More Religion

I am glad the NYT publishes stuff like this but it would be nice if they put the truth in the paper.

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:[....]
Climate-change denial is a special category all its own. Once on the fringe, dismissal of scientific consensus is now an ariticle of faith among leading Republicans, again taking their cue from Limbaugh and Fox.
It is nice to see that other people understand republicanism is a religion and you need faith to believe in it.

Faith

As with trust, faith involves a concept of future events or outcomes, and is used conversely for a belief "not resting on logical proof or material evidence.

Media Bias

Josh Marshall

The McCain campaign's ability to frame their message around a series of demonstrable lies is only possible because most of the press takes an agnostic position on whether his messages and ads are true or not. But if the press won't, don't we need to stop relying on the mainstream press to make that point? That's a very tall proposition. But this is a pattern we've seen cycle after cycle. Complaining about it only achieves a sort meaningless moral victory.

So Many Lies, So little Time

The anthrax killer or killers are being flushed down the memory hole. The news comes out on a Friday. How convenient. Journalists or are they mere agents of propaganda at ABC and other mainstream outlets are covering the republican governments lies. The republican government wants the investigation over before a Democratic Attorney General comes into office. That could be embarrassing for Cheney and his minions. Go read Glen Greenwald for the details.

The death of government scientist Bruce Ivins has generated far more questions about the anthrax attacks than it has answered. I want to return to the role the establishment media played in obfuscating the anthrax investigation for so long and, at times, aiding in what was clearly the deliberate deceit on the part of Government sources. This is yet another case where the establishment media possesses -- yet steadfastly conceals -- some of the most critical facts about what the Government has done, and insists on protecting the wrongdoers. Obtaining these answers from these media outlets is as important as obtaining them from the Government. Writing about ABC's dissemination of the false Iraq/anthrax story, The New Republic's Dayo Olopade wrote yesterday: "Pressure on ABC to out their sources should be swift and sustained."

The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum argued yesterday that despite the need for journalists to use confidential sources, "the profession -- and the rest of us -- [are] better off if sources know that they run the risk of being unmasked if their mendacity is egregious enough to become newsworthy in its own right." Drum added: "I'd say that part of [Ross'] re-reporting ought to include a full explanation of exactly who was peddling the bentonite lie in the first place, and why they were doing it." Nonetheless, Drum said: "In practice, most journalists refuse to identify their sources under any circumstances at all, even when it's clear that those sources deliberately lied to them."

No read it all.

Anthrax Killer May Have Committed Suicide

Or maybe Cheney's minions helped him along. Either way the FBI will not have to tell us what really happened. They could have arrested him long ago if they wanted. But like what happened on September 11, 2001, the republicans are going to hide and obfuscate the truth as best they can. Of course, there alias in the media will aid and abet them.
Glenn Greenwald:

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

Avedon's take on the anthrax killer.

Someone working for the US government tried to assassinate two members of the Democratic leadership - the two who were best placed to stop Bush's extraordinary power-grab - and some members of the media. People in the government were warning people (such as Richard Cohen) to take Cipro before the attacks. It's unsurprising that these legislators and journalists were scared to death - indeed, scared into supporting madness in response - but it's still considered beyond the pale to put two and two together.

Best Sentence Of The Day

Cernig at Newshoggers

Down on the coast, people are battening down the hatches and here in San Antonio Gov. Perry has actually learned from past mistakes, shocking many:

What War?

The media has decided to disappear the war that John McCain wants to keep going for a hundred years.

Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year.

Why report on something that makes McCain look bad.

And Justice For...

No one apparently. Scott Horton over at Harpers has a great article on what happened to the Justice Department under Bush.

Has the Bush Justice Department used the criminal justice system to punish its political adversaries all across the country? As the countdown begins to the end of the Bush Administration, abuse of the criminal justice system is finally coming into focus.

Within the Justice Department itself, the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General are conducting a joint investigation into the case of the “Gonzales Eight,” namely the firing of eight U.S. attorneys on December 7, 2006. Preliminary inquiries by Congress produced the resignation in disgrace of most of the senior leadership of the Justice Department, including Attorney General Gonzales. Now ee hear that Alberto Gonzales has “lawyered up” — for good reason. The internal probe will, I am told, demonstrate a stunning pattern of management of political prosecutions out of the White House. Karl Rove himself figures at the center of the process. And George W. Bush will put in more than a couple of key appearances in the process before this drama has been played out. The internal probe has already assembled explosive evidence of precisely this sort of abuse in its examination of the dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. And the inquiry has barely begun to address the parallel facts in Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, Las Vegas and Little Rock. I will be discussing all of this in much greater detail in a feature article which will appear in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

It is a great article a must read.

Reid Still A Republican Tool

We must defeat the amnesty for law breaking provision. I do not support amnesty for law breakers. Do you? From Glenn Greenwald:

Harry Reid -- who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush's demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster -- went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned "retreat," and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.

To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster. This is what Reid said:

[I]f people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate.

That is what Democrats have been urging Reid to do to the filibustering Republicans all year -- in order to dramatize their obstructionism -- but he has refused to make them actually filibuster anything, generously agreeing instead that every bill requires 60 votes. Instead, he reserves such punishment only for the members of his own caucus trying to take a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution, those who are trying finally to bring some accountability to this administration.

As I noted in my post yesterday, Reid had the audacity to send his spokesman, Jim Manley, to falsely claim to the New York Times that "Senator Reid intends to do everything he can to strip immunity from the bill" -- even though the exact opposite is true. Reid is engaged in at least as much maneuvering to ensure that Bush and Cheney get what they want here as McConnell would be willing to do if he were the Majority Leader.

Read it all.

Chris Mathews Apologizes

Well he does a little but not really. The Carpet Bagger has the goods.
Update: Josh at TPM
Update 2: Hecate may have said it best.

Afraid

The mainstream media, republican tools for the most part, are afraid. The are afraid that the american public will associate the democratic party with good. They are refusing to poll the democratic voters to see if they are christian. In this country people think christian and good are synonyms. The media does not want you to think that democrats can be good. From Sarah at Tapped:

As was the case in Iowa, the exit polling firm that provides data to all the major networks, cable news outlets and the Associated Press, did not ask New Hampshire Democrats if they were evangelical, further enabling the extremist conservative evangelicals with the very loud voices to assert that they represent all evangelicals voters. Moderate and liberal evangelicals make up a little less than half of all American evangelicals. Surely some of them are Democrats, or at least we should be interested in finding out how many of them are? The folks at Faith in Public Life have more

WOW

It is hard to believe this is our elite political commentary. Chris Mathews has no respect for Hillary at all. What a republican tool.

Update:Tritero over at Digby's place has this to say.

He's absolutely right. But really now, what does it matter? To be charitable towards poor Mr. Fenn, it's perhaps an error of omission. After all, Fox represents Absolute Evil and the networks aren't in that league, right?

No. That's simply not so. And if you think so, take a trip through the Howler's archives and marvel at the unbelievably nasty and gratuitous lies and distortions in the coverage of Gore, of the Clintons, and of other major Democrats from the major networks, from the major papers, from media outlets who claim to disavow Fox's biased agenda but whose hateful coverage of leading Democrats is just as bad.

It's true. Fox is not the problem but only part of it. Whatever the reasons, the major media hated/still hate Gore, hated Kerry, hate the Clintons. By all means read all about it on the Howler. Follow the links. Read what the non-Fox media, the "better" outlets have said and done. That is why Somerby won't tolerate Fenn's failure to include the mainstream in the list of Clinton bashers:

If the mainstream press corps turns on the next Dem nominee, will voters understand what they’re seeing? Or will they assume that, since it’s not Fox, the trashing must be well-founded?

The dead of Iraq are in the ground because of the story we liberals wouldn’t tell. Peter Fenn seems like a nice guy. Last night, within the context of insider Washington, he did keep himself highly likeable.

I don't know the answer to Bob's rhetorical question, whether viewers today -given the amount of pushback from blogs and a less turgid Democratic party - will think bashing from the mainstream has some foundation. But if I had to answer it, I'd guess they will assume the bashing must have some basis. But even if every reader and viewer in America was savvy enough never to be taken in by the media's unprofessional coverage of the Clintons and other Democrats, it makes no difference. The media have a job to do and that is to provide us with dispassionate reporting. And, as we've recently seen, they are once again failing to do so, acting like sulking children. As they have done for years and years and years.

Again, Somerby is right. We should howl bloody murder at the way the media covers the candidates. The press needs to grow up, stop their addiction to Republican talking points and their lies. They need to report; how the candidates make them feel is, or rather should be, of no one's concern except to their mommies and daddies.

Update 2: Glenn Greenwald:

All of the points Brokaw made would have been just as valid even if their Wicked Witch had been crushed last night by 15 points, just as they were all hoping, predicting, and (therefore) trying to bring about. The endless attempts to predict the future and thus determine the outcome of the elections -- to the exclusion of anything meaningful -- is a completely inappropriate role for journalists to play, independent of the fact that they are chronically wrong, ill-informed, and humiliated when they do it. It would all be just as inappropriate and corrupt even if they knew what they were talking about, even if they were able to convert their wishes into outcomes.

But Matthews' response to Brokaw is perfect in several ways. The very idea of discussing issues, examining the candidates' positions, or even analyzing voter preferences does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews. That -- the most elementary nuts and bolts of standard, healthy journalism -- is way, way beyond the scope of what our media stars are able to do or want to do.

Update 3: Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake:

What is wrong with Chris Matthews? With all of these media people? I mean that, in all honesty, what in the hell is wrong with them? Their personal loathing of Hillary Clinton shone through in every sniggering, overwrought report this week. Their building up of Barack Obama is only their prelude and set-up for the frenzied clawing and shredding of him that is to come. And they have well and truly written off coverage of either John Edwards or Bill Richardson solely based on their current fundraising numbers, and never mind that, as of yesterday, there had been two -- count them, only TWO -- Democratic contests.

None of it has anything to do with substance. It's as if a pack of hyenas were crossbred with the characters in Mean Girls and then sent out to play at journalism.

Maureen Dowd's column this morning reads like J.J. Hunsecker in drag, although it's not exactly a shock given that its Dowd we are talking about, is it? Rachel Maddow let Matthews have it last night (C&L has the clip.) as a proxy stand-in for all the media idiocy. And Pam Spaulding nails it, calling it "'The Tweety Effect,' where the misogyny of a talking head in the MSM so enrages a demographic that they go out and vote in a manner that will put egg on the face of the talking head."

Read Crooks and Liars

Really you should read it every day. Watch Olbermann smack down republican tool Chris Mathews.

How Racist Can You Be?

Bob Novak, the traitor, is still on TV. He is a reliable republican tool. He will not ever say a progressive thing. Lie, slander and pander to the right, he will. He channels Joe Bidden in this episode of Youtube. Saying Obama is not one of those stereotypical Negroes.

Milk Labeling

It just pisses me off that big business keeps getting its way. They have some lame ass argument. Dairies are no longer allowed to say they do not have rBST, because it says other milk is not healthy. I hate Monsanto. Really. Anyway, Shira at unbossed has a good article about there shenanigans. Here is a teaser.

And in Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania papers have managed to present the issue in a way that at best gives lipservice to the issues.
In the last month or so, we finally woke up to the fact that the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, now followed by Ohio and New Jersey area all planning to ban labels on milk that tell us whether Posilac / rBST (recombinant bovine somatrophin) has been injected into the cows that produce our milk.

This is an exploration of how the media is playing the story, but for those who are new to this issue, here is a quick overview of how I see the situation.

Some of us want to know, because we are concerned about the safety of the milk. Most other countries in the world are concerned and have banned its use until it is clear it is safe. The US has taken the position that its safety is not in question and placed the burden on proving it is unsafe. There are concerns about the BST or IGF-1 in our milk, the levels and types, and hints that IGF-1 could be connected with cancer - or not - when we have had more testing. There are concerns about the rush to expose the public and children to a product without being totally assured of its safety .

What Digby Said

Go Read.

No Balls

Bush is going to veto the defense spending because he hates the troops. Bush does not have the balls to sign the veto.

It Is Hard To Respect Republicans

I see things like this and I do not laugh. It would be funny, if the republican tool was just running for office. The president should be able to speak the language, the American language. Yes, I know it is English. The media foisted this Nimrod on the American public because they wanted to please their republican masters.
Via Maru, whose co blogger Undeniable Liberal just one a Monkeyfister award.

Breaking

It appears that John Edwards hair will not be an asset if republican tools like Peggy Noonan are going to talk about it. From the distinguished Glenn Greenwald.

This grown-up then proceeds to pronounce that Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson and Duncan Hunter are all "reasonable" -- as are Biden, Dodd, Richardson and Obama (though too young and inexperienced to be President) -- but this is what she says about John Edwards:

John Edwards is not reasonable. . . . .[W]e can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't.

So Peggy Noonan is a "grown-up." She goes on ABC News and MSNBC and writes for the Wall St. Journal in order to opine and is widely respected by our media elite as a mature political commentator. She knows that "the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days." America therefore needs a President with "knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world."

John Edwards, however, is disqualified, because four years ago, he was caught red-handed brushing his hair before a television appearance -- "poofing," in Noonan's words, which isn't really a word at all, but rather, a British epithet for a male homosexual -- "Slang: Disparaging and Offensive" -- a synonym for "faggot." Noonan is making the same point Ann Coulter made: Edwards can't possibly be President because he's a faggot. And to make her "grown-up" case for this, she cites one of our national media's most talked-about political stories of both 2004 and again in 2007: Edwards' brushing of his hair.

Media Bias

Glenn Greenwald has a great year end list of media quotes. The republicans like them some man parts.

"Does he have sex appeal? . . . Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man's shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of, a little bit of cigar smoke?" --

Chris Matthews, fantasizing about the pleasing, manly body smells of Fred Thompson.
"What's appealing about Rudy Giuliani is not the generous side, what's appealing about him is the tough cop side.

Right. You just wait until daddy gets home.

Yes, that part...

That Daddy.

... of the daddy. It's the tough cop side, so...

Yes. Yes" --

Chris Matthew and Howard Fineman, breathlessly sharing their excitement over the firmness of their Daddy, Rudy Giuliani.


He has "chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest . . . . and has shoulders you could land a 737 on" --

Roger Simon, The Politico's chief political columnist, enthusiastically admiring numerous parts of Mitt Romney's body.

My favorite is the JokeLine.

"I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right" -- Joe Klein of Time Magazine, reciting the anthem of our modern press corps in explaining why he can't be bothered to correct the script Hoekstra fed him.

Perhaps Time can get someone who can figure the issues out. But The media is here to distort the news not inform.

How To Rig An Election

From Muckraker Paul Kiel.

"Back in 2002," he writes, "just about every Republican operative was so dizzy with power that if you could find two of us who could still tell the difference between politics and crime, you could probably have rubbed us together for fire as well."