For the Record

Good reporters opting for comparatively free expression

Being a columnist mean not having to launder your views.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

Times v Post

NYT responds after a week to WaPo's inane editorial "A Good Leak", with "A Bad Leak". I'm pleased to see that in the judgement of the Times:

 

Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

To declassify an intelligence document, officials have to decide whether disclosing the information would jeopardize the sources that provided it or the methods used to gather it.

This squares with the analysis earlier in this space, against the opinion of much of the left blogosphere, which bought into the Bush Gang frame.

See the Ruling Class Protect Itself!

Why are Fox News and MSNBC getting involved in odiously attacking the alleged victim in the Duke Lacrosse rape case? What business is it of their multi-billion dollar immortal selves? Evidently, someone made the decision to fire off the big guns to keep the laxers' lily-white asses out of prison. Those Duke laxers must be pretty fancy . . .

An intrepid investigative blogger googles around; turns out the dad of one of the alleged rapists is Bruce E. Thompson, Jr, a fancy fellow indeed. Thompson is "director of government relations" for Merril Lynch -- basically, chief lobbyist. His boss is Stanley O'Neal, a Bush Pioneer. By affiliation, Thompson's a member of the Federal City Council, a secretive business group to influence municipal policy in DC with close ties to the Washington Post; he's on the "Board of Visitors" of Duke's public policy school (a sort of advisory body of fancy people); and went to four parties a day at the 2004 Republican convention.

In a certain respect, it's nice to see this sort of thing: public exhibitions of the US class structure don't get much more blatant.

What's responsible for the failure of the press?

Digby has a characteristically readable post detailing the trajectory of their disillusionment with the press (including the so-called "liberal" papers -- hardy-har-har -- like the Washington Post and NYT) which ends with a seeming assessment of the problem and suggestion for how we can get the press back on track:

This is fifteen long years of watching the Times and the rest of the mainstream media buckle under the pressure of GOP accusations that they are biased, repeatedly take bogus GOP manufactured scandals and run with them like kids with a brand new kite, treat our elections like they are entertainment vehicles for bored reporters and generally kowtow to the Republican establishment as the path of least resistence. I waited for years for them to recognise what was happening and fight back. It didn't happen. And I began to see that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction. It's a tug of war. They were not strong enough to resist being dragged off to the right all by themselves. They needed some flamethrowers from our side pulling in the opposite direction to make it possible for them to avoid being pulled all the way over.

No doubt a desire not to have to listen to the screeching of irrational Republican harpies has played some role in the miserable failures of the fourth estate.  Similarly for the line one sometimes hears about how reporters have bent over for the Republicans in order to retain their precious access to the mouthpieces of power -- and don't forget the incredible lure of the Washington Cocktail Party.  But honestly, does anyone think these sorts of considerations explain the phenomena?  Get real, liberals.

The comment thread on Digby's post has lots of alternative suggestions, but my own views on the matter coincide with commenter anna's:

it is a corporate media. it does what is best for the corporatocracy. plain, simple, and really fucking scary.

There it is: the plain, simple, and really fucking scary truth.  THE  SAME CORPORATIONS THAT PROFIT FROM REPUBLICAN POLICIES OF ENDLESS WAR AND DECIMATION OF SOCIAL GOODS AND RIGHTS IN SERVICE OF CORPORATE PROFITS ARE THE SAME CORPORATIONS THAT OWN (EITHER DIRECTLY, OR INDIRECTLY VIA ADVERTISING REVENUE) THE MEDIA.

A second-grader could 2 and 2 together here.  I think it's really interesting that those who expend so much effort in observing the present tattered state of the press in the U.S. so reliably fail to observe the obvious causal and constitutive explanations here.

More generally, it seems to me as if progressive criticisms of the present tattered state of the nation are similarly blind as to the obvious mechanisms of Corporate Capitalism (again, there isn't any point in qualifying CorpCap as "unregulated" -- the obvious mechanisms of power and influence guarantee that any capitalist system will eventually become unregulated).

Failure to recognize the basic fact of the malignant tendencies of a state run by and for Corporate Capitalism means that the majority of progressives are just shouting into the wind.  Their suggestions for how to improve things uniformly fail to hit the target. But the specific failure of progressives to recognize and specifically address the fact that Corporate Media is not EVER going to be on board with the progressive agenda plays a key role in the ineffectiveness of general strategies for implementing this agenda. 

No amount of "reframing" the Democratic party as the party of "common sense", of the grassroots, of the really brave or really patriotic people, or whatever, is going to make one small bit of difference if Democrats (or other progressives) can't get the word out.  Nor is there any chance that our problems will be solved as soon as some Bill Clinton Redux rides into town to save the day, given that the Corporate Media sets the agenda for presentation of that person, and has come to full realization of just how much it can get away with, either directly by way of lies and distortion (as with Al Gore's non-existent "lies" about inventing the internet, and Howard Dean's isolated-mike-feed-in-a-roaring hall "scream"), or indirectly by publicizing Republican talking points and smear campaigns (against Kerry, Hillary, whoever).

You don't believe me?  Look at what has happened -- or rather, what hasn't happened -- in the last 5 years.

Progressives need to wake up to our real enemy.  It's not Republicans (except indirectly): it's Corporate Capitalism.

Ethics? What ethics?

Dana Milbank, ever ready to pull his punches against Republicans, opens his WaPo article on the failures of Congress to open ethics investigations as follows:

After a series of embarrassing disclosures, Congress is reconsidering its relatively lenient oversight of the Bush administration.

"Relatively lenient"?  How about "effectively absent":

Specifically, Democrats list 14 areas where the GOP majority has "failed to investigate" the administration, including the role of senior officials in the abuse of detainees; leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame; the role of Vice President Cheney's office in awarding contracts to Cheney's former employer, Halliburton; the White House's withholding from Congress the cost of a Medicare prescription drug plan; the administration's relationship with Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi; and the influence of corporate interests on energy policy, environmental regulation and tobacco policy.

Meanwhile, the House ethics committee has not opened a new case or launched an investigation in the past 12 months, despite outside investigations involving, among others, Cunningham and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

And how does all this compare to ethics investigations into the Clinton administration?

Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.

Yeah, that's "relatively lenient", all right.

The Social Security Privatization Scam

As per this WaPo article, some interesting numbers from a comprehensive study by Yale University finance economist Robert J. Shiller:

Nearly three-quarters of workers who opt for Social Security personal accounts under President Bush's "default" investment option are likely to earn less in benefits than those who stay with the traditional Social Security system, a prominent finance economist has concluded.

A new paper by Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller found that under Bush's default "life-cycle accounts," which shift assets from stocks to bonds over a worker's lifetime, nearly a third of workers would bring in less in benefits than if they remained in the traditional system. That analysis is based on historical rates of return in the United States. Using global rates of return, which Shiller says more closely track future conditions, life-cycle portfolios could be expected to fall short of the traditional system's returns 71 percent of the time.

More info here.

The definitive comparison of "Memo-gate" vs. WMD-gate

is here.  This says it all about what happens when the media is run by the same criminal corporate capitalists running government.

Trump disses Bush

Remember this funny clip? Well, turns out Trump really means it!

Trump also asks a very good question:

"Tell me, how is it possible that we can't find a guy who's 6-foot-6 and supposedly needs a dialysis machine? Can you explain that one to me?

Of course, as Jesus's General points out, you have to read the Australian or Indian papers to find out what Trump thinks.

Deb Riechmann of the AP: He said, he said, blah, blah, blah

UPDATE: Deb Riechmann's article was removed from the Post's website, and may now be found in the extended post.

You know, once you get tuned into the incredibly misleading (in this Orwellian age) pattern of "he said, she said" journalism, it becomes hard to read much of what is in the papers without becoming enraged. It's even worse when the "journalist" takes another step backward into the lie-infested morass of "he said, he said" journalism. Case in point is this shameful Deb Riechmann article in the Post. Here's how the article breaks down, paragraph by paragraph:

Title: Bush Issues Broad Defense of [Blah]
By Deb Riechmann, The Associated Press
Monday, July 12, 2004; 12:04 PM

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- President Bush defended [blah, blah]

[Blah, blah], Bush said.

["Blah, Blah"], Bush said, after inspecting a [blah].

[Factual statement.]

["Blah, Blah"], Bush said.

The president offered a broad new defense of [blah].

[Blah, blah], a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.

[Blah, blah], it said.

Without directly acknowledging [blah], Bush said [blah, blah].

[Blah, blah], he noted.

[Blah, blah], Bush said.

"Blah, blah".

Bush has used similar rhetoric [blah, blah, blah].

Bush's trip to Tennessee was designed to [blah, blah].

Bush was shown [blah, blah] and called them "blah, blah". It was the White House's second effort to [blah, blah]. Several months ago, the White House [blah, blah].

Bush said [blah, blah]. But it also [blah, blah], he said.

He said [blah, blah] and that the ["blah, blah"].

And Bush said [blah, blah].

Completely unquestioned go such factually corrupt of Bush's assertions as that "Saddam refused to open his country to inspections".

And they wonder why we call them stenographers.