Month: March 2013

Dodd-Frank: death by a thousand cuts

by digby

This is just sad:

President Obama wants to consign the financial crisis to the past and delegate the implementation of financial reform to others in his administration. But he needs to get personally involved. Why? Because Senator Carl Levin’s recent hearing on the JP Morgan Whale showed that nothing has changed at the largest banks or the bank regulatory agencies since the run up to the financial crisis. In the early months of 2012—two years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act—JP Morgan acted deceptively, regulators remained clueless, and investors were the last to know about the true magnitude of the bank’s $6.2 billion in losses. Nevertheless, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress are today working to repeal reforms.
[…]
Is it too soon for President Obama to care? After all, it’s just one committee in the House. But this is precisely how momentum developed for passage of the JOBS Act, which loosened securities regulations for small companies, and which former securities regulators had harshly condemned during congressional consideration. The White House sat silent, Democrats joined to support the bill in the House, and it became too difficult, too late, for reform-minded Democratic Senators to improve its most egregious provisions. In yet another disappointment to those who care about preventing securities fraud, President Obama signed the JOBS Act, even over the (belated and weak) objection of his own SEC Chairman.

If the Treasury Department or White House do not weigh in strongly and soon against House efforts to undermine Dodd-Frank derivative provisions, the limited gains in Dodd-Frank may begin to recede. If Wall Street proponents succeed in passing this wave of Dodd-Frank “fix it” bills, more will follow. Wall Street reform is a legacy issue for the president. Does he really want a derivative deregulation bill to reach his desk in the coming months?

That’s a perfect description of the dynamic that’s destroying us. Still, even if he doesn’t want this (and I have no idea if that’s the case) I’m told by many important people that the President has no power to do anything and nothing he says has any effect so I suppose all he can do is sign whatever they pass. Too bad.

We can however, pressure some Democrats in congress. They have to face voters in a year and a half. I know the work of doing that is boring and unglamorous. But it might be worth something to try.

Here’s Howie, with a look at one of the worst offenders:

[A]nother Steve Israel announcement this week was that Connecticut New Dem vice-chair, Jim Himes (CT) is the new National Finance Chair, replacing another New Dem vice chair, Alysson Schwartz, who can’t raise money for the DCCC because she’s using every contact she knows to raise money for her gubernatorial race against Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania. Himes has been a shady character on the House Financial Services Committee, routinely voting with the GOP to undermine Wall Street bankster reforms. I was dismayed when I learned that his chief of staff, Jason Cole, is a former UBS lobbyist. Remember when Blanche Lincoln– now a lobbyist, then a U.S. Senator being primaried intensely– introduced an anti-bankster derivatives amendment to try to get progressives to stop donating to her opponent? Himes teamed up with a GOP bankster shill, Randy Hultgren to introduce a bill to repeal it. Himes tried the same thing last year at this time (with Republican Nan Hayworth, who was subsequently defeated by the voters in her district. I bet that makes Steve Israel and Joe Crowley dance for joy– as well as the entire GOP.

This week, a Himes staffer proudly anounced that “Reps. Hultgren and Himes will introduce a bill Wednesday– with bipartisan co-sponsors on the Agriculture Committee– to modify the swaps ‘push out’ provision in Dodd-Frank. The bill will mirror the final version that the committee reported last Congress (as amended by Mr. Himes).” Companion legislation is expected in the Senate. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was supportive of the change, which would allow banks to keep commodity and equity derivatives in federally insured units, during testimony to the Senate last week.”

And, by the way, Himes hasn’t signed the Grayson-Takano letter that pledges “we will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits– including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need.” Neither has anyone on Steve Israel’s list of Frontline candidates. If you were thinking of making a political contribution, please consider making it here, not to the DCCC. As Grayson explained, “With the Norquist pledge, the Republicans have lined up on the side of millionaires, billionaires and multinational corporations. With our No Cuts pledge, we are lined up on the side of seniors, sick people, and poor people. We are comforting the afflicted, and they are comforting the comfortable.”

I wish there weren’t so many Democrats spending so much time comforting the comfortable along with them.

No kidding.

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Mea culpas, “The Arab Mind”and the White Man’s Burden


by digby

David Ignatius wrote his Iraq mea culpa today and it’s a good one. He admits that Iraq was an epic strategic blunder and that he was wrong to have been such an enthusiastic cheerleader for it. But in chronicling his mistakes, I find this one to be almost shocking coming from a sophisticated man of the world:

Another lesson is the importance of dignity in the Arab world. Most Iraqis despised Saddam because, in addition to torturing their sons and daughters, he had taken their dignity. But many came to loathe America, as well, because for all our talk of democracy, we damaged their sense of honor and independence. As the Arab world proves over and over, from Palestine to Benghazi, people who are penniless in terms of material possessions would rather die than lose their sense of honor to outsiders.

Right. That’s unique to the Arab world. Imagine, if you will, how even a rich country would feel if someone crashed airplanes into their biggest city and killed thousands of their people? I’d expect they would be quite incensed.  It turns out that poor people, just like rich people, don’t care for it when strangers come in and start killing their families and taking everything they have. It doesn’t take a political genius or a psychologist to know that.

What Ignatius leaves out is that the Very Serious People not only believed that the Iraqis would greet them as liberators, they also assumed they were some kind of primitives.  They even consulted the “experts”:

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Bad Books For Stupid People

This business of using dogs to torture Iraqi prisoners actually is more depraved than is obvious, if you can believe that.

We know that big tough American guys like Trent Lott wouldn’t piss all over themselves if they were tied up naked while a 150 lb snarling German Shepard was allowed to back them into a corner and take a piece out of their flesh. They don’t have a problem with dogs like those arabs do.

This is but another example of the crude, stereotypical approach we seem to have taken toward the Iraqis (and undoubtedly the Afghans, as well.) And it is likely because the “intellectuals” who planned and implemented the war don’t have a clue.

Sy Hersh mentioned in his May 24th article in the New Yorker one of the many possible reasons why:

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. 

The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” 

The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

You might as well read a ZOG comic on mudpeople as read this for any true understanding. The passages on sex could have been written during Queen Victoria’s reign which is, indeed, the period from which many silly, crude stereotypes about Arabs and sex really got off the ground. (The funny thing is that Patai’s book portrays middle eastern culture as being rigidly sexually repressed when during Victoria’s time they were reviled for being scandalously oversexed. It seems that no matter what, westerners believe the Middle East is all fucked up when it comes to sex. Unlike we Americans, of course, who define healthy sexuality.)

So, a bunch of second rate minds read a third rate book about people they know nothing about except what they’ve seen at parties where Ahmad Chalabi is holding court, and they fashion a torture regime based upon a ridiculous thesis that arabs (unlike Western he-men apparently, which is interesting in itself) are particularly uncomfortable with being herded around naked, forced to pretend to masturbate in front of women and piling themselves up in naked pyramids, among other sexually charged, homoerotic acts.

It’s always interesting to see people’s innermost fears and insecurities projected on to another isn’t it? These neocons have some serious issues. 

One of the most fatuous aspects of the Iraq war was the supporters’ insistence that the US was doing something uniquely benevolent by invading and killing people in that country.  And even more absurd, that they would love us for it.  Let’s face it, the throwbacks weren’t in Iraq.  They were here.  That anachronistic belief in “White Man’s Burden”got a lot of people killed for nothing.

It turns out that human beings are all pretty much the same when it comes to being humiliated, dominated and killed by strangers. They don’t like it. Who knew?

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Deficits are the new Iraq

by David Atkins

I mentioned a few days ago that the failure to prosecute the crime of the century in defrauding the world to invade Iraq is a moral stain that will never fully wash out of the fabric of society until justice is done. It impacts the trust of the military in civilian leadership; it harms the trust of voters in the statements of their government; it destroys the credibility of the nation in eyes of the global community; and it creates an entire generation of new terrorists determined to attack the industrialized world.

But if–and it’s a big if–we are to “look forward” rather than back, settling for a series of half-hearted meae culpae by the war’s proponents in exchange for any real accountability for its architects and cheerleaders, then at the very least it must be a forward gaze that engages the failings of the past to apply their lessons to the present.

For most pundits that reckoning involves more skepticism toward government statements, as well as a more cautious attitude toward reckless interventionism. But that is too easy and vague a lesson. It calls for no real change, and neither afflicts the comfortable nor comforts the afflicted.

Of all the failures of the press and the Washington elite in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the biggest was not foreign policy views or blind trust in the Executive Branch. Those things were certainly problems, but they alone didn’t create the conditions necessary for the invasion. The indispensable linchpin enabling both the deceit and the political bulldozer toward war was the marginalization of contrarian voices who could have slowed down and ultimately stopped them.

This marginalization wasn’t just a matter of the political destruction of the likes of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame–though that was part of it. The most important marginalization was of a softer kind. Every Serious Person knew that Colin Powell would never deceive the American People. Every Serious Person knew that George W. Bush was, even if intellectually incurious, at least a straight shooter and resolute leader who would never lead anyone astray, abuse the troops, or put the country in harm’s way. Every Serious Person knew that U.N. weapons inspectors were a weak joke, that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who would stop at nothing to destroy America, and that no American President would ever take their eye off of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to turn the nation’s attention to Iraq were it not essential to the world’s security.

To believe otherwise was unthinkable. It was the sign of a deeply unserious mind, unfit for the politics of adults. Unless you were an objector who lived through it, it’s hard to state how suffocating was the experience of the time. Even vaguely liberal friends would listen to your opinions with a barely contained smirk and roll of the eyes; you would hide your opinions from apolitical types for fear of being branded as a weird radical; and to state your displeasure in front of conservatives would be sure to earn an accusation of being in bed with Osama Bin Laden himself. The practice of blogging pseudonyms among liberals took hold at the time for a very good reason: there was a legitimate fear among many progressives that to be associated with opposition to the Bush Administration’s drumbeat to war would result in damage to one’s ability to find employment, clients, apartments, etc.

To truly take to heart the lessons of 2003 is not to relitigate the Bush Administration. That should be a matter for justice, not instruction.

To truly learn the lesson of Iraq is to ask oneself what critical policy issue of the day carries the same force of conventional wisdom and marginalization of contrarian voices. What issue of the day is incredibly divisive among normal American people, but has nearly unanimous consensus in the Beltway? What contrarian belief on a matter of major policy earns the same quiet, amused contempt from centrists and conservative Democrats? What policy disagreement earns the outraged ire of conservatives normally designated for enemies of the state? On what subject is it allowed for straight journalists to unequivocally state support for a policy position without the need for a credible opinion from the opposing side? On what topic would a Nobel-prize-winning expert on the subject in question be mocked in person on television by a panel of low-rent pseudo-journalists and failed former Congressmembers as if he had called the moon landing a hoax? On what public policy does the widely accepted conventional wisdom in Washington also very neatly align with the interests of influential corporations and the world’s wealthiest individuals?

I speak, of course, of the bipartisan march toward deficit reduction and the bizarre exclusion of Keynesian or countercyclical solutions from acceptable discourse on the economy. It’s not the only issue of its kind, but it’s the most important.

Make no mistake: find the major issue that creates this uncomfortable dynamic, and you will find the new Iraq. In 2003 it was foreign intervention. In 2013, the issue on which conventional wisdom is so neatly aligned against all reason is deficit reduction. In 2023 it will likely be something else.

But the real lesson of 2003 has far less to do with the rush to war in the Middle East, and far more to do with the rush to exclusionary conventional wisdom among the Very Serious People in Washington.

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World leader humor for dummies

by digby

The wingnuts are predictably upset that Obama allegedly committed a “gaffe” in Israel because he said he was happy to be away from congress.

First of all, you simply cannot be more gracious that he is in that clip. If he weren’t in Israel, I have no doubt they’d all be braying about him bowing or apologizing for America or some other nonsense, but it’s quite clear to me that what they perceive as being obsequious is just good manners.

Anyway, it’s obvious to anyone — including Netanyahu, who bursts out laughing — that he was sharing a “world leader” joke with a fellow world leader. I suppose he could have spit gum into his hand like Bush used to do, but really, acting like an ass in foreign countries it’s not a sign of a manly man, being a manly leader. It’s the sign of a punk.

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At least we know we’re free. Well 75% of us anyway

by digby

Things are certainly crazy right now, but I’m sure that some of you remember just how crazy … and sick … the “law and order” craze was back in the 80s and 90s. We were pretty much obsessed with the idea of “super-predators” who had been bred to stalk and kill us all in our beds just for the fun of it. And the only way we could stop it was to arrest people on petty charges and throw them in jail for as long as possible before they … stalked and killed us all in our beds.

It was an ugly chapter. However, things might just be changing. First we have the fact that capital punishment seems to be at least open for debate, with a Democratic Governor (and presidential hopeful) from Maryland signing a bill to ban it just last week. And now this:

Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced a bill Wednesday designed to give relief to the nation’s bloated prison system by offering judges leeway to consider sentences below the mandatory minimum for all federal crimes.

The bill, named the Justice Safety Valve Act, would expand a current provision in sentencing law, authorizing judges to hand down less harsh sentences if they determine doing so would not jeopardize public safety. Under current law, only certain nonviolent, low-level, first-time drug offenses are subject to sentencing below the federal mandatory minimum[…]

In an op-ed in The Hill on Wednesday, Julie Stewart, founder and president of the Families Against Mandatory Minimums Foundation, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, both hailed the Justice Safety Valve Act as a “common sense” measure that would save money and help ensure that the “time fits the crime in every criminal case.” Their column offered some data on prison capacity and overcrowding:

According to a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, the number of inmates under the Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) jurisdiction has increased from approximately 25,000 in FY1980 to nearly 219,000 in FY2012. BOP prisons are operating at 38 percent over capacity, endangering the safety of guards and inmates alike. Last week, the Inspector General for the Department of Justice testified that it’s only going to get worse: the BOP projects system-wide crowding to exceed 45 percent over rated capacity through 2018.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, met the legislation with similar approval.

“Our justice system’s overreliance on mandatory minimum sentencing is a major reason our prison system incarcerates more people than any other industrialized nation in the world, a disproportionate number of whom are Black and Brown,” he said in a statement. “In fact, our overcrowded prisons are almost entirely the result of the mass incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders, who make up nearly half of all federal offenders, not violent criminals.”

Now there’s some budget cutting that makes sense. Locking up petty criminals for long prison terms is expensive. And unjust. Let’s stop doing that and use the money for something worthwhile. And maybe we could change this shocking statistic:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

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Mr. Austerity losing his sheen

by David Atkins

It turns out that most people don’t like Paul Ryan all that much anymore. Even Republicans are tepid these days:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is viewed favorably by just 35 percent of American voters, according to a Rasmussen poll released Monday. Fifty-four percent view him unfavorably.

A bare 52 percent majority of GOP voters gave Ryan positive marks, down from 83 percent when he was selected as the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee in August 2012.

The GOP has a regular habit of trotting out these golden boys, then watching them crash and burn as the weight of their unpopular policy positions takes its toll. But it doesn’t stop them from coming out with the next supposed savior, and it doesn’t stop the traditional media from dutifully latching onto the frenzy.

A word to the wise would be to look past the personality and examine instead the policies on offer. That will be a better indicator of long-term popularity than whatever obsequious lionizing happens to be occurring in the moment.

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From the Bad Instincts file: believing Bush knew what he was doing

by digby

There are too many Iraq mea culpas going around to mention, but for the most part they seem to be sincere reflections on a decision that turned out to be wrong (although some predictably manage to find ways to say that regardless of their bad judgement, the hippies are even worse.)Andrew Sullivan has been doing a whole series on it and his recollections and re-evaluations are very interesting, (and somewhat infuriating, still) to read.

But this I just don’t get:

Rumsfeld and Cheney were great at projecting confidence, competence and management skills.

I think this may be one of the most important perceptions that separated the believers from the non-believers. The evaluations of someone’s “confidence, competence and management skills” requires a very complex set of assumptions and observations, which human instinct has evolved to do very skillfully. But we don’t always see the same things. When I looked at George W. Bush I saw someone barely sentient. He was childlike and almost silly.

In fact, it frightened me to think that someone this shallow was making such momentous decisions. And it didn’t help that his two lieutenants, Cheney and Rumsfeld, were old Cold Warhorses in a longstanding DC bureaucratic battle dedicated to rebuilding presidential power in the wake of Watergate so they could beat back the Commies. They were like those Japanese soldiers on a pacific island who never heard about VJ Day.

I think this anecdote captures the picture I had of this troika from the very beginning quite well:

On Jan. 10, a Wednesday morning 10 days before the inauguration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell went to the Pentagon to meet with Cohen. Afterward, Bush and his team went downstairs to the Tank, the secure domain and meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Two generals briefed them on the state of the no-fly zone enforcement. No-fly zone enforcement was dangerous and expensive. Multimillion-dollar jets were put at risk bombing 57mm antiaircraft guns. Hussein had warehouses of them. As a matter of policy, was the Bush administration going to keep poking Hussein in the chest? Was there a national strategy behind this, or was it just a static tit for tat?

Lots of acronyms and program names were thrown around — most of them familiar to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell, who had spent 35 years in the Army and been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. President-elect Bush asked some practical questions about how things worked, but he did not offer or hint at his desires.

The Joint Chiefs’ staff had placed a peppermint at each place. Bush unwrapped his and popped it into his mouth. Later he eyed Cohen’s mint and flashed a pantomime query, Do you want that? Cohen signaled no, so Bush reached over and took it. Near the end of the hour-and-a-quarter briefing, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, noticed Bush eyeing his mint, so he passed it over.

Cheney listened, but he was tired and closed his eyes, conspicuously nodding off several times. Rumsfeld, who was sitting at a far end of the table, paid close attention, though he kept asking the briefers to please speak up or please speak louder. “We’re off to a great start,” one of the chiefs commented privately to a colleague after the session. “The vice president fell asleep, and the secretary of defense can’t hear.”

That’s how I saw them from the very beginning — a spoiled dauphin under the control of grey emminences fighting the last war. They certainly struck me as malevolent, but they never seemed competent to me, quite the opposite. I’d watch those press conferences with Rumsfeld in which the press corps would call him a “rock star” and laugh uproariously at his lame jokes and feel as if I was having an out of body experience. I just never got it.

Sullivan claims that we now know they were as terrified as we were and just sort of lost their heads. Maybe. But it’s at least debatable as to whether they were all that on the ball to begin with. Aside from all the evidence telling us that invading Iraq was a strategic error of massive proportions that would come at great cost and offer no gain, I felt absolutely no confidence that the group running this mission was even barely competent. I’ll never understand how people looked at George W. Bush on 9/11 or any of the days after and convinced themselves that he was a great leader.

I wrote about this many, many times over the course of the last decade such as this post, in which I discussed Mark Danner’s great essay about the Bush administration in the NY Review of Books:

I understand that it is difficult to know in advance what constitutes a real leader. A resume isn’t enough to make one (although it’s certainly better than not having one at all) and depending on personality or symbols isn’t enough either. I don’t know what the magic formula is. I do know that when someone speaks like a fool and acts like a spoiled child and appears to be “intellectually uncurious” and has never done anything in life that would give you a clue that he knows how to govern or lead — well, it’s not a good idea to make that person the most powerful person on the planet. If we’ve learned nothing else, I hope we have learned that.

I’m not holding my breath.

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Ten years ago today

by digby

Thursday, March 20, 2003

 
The War Show

CNN has it goin’ on. Baghdad Under Seige, Part I put them on the map and they own the sequel, too, so far. Nic Robertson is the only guy worth watching. Aaron Brown’s trying to be Dan Rather, but Dan Rather is still here and he does this verbose sanctimony so much better.

FoxNews proves what we always knew. It is to real news as professional wrestling is to boxing. Fake. They have nothing to offer when something real is happening. Colonel Ollie is unintentionally hilarious.

CBS has the insignia of the military unit in which their correspondent is “embedded” up as a huge logo on the side of the screen, while said correspondent, all dressed up like big grown-up soldier, broadcasts by video phone which delivers its images in an other worldly green.

Brokaw suddenly and shockingly looks old and Ted Koppel looks uncomfortably like Dukakis in a tank. Big hair just doesn’t work with the military thing. 

Tom Friedman’s poppin’ up the Redenbacher as we speak, rootin’ for president Quarterback’s Hail Mary to hit Saddam right between the eyes. I’ll bet he’s got his CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing”The Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing on a loop. 

And, according to Strangefeld, the war hasn’t even started. When “Shock and Awe” does start, it will be “something we have never seen before.” Cool. Maybe phasers and lasers and MOABS. So, there is still time to get the show together.  

We’re at blinking neon orange. Tents are being pitched all over Washington as we speak.

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Let’s put on some Alanis and relive the 90s

by digby

I see Politico is taking a 90s nostalgia tour today, running a story about a shady donor with a funny foreign sounding name seeking influence from the Democratic president (who is himself sort of “foreign” and for whom a lot of “foreign” types vote, dontcha know.)

Anyway, this bombshell is the usual Drudge style “buddhist temple” hack job. As I have written before, this is a patented style of cartoonish right wing scandal mongering, which the Villagers love more than anything:

These are patented Whitewater-style “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return. They feature colorful and unsavory political characters in some way. They often happened in the past and they tend to be written in such a way as to say that even if they aren’t illegal they “look bad.” The underlying theme is hypocrisy because the subjects are portrayed as making a dishonest buck while pretending to represent the average working man. Oh, and they always feature a Democrat. Republicans are not subject to such scrutiny because a craven, opportunistic Republican isn’t “news.” (Neat trick huh?)

I don’t know if there’s much appetite for this stuff at the moment, but the Drugico nexus will always be there to flog such stories. They have a strange affinity for the “icky foreigner” story. I wonder why?

Why was the media so gung-ho for the war?

by digby

… to borrow a line from Reds: “profits”

ANDERSON COOPER: Jessica, McClellan took press to task for not upholding their reputation. He writes: “The National Press Corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The ‘liberal media’ – in quotes – didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Dan Bartlett, former Bush adviser, called the allegation “total crap.”

What is your take? Did the press corps drop the ball?

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I wouldn’t go that far.

I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives – and I was not at this network at the time – but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.

I think, over time…

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

YELLIN: Not in that exact – they wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.

Yellin later admitted that she was talking about MSNBC.

Do we think anything’s changed? I don’t know why we would. Certainly one could surmise that this subtle pressure from could be influencing the coverage of our economic crisis. That reallyhits home with these executives.

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