The Interview With Fred Hiatt

I guess the President made more news last night in this interview with Fred Hiatt than at his press conference. Reporters should have been briefed on it.

First, the President basically confirmed that expansion of MedPAC, to have an independent body of experts determine reimbursement rates and reforms to Medicare, would be a component of the House and Senate bills. I was initially skeptical of this idea, but I think the Speaker's addition of Congressional input on appointees makes it a nice compromise, and taking the complicated business of delivery system reform away from parochial interest makes sense as well.

At this point, I am confident that both the House and the Senate bills will contain what we've been calling MedPAC on steroids, the idea that you continually present new ideas to change incentives, change the delivery system, understanding that because this is such a complex system we're not always going to get it exactly right the first time, and that there have to be a series of modifications over the course of a series of years, and we have to take that out of politics and make sure that an independent board of medical experts and health economists are providing packages that are continually improving the system. So I think there's general consensus that that is one of two very powerful levers to bend the cost curve.

Second, the President endorses some modified version of the employer deduction, along with John Kerry's idea of taxing insurance companies' highest-cost benefit plans as a way to get at the same pot of cash:

Obama: Now, the second idea, which is the one that got more attention, even though Elmendorf, I think, has emphasized the benefits of a MedPAC board, as well, was the elimination of the tax exclusion [on employer-provided health insurance]. And I've been very clear on my position that I think to add additional costs to families right now when they're already seeing their premiums doubled is not the kind of health reform that I'd like to see, but I believe that there may be ways of getting at the same principle.

For example, you could conceivably set up an index of some sort that makes sure that health care inflation -- or to make sure that the exclusion only accommodates a certain amount of health care inflation -- as opposed to 8 percent or 9 percent, or what have you -- without burdening current plans, but over time assuming -- if we're assuming that health care inflation is going to continue to be a problem, that you could get at the problem in that way.

Hiatt: A kind of cap, but one that doesn't hurt anybody --

Obama: Currently.

Hiatt: -- at the current level?

Obama: Exactly. You're also seeing, I think, some interesting discussions in the Senate Finance Committee about a variation that goes after the insurance companies, as opposed to directly taxing the benefits.

Because this is Fred Hiatt he was talking to, the conversation was consumed with long-term costs and entitlements. Hiatt is practically the king of the fiscal scolds. The President still wants universal access and lower costs for individuals, which is separate from lower budget costs. But I agree that you can do both at the same time, and that now is a great time to do that. As Obama said in this interview, "I think it's important for us to make sure that 46 million people who don't have health insurance get it. And I think it's important for us to bend the cost curve, separate and apart from coverage issues, just because the system we have right now is unsustainable and hugely inefficient and uncompetitive."

And both go hand in hand. Removing the hidden tax of the uninsured visiting ERs will lower costs, and the mechanism is expanding access. Offering a public plan will expand access, and by forcing competition, in the process lower costs. There's a lot in health care reform that can be symbiotic, just as there's a lot that works at cross-purposes.

On long-term budget issues, I think it's important to recognize this:

Obama: We have a structural gap that has to be closed.

Hiatt: So can I ask you how you think about the timing and politics of closing that structural gap?

Obama: What I think has to happen is if we can show that we have a disciplined health care reform package that is serious about cost savings and is deficit-neutral, you combine that with the pay-go rules that we have been promoting and I believe that we can get through Congress, and you are imposing some discipline on the appropriations process -- and I thought that the F-22 victory yesterday was a good example of us starting to change habits in Washington -- then I think we're in a position to be able to, either at the end of this year or early next year, start laying out a broader picture about how we are going to handle entitlements in a serious way.

It may start with Social Security because that's, frankly, the easier one. And I think that it's possible to also look at tax reform and think about are there ways that we can maybe even lower marginal rates but eliminate all the loopholes and have that a net revenue generator. I think there are going to be a bunch of things that we can take a look at, but I think health care reform combined with pay-go, combined with how we deal with appropriations bills over the next six months will help lay the foundation for us to be able to make some of these broader structural changes.

The challenge I've got, Fred, is that obviously -- our biggest problem right now in terms of short-term deficit is the recession. And nobody -- no economist I've talked to thinks that it would be wise for us to start early, start now, in reducing government outlays, when states are already cutting back drastically, and you'd have a hugely destimulative effect on the economy. But we have to begin to prepare on the midterm and the long term. And that's why I think health care reform is so important.

The House actually passed paygo legislation yesterday. And I get from this that Obama is open to reducing the defense budget over time - he checked himself at one point, saying that non-defense discretionary spending cannot be lowered to bring us in line on the budget. But people might go nuts about his fleeting mention of Social Security. The only way Social Security changes are "easy" is through raising the cap. Anything else will be met with howls of disapproval from Obama's own base. And they won't pass Congress. I think the tax reform idea in the main, lowering rates but broadening the capture by getting rid of loopholes, is a good one as well.

There can be a lot of minefields in talking to Fred Hiatt, but I think the President did well. He held firm against deficit reduction at a time of near-Depression, and he forced Hiatt to live up to his rhetoric and recognize that the main reason our long-term budget outlook is bleak right now is due almost entirely to health care.

Sarah Barra-journalist

Somebody at the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post and slapped Sarah Palin's name on it. We learn that God, not Nikolaus August Otto or Karl Benz, invented the internal combustion engine:

We must move in a new direction. We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil. Just as important, we have more desire and ability to protect the environment than any foreign nation from which we purchase energy today.

With that, we get a rehash of Drill Baby Drill over "cap and tax." You've heard it all before, and so has the public. And they voted last November.

But Fred Hiatt just had to have his Golden Girl splashed across his op-ed page. Well, at least we know now what newspapers Palin reads.

This amused me, by the way:

In late March, a senior official from the Republican Governors Association headed for Alaska on a secret mission. Sarah Palin was beset by such political and personal turmoil that some powerful supporters determined an intervention was needed to pull her governorship, and her national future, back from the brink.

The official, the association’s executive director, Nick Ayers, arrived with a memorandum containing firm counsel, according to several people who know its details: Make a long-term schedule and stick to it, have staff members set aside ample and inviolable family time to replenish your spirits, and build a coherent home-state agenda that creates jobs and ensures re-election.

Like so much of the advice sent Ms. Palin’s way by influential supporters, it appeared to be happily received and then largely discarded, barely slowing what was, in retrospect, an inexorable march toward the resignation she announced 10 days ago.

The Revolt At The Washington Post

This slow but growing rollout of frustration from inside the Washington Post at George Will's pig-ignorance on climate change has become very compelling to watch. I still think the problem resides with Editorial Board chief Fred Hiatt for printing not only the false op-ed, but the continued lies and distortions from Will, in the first place. He is not entitled by virtue of his editorial position to lie. The editors fail in their responsibility to inform the public in that scenario. And Eugene Robinson basically called them on it.

ROBINSON: What George Will did was cherry-pick a sentence in a report, you know, be very persnickety in the way he parsed his sentences, and end up making it sound as if the report had said the exact opposite of what it actually said. He was persnickety enough that his editors, who also happen to be my editors, felt he didn’t quite cross the line. I thought he did. And the ombudsman agreed with me, actually, and wrote about it in last Sunday’s paper.

In a related note, Tom Toles rocks.

The blame does indeed lie with the editors who allowed the lies to appear in print. And it taints not just the editorial page but the entire newspaper. And clearly the reporters there know that, which is why they're speaking out. Ultimately, the editors hold the cards, they can stop providing a platform for misinformation, and the passive-aggressive way they're going about "addressing" the issue speaks very low of them.

Will Drags Down Journalism With Him

This week we have seen perhaps a tipping point in the decline of American newspapers. Hearst announced they may sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle, a month after they said the same about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The two newspapers in Philadelphia, the Inquirer and the Daily News, filed for bankruptcy, as did the Journal Register Company, which owns 20 papers in the Northeast. And the Rocky Mountain News in Denver ran its last edition yesterday.

As much as we don't want to admit it, some of this is inevitable. The medium of delivered print newspapers in an environment where anyone can hop online and read virtually any article around the nation or the world is going to be threatened. That advertising revenue is falling because of the economic meltdown is just accelerating this decline. While newspaper websites generally do quite well, they haven't been able to monetize the content to a degree that's economically feasible. And the overall threat here is the death of news reporting, not the physical newspapers themselves. At least that's the view of Gary Kamiya.

If newspapers die, so does reporting. That's because the majority of reporting originates at newspapers. Online journalism is essentially parasitic. Like most TV news, it derives or follows up on stories that first appeared in print. Former Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll has estimated that 80 percent of all online news originates in print. As a longtime editor of an online journal who has taken part in hundreds of editorial meetings in which story ideas are generated from pieces that appeared in print, that figure strikes me as low.

There's no reason to believe this is going to change. Currently there is no business model that makes online reporting financially viable. From a business perspective, reporting is a loser. There are good financial reasons why the biggest content-driven Web business success story of the last few years, the Huffington Post, does very little original reporting. Reported pieces take a lot of time, cost a lot of money, require specialized skills and don't usually generate as much traffic as an Op-Ed screed, preferably by a celebrity. It takes a facile writer an hour to write an 800-word rant. Very seldom can the best daily reporters and editors produce copy that fast.

But the story is more complicated than that. At the same time that newspapers are dying, blogging and "unofficial" types of journalism continue to expand, grow more sophisticated and take over some (but not all) of the reportorial functions once performed by newspapers. New technologies provide an infinitely more robust feed of raw data to the public, along with the accompanying range of filtering, interpreting and commenting mechanisms that the Internet excels in generating.

As these developments expand, our knowledge of the world will become much less broad. Document-based reporting and academic-style research will increasingly replace face-to-face reporting. And the ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness will increasingly crumble, to be replaced by more tendentious and opinionated reports.

Paul Starr makes a similar argument in The New Republic, saying that the loss of newspapers will most impact local news coverage and lead to a rise in local corruption.

Now, I agree with this to an extent. The breadth of material presented in a newspaper is not entirely likely to be replicated online, at least not at any one place. More things would happen in the shadows in a post-newspaper world. And I hope for that not to happen. At the same time, there's a lot of redundancy in newspapers. Dozens if not hundreds of different writers across the country cover the exact same Obama address to Congress that I watched with my eyes as well, and can just as easily form an opinion on. There is an argument that local papers should focus on local reporting, and get their national news from national sources, which would probably still offer enough of a variety.

This breaks down when the papers that are able to weather the decline, the ones with the highest reputation and the broadest base of reporters, who could funnel news across the country and present themselves as an established brand, soil themselves with demonstrably mendacious columnists that call into question the editorial aptitude of the whole project.

Clearly, the main cause of the crisis is structural/technological shifts in the media and economic landscape. But a small number of news organizations are actually well-positioned, in principle, to benefit over the long run from these changes. Papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have strong brands and the possibility of becoming national news organizations that partially fill the space left empty by the receding metro dailies in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and elsewhere. But The Washington Post, by standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is is, is pissing that brand away. Rather than complaining to me, people who work at, or care about, The Washington Post need to complain to Fred Hiatt and ensure that something gets done.

Meanwhile, one of the Post’s main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is The New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will’s sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore’s sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in The New York Times. Hm.

And since this was written, George Will responded to that falsely equivalent NYT article with a pissy rant standing by the substance of his global warming denialist column of the week prior. In doing so he defends the substance of a data point he included about sea ice levels in Antarctica, despite the climate research center where Will got the data has publicly disavowed it. And then, Will's editor Fred Hiatt defends his writer in some of the weirdest ways possible.

Hiatt insists Will's entitled to his opinion about the global warming facts because those facts are just too complicated--too unknowable--and who the hell are readers to claim otherwise? Hiatt told CJR:

"If you want to start telling me that columnists can’t make inferences which you disagree with—and, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subject—I think that’s really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him."

That sound you hear is Hiatt digging the Post an even deeper and more embarrassing hole.

I have two favorite parts. The first was Hiatt's insistence that Will has every right to draw inference--to make claims of fact in his column--based on data that most scientists reject. Good Lord, what is Will not allowed to do in a Post column? And does the Op-Ed page maintain any guidelines?

And second, I chuckled when Hiatt insisted that if people disagree with Will's published falsehoods, they shouldn't try to pressure the paper to publish corrections, they should, y'know, "debate him." Right, because Will and Post editors have been so open and willing to address--to debate--the controversy.

Now, to his credit, the Post's ombusdman will write tomorrow that Will was wrong on the science, and that the paper should have addressed this more quickly. But clearly there is a problem with accountability at the Post when it comes to their star columnists.

(By the way, good for John Kerry for trying to get some measure of accountability by himself.)

But this is a serious concern. With the viability of the newspaper model looking less clear, we will necessarily shrink the amount of reporters covering both local and national issues. Online sources cannot fill the gap without substantial resources (endowments, anyone?). Therefore we vest more power in the fourth estate in the hands of a number of established brands. And yet those brands are gradually proving themselves unworthy of the power. It shouldn't look unfavorably on the entire profession, and the many fine reporters working under these brands, but it inevitably does.

It would be nice to say that, after being trashed and abused by major media for so long, that we don't need journalism. But we clearly do. And when they damage their reputations, it actually affects all of us.

Triumph Of The Will

George Will resurrected a zombie lie yesterday. In fact, he literally resurrected it - Brad Johnson compared and contrasted his misinformation yesterday with a column from April 2006.

“Let Cooler Heads Prevail,” 4/2/2006

While worrying about Montana’s receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation.” Science Digest (February 1973) reported that “the world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor (”Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect,” Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers “have begun to advance,” “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool.” Newsweek agreed (”The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975) that meteorologists “are almost unanimous” that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said “may mark the return to another ice age.” The Times (May 21, 1975) also said “a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable” now that it is “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950.”

“Dark Green Doomsayers,” 2/15/2009

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975). Armadillos were fleeing south from Nebraska, heat-seeking snails were retreating from Central European forests, the North Atlantic was “cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool,” glaciers had “begun to advance” and “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter” (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 27, 1974).

He shuffled around the quotes a bit, but they are basically the same ones. Which are, of course, wrong. And it's amusing how they're wrong, because Will values the fact that Newsweek and other pop-science publications wrote mass-market articles about global cooling over, you know, science, and the breadth of scientific opinion at the time. In other words, Will believes that anything in a Villager text reflects the collected wisdom of the entire world. The Village community presumes to speak for the scientific community.

But that's not all that Will was wrong about. He skimmed data about Arctic sea ice off a 45 day-old blog post from Jim Inhofe's climate denialist shop, which was quickly slapped down by, well, a scientist. And he wrote "[A]ccording to the World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade," which is practically the opposite of the truth.

Will could have done the world a favor by reading his own paper's news coverage and maybe canceling his column for the day.

The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

True, that was the result of a scientific study and not what old Newsweeks were printing to sell copies through counter-intuition 30 years ago. But you know, it's a perspective.

Predictably yet somewhat hilariously, Will and his editor Fred Hiatt are ducking accountability on this tripe.

Mum's the word for George Will and the Washington Post when it comes to explaining how misinformation on global warming got into Will's most recent column.

Yesterday morning we called Will to ask him about the misrepresentations in his Sunday column. We also called Fred Hiatt, the editor of the paper's editorial page, to ask about the editing process that the Post's editorial page employs. Neither chose to answer our questions [...]

Will's assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he'd try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday's post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.

But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will's column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.

I get the impression that opinion columns in Big Media papers aren't rigorously fact-checked, with the excuse being that they are, well, "opinion." In practice, this becomes a license for Villagers to use the credibility they've assumed for themselves to lie. And if they make a mistake that actually filters through the roadblocks and reaches their editors, they face no consequence. In fact, they frequently fail upward. So they reprint the same nonsense the next week or the next month or the next year. And they are feted at cocktail parties through the next millennium.

Somebody convene a blogger ethics panel.

The Last Bit Of Bile

This attempt to trump up an association between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi, as if it's a problem for a politician to know a world-renown scholar, is really sickening. So much so, in fact, that even the Washington Post editorial board disapproves.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear [...]

Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was "deeply flawed" but conceded there were also "flaws in the alternatives." Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging -- as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he "offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

It's fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable -- especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous, as Mr. McCain surely knows.

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over." That's good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign's increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

In other words, Khalidi actually listens to and comprehends multiple sides of a debate, which in conservative politics is strictly verboten. This is nothing more than slander toward a man who is being singled out for little more than, yes, the color of his skin. It's shameful and reminiscent of some of the worst eras of American politics. And it's sadly typical in this campaign for John McCain, who as Ezra Klein notes is "a leader who decided to stop leading."

Imagine, then, what would have happened if Barack Obama had ended up running against the senator who brought the first cap-and-trade bill before the Congress, passed one of the most important campaign finance reform bills in history, voted against Bush's tax cuts, championed the Patient's Bill of Rights, fought for comprehensive immigration reform, and was the Senate's most effective opponent of torture. Catastrophe, right?

Luckily, Obama didn't run against that guy. John McCain, who did all that, spent this election refusing to mention any of his accomplishments. He argued the virtues of experience without pointing to its fruits. He bragged of being a maverick without explaining how his independence had resulted in tangible achievements. The reality of his record is that he was an ineffective Senator until the aftermath of the 2000 election, when his anger with the Republican Party led him to construct odd-bedfellows coalitions with Democrats and his national celebrity -- yes, celebrity -- helped him pass the legislation, or at least get press for breaking with his party. The resulting achievements proved deeply unpopular with the conservative base. So when he ran as the Republican nominee, he clammed up about global warming and flip-flopped on immigration. He stopped talking about campaign finance reform and started supporting tax cuts. His resulting criticisms of Obama fell flat: Unable to detail his own record, he couldn't connect with his critique of Obama's history. Unable to explain why it was good to be a maverick, he came off like a pro-wrestler trying to promote his new nickname.

And so he resorted to baseless smears and insults, without giving one voter a compelling reason to choose him rather than reject his opponent. And at a time of such tremendous challenges, small-ball like that falls flat.

I also agree with Ezra that you should maybe buy Khalidi's book and decide for yourself what you think of his scholarship.

In Their Own Words

It might be worth telling every media figure who listens to Sarah Palin tonight that she'll be reading a speech written for somebody else. It's typical for a politician to read somebody else's words, but not somebody else's speech:

There was a flutter of attention when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told a group of Post reporters and editors yesterday that his team was having to rework the vice presidential acceptance speech because the original draft, prepared before Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen, was too "masculine." While we all wondered to ourselves what might make a speech masculine or feminine, no one batted an eye at the underlying revelation: that the campaign was writing the nominee's speech before knowing who the nominee would be [...]

So when you watch Sarah Palin tonight, expect to learn something about how well she handles a Teleprompter. Expect to learn something about the McCain campaign's assessment of its political standing with women, or working families, or social conservatives. Whether you're learning what Sarah Palin really thinks or feels is anybody's guess.

Fercryinoutloud, that's from FRED HIATT. If he's figured this one out, I hope the context will stretch to the rest of the media. Tonight is a kabuki theater show and a layup for Mrs. Palin. It will mean nothing.

Maybe Team McCain had to start writing the speech because they didn't even vet Palin until the day before they picked her, which would explain the utter chaos that has followed the pick.

Is it weird for me to say that this doesn't sound like parody, considering?

The People Want To Leave

I know it's a novel concept to listen to the mere plebes about Iraq, but they are speaking with essentially one voice.

Here's one result from the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that will be released tonight at 6:30 pm ET on Nightly News and MSNBC.com... With the news that Iraq's prime minister wants the US to set a timetable for withdrawal, 60% of registered voters believe it's a good idea for the US to set such a timetable, while 30% say it's a bad idea.

When the people in America want us to leave, and the people in Iraq want us to leave, and the Iraqi government wants us to leave.... you get the idea.

Fred Hiatt asking us to stay so we can rape the country of its oil is not a good enough reason. And just because St. David Petraeus doesn't want a timetable doesn't mean his commanding officer, the President, should allow him that. The days of passing off comprehensive military decision-making to local commanders who have no sense of the big picture is over.

Turning American Media Into Pravda

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II report, describing in great detail the lies and deceptions made by the Bush White House in the run-up to the war - is perhaps most notable for what it DIDN'T cover, like the activities of the White House Iraq Group, assembled precisely to sell the war to the public, or the effort to bully intelligence agencies into offering misleading or incomplete data that sided with the White House's views. The report is useful but really a simple analysis that measures the Administration's public statements against known facts, which any blogger with "the Google" could have done.

The Administration has responded to these charges by saying that we're all just upset because it was so successful. But what's interesting is how the summary of White House lies has rankled those inside the media who bought whatever Bush and Cheney were selling in 2002 and 2003, and who don't want to be tarred with that same brush of propaganda, even though that's precisely what they deserve. And so you have idiots like Fred Hiatt compounding the lies by trying to claim that the Phase II report didn't say what it said.

Hiatt:

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

The actual report (pg. 15):

(U) Conclusion 1: Statements by the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor regarding a possible nuclear weapons program were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates, but did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community.

Hiatt:

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

The actual report (pg. 49):

(U) Conclusion 5: Statements by the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction were generally substantiated by intelligence information, though many statements made regarding ongoing production prior to late 2002 reflected a higher level of certainty than the intelligence judgments themselves.

Hiatt:

Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? “Generally substantiated by intelligence information.”

The report (pg. 57):

(U) Conclusion 8: Statements by the President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could be used to deviler chemical or biological weapons were generally substantiated by intelligence information, but did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community.

And in another tactic, you have duped editorialists like Nick Kristof saying that the reason he didn't speak up against the war was because of the lack of meaningful Democratic Party opposition, which neatly ignores the majority of Democrats in the House and 21 Democrats in the Senate who voted against authorization, as well as those pesky 15 million protesters in February 2003 (present company included).

There's a lot of self-protection going on here, with media figures wanting to absolve themselves of any blame for the worst foreign policy disaster in US history. But on the margins, you're starting to see some journalists come to terms with the failure of their profession, like Ruth Rosen of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America's most catastrophic foreign policy disaster [...]

Let me give you some examples. I was raised in a Republican family, but schooled by the great iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, who taught me that you can find the truth without inside sources, if only you're willing to see beyond patriotic fervor and examine voices in the public domain that are marginalized, So, I would read national security experts who countered Donald Rumfeld's ridiculous predictions; I would read the British, Canadian, Italian and French press; I would read the writings of experts in resource wars and weapons of mass destruction.

No, I didn't know I was right. But I was sure that the administration was lying. And, I knew that at the very least that our editorials should be asking why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al should be believed when I had found strong evidence that they were cherry picking intelligence, and setting up their own office in the Pentagon, and acting in complete secrecy [...]

To its credit, the editorial board raised some of the toughest questions in the mainstream media. And yet....I was the only one who didn't believe Colin Powell's shameful presentation at the United Nations. Why? Not because I had special insider knowledge, but like I.F. Stone, I had found credible people who could dissect his speech and found it unconvincing and unpersuasive [...]

This week, I sat with a former colleague from the editorial board in a café, rather than in the room where we used to make our editorial decisions. He admitted that I had been right, but even more, that even in a liberal paper, the editor and most of the board, had felt restrained, afraid of seeming unpatriotic, afraid of saying the emperor wore no clothes, afraid of not giving the President the benefit of the doubt, afraid of truth telling without access to inside sources.

Unfortunately for Rosen, being right is bad for her career, and remaining in the editorial consensus results in failing upwards, and never getting called on the equivalent of war crimes that people like Tom Friedman committed on the public. This raises a larger question about the corporate takeover of the media and how their agendas end up reflecting what gets covered and what doesn't. Conglomerates who profit from war are in no mood to resist it, and conglomerates who want to maintain their credibility would never toss out the bulk of their staffs who were entirely wrong. Fortunately there's a movement dedicated to restoring an independent media and returning the power of knowledge back to the people. Dan Rather spoke at it, and Bill Moyers had a great moment when he turned the tables on a Fox News flunky that tried to ambush him, which you just have to see.



It's called the National Conference for Media Reform, and it's our last best hope as a nation to get the press we deserve. As for the war criminals who led us down a path to destruction, there's always a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

America's Worst Op-Ed Page

Beyond David Broder, beyond George Will, beyond Robert Novak, beyond David Ignatius, beyond Richard Cohen, and beyond the straw that stirs the drink Fred Hiatt (I'm sure I'm missing some of the other illustrious luminaries), the Washington Post also publishes Kathleen Parker, who this week pondered whether Barack Obama had the proper "blood equity" to be President, and then decided John Edwards and Obama were gay for each other. Bradrocket had the definitive takedown of that mess.

It’s tough to list all the things that make this column so mind-crushingly stupid, but let’s give it a shot:

• Parker begins the column by calling Edwards and Obama fags.

• Then, not having the courage to stand by this novel and poignant insight, she claims that it wasn’t her idea to call them fags, but was instead the idea of one of Edwards’ advisers. But hey, they’re still gay homo fruits who like to take it up the homobutt.

• Next, she pulls out the oldest trick in the Wingnut Punditry Bible: she lectures us about what Real Americans think! Never mind that she’s spent her entire working life on the Wingnut Welfare circuit - she’s got her hand on the pulse of The People, baby!

• And what do Real Americans think, you ask? Why, they’re apparently super-duper happy about the state of the country! Even though, like, 85% of them are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. And even though Bush’s approval rating stands at a sterling 28%. And even though the Republicans just lost a goddamn seat in freaking Mississippi.

To sum up: the WaPo just published a fact-free op-ed whose only “substantive” points are that Edwards and Obama are TEH GHEY OMG LOL IT IS TOO FUNNY FOREVER.

This is why I don't read op-ed pages, and yet the WaPo's "Makes Me Want To Commit Self-Murder"ers Row is so astonishingly bad that you can't help but hear about it.

Liberal Media

The wide range of opinion on today's Washington Post editorial page:



John Bolton, Michael Gerson, Robert Novak, George Will.

Thanks for playing, Fred Hiatt.

Wiretapping Update: House of Cards Crumbling

When we last left our story, we discovered that the NSA was seeking phone records for massive data mining well before 9/11. That's been corroborated by other lawsuits and filings.

...in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security [...]

But Mayer and Nacchio may not even be the only two arguing that the NSA started a program of collecting Americans' phone records before 9/11.

In a January 2006 Slate article that came out before the USA Today totally blew open the call records story in May 2006, Tim Naftali and THREAT LEVEL pal Shane Harris reported:

"A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and emails."

Now, this is specifically about data mining, taking in millions of calls and emails. There is no mention of actual access to the calls themselves until after 9/11. But clearly, the White House was ramping up for some kind of surveillance almost immediately, perhaps data mining from supposedly international sources which are routed through the United States. Today, it was revealed that Verizon executives have been giving up phone records on hundreds of occasions since 2005, an illegal act, by the way.

The company said it does not determine the requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.

The words "good" and "German" come to mind.

Verizon also disclosed that the FBI, using administrative subpoenas, sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. Verizon does not keep data on this "two-generation community of interest" for customers, but the request highlights the broad reach of the government's quest for data.

The disclosures, in a letter from Verizon to three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigating the carriers' participation in government surveillance programs, demonstrated the willingness of telecom companies to comply with government requests for data, even, at times, without traditional legal supporting documents. The committee members also got letters from AT&T and Qwest Communications International, but those letters did not provide details on customer data given to the government. None of the three carriers gave details on any classified government surveillance program.

Verizon detailed 720 of these "emergency requests" from government agencies, and other telecoms may have detailed even more if they weren't barred by the Director of National Intelligence, who invoked the state secrets privilege.

We're getting a fairly clear picture of near-constant collaboration between spying agencies and corporate telecommunications firms, in a manner where the telecoms are almost an arm of the government, in rampant violation of the Fourth Amendment. Yet Fred Hiatt, in his infinite wisdom, sees nothing wrong.

Let's leave to the side Hiatt's inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be "patriotic corporate citizens" -- rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law. Leave to the side the fact that actual "patriotism" would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution -- as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did -- rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President [...]

There is no such thing as a "patriotism exception" to the laws that we pass. It is not a defense to illegal behavior to say that one violated the law for "patriotic" reasons. That was Oliver North's defense to Congress when he proudly admitted breaking multiple federal laws. And it is the same "defense" that people like North have been making to justify Bush's violations of our surveillance laws -- what we call "felonies" -- in spying on Americans without warrants.

By definition, the "rule of law" does not exist if government officials and entities with influential Beltway lobbyists can run around breaking the law whenever they decide that there are good reasons for doing so. The bedrock principle of the "rule of law" is that the law applies equally to everyone, even to those who occupy Important Positions in Fred Hiatt's social, economic and political circles and who therefore act with the most elevated of motives.

Indeed, we already know that the federal government is willing to lie about intelligence failures, blaming them on restrictive wiretap laws, and they're willing to use their lapdogs in the media to exploit the same intelligence failures to push for this opportunity. We're not dealing with honest brokers, and therefore you must call into question their agenda for wanting these spying powers. The Fred Hiatts of the world would rather reward and facilitate lawbreaking than defend the Constitution. Again, those words "good" and "German" come to mind.

UPDATE: John Conyers has some questions.

World Report

Because why not?

• So Bin Laden's going to preview the new Al Qaeda fall season with a taped message. Judging from the photo, he dyes his beard; is that part of the mores of the traditional Wahhabist caliphate? Aside from wetting the pants of a few insaneosphere residents, I'm pretty sure nothing he has to say makes a lick of difference. I'm sure the media will somehow turn this into a "win for the GOP," that the most wanted man in the world who killed 3,000 Americans on a Republican Administration's watch is still alive 6 years later. Just remember: EVERYTHING is good for the GOP. That's why they're doing so well these days!

• I remember hearing at some point a few months back a bit of media chatter that "Israel and Syria are going to war this summer because... just because." Didn't think much about it until this story today that Syria claims to have repelled Israeli warplanes that actually dropped munitions. Israel won't comment. Did they violate Syrian airspace to get to Syria, or to get a couple countries over to Tehran?

• Three Marine officers were censured for their failure to investigate the massacre of 24 civilians in Haditha in 2005. Their military careers are effectively over. Murder charges in this case have been dropped against two of the men mainly because of the byzantine military justice system and code of conduct IMO.

• Here's a nice story: airstrikes in Baghdad killed 14 civilians while they were sleeping. Read to me in the counterinsurgency manual where a key component is a massive bombing campaign. This is the great untold story of this escalation; we're dropping a tremendous amount of ordnance over there. You cannot win hearts and minds by substituting bombs for boots on the ground. We don't have enough troops for the mission (not that the mission is winnable), so we're trying to compensate with airstrikes. It just stirs up more anger.

• German authorities are looking for a dozen more suspects in the foiled terror plot against various facilities. Good for diligent police work. Meanwhile the US Embassy in Nigeria is under alert of attack. The world is still dangerous, made more so by our debacle in Iraq and our inattention to extremism around the world.

• Fred Hiatt is a complete idiot, trying to save his own reputation by attacking the good name of Mohammed El Baradei, who happened to be right about Iraq and is right about Iran. It's those who have been completely wrong who are trying to deflect from their own mistakes by beating the drums for yet another war.

• We all hope for some better news from Iraq, we just don't see a lot to be that pleased about. But this is encouraging, and it's typical that it had nothing to do with the Americans. Top Parliament leaders met in Finland with representatives from South Africa and Northern Ireland, to discuss the best practices for real reconciliation. It suggests that this isn't about the Iraqis "getting their act together," it's about removing the crush of the American presence so that the Iraqis can figure this out for themselves. I'm mindful that this doesn't mean the Shiites and Sunnis will immediately become best of friends; the work done in Northern Ireland took decades. But they did take the steps toward a resolution here, even if they are baby steps. Note that South Africa and Northern Ireland are not occupied nations. And maybe we don't need to return power to CIA-and-lobbyist-backed thug who will destroy democracy in order to save it.

• 50 killed in campaigning for Guatemala's national election, and it's not until this weekend. Political rivals are shooting each other and a lot of candidates are backed by drug lords. This is pretty normal practice in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world. As long as our goal is to spread freedom and democracy, could we be bothered to give a hand here?

• Riverbend has left Baghdad. She was an honest voice among the madness, and she will be missed, but she is certainly safer in Syria.

• And finally, a sketch comedy group in Australia managed to get through two security checkpoints and pretty darn close to George W. Bush with a guy dressed up as Osama bin Laden.

The group staged a faux motorcade, pretending to be the delegation of Canada with one of the comedians dressed as bin Laden, and made it past two police checkpoints before being stopped, reported The Hill.

Cast members hired two motorcycles and three large cars on which they put Canadian flags. Police waved the motorcade through two checkpoints before pulling it over near the Intercontinental Hotel where Mr. Bush is staying.

Australia: better comedy than Yahoo Serious and Crocodile Dundee! Who knew?

Pay To Play

Glenn Greenwald brings up a very good point. Iyad Allawi is paying $300,000 to a GOP-connected lobbying firm (perhaps using some of the billion or so his buddy stole from the Iraqi Treasury when he was Prime Minister). A week ago he had an op-ed in the Washington Post essentially laying the blame for Iraq's problems on Nouri al-Maliki, which we've seen congeal into conventional wisdom. And we know that one of the things lobbying groups do is place their clients onto editorial pages to argue for their positions, particularly on the Washington Post's page, which gets the issue in front of the politically connected.

Did a GOP lobbying group pay Fred Hiatt to run an Iyad Allawi op-ed advocating for the overthrow of an elected Iraqi government?

Wouldn't you think that would rate as a scandal?

Harry Reid 1, Fred Hiatt 0

You go Majority Leader:

On reading the July 21 editorial "The Phony Debate," it became clear why The Post's editorial writers have been such eager cheerleaders for the Bush administration's flawed Iraq policies -- the two share the same disregard for the facts en route to drawing dubious conclusions.

The editorial was an inaccurate commentary on the nature of the Senate debate, the reality in Iraq and the president's stubborn adherence to failed policies.

Your editorial wrongly asserted that "a large majority of senators from both parties favor a shift in the U.S. mission." While a majority of the Senate voted again last week for a plan that would keep U.S. forces in Iraq for counterterrorism and troop protection and launch a diplomatic effort to help stabilize the region, Democrats were joined by only a handful of courageous Republicans -- far from a majority of Republicans and not enough to break the Republican leadership's filibuster. And if the president truly supports changing course, as your editorial implied, he needs to do much more than tell us "it's a position I'd like to see us in" -- he must drop his irresponsible veto threats and tell Republican leaders to stop blocking votes on proposals to carry out this change.

Finally, it was disingenuous to assert that Democrats are using Iraq to stir voters' passions; the American people are sufficiently disappointed on their own. Three-quarters of Americans recognize that the war is going badly, three out of five support further funding only if it includes a timetable for transitioning the mission, and nearly all expect their president to work with Congress to do something to change course.

You know, good for the Washington Post for publishing this. Though Reid probably didn't do himself any favors with the Washington Elites - there's probably a run on fainting couches in DC this morning ("I just can't heep 'em in stock!") - he was clear in his language and placed the blame for this continued occupation where it should be, on the Republican obstructionists who can't break with their leader in the White House. Democrats need to use every part of their megaphone to amplify this.

The Pundits, They Burn!

I've been collecting really bad editorial columns for a new feature I think I'll call "This Week In Abominable Punditry," but I never got around to last week's. So I'll just bullet-point it here for your perusal:

• If I had to give out an award for abominable punditry, clearly it would have to be called the Golden Hiatt. In this edition, Fred blames Harry Reid for being so mean and angry and bullying Senators around on Iraq, disabling them from coming up with a nice sensible centrist solution for themselves. In other words, he's claiming that if Harry Reid and the Democrats weren't pushing for a change of course, Republican moderates who have voted in lockstep with Bush for over four years would suddenly break with the President and come up with their own plan. Talk about waiting for Godot.

• It's never a carnival of abominable punditry without John Stossel, who actually argues that life expectancy isn't a function of health care, just simply that "in America we kill each other more." Murder to BOLSTER an argument! Why didn't I think of that? He also laments that patients don't "shop around" for health care, and he's right because when I break my ankle, it is my right and duty as a capitalist not to get it set and fixed immediately but to comparison shop. (This, by the way, is part of a common thread of Michael Moore-bashing that has a root in journalistic exceptionalism, where they must scrupulously fact-check his numbers without concern for their own.)

• David Brooks' column, where he peers into the soul of George W. Bush and finds a man at peace, certainly qualifies for abominable, but Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting point about one passage:

Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.

Now I suppose their must be some conservatives for him this "are supposed to distrust government" dictum applies, but for the past fifty or so years that's clearly not the case. The mainstream conservative belief is that the government needs to be given dramatically greater scope to gather information and to deploy force -- including deadly force -- and threats thereof.

Indeed, and that's something Jonah Goldberg conveniently forgets in his abominable column, where he asserts that liberals only hate strong executive power when applied to George Bush (and he backs it up with tales of FDR, which certainly resonate for everyone over the age of 80, but not many others). In fact, conservatives' views on the Presidency have transmorgrified to a far greater degree over time, even constructing wild theories validating the Imperial Presidency and reconciling it with conservatism. It should not surprise you that Goldberg gets this backwards. If it does, please go directly to The Corner and come back after total immersion in the bullshit.

• Our "Abominable Punditry in History" series takes us back to the words of Thomas Friedman, one of America's most-respected foreign policy writers, mind you, who said this about Kosovo:

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

Classy. I guess achieving every objective without the loss of a single American life was too neat and clean.

• And finally, there's the all-timer from Bill Kristol, Why Bush Is A Winner, a raft of lies and uncomfortably bad predictions that managed to only convince one person in the entire country:

Bill Kristol's the-war-is-being-won piece in The Washington Post brought him plenty of ridicule, but at least one person liked it.

President Bush read the July 15 Outlook article that morning and recommended it to his staff.

"I like the cut of this guy's jib! Never thought about it that way! I'm actually doin' a good job! This guy's like Einstein! I wonder what else he thinks about me?"

Peace out.

The Anger Is Palpable

Editorial boards across the country are incensed.

Libertarians are incensed (though I don't agree that Dr. Ronald McIver, who was running a prescription mill and getting people hooked on OxyContin, should be set free).

Apparently conservatives are incensed because the President didn't go far enough and outright pardon (don't worry, that's coming).

Fred Hiatt is in mild disagreement, which is the best that can be expected for a palace bootlicker like him who has permanently destroyed the editorial reputation of the Wahington Post.

People are really, really upset that the President (and by President I mean Fourthbranch Cheney) has set a different standard of justice for his friends than the rest of America. They're so upset that they forced a shutdown of the White House comment line. They wish to be completely unaccountable and untroubled by this assault on justice and the rule of law. Leah at CorrenteWire has some other numbers you can dial.

I'll say it again; this President should not be allowed to leave his home, for the rest of his life, without shouts and catcalls and protests by his side. His image should never be allowed to rehabilitate. He should be shunned. There should be daily protests at that monstrosity he'll call a Presidential library. He is easily the worst President in the history of this country.

However, of course, he's not the motivating factor behind this commutation. That'd be the guy who works out of the Executive Office Building. The man whom Libby worked for as chief of staff. The man who thinks he's some other branch of government. I'll deal with him in a later post.

UPDATE: That's an amazing footnote: Scooter Libby was Marc Rich's lawyer. Here's hoping some Democratic talking heads mention that.

UPDATE II: Rick Perlstein on Bush, Libby, and My Lai.

Chutzpah

I'll say this for Richard Perle, in the words of Dabney Coleman in Dragnet, he has balls as big as church bells.

In this op-ed defending himself and attacking George Tenet, Perle claims he didn't tell the President to go after Saddam right after 9-11, and as proof he cites a letter he wrote 10 days after 9-11 that said:

"any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

My head just spun off it's neck, pardon me while I retrieve it.

Is it worse that Perle might actually believe that he didn't advise the President to attack Saddam Hussein, he only advised the President to "remove Saddam Hussein from power"; or is it worse that Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post editorial staff took a look at that logic and said, "Looks good to me, fire up the printing press!"

Greatest Hits of the Iraq Floor Debate

David Obey takes apart The Washington Post:



Jack Murtha on what hurts the troops (bullets, grenades):



Patrick Murphy gives the closing speech:



(Editorial comment: I don't totally agree with Obey on this, enticing people with farm subsidies for votes is in my view an odious practice. But he's dead right on Fred Hiatt and the war-lovers at WaPo. Glenn Greenwald has more.