July 2, 2006 - Pensito

Arriana Huffington and others have been crying foul for the last year or so about the ideological imbalance on the “Meet the Press” roundtable on most Sundays. Today’s show was particularly egregious. Can you find a liberal in this group of panelists:

Guest moderator Andrea Mitchell
Reagan era drug czar and gambleholic Bill Bennett
Wall St. Journal reporter John Harwood
Washington Post reporter Dana Priest
New York Times columnist William Safire, who was a speech writer for Richard Nixon

Even if Priest and Harwood are flaming lefties in real life, they are on the NBC set as reporters and therefore prohibited by the rules of journalism from discussing their personal political views.

The main subject was the rightwing’s new assault on the freedom of the press. Bill Bennett hounded Dana Priest about her reporting on the CIA’s off-shoring its torturing of terror suspects.

Priest is no patsy, however, and she got off a good one at Bennett:

MS. MITCHELL: Dana, let me point out that The Washington Post, your newspaper, was behind the others but also did publish this story. And a story you wrote last year disclosing the secret CIA prisons won the Pulitzer Prize, but it also led to William Bennett, sitting here, saying that three reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize—you for that story and Jim Risen and others for another story—were, “not worthy of an award but rather worthy of jail.” Dana, how do you plead?

MS. PRIEST: Well, it’s not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can’t publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.

Now why isn’t it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn’t it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight, and you can’t do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena.

Bush’s approval rating slipped to 35 percent in a TIME poll taken this week, down from 37 percent in March.

This is bad:

A spate of good news at home and abroad has so far failed to boost how Americans feel about President Bush’s job performance. Bush’s approval rating slipped to 35 percent in a TIME poll taken this week, down from 37 percent in March (and 53 percent in early 2005).

And it gets worse:

Only 33 percent of Americans in the survey said they approved of Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq, vs. 35 percent in March, and 47 percent in March 2005. His management of the U.S. economy lost supporters, too, as 36 percent approved, compared with 39 percent three months earlier.

Finally, after all the “cut and run” skullduggery Karl & Co. cooked up in the Congress recently, this:

Bush’s handling of the war on terror saw a slight gain in support, from 44 percent to 45 percent.

Day: July 2, 2006

MSM Shows Signs of Life, Starts to Fight Back

Poll: Bush Approval Slips

Poetic Justice

Verbatim

“One woman at a rally in New Jersey told me last week that she was ‘nauseously optimistic.’ That may capture a lot of people’s last-minute jitters.”

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), quoted by Axios, on what Democrats feel ahead of the midterm elections.

“I think Congress made a mistake not protesting turning the Rose Garden into what looks like the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom.”

— Former President Bill Clinton, quoted by The Wrap.

“Boy, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. It feels like a real desperation play to me, because it has got zero basis in the law.”

— Republican election law expert Ben Ginsberg, quoted by Politico, on the Trump administration’s effort to invalidate Alaska’s election results.

Numerati

3,824

$1.4 billion

-35 points

31%

63% to 38%

KFF Poll: “With the 2026 midterm campaigns in full swing and early voting about to begin, there is a wide enthusiasm gap between partisan voters, with Democratic voters 25 percentage points more likely than Republican voters to say they are ‘more motivated’ than usual to vote (63% vs. 38%).”