Month: September 2009

I Know You Are But What Am I Politics: 101

by digby

Remember this?

Irony Alert: “House Republicans are preparing to vote en bloc against the $106 billion war-spending bill, a position once unthinkable for the party that characterized the money as support for the troops,” The Hill points out. “For years, Republicans portrayed the bills funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as matters of national security and accused Democrats who voted against them of voting against the troops.”

“Congressional Republicans are at their weakest point politically in decades, but they still appear to be keeping Democrats on the defensive when it comes to national security,” Roll Call writes

The Democrats halfheartedly ran a few ads saying that the Republicans didn’t support the troops but didn’t really follow though because they actually didn’t believe in the war funding themselves. So, the Republicans got away with doing what they accused the Democrats of doing for years.

Now we have this:

After years of trying to cut Medicare spending, Republican lawmakers have emerged as champions of the program, accusing Democrats of trying to steal from the elderly to cover the cost of health reform.
[…]
The cuts are designed to be relatively painless. Except for an increase in premiums for wealthier subscribers to the Medicare drug plan, the Baucus bill would not increase premiums or co-payments, or explicitly cut benefits, for most Medicare beneficiaries.
[…]

Fifty-six percent of seniors said they thought reform would weaken the Medicare program. With seniors likely to make up nearly 20 percent of the electorate in 2010, Republicans see Medicare as a potent campaign issue. In the Finance Committee, GOP senators moved repeatedly to strip the spending cuts from the bill.

For decades, the Republicans have been trying to gut Medicare. And every time they screamed bloody murder that the Democrats were “trying to scare seniors” when the Democrats pointed out what they were doing. Today, they are shamelessly doing exactly what they accused the Dems of doing — and they are getting away with it.

It takes a lot of brass to be this brazenly hypocritical but they realize something that the Democrats don’t, which is that there is no accountability for conservatives. Ever. And that’s mostly because the liberals are confused by this and just keep playing by rules that only apply to themselves. In politics, the assault on reason is now a full fledged, mob beat down and reason is on life support.

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True Colors

by dday

Here’s the vote on the Rockefeller amendment: Rockefeller, Aye; Conrad, No; Bingaman, Aye; Kerry, Aye; Lincoln, No; Wyden, Aye; Schumer, Aye; Stabenow, Aye; Cantwell, Aye; Bill Nelson, No; Menendez, Aye; Carper, No; Grassley, No; Hatch, No, Snowe; No; Kyl, No; Bunning, No; Crapo, No; Roberts, No; Ensign, No; Enzi, No; Cornyn, No; Baucus, No.

8 Ayes, 15 Nos. Conrad, Lincoln, Bill Nelson, Carper and Baucus have been ferreted out. We’ll see if anyone flips on the Schumer “level playing field” amendment. Given the debate on the prior amendment, I’d say that MAYBE Bill Nelson could go that route. Probably not anyone else.

Now we know which Democrats want to protect the insurance industry at the expense of people.

…UPDATE: Bill Nelson just agreed to vote for Chuck Schumer’s “level playing field” amendment. And during Schumer’s remarks, he thanked Tom Carper for helping “move us toward consensus.” So we may pick up a couple votes here. Of course, the “level playing field” amendment, which doesn’t tie a public option to Medicare rates, saves $85 billion less over 10 years than the Rockefeller amendment.

…Kent Conrad is saying that the Schumer amendment reflects a “significant improvement” on the Rockefeller amendment… so will he vote for it? No. “The place where we still have a difference is whether the non-profit option is run by the government.” He’s sticking with his crappy co-ops. Conrad says that Schumer is moving much closer to package that can get 60 votes on the floor, but he won’t help move it, of course.

…Schumer amendment vote coming right up. Max Baucus once again says that “the public option can’t get 60 votes, so I won’t vote for it.” It’s the “innocent bystander” theory of government. Why, if only a Senator like Max Baucus had a vote on the bill, surely it could attract the necessary votes!

..here’s the vote: Schumer Aye; Rockefeller Aye; Bingaman Aye; Kerry Aye; Cantwell Aye; Stabenow Aye; Wyden Aye; Menendez Aye; Bill Nelson Aye; Baucus No; Conrad No; Carper Aye; Lincoln No; All R’s no.

So Carper and Nelson flipped. Amendment fails 10-13. Only Lincoln, Conrad and Baucus against it.

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Burrowed In

by digby

Everyone on the right is totally appalled by the NEA enlisting artists to pass on the good word about government and rightly so. Nothing could be worse than using the power of the government for political purposes, right?

Well, unless it has to do with flogging an illegal and unnecessary war (or using the DOJ to tip elections.) Then it’s perfectly acceptable. I’ll be waiting to see if the right can figure out what they think about this (from Raw Story):

A key senior figure in a Bush administration covert Pentagon program, which used retired military analysts to produce positive wartime news coverage, remains in his same position today as a chief Obama Defense Department spokesman and the agency’s head of all media operations. In an examination of Pentagon documents the New York Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request — which reporter David Barstow leveraged for his April 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose on the program – Raw Story has found that Bryan Whitman surfaces in over 500 emails and transcripts, revealing the deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations was both one of the program’s senior participants and an active member.[…]
The program, ostensibly, was run out of the Pentagon’s public affairs office for community relations as part of its outreach and attended to by political appointees, most visibly in these records by then community relations chief Allison Barber and director Dallas Lawrence. But as Barstow noted in his report, in running the program out of that office rather than from the agency’s regular press office, “the decision recalled other Bush administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” In addition to concealing the true nature of the program and the retired military officers’ participation in it, Raw Story uncovered another effect of this tactic. It provided Bryan Whitman, a career civil servant and senior Defense Department official who oversees the press office and all media operations, cover if and when the program was revealed. Additionally, while political appointees tend to come and go with each new administration, Whitman would be there before the program and he would be there after it. His status as a career civil servant, the fact that he’s worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations – something he points out often in public settings and did as well at the close of his recent phone interview with Raw Story — has also served to buffer him thus far from scrutiny regarding his involvement in this program. Speaking with Mr. Whitman, he denied any involvement or senior role in the program, saying he only had “knowledge” of its existence and called the assertion “not accurate.” Asked to explain the hundreds of records showing otherwise, Mr. Whitman replied, “No, I’m familiar with those documents and I’d just beg to differ with you,” though he did acknowledge being in “some” of them. In defending his claim that he wasn’t involved in the program, Whitman reiterated numerous times that since it was not run out of his office, it was not under “my purview or my responsibility.” Yet records clearly reveal that Whitman was not only fully aware of the program’s intent but also zealously pursued its goal of arming the military analysts with Pentagon talking points in an effort to dominate each relevant news cycle. He was consulted regularly, doled out directives, actively participated and was constantly in the loop. Documented communications show that Whitman played a senior role in securing generals to brief the analysts, fashioned talking points to feed them, called analyst meetings to put out Pentagon and Bush administration PR fires, hosted meetings, determined which analysts should attend trips to wartime military sites (such as the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and received frequent, comprehensive reports detailing the analysts’ impact on the air, in print and online.

Now, we all know that artists and poets are far, far more powerful than the military, so it’s not fair to compare the two. But still, consistency would require that the wingnuts be just a little bit appalled by the Bush adminstration and Pentagon pushing war propaganda in this blatant fashion. But we know consistency isn’t exactly their strong suit.

But as with so many things, they must be confused about what to do about this. This fellow, after all, is now working on behalf of the Obama administration, which makes his activities a dangerous march to fascism where under Bush they were necessary, patriotic defenses of the homeland.

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Public Service Announcement

by digby

For those of you lucky enough to have a job, the public option debate in the finance committee is being liveblogged by Brian Beutler and is streaming here.

Update: You have to love this:

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) continues to be a scold to the liberals in his party. Before a crowd of over 200 gathered at a senior center in Nebraska, Nelson said health care reform ought to pass with 65 votes–a feat which would require at least five Republicans to break with their party.

“I think anything less than that would challenge its legitimacy,” he said.

That’s so true. It’s so much more legitimate to give 35 political enemies of the majority party veto power over all legislation, which is the very definition of democracy.

Update II: Dday, writing over at Brave New Films has a post up about the public option, replete with a BNF video to illustrate everything that’s wrong with the Baucus Plan.

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Smoking Gun

by dday

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone has a huge scoop – 15 years too late, but still a huge scoop – that again shows the capture of our government by corporate interests. It turns out that Betsy McCaughey, the wingnut noise machine creation, was actually a creation of – get this – Philip Morris:

During the debate over Clinton’s health care overhaul in the early 1990s, McCaughey — then an academic at the right-wing Manhattan Institute — wrote an article for The New Republic called “No Exit,” in which she claimed that Hillarycare would prevent even wealthy Americans from “going outside the system to purchase basic health coverage you think is better.” Even though the bill plainly stated that “nothing in this Act” would prohibit consumers from purchasing additional care, McCaughey’s claim was echoed endlessly in the press, with each repetition pounding a stake further into the heart of the reform effort.

McCaughey’s lies were later debunked in a 1995 post-mortem in The Atlantic, and The New Republic recanted the piece in 2006. But what has not been reported until now is that McCaughey’s writing was influenced by Philip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton’s health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks, front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company’s strategy, the memo observed, was an effort to “work on the development of favorable pieces” with “friendly contacts in the media.” The memo, prepared by a Philip Morris executive, mentions only one author by name:

“Worked off-the-record with Manhattan and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part exposé in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan.”

The story goes on to say that Big Tobacco funded a front group called Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1993-94 to stage “grassroots revolts” in Congressional town hall meetings, which morphed this year into Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

We all knew McCaughey was a paid liar, but not a tobacco-funded paid liar. James Fallows has a bit more. This will be a great angle for the media to ignore the next time they invite McCaughey on one of their shows to tell us what’s “really” in the health care bill.

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Fed Up

by dday

Alan Greenspan had an interesting change of heart today. He endorsed the Consumer Financial Protection Agency as an overseer of banks and lenders.

For Alan Greenspan, lapdog to Ayn Rand, perhaps the only person in America not to recognize the possibility of human greed in the financial markets, to come out for a federal body overseeing the Masters of the Universe, the same kind of consumer protections he opposed while chairing the Fed, is quite a turnaround indeed. But then Greenspan told us that he was rethinking his theories after the biggest financial collapse since the Depression.

Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms…

Waxman: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

Greenspan: Absolutely, precisely. You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

In particular, Greenspan said that the Fed’s current responsibilities are quite enough for the body to manage without the added layer of consumer protection. He might have gone a bit further and mentioned that, when faced with a choice between monetary policy and consumer protection, the Fed will always choose the former. They don’t exist for the mere consumer. You can see this in the performance of Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve during the housing bubble.

The visits had a ritual quality. Three times a year, a coalition of Chicago community groups met with the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators to warn about the growing prevalence of abusive mortgage lending […]

The evidence eventually led Illinois to file suit against Wells Fargo in July for discrimination and other abuses.

But during the years of the housing boom, the pleas failed to move the Fed, the sole federal regulator with authority over the businesses. Under a policy quietly formalized in 1998, the Fed refused to police lenders’ compliance with federal laws protecting borrowers, despite repeated urging by consumer advocates across the country and even by other government agencies.

The hands-off policy, which the Fed reversed earlier this month, created a double standard. Banks and their subprime affiliates made loans under the same laws, but only the banks faced regular federal scrutiny. Under the policy, the Fed did not even investigate consumer complaints against the affiliates.

“In the prime market, where we need supervision less, we have lots of it. In the subprime market, where we badly need supervision, a majority of loans are made with very little supervision,” former Fed Governor Edward M. Gramlich, a critic of the hands-off policy, wrote in 2007. “It is like a city with a murder law, but no cops on the beat.”

Binyamin Appelbaum’s story is well worth reading. If the Federal Reserve were a rank-and-file employee, they would have been fired long ago.

I don’t know if Greenspan is trying to atone for past sins or actually learn from past experience. But when you have Greenspan and the World Bank in agreement with the likes of Elizabeth Warren, that Fed powers have grown too strong and a separate entity needs to be charged with protecting people who enter into financial arrangements, there clearly is a growing consensus here.

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Planned Personhood

by digby

Here’s the latest “pro-life” tactic, which I’m sure will be a lot of fun for all of us:

It is one of the enduring questions of religion and science, and lately of American politics: When does a fertilized egg become a person?

Abortion foes, tired of a profusion of laws that limit but do not abolish abortion, are trying to answer the question in a way that they hope could put an end to legalized abortion.

Across the country, they have revived efforts to amend state constitutions to declare that personhood — and all rights accorded human beings — begins at conception.

From Florida to California, abortion foes are gathering signatures, pressing state legislators and raising money to put personhood measures on ballots next year. In Louisiana, a class at a Catholic high school is lobbying state legislators as part of a civics exercise.

[…]

“I realize it’s been defeated in every state where it’s been attempted, but I am not discouraged,” said Hoye, who has founded the California Civil Rights Foundation to push the initiative. “Everywhere I go from now on, we are going to be talking about personhood. Imagine the discussion statewide on whether the child inside the womb is human or not.

“

Yes. Imagine. Ugh.

This is just another harrassment strategy to wear down the population until they finally just give in out of sheer fatigue. I certainly know more than a few liberals who would love to add this to the death penalty, gun control column.

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Americofascism

by digby

Dave Weigel reports from deep in the heart of the conservative movement:

Kitty Werthmann has made quite a career out of warning Americans that fascism is on its way. The 84-year-old native Austrian survived the excesses of the Third Reich and, in her dotage as a leader of the South Dakota branch of the Eagle Forum, recorded tapes and videos explaining just how Hitler took power. She made her case during George W. Bush’s presidency, but the audience was small–fringe conservative activists, radio hosts like Alex Jones. Then came President Barack Obama. On Saturday, at the “How to Take Back America” conference, Werthmann found herself speaking to an overflowing room of conservative activists about the parallels between Obama and the rise of Hitler. “We had prayer in school before we started class, and after class,” said Werthmann. “One day I came into the classroom and the crucifix was gone, and there was Hitler’s picture, and the Nazi flag on either side. And our teacher said, ‘Today we don’t pray anymore. We sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles.’” [I hope nobody tells her about the Pledge of Allegiance. hooboy… ed]
The audience of mostly female conservative activists murmured; some of them scrawled out detailed notes, shaking their heads at what they were hearing. It had been a few days since Fox News reported that a New Jersey school had children sing a song of praise to President Obama. They kept on writing and listening as Werthmann explained how Hitler had euthanized mentally handicapped children, and how he’d kept lists of political enemies. “What would you suggest we do,” asked one activist, “if we are asked to give up our guns?” “Don’t you dare give up your guns!” thundered Werthmann. “Never, never, never!” “Give them back one bullet at a time!” called out another activist. The tense atmosphere melted a little bit; the room broke up with laughter.

Ah, good times at Phyllis Schlaffley’s yearly confab. Apparently, it’s more successful than ever this year.

But this was classic:

“If you look at the classic model for moving to Marxism,” said retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who would give the conference’s opening speech, “you look at what every Marxist organization has done, they nationalize. They redistribute wealth. They restrict gun ownership. They then go out and suppress the opposition. And then, finally, they censor the media.”

In his speech, Boykin–who has gotten into hot water for speaking out against Islam while in uniform–begged the audience to pray for their country. “It’s only because of intercessory prayer that we haven’t been hit again since September 11,” said Boykin. “Pray for America for 10 minutes a day. If we can mobilize millions of prayer warriors that can pray for 10 minutes a day, we can open the gates of heaven.”

Boykin, of course, is the Delta Force zealot Zelig who became famous for saying that he was fighting the terrorists for Jesus:

The Pentagon has assigned the task of tracking down and eliminating Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and other high-profile targets to an Army general who sees the war on terrorism as a clash between Judeo-Christian values and Satan.

Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is a much-decorated and twice-wounded veteran of covert military operations. From the bloody 1993 clash with Muslim warlords in Somalia chronicled in “Black Hawk Down” and the hunt for Colombian drug czar Pablo Escobar to the ill-fated attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, Boykin was in the thick of things.

Lt. Gen. William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin, speaking about battle with a Muslim warlord
Yet the former commander and 13-year veteran of the Army’s top-secret Delta Force is also an outspoken evangelical Christian who appeared in dress uniform and polished jump boots before a religious group in Oregon in June to declare that radical Islamists hated the United States “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian … and the enemy is a guy named Satan.”

Discussing the battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia, Boykin told another audience, “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

“We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this,” Boykin said last year.

On at least one occasion, in Sandy, Ore., in June, Boykin said of President Bush: “He’s in the White House because God put him there.”

Interestingly, this super Christian is the same guy who went down to Guantanamo and dispatched General Geoffrey Miller to Iraq to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. But then, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, it’s interesting to watch the Christian right shifting into anti-communism/fascism (which seems to have morphed into the same thing, which would come as a helluva surprise to Hitler and Stalin….) A guy like Boykin is perfect. He’s a real Christian soldier, who fought for both God and the flag as if they were the same things — kind of like the Nazis actually. He’s an excellent standard bearer. The real Jack D. Ripper.

Wiegel’s reports from the front are fascinating. The right may be confused but they are thrilled to be wallowing in their domestic paranoia once again. The Islamofascists are terrible and all, but they’re nothing to the threat of the Amerifascists, the clear and present threat to everything the wingnuts hold dear.

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A Vast Failure

by digby

Norah O’Donnell, Tamryn Hall and Jonathan Capehart examined Bill Clinton’s statement over the week-end that the vast right wing conspiracy still exists. Here’s what he said:

It’s not as strong as it was, because America’s changed demographically, but it’s as virulent as it was. I mean, they’re saying things about him–you know, it’s like when they accused me of murder and all that stuff they did. He–but it’s not really good for the Republicans and the country, what’s going on now. I mean, they may be hurting President Obama. They can take his numbers down, they can run his opposition up. But fundamentally, he and his team have a positive agenda for America. Their agenda seems to be wanting him to fail, and that’s not a prescription for a good America.

They all agreed that the virulence on the right still exists and that it has to do with the fact that these people simply don’t believe that the president is legitimate. (They didn’t believe that of Clinton either, btw, because he won with only a plurality of the vote. It’s always something.) They talked about Richard Scaife and how he financed the conspiracy, but agreed that nobody is financing today’s version. They seemed very sure of themselves.

This reminds me of a story I read in the NY Times a couple of days ago in which they profiled a plucky right wing activist named Bill Wilson:

It is the weekly research meeting at Americans for Limited Government, and Bill Wilson is presiding with gusto. The Obama administration is serving up so many rich targets that Mr. Wilson and his crew of young conservatives hardly know where to begin.

There is the small, minority-owned firm with deep ties to President Obama’s Chicago backers, made eligible by the Federal Reserve to handle potentially lucrative credit deals.

“I want to know how these firms are picked and who picked them,” Mr. Wilson, the group’s president, tells his eager researchers.

There is the Georgetown University professor, nominated for a top State Department post, who Mr. Wilson thinks is way too soft on Fidel Castro of Cuba and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. He is pleased that a Republican senator has put a hold on the nomination.

There are three new appointees to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities — in the hunt for political vulnerabilities, no post is too humble to scrutinize.

“Are they for using the arts as propaganda, as opposed to just art?” Mr. Wilson asks. The researchers scribble notes.

Last November, when Mr. Obama won 53 percent of the vote and stirred many Americans with soaring rhetoric about what his administration might achieve, pundits wondered whether the election marked a symbolic end of the “government is the problem” era that Ronald Reagan had started. But eight months into Mr. Obama’s presidency, his proposals have hugely energized his opposition.

A longtime Boy Scout leader with a broad light bulb of a forehead, Mr. Wilson, 56, seems to take avuncular pleasure in mentoring his young staff members at Americans for Limited Government, a nonprofit advocacy group with a $4 million budget. In person, he is no obvious firebrand.

But for more than 30 years, migrating through groups pushing right-to-work laws, term limits and school choice, he has been a member of Washington’s permanent class of ideological activists. Appointed to no government post, elected to no office, they populate research and advocacy groups with names that often seem to include the word “American,” laboring to steer the ship of state to the left or right.

A non-profit advocacy group with a four million dollar budget, you say? Why how interesting. Where do you suppose they get the money? Well, it isn’t their membership:

While Americans for Limited Government claims 400,000 members in its literature, that turns out to be wishful thinking; that is the number of “conservatives” on an e-mail list it bought from a marketing vendor. And the group cannot claim credit for any single major victory against the administration to date. But its relentless agitation has clearly helped rally the opposition.

Yes it has. But where do they get that four million dollars? You won’t know about that until you get to the 26th paragraph, the fourth paragraph from the end:

In 1992, he was contacted by Howard Rich, a New York real estate magnate who has poured much of his fortune into conservative causes.

The relationship has lasted, and Mr. Rich has been a crucial financer of Mr. Wilson’s efforts at a series of organizations: U.S. Term Limits, Parents in Charge and Americans for Limited Government.

Howard Rich is well known to anyone who follows right wing politics, (but completely unknown to the public at large) and the fact that he supports this allegedly “grassroots” activist with a four million dollar a year endowment is the actual story. And once again, just as they did in the 90s, they are refusing to report it.

And just as they did in the 90s they blame Clinton for being a target. O’Donnell made the point in her commentary that the real difference is that the Clintons insisted on “engaging” these people whereas Obama refuses to. (I say, wait until he’s got special prosecutors crawling all over him 24/7 and is being impeached and then see if he feels the need to fight back…)

Meanwhile, just as it was at the Washington Post last week, the garment rending over their alleged failure to write about the depth of the ACORN threat continues in the MSM, this time at the very same NY Times that wrote a glowing profile of one of the people who flogged the story for ideological purposes in the first place. You can’t make this stuff up:

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

One need only to look back at how this worked the first time to feel a chill at the idea that they are going to do it all over again:

It’s not as if the press didn’t know from the very beginning with whom they were dealing because they were called to task for their stenographic use of Citizens United “press packages” all the way back in June of 1994 by Trudy Lieberman in the Columbia Journalism Review:

Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation’s press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency.

[…]

…Citizens United has collected thousands of facts and documents on Whitewater and packaged it all to catch the attention of the press and to restoke the story whenever it threatened to die down.

Bossie and Brown have been briefing people since October — “the top fifty major publications, networks, and editorial boards,” Bossie says. “We’ve provided the same material on the Hill both on the House and Senate side.” An equal opportunity source, Bossie says he would gladly provide documents to Democrats, but they haven’t asked.

Francis Shane, publisher of Citizens United’s newsletter, ClintonWatch, hesitates to say exactly whom they’ve worked with — “We don’t particularly like to pinpoint people” — but he does say, “We have worked closer with The New York Times than The Washington Times.” Jeff Gerth, The New York Times’s chief reporter on Whitewater, hesitated to talk on the record. He did say, “If Citizens United has some document that’s relevant, I take it. I check it out like anything else

[…]

The March 1994 issue of ClintonWatch characterized the organization’s impact on Whitewater press coverage this way: “We here at ClintonWatch have been working day and night with the major news media to help them get the word out about the Clintons and their questionable dealings in Whitewater and Madison Guaranty.” Of course, Citizens United is not the only source of information on Whitewater. And reputable reporters do their own digging and doublechecking. Still, an examination of some 200 news stories from the major news outlets aired or published since November shows an eerie similarity between the Citizens United agenda and what has been appearing in the press, not only in terms of specific details but in terms of omissions, spin, and implication.

[…]

Whitewater is about character, publisher Fran Shane tells me. “The American people have elected a president with 43 percent of the vote. He is a man of no character. He may have to tell the people he didn’t come clean. We’re saying Bill Clinton may not be worth saving.”

Many news organizations explain the importance of Whitewater in similar terms. Take Time, for instance. In a January 24 story laced with references to documents that also appear in Bossie’s Whitewater collection, the magazine pronounced that “the investigation concerns the much larger issue of whether a President and First Lady can be trusted to obey the law and tell the truth.”

Now please tell me how the Bill Wilson operation differs from that one. The only thing he is doing that Citizens United didn’t do is use the internet, but that’s only because it didn’t really exist for public use then. Everything else is VRWC 101.

In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d assume that that puff piece on Wilson was a beat sweetener for the NY Times reporter, Scott Shane, who hopes to have greater access to more of those important ACORN and Van Jones scandals the mainstream press wants to get in on when they first “bubble up” in the conservative noise machine. I’m sure Wilson will be very happy to slip Shane some good dirt whenever he wants it. After all, he’s got a four million dollar operation funded by a right wing millionaire and a full time staff dedicated to the task.

And why not? If it weren’t for the fact that the newspaper business is almost dead and the respect for the news media among the public is somewhere between Michael Vick and Dick Cheney, you couldn’t think of one good reason why they shouldn’t do it. Just as the financial sector learned nothing from their actions of the past two decades, neither has the press. They know they are failing but it never occurs to them that it’s because they refuse to tell the real stories.

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Minority Report

by dday

The very manly Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blessed with the manliest of manliness, have decided to take their toys and go home rather than participate in a probably-toothless study of the CIA torture program, because they’re so personally hurt that anyone could be held responsible for lawbreaking.

Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said Friday that they will no longer participate in an investigation into the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, arguing that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s decision to reexamine allegations of detainee abuse by the CIA would hobble any inquiry […]

“Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the Committee’s review,” the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said in a statement. “What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the Committee’s questions? Indeed, forcing these terror fighters to make this choice is neither fair nor just.”

“Terror fighters.” That premieres right after 24 on Fox this fall, right? (It’s certainly not going to be on after Law And Order.)

I suppose another word you could use in place of “terror fighters” is “murderers,” but that would be grossly uncouth and would cause a run on fainting couches in Washington, particularly in the Republican caucus.

I will say that the bravery on display by these Republicans, not seen since the times of Sir Robin, is truly inspiring. They know just how to treat allegations of wrongdoing – with the most studied indifference and, if necessary, outright ignorance. They make me proud to be an American.

The only problem with their strategy is that others will not forget so easily. There are multiple court challenges and civil suits and investigations and FOIA requests. I suppose the defense attorneys in these cases can take the example of the Senate GOP and walk out of the proceedings, but it’s unlikely to have the same impact.

I think the next step for Kit Bond and his charges will be to write a minority report, refuting whatever comes from the committee investigation and pressing for expanded CIA powers to, I don’t know, pull the fingernails out of suspects in the name of fighting terror. Watch for who leads that minority report authoring, it may be important later.

But there were dissenters. A number of House Republicans on the committee cheered Colonel North on. One who led the way was Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who praised Colonel North as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.”

Mr. Cheney the congressman believed that Congress had usurped executive prerogatives. He saw the Iran-contra investigation not as an effort to get to the bottom of possible abuses of power but as a power play by Congressional Democrats to seize duties and responsibilities that constitutionally belonged to the president.

At the conclusion of the hearings, a dissenting minority report codified these views. The report’s chief author was a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael J. Malbin, who was chosen by Mr. Cheney as a member of the committee’s minority staff. Another member of the minority’s legal staff, David S. Addington, is now the vice president’s chief of staff […]

The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress.

Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”

History, the report claimed, “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States.” It went on: “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

Maybe they’ll just dust off that old report and replace “Iran-Contra” with “torture” and be done with it.

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