Month: June 2014

More decline in institutional trust thanks to inequality

by David Atkins

We’re fraying even further at the edges:

From Gallup:

Americans’ confidence in all three branches of the U.S. government has fallen, reaching record lows for the Supreme Court (30%) and Congress (7%), and a six-year low for the presidency (29%). The presidency had the largest drop of the three branches this year, down seven percentage points from its previous rating of 36%.

These data come from a June 5-8 Gallup poll asking Americans about their confidence in 16 U.S. institutions — within government, business, and society — that they either read about or interact with.

While Gallup recently reported a historically low rating of Congress, Americans have always had less confidence in Congress than in the other two branches of government. The Supreme Court and the presidency have alternated being the most trusted branch of government since 1991, the first year Gallup began asking regularly about all three branches.

Confidence in government itself is shrinking rapidly, but it’s also declining in most other sectors of society as well.

What Gallup doesn’t mention is that this is directly related to rising inequality in society:

It is not an accident that trust in major institutions has declined on a linear track with rising inequality. Study after study has shown that trust in our fellow citizens and in institutions at large are dependent on the level of inequality and corruption in society. This stands to reason: people know when they’re getting the short end of the stick, even if they can’t agree on why. Conservatives wrongly blame government spending and regulation. Liberals rightly blame disproportionate rewards going to the very wealthy. Not surprisingly, then, high levels of inequality also create strong partisanship within society as politicians and pundits alike ratchet up the rhetoric of blame. As both secular and religious institutions seem equally powerless to address increasing economic and social insecurity, the social fabric begins to fray and people tend to self-segregate in many ways, including politically. Economic tension and social tension tend to go hand in hand.

Conservative economics are quite literally tearing society apart.

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Ganster imperialism

by digby

This blockbuster report from James Risen really ought to blow your mind:

Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

I’m not sure which is more shocking, that Blackwater issued death threats as if they were members of the Soprano crime family or the fact that the Embassy officials sided with them:

The shooting was a watershed moment in the American occupation of Iraq, and was a factor in Iraq’s refusal the next year to agree to a treaty allowing United States troops to stay in the country beyond 2011. Despite a series of investigations in the wake of Nisour Square, the back story of what happened with Blackwater and the embassy in Baghdad before the fateful shooting has never been fully told.

Huh. And to think the Iraqis wanted the US to get completely out. Go figure.

Read the whole thing. It’s a shocker.

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QOTD: Justices Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by digby

Alito:

“According to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients.”

Fascinating. They aren’t “abortifacients.” That is simple scientific fact. But they say they believe they are and their “belief” trumps objective reality.

The Daily Beast asks some pertinent questions about why “morality” is found to be in the hands of the employer rather than the person who will be using the allegedly immoral birth control. After all, we don’t hold gun stores culpable for the murders committed by people who buy guns there:

Justice Alito specifically refutes these questions later in his opinion. He writes:

The Hahns and Greens believe that providing the coverage demanded by the HHS regulations is connected to the destruction of an embryo in a way that is sufficient to make it immoral for them to provide the coverage. This belief implicates a difficult and important question of religion and moral philosophy, namely, the circumstances under which it is wrong for a person to perform an act that is innocent in itself but that has the effect of enabling or facilitating the commission of an immoral act by another.

Justice Alito angrily dismisses the notion that there can be a “binding national answer to this religious and philosophical question.” Thus, if the Hahns and Greens say that it’s so, it’s so.

How convenient. Morality only attaches to people who want to exempt themselves from scientific fact in ways that comport with what a majority of the Supreme Court in this particular moment  find compelling. Funny that he doesn’t find the complicated religious and philosophical question of abortion to be equally beyond the scope of a “binding national answer.” How odd.

Ginsburg:

“The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

The minefield in question is the one that is, in essence, the Supreme Court choosing to privilege certain religious beliefs over others. It’s very hard to see how they are going to thread a needle that says this logic can only apply to contraception. I’m sure they’d like it to  (along with abortion and perhaps gay rights and other socially conservative venues for excusing corporations from participating in government mandates.)  After all, these are the passions that move the political and religious constituency to whom this Court is catering. But there are a lot of religions in this world, some of which have some pretty unusual beliefs. It will be interesting to see how this conservative Christian Supreme Court majority —  which is clearly trying to extend special dispensation to conservative Christians like themselves and corporations in general   — deals with the “religious freedom” of those with whom they disagree.

Perhaps they should take a look at what’s happening in Iraq for a clue as to what happens when government takes sides in religious disputes.

Meanwhile, women are out of luck if they expect to be treated as equal citizens under the law. When some religious people “believe” things that are not factual their equality is trumped by their employers’ rights as “owners”, religious or otherwise.

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The unprincipled insiders did it again

by digby

They say that no good deed goes unpunished and nothing illustrates the truth of that old trope more vividly that the Human Rights Campaign endorsing Maine Senator Susan Collins over her Democratic opponent, the stalwart defender of human rights and civil liberties, Shenna Bellows. It wasn’t the first time Republicans have been unjustly rewarded with endorsements from national liberal organizations, unfortunately. But there are few Republicans who have been more lauded by people for whom she has consistently done so little than the bucket of lukewarm water known as Susan Collins.

This endorsement was particularly galling. Shenna Bellows is not just another Democrat who supports marriage equality. She has devoted her life to expanding civil rights and civil liberties. In her capacity as the Director of the Maine ACLU she helped lead the way for marriage equality in Maine and was instrumental in getting the Maine Human Rights Act passed. It’s a truly bold piece of legislation, one of the strongest anti-discrimination laws in the country, which Bellows promises to bring to the national level. She has said:

The important thing we learned in Maine was to aim big and be persistent. Frankly, Congress could benefit from our example. The debate in Congress has focused for too long on weak versions of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which only covers employment decisions and now has such a big religious-exemption loophole that many activists no longer support the bill. As Ian Thompson wrote for Slate in April, the loophole “opens the door for religiously affiliated organizations to engage in employment discrimination against LGBT people — for any reason.” That’s not the stuff big civil-rights advances are made of.

I’m proud to say we’ve done better in Maine, and I’ll do better in Washington. We need a national Human Rights Act along the lines of the Maine Human Rights Act. We need to outlaw discrimination in employment, housing, credit, public accommodations and educational opportunity on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation — once and for all, nationwide, no exceptions. Sen. Al Franken has done good work on this issue, and I can’t wait to join him. The LGBT community isn’t alone in worrying that its Washington allies are aiming too low.

Many immigration-reform groups rightly wonder not only why Republicans won’t support them but why too many Democrats supported a weaker House bill in this Congress than the one they introduced when they were in the majority. We can’t fall victim to lower expectations or lesser ambitions, no matter who controls what branch of government. Good policy is good policy, and fighting the wrong legislative fights won’t get us where we need to be.

That’s the kind of leadership we need so desperately in Washington — leadership that understands that we are all in this together. If you agree, you can donate to Shenna Bellows’ campaign here.

You will not be surprised to learn that Senator Collins is all for that “religious exemption.” And her definition of courage is to wait until the nation has largely moved forward before she reluctantly leads from behind: it was only last week that she could summon the nerve to support marriage equality even in principle, much less to act to make it a reality.

As you can see from Shenna Bellows’ comments, her approach to basic human rights and liberties stems from her clear, strong set of principles. She doesn’t put her finger in the wind, she kicks up a storm and makes things happen. Maine would not have the strong protections and rights available to LGBT citizens that it has today if not for Shenna Bellows. Yet the thanks she gets from the National Human Rights Campaign is an endorsement for her opponent. With friends like these…

Shenna does have real friends, however. Shenna Bellows has been endorsed by all the national progressive netroots groups (with Blue America leading the way by being the very first to do so) and she raised more than Collins in the first quarter, which says something about her incumbent’s lack of support from anyone but beltway insiders and establishment courtiers. She is getting favorable press wherever she goes. In fact, Blue America has a donor who has offered a matching donation up to $1,000 on the basis of Bellows’ outstanding record on civil liberties. (Click here to help us match it!)

Shenna came out to Los Angeles last week to meet with some supporters and my Blue America partners John Amato, Howie Klein and I were privileged to help host the event. It was a truly inspiring evening, and not just for us. Everyone there was terrifically impressed by her knowledge of the issues, her grasp of the politics and more than anything, her obvious passion and commitment to the principles we all share — and which are so often poorly articulated by our Democratic establishment politicians. Howie had the honor of introducing her to the crowd and he said it best: “we believe Shenna Bellows is another Elizabeth Warren, a gifted, intelligent communicator with an uncanny ability to explain complicated issues to the American people.”

We committed that night to raise $2,000 more dollars for Shenna Bellows’ campaign. Our anonymous civil libertarian donor has already met half that goal for us if you will meet him halfway.

Please give what you can. Shenna is the progressive future and we desperately need such principled, passionate and committed leaders to start taking their place in the Democratic Party.

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Well that worked out well

by digby

So the Roberts Court with a divided majority just decided that corporations are able to exercise freedom of speech by spending corporate money on political campaigns, they are now able to exercise their freedom of religion by denying benefits to employees who disagree with the bosses religious beliefs. It’s a good time to be an abstract legal concept called a corporation. A woman, not so much:

For many years, the Supreme Court struck a careful balance between protecting religious liberty and maintaining the rule of law in a pluralistic society. Religious people enjoy a robust right to practice their own faith and to act according to the dictates of their own conscience, but they could not wield religious liberty claims as a sword to cut away the legal rights of others. This was especially true in the business context. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Lee, “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

With Monday’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, however, this careful balance has been upended. Employers who object to birth control on religious grounds may now refuse to comply with federal rules requiring them to include contraceptive care in their health plans. The rights of the employer now trump the rights of the employee.

My favorite parts of this opinion are all the disclaimers and caveats about how it doesn’t apply here and doesn’t apply there and don’t worry your pretty little heads ladies, you won’t be forced to handle snakes or burn incense if you want to work at JC Penneys. When they go to such lengths to soothe people that they aren’t setting a hugely significant precedent that makes little sense, that’s what they’re doing.

Unfortunately, neither is it a good time to be a teacher, firefighter, police officer or any other public employee. The handwriting is on the wall:

By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled in Harris v. Quinn that eight home health care workers in Illinois cannot be compelled to pay dues to a union they don’t wish to join. Illinois is one of 26 states that require public sector workers to pay dues to the unions that negotiate their contracts and represent them in grievances, even if the employees find the union’s advocacy work distasteful.

Union leaders had feared that the justices might strike down those state laws as unconstitutional. The justices did not go that far. They issued a more narrow ruling that the home health care workers at issue in the case are not “full-fledged public employees” because they are hired and fired by individual patients and work in private homes, though they are paid in part by the state, via Medicaid.

Because they’re not truly state employees, the justices decided workers did not have to pay union dues.

But writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito sharply criticized a 1977 precedent, known as Abood, that granted states the right to compel union dues. Alito called that ruling “questionable” and “anomalous,” all but inviting a further challenge in the future. He was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Happy 4th of July week everybody. Let’s celebrate our freedom to be serfs!

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You don’t need to be a bleeding heart to know that liberal economics works

by David Atkins

One of my posts yesterday at the Washington Monthly focused on how much the left has lost in terms of vigorous defense of Keynesian economics by allowing itself to be hemmed in as the party of bleeding heart compassion:

Most of the rhetoric around income inequality and economic fairness on the American left is about helping those who have “been left behind in our economy” or “need a helping hand.” While there has been some very welcome focus on broader structural challenges from some, including from President Obama in this superb 2013 speech on economic mobility, the vast majority of liberal rhetoric is framed in terms of either the decline in the middle class or compassion for the poor. Even Hanauer himself falls into this trap somewhat by focusing most of his policy attention on the minimum wage.

But while empathy for the poorest Americans and those who have fallen into poverty is an excellent and important thing, it’s not actually a prerequisite for fixing America’s broken economic system. There has been a widespread and fatally flawed acceptance since at least the 1980s of the notion that unrestrained asset and capital growth is a good thing, and that all we need do is soften its edges by making sure that the people left out of the churning growth-mobile have a safety net to support them.

Very little attention has been paid by either side of the aisle until recently to the problem of stagnant wages, or the problem of overinflating asset bubbles, or even to the problem of inequality itself. There is even less talk around the nation’s capital about broader Keynesian principles, or about how all of this inequality is actually bad for business as well. It is simply presumed that conservatives know what is best for business (even if it’s at the expense of workers), that what is good for the Dow Jones index is good for the economy, that rising housing prices are an unadulterated benefit, and that the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals is how much the rest of us should pay in taxes to help the few who get lost along the way.

I went on to highlight the way that FDR used a much more mechanistic approach to talk about why the New Deal was not only important from a moral perspective, but necessary from a purely functional perspective. For instance, here’s a bit from one of his fireside chats:

Now I come to the links which will build us a more lasting prosperity. I have said that we cannot attain that in a Nation half boom and half broke. If all of our people have work and fair wages and fair profits, they can buy the products of their neighbors, and business is good. But if you take away the wages and the profits of half of them, business is only half as good. It does not help much if the fortunate half is very prosperous; the best way is for everybody to be reasonably prosperous.

It’s not just that liberal economics are the right policies for those with a shred of empathy in their bones. It’s also that it’s more efficient and leads to better outcomes in general. We should talk about that more.

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I’ll have an order of freedom fries and you can keep the plus ça change

by digby

I wrote earlier about how the right wingers all seemed to be more at war with liberals than with al Qaeda or Saddam 11 years ago. Well listen to this rant from Fox News today from Larry Gatlin:

“In defense of low-information voters, I knew one. Little half-breed Cherokee Indian — yes, that’s Cherokee Indian for you Florida State Seminoles and Washington Redskins.”

At that point, Gatlin paused to demonstrate Florida State’s tomahawk chop “war chant.”

“She was very wise, though,” he said. “She said if a child acts badly, if a child is naughty, slap the grandmother. Because, see, that means the grandmother didn’t teach mother, and the mother didn’t teach the child. By the way, that was my grandmother.”

“Here’s what we have, we have old hippies from the ’60s, Bill and Hillary [Clinton], ruling our country, not governing our country,” Gatlin continued, arguing that liberals were upset when the country took military action because “they don’t believe there is a right or wrong.”

“They blame America, they blame Bush, they wrap their robes of self-righteousness around them, get in their Lear jets, and take off, and they’re still mad at me,” he quipped. “Love it or get out of my face!”

“The liberals, they’ll sing ‘Kumbaya’ but they won’t stand up and sing the Marine Corps Hymn!” Gatlin exclaimed, adding that President Obama did not know how to pronounce “Marine Corps.”

“Who elected this doofus anyway?” he asked. “The liberals and the low-information voters.”

You can watch it here.

Chart ‘O the Day: executions

by digby

They look like blood stains. Which they are:

People executed 1977-2014 Texas 512 Virginia 110 Oklahoma 110 Florida 85 http://t.co/RvJOBTLF4F pic.twitter.com/Dk3IKKieX6
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) June 29, 2014

Also interesting to note that a disproportionate number of those executions were of African American men.

Your fascinating long read of the day: Bigger ain’t better

by digby

A conversation between Tom Frank and Barry Lynn about America’s history of monopoly power.  I thought this passage was especially interesting in light of our current “debate” about the president allegedly abusing the power of his office by manipulating the regulatory agencies to to thwart the intent of legislation. The historical discussion picks up in 1980 with Reagan’selection:

Barry Lynn: … all the traditional concern with protecting our rights as producers of work and ideas and goods, and suddenly it’s all about the consumer, it’s all about, how do we promote your welfare as a consumer? And that’s actually the phrase they use, the “consumer welfare test.” So nowadays, what this means in practice is that if you are a big capitalist, if you go to the Justice Department and say, I’m gonna merge the number one beer company to the number two beer company, or the number one steel company to the number two steel company, and this deal will result in all sorts of big savings, because this deal will let me fire all these excess people and close all these excess plants, and I’m going to pass at least some of those savings on to the consumer, put a few pennies in their pocket, then you get a stamp of approval from the U.S. government. That’s the test put in place in ‘81 and ’82. And that’s the test still in place today. I mean, the Department of Justice just last year let the number one book publisher in America, Random House, merge with the No. 2 book publisher, Penguin. Which is insane.

Thomas Frank: was politically literate in the early ’80s, and was reading newspapers, and I don’t remember any debate about this at all.

There was a big debate in 1981, which I’ve gone back and studied. Much of the debate took place within the Senate. Howard Metzenbaum led the challenge to it. The Reagan people came in and said, we’re going to impose this radical change to your antitrust laws which you’ve been using since 1773 to protect yourselves against concentrated power. . .

Wait, so they worked this huge change in antitrust without actually getting a new law passed, am I right?

Yes, that was what was so brilliant about what they did. The Department of Justice establishes guidelines that detail how regulators plan to interpret certain types of laws. So the Reagan people did not aim to change the antimonopoly laws themselves, because that would have sparked a real uproar. Instead they said they planned merely to change the guidelines that determine how the regulators and judiciary are supposed to interpret the law.

But they didn’t change the laws, the laws were still on the books, is what you’re telling me.

Yes. Here we have laws that go back 200 years in America, and 400 years to Elizabethan times, and 800 goddamn years to the Magna Carta, and the Reagan people came along and said hey, ya know what, we’re so much smarter nowadays, we’re technocrats, we’re scientists, so let’s take these laws and enforce them in a slightly different way, based on this slightly different goal, this scientifically determined goal of efficiency, and you’re going to be so much happier because we’re going to help you live better as a consumer, we’re going to get you so much more stuff. When they said that, there was some real opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. Metzenbaum was against it. Arlen Specter was against it.

Not much of a Republican.

Well, back then he was a pretty mainstream Republican.

Okay.

So Metzenbaum and Specter were like, what the hell is going on here, this is a big problem, you people in the Reagan Administration can’t just gut our antimonopoly laws like this. But then another group of people came along and said, well no, these radical changes in antimonopoly law are actually a good idea. And this really confused matters, because some of the people who agreed with the Reagan Administration stood on the left wing of the Democratic Party. They were, in essence, the grandchildren of the old Teddy Roosevelt Progressives – people like John Kenneth Galbraith and Lester Thurow.

So wait, they want regulation-

What Galbraith and Thurow wanted was to get rid of competition, which they thought was inefficient and wasteful.

To say a word for my leftists: That can make sense if the giant companies they’re talking about are regulated, right?

Depends what sort of regulation you’re talking about. As Brandeis used to say, competition is often the best regulator. Top-down regulation by government “experts,” on the other hand, can tend toward sclerosis and corruption, the blending of state and private power.

What’s most important to understand about the radical reframing of antimonopoly law by the Reagan people in cahoots with the Progressives is just how  massive a political shift it set into motion in America. In 1978 Robert Bork published a book called The Antitrust Paradox, which became sort of a primer for the Reagan people. Bork argued that monopoly could be more efficient, and efficiency in the name of the welfare of the consumer should be our primary goal. Back when Bork wrote that, there were tens of thousands of families who ran grocery stores in America and hardware stores and garages and general merchandise stores, and that was because the law protected them from concentrated capital. Jump ahead 32 years and we’ve got a single company, Wal-Mart, that is the de facto governor of commerce in many small towns and even small cities all across America. Wal-mart has sucked Main Street right inside their walls. And that has huge political and economic effects. Wealth from these communities flows off to distant places, Bentonville, Wall Street. And power over these communities is exercised from distant places, like Bentonville, and Wall Street. But we see the effects also at a national level. Here you have one family with as much wealth as the bottom 41.5 percent of all Americans. One family with as much wealth as 130 million Americans.

But they do sell stuff cheaper.

Do they?

David Brooks writes about this all the time.

They don’t always sell stuff cheaper. That’s the thing about old, decrepit systems, and Wal-mart is increasingly an old, decrepit system. They have stock-outs all the time. They’ve got empty shelves sometimes. They sometimes don’t have enough people in the stores to stock the shelves. My friend Tracie McMillan went and worked in a Wal-Mart in Michigan in their produce department. She then wrote a book about her experience, and one of the things she details is the remarkable wastefulness of the Wal-Mart system.

That’s cool. Those small towns will generate competitors then and put Wal-Mart out of business, right? *laughs*

*laughs* Yeah, well. So it was a political revolution that happened.

Here we are having all of these discussions in America about inequality. Inequality in wealth. Inequality in voice. And yet no one’s looking at one of the main sources of that inequality, which was the overthrow of antitrust in 1981 by the Reagan Administration.

I know it’s shocking to find that it’s perfectly fine for Ronald Reagan to boldly use the power of the presidency in exactly the same way that President Obama has (tepidly) used itand is now being called a tyranical despot for having done so.  That’s how it rolls.

This article is a fresh perspective on the problem of inequality by looking at how we’ve dealt with “bigness” in the private sector. Well worth the time.

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Stimulating Media and bored presidents

by digby

This Jacobin piece by Corey Robin about bored leaders and thinkers seeking “stimulation” really illuminates something I’ve long observed but have only been able to articulate in piecemeal fashion. His quote by Christopher Hitchens really gets to the heart of it:

I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view… I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

At least he was honest.

Way back in March 2003, just as the invasion of Iraq was beginning, I wrote about this, wondering why the most powerful country in the world was so afraid. I don’t think I realized quite yet just how stimulating that fear was to so many people. And while Hitchens ascribes his excitement to his ideological zeal to rid the world of “theocratic barbarism” the fact is that he was far from the only media figure to be feverish and aroused by the prospect of war. Recall:

Embedded Ambition


by digby


With all the discussion about the media’s malfeasance leading up to the war, I think one aspect of it has been overlooked: the thrill of embedding. Here’s a taste of what we all saw during the first few days of the war from CNN:

BROWN: Again, down in the corner of your screen, what you are seeing is the 7th Cavalry on its way to Baghdad. How quickly and what it will encounter as it gets there, we do not know. But we know what has happened so far because CNN’s Walt Rodgers has been riding with them. Walt, tell us — you don’t need to tell us location. But tell us what you can about what you have encountered to date.

WALTER RODGERS, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The pictures you’re seeing are absolutely phenomenal. These are live pictures of the 7th Cavalry racing across the deserts in southern Iraq. They will — it will be days before they get to Baghdad, but you’ve never seen battlefield pictures like these before.

Immediately in front of our cameras, an M1-A1 Abrams tank. We’re sitting about 30 meters, now about 40 meters off the back of that tank. You can see that they’ve got water bottles stacked on board. That’s how close we are.

The orange cover on the back is called a VF-17. That’s a visual identification marker for allied aircraft in the air to let them know this is the 7th Cavalry, these are friendly units, we are rolling through the desert. Speed here, probably 40 to 50 kilometers an hour. That’s been our speed most of the time.

A short while ago, perhaps 30 minutes ago, this unit took some incoming fire. It never came within more than half a kilometer of the 7th Cavalry. But there you can see these tanks rolling along. The Army says these are the most lethal killing machines on the earth. And when you see those 120-millimeter guns go off, there’s no doubt about it.
There he’s swinging the turret. That constant swinging of the turret is to maintain a state of alertness. As you look at the soldiers atop the tank, the one nearest us on the left side of the tank is the loader. He is responsible for loading the 120-millimeter shells, gun shells into the tank when it engages in hostile combat. That has not occurred. That is, the tanks have not fired, to the best of our knowledge, so far today.

The other soldier on the right side of the turret, his head sticking up too, is the commander of the tank. You have to realize, they’ve been riding along, bouncing along in these tanks for probably six or more hours now. Those two on top are standing. The driver is — if you can look on the left front side, the driver is in a reclining position by that slash (ph) 91 figure. He’s in a two-thirds reclined position.

And then deeper inside the tank, and if you ride inside that tank, it is like riding in the bowels of a dragon. They roar. They screech. You can see them slowing now. We’ve got to be careful not to get in front of them. But what you’re watching here…

BROWN: Wow, look at that shot.

RODGERS: … is truly historic television and journalism. This is live pictures of the 7th U.S. Cavalry headed for Iraq. This is actual time. What you are witnessing now is what is happening here in the Iraqi desert as the 7th Cavalry, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, is moving northward through the Iraqi desert.

I remember that story vividly — the sunburned, khaki-clad Rogers standing up in the back of the vehicle with the sand blowing in his face looking for all the world like some sort of JC Penney version of TE Lawrence going on about the total awesomeness of his own awesome reporting of the awesome march across the awesome desert. I’m sure that the Pentagon was extremely pleased that day at the success of their war marketing.


One of the things that cannot be discounted is the fact that the news organizations and reporters themselves were beside themselves at the prospect of being able to cover “the war.” Their childlike excitement was palpable and the government used the enticement of “embedding” reporters on the front lines with access to that totally awesome coverage as Rodgers shows in the clip above. It’s not that I blame reporters for being thrilled to be a part of this operation — it was the obvious Walter Mitty warrior fantasy that made me queasy.


This was set up in a very systematic way by the Pentagon. In a very slick maneuver, they held a media “boot-camp” months before the war began (and while they were insisting that they were not preparing for war.) They got the reporters all hot and bothered about the exciting story they would be able to cover. Who wanted all those unpleasant old facts refuting the casus belli to get in the way of that?

December 11, 2002

At the November boot camp, finding that separation wasn’t easy. Upon arrival, journalists received military issue equipment such as backpacks, helmets, flack-jackets and NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits, which they then used in training exercises. Washington Times staff photographer Gerald Herbert says at first they enjoyed getting their hands on the new “toys,” but a few of the journalists quickly realized the dangers of donning all the military gear.

After a demonstration on weaponry, one of the participating photographers took a picture of UPI reporter Pam Hess wearing full battle fatigues and holding an M-16 while a marine at her side gave instructions. When the picture ran in The International Herald Tribune the next day, some boot campers began to worry about how they were being perceived by the outside world.

Some feared the picture would fuel suspicions that American journalists are working in concert with the American military, a danger made all the more real by the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl last year in Pakistan.

“I don’t think in any sense we should wear anything that confuses us as members of the military,” Platt says. “This is a new war and journalists are targets. If the concept gets out there that we’re working for the military, it’s going to make our jobs much more difficult.”

On the final night of boot camp the journalists learned they were about to become the subjects in a massive photo-op organized by the military. The thought of marching five miles in full gear with still and TV cameras documenting their every move spooked many of the journalists there. So before the big event, many decided to present themselves in more of an independent light when the time came for their pictures to be taken.

“All of a sudden the media was trying to spin the media,” says Herbert. “That question was nagging me all week long and came to a head that day: at what point are we observing and at what point are we participating?”

Herbert says some of the journalists used white tape and black markers to designate themselves as press, while others wore jeans and one guy even drew a peace symbol on his shirt.

This issue of what to wear was obviously quite a problem for the press as I recall laughing at some of the embeds’ quasi-military get-ups. Many of them were very sharp, like this one:





Yep, that’s Judy Miller on the left…

Just as the anchors back in the booth were waving flags and enjoying the huge ratings that war porn brings to the usually flat cable news networks, the reporters in the field were getting fitted for Prada camo-fatigue safari gear for their war epic. By the beginning of January 2003, the news networks were literally selling the war.(“See full coverage of The War, here on CNN…”)

Update: Speaking of bored presidents, this is one I’ll never get out of my head:

As Bob Woodward reports in his book “Bush at War,” a month into the bombing of Afghanistan, when the Taliban stronghold of Majar-i-Sharif fell, Mr Bush turned to Condoleezza Rice and asked: “Well, what next?”

There’s bored and then there’s ADD …

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