Rachel: 'The media narrative has turned into a Republican campaign ad'

This is a Maddow two-fer, a revealing look at a problem, followed by the solution. I'm going to post both videos.

The Problem: "The media narrative ... has turned into a Republican campaign ad." It's that simple.

Rachel Maddow gets right to the point in this well-produced segment. Her bottom line — the media narrative is identical the Republican party spin on what the midterm elections mean. As I said, well-produced:



While this focuses on conservatives, let's not forget her spotlight on the press: "The media dressing these guys up like there is some coherent narrative here ... conveniently obscures what's really going on here. ... [W]e are on the precipice of elevating into federal office the most extreme ... set of conservative candidates in a lifetime."

Exactly. (And note that word "conveniently". I think she means it.)

And now the Solution: Attack, attack, attack. Her follow-on segment contains many effective examples of Democrats fighting back hard.



The discussion with Chris Hayes teases out some of the corner ideas, but the bottom line advice is clearly to defy the current Beltway pundits — and I'll add, that of many consultants as well. Don't hunker down; man up (as it were).

About "It's the Deficit", the lead lie in the pool. This one is totally disingenuous, both from the media (whose job is to know better) and conservatives (whose job is to lie to win).

Here's Paul Krugman's n-th attempt to illustrate a simple concept: The "deficit" has two components — income and expenses — not just one. The first set of bars in the graph below shows change in GDP, Expenditure, and Revenues in the last business cycle, 2001–2007. The second shows what came after. The "deficit" is the difference between the red bar (Expenditure) and the green bar (Revenues) next to it. (Note that the bars show rate of change, not nominal values.)


The red bar doesn't change much, but the green bar tanks. Hmm. Looks like "deficit" as code for "spending on the Wrong People" doesn't wash — not in the real world anyway. Keep your eye on that lie though. You'll hear it from a lot from people whose job is to know better. Just sayin'.

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Guardian: 'Turning up the heat on Rupert Murdoch'

There's always much talk about Rupert Murdoch (for example, here, here, and here). But it's hard to get a grasp on what he actually does.

We think of him as a propagandist, but he's so much more. And he's not primarily a propagandist; he's a media monopolist whose market product is propaganda. Here's his business model — he semi-monopolizes media in whatever country he gets into, and then sells propaganda services to government officials and hopefuls in exchange for increased monopoly control after they get elected.

Andrew Cockburn had a good analysis in a 2003 Counterpunch article (h/t Griffon for the link). Quoting a recent Murdoch biography:

Not only has Murdoch sought and received political favours: most of the critical steps in the transmutation of News Limited, his inherited business, into present-day Newscorp were dependent on such things. Nor is there essential change in his operations as the new century gets under way, and he prepares his sons to extend the dynasty.

There's not enough space here to detail the growth of News Corp in the U.K. and the U.S. But every step depended on the hand-shaking noted above — get into a market, sell propaganda favors to politicians (often, but not always, right-wing ones), get those pols elected, then extract further monopoly concessions. Repeat until his insatiable hunger is satisfied.

That's how he grows his empire. He's international, and no one has yet stopped him.

So now the U.K. is at another Murdoch decision point. The Guardian has an article that opens this way (h/t hector); my emphasis throughout):

It is March 2015, a couple of months before the general election. One media company bestrides British politics – spanning television, newspapers and the internet. It is more than twice the size of the BBC, with a turnover of £9bn. Controlled by Rupert Murdoch, it is called News Corporation.

Bound by none of the BBC's tradition of impartiality, the Murdoch family is deciding whether to endorse David Cameron for a second term. They meet in the knowledge that behind them lies the support of a company whose Sun and Times titles account for two-fifths of all newspapers sold in Britain and whose broadcasting operation is larger than the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 combined. This vision of financial and political power has so terrified rivals that they are already ganging up in alarm. From the Daily Telegraph to the Daily Mirror, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, a joint letter has been prepared for the business secretary, Vince Cable. Sent today, the purpose of the memo is simple – to persuade Cable to block News Corp's proposed £8bn bid to take full control of BSkyB. ... What so frightens Britain's newspaper owners today is what would happen when the profits of Sky are aligned to the power of the Sun and the Times, creating a media company whose size and scale is unheard of in British history.

Sky is already larger than the BBC today, with a turnover of £5.9bn, while News International turns over £1.7bn.

And that's the decision before Cameron's government. At present, News Corp owns 39.1% of the company. Murdoch wants to spend £8 billion to buy the rest. Will Cameron's government, which owes Murdoch huge favors for recent election support, block this or not?

It's hard to trim this article to fair-use size, so please do read it through. There's so much there.

As a taste of how Murdoch operates, here's from the Krugman article I discussed a few days ago:

[I]n Britain, a reporter at one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers, News of the World, was caught hacking into the voice mail of prominent citizens, including members of the royal family. But Scotland Yard showed little interest in getting to the bottom of the story. Now the editor who ran the paper when the hacking was taking place is chief of communications for the Conservative government — and that government is talking about slashing the budget of the BBC, which competes with the News Corporation.

Which takes us back to Sky. Note that the BBC is the only real remaining competitor to Sky for satellite TV services in the U.K., the rest having been eliminated. Say goodbye BBC if this plays out as usual.

And so it goes. Murdock is not a propagandist; he's so much worse. He's a megalomaniac, an empire builder of tremendous capability, and a dynasticist — he wants to pass control intact to his children and his children's children. In our new century of crazed corporate beasts, Murdoch is among the worst — soulless, ruthless, relentless, and effective.

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Sunday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The lineup for the Sunday talk shows can be viewed here. Lots of politics on the shows today, including two Senate debates. ABC hosts the candidates for Senate in Connecticut: Richard Blumenthal vs. Linda McMahon. NBC has candidates from one of the tightest races in the country - the Illinois Senate: Alexi Giannoulis vs. Mark Kirk. Axelrod is on Face the Nation.

Christine O'Donnell was featured on Saturday Night Live -- again. This takes spoofing her "I'm not a Witch" ad to a whole new level:
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The world of extreme militias

Via the ever-helpful Scott Horton, we found this in Time magazine, something I rarely read these days. It's a surprising discovery — "The Secret World of Extreme Militias" by Barton Gellman (author of the Cheney book Angler). And it's the cover story no less.

After describing a training exercise — a two-pronged assault on a "neo-Islamic command post" by the "Ohio Defense Force" — Gellman quotes one of the participants (my emphasis):

"I don't know who the redcoats are," says Brian Vandersall, 37, who designed the exercise and tried to tamp down talk of politics among the men. "It could be U.N. troops. It could be federal troops. It could be Blackwater, which was used in Katrina. It could be Mexican troops who are crossing the border."

Or it could be, as it was for this year's exercise, an Islamic army marauding unchecked because a hypothetical pro-Muslim President has ordered U.S. forces to leave them alone. But as the drill played out, the designated opponents bore little resemblance to terrorists. The scenario described them as a platoon-size unit, in uniform, with "military-grade hardware, communications, encryption capability and vehicle support." The militia was training for combat against the spitting image of a tactical force from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), FBI or National Guard. "Whoever they are," Vandersall says, "we have to be ready."

As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs.

Here are the details that make it certain our guess about these groups is right. There's the story of James von Brunn, the guy who killed the guard at the National Holocaust Museum last year; his "other" target was David Alexrod. Or the tale of James Cummings, shot to death by her abused spouse Amber, who was assembling a dirty bomb:

"His intentions were to construct a dirty bomb and take it to Washington to kill President Obama," Amber Cummings says. "He was planning to hide it in the undercarriage of our motor home." She says her husband had practiced crossing checkpoints with dangerous materials aboard, taking her and their daughter along for an image of innocence.

He was smart, and he'd moved the project rather far along. And there's more. Horton calls this "essential reading":

Gellman has brought solid, nuts-and-bolts investigative journalism back to Time magazine. This piece is an eye-opener.

Which brings me to the second story in this story. What's going on at Time? Have they decided to "commit journalism," to borrow Maddow's phrase? Newsweek is looking thinner and thinner, a kind of text-filled Penny Saver. If Time is bucking the trends — towards small and more Right — this is welcome news. I even found this in one of their teaser click-aways:

(Watch TIME"s video "WikiLeaks Founder on History's Top Leaks.")

Where's the spitting vilification we've come to expect? If real journalism is emerging in the Print Bigs in this country, it's a trend worth watching.

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Frank Rich: We're watching 'a billionaires’ coup'

Frank Rich has an interesting column that draws a nice line between the idiocy of Christine O'Donnell (our friend the Handmaiden) to the mega-billionaires who fund it, to what he calls a "coup" ... in print.

The column is excellent, a nice walk through the garden of logic that gets him from A to B to C. Do check it out. I'll leave you with just two quotes. The first:

Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else.

And by the logic of post-election flim-flam, it all goes down in the lame duck session (or Lame Duck Session, since this will be a Lame Duck for the ages). Here we can watch both betrayals at the same time — the water will start to drain from the Social Security glass, straight to the Big Boy tax cuts glass. Voilà.

I plan to develop my list of good Dems–bad Dems after that session. The second quote, from Rich's final paragraph:

Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party everywoman ... just may be the final ingredient needed to camouflage a billionaires’ coup as a populist surge.

The whole close is strong, but I didn't want to hide the bomb. "A billionaires' coup." Score one for the good guys.

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The mechanism: How the rich buy journalists

In his penultimate post at Harpers, Ken Silverstein follows up on his investigation of the paid speaking gigs of David Broder and Bob Woodward.

What emerges shows pretty clearly how people like Broder are "incentivized" to align their interests with those who, for example, have a strong belief in "the destructive effects of the estate tax to families and their businesses."

Speaking gigs lead to sejours at "retreat(s) open exclusively to ... client family members," which lead, apparently, to posh-friendly articles suggesting that what's good for "ultra-high net worth families" (to pick one gig's crowd) is also good for those "small people" whose interests people like Broder can always instantly feel, like an itch on the back of their leg, but higher up.

If this were a novel, the plot would almost be trite (time for a sex scene near the scented Cleopatra Asp Pond in the retreat's back corner). But in real life, it smells like the real deal. A taste:

Last May, Broder was the keynote speaker at a May 19 to 21 conference sponsored by GenSpring Family Offices, “a leading wealth management firm for ultra-high net worth families. With over $20 billion in assets under advisement, GenSpring…is trusted by more than 700 of the world’s wealthiest families to oversee or manage important aspects of their financial lives.” GenSpring is an affiliate of SunTrust Banks, which lobbies congress. The conference, called the “Men’s Retreat,” was held at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida. The conference offered “an opportunity for men to learn and network together, attend and participate in provocative and timely meetings covering the gamut of wealth related topics presented and facilitated by key GenSpring experts as well as select guest speakers who are renowned experts in the fields of finance, communication, health, and wealth preservation.” ...

Among the panelists was Patricia Soldano, a lobbyist who heads up GenSpring’s office in southern California and who is president of the Policy and Taxation Group, “an organization that educates on the destructive effects of the estate tax to families and their businesses.” In other words, the conference Broder spoke at was not only hosted by a business with significant interests in Washington, but the group’s lobbying agenda was a notable component of the event.

Broder writes about financial reform and tax policy with some regularity. Last July ...

How's that for a teaser? The piece isn't long, but it's meaty, and includes some Woodward dish as well. Be sure to click the embedded links if this stuff interests you.

It's a club; we're not members. Our Betters and their propagandists are.

Silverstein is leaving his Harpers day job to do investigative journalism somewhere other than Washington. It's the Obama–Clinton reflux, as he explains in his farewell. (For one of the most prescient pieces on Senator Obama, click here. It's what drew me to Ken's work.)

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Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Good morning.

The talk shows are featuring lots of Republicans today. A few Democrats get some face time.

On CBS, we've "Face the Nation, Teabagger edition" with GOP/Teabaggers Marco Rubio (FL) and Ken Buck (CO).

ABC is hosting David Axelrod, GOP leader Mitch McConnell (fresh off his filibuster victory over DADT) and Jordan's Queen Rania. (Although, when I first looked at the article, my eyes played tricks on me and I thought it read "Queen McConnell.")

"Meet the Press is all about education.

CNN has Lieberman and a couple other GOPers. Oh, and Dick Durbin.

But, the best Sunday show will be playing out at a mega-church in Lithonia, Georgia. Bishop Eddie Long will be speaking to his flock about the lawsuits filed against him by four young men. Yes, in case you haven't been following, Eddie Long is apparently another right-wing, viciously homophobic church leader who was having sex with men on the side. Tim Beauchamp has posts on Long here and here. Long's story is also on the front page of today's New York Times and some prime coverage in the Washington Post.

The full lineup for the talk shows is here. Read More......

Taibbi on NFL players' pro-union 'statement'

We all know (without quite remembering) how political many football broadcasts are.

For example, during the Kerry–Bush contest, we were treated to sneering "flip-flopping is weak" remarks from all the manly men with a mike in their hands (said while watching manly men in tight pants bash each other hello). It all played nicely into the "girly Dem" meme that's with us even today.

Somehow union-bashing is manly now as well (how times have changed). Leave it to Matt Taibbi to tease out all the contradictions. He starts (my emphasis):

So it seems the whole sports world is abuzz about the decision by the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints players to raise a finger in the air before the season-opening game as an expression of union loyalty -- "We are one" -- in a year in which the players and the owners are negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. I watched that gesture during the game and knew it was going to inspire the usual sneering (it started almost immediately, with Al Michaels chirping, "There's nothing like starting an NFL season with a labor statement"), as voices from all corners (including, unbelievably, many former NFL players) denouncing the absurdly brief, silent, and inoffensive demonstration as a tasteless interruption of our God-given right to nonstop mindless entertainment.

Forget about people actually supporting unions in a labor disagreement: they apparently don't even want to see them, not if it's going to delay a football game by three whole seconds. There were actually arguments across the media landscape to the effect that NFL players were out of line bringing their labor disagreement into our living rooms, the implication being that any display of union activity is somehow unseemly or (I love this) selfish. We have a whole reality-show culture celebrating the cause of people eating centipedes and stabbing each other in the back for cash prizes and fame, but football players quietly showing union solidarity is tasteless. If you can explain that one to me, please don't hesitate to write in.

Anyway the NFL players gesture was a significant thing because it was seen by 28% of the country; it's probably going to be the signature piece of labor theater in America this year. For obvious reasons the NFL union is a tough sell to most people. You're talking about guys who get paid millions to play a kids' game, so when they start getting together to talk about holding out for more (although any work stoppage next year will technically be a lockout), most people tune out instantly. I don't agree with this attitude -- if people think the players are greedy, what would they call the owners, who don't even have to get beat up for their money and have the gall to beg taxpayers for stadium money on top of their TV billions -- but I get where it's coming from.

This post takes many turns, ending at an interesting cultural-political place:

That kind of thinking is spreading, because our pop culture priests have succeeded in filling the population with shame and nervous self-loathing to the point where they think of anyone who isn't an employer as a parasite, and anyone who isn't rich and famous, or trying to be, as a loser.

Wise words, Matt.

I often think we wouldn't be in the state we're in — handing the country over in buckets to the predatory rich — if it weren't for that (well engineered) cultural shift.

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Tea Baggers: More like carpet-baggers than grass-roots

A couple of takes on Mike Castle and Tea Party Handmaiden (heh) Christine O'Donnell. Let's start with E.J. Dionne at the Wash Post (h/t Kay at Balloon Juice; click for her own good comments):

Want to know how angry the state’s Republican leaders are at the campaign of Christine O’Donnell, the perennial candidate who is threatening Rep. Mike Castle in the U.S. Senate race? Here’s what Delaware Republican Party chairman Tom Ross told me last night:

I could buy a parrot and train it to say, ‘tax cuts,’ but at the end of the day, it’s still a parrot, not a conservative.

That, so far, is my favorite line of this election season.

Ross is furious because O’Donnell had no credibility as a candidate until the Tea Party Express, a California-based group, decided to target Castle, a genuine moderate who represents the last vestiges of what was once a thriving and honorable wing of Republicanism. Oh yes, and she also got the endorsements of Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). DeMint is determined to purge his party of anyone with the nerve to be – well, even a moderate conservative.

Ross notes that the state Republican convention endorsed Castle. These are not some shadowy party bosses, but, as he put it, “the grass-roots delegates who knock on the doors and pass out the literature and pound the pavements.”

Carpet baggers for sure. Next time I want to see some plush and shag hanging from those hats.

But before we deify Mike Castle, let's listen to Dave Weigel at Slate (h/t Annie Laurie):

I’m from Delaware, born in 1981, and can not remember a time when Mike Castle wasn’t being elected to something. ... There are two parties here: the party that does what the banks and DuPont wants, and the party that loses. Castle was the undisputed leader of the first party. ...

I see a lot of conservatives arguing tonight that Christine O'Donnell's victory shows that she can upset the establishment and win this seat. These conservatives are not from Delaware. ... Her victory was only possible because, for the first time, political donors and activists from outside our little state picked a target, froze it, and polarized it. But the message I am getting tonight is clear—neither the state GOP nor the NRSC will spend any resources on O’Donnell.

If Delaware catches your eye, there's much more by Weigel on his main blog page.

And finally this, by Charles Pierce in Esquire, is well worth quoting (cause I'm a sucker for good prose). The appetizer:

Once O'Donnell's victory was assured, the requisite thumbsucking over What It All Means got dialed up to 11 almost immediately. Matthews was the wildest, divining a secret hidden block of frustrated Hillary Clinton voters who had been marinating in frustration since the 2008 primaries and were bleeding from the teeth to vote for anyone with ovaries, even someone who spent the 1990's inveighing against the evils of jacking off.

The main dish:

O’Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature From The Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid… Her resume is so thin as to be opaque [sic], and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and “U.S. Senator” seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. ...

She is what politics produces when you turn them into a game show and the coverage of them over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing them from the real world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.

She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that’s the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters. Christine O’Donnell’s campaign is a successful exercise in angry, misfit masturbation[.]

If this country falls in the late rounds (it may not), the epitaph could read, "The rich gave them the noose, and they wore it like a necklace."

If you care, click through for the Handmaiden's OMG-face.

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Dylan Ratigan & Tom Hayden: Where's the anti-corporate outrage?

A good discussion on a late-August Dylan Ratigan episode. Dylan asks "Where's the outrage?" given the current economic troubles and the power of the "six major industries [that] control the entire U.S. government regardless of whatever political party the telecommunications, banking, health care, defense, agriculture, energy".

Hayden and Ratigan compare these times to both the Sixties and the Thirties, similar eras with different protest arcs. I think the comparison to the Thirties (2:00 in the vid) is correct; if so, the real protests are coming, and not passé (in both senses).

At one point (3:45), Hayden talks about the Tea Partiers as representing the counter-movement, but also as inadvertently prepping the way for the next wave. A good discussion throughout (h/t Griffon for the link).



The discussion in the final third of the interview is also astute. Comparing students in the Sixties with today's, he correctly identifies the differences that keep today's students more passive (my word, not his) — especially educational debt and the lack of a draft. (Debt as a way of killing student protest was another Reagan gift.)

But Hayden isn't negative on the young; when the opportunity for something that looks practical comes up, they come through. His example is telling (I'll leave you to experience it directly).

Once more, Dylan Ratigan — someone who belongs on the radar. His show is early by Keith standards — 4pm EST, 1pm PST. The watch-for-free website is here. Enjoy.

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Frank Rich on Obama's 'corporatist image' & the enthusiasm gap

Sunday columnist Frank Rich looks at the coming election, and in passing touches on Obama's corporatism in remarks that are deftly on-point. For example (my emphasis):

That spread is the Democrats’ dread “enthusiasm gap.” And since that gap can’t be bridged in two months by new government programs or divine intervention for the nearly one in six Americans who are un- or underemployed, what could give the Democrats even a slender reed of hope? If there’s any plausible answer, it can be drawn from the single poll finding that is most devastating for Obama, the question (as worded by The Washington Post/ABC News) of whether “he understands the problems of people like you.” There his numbers really have imploded. When he arrived in office, 72 percent answered Yes and 24 percent No. As of last week, Yes had fallen to 50 and No had doubled to 48.

That a former community organizer and insurgent presidential candidate from a rocky middle-class background could be branded an out-of-touch elitist is not entirely the fault of his critics. Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration’s plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble — Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama’s more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush’s, created TARP. ...

The White House’s not-on-C-Span deal-making with the health care industry behemoths only cemented the administration’s corporatist image, as did Obama’s meandering path to what still looks like a loophole-ridden compromise on financial regulatory reform. This is why even many Democrats have become lukewarm in their conviction that their president “understands the problems of people like you.”

Clearly, Rich gets it.

The rest of this good article contains comments on FDR and his battle in 1936 against "business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering" (Roosevelt's words), as well as comparisons between Roosevelt's campaign style and that of the new Battlin' Obama.

I found Mr. Rich's close interesting. Bringing it back to the election and the enthusiasm gap, the article suggests that the way for Obama to close that gap is to "clear up the ambiguity" about whose side he's really on.

Well played, sir. Well played. If you want to be listened to by those in the cozy seats, it's soft touch every time.

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Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

The economy, politics and 9/11 are the main topics today.

The new chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Austen Goolsbee, is doing the rounds. He's on ABC and FOX.

David Axelrod is making an appearance on NBC.

The tan who would be speaker is on CBS. (Icky question of the day: Does Boehner have a full body tan or a tan line? Maybe Scheiffer can ask.)

To talk 9/11, Rudy "Noun, Verb 9/11" Giuliani is on NBC (some get, huh? I'm sure the networks fought to get Rudy.) You can see the current and former Secretaries of Homeland Security, Napolitano and Chertoff, on CNN.

And, Newt is on FOX. Of course, Newt is on FOX. Newt is always on FOX.

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

Dylan Ratigan & Matt Bai on the economic crisis

This segment from Friday's Dylan Ratigan Show is worth watching for several reasons.

One is that Ratigan correctly sees the relationship between the "mosque"–Quran-burning controversy and the economic crisis — namely, that the first obscures the second.

Another is that the segment provides a good instance of where Ratigan's head is at. (I personally think he's under-appreciated, or at least under-quoted, which may just mean he's under-watched by his natural audience. Here's Ratigan, for example, on Obama and BP.)

And finally, there's our friend, Matt Bai. The blinking before he gets his first opportunity to speak alerted me to his discomfort, and if I'm not over-reading him, his "Hello, Arianna" sounded wary. I've got Mr. Bai as a stealth conservative activist, so I was watching for the classic double move:

1. Make sure you seem reasonable, no matter what comes out of your mouth.
   
2. Push the Movement obfuscation, whether it makes sense or not.

With that in mind, you might pause the clip at 3:40, after Matt answers Dylan's first question. He sounds like he's making sense.

Now think of the context of the segment — the economic crisis — and the question Mai was asked, and try to anticipate what Arianna's will say to him. (Hint: The question was "What is your perception of the president's understanding and attunement to what is actually troubling the country?")

The rest is magic, even the Freudian slip in Matt's first response to Ariana's reply.



Note also the interchange that pivots around Matt's "What's new?" at about 6:12. That part goes on a while and is worth your attention as well. (I also really liked the way Arianna ended the segment. I've heard similar stories, and they're both touching and right on.)

The bottom line is that while Matt makes reasonable statements, he consistently refuses to engage either Arianna or Dylan on their main point — that the Big Boys are taking the "small people" to the cleaners. His job is to shine a light on those spinning political hubcaps, and distract from the fact that there's an actual something happening — and that you can be on the right side of it, or the wrong side.

Neither Arianna nor Dylan take the bait. "It's not about the hubcaps, Matt," they seem to be saying. "Look, the car just killed someone."

Nice segment. Mr. Bai stays on our list (thanks, sir, for the confirmation). And Mr. Ratigan goes on our other list — people who need more listening to. "Predatory economy" indeed.

GP

(By the way, I couldn't find a reference in the google for Ratigan's "six major industries that control the government" but I'll keep looking. It would be interesting to hear more on this.) Read More......

Stop The Press

They shouldn't.

TVNewser:

ABC News says that it will have people there to cover the event, and afterward producers and executives will meet to decide what images to show on-air.

A CBS News spokesperson says: "We will cover the story with the appropriate context, as we would any other news story"

An NBC News spokesperson says: "Our policy is to cover news events as they take place, and report on them with context and perspective. The determination about what images are appropriate and will be broadcast will be made by NBC News management after the event happens."

A CNN spokesperson says: "We will dedicate resources to the story and provide coverage as news warrants."

I went out for a run and came back to the "news" that the burn may be off. But as I type, the whole circus continues, and will he or won't he is still unclear.

What is totally obvious, however, is that we've just witnessed a big fat media fail.

I don't have kids, but this sure seems like Parenting 101. Don't give a delinquent child attention. Ignore the tantrums, and eventually they stop. Just because someone does something inflammatory doesn't mean it's news or needs to be covered. Let the crazies be crazy in a vacuum. Without an audience, they're not significant. They're just crazy. The media creates madness when it rewards bad behavior with attention. The Pastor is nothing more than a bratty 3-year-old in a toy store, and the press never should have turned down that aisle.

When I worked for CNN, the higher ups were cautious about putting blog content on the air without our vetting and revetting. The argument was - and rightly so - that CNN is a megaphone, and the power of that megaphone should not be underestimated. The network's ratings were higher back then and there were more true journalists in house than there are now, but that's no reason for the standard to slip so dramatically.

This isn't national news. It's a bad local story on a slow day, and even then, a good News Director would refuse to send a crew on the grounds that it's batsh*t insanity.

Where is the good to come of burning a holy book? Any holy book? Why encourage it?

I would have more respect for the network that didn't budge than the hordes that do. That's a station I'd watch, and if I were an advertiser, it's where I'd spend my money. I'd also make a point of publicizing why.

Of course the networks will argue they have to cover the burning (if it happens) because it's news, ignoring the fact that they made it news. They shouldn't have given this moron a microphone - let alone a megaphone - in the first place. Read More......

Ezra Klein recants support for raising Social Security retirement age

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald, I'm pointed to this, from Ezra Klein, writing Sunday in the Washington Post (my emphasis):

There are a lot of things Congress doesn't know right now. What to do about jobs, for instance. Who'll be running the House come January. How to balance the budget. But there is one thing that both parties increasingly seem to agree on: You should work longer.

Raising the Social Security retirement age has become as close to a consensus position as exists in American politics. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) supports it. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) has said that "we could and should consider a higher retirement age." And for a while, I agreed with them, too. It seemed obvious: People live longer today, and so they should work later into life. But as I've looked at the issue, I've decided that I was wrong. So let me be the skunk at the party. We should leave the retirement age alone. In fact, we should leave Social Security alone -- unless we're making it more, rather than less, generous. ...

That doesn't mean that Social Security shouldn't be on the table when we look at how to balance the budget. Everything should be on the table. And Social Security is our single largest program -- though Medicare is projected to overtake it in the next couple of years. But if you really put everything on the table -- the health-care system, the tax code, military spending, farm subsidies, etc. -- then raising the retirement age or otherwise cutting Social Security stops looking so good.

Ezra's turned into one of the good guys on Social Security, and I'm glad to see him on the team. He's a listened-to voice.

If you recall, it was Klein who stood up to Lawrence O'Donnell on that shameful Countdown segment where O'Donnell caught benefit-cutting fire and Klein tried to douse him out. In that segment, by the way, Klein came out for ... (gasp) raising taxes, specifically the FICA income ceiling. (Click through to watch the vid; Klein comes through like a champ.)

Raising the income ceiling is also my preferred solution. It now stands at $106,800. I think people who like that extra $4 million in their pay envelope should be taxed on it, just like the rest of us. But that's me; I'm a bit of an egalitarian.

Thanks, Ezra. We look for more from you.

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Maddow: Jan Brewer 'retaliates' against TV station investigating her ties to prisons-for-pay

We've been following the Jan Brewer–"jail the immigrants"–prison-for-pay nexus for a while, thanks to excellent coverage on The Rachel Maddow Show. The latest: Brewer has now canceled all media buys on the CBS station investigating her.

As Rachel says it, "This is about political retaliation against journalism." (A quibble; I think it's about blackmail.) The clip below speaks for itself, however. Well done, Rachel.



Think Progress has more information and links.

Here's the money chain as I see it:

1. CCA ("we win when you rot in stir") funnels money to its lobbyists,
   
2. who also work for Brewer and the Brewer campaign.
   
   
3. That money goes into the Brewer campaign and her other causes,
   
4. and right back out the door to TV and radio stations for campaign ads.
   
   
5. Suddenly these lobbyists are investigated by KPHO's Morgan Loew.
   
   
6. So Brewer blackmails the beast that owns KPHO, by withholding that big campaign-season media-buy cash. The message: "You lean on Loew and we'll turn the spigot back on."

In other words, Brewer opened money-to-money talks directly with KPHO's corporate owners, bypassing Loew. So far she has failed to achieve rapprochement, but the conversation isn't over. Bummer for Brewer that the opening move went public. (Thanks, Rachel.)

Keep an eye on the corporate owner of KPHO, Meredith National Media Group, however. They've been heroes so far, but they have shareholders and a stock price. Here's a list of the stations they own. And here's a list of the top 100 TV markets. Meredith is a lower-tier player with only two big-market stations — Atlanta (No. 8) and, yes, Phoenix (No. 12).

So watch this one; if the spotlight winks off, Meredith could still make a money move. (Keep the pressure on, Rachel. And did we say Thanks?)

Side note: Check Brewer saying "complete the mission" and "Brewer is a fighter" at 1:20 in the clip. Good lizard-brain material, but a B-movie delivery of her lines. With that many lizards to sell to, however, you don't need first-tier acting.

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Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

It's Labor Day weekend, so a couple of the shows are actually talking about workers and the economy. If you want to hear that discussion watch CBS and CNN. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is one of CNN's guests. He should remind everyone what the labor movement has achieved for the American worker (you know, little things like weekends, holiday, overtime, child labor laws...)

John McCain and his sidekick,Lindsey Graham, are back on the circuit today. McCain is on FOX and Graham is on NBC. Providing the Democratic perspective on those networks, you'll see David Plouffe on NBC and Tim Kaine on FOX.

And, Tony Blair, fresh off a pelting of eggs and shoes at a book-signing in Dublin, is the guest on ABC.

The full lineup can be found here. Read More......

Jimmy Breslin: 'The aimless babbles of this Beck'

Jimmy Breslin is a national treasure. Born in 1929 (or 1930), he's perhaps the best journalist I've read in my life. He's got Mike Royko cred and an ear like an angel.

(Sample: "The first funeral for Andrew Goodman was at night and it was a lot of work. To begin with they had to kill him.")

At age 79, his style has entered transcendence. He's just written in Harpers about "this Beck" and what he's connected to. You see, Breslin was in the kitchen when Bobby Kennedy was shot. He's one of the guys who smashed Sirhan Sirhan to the ground.

Here's Breslin on Beck and crew, just a taste of this marvelous piece:

[N]ow in New York they are turning an empty lot of the old World Trade Center and a mosque that isn’t built and probably never will be, into national fear. Omaha fights the mosque in Manhattan! Some foamer named Jones says he burns the Koran, and he actually is treated as news. All day on television yesterday you had the aimless babbles of this Beck, who looks like he eats Bibles.

They all come with the double barrels of a Low IQ and High Color Fear let loose on cable stations and e-mail, of which yesterday you read in disbelief.

Let me tell you what a life spent running after news like this has left me remembering....

And remember he does. This short piece is filled with well-told stories. Here's how it starts:

There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

Please, if only for the style, read this piece. ("Some foamer named Jones" — magic.)

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Lawrence O'Donnell fans fear over Social Security

I think Lawrence O'Donnell just messed up with his Social Security segment as guest host on Countdown on Monday. If so, wow. And just ahead of his big MSNBC debut too. What do you think?



Notice his eagerness and interruptions in both of these interviews (the one above and below) — evidence that he really wanted to get his own "insight" out; and the way he went after Ashley Carson, the woman Alan Simpson insulted with the "310 million tits" remark, was striking.

The Carson interview starts in the clip above at the 3:50 mark, if you want to jump to it. The real poking starts at 6:20, where he claims that "for you" the "money will not be there." She corrects him, of course, saying he's not "factually correct." But she shouldn't have to; the man made his political bones with Moynihan on the Senate Finance committee! The rest of the interview is similarly revealing.

The performance continued in the second interview on the subject, with Ezra Klein. I don't normally think of Ezra Klein as this far left-of-center, but he comes through here like a champ.



Is Lawrence O'Donnell to the right of Klein on Social Security? Surprised me.

I don't think I heard this wrong. Here's David Dayen on the same subject. His headline: "Lawrence O’Donnell is Dangerously Wrong About Social Security".

Lawrence O’Donnell drank the Kool-Aid on Social Security a long time ago, probably from back when he worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1990s. Last night he showed a consistent ability to swallow myths about the most successful social program in American history.

Dayen also agrees that the Klein interview was "even more absurd."

O'Donnell seems dangerously close to deficit fear-mongering against "entitlement spending." If so, that's how they'll kill Social Security, by spreading Dem cred on Conservative dreams. Take taxes off the table; dis-entitle the "entitled."

I'm especially concerned here, since as I mentioned, O'Donnell will soon have his own show, with Rachel as his lead in. We'll have to see, but this may not go well, at least on the Social Security front.

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Allison & Jamie of Citizen Radio on The Young Turks

For fans of our recent children's story "Allison and the Blogging Knife", here's an interview with Allison Kilkenny and Jamie Kilstein on The Young Turks. The commentary is interesting, the phrase "new media" comes up a lot, and the stories are a hoot.

It might even give you "new media" ideas of your own. Take a look.



Citizen Radio, their joint operation, could probably use a donation — if for no other reason, to keep that Blogging Knife sharp.

You could also, you know, watch.

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