Month: March 2009
Pres Presser: Chuck Todd Reveals Beltway Cluelessness about Americans’ Sacrifices
As Beltway insiders go, Chuck Todd has a well-deserved reputation for solid reporting, keen analysis and fairness. Because of this, NBC elevated him to the White House press corps, one of the media’s top posts, earlier this year.
“Why, given this new era of responsibility that you’re asking for, why haven’t you asked for something specific that the public should be sacrificing to participate in this economic recovery?”
– Chuck Todd
– Chuck Todd
Reporters who work in the White House are the ultimate media insiders. This can be troublesome because they are also the Fourth Estate’s first responders in our democracy’s defensive ring around the government.
They can become compromised, however, by being forced to choose between playing their watchdog role and protecting their access to power and information. Who can forget the White House press corps’ collective silence — even obsequiousness — in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when none of them dared challenge Bush on about his push to lead the country into what was clearly an unnecessary war.
Based on the inane question Chuck Todd asked at the White House news conference last night, it appears that his elevation to the media elite’s inner sanctum may already be corrupting his values, not to mention his perception of reality:
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. Some have compared this financial crisis to a war. And in times of war, past presidents have called for some form of sacrifice. Some of your programs, whether for Main Street or Wall Street, have actually cushioned the blow for those that were irresponsible during this — during this economic period of prosperity or supposed prosperity that you were talking about. Why, given this new era of responsiblity that you’re asking for, why haven’t you asked for something specific that the public should be sacrificing to participate in this economic recovery?
As the Daily Beast put it, “Chuck Todd wants to know what more Obama thinks American public should be sacrificing for the sake of the economy. Because losing jobs, homes and heath insurance apparently aren’t enough.”
Schwarzenegger Tamps Down Talk of Senate Race: ‘I’m Not Running for Anything’
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told the Los Angeles Times today that he is “not running for anything,” meaning he won’t run for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat, next year.
Schwarzenegger has a nearly insurmountable problem in the state: He has no base among California voters.
The statement came just a few weeks after he fueled speculation — and incited a few chuckles — in an offhand remark that seemed to leave the door open for a run against Boxer:
“I have my hands full with all the stuff I’m doing now,” he said, referring to his campaign to pass a package of budget-related propositions that are on a special-election May 19 ballot. “I’m concentrating on that and not what I’m going to do next,” he said.
“You know,” he added, as he signed autographs, “I’m not a politician. I’m a public servant.”
With his polling down in the low 30s for months now, as they were in 2005, some in the state have speculated that what the governor meant to say was, “I am not a good politician.”
The only people pushing Schwarzenegger to run are national Republicans in Washington who like his 100 percent name recognition and access to cash. What they don’t seem to grasp is that Schwarzenegger has a nearly insurmountable problem in the state: He has no base among California voters.
The state’s hard core GOP distrusted and disliked Schwarzenegger because of his liberal ways before he broke faith with them and proposed raising taxes as part of his plan to eliminate the state’s $42 billion deficit. In the Times interview today, the governor cited his broken pledge as a central reason he will not run.
Is the Anti-Gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) a Secret Mormon Front Group?
Leaked documents detailing the formation of an anti-gay front group by the Mormon Church in Hawaii over a decade ago have prompted a call for an official investigation into the church’s relationship with the National Organization for Marriage, a group formed in 2007 to promote Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment, in California last year.
“The [anti-gay campaign] ideas are introduced but the Church is not visible.”
– Leaked LDS memo
– Leaked LDS memo
The call for an inquiry was made to the California Fair Political Practices Commission by Californians Against Hate in an amendment to a complaint filed by the Los Angeles-based gay-marriage advocacy group in November. In the original filing, Californians Against Hate alleged that the Mormon Church had failed to fully disclose its contributions to Prop 8. Two months after the filing, the church reported previously undisclosed services donated to the Prop 8 campaign valued at around $190,000. The fact the church filed the disclosure in a classic late Friday news dump on Super Bowl weekend added to its critics’ suspicions that it was being evasive.
A few days after the disclosure, the church issued a non-denial in which it acknowledged reporting the donations but noted that its $189,903.58 contribution to protectmarriage.com was “less than one half of one percent of the total funds (approximately $40 million) raised for the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign.” (About half the $40 million was donated by Mormons at the behest of the church leadership.)
On the heels of this apparent double-dealing comes the newly leaked documents that describe how the church secretly set up a front group similar to the National Organization for Marriage in Hawaii in the mid-1990s:
Which Polls to Ignore From Now On
We all lived on polls before the presidential election, and some of us live on them the rest of the time too. But how accurate were the endless projections we hung on?
A Fordham University professor, Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., took a poll of the pollsters and ranked them by accuracy. Pew Research and Rasmussen, the right-leaning group, tied for number one, producing polls “perfectly in agreement with the actual election result.” Rasmussen uses a daily poll which it rolls into a three-day average. While more precise in the long run, this method also offered a partial time delay after pivotal events like the presidential and vice presidential debates.
George Washington University, Diageo/Hotline, and the American Research Group all overestimated McCain’s support, placing them in fourth place and tied for fifth, respectively.
The surprising last place finishers were such esteemed news organizations as Reuters/C-Span/Zogby, CBS/Time, and Newsweek. Incredibly, FOX was right in the middle. The full list:
- 1. Rasmussen (11/1-3)
- 1. Pew (10/29-11/1)
- 2. YouGov/Polimetrix (10/18-11/1)
- 3. Harris Interactive (10/20-27)
- 4. GWU (Lake/Tarrance) (11/2-3)
- 5. Diageo/Hotline (10/31-11/2)
- 5. ARG (10/25-27)
- 6. CNN (10/30-11/1)
- 6. Ipsos/McClatchy (10/30-11/1)
- 7. DailyKos.com (D)/Research 2000 (11/1-3)
- 8. AP/Yahoo/KN (10/17-27)
- 9. Democracy Corps (D) (10/30-11/2)
- 10. FOX (11/1-2)
- 11. Economist/YouGov (10/25-27)
- 12. IBD/TIPP (11/1-3)
- 13. NBC/WSJ (11/1-2)
- 14. ABC/Post (10/30-11/2)
- 15. Marist College (11/3)
- 16. CBS (10/31-11/2)
- 17. Gallup (10/31-11/2)
- 18. Reuters/ C-SPAN/ Zogby (10/31-11/3)
- 19. CBS/Times (10/25-29)
- 20. Newsweek (10/22-23)
Obama: Cheney Cabal Believes U.S. Legal System ‘Not Up to the Task’ of Dealing with Terrorism
From Pres. Obama’s interview on “60 Minutes” last Sunday:
“The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists.”
– Pres. Obama
– Pres. Obama
STEVE KROFT: A week ago Vice President Cheney said essentially that your willingness to shut down Guantanamo and to change the way prisoners are treated and interrogator — interrogated — was making America weaker and more vulnerable to another attack. And that — the interrogation techniques that were used at Guantanamo were essential in preventing another attack against the United States.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can’t reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don’t torture, with our national security interests. I think he’s drawing the wrong lesson from history.
The facts don’t bear him out. I think he is — that attitude, that philosophy has done incredible damage — to our image and position in the world. I mean, the fact of the matter is after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many — how many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against U.S. interests all around the world.
STEVE KROFT:
Some of it being organized by a few people who were released from Guantanamo.
PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Well there is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we’ve got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up. The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that somehow the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists.
I fundamentally disagree with that. Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.
STEVE KROFT:
What do you do with those people?
PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Well, I think we’re going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they not released and do us harm. But– do so in a way that is consistent with both our traditions, sense of due process, international law. But this is — this is the legacy that’s been left behind. And, you know, I’m surprised that the Vice President is eager to defend a legacy that was unsustainable let’s assume that we didn’t change these practices. How — how long are we going to go? Are we going to just keep on going until, you know, the entire Muslim world and Arab world despises us? Do we think that’s really going to make us safer? I — I don’t know a lot of thoughtful thinkers, liberal or conservative, who think that that was the right approach.
Drought in America: Yes It’s That Bad
If like me you have a yard, and if like mine it crunches underfoot, then this site can help you decide whether it’s your imagination or you really should be sniffing the wind for wildfires.
Drought.gov offers a fascinating array of maps that tell you more than you want to know about the status and outlook for your area, at least more than you want to know if your area is like mine. And judging by most of the maps, it is.
For example, there’s a “Seasonal Drought Outlook” map that shows drought conditions forecast to persist or intensify in most of Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, and California between now and June. There are a handful of areas that will improve, including Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, which only demonstrates that the word, “improve” is relative. That area that has been so dry for so long the people wouldn’t remember what to do if lawn watering and burn bans were lifted.
There’s even a drought photo gallery, where you can see shots of dry lake beds, low water levels, and plants that look like the ones in my yard.
Drought.gov shows you how endlessly fascinating an absolutely dreadful and dismal subject can be.
Return of the Blame Game: GOP Decried It During Katrina, Now Fingerpointing Over Bonus Caps Is All They’ve Got
The Republicans’ campaign to gin up outrage over AIG bonuses has at least two purposes, neither of which has anything to do with bonus caps. Their over-arching motive is to damage the Democrats at any cost. In the short term, however, Republicans are agitating about the bonuses to shift public attention from the fact that it was their “trickle up,” anti-regulatory ideology that caused the U.S. economy to crash.
Republicans are masters at message discipline — a dark art liberals are too independent-minded (and disorganized) to master.
The GOP’s blame-shifting campaign now has striking similarities to the tactics they deployed — quite successfully — to silence calls for investigations and even impeachment of George Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
In September 2005, as the floodwaters in the streets of New Orleans receded and calls for investigations into the Bush administration’s failed response to the disaster rose, these same Republicans successfully staved off political retribution by trivializing Democrats’ calls for accountability as “playing the blame game.”
The tactic was hatched in the White House political office, then under the direction of Karl Rove. It was first floated by former Pres. George H. W. Bush on CNN’s Larry King on the first Monday night after the storm, on Sept. 5, 2005. “The media has a fascination with the blame game,” Poppy told King, “and instead of looking for what can we do to help now there’s a lot of why didn’t we do something different?”
The next day, it was power of repetition to flog the “blame game” theme:
McClellan told reporters six times that their questions about how the government failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amounted to a “blame game.” Twice he used the twisted neologism “blame gaming,” as in: “The time for bickering and blame-gaming is later.”
For the next three or four news cycles, Bush’s foot soldiers in Congress crowded the airways repeating the magic words “blame game” as often as possible. The messaging quickly found permeated the media. A New York Times headline read, “After Failures, Government Officials Play Blame Game.”
In a column on Sept. 9, the late great Molly Ivins connected the dots between the Republicans’ systematic destruction of FEMA, the federal response agency, and the cascading disaster after FEMA failed to respond in New Orleans after Katrina swept through:
House Dittohead Caucus Votes Overwhelmingly Against Taxing AIG Bonuses
The Dittohead Caucus in the U.S. House — which includes every GOP representative — followed their dictates of their leader, Republican Party boss Rush Limbaugh, and voted overwhelmingly against a bill that would impose a heavy tax on bonuses received by executives at financial institutions that are on the dole from U.S. taxpayers.
Earlier this week, the GOP boss asserted his support for the $400 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars that AIG — in which taxpayers now have an 80 percent ownership — planned to give as “retention” bonuses to the same traders whose risky schemes contributed to the collapse of the world economy:
LIMBAUGH: “Let me tell you something, folks. I am all for the AIG bailouts, and I am all for the AIG bonuses. Well, I’m not for the bailouts, well, in a way I’m for the bailout because I’m for the bonuses.”
In lockstep with Limbaugh, 113 out of the 198 Republicans in the House voted against taxing the bonuses of the financial industry fatcats. Six out of 235 Democrats also voted against the tax.
The measure passed 328-93, and is now moving to the Senate.
The PSA That Wasn’t: Bill McCollum Runs for Something
A lot of questions are being raised about this “public service announcement” (PSA) from Florida’s Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum.
For one thing, why did he skirt Florida’s procurement laws to hire his own 2006 campaign media consultant to produce the PSA and buy the media? The tab, so far, is $1.4 million.
McCollum is the perpetual candidate, almost always out-gunned. He hitched his star to the Bill Clinton blow job scandal and expected to see it rise like…well, never mind
The other thing is, what’s the ad, er, PSA, really selling? According to McCollum’s office, the spot publicizes a web site where parents can get help with the questionably “rampant” problem of online sexual predators. McCollum’s name hangs on the screen in huge letters at the start of the piece while the web site URL is grayed out at the bottom of the screen and typed in fleetingly at the end.
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum appears in nearly every frame…
McCollum said he hired his former campaign consultant, Chris Mottola, because the state’s competitive bidding process was ”very slow, very complicated.” He cited an exemption in state law that allows him to use a no-bid contract for “artistic services.”
The ad shows McCollum speaking directly to the camera…
”The development of the ad is artistic. It’s how you present it,” McCollum said. “You got 30 seconds to be able to tell somebody something.”
But what’s he telling them?
