supreme Court will begin today gathering arguments in two lawsuits that ask the court to determine whether Gov. Mark Sanford must comply with a state budget that requires him to accept a disputed $350 million in federal stimulus money.

China still buying record amounts of U.S. bonds: report (Reuters)
China’s official foreign exchange manager is still buying record amounts of U.S. government bonds, in spite of Beijing’s increasingly vocal fear of a dollar collapse, the Financial Times reported.

Job Losses Push Safer Mortgages to Foreclosure (New York Times)
As job losses rise, the nation’s real estate disaster is shifting from subprime loans to prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

Housing: Recovering or Not? (Business Week)
Just as optimism began to bloom,
U.S. housing starts hit a record low. The sector may endure a long bottoming process.

No HOPE for homeowners (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
When Geithner sold his plan to give away trillions to the big banks, he also promised that the administration would offer help to the many thousands of homeowners who are under water. That plan was called HOPE for homeowners. How many people has HOPE helped? Right now, the number is holding steady at…er…um…one. One as in 1 as in uno as in the loneliest number… Obama has signed a reworked version of HOPE. He says he HOPEs to do better.

Amid Housing Bust, Phoenix Begins a New Frenzy (New York Times)
Every weekday morning, Lou Jarvis drives the sun-baked suburban streets looking for investment gold: a family that will lose its house in a foreclosure auction within a few hours. If the property looks promising, Mr. Jarvis puts in a bid on behalf of any of his dozens of clients eager to become landlords. When he wins, he offers to let the family stay in the house and rent for much less than their mortgage payment.

Regulation war: business in crosshairs (Politico)
The Treasury Department this week is expected to unveil its plan for revamping the patchwork of agencies that oversee the financial industry… The upshot is a classic legislative Christmas tree laden with proposed regulations that carry profound consequences for corporate
America and the post-recession economy… The economic implosion last summer exposed a host of weaknesses — including gaps in oversight, or lax application of it — that prevented early detection of the financial threats, a full understanding of the scale of the problems and an inadequacy of tools to respond to them.

Confronted with those facts, even financial industry officials concede that new regulations are in order. Their worry is overreach — that Congress will impose a draconian system that stifles innovation and handicaps U.S. markets globally.
They didn’t complain about overreach when it was the Ponzi schemers and the hedge hogs doing whatever the hell they wanted to do.

Don’t pin the recession on AIG’s Joe Cassano (by Matt Taibbi at True/Slant, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
The problem isn’t a few technical glitches in the system that allowed the [Joe] Cassanos of the world to drive Mack Trucks of leverage through a loophole or two. The problem is, at its roots, a profound collapse of morals on Wall Street that would have found its way to financial destruction using any available set of instruments and laws. We are talking about people who sold giant rafts of bullshit mortgages to pensions, who stuck municipalities, innocent taxpayers, with time-bombs of subprime debt. And not just one trader here and there, but thousands of them, with the sober approval of the highest level executives in the biggest firms. On its most basic level what these people did is rip off huge institutional investors — old people, taxpayers, you and me — by finding ways to game the system and trick the big institutional fund managers into buying what they thought were safe investments, but were actually financial lemons that could barely make it out of the lot…

These Wall Street players are enormously compensated, which supposedly means that society highly values their work and is willing to pay them a premium to do it. Having been given that kind of responsibility and trust, these assholes should not then force us to police them as tightly as we police those who we expect to steal from us, like third-rate car salesmen, telemarketers, hookers and three-card monty dealers… Still, you can be sure that people will find a way to blame the Cassanos and Madoffs of the world for all our troubles, and business will try to go on as usual. And we’ll have more catastrophes. It’s the nature of the beast.

Yep, Geithner’s giving the Banksters whatever they want:
Geithner Adopts Part of Wall Street Derivatives Plan (Bloomberg)
The U.S. Treasury’s plan to regulate the over-the-counter derivatives market outlined by Secretary Timothy Geithner on May 13 contains recommendations similar to those made by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG and Barclays Plc three months earlier. The banks sent the Treasury a plan written in February titled “Outline of Potential OTC Derivatives Legislative Proposal,” saying the Federal Reserve should extend capital and margin requirements to companies and hedge funds that trade in the $592 trillion unregulated market, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News and confirmed by the Treasury. Energy companies, corporations and hedge funds don’t face such requirements now, while banks do under central bank oversight.

“The banks appear to wish to maintain the intra-dealer market and raise barriers to new entrants to keep the OTC business as compartmentalized as possible and to protect their profitable market conditions,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. “The Street’s lobbyists appear to be asking for a ‘club’ structure in OTC trading.”

Here’s one more reason why allowing gigantic media conglomerates is a bad thing:
The Back Story to Bailout Nation
(by Barry Ritholtz)
Bailout Nation was written as 3 complete books over 18 months. The first version was a history of bailouts… After I handed the book into the publisher (McGraw Hill), they let me know they had problems with my assessment of the Ratings Agencies. They were unhappy with my calling them “Pimps & Hos“, or describing their business model of rating junk bonds as AAA for big fees as “Payola.” (What else would you call it?) Not coincidentally, McGraw Hill owns of the largest Rating Agencies, Standard & Poor’s… [After a second version was rejected], I exercised my right to buy the manuscript back from them…

The third version was the charm… Astonishing things happened as the book progresses. The more I researched and wrote, the more it was apparent we were witnessing the greatest heist ever made. By the last section of the book, history’s biggest transfer of wealth — from the taxpayer to the Banksters — was taking place. Trillions were being shifted from the responsible to the reckless, from the prudent to the incompetent. It was infuriating — and you will see as the book progresses my initial academic tone gets replaced with greater snark and anger. I not only had my ending, I had a new cause — exposing those who caused this mess, be they Democrat or Republican, Corporate CEO or derivatives trader. I hope the end result is something that will inform and illuminate, while entertaining you along the way.
Now available: Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy

Obama Sends Rebs a Wreath (Truthdig)
President Obama decided not to break with White House custom this Memorial Day and sent a wreath to honor the fallen Confederate soldiers who wanted nothing to do with the
Union. But he also started a new and long-overdue tradition by honoring the hundreds of thousands of black Americans who fought against the South.

Obama Picks Shuttle Veteran To Be First Black NASA Chief (Washington Post)
President Obama yesterday nominated a former Marine aviator and space shuttle astronaut to become the new head of NASA and oversee a broad review of the agency’s ambitions for manned and robotic space exploration. Retired Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. will become the first African American to run the space agency if approved by the Senate. In addition to his long résumé of military and NASA experience, Bolden served more recently as chief executive of a defense and aerospace consulting firm.

Federal Judge Spotlights Misconduct by Federal Prosecutors in Siegelman Case (by Scott Horton, Vanity Fair)
U.W. Clemon, formerly Alabama’s most senior federal judge, has written a scorching letter to Attorney General Eric Holder itemizing gross misconduct by federal prosecutors involved in the Siegelman case and demanding that the Justice Department open a full investigation into the matter. “The 2004 prosecution of Mr. Siegelman in the Northern District of Alabama was the most unfounded criminal case over which I presided in my entire judicial career,” he writes. “In my judgment, his prosecution was completely without legal merit; and it could not have been accomplished without the approval of the Department of Justice.” Clemon goes on to note that prosecutors engaged in judicial forum shopping, attempted to poison the jury pool, and filed and pressed bogus charges…

Attorney General Holder’s office advised the Huffington Post that notwithstanding the long-standing allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, now amplified by a large group of attorneys general and the state’s former senior federal judge, the Justice Department had no investigation of the accusations underway.
That’s former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, who was railroaded by Bush era federal prosecutors, in case you don’t remember.

Obama’s Halfway Change on Stem Cell Research (by Froma Harrop)
Embryonic stem cell science may someday produce cures for Alzheimer’s and other dread diseases. That’s why the public supports the research by more than two to one. There is, however, a vocal minority opposed to this work because it requires the destruction of embryos. To keep the peace, Obama proposed new guidelines that go only halfway toward freeing embryonic stem-cell research. Some of the most promising investigations will still be denied federal funding. “They yielded to political pressure when they didn’t have to,” Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.

Labor Ad Calls On Obama To Aid Health Care Workers With Whom He Campaigned (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
The labor community is ramping up the pressure on Barack Obama to intervene in what could be drastic and costly wage cuts for health care employees in California. A source with the Service Employees International Union tells the Huffington Post that the union is making a six-figure ad purchase in Los Angeles and surrounding markets, calling on the President to come to the aid of the state’s home health care workforce.

The spot, which should be released on Wednesday, will tell, in part, the story of Pauline Beck, the homecare worker with whom Obama famously spent a day walking “in her shoes.” It will coincide with the president’s visit to L.A. for a DNC fundraiser scheduled that evening. The dueling images could be politically touchy for the White House: health care workers pleading with the president to help them keep their salaries as he attends a high-end event with Democratic donors.

Obama Aims to Sway Midterm Elections (Wall Street Journal)
Just four months in office, President Barack Obama and his White House are taking steps to shore up Democratic Congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections… Since Ronald Reagan, every president has had a political office and has intervened in midterm elections. Obama aides say that with such a full legislative plate, politics is hardly a focus. “We’ve got our hands full with a thousand other things,” senior White House adviser David Axelrod said Monday.

But with a chief of staff like Rahm Emanuel and a political operator like Mr. Axelrod in the West Wing, Democrats expect the help. Mr. Emanuel comes from the political crucible of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and saw the devastation wrought by the 1994 Republican sweep on the last president he worked for, Bill Clinton. Mr. Axelrod has deep ties to the DCCC.

Reid Hopes Cash Will Head Off Challenge (Political Wire)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), in an interview with the New York Times, “said he would raise $25 million for his campaign, a record-breaking figure for a Senate candidate in Nevada. Aides said that sum, which Republicans did not dispute, was intended to give pause to any Republican thinking of taking him on.” Said Reid: “I’m telling you about what I’m planning to do. I don’t know what effect it will have on anybody, but that’s what I’m planning to do.” A poll last week showed Reid on very shaky ground and vulnerable to a challenge.

Justice Dept. Investigates Pa. Contractor Tied to Murtha (Washington Post)
Over the past five years, a local defense contractor with close ties to Rep. John P. Murtha, a Democrat who has represented southwestern Pennsylvania for three decades, has selected several small police departments in the region to receive $10 million in Justice Department grants. The company, Mountaintop Technologies, was selected by the lawmaker in a series of earmarks to hand out and monitor the grants. As it distributed the money to the departments, the firm would explain each time that it was arriving through the largess of Murtha — often just before fall elections.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Political Wire)
“And there I was, former president of the
United States of America, with a plastic bag on my hand.” — Former President Bush, quote by the AP, on how walking the dog showed him that “life is returning back to normal.”
I hope he didn’t fuck it up.

IN MEMORY OF A DREAM: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
[L]et’s memorialize the death of a dream. According to that dream, we liberals and progressives were better, finer, saner, brighter when it came to the public discourse. We said this about ourselves for years. We liberals would never succeed at talk radio, we said–we’re just too smart, too honest, too decent. We were too inquisitive, too wonderfully nuanced to succeed at such a task. Here at THE HOWLER, we never much believed that tale. That said, even we had to marvel [Thursday] night at the two-hour block by Olbermann/Maddow. We’d have to say that every segment pretty much struck us as blather or nonsense. We don’t think we’ve ever thought that watching these programs before.

Over the past twenty years, your public discourse has been undermined by a sprawling warren of pseudo-conservative news orgs. These orgs produced reams of reliable nonsense. Today, we seem to have two such empires. Our guess: This ain’t good for the world.

Blogging about blogging (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
All in all, Eric Boehlert seems fair and reasonable as he discusses the rise of the progressive blogosphere and the great left-against-left split that beset the 2008 primaries. A few points:

1. According to Boehlert, Hillary fans became enraged at the sexism displayed by the Obots. That’s true, but only in part. In my view, the problem was not sexism but psychosis. The pro-O combat brigades displayed a sheer lunatic hatred – a daily outbreak of mass insanity — that many people found both frightening and repellent. Sexism was but one manifestation…

2. Boehlert ignores the degree to which the left-wing blogosphere is a right-wing phenomenon. I consider this development fascinating. Moulitsas, Aravosis, and DAH-link Arianna are all libertarians at heart. Marshall may be as well; I’ve received contradictory reports. We cannot pin the “prog[ressive]” label on Andrew Sullivan, but he was another prominent pro-O libertarian during 2008.

3. Boehlert (correctly) scores the right-wing blogs for becoming mired in extreme anti-Obama conspiracy theories. He says that those theories keep the righties from being taken seriously. But Huffpo, Kos and D.U. were overstuffed with similar displays of paranoia throughout 2008, and those sites thrived.
Buy it: Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press

Bloggers on the Bus—Get in the Back (by paradox at The Left Coaster)
Without hardly a thought major bloggers shed their media robes and became partisan backers. Not only did this cause a disastrous, ferocious blogger war of awful language and ludicrous behavior, it baked in often completely stifling and rigid adherence to the eventual winner—Obama—to the point where previously daring and obstreperous blogs and sites morphed in idolatrous zones of Obama ass-kissing, to varying degrees. Will some bloggers nix neutrality make the same choice for 2016? We shall see.

Readers could get a much firmer personal answer to that question by reading the book, Bloggers on the Bus is an extremely well-written, funny and insightful look at some of the most vivid internet players and bloggers to grace our last election, and I cannot recommend it more highly.

Republicans Flock to HuffPo (Politico)
Republicans have begun heading to the Huffington Post to talk up their views. Arianna Huffington said the GOP engagement “is a reflection of our traffic, our brand, and the fact that we are increasingly seen… as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news.”

New York Times Claims It Knew of Watergate Scandal First (New York Times)
The Watergate break-in eventually forced a presidential resignation and turned two Washington Post reporters into pop-culture heroes. But two former New York Times journalists have stepped forward to say that the Times had the scandal nearly in its grasp before the Post did — and let it slip.

Humanitarian Intervention (by Jake Lynch, Transcend Media Service)
What’s happened to the concepts of humanitarian military intervention and the responsibility to protect? How come no one stepped in to prevent thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils being killed? Why doesn’t media coverage discuss humanitarian intervention? Australian academic and former Newscaster Jake Lynch tackles these questions in his latest column.

Resource: Think the Recession is Bad? See Great Depression Photos on Flickr (Mashable)
The Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr [got] a timely new addition [Friday]: photos from the Great Depression and World War II. With both the current economic recession and upcoming Memorial Day holiday in the US, the pictures – some of the Library of Congress’ most requested photos – are a fascinating look back at America during a far more traumatic time. Flickr has been hosting Library of Congress photos since early last year, in a continuing effort to put more of the institution’s content online. Other collections currently available on Flickr include albums for Abraham Lincoln, the women’s suffrage movement, and World War I.

Al Gore: “Mother Nature does not do bailouts (by Alegre)
Al Gore delivered the above message to the 500 business leaders gathered in Copenhagen [Sunday] for the three-day World Summit on Climate Change. It may sound like a bumper sticker at first glance, but truer words were never spoken. In our rush to buy crap we don’t need and then toss aside when we realize we never needed it in the first place, we’re buying our way into debt both in terms of the world economy and in global resources. The people at this conference hope to come up with ways business can help lead the way in combating climate change. “‘[T]here is good news, because the world’s business community is beginning to respond,’ said Gore.”

Global CEOs back greenhouse gas cuts, carbon caps (AP)
A global summit of business leaders urged governments to order steep and mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases Tuesday, favoring a cap-and-trade system instead of a tax to set a market price for carbon waste.

Refiners blast proposed climate bill (Reuters)
U.S. refiners on Friday blasted landmark climate change legislation that is currently making its way through Congress as an “abject policy failure,” saying it could lead to an increase in imports of refined products such as gasoline and diesel. The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association said in a statement the roughly 1,000 page bill sponsored by Representatives Henry Waxman and Edward Markey that is aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions would make U.S. refiners less competitive internationally.

‘Clean’ Energy and Poisoned Water (Truthdig)
Natural gas companies have managed to convince Congress and the EPA that millions of gallons of toxic water left underground or collected in huge open pits pose no threat to watersheds, yet wells in 11 states have already been poisoned.

Did Wilco’s Jay Bennett Die Because He Lacked Health Insurance? (by The Cajun Boy at Gawker)
[On Sunday] news broke that Jay Bennett, a singer/songwriter most famous for his work with the band Wilco, died during his sleep on Sunday. Bennett, who earlier in the month sued Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, recently blogged that he needed hip replacement surgery, but lacked health insurance to cover its costs… Though an autopsy to determine Bennett’s cause of death is pending, and it should be noted that he has battled drug addiction in the past, it’s hard not to wonder if Bennett’s inability to get care for his hip didn’t contribute to his death… Jay Bennett was 45 years old.

Isn’t This Just Damned Perfect? (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
Talk about a terror plot! You got your faux jihad, you got your inadequate health insurance (nothing single payer wouldn’t fix!) and you got an FBI informant who supplied a motive. Now, I wonder how they thought all of this would play in court? I mean, we were planning to try these people, yes? “‘My insurance wasn’t good enough,’ said Lord McWilliams, 20, who has a deadly liver disease. His brother, David Williams, wanted money ‘to speed up the process,’ McWilliams said. ‘Medicaid only goes so far.’ He dismissed as ‘crazy’ federal accusations that Williams was a Jew-hater who wanted to wage jihad. McWilliams said the FBI informant who lured his brother and three other hapless petty criminals into a plot to blow up synagogues and shoot down a plane promised enough money to take care of his transplant.”

I hardly know what to say. What’s worse: A healthcare system where someone is so desperate, he’d blow up buildings to pay for his brother’s treatment, or homeland security that thinks nothing of setting people up so they can claim they caught some “terrorists”?

Taking From the Poor (Truthdig)
[Last] Tuesday, Californian voters refused to pass Gov. Schwarzenegger’s ballot measures aimed at fixing the state’s budget crisis by increasing taxes, redistributing funds and borrowing money… Washington offered little hope in lending money to
California, fearing it would set a precedent, with other states demanding the same help. As a result, Schwarzenegger announced a plan to fill the gap of the budget crisis by attacking the poor. He is considering eliminating the state’s main welfare program, as well as health insurance that caters to low-income families and children, and CalGrants, a financial aid program for low- and middle-income college students.

Do schools make inequality worse? (by Lane Kenworthy, thanks to Economist’s View)
“Far from leaning against economic inequality, U.S. schools make it worse.” This sentiment, from a recent Clive Crook op-ed, expresses a view that’s commonplace on both the left and the right, and among both proponents and opponents of school reform. It’s wrong. Americans do leave the schooling system more unequal in cognitive and noncognitive skills than when they enter it. Yet that inequality is less — probably much less — than it would be in the absence of schools. Schools don’t increase inequality; they just don’t do enough to overcome the inequality produced throughout childhood by differences in families, neighborhoods, peers, and other influences.

How do we know that? First, children are vastly unequal in ability when they enter the school system at age five or six. This is due partly to genetics and partly to environmental differences. Second, we have evidence from the natural experiment that is summer vacation. During those three months out of school, the cognitive skills of children in lower socioeconomic status (SES) households tend to stall or actually regress. Kids in high-SES households fare much better during the summer, as they’re more likely to spend it engaged in stimulating activities… Without schools this pattern would be magnified, and the gap in cognitive and noncognitive abilities at age 18 almost certainly would be much greater than it now is.

This by no means implies that our educational system is doing fine. It could and should do much better at helping children from disadvantaged environments. But saying it currently makes things worse suggests the situation is hopeless. Instead of promoting reform, that undercuts it.

How to help the poor have more money? Well, you could give it to them (by Laura Freschi, thanks to Economist’s View)
Unconditional cash transfer programs can be fast and cost effective. With no technical experts’ salaries to pay, and no trans-Atlantic shipping costs for US-produced food aid, more of the cash can go straight to the recipients (in the case of the Concern Worldwide project 27% was spent on program administration, while 73% was distributed in the cash transfers.) Cash transfers also acknowledge that poor people are capable of making good economic decisions without the help of outside experts armed with needs assessment checklists…

Cash transfers have plenty of potential drawbacks, as these studies also point out. Handing out large amounts of cash comes with its own set of logistical hurdles and could invite theft or corruption… [But with] the cash transfers, the people can decide for themselves how to meet their most urgent needs. This gives people who have lost their livelihoods, belongings or loved ones a new feeling of control over their lives, builds money-management skills, and restores to them their power to make economic decisions. If you were in their shoes, which would you prefer?

Don’t worry, be unhappy (by Sady Doyle, The Guardian)
Women: you are all terribly sad now. This, anyway, is the message of “The paradox of declining female happiness,” a new study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers of the
University of Pennsylvania… [W]hen you look at the study, without the sensationalist “women: now sad” trappings, it doesn’t seem to convey that women are descending into the black pits of despair. What it says is that women and men now experience similar levels of happiness: there’s been an overall happiness decline (well, unless you take the increased happiness of black people into account – which, again, the study doesn’t; nor does it seem to address other people of colour), with women’s being slightly more precipitous than that of men. In other words, as women and men have become more equal, their subjective experiences of life have become … more equal. Shocking!…

[T]he main thing I learned from this study [is that] we’re not done yet. By the time that we are, it won’t make sense to measure happiness – or any other basic human experience – by gender. We’ll all just be people.

Threats to Judges, Prosecutors Soaring (Washington Post)
Threats against the nation’s judges and prosecutors have sharply increased, prompting hundreds to get 24-hour protection from armed
U.S. marshals. Many federal judges are altering their routes to work, installing security systems at home, shielding their addresses by paying bills at the courthouse or refraining from registering to vote. Some even pack weapons on the bench. The problem has become so pronounced that a high-tech “threat management” center recently opened in Crystal City, where a staff of about 25 marshals and analysts monitor a 24-hour number for reporting threats, use sophisticated mapping software to track those being threatened and tap into a classified database linked to the FBI and CIA.

Media Matters for America headlines

Fox’s Kelly, ABC’s Greenburg skew Sotomayor remark about “Latina,” “white male” judges

Politico ignores history of conservatives’ citing importance of empathy in a judge

CNN, Fox News, MSNBC misrepresent Sotomayor remark on role of appeals court justices

CNN’s Borger, Schneider baselessly conflate judicial “activist[s]” with liberal judges

NBC’s Todd falsely claimed Sotomayor said “we legislate from the bench”

Media obsess over Obama’s comments, ignore Bush’s highlighting of Thomas’ “great empathy”

Echo chamber: Fox News runs with Rosen’s anonymously sourced claims that Sotomayor is “domineering”

CBS fails to note political basis for GOP Supreme Court opposition

Will media note political motives behind conservative criticisms of SCOTUS nominee?

Un-debatable: Contrary to media claim, national security was an issue during 2008 campaign

Cyberbullying case brings big changes
The July sentencing of a
Missouri mom convicted for her part in an Internet hoax that led to a teenager’s suicide may disappoint those looking for justice… At least 45 states have changed harassment laws to include cyberbullying. Many, including Kansas and Missouri, pushed for change shortly after the news of Megan’s death. Several Missouri counties have already used the new law, prosecuting people who harass victims on the Internet or on a cell phone.

Internet Threatened by Censorship, Secret Surveillance, and Cybersecurity Laws (MediaChannel)
At a time of corporate dominated media, a free and open Internet is democracy’s last chance to preserve our First Amendment rights without which all others are threatened.

Global Pulse: Sri Lanka Propaganda War (Video) (Link TV, Global Pulse)
The long and bloody civil war in Sri Lanka began with rebellion and ended with mass civilian displacement and an unknown number of casualties. In the last days, the fog of war made it difficult to tell truth from propaganda – and the real losers are the innocent people caught in the crossfire.

Iran blocks Facebook over presidential hopeful: Ilna
Iran has blocked access to Facebook ahead of June presidential polls, allegedly to prevent supporters of the leading opposition candidate from using the site for his campaign, Ilna news agency said on Saturday.

EU pushes music industry to open up online rights
EU antitrust regulators told the music industry Tuesday to move quickly and change licenses that currently restrict online music stores such as iTunes from offering the same songs for sale across Europe.

China Sentences Virtual Currency Extorter to Prison
A Chinese man who extorted virtual items and currency from a fellow Internet cafe user to improve his performance in online games was sentenced over the weekend, local media said.

The News: It’s Not Dead, It’s Just Resting & Rocky Mountain Blues (Video) (IFC Media Project)
With so many stories to tell about the state of the news industry, we couldn’t decide on just one. Instead, we took a wider view of the industry, visiting recycling plants, strip clubs, news agents, and media innovators.

IFC News Junkie: Super Local News!
The News Junkie embraces the new media revolution and starts his own hyperlocal news outlet by screaming out his apartment window at the folks who populate his street. It does not go well.

Online news fees: financial salvation or suicide?
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a rarity among large U.S. newspapers — it’s selling more weekday copies than a decade ago. In Idaho, the Post Register’s circulation has remained stable, while many other print publications have lost readers to the Internet. How can this be?

How Can Google Help Newspapers? How About Some SEO Coaching (Paid Content)
In an interview with The Financial Times this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt … said he had considered buying a newspaper but decided instead to help papers’ websites better position themselves to make money from online advertising. That could mean any number of things. But here’s a suggestion if he’s looking for a good first project: Help papers understand how to climb higher in search results, something that many no-name blogs have already mastered.

Magazine, Newspaper Readers Aging at Accelerated Rate
Digital Media Has Drawn Young Eyes Marketers Covet to Screen From Print

Newsweek’s Journalism of Fourth and Long (by David Carr, New York Times)
Newsweek’s makeover represents a rethinking of what it means to be a newsweekly, but no redesign can gild the cold fact that it remains a news magazine that comes out weekly at a time when current events are produced and digested on a cycle that is measured with an egg timer, not a calendar.
But there’s also room for analysis, for making sense of the minute-to-minute news.

Online magazine tries to be a lab for media future
An online magazine operating a little more than a year, Flyp (pronounced “Flip”) has no foot in journalism past. Its reporters — mostly freelancers — conceive of their stories as Internet creatures beginning to end. “The idea isn’t just to write a story and then add a video or an audio piece,” explains Flyp senior editor Matthew Schaeffer. “It’s to really figure out the best way to conceptualize these stories as multimedia pieces.”

Mags’ Apps Add Cash
While some newspapers experiment with online pay walls, magazine publishers are toying with products beyond their Web counterparts to shift costs to consumers. Publishers see the potential not in cutting off access to existing content but charging for new offerings such as mobile applications.

LAT Suspends Publication of Spinoff Mag Ahead of Launch
File it under one of the shortest-lived magazines ever. Three days before the first issue hit subscribers’ mailboxes, the Los Angeles Times last week suspended publication of LAetcetera, a weekly spin-off magazine.

Scripted Series to Change Look of Friday TV
In recent years, Fridays have become a wasteland for network TV, populated largely with low-cost, low-impact reality series and newsmagazines. Friday this fall looks different. The major networks’ schedules, announced last week, include 10 scripted series.

YOU Are What This Competition Is All About! Yes, You! (by Simon Dumenco, Advertising Age)
There aren’t a lot of situations in life in which a person can briefly do something well and then get to bask in lavish praise that lasts longer than the actual done-well thing. That’s the real genius, the real brand value, of “Idol”: It not only takes ordinary people and makes them famous, it teleports them into this alternate universe where their job is, literally, to be adored for just doing what they’re good at.
Huh? Some of us might say it’s giving a chance at success to people who might never have gotten that chance is the basis of the show’s attraction.

The CBS-CNet Integration, One Year Later
CBS was roundly criticized last summer for dropping $1.8 billion on CNet, an early Web publisher that over time had become a big, slow-moving, unprofitable bureaucracy. But nearly a year later, integration is complete, and so far the marriage seems to be working, at least strategically.

Survey: Only 8 percent of Teens Watch TV Online
A nationwide survey of 1,250 broadband households and separate sample group of 250 teens aged 12 to 17, found that only 8 percent of respondents watch repurposed TV shows online, compared with 24 percent who watch news clips, 20 percent who view user-generated clips on YouTube, and 15 percent who watch sports news.

YouTube Gets Flexible to Pull in Network Partners
As YouTube tries to win over television programmers, the site is offering more flexible terms for providers of premium TV content. New inducements include functionality that lets programmers run pre-roll ads before shows and a policy that lets networks use their own video players on the site.

Google increasingly battles Facebook in search
As people search out advice online for everyday, personal decisions, the standard list of links served up by Google is not seen as intimate or trustworthy. For decisions such as choosing a restaurant or a day care provider, social networking sites or known review sites have an advantage, said Google Group Product Manager Ken Tokusei. Such sites offer information from friends or acquaintances, and Tokusei said users tend to trust that information more. This puts Google’s results at a disadvantage.

Nokia opens Ovi online software and content store
Nokia said it opened its online software and content store, Ovi Store, globally to some 50 million phone users on Tuesday.

New Yorker Cover Drawn on iPhone
Artist Jorge Colombo took about an hour to fingerpaint an intricate Times Square scene on his iPhone using Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone drawing app. Now, it’s the June 1st cover for The New Yorker. A video shows how
Colombo painted his scene from start to finish.

Texting May Be Harmful to Your Health
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier. The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Webcast Your Brain Surgery? Hospitals See Marketing Tool
Hospitals are using Twitter from operating rooms, showing surgery on YouTube and having patients blog about their procedures, but ethics and privacy questions linger.

Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive
Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scotswoman who became a worldwide singing sensation last month, may wind up as the winner this week of “
Britain’s Got Talent,” the hit ITV show. After a six-week absence, she returned on Sunday night to sing “Memory” from the musical “Cats,” wowing the crowd and advancing to Saturday’s finale. The producers immediately posted her performance on the Internet for the rest of the world to see. She has already won a popularity contest on YouTube, where videos of her performances in April have been viewed an astounding 220 million times. But until now, her runaway Web success has made little money for the program’s producers or distributors.
This is the best video I’ve found of her semi-final performance. I’m glad to see that she doesn’t need the surprise factor to sing beautifully. She had a bit of a rough start, but then she did great.

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability
Selling ads doesn’t generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users’ tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It’s a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google’s future but the future of anyone who does business online.

Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet
As advertisers cut online spending, start-up companies look for new ways to make money, like selling real or virtual goods or asking customers to buy subscriptions.

No Recovery This Year: Cowen Says Online Ad Spend Will Fall 6 Percent (Paid Content)
While some might hold out hope that the economy could stabilize in the second half of the year, Cowen & Co. have lowered their revenue forecast for U.S. online ads to a 6 percent decline in 2009 to $22 billion. The financial analyst firm, which tends to offer more pessimistic forecasts compared to other prognosticators, had previously anticipated that online ad spend would drop 3 percent. Online share of the ad market will continue to rise, but only slightly, ending this year 9.4 percent of total U.S. ad budgets over last year’s 8.7 percent.

In-Flight Entertainment That Begins With Wi-Fi
Airlines that are installing Wi-Fi systems aboard their aircraft may eventually use the equipment to provide passengers with programming to be viewed on laptops or smartphones.

 

Media & Politics (Memorial Day Edition)

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Wikimedia Commons
They died for the freedoms we’re throwing away.

Obama’s Democratic Authoritarianism‎ (by Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com)
This Memorial Day should be devoted to reviving and refreshing the failing memory of the American people, or, at least, those millions who voted for Obama in hopes of a better day. Remember the campaign promises, the soaring rhetoric about “the rule of law” and our “constitutional liberties”? Remember this: “Gitmo. That’s an easy one: close it”? Remember the promise of “change”? As for this last, well, yes, the Obama administration is indeed carrying out a sea change in the realm of civil liberties, there’s no doubt about that. It’s a continuation of the transformation effected by Team Bush and made possible by the post-9/11 hysteria, in which the leaders of both parties were caught up – and which they continue to stoke for political gain.

Two Sides of the Same Coin… Heads-Heads (by Sibel Edmonds, founder and director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, writing at The Brad Blog)
Despite all the promises Mr. Obama made during his campaign, especially on those issues that were absolutely central to those whose support he garnered, so far the President of Change has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. Not only that, his administration has made it clear that they intend to continue this trend. Some call it a major betrayal. Can we go so far as to call it a ’swindling of the voters’?

On the State Secrets Privilege
Yes, I am going to begin with the issue of State Secrets Privilege; because I was the first recipient of this ‘privilege’ during the now gone Administration… So far The Obama administration has invoked the state secrets privilege in three cases in the first 100 days… This is the same President, the same well-spoken showman, who went on record in 2007, during the campaign shenanigans, and said the following: “When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution.”…

On NSA Warrantless Wiretapping
The new Administration has pledged to defend the Telecommunications Industry by giving them immunity against any lawsuit that may involve their participation in the illegal NSA wiretapping program… Obama’s Justice Department defended its predecessor not only by using the State Secrets Privilege, but taking it even further, by astoundingly granting … the Executive Branch an unlimited immunity for any kind of ‘illegal’ government surveillance…

Accountability on Torture
President Obama’s action and inaction on Torture can be summarized very clearly as follows: First give an absolute pass, under the guise of ‘looking forward not backward,’ to the ultimate culprits who had ordered it. Next, absolve all the implementers, practitioners and related agencies, under the excuse of ‘complying with orders without questioning,’ and then start giving the ‘drafters’ of the memos an out by transferring the decision for action to the states… Not only that, he goes even further to shove his secrecy promotion down other nations’ courts throat… Today he and his administration unapologetically maintain the same Bush Administration position on extraordinary rendition, torture, and related secrecy to cover up…

The Revival of Bush Era Military Commission
After all the talk and pretty speeches given during his presidential campaign on the ‘failure’ of Bush era military tribunals of Guantanamo inmates, Mr. Obama has decided to revive the same style military commission, albeit with a little cosmetic tweak here and there to re-brand it as his own…

On War and Bodies Piling Up
[O]ur so-called ‘New’ Afghan Strategy includes more troops and asks for a much larger budget allocation; nothing new there. It is another war with no time table. It is the continuation of the same abstract ‘War on Terror’ without any definition of what would constitute an ‘accomplished mission.’ One minute there is pondering on possible ‘reconciliation’ with the Taliban, and the next minute seeking to topple it…

Nuance Is Fine Until It’s a Flip-Flop (by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times)
Mr. Obama … has recalibrated his approach to positions on any number of issues… On all these fronts, Mr. Obama and his aides have offered detailed explanations of the factors that shape his decision-making. So far, the public seems on board. But in a sound-bite culture, there are limits to how much nuance the public can absorb. And that raises a question: at what point is President Thinker in danger of being perceived as President Flip-Flop?

Obama’s Deeds Vindicate Bush (by Charles Krauthammer, a neocon bushophile)
If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

Obama To Navy Grads: No Choice Between Security and Ideals (by Yunji de Nies and Sunlen Miller at Political Punch, ABC News)
President Obama delivered his third commencement address of the graduation season at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md… Largely avoiding politics, the president made only a brief mention of his speech yesterday at the National Archives in which he responded to the recent debate over the administration’s policy on Guantanamo Bay, detainees, and larger national security issues. “I went there because as our nation debates how to deal with the security challenges that we face, we must remember this enduring truth: the values and ideals in those documents are not simply words written into aging parchment, they are the bedrock of our liberty and our security. We uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to, but because we swear to. Not because they feel good, but because they help keep us safe.”

Obushma-Biney in the Home of the Frightened (by Willem Buiter  at Maverecon, Financial Times, thanks to Cannonfire)
The spinelessness and moral cowardice of the Obama administration know no bounds.  The Bush-Cheney  team ordered the torture and abuse of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and assorted other locations abroad – offshore detention without trial as well as torture by US officials or persons acting under their instructions… Those who can be charged with these offences should be tried and, if found guilty, punished according to the law.  If among the guilty parties are CIA agents and former vice-president Dick Cheney, then so be it.  If you cannot do the time, you should not do the crime.  This is not vengeance, it is justice – and it is the law.  Justice must be done and must be seen to be done before healing and reconciliation can start.

Preventive detention (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
[S]ome (not all) of the folks on the prog-blogs are defending Obama’s atrocious [preventive detention] scheme. As [Glenn] Greenwald point out, these defenders neglect to consider the consequences of giving these expanded powers to the ultra-conservative president who will probably take the oath in January of 2013. You’d think that most progs would want to prevent that possibility. Hey — that’s it! This move is simply a subtle, canny piece of political jiu-jitsu. Obama wants to maneuver Congress into passing legislation which will prevent the very thing he now claims to espouse. Yeah. That must be it. Boy, that Barry. He sure is one helluva 11-dimensional chess player, isn’t he?

A Woman of Her Word: Hillary Pushes for Equal Rights for Gay State Dept. Employees (by campskunk at Alegre’s Corner)
Someone leaked a draft of a memo Hillary is apparently planning to send to State Department employees on the issue of problems gays in State face because rules to accommodate heterosexual couples in overseas postings don’t apply to them. Here’s some of the text, from HuffPo: “…‘At bottom, the department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex domestic partners because it is the right thing to do,’ Clinton says.” Notice all the cunning political calculation for which Hillary is so famous in her rationale for this move? It’s the right thing to do. Discrimination is unfair. Common human decency. Wow, that’s really conniving of her… Back in February, Hillary said she’d address this. And guess what? She did.

Trying to prove it isn’t torture, Mancow gets waterboarded and says it’s ‘absolutely torture.’ (Think Progress)
On his radio show [Friday], “conservative libertarian” talker Erich “Mancow” Muller set out to prove that waterboarding isn’t torture by having himself waterboarded. But instead, after enduring “6 or 7 seconds” of the interrogation technique, Mancow admitted that it was “absolutely torture”l
Click through to watch the video.

North Korea’s second nuclear test stirs outrage (CNN)
North Korea delivered on its threat Monday, conducting a second nuclear test that angered governments around the globe. The North had threatened to do so unless the U.N. Security Council apologized for imposing sanctions on it following a rocket test on April 5. The secretive communist state also apparently test-fired a short-range missile on Monday, the White House said… The White House — which less than three weeks ago announced a new diplomatic effort to restart stalled talks with
North Korea about its nuclear program — said the test was in “blatant defiance” of the Security Council.

Obama Orders Update to Iran Attack Plan (by Jason Ditz at AntiWar.com)
On NBC’s Today Show [Friday] morning, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that President Obama has ordered him to update the plans for a US attack on Iran, plans which were last updating during the Bush Administration. Gates says the plans are “refreshed” and insists that “all options are on the table” with respect to the potential attack. It was only a month ago that Secretary Gates was warning vigorously against the potential attack, saying that it would create a “disastrous backlash” against the United States to hit Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. 

FBI ‘lured dimwits’ into terror plot (The Times, U.K.)
The arrest of petty crooks over a plan to target Jews has put the use of sting operations under fire

FBI Agent on Synagogue Case Has Questionable Record (Village Voice)
The FBI agent with a high-profile role in yesterday’s arrests of four men for plotting a terror attack in New York has a pretty interesting — and controversial — track record. Special Agent Robert Fuller, whose name appears at the top of the federal criminal complaint in the case, had a hand in the FBI’s failure to nab two of the 9/11 hijackers, had one of his informants set himself on fire in front of the White House, and was involved in misidentifying a Canadian man as a terrorist leading to his secret arrest and torture — a case that is now the subject of a major lawsuit.

Yet Another Bogus ‘Terror’ Plot (by Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation)
It is disgusting and outrageous that the FBI is sending provocateurs into mosques. The headlines reinforce the very fear that Dick Cheney is trying to stir up. The story strengthens the narrative that the “homeland” is under attack. It’s not. As I’ve written repeatedly, since 9/11 not a single American has even been punched in the nose by an angry Muslim, as far as I can tell. Plot after plot — the destruction of the
Brooklyn Bridge! bombing the New York Subways! taking down the Sears Tower! bombing the Prudential building in Newark! — proved to be utter nonsense.

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts (Threat Level, Wired)
You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it… The rules came to attention this month when an FCC agent investigating a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado, left a copy of a 2005 FCC inspection policy on the door of a residence hosting the unlicensed 100-watt transmitter. “Whether you operate an amateur station or any other radio device, your authorization from the Commission comes with the obligation to allow inspection,” the statement says…

[I]f inspectors should notice evidence of unrelated criminal behavior — say, a marijuana plant or stolen property — a Supreme Court decision suggests the search can be used against the resident. In the 1987 case New York v. Burger, two police officers performed a warrantless, administrative search of one Joseph Burger’s automobile junkyard. When he couldn’t produce the proper paperwork, the officers searched the grounds and found stolen vehicles, which they used to prosecute him. The Supreme Court held the search to be legal.

Fix is hard for Medicare, Social Security finances (AP)
There is no easy fix. Medicare and Social Security will go broke sooner rather than later because of the recession. With millions of baby boomers beginning to leave the work force, the cost of these popular benefit programs threatens to swamp the government in debt in the coming years if nothing is done. Congress and the White House are under increasing pressure to find a solution.

Hating on social insurance (by Paul Krugman)
Of all the things to worry about in today’s world, the prospect of Social Security shortfalls several decades from now doesn’t rank high on the list. But there’s a whole generation of Very Serious People who think that worrying about entitlements is how they demonstrate their seriousness — while, say, worrying about climate change is hippy-dippy. Indeed, we find the same people who declare that to show how responsible we are we must do something about Social Security RIGHT NOW declaring that saving the planet is, you know, expensive, so let’s not.

Rx and the single payer (by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, writing in Salon)
In 2003, a young
Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program.”… Fast-forward six years. President Obama has everything he said was needed — Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. So what’s happened to single payer?… “We don’t want a huge disruption as we go into healthcare reform where suddenly we’re trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy.”

So the banks were too big to fail and now, apparently, healthcare is too big to fix, at least the way a majority of people indicate they would like it to be fixed, with a single-payer option. President Obama favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But single payer has vanished from his radar.
It’s so HARD, see. It’s HARD WORK. Bill Moyers Journal’s 5/22 episode had some excellent interviews on single payer.

Crossroads (by Anglachel)
The problem here is not so much that we’re dealing with the insurance industry, but that we have a political leader who does not believe in forcing choices onto people, and most especially not forcing them onto white collar corporate interests. I wrote about this in the context of health care and retirement savings almost exactly a year ago today, in my post Libertarian Paternalism, where I looked into the intellectual environment Obama lives in and where his philosophical inclinations lie. My key point has to do with having a certain con[c]ept of what politics and government is for: “[Libertarian paternalists] cannot accept that government is needed to counteract concentration of power to the detriment of the citizenry… This is why, for all the specific proposals, Obama’s economic policies simply do not convince anyone who actually wants things to change.”…

Obama is at the crossroads. The domestic political and economic circumstances are such that he can choose to be the President and use his political capital for something that will materially improve the lives of millions of people for generations, or he can be the Preznit and posture about his wonderful inclusive hopey-changey powers while millions more citizens are immiserated. I have said for more than a year that he will deliberately go with the easy path, the one so heavily traveled the last few decades, and side with the socio-economic winners. Prove me wrong, Precious.

Health Care Organizing Kickoff (My.BarackObama.com)
On June 6th, thousands of people just like you are beginning to organize for health care reform by hosting or attending a Health Care Organizing Kickoff…. Together, we’ll win health care reform the same way we won the election: Building support one block, one neighbor, one conversation at a time. Please sign up today.
Lambert asks, “Would that be exploiting the naïveté of young voters, misogyny, and false charges of racism? Or just the back-room deals?” And he suggests that we attend the meetings to advocate for single payer.

In our country, you have, at present, two political choices. (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
1. Do you want to have Milton Friedmanism mixed with wacko religious fanaticism (as exemplified by the above)? If so, you are a Republican, and you are obligated to call Obama a “socialist,” even though he isn’t.
2. Do you want Milton Friedmanism without the religious factor? If so, then you are a Democrat, and you are obligated to support Obama even when he acts just like Dubya.
And that’s it. No third choice.

Can anyone explain THIS? (by Alegre)
Democrats won major victories last November.  Scott Murphy won a hotly contested congressional race in
New York’s 20th CD.  Heck we even put Nancy Navarro up and over the top to keep the Montgomery County Council in Democratic hands (all 9 seats!).  With BHO’s approval rating still in the 60s (it IS still in the 60s – isn’t it?), you have to wonder how the DNC got outraised last month by $1.3 million.  

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Media & Politics

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

RNC AD: Guantanamo – To close it? To close it not?

New GOP Ad Compares Threat Of Closing Guantanamo To Nuclear War (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
The Republican National Committee has a new Web ad that appears to suggest that the stakes of the Guantanamo issue are as high as those of the Cold War nuke standoff… The ad references the famous 1964 “Daisy” ad that Lyndon Johnson ran against challenger Barry Goldwater, which featured a little girl plucking daisy petals while a voiceover counted down to a nuclear detonation… The suggestion appears to be that closing down Guantanamo potentially poses as big a threat as did the possibility of war with a nuclear-armed superpower — and that Obama’s move to close Guantanamo is as reckless and dangerous as Goldwater’s comments about possibly using nukes in Vietnam.

The ad, which also quotes Congressional Dems defecting from Obama on the issue, shows how neatly those Dems have fallen into the GOP’s trap by letting them drive the Gitmo debate. It has now enabled the Republicans to use the issue as a wedge and to use the words of Democrats to try to cast doubts on Obama’s ability to keep us safe.
Those of us who voted for Goldwater (yes, it was a lifetime ago) used to say, “They told us if we voted for Goldwater there would be war, and I did, and there is.”

You may not be surprised to learn that fear has won the Guantanamo battle:
Congressional Aides: Obama’s Speech Unlikely To Move Dems Much On Guantanamo
(by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Congressional aides I talked to are saying that Obama’s big speech yesterday, in which he defended his plan to close Guantanamo and house detainees on American soil, is unlikely to move opinion much among Congressional Dems — for now, at least. The aides provide an interesting perspective on the fluidity of the situation, hinting at the extent of the breach that has opened up between the White House and Congressional Dems on this issue — and the extent of the work that will be required to repair that breach.

Supermax Prisons in U.S. Already Hold Terrorists (Washington Post)
In news conferences, speeches and debates this week, lawmakers from both parties, as well as the director of the FBI, have sounded alarms about moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to federal prisons, where they could launch riots, hatch radical plots or somehow be released among the populace… But the apocalyptic rhetoric rarely addresses this: Thirty-three international terrorists, many with ties to al-Qaeda, reside in a single federal prison in
Florence, Colo., with little public notice.
The apocalyptic rhetoric doesn’t have to bear any relation to the real world, although it tends to be more effective when there is some tiny kernel of truth in it somewhere. The rhetoric is intentionally apocalyptic and would be just as loud if those spouting it were yelling the opposite of what they’re screaming about today. In fact, tomorrow they may well be shrieking the exact opposite of what they’re bawling today. Because the purpose is not to bring understanding, or to persuade, but to intimidate. The right wing has been doing it for a very long time and has been pretty successful up until they practically destroyed the country with their version of governing.

Obama’s civil liberties speech (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
Obama’s speech [Thursday] … was fairly representative of what Obama typically does:  effectively defend some important ideals in a uniquely persuasive way and advocating some policies that promote those ideals (closing Guantanamo, banning torture tactics, limiting the state secrets privilege) while committing to many which plainly violate them (indefinite preventive detention schemes, military commissions, denial of habeas rights to Bagram abductees, concealing torture evidence, blocking judicial review on secrecy grounds).  Like all political officials, Obama should be judged based on his actions and decisions, not his words and alleged intentions and motives.  Those actions in the civil liberties realm, with some exceptions, have been profoundly at odds with his claimed principles, and this speech hasn’t changed that.  Only actions will.

Obama on National Security: I Am Doing the Right Things; I Have Not Broken Campaign Promises (by Prof. Darren Hutchinson at Dissenting Justice)
Ironically, Obama, who ran as the antiwar candidate, is now the “war” president. He is the commander-in-chief in two ongoing offenses, including one in which he has authorized a “surge.” As proof that his antiwar rhetoric is a distant memory, Obama has delivered a speech to justify his Bush-esque national security policy against liberal (and Cheney’s) criticism in a building that houses the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, which rank among the most enduring of American symbols. This is a long road from the flag pin controversy…

[Obama] is, as Reverend Wright accurately stated during the campaign, a politician. All presidents before him were politicians as well. I was stunned that liberals refused to see this. So, to the formerly effusive and uncritical Left: I told you so.

Civil Libertarian Rips Obama’s Speech: All Bells And Whistles (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
“Obviously, he is a very effective speaker, but of course we have major problems with what he is doing,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “He wraps himself in the Constitution, talks about American values and then proceeds to violate them.” In an interview with the Huffington Post shortly after Obama concluded his remarks at the National Archives, Ratner expressed disappointment and even a tinge of anger at the approach the president had outlined on detainee policy, military tribunals, and even accountability.

The Thought Crimes President (by Ian Welsh, thanks to Alegre)
[P]eople who have committed no crime which can be proved in a court of law, including the crime of conspiracy, will be held indefinitely without a trial.  Note that Obama wants to use military commissions to try some detainees, which means that these detainees can’t be found guilty of anything even under military law. This is punishment for a thought crime…

Perhaps some of the prisoners, if released, will go back and take up terrorist activities again.  Let us assume, for the point of argument, that they will. Does that mean that we punish them for crimes they have yet to commit?… And where do we draw the line?  Once we’ve decided that thought crimes are worthy of preventative punishment, once that is a principle embedded in the law, who else are we going to lock up whom we can’t prove has committed a crime, not even that of conspiracy, because we think they may commit one in the future? That’s not a power any human being should have over another. But it is the power Obama has demanded, has arrogated to himself, just as George Bush does.

A Blight On Humanity (by Turkana at The Left Coaster)
Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization. They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won’t try, to regain power. But it’s time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It’s time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn’t. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.

NYT , please define “returned” (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
[T]he Times’ Elizabeth Bumiller claimed the following: “An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials…”  The Times left little doubt… But then appearing on MSNBC later in the day Thursday, Bumiller announced, ”There is some debate about whether you should say ‘returned’ because some of them were perhaps not engaged in terrorism, as we know — some of them are being held there on vague charges.”… But their supposed return to terrorism was the central thrust of the news report. That’s what landed the story on A1. How could the Times not be sure about that before they published the piece?

Obama in Command (by David S. Broder, Washington Post)
No new president finds that every aspect of the job suits him at once; some duties are inevitably more comfortable than others. What we have witnessed in the past few weeks is Barack Obama trying on and fitting himself to the role of commander in chief… The predictable result has been the first sustained outcry from the left, angry denunciations from leaders of constituencies that had been early supporters. They feel betrayed as they watch him continuing, with minor modifications, the policies and practices of his Republican predecessor…  Obama’s liberal critics are right. He is a different man now. He has learned what it means to be commander in chief.
There’s nothing Villagers like Broder love more than at least the pretense of a he-man war president who foils them dang hippie leftists.

We have always been at war with Eastasia:
Hailing the leader as a War President and the powers that go with it
(by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
[T]here’s no such thing as an American President who is not a “war President.”  We never go more than a few years without some kind of a direct war, and are always waging covert and indirect ones.  American presidents are inherently “war presidents.”  We don’t really have any other kind.  To vest a specific power in a President on the ground that he’s a “War President” is to vest that power in presidents generally and permanently.

That’s why this media construct that things are different for “war presidents” — we have to give “war presidents” greater power and leeway; demand less transparency and accept more secrecy; acquiesce to abridgments of civil liberties when “America is at war”; and, coming soon under the Change banner, allow them the right to imprison people indefinitely with no trials even beyond “war zones” — is so manipulative and misleading.  It implies that “America at war” is some sort of unusual and temporary circumstance rather than what it is:  our permanent state of affairs.  In perfect Orwellian fashion, our allies can easily become our enemies (Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Mujahideen precursors to Al Qaeda) and our enemies can just as easily become our allies (Iraqi Sunnis, Gadaffi), but what never changes is our status as a war-fighting nation.

The March of Folly, Continued (by Norman Solomon)
To understand what’s up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ago. “The March of Folly,” by historian Barbara Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power can do very stupid things… What happens among policymakers is a “process of self-hypnosis,” Tuchman writes. After recounting examples from the Trojan War to the British moves against rebellious American colonists, she devotes the closing chapters of “The March of Folly” to the long arc of the
U.S. war in Vietnam. The parallels with the current escalation of the war in Afghanistan are more than uncanny; they speak of deeply rooted patterns.
Click through for details of the comparison.

Are Deaths From Terrorism Qualitatively/Morally Different? (by Peter Daou)
Over a million people lose their lives to violence and millions more are injured and maimed every year. Death and injury by terrorist attack is no more horrific than a young girl being stoned to death in Somalia (for being raped) or a baby being thrown out of a car window in Florida. We need to handle both issues with the appropriate alarm and with the same sense of justice and fealty to the rule of law. We must do away with the flawed notion that combating terrorism requires a unique set of guidelines — that somehow deaths from terrorism are qualitatively/morally different.

Violence and preventable death in all forms should be our utmost priority and we should do everything we can, within the law and within the parameters of basic decency and morality, to bring an end to them.

GOP’s best hope: Obama overreaches or underachieves (McClatchy)
If history’s any guide, the Republican Party’s best hope for winning back power is a public backlash against Barack Obama.
Of course. Neither party actually wins an election any more. Democrats didn’t “win” in 2006 or 2008. They were given their so-called victories by the failures of the right (and the active help of some principled Republicans). Republicans put Obama in the White House, and they’re now in the process of taking him down.

Cooper on Cheney: If a Dem were doing this in a GOP admin., “wouldn’t the Republicans be saying this is traitorous?” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

GOP Wants More Help From Cheney (by Jeff Muskus at the Huffington Post)
Democrats and Republicans may have found an area of agreement: Dick Cheney should keep on campaigning for the GOP cause… “I’m sure he can help some,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I hope he helps where he can…” Graham qualified that he doesn’t see Cheney, 68, as the future of the Republican Party, leaving that role to “some young governor or somebody out there that will emerge over time.” He noted that he and Cheney have not always agreed on policy, a caveat that John Thune was also quick to include amid his praise.

White House Reporter Protects Cheney, Accuses Gibbs Of Taking “Swipe” (by Greg Sargent at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
One of the odder things we’ve seen from some members of the White House press corps this year is a kind of zealous over-protectiveness of the previous administration — Dick Cheney, in particular. Back in March, after Cheney accused Obama of putting the country in danger the first time, White House press sec Robert Gibbs defended Obama by describing Cheney as a member of a GOP “cabal.” The comment triggered outrage from the MSNBC gang and other reporters who said Gibbs hadn’t shown the former Veep proper deference.

Today during the briefing, another reporter (I’m not sure who) attacked Gibbs again for being mean to Cheney. The reporter said Gibbs had taken a “swipe” at Cheney. What was the swipe? Earlier in the briefing, Gibbs had responded to Cheney’s attack by puckishly saying he had a lot of time on his hands. That was the swipe.

A Blight On Humanity (by Turkana at The Left Coaster)
Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization. They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won’t try, to regain power. But it’s time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It’s time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn’t. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.

Pelosi Tanks In Torture Poll (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Gallup does a poll on the torture fight, and finds Nancy Pelosi faring worst of all the parties involved… Fifty-two percent approve of the CIA’s handling of the torture mess, while only 31% approve of Pelosi’s handling of it. The GOP checks in somewhere in between, with 40% approving of its performance on the story…

Pelosi’s Probably Right (by Jay Newton-Small at Swampland, Time)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a tough week — much of it her own making. But in looking at the substance of the accusations, it increasingly looks like she was right. Porter Goss was careful to parse his words in the conditional future tense when talking about what, exactly, he and Pelosi were briefed on in September 2002: “Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as ‘waterboarding’ were never mentioned.” And Senator Richard Shelby also carefully avoided saying he’d been briefed on EITs that had already been used, saying only that he’d been told about the techniques. And “purported” isn’t exactly a strong word – it’s a synonym of suggested or claimed…

Bob Graham, who was theoretically in the room with Shelby, says he has no recollection of the meeting at all – this from a man who famously details his every waking minute. Perhaps the most astonishing response has been from the CIA Director Leon Panetta, who basically said: Don’t trust our records. Which begs the question: what other issues have they kept questionable records on? But all of this has been lost in the GOP sturm und drang, led, by – of all people – Pete Hoekstra and Newt Gingrich. Yes, Pelosi needs a serious lesson in public relations but it increasing looks like there’s nothing wrong with her memory.

Pelosi vindicated (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Ron Elving’s piece on Pelosi has to be the ultimate in smarm. Savor these words, for they achieve smarmgasm: “No one will ever mistake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Dick Cheney for soul mates, but the two have a lot in common… Cheney defends the use of ‘extreme techniques’ while refusing to call waterboarding torture. Pelosi insists she did not know about waterboarding despite claims to the contrary, and she accuses the CIA of lying to her and to Congress. See? There’s a moral equivalence there, when you think about it. Elving has convinced me that both parties are equally guilty of torture. Then again, perhaps the Dems bear an even greater burden of guilt. After all, Hillary more or less started the
Iraq war all by herself (or so said the Kossacks throughout 2008).

The Wilson betrayal has been the final straw for some former Obamaphiles:
Lord Kos, will you pick up, please? We have a post for you to censor and a poster for you to ban!
(by lambert at Corrente)
Sadly, Lambert also bans people because he doesn’t like what they have to say.

Obama “Looks Forward” on Financial Fraud, Too (by Marcy Wheeler at Firedoglake)
Obama [on Thursday] issued a signing statement to the bill establishing the “Pecora Commission,” mandated to investigate the financial meltdown. The statement seems to signal a desire to “look forward” on financial fraud, in the same way he continues to try to “look forward” on torture an other abuses of power… I find the signing statement troubling for a number of reasons. First, Obama’s celebration of investigative tools to combat fraud going forward seems like the same old “look forward” language with which Obama has thus far prevented any inquiry into Bush-era torture and other abuses. Investigative tools are nice, but we need to know what the beast we’re investigating really looks like, which is what the Pecora Commission should tell us…

[T]his Pecora Commission is mandated with investigating a financial failure, not a national security one.  Yet Obama’s signing statement suggests he may invoke privilege to hide details of that failure. 

Blue Double Cross (by Paul Krugman)
Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. Indeed, it’s now clear that even as they met with the president, pretending to be cooperative, insurers were gearing up to play the same destructive role they did the last time health reform was on the agenda… Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the
Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a “big table.” And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.

But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: “If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I’ll run my own ads as president. I’ll get on television and say ‘Harry and Louise are lying.’ ” The question now is whether he really meant it. The medical-industrial complex has called the president’s bluff. It polished its image by showing up at the big table and promising cooperation, then promptly went back to doing all it can to block real change. The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity. It’s up to Mr. Obama to prove them wrong.

Friday: Haggle (by riverdaughter at The Confluence)
I have a relative who works for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.   She works in an unmarked building in central PA in what I can only assume is an attmept to keep the desperate from going postal on them. Her bosses are not nice people. They’re the kind that monitor keystrokes and bathroom breaks.  They eliminated her management position and hired her back at a 40% reduction in salary in a different division… If you want to get an idea of how easy it will be to negotiate with a company, just look at the way they treat their employees.  They don’t have to be as meanspirited, untrustworthy and cheap as they are.  They don’t have to behave as though human beings with personal lives are out to take advantage of them in the workplace.  These penny pinching, hard hearted skinflints do it because there is profit in reducing people to cogs in a machine and they can get away with it.

Obama is a fool if he doesn’t know this.  As inexperienced and weak as he is, I don’t think he is a fool.  He’s just not much of a Democrat.
How can Obama have any idea what you’re talking about, Riverdaughter? He has never been treated like that.

Obama approves US-UAE nuclear cooperation deal (AP)
President Barack Obama has approved plans for the
U.S. to help the United Arab Emirates become the first Arab nationwith a nuclear power industry that will fuel the country’s growing demand for electricity. Obama’s official backing of the pact, known as a “123 agreement,” is praised by pro-business groups that say U.S. companies are now in the running for major construction work connected to the $41 billion project. The president’s approval comes a few weeks after news organizations, including The Associated Press, obtained a videotape showing a member of the country’s royal family torturing a man.

Robobama (Political Wire)
The New York Times reports that Disney World is building “an audio-animatronic representation” of President Obama which was “assembled with the direct involvement of the White House staff — and of Mr. Obama himself.” The president supplied not just his measurements, but he also recorded a speech — “and yet another recitation of the oath of office, this one in Disney high-definition sound.” “Disney officials declined to say how much it cost to build an Obama. They have cloaked the project with a blanket of secrecy befitting the Secret Service, permitting this reporter to be the only journalist thus far to view the figure up close but allowing only a Disney photographer to take its picture.”

Baucus Flees Single Payer Questions, Conducts Business of Health Care in Secret (by Kevin Zeese at OpEd News)
[Thursday] morning I got up early to go to the Kaiser Foundation before Senator Baucus arrived… We didn’t get to ask Senator Baucus any questions because he fled down an alley into a service entrance.  He was prepared to park in front of Kaiser but when he saw several cameras, me and others outside he decided retreat was the better alternative.  So, he drove into a heavy metal door protected garage and did not get out of his car until the door was closed and he was safely away from questions from the public.

Evan Bayh votes against a national renewable electricity standard that even Republicans supported. (Think Progress)
[Thursday] morning, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) “was the only Democrat to oppose a renewable-energy requirement” that even some Republicans supported. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee “voted down an amendment offered by Republican Senator Jeff Sessions that would have removed the renewable electricity standard from the energy package the panel is currently debating” by a vote of 9 to 13. Even though the Energy Information Administration has found that a much stronger standard would only affect electricity prices in
Indiana by 6 percent in 2026, Bayh argued Indiana would be hit hard.

Senate Republicans block vote on Obama judicial nominee. (Think Progress)
Bloomberg reports today that “Republicans temporarily blocked Senate committee action on President Barack Obama’s first judicial appointment, attacking the nominee for rulings based on separation of church and state.” The GOP, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), are attempting to challenge the fitness of U.S. District Judge David Hamilton of Indiana to be promoted to a federal appeals court in Chicago. Senate Democrats postponed a preliminary vote on Hamilton as the GOP raised objections to Hamilton, calling him “controversial” and “troubling.” As ThinkProgress has noted, Republicans have previously distorted
Hamilton’s rulings regarding “non-sectarian prayers” in the Indiana House of Representatives.

Santorum: ‘Conservatives believe in the stewardship of patrimony.’ (Think Progress)
Last night on Fox News, former senator Rick Santorum told Greta Van Susteren that the Republican party “has to stand up for conservative principles.” They have to support the “patrimony” against “a guy named Barack Obama” who wants to upend “our social structure”.
If only.

Specter Would Crush Sestak in Primary (Political Wire)
A new Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group poll in Pennsylvania found Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) way ahead of Rep. Joe Sestak (D) in a possible Democratic primary match up, 56% to 16% with 16% undecided. The poll was commissioned by the DSCC. Meanwhile, an interesting article in the Allentown Morning Call notes that with the exception of his first two Senate votes after switching parties, Specter has “been about as automatic” a 60th vote as they come, “holding the party line on every measure but one that’s come before the chamber. The sudden streak of loyalty comes after some Democrats balked at Specter’s initial insistence on touting his maverick style and as a potential deep-pocketed challenger waits in the wings.”

Burris Approval Hits 17% (Political Wire)
A new Public Policy Polling survey shows approval ratings for two dozen U.S. Senators and finds Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) at the bottom with just 17% approving of the job he’s doing.

Blago’s Boffo Book Bucks Blocked? (by Pareene at Gawker)
Not only was beloved former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich denied his opportunity to be a celebrity wishing to get out of here, now he won’t even get his million dollars from his book deal. The killjoys of the Illinois State Senate are passing some terrible bill that wouldn’t allow elected officials “convicted” of “misconduct” from cashing in on their fame. If the governor is convicted, he must “forfeit any monetary rights derived from any book, movie, television, radio program, or Internet depiction or detailing of the crime for which he or she was convicted.”

Texas two-step (by Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors)
Some of you may remember a few weeks back, notorious fake cowboy, Gov. Goodhair of Texas was grandstanding with stimulus money being offered by our socialist magic negro overlord and re-education camp counselor, the Carebear, saying that he would not take the money. He took the money. And he’s using the money to re-hab the Texas Governor’s Mansion.

The Road to Bankruptcy (by Megan McArdle at Asymmetrical Information, The Atlantic)
At the end of his book’s harrowing account of mortgage mistakes and credit card crises,  Edmund Andrews writes:  “While our misadventure had certainly been more extreme than those of many other Americans, our situation was not all that unusual.”  And indeed the book reads like the story of an American Everyman, easily sucked in to the alluring world of easy credit as he struggled to blend a new family.  The terrifying implication is that it could happen to you–to anyone who leads with their heart and not their head. But en route to that moral, it turns out the story has been tidied up a little.  Patty Barreiro, Andrews’ wife, has declared bankruptcy twice.  The second time was while they were married, a detail that didn’t make it into either the book or the excerpt that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine…

Serial bankruptcies can, of course, happen to anyone with enough bad luck.  But they usually don’t.  And when they do, they usually hit people with marginal incomes that leave no margin for error in the budget.  Most people, even in LA, are able to build a sustainable budget out of an income in the low six figures. Moreover,  pesky bad luck isn’t really the picture painted by either filing.  Rather, Ms. Barreiro seems to have spent most of the last two decades living right up to the edge of her income, and beyond, and then massively defaulting.  If you structure your finances so that absolutely everything has to go right, it’s hard to blame the mortgage company when you don’t quite make it.
Don’t forget that Andrews is a reporter on economics for the New York Times.

DHS Enlists Sci-Fi Writers to Imagine Future Dangers (Washington Post)
The line between what’s real and what’s not is thin and shifting, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has decided to explore both sides. Boldly going where few government bureaucracies have gone before, the agency is enlisting the expertise of science fiction writers.
That’s actually a very good idea.

Media Matters for America headlines

Memo to Chris Wallace: Military officials say Gitmo has been a “recruiting tool” for terrorists

Wash. Times fails to disclose op-ed author’s ties to defense industry

Will the NY Times issue correction to report on former Gitmo detainees?

Obtuse Angle: Fox News correspondent repeats debunked Library Tower claim

Media uncritically aired Cheney claim that “EITs” were used after other techniques failed

Coulter falsehood: No evidence Guantánamo “has served as a recruiting tool for terrorists”

Brzezinski’s reading of CNN’s Cheney poll contradicts CNN polling director

Buchanan, Peters call Cheney speech “candid,” “accurate” despite discredited claims

Coulter revives campaign falsehood about IL “Born Alive Act”

Venezuelan officials raid business of TV news station owner (McClatchy)
Government agents Thursday night raided a car dealership business here owned by the main owner of Globovision, an all-news television station that President Hugo Chavez has been threatening to close in recent days.

Pirate Bay Trial Fiasco Continues: Second Judge Removed for Bias (Mashable)
The Pirate Bay trial, in which the four Swedish founders of the file sharing service were convicted of assistance to copyright infringement, continues to grow more absurd. On April 17, the group were sentenced to a year in prison and fined approximately $3.6M USD. The trial came under question, however, when it was discovered that the judge in the case was affiliated with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property. A second judge, Ulrika Ihrfelt, was then brought in to determine whether the original trial judge was biased, and whether a retrial was required.

This second judge has now been removed from the job amid claims that she too was a member of those organizations, reports a Swedish newspaper.

LA police union wants San Diego Union-Tribune editorial writers fired
The San Diego paper’s new owner relies on a $30-million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles police officers and firefighters to help fund its acquisitions of companies; the union says that makes it a part owner of the Union-Tribune. “Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced,” says the head of the Los Angeles Police Protective League.

The New York Times L.A. Bureau’s Favorite Studio (by Hamilton Nolan at Gawker)
Jennifer Steinhauer is the L.A. Bureau chief for the New York Times. Her husband is Times television reporter Ed Wyatt. Steinhauer’s having a book party in LA tonight for her new novel, Beverly Hills Adjacent. The location of the party: the home of Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton… Now, to the untrained eye this may appear to be that ancient, hibernating specimen called a “conflict of interest.”

Prof: Media critics don’t need journalistic training
“We write about doctors and we’re not doctors,” says Christopher Harper, who recently wrote about media critics. “I think it’s legitimate for people who don’t necessarily have journalistic training to criticize the techniques of journalism. They might be wrong in their analysis, but I think that any traditional technique of gathering information or journalistic practice is certainly open to criticism.”

Listen to Chicago media heavy-hitters (plus Carl Bernstein) discuss the news business (Chicago Public Radio Blog)
Public radio station WBEZ has posted audio from Thursday’s Make Media Matter discussion. Panelists included the top editors from the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times.

Take a tour of five newsrooms doing innovative work
The Nieman Journalism Lab has video tours of work spaces at Talking Points Memo, Gawker Media, Daily Telegraph, Spokesman Review, and Valley Independent Sentinel. Zachary M. Seward writes that TPM’s newsroom “has a familiar feel: very smart, very young journalists working too hard in hip but unglamorous quarters. However, most newsrooms don’t have a Polk Award.”

TSummer 2009 Could Be Right Time to Expand Mobile News Services (by Amy Gahran at Poynter Online)
Apple’s iPhone certainly possesses ample consumer appeal, and it’s a great platform for mobile news and information. However, its relatively high monthly bill (I pay about $93/month total for mine) prevents many would-be users from getting one, especially in a struggling economy. But BusinessWeek recently reported that cheaper iPhones may be on the way from AT&T, the exclusive iPhone service provider, possibly as soon as the end of May.

If AT&T makes iPhone plans significantly less expensive and/or more flexible (such as offering pay-as-you-go options, as most low-cost cell phone providers do), the iPhone could become a strong mainstream news platform. Also, with the new Palm Pre launching June 6, and other cell-phone providers planning big moves in the smartphone market, AT&T will definitely have to work on its iPhone pricing. That could make this summer the right time for a significant push on mobile news services.

o the Rescue: Newspaper Content Cops
This week, Scribd, a document-sharing outfit in San Francisco, unveiled a system for publishing secure bodies of text and distributing them across the Web… Scribd Store’s initial users are mostly publishers of long-form electronics books who sell access for one-time payments, says co-founder Jared Friedman. But the distribution system could easily be applied to newspaper and magazine Web sites. By making the secured widget the only mechanism for reposting the content, the news publishers could make sure that all editorial and advertising content remains in tact as other Web sites post their work.

Another Bay Area start-up, Attributor, hopes to attack the piracy problem by giving publishers tools to hunt down republications of their text and claim a chunk of any advertising sold against it.

Some Newspapers Booking Local Ads Online Thanks to Yahoo
Newspapers are reporting success with an intriguing industry effort: chasing local advertising with technology and ad inventory from Yahoo. The Yahoo newspaper consortium has sold nearly $50 million in Yahoo inventory so far, according to estimates.

What NYT, other papers might offer paid members
Some of Steve Outing’s ideas:
* Once-a-month lecture with free admission for members. (Others pay, so with a good speaker line-up it’s another revenue source.)
* Seminar series featuring staff journalists and community leaders and celebrities; free to members.
* Access to “exclusive” forums or discussion areas on the website that are closely monitored and in which staff journalists regularly participate.
* Free downloadable mobile phone apps that others must pay for.
Click through to the original story for more Ideas. There’s one that I think might come under IRS scrutiny: “Advertisers should be persuaded to take part in the member discount program as part of their overall ad deal with the newspaper and its digital services, so there’s a wide variety of discounts and deals to be had.” It’s the kind of activity that avoids taxes by bartering instead of I pay you and you pay me, where the exchange has to be reported. It won’t be long before the IRS catches on and finds a way to tax these events.

Why doesn’t Wired practice what its editor preaches?
Chris Anderson says that giving things away for free is the “radical” new business model of the future, yet his magazine charges $90,000 for a full-page ad and $10 for a one-year subscription. “If the free model would ruin
Anderson’s own business, why does he think it’s so great for most other businesses?” asks James Ledbetter.

More Budget Cuts, Job Losses to Hit Detroit Dailies
Executives at Detroit’s two daily papers, and their JOA-arm Detroit Media Partnership, are bracing for budget reductions that are likely to come next week and could include as many as 100 job losses. The cuts would come less than two months after the papers stopped home delivery four days per week.

Digital Boxscores: Science, Celebs Lead ‘09 Growth
A number of consumer magazine brands continued to gain traction online in the past year. Comparing March 2008 to March 2009 page views and unique users, it appears that the re-launch initiatives from Health.com, RD.com, DiscoverMagazine.com, and OKMagazine.com succeeded.

Playboy Looks for $300M Sugar Daddy
Playboy Enterprises, the far-flung empire founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953, is quietly being shopped around for $300 million. But so far, well-heeled suitors that have been approached, like Apollo Capital Partners and Providence Equity Partners, haven’t stepped up.

New York Magazine Increases Sub Price, Cuts Rate Base
New York
 said today that it is increasing its introductory subscription price from $19.97 to $24.97 — a 24 percent bump. The increased sub price will be phased in during the second half, the magazine said.

Radio Ad Biz Posts Worst Quarter in History
The radio advertising business posted its worst quarter in history. National and local ad spending combined fell 26 percent to $2.8 billion, according to figures released late Thursday by the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Numbers Tell Sad Tale for 2008-09 TV Season
At the close of the 2008-09 season, which officially ended Wednesday, the major networks’ ratings were down a collective 16 percent from the 2007-08 campaign. Fox won the season in the adults 18-49 demographic, while CBS won in total viewers.

The End of Television as We Know It (by The Cajun Boy at Gawker)
For decades now, the networks and production studios have held a creative stranglehold over the industry. If you were a writer with a brilliant idea for a new show, you had to go through “the system” if you held any hope for your idea to see the light of day and come to fruition as an actual television show… But all of that is changing. You see, with the internet, yes the internet, creators of serialized content can circumvent “the system” and produce their shows independently, in much the same way that filmmakers began began circumventing the studio system to develop films a few years back…

In other words, the need for television networks to develop and air shows will evaporate. They’ll still be there, it’s a stretch to say they’ll die off altogether, but they will never be the same. And we’ll all be better off for that.
One of the things I like about some of the contest reality shows like Top Chef, Project Runway, and even America’s Next Top Model is that they give people a chance to succeed without submitting to the ossified, bureaucratic, risk fearing, corrupt, who’s your daddy, casting couch way of choosing people to be given a shot. And that’s a very good thing.

Google TV Ads Makes Upfront Splash (Paid Content)
[I]t looks like the big news out of this year’s fall TV preview had nothing to do with the big four networks. Google TV Ads has deals with several marketers, who have pledged roughly “seven figures” to the spot buying platform for the fall, reports Daisy Whitney in THR… While a few million dollars is still not enough to make the networks worry, even in this dismal ad market, it suggests that Google TV Ads could wind as a player in the broadcast game after all.

Why Broadcast Networks Can’t Just Turn Cable (by Jon Fine at Business Week)
Turning the nets into cable channels isn’t so easy, not least because the networks would have to persuade the cable guys to put them on the dial. And such a move would have implications for advertisers, because cable channels don’t reach as many people as the broadcast networks do.
Yes, but some of the cable channels will start broadcasting, using the spectrum freed up by the broadcast networks going digital. It will get harder and harder to tell the difference between the two.

YouTube Deletes Thousands of Videos After ‘Porn Day’ Attack
YouTube is deleting thousands of sexually explicit videos after it was hit by an organized attack yesterday in a prank known as “Porn Day.” The site has removed most of the porn clips but some content could be available for days as YouTube deletes the offending material.

Facebook Connect Serves as Tool for Journalists Experimenting with OpenID (by Will Sullivan at Poynter Online)
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb summed up a major change this week with an enticing headline, “The Dam Just Broke: Facebook Opens Up to OpenID.” He reports: “In a few minutes Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies’ Web sites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming ‘relying parties’ that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken.”

Hello, an Avatar Is Calling You
Second Life, Sony, and Lenovo are adding Internet phone features to their virtual worlds as Web calling becomes a must-have for social sites

Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships
Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they’re beginning to have about our online friendships

Coupious Provides Location Aware Coupons on Your Mobile (Mashable)
Coupious, a free coupon application for iPods, iPhones, and Android devices, is in the process of transforming the way we think about using coupons. Currently being beta tested with users in Lafayette, Indiana (yes, the rest of us will have to wait patiently), Coupious works by using your phone’s GPS to provide location-based coupons relevant to your immediate whereabouts. Essentially, all you need to do is launch the application to find deals within walking distance or up to 50 miles away.

Gmail Down for Many (Mashable)
Gmail is down for some users tonight [and on into today]… As Gmail speeds ahead, adding features like Inbox Preview today (preview your inbox before it loads fully on a slow connection) and the addition of Google Translate this week, it’s tempting to claim that the basics – keeping Gmail online – are somewhat lacking. That situation, if real, would undermine the case for “the cloud”.
The more people, and especially businesses, put their computing and data online, the more costly will be down time.

Google Chrome: Another 30 Percent Faster? (Mashable)
Arguably the best feature of Google Chrome isn’t a feature at all, but rather the fact that it’s simply a faster Web browser than the competition. Today, the Chrome team has pushed live some new updates that they claim make the browser up to an additional 30 percent faster when it comes to loading web pages.

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Media & Politics

Permanent link to MTA daily media news

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. – Aung San Suu Kyi
Stewart Shaw

Senate Democrats postpone funds to shut Guantanamo (McClatchy)
Senate Democrats, under pressure from Republicans eager to brand them as ready to release terrorists into America’s backyards, [stripped] $80 million for closing the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, out of a war-spending bill.

With Friends Like These (by Dan Froomkin at White House Watch, Washington Post)
Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed in the Obama era: Republicans are still able to come up with scare tactics that turn Senate Democrats into a terrified and incoherent bunch of mewling babies. It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than the suggestion that bringing some of the terror suspects currently incarcerated in
Guantanamo to high-security prisons in America will pose a threat to local communities. It is nothing more than a bogeyman argument, easily refuted with a little common sense. (Isn’t that what prisons are for?)

But that’s assuming you don’t spend your every moment living in fear of Republican attack ads questioning your devotion to the security of the country. Or that you have a modicum of respect for the intelligence of the American public.

Terrorists in Prison: is there anything the Right doesn’t fear? (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
The ”debate” over all the bad and scary things that will happen if Obama closes
Guantanamo and we then incarcerate those detainees in American prisons is so painfully stupid even by the standards of our political discourse that it’s hard to put into words, and it also perfectly illustrates the steps that typically lead to America’s National Security policies:

(1) Right-wing super-tough-guy warriors project some frightened, adolescent, neurotic fantasy onto the world…
(2) Rather than scoff at the inane fear-mongering or point out simple facts to reveal its idiocy, Democratic “leaders” such as Harry Reid echo the right-wing fears in order to prove how Serious and Tough they are…
(3) ”Journalists” who are capable of nothing other than mindlessly reciting what they hear then write articles depicting the Right’s frightened neurosis as a Serious argument, and then overnight, a consensus emerges:  Democrats are in big trouble politically unless they show that they, too, are as deeply frightened as the Right is.
My message to Glenn: It’s not that the right actually fears this stuff. They’re not afraid for their own personal safety, anyway. But they know that instilling fear in the populace is the only way they can gain power. It’s a tool to them. I’ve spent nine years trying to convince Democrats that their job is to teach Americans there’s less to be afraid of than the right is telling them. Obviously to no avail. Instead, they’re happy about the fact that they’re now equal opportunity scarers.

Obama Huddles With Human Rights Groups Before Security Speech (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Under heavy criticism for a series of decisions on national security that resembled, for some, those of the Bush years, President Barack Obama hosted a lengthy meeting on Wednesday… “It was really a back and forth discussion,” said [Elisa Massimino, CEO of Human Rights First]… On Gitmo, Massimino said, the President “emphasized that he was in this for the long game. He said he realized that you can’t change people’s misperceptions overnight, that they have had eight long years of a steady dose of fear and a lack of leadership and that is not something that you wave a magic wand and make it go away.”

Obama Reiterates Promise To Close Gitmo, Urges Congress Not To Make Decisions In A ‘Climate Of Fear’ (Think Progress)
Speaking in front of the original U.S. Constitution at the National Archives this morning, President Obama delivered a lengthy, detailed speech outlining his approach to national security. Obama criticized Bush’s legal system at that convicted only three terrorists in seven years. He said it was “clear” that, “rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security.” Discussing the problem of what to do with the detainees currently imprisoned at
Guantanamo, Obama reminded the audience that the problem was caused by the erroneous decision to open the extra-legal prison camp in the first place…

He also seemed to mildly rebuke Congress — which yesterday barred the use of any funds to transfer detainees to the United States — for making “decisions within a climate of fear.” He challenged them to remember their oath [to uphold the Constitution].
Click through to watch the video.

Obama: Existing U.S. Institutions Can ‘Work Through And Punish’ Bush’s ‘Violations Of Our Laws’ (Think Progress)
Today, during his much-anticipated speech on national security policy at the National Archives, Obama addressed lingering questions about his views on a truth commission and torture accountability. Obama said that instead of a 9/11-style commission, he favors an investigation of “abuses of our values” done through Congress. Most notably, the President reiterated his view that the DOJ “and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws”.
Does that mean the Justice Department is investigating?

Obama Returns To Persuasion Mode (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
The national security speech Barack Obama [gave today] is a sign that he has returned to persuasion mode with a vengeance. One of the premises of Obama’s presidential campaign was his belief that he could win arguments with Republicans about national security; that he didn’t have to shy away from such arguments; and that Dems could frame debates about such questions, rather than always cede the game to the GOP…

Obama argued that torture is not only wrong, but is also ineffective. He practically mocked the idea that we should fear housing terrorists in maximum security prisons in America. He didn’t shy away from arguing that the law, ultimately, is our most important source of strength. Tellingly, he also refused to cede ground to his liberal critics, implicitly insisting that decisions that have disappointed them do have a place in his larger vision… One interesting thing to watch will be whether Obama’s speech reassures Dems in Congress or whether they persist in believing that they remain vulnerable to the GOP attacks. Our bet is the latter.

Obama Nails it On Guantanamo (by Larry Johnson at No Quarter)
Give the boy his due. He acted like a President today in his speech on national security and terrorism at the National Archives and gave one of the most substantive, intelligent speeches of his short tenure in office. I know this may make some of you crazy, but if we are to have any credibility in criticizing Obama we must also be prepared to acknowledge when he does the right thing and does it well. He is refusing to indulge in the politics of fear…

I presume you have caught the news that the FBI arrested four aspiring jihadists in New York City who had hatched a plot to attack Jewish targets? Let me repeat that–THE FBI ARRESTED. Note, I did not say Delta Force. I did not say U.S. Navy SEALS. In fact, we took down a terrorist cell without having to use military force. If you go back over the last decade you will find that more often than not, FBI and law enforcement techniques and procedures have been far more effective in identifying and disrupting terrorist plans… I think Obama made an effective case today that we can protect Americans without abandoning the Constitution and the rule of law. I applaud his words, let’s see if the actions follow.

When will the right wing insist the NYC synagogue bombers are ‘too dangerous’ for U.S. prisons? (Think Progress)
Last night, “an elaborate sting operation” resulted in the arrest of four men accused of plotting to bomb a synagogue and shoot down airplanes. The New York City Police Commissioner said the four men “stated that they wanted to commit jihad,” and said the men were part of a “homegrown terrorism” movement. Given conservatives’ recent hysterical declarations that U.S. prisons are unfit to handle terrorist suspects, Hilzoy challenges the right wing’s talking points in regards to the imprisonment of these “homegrown” terrorists: “…I assume that if it’s too dangerous to move people at Guantanamo to the United States, it must be much too dangerous to allow these jihadists to run loose in our prisons.”

Feinstein: California prisons are ‘eminently capable of holding’ Guantanamo detainees. (Think Progress)
Since President Obama announced his goal to shut down the
Guantanamo prison, conservatives have fearmongered that it would mean terrorists would be coming to Americans’ “backyards.” On the Senate floor this morning, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that her state’s prisons were “eminently capable” of housing detainees, and slammed conservatives for “fear-baiting”.
Click through to watch the video.

Reid Spokesperson Signals Wiggle Room On Guantanamo (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
A spokesperson for Harry Reid is signaling some wiggle room on the issue of Guantanamo Bay, opening the door for Reid to possibly support the imprisoning of detainees in America once Obama produces a plan, despite appearing to rule that out [Tuesday]. Reid’s spokesperson emails that Reid actually opposes the transfer to America “at this time,” adding that when the White House produces a plan, he will “evaluate it carefully and make a judgment at that time.”

Cheney’s Speech (Political Wire)
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech this morning on national security was entirely about the past. It was a well-argued defense of Bush administration policies, though sarcastic jabs at President Obama, Democrats and the media make clear Cheney knows he’s not a popular politician and has no illusions he will soon become one. While the speech was probably effective for Bush administration loyalists, it’s not likely to impact the current debate. This speech was almost entirely about defending the historical record and Cheney’s own legacy. 

Krauthammer voices support for Gitmo: “I know it’s the romantic in me” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Playing the Pelosi card (by Gene Lyons, Salon)
It took them a while, but Republican thinkers and their media enablers appear to believe they’ve found a way to turn the torture issue against Democrats. Enough tiresome rhetoric about the rule of law and America’s lost moral compass. Let’s take the discussion back to the junior-high level, where everybody’s most comfortable. Let’s have a national witch hunt. Skeptical analysts at mediamatters.org wrote the perfect headline: “What did President Pelosi know, and when did she know it?” To House Republicans and drumbeaters like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, that’s the big question. Not whether CIA interrogators under the orders of the Bush White House violated all norms of civilized behavior frantically trying to prove one of Dick Cheney’s most cherished delusions: nonexistent links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, used to justify invading Iraq.

Not, that is, whether agents of the U.S. government used Stalinist techniques for Stalinist ends: to secure “confessions” supporting decisions previously made for ideological reasons. But whether or not CIA briefers told a minority congresswoman in September 2002 that captured al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah had already been waterboarded 82 times at Guantánamo.

Jamiol’s World

Pelosi-CIA Contretemps May Spark Wider Probe (William Fisher, IPS)
Congressional Democrats and many Washington journalists are predicting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s current dispute with the Central Intelligence Agency may ultimately hasten the push toward the last thing Republicans want – a comprehensive investigation of prisoner detention and interrogation during the administration of former President George W. Bush… A recent Senate hearing on torture provides a measure of just how embarrassing such revelations could be. That hearing aired two claims that went largely unreported in mainstream media accounts. 

The first claim was intended to debunk the widely-held view that the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were at odds about the effectiveness of harsh interrogation practices. Testimony at the hearing suggested that the two agencies were in agreement. The second claim was that CIA operatives were responsible for the application of abusive interrogation practices. But testimony asserted that these interrogations were carried out by private contractors, and that CIA personnel present at the time agreed with the FBI that the so-called “enhanced techniques” were unnecessary and counterproductive. Both these claims came from a former FBI special agent, Ali Soufan, an interrogator who helped question Abu Zubaydah – the first high-value detainee in U.S. custody.

Specter Defends Pelosi, Says CIA Has “Very Bad Record” On “Honesty” (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Nancy Pelosi has picked up an unlikely defender in her standoff with the CIA. That would be the Senate’s newest Democrat, who delivered a scathing indictment of the CIA’s credibility [Wednesday]: “…’The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to — I was about to say “candid”; that’s too mild — to honesty,’ Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a lunch address to the American Law Institute.”…It’s funny that it’s fallen to Specter, of all people, to remind everyone of this. And it’s a pretty harsh quote, particularly coming from someone who was a Republican only a few weeks ago.

After Claiming He Couldn’t ‘Imagine’ The CIA ‘Would Mislead Us,’ Boehner Acknowledges They May Have (Think Progress)
Last week, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) asserted in a press conference that she believed the CIA had misled her in a briefing on interrogation, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) scoffed at the idea that the CIA could have been dishonest. “It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone in the intelligence areas would mislead us,” said Boehner in his own press conference. But on CNN [Wednesday], Boehner acknowledged that members of his own party, such as Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), have previously accused the CIA of lying to Congress. Pressed by Wolf Blitzer, Boehner did not disagree with Hoekstra’s allegation that the CIA lied to Congress in a previous case.
Click through to watch the video.

Porter Goss Won’t Say Whether He And Pelosi Were Told About Use Of Torture (by Greg Sargent at The Plum Line)
Porter Goss, the former GOP Congressman who was in the room with Nancy Pelosi during their 2002 CIA briefing on interrogations, is declining through a spokesperson to say whether the two of them were told that enhanced interrogation techniques had been used. Goss’ reticence raises still another round of questions about the accuracy of the recently-released CIA documents purporting to detail what members of Congress were told about the use of torture.

Gingrich: Only Republicans — Like Me — Are Allowed To Accuse The CIA Of Misleading Congress (Think Progress)
[On Wednesday], former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich went on ABC’s Good Morning America and called on Democrats to pressure Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to resign her position as Speaker. He claimed that she has “disqualified herself” for the leadership spot, because “if I were a person trying to defend this country, I’d have very little confidence that the Speaker of the House had any regard for what we were doing.” Host Diane Sawyer challenged Gingrich, noting that he never criticized Rep. Peter Hoekstra’s (R-MI) repeated criticism of the agency, including this statement in 2007: “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress.” Gingrich struggled uncomfortably and repeatedly attempted to change the subject.
Click through to watch the video.

The Boston Globe can’t be bothered with facts in its Pelosi story (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
According to the Globe article, it’s all very clear: Pelosi’s facing a rebellion within her party because of the on-going CIA story… According to the Globe, there is dissension within Democratic ranks over Pelosi. (And only Obama can quell it!) And specifically, ”moderates” in the party have backed the CIA–not Pelosi–in the intelligence dispute. Slight problem though, the Globe article never supplies any evidence to back up the claims.

The Pelosi polling lie, please make it stop (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
It’s become the blind-leading-the blind at this point, as the The Drudge Report and the Boston Globe have joined with Politico to completely butcher the results from a recent CNN poll. They have completely manufactured the claim that Pelosi’s approval ratings have plunged from 51 percent in January of this year, to 39 percent today, with the suggestion that it’s all the fault of the CIA briefing scandal.

Quinn on Pelosi: “This bitch is trying to get us to lose the war!” (video at County Fair, Media Matters for America)

Torture Lawyers Ought To Be Disbarred (by Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report)
President Obama considers U.S. use of torture as an instrument of national policy is best relegated to the past, unpunished – even though a web of international treaties and laws, and
U.S. statutes, obligate the executive branch to prosecute the guilty. It has been left to a coalition of activist groups to pursue some small measure of punishment for the 12 Bush lawyers that conspired to make torture, legal. The coalition has filed complaints with state bar associations to pull the torture lawyers’ licenses.

The American Way: In Defense of George W. Bush (by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque)
If George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other principals of the previous administration were ever brought to trial for war crimes, I would offer my services, in all sincerity, to their defense. For I think they would have a strong case to make, one that would be of vital, perhaps decisive importance for the future of the nation — and the world…

Faced with prosecution for their admitted deeds, the principals of the Bush Administration would have only one defense: precedent. They would have to show that their actions had been accepted practice in American government for many, many years — from the very beginning, in fact… Thus the Bush defense team would have to put forth a mountain of historical evidence, laying out in great detail the use of military aggression and torture (both directly and by client states under American direction, for American purposes) over the entire course of U.S. history.

Senators Push for Delay of ‘Public Option’ in Health-Care Plan … (Bloomberg)
Some senators drafting a health-care overhaul said they may support creating a new public health insurance program only if private insurers don’t do enough to expand coverage and reduce costs. Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, said a bipartisan group on the Senate Finance Committee is discussing a delay for several years in creating a “public option” plan that would compete against private insurers. The lawmakers first want to see whether more uninsured Americans get coverage under other policy changes, such as new subsidies for lower-income people, Snowe said.

Snowe said she views a new government health-care program as a gamble, in part because it might attract a high proportion of sicker patients who would drive up costs.

A “TRIGGER” FOR THE PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE OPTION? ALREADY TRIGGERED. (by Jason Rosenbaum at Health Care for America Now, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
Think about it. What would the trigger be for the public health insurance option? Skyrocketing prices? Already there. No choice or competition? Already there. Denying care? Already there. As has been proven time and time again, we have a health care crisis now. Trigger conditions have long since been met. So, proponents of a trigger are in effect saying, “Wait! The health care crisis needs to get worse. The insurance industry should be more concentrated and premiums should be higher before we give America relief.”

GOP Senator Leading Attacks Against Health Care Reform Admits Gitmo Detainees Get Better Care Than Americans (Think Progress)
Last week, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) visited the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and declared that even if detainees are held without charge, they should remain at Guantanamo “until the war against terrorism ends.” “They are like having Charles Manson times whatever factor — these people are so dangerous,” Ensign said. Ensign said that
Guantanamo seemed so appealing to him that it would be “hard to imagine” why anyone would want to close the facility. When making this argument, however, Ensign inadvertently made a case for health care reform: “…They get better health care than the average American citizen does…”

Insurance Lobby Reverses Course, Prepares To Smear Key Element Of Obama’s Health Reform (Think Progress)
Last week, the health insurance lobby met with President Obama and pledged to “work together” to provide quality, affordable coverage and access for every American. In less than five days, the insurers not only broke that promise, but the Washington Post reports that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has drafted ads aimed at smearing the President’s proposed public health insurance plan…

Rather than being an honest partner in the debate on health reform, the health insurance industry appears to be launching a campaign of misinformation aimed at sinking any serious prospect for change. The leader of the trade group representing the health insurance lobby, Karen Ignagni, made headlines earlier this year when she promised to the President, “you have our commitment, to play, to contribute and to pass health care reform this year.” Curiously, the date on the ad storyboard is May 9th, meaning that at least one major health insurance company has been secretly planning to assault health reform for several weeks. The strategy is stunningly reminiscent of the last attempt to reform the system in 1993.

Frank Luntz Won’t Say Who Paid For His Health Care Memo (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Conservative communications guru Frank Luntz has written the playbook for GOP opposition to the Obama administration’s health care proposal. His plan, which is heavy on framing the president’s proposal as a government “takeover,” is already popping up in statements from top congressional Republicans and on Fox News, despite the fact that no Democratic legislation has been proposed. But when it comes to discussing who funded his messaging, the wordsmith Luntz is notably devoid of words. Asked about his funder in an interview with the New York Times Magazine to be published on Sunday, Luntz was close-lipped…

Asked why he suggested the foreboding “Washington takeover” as a description for a public plan for insurance coverage, Luntz replied: “‘Takeover’ is a word that grabs attention.” When reminded by the interviewer Deborah Solomon that the president isn’t actually in favor of a single-payer system, but rather a hybrid of public and private providers, Luntz replied: “I’m not a policy person. I’m a language person.”

U.S. announces effort to combat Medicare fraud (McClatchy)
The Obama administration on Wednesday unveiled an anti-health care-fraud mission aiming to combat billions of dollars in Medicare scams from
Miami to Los Angeles.
Good. THAT will save a bundle of money.

Meeting of America’s Richest About ‘Need,’ Attendee Says (ABC News)
Under a cloak of secrecy, some of the world’s wealthiest people gathered in an unprecedented meeting early this month in New York City “to see how they can join together to do more,” according to one attendee. Invited by the world’s two richest men Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, along with David Rockefeller, a Who’s Who of American wealth and influence gathered around a long table in a window-lined private room overlooking the
East River on May 5. “The overwhelming reason for the meeting was need — that was the issue that galvanized everyone to participate,” Patricia Stonesifer, senior advisor to the Gates foundation’s trustees, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, told ABCNews.com. “This was a group very committed to philanthropy coming together to see how they can join together to do more.”

Gates and Buffett were joined by billionaire moguls Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg along with heavyweight philanthropists George Soros and others. Together the attendees have donated more than $70 billion to charity since 1996, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
I may be the ultimate class warrior, because I don’t think it should be up to these people how this money is spent. I think we should tax the hell out of them—they’ll still make a lot of money, anyway, and we the people should decide how to spend it. “Do more”, indeed.

The Crimes of Wall Street: The Scams and Sleaze at the Top (by Danny Schechter, the News Dissector)
Along With the Lies That Misled Us, and Frauds That Robbed Us

Blue collar males lose more ground (Reuters)
One statistic that stands out in
America’s recession-stung economy is the unemployment rate for adult men: in April for the second month in a row it surged ahead of the national average to 9.4 percent versus 8.9 percent for all workers. The jobless rate for adult women was 7.1 percent. The reasons are clear: male-heavy sectors such as construction and manufacturing have been hard hit. But the implications may be dire for the broader economy and hamper the recovery as families that once had male breadwinners struggle.

What Industrial Policy Should Be (by Robert Reich)
Much of the industrial Midwest desperately needs new technologies and industries to take the place of the shrinking U.S. auto industry, and workers who have been (or are about to be) laid off need help transitioning to those new jobs. Could chunks of the old auto industry be adapted to producing high-speed rail or, more generally, highly-efficient people-moving systems of the future or, even more generally, green technologies that support such systems? Could some of the billions now slated to fund new non-carbon based energy sources be targeted to this? I don’t know the answers but I worry no one is asking these questions.

Republicans, the Stupid Party; it’s Much Worse than I Thought (Niall Ferguson Edition) (by Brad DeLong)
Not only Republican intellectuals not pushing back against the RNC’s self-abusive claim that the Democratic Party “is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” [they have] written down the talking point and are running with it…

Barack Obama is a Keynesian (and not enough of one, at that), not a Marxist. John Maynard Keynes is not Karl Marx. The last time any bunch of people argued what Niall Ferguson does it was the honchos of National Review in the 1950s, who denied the possibility of any third-way alternative at all to either laissez-faire or Soviet Russia, who lauded Francisco Franco as Europe’s greatest twentieth-century politician, who thought there was a serious chance that George C. Marshall was part of the conspiracy so immense that had handed China and was working to hand America over to Josef Stalin, and believed that white southerners had the right and duty to deny African-Americans the vote by “such measures as are necessary to prevail.”

The new regulatory structure begins to emerge (by Felix Salmon, Reuters, thanks to Economist’s View)
The WaPo … broke the news [Wednesday] evening that Elizabeth Warren’s dream of a Financial Product Safety Commission is likely to become reality, thanks to the Obama administration. The WSJ’s Damian Paletta then did a fantastic job with his follow-up (although weirdly Warren’s name is nowhere to be seen): “…One possible scenario is that government officials consolidate some government agencies, such as the Office of Thrift Supervision, and strip some powers from the Federal Reserve and others to centralize the policing of financial products within a new body.”

[And] “…The creation of a financial product regulator would match a theme that Mr. Geithner has suggested is central to his vision of financial supervision. Instead of having regulators tha