Palin isn't 'dismissive' of the MSM, it's all part of her, and the GOP's, long-term plot

Palin isn't dismissive of the traditional media. She's an idiot, and she knows it. And the only way she can get around constantly being called out for being wrong, and making up fake words (and thinking they're actually real words), is by going after the gate-keepers. It's what Republicans have been doing for years. While some, I'm sure, actually believe the mainstream media is wrong and biased. I think conservative leaders, who long ago master-minded the effort to undercut the traditional media, are more concerned that their message - their false message - can't survive in a country in which a free press fact checks false politicians. So they constantly undermine the press, and at the same time, hope to push the press even farther to the right than it already is.

Palin isn't dismissive of the traditional media. She's trying to get rid of it, in the public's eye, because it poses a danger to her plans to snooker the people into office.

PS At some point, the traditional media had better start fighting back. Their name is already, increasingly, mud to the public at large. And a good portion of the blame goes to the GOP, and their propaganda organ, FOX News, who have been telling the public for years that the media is biased. The media, the real media, then turns around and embraces FOX, while trying to figure out what they've done wrong to so anger people like Palin. And then they wonder why their readership is down. Read More......

Pay-to-play Dem lobbyist indicted

This is not good news for Dems; you can hear the über-righteous ringing the alarm already. But the deeds are classic and wrong, and if the lobbyist is found guilty, he deserves what he gets.

He's accused of funneling campaign money to congressional earmark kings through family and friends, including a "hotel sommelier" (go ahead, look it up) and a "golf marketing director", then reimbursing the contributors — one of the few clear no-nos in the bribe-a-congressman, win-a-prize game. The numbers are large, as defense numbers tend to be.

From the Washington Post (h/t Ken Silverstein at his Harpers digs, my emphasis):

On Thursday, the former defense lobbyist stood accused by federal prosecutors of orchestrating one of the largest campaign-finance frauds in U.S. history. He faces devastating testimony from his son and has checked himself into a Baltimore clinic for anxiety.

Magliocchetti, 64, the founder and owner of the now-closed PMA Group, was charged in U.S. District Court in Alexandria with eight counts of illegal campaign contributions and three counts of making false statements. . . .

PMA's clients gained more than $200 million in federal earmarks from a roster of lawmakers, who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the lobbyist, his family and associates.

Members of the House defense appropriations subcommittee were exempted in the indictment:

That is good news for lawmakers on the powerful House defense appropriations subcommittee who have been the focus of inquiries related to PMA. Reps. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) and Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.), along with former subcommittee chairman John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, were the largest recipients of donations from PMA lobbyists and their clients, according to campaign records. . . . Moran, Visclosky, Murtha and four other lawmakers were cleared of wrongdoing in December by the House ethics committee[.]

Because we all know what babes in the woods these guys are.

And check the numbers — as always in these cases, the ROI (return on investment) for earmark recipients is 100:1. $200,000 in bribes (ish) gets you $200 million in goodies (not counting cost overruns). All beasts want money, but this is where the big beasts play.

GP Read More......

When David Boies destroyed Tony Perkins on 'Face the Nation'

I watched the debate between Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council and Prop. 8 lawyer David Boies live this morning on "Face the Nation." It was great t.v. I posted it AMERICAblog Gay, too.

Boies didn't let Perkins get away with spewing falsehoods and lies. After Perkins spewed the usual right-wing anti-gay rhetoric, Boies let him have it:

"In a court of law you've got to come in and you've got to support those opinions, you've got to stand up under oath and cross-examination," Boies said. "And what we saw at trial is that it's very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens of the right to vote [sic] to make all sorts of statements and campaign literature, or in debates where they can't be cross-examined.

"But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that's what happened here. There simply wasn't any evidence, there weren't any of those studies. There weren't any empirical studies. That's just made up. That's junk science. It's easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court you can't do that.

"That's what we proved: We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost," Boies said.

Seriously, anyone who is going to debate any of the right-wing homophobes should watch this interview and learn from Boies.
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A bit more Paris blogging...

I spent yesterday with my friend Serge, who was having some difficulty with his washing machine. The hose broke and it wasn't entirely clear how to install a new one. So I popped over to his neighborhood in the 10th, near Gare de l'Est, and we spent a late afternoon washing machine fixing and checking out Serge's new artwork he created (I should have gotten some photos, will next time). What made Serge think I would be able to help fix a washing machine, I'll never know.

In the upper right of the photo above, at the top of the long street, you can see the Porte Saint-Denis. It looks like the Arc de Triomphe, and is a relatively new addition to the neighborhood - built to replace the old walls of the city, themselves built in the 1300s. This new addition dates to 1672.



Serge has a studio apartment in a really old building - well, American "old" - I believe it's from the 1700s. The iron work outside his windows is apparently original. I love the old wooden stairway and windows as you walk up to the 6th floor or so where Serge's place is.



The neighborhood is quite ethnic. Heavy Arab influence, but also, apparently, an Indian and Pakistani influence as well (judging by the Bollywood video store just below). But just like big cities in the states, the neighborhood is slowly shifting from working class to yuppie, or at least a healthy mix of the two.



Just a view of the sidewalk below Serge's. I like to hang out the window and snap photos. Paris, being such a low city - buildings just don't get that tall in most of the city proper - you always have a great view once you get up a few floors.



After we manly fixed the washing machine, and I helped Serge figure out that, after all these years, he apparently DID have wifi in his apartment we went down the block to a Kurdish kabob place for dinner. It was quite interesting. My first Kurdish restaurant, and I'm pretty sure my first Kurds as well. The kabob was quite good, I got lamb (we also got a second vegetarian thing that you can see Serge eating above), Serge got ground beef, but the best part was sitting on these itty bitty v-shaped-butt chairs at itty-bitty tables that felt like something out of kindergarten.

It started to rain, and we had finished our kabobs, so headed back to Serge's for a late night herbal tea. The French are big on having tea with friends (at least my friends are). And it's quite lovely, for lack of a better word. The entire tea set comes out - folks my age actually have tea sets - and you sit and sip your tea while surfing for Ikea shelves on Serge's newly-found WiFi (or wee-fee, as they say in French).



Finally, back to Montparnasse around 11pm or so. The rain had stopped, so the streets had a nice glisten to them, perfect for the neon that is both popular, and famous, in our more chi-chi neck of the woods.



Oh, and the scarves. The French (and a lot of Europeans), just LOVE their scarves. A short rain, and temps in the mid 60s, and the scarves are out in full force (in the states, we don't sport scarves unless it gets to the upper 40s F or so, I'd say - at least not in the north). Admittedly not a bad way to warm up if you have a slight chill, even in the 60s.

And hey, she looked good. It is Paris, after all. Read More......

Told ya so (stimulus version)

Hey kids, guess what? Seems the growing conventional wisdom is that the administration f'd up by not trying to pass a larger stimulus, and now Dems are screwed as a result. From Greg Sargent at Plum Line:

In the wake of today's disappointing jobs numbers, a bunch of people around the Web have been lamenting that Dems will take it on the chin for the bad economy even while Republicans have done everything they can to block Dems from implementing their solutions.

That's true. But there's another layer of perversity to consider here that makes the situation even worse: The sputtering recovery is actually making it tougher politically over time for Dems to take new steps to solve the problem. The sluggish recovery has undermined public confidence in the Dems' general approach to solving the problem, making Dems more reluctant to attempt the next round of ambitious solutions. That, in turn, insures that the jobs numbers remain grim. And so on.

As Josh Marshall notes today, it's getting tougher to avoid the conclusion that Dems erred badly by not passing a larger stimulus package:

[I]t was always clear there was only going to be one real bite at this apple. And it just wasn't enough. Why the White House predicted a max out at 8.5% unemployment I'll never know since that was not only a politically unhelpful number, it was also deeply unrealistic. I suspect a lot of Democrats are going to go down to defeat because of it.

What makes this even worse is the perverse dynamic I noted above. Republicans have pursued a very deliberate strategy to feed public pessimism about Big Government's ability to lift us out of the doldrums, pointing to the sputtering recovery as proof that the Dems underlying philosophy has been discredited.

The result is that it's even less likely that Dems will risk taking "another bite at this apple," as Josh puts it.

I do seem to recall being upbraided at the White House a few months back by top VP economic adviser Jared Bernstein for this blog having repeatedly criticized the administration's handling of the stimulus (the size of it, the contents of it (tax cuts!), and the selling of it before and after passage). And now it seems, we were right. And Stiglitz was right. And Krugman was right. Krugman outright predicted everything that was going to happen, politically and economically - and no one at the White House wanted to listen to the DFH with the Nobel prize (either of them). I take you back to Paul Krugman, January of 2009:

This really does look like a plan that falls well short of what advocates of strong stimulus were hoping for — and it seems as if that was done in order to win Republican votes. Yet even if the plan gets the hoped-for 80 votes in the Senate, which seems doubtful, responsibility for the plan’s perceived failure, if it’s spun that way, will be placed on Democrats.

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.

And the only head that seems to have rolled as a result is the person who argued for a larger stimulus, and lost: Christine Romer. Read More......

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Today's show have a mix of topics including Iraq, Afghanistan and the oil spill. But, there will also be a discussion of the Prop. 8 decision. Ted Olson is on FOX. I imagine Olson has been on FOX many times. Maybe he can talk some sense over there. As Karl Frisch from Media Matters points out, FOX hasn't exactly been providing "fair and balanced" coverage of the Prop. 8 decision or LGBT issues in general (big surprise, huh?)

And, Tony Perkins appears on CBS. Note to John Dickerson who is subbing for Bob Scheiffer: There is no rational basis for discrimination. Homophobia is all Tony Perkins and his anti-gay allies have. Make him own it (although, I doubt that will happen, it should.)

John Boehner is on "Meet the Press." I think the more people in the U.S. get to know him, the less they'll ever want him to be Speaker.

The full lineup is here. Read More......