Some People Say

The Washington Post considers it a big news story that Republicans are criticizing SEIU for their ties to ACORN. The article says "some criticize," but here are the sum total of the critics in the story:

"Some Republicans", Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, a guy named Herman Benson who appears to publicly hate SEIU for a living, and James "Buddy" Caldwell, the Democratic Attorney General of Louisiana, a state where the statewide Democrats are all Democrats in name only.

That seems like a broad cross-section of American opinion, worthy of the title "some".

Eric Boehlert traces this back to the media's touchiness with any criticism from the right that they are ignoring their issues. So they go completely in the other direction and dutifully type up guilt-by-association pieces like this, and they bury the truth about who is actually leading the crusade:

Today, with the GOP increasingly irrelevant and the right-wing media, and specifically Fox News, taking over as the Opposition Party, other journalists are now taking their cues in terms of partisan news from radio talk show hosts and cable TV hosts. It's unprecedented.

In today's "Some Criticize" era, all White House opponents have to do (regardless of who they are or what power they hold) is criticize Obama and the press corps snaps to attention and starts typing up the list of grievances. So today we have the Post furthering Fox News' attempted guilt-by-association with regards to ACORN and labor power SEIU, but the Post pretends it's really the GOP that's leading the charge:

"Last week, Republican Reps. Mark Steven Kirk and Peter Roskam of Illinois and Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina urged the Census Bureau to stop allowing the SEIU to help recruit workers for its 2010 head count."

This utterly mundane partisan request suddenly qualifies as news in a Post article that's virtually barren of any actual revelations about ACORN or SEIU? Again, it's really Fox News and the GOP Noise Machine that are criticizing the "connections" between ACORN and SEIU, and it's the Post presenting that hodge-podge as news.

The article is really a ping-pong match of charges and random associations, like a written version of The Glenn Beck Show.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress, in a far more newsworthy story than what some Republicans are saying about whatever, have introduced a bill to hold defrauders of the government Treasury to the same standard to which the House held ACORN:

Top-ranking liberal lawmaker Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) pressed her colleagues to support a legislative counterpunch to the GOP’s effort to defund the controversial grass-roots organizing group ACORN.

McCollum, a senior Democratic Whip in her caucus, challenged the 172 Democrats who supported a measure to cut off federal funds for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to endorse a similar measure geared towards private companies in business with the government.

The appropriations committee member introduced the “ACORN Act,” or “Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act,” last week; it is the first formal defense against the recent GOP success in Congress to defund the left-leaning activist organization.

Democratic Reps. Raul Grijalva (Ariz.), David Obey (Wis.), Pete Stark (Calif.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Lynn Woolsey (Calif.), Jim McDermott (Wash.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.) have co-sponsored the bill that would cut off federal agreements with private companies, nonprofits and other groups that have been convicted of defrauding the government.

If we had a media capable of dealing in an actual even-handed manner instead of the fake even-handedness they currently peddle, every Republican in the country would be asked if they support holding all corporations convicted of defrauding the government to the same standard.

Instead, we get "Some people say SEIU has cooties because it played in the same sandbox as ACORN."

The Last Word On The Right's Glory In Defeat

Paul Krugman's column today allows me to not have to say another word on the childish behavior of the right over Chicago not receiving the 2016 Olympics bid:

“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

If anything this has gotten far worse, even since the Clinton years. Now you have Republican candidates comparing themselves to doughboys fighting the Nazis. No, really: "I'm willing to interrupt (my career) the same way that somebody interrupted their career and joined World War II and went off to fight the Nazis." You have not activists, but the very top of the Republican Party valuing long-shot extreme-right troglodytes over winnable candidates. You have wingers measuring their dicks over Michael Moore's box office receipts as if it's a subject of world-historical significance.

They are not a political party anymore. They are just a collection of insults.

If At Frist You Don't Succeed

Does anyone alive believe this man?

Bill Frist on Health Bill: I'd Vote For It

Or so the former Senate Republican Leader, a surgeon who has written a new book on health care, told me a few minutes ago in an interview.

Were he still in the Senate, "I would end up voting for it," he said. "As leader, I would take heat for it. ... That's what leadership is all about."

It's quite an impressive crop of retired Republicans claiming they would vote for the health care bill. Why, you could almost build a direct correlation between the propensity for Republican support and whether or not they are in any position to support it!

Funny how that goes.

Frist does appear somewhat sincere later on in the interview:

While Frist believes that the bill will pass, he worries that the Obama Administration and Congress have not given enough attention to what happens next: the implementation. The first few years are likely to be rough, he predicts. States will be struggling to set up new marketplaces for insurance coverage, their medicaid rolls will grow, taxes will go up, and consumers will not yet see the benefits. "The Republicans will go wild," using the start-up difficulties as a tool for fundraising and for making their case in the next election, Frist says. "In the Congress, nobody's thinking about that." His advice for the Obama Administration: "Stay nimble," and be prepared to make adjustments as difficulties arise. (emphasis mine)

If you thought debunking the lies about what the health care bill would potentially accomplish was fun, wait until you get to the part where conservatives nitpick and distort every misstep or half-step or just plain old step in the process, and spin it as proof that Obama meant to take over health care, the planet and your children after all. Consequent their stint as defenders of Medicare, Republicans will become defenders of Medicaid, and go on and on about long lines and expanding rolls. And they'll ask what Americans got for all those billions they spent on health care.

This will be difficult to counter. Most of the legislation doesn't go into effect until 2013, partially because of start-up time, but more as a pure cost-reduction play within the budget window. Especially because most of that time will be spent climbing out of the recession, which could lead to more loss of health care benefits if unemployment continues and COBRA help runs out at the end of the stimulus package, the White House will have to suffer through four years of "where's the health care reform" and people calling the whole thing a waste before the implementation even begins. It wasn't a smart way to save a buck.

I don't know if the Administration is thinking about this and preparing for it or not, but they haven't been prepared for many of the right-wing freak-outs thus far. There's no question that they will seek to label health care reform a failure before the ink is dry from Obama's bill-signing ceremony. Somebody might want to heed Bill Frist's warning.

The Latest Attack Of The Wingnut Brigade

Amazingly enough, conservatives weren't satisfied by the resignation of Van Jones and the funding cutoff for ACORN. Seems they are trying to attack the Administration relentlessly, as if that was their singular objective! There have been a few clumsy stabs this week, like the mild song praising the President, or the lame tape of community organizers praying to "O God," not "Obama"; or attacking the President for wanting to bring the Olympics and $22 billion dollars of economic activity to America. But the right thinks they've found a target with a Department of Education official named Kevin Jennings. Sean Hannity has practically jumped on his desk and demanded Jennings' resignation for allegedly "covering up statutory rape." I say allegedly because only Sean Hannity thinks that, and it certainly doesn't meet with the facts of the case.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Fox News -- led by Sean Hannity -- and other right-wing media have claimed that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings "cover[ed] up statutory rape" and violated Massachusetts law by not reporting to authorities a 1988 conversation in which a high school student told Jennings about his relationship with an older man. In fact, Jennings' attorney wrote in a 2004 letter that the student was 16 years old, which is -- and was at the time -- the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.

Jennings' attorney: Conversation was "with a sixteen-year-old student"; "no factual basis" that Jennings was "aware of any sexual victimization of any student." In an August 3, 2004, letter, Constance M. Boland of the law firm Nixon Peabody -- which represented the organization that Jennings ran -- wrote that the "conversation" Jennings had was with "a sixteen-year-old student" and that there "is no factual basis whatsoever for" the "claim that Mr. Jennings engaged in unethical practices, or that he was aware of any sexual victimization of any student, or that he declined to report any sexual victimization at any time." [Boland letter, 8/3/04]

What happened was that Jennings wrote about a conversation he had while a teacher - 21 years ago - where a 16 year-old student told him about a relationship with an older man. Jennings, who is gay, didn't report the kid to the authorities for doing anything illegal, mainly because he... wasn't doing anything illegal.

Nevertheless, Hannity is outraged (but that's redundant) and the trumped-up scandal is seeping into the media. John Aravosis writes:

Allen went on a right-wing TV show this morning and falsely accused Department of Education official Kevin Jennings of a crime. He said - falsely - that Jennings failed to report "an assault" on a young man, twenty years ago, which would be a crime under Massachusetts law at the time. In fact, Jennings was never informed of an assault on anyone. He spoke to a student, of the legal age of consent, who had sex with a man. Ta ta ta dum.

Yes, you guessed - they were g-a-y. And one was older than the other. Ergo, it must have been one of those gay pedophile predator types who always go after young boys, because those gays are such perverts - right?

I'm not surprised that FOX News and the far right hate groups are going after a gay appointee in the Obama administration. Anti-gay bigotry is ripe at FOX, in the religious right, and in the GOP base that now controls the Republican party. So none of this should surprise us. What does surprise me is when real journalists, real reporters, like Mike Allen, swallow the bait from the ilk of Sean Hannity and the Family Research Council, and report their sludge as fact, when it's an outright lie. It really makes you wonder why the media smells a story here. I doubt they'd be as interested if the two legal adults, and the Obama official, were straight.

And another thing. Would Mike Allen, and any other media outlet covering this story, prefer if the kid had killed himself? From the REST of the story, if you bother reading it, the kid didn't exactly sound long for this world. Can you imagine, in the 1980s mind you (which is when this happened), had Jennings outed the kid as gay, not just to his parents, but to the entire state (which would include his school), which is what Allen is proposing? Assuming the kid didn't kill himself, would his parents have kicked him out of their house (which happened, and still happens, to a lot of gay kids)? Gee, I'll bet the media covering this fake story didn't think of that one. No, they had a "sex" story involving a gay guy - three gay guys in fact - and well, how you can top that?

Jennings' real crime in the eyes of his accusers appears to be that he's a gay man. After all, a famous director drugging and raping an underage white girl without consent - that's OK for the establishment, and he shouldn't be punished because he's in their social class. Someone like Jennings not turning in a ghey for his consensual relationanship - that deserves a burning at the stake.

This ticky-tack distractions don't even have to succeed. It's part of an effort to chip away at the legitimacy of the President, so that when the big story breaks, these zombie lies can fit an invented pattern. That's all.

If You Take Out People Who Die, Americans Live Forever!

I hit this in my liveblogging of the public option debate, but I want to go back to it because it's simply crazy. John Ensign, the adulterous Senator from Nevada who had his parents pay off his mistress and her family in possible violation of campaign laws, put forward the following argument to prove the awesomeness of the US health care system:

"Are you aware that if you take out gun accidents and auto accidents, that the United States actually is better than those other countries?" Ensign said. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) had been citing the health care systems of France, Germany, Japan and Canada as more effective, but with lower costs.

Conrad responded that one can bend statistics in all sorts of ways.

"But that doesn't have anything to do with health care. Auto accidents don't have anything to do with h--," Ensign said, cutting himself off. "I mean we're just a much more mobile society. ... We drive our cars a lot more, they do public transportation. So you have to compare health care system with health care system."

I'm sure that if you take out truffle and eclair accidents, France's health care outcomes skyrocket, too. But I'm wondering why this means anything, even if it were true, which it isn't. First of all, if Ensign wants to improve health care in America, he seems to be saying that the way to do that is to move away from a car-centered transportation system and engage in strict gun control. Somehow I doubt that was his intention, since he's never cast a vote in favor of more mass transit or bike lanes or gun control in his life, but there's no other way to characterize this argument.

So in order to properly figure out what in the hell Ensign was trying to prove with that comment, you have to recognize that he read it in some talking points somewhere. And the talking points trace back to - you guessed it - Betsy McCaughey.

Where did he come up with such an argument? TPMDC's Brian Beutler tracks down the source: Betsy McCaughey said as much when she appeared on the Daily Show last month. McCaughey is the former lieutenant governor of New York and the first person to push the idea that, under health care reform, the government would decide who gets care, who lives and who dies -- a precursor to the "death panel" articulated by Sarah Palin.

On the show, McCaughey said that, without violence and auto accidents, the U.S. would have the highest life expectancy in the world. It was an attempt to undermine an argument for reform, that the U.S. spends more money than any other country but still lags in life expectancy.

The Wall Street Journal explains that McCaughey got the idea from a 2006 report published by conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.

As that last link notes, the OECD rebuts this talking point, saying that the AEI report is "based in part on GDP. If you don’t factor in GDP, the U.S. ranks 17th in the world for life expectancy when the high U.S. rate of fatal injuries is ignored." In fact, even the report's writers walked away from this statement in future reports. It's a moot point anyway, it says nothing about the health care system itself, nor is it comfort to anyone who experiences a gunshot or a car accident in the US, that if their death gets factored out, then the system works.

So the real lesson here is that the entire GOP position on health care - or really, anything - is based on irrelevant misinformation, and when you're looking for such misinformation, all roads lead to Betsy McCaughey.

No (Smoking) Exit

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone has a huge scoop - 15 years too late, but still a huge scoop - that again shows the capture of our government by corporate interests. It turns out that Betsy McCaughey, the wingnut noise machine creation, was actually a creation of - get this - Philip Morris:

During the debate over Clinton's health care overhaul in the early 1990s, McCaughey — then an academic at the right-wing Manhattan Institute — wrote an article for The New Republic called "No Exit," in which she claimed that Hillarycare would prevent even wealthy Americans from "going outside the system to purchase basic health coverage you think is better." Even though the bill plainly stated that "nothing in this Act" would prohibit consumers from purchasing additional care, McCaughey's claim was echoed endlessly in the press, with each repetition pounding a stake further into the heart of the reform effort.

McCaughey's lies were later debunked in a 1995 post-mortem in The Atlantic, and The New Republic recanted the piece in 2006. But what has not been reported until now is that McCaughey's writing was influenced by Philip Morris, the world's largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton's health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks, front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company's strategy, the memo observed, was an effort to "work on the development of favorable pieces" with "friendly contacts in the media." The memo, prepared by a Philip Morris executive, mentions only one author by name:

"Worked off-the-record with Manhattan and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part exposé in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan."

The story goes on to say that Big Tobacco funded a front group called Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1993-94 to stage "grassroots revolts" in Congressional town hall meetings, which morphed this year into Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

We all knew McCaughey was a paid liar, but not a tobacco-funded paid liar. James Fallows has a bit more. This will be a great angle for the media to ignore the next time they invite McCaughey on one of their shows to tell us what's "really" in the health care bill.

Criminal Enterprise

ACORN has now decided to sue the two filmmakers who ran undercover sting operations at their satellite offices, for violating Maryland law by obtaining documentary footage without consent.

The group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.

The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered "extreme emotional distress."

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit seeks damages from James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the pimp and prostitute in the videos, and from conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who posted the videos on his Web site.

When ABC News took hidden-camera video of Food Lion workers bleaching rotten meat for resale, they sued - and won in court, to boot. The law is pretty clear on all this.

Mind you, this is the second Breitbart operation in as many weeks where he has posted illegally obtained material on his website. This nascent NEA mini-scandal uses audio from a conference call whose taping seems to violate state law.

There's also the matter of the worker in one surreptitiously taped ACORN video calling the police and reporting the couple for human trafficking. For his effort, he got fired by ACORN based on what he said in the video, regardless of the fact that he did the right thing and reported the fake pimp and prostitute to the police.

James O'Keefe, the supposedly "independent" filmmaker responsible for the ACORN sting, may be getting all kinds of cash from the conservative movement, but he'll need a lot of it, with all the state laws he appears to be breaking.

Ya Gotta Admit, They're Good

From the people who built the Overton Window from hand-crafted glass, we have the sensible moderate conservative alternative.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, host Chris Wallace asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich about the controversy, noting that in 1991 Gingrich defended a similar speech by then-President George H.W. Bush by saying, “Why is it political for the president of the United States to discuss education?” Gingrich replied that if it’s “a totally positive speech” that parents can see “in advance” (which they can), then “it is good to have”:

GINGRICH: My daughter Jackie Cushman just wrote a column in which she said, “if the president gives a speech as a parent to students to encourage them to learn and stay in school, it is a great thing for him to do.” It was a good thing for Ronald Reagan to do. It was a good thing for George H. W. Bush to do. And I’ve been communicating with Arne Duncan and the team at the Department of Education. I believe this is going to be posted, people are going to be able to see it in advance, it’s going to be a totally positive speech, and if that’s what it is, then it is good to have the president of the United States say to young people across America: Stay in school, study and do your homework. It’s good for you and it’s good for America.

First of all, Newt Gingrich's daughter writes columns. Maybe she should do a pundit road show with Bill Kristol, Meghan McCain, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Liz Cheney and Jenna Hager Bush about the dangers of affirmative action.

Second, here comes the sensible Newt Gingrich, riding in to denounce the hysteria and position himself as a serious, brave conservative who only concerns himself with real-world issues like the threat of an electromagnetic pulse attack and using lasers to wipe out North Korean missiles. Now we can make way for the parade of liberal DC columnists like Joke Line and Richard Cohen lauding the bravery of conservative heroes like Gingrich, boldly going against the attacks of his own party supporters. (Hey wait, here they are!) Maybe this will kick off his Presidential campaign in 2012, although he'll have to get past early adopter of the "Obama's education speech is fine" gambit, Joe Scarborough.

Being able to assert that it's OK for the President of the United States to give a "stay in school" speech to children is about the lowest bar anyone in politics will ever have to surmount. If that's evidence of conservative sanity, then whoever said "the soft bigotry of low expectations" was a genius. Now Gingrich and Scarborough and whoever else can get on with their attacks on Obama's government takeover of health care and efforts to make America vulnerable to Evil Terrorists. At least they aren't too crazy.

I'm reminded of the Chris Rock routine:

Niggas always want credit for some shit they supposed to do. A nigga will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A nigga will say some shit like, "I take care of my kids." You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What kind of ignorant shit is that? "I ain't never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?! You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!

Saturday Night Massacre

I expected this, but it's still kind of depressing what has been done to Van Jones.

I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today.

On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.

I have been inundated with calls - from across the political spectrum - urging me to “stay and fight.”

But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

It has been a great honor to serve my country and my President in this capacity. I thank everyone who has offered support and encouragement. I am proud to have been able to make a contribution to the clean energy future. I will continue to do so, in the months and years ahead.

People who have said extreme things at some point need to resign. I eagerly await the resignations of the entire Fox News primetime lineup and about 85-90% of the GOP caucus.

Look, Presidential advisors get too hot to handle and they resign. Happens all the time. Off the top of my head, Alberto Gonzales, Don Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. But those took forever to consummate. Jones had one bad week, with the right-wing Wurlitzer ramping up to epidemic proportions. It turns out that the worst accusation, his signing a Truther statement, had an alibi - the Truthers flat out lied to him about what the statement would say (although, a Truther comes to me with a pen and paper, and I go running in the other direction). And that was enough for the White House to call no joy. Which is kind of pathetic and shows a complete lack of loyalty.

Really, Van Jones wasn't chased out of the White House because of any statement or action. It was because of what he believes.

To understand why and how he's being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.

The "why" is simple: he is a genuine left-wing liberal with a White House job. He is black. He used to be radical, and probably still has radical sympathies (you know, caring about poor black people and all that). He is, in other words, fucking terrifying, if you frame his story right [...]

Here is the message machine in its platonic form: Glenn Beck introduces his audience to a group Jones once belonged to called "The Apollo Alliance" on August 24th. 72 hours later a constituent is asking his (Republican) representative if this Apollo Alliance wrote the health care bill. The Rep has no idea what the guy is talking about, but the rest of the audience certainly does ("Van Jones!" they shout).

And now, here we are. His name on an old 9/11 truther petition is dredged up. An amusing clip in which he calls Republicans assholes (but explains that he, too, is an asshole) is on CBS News. Jake Tapper and Politico are on the case.

That is how a smear becomes a meme. Schoolhouse Rock, 2009 style.

People in the progressive movement identify strongly with someone like Van Jones. He delivered the keynote at Netroots Nation 2008. He had a best-selling book about the Green-Collar Economy last year. His star was rising as he combined the unconscionable problem of urban poverty with the inescapable reality of climate change to find real-world solutions to both problems. And some people on the right couldn't handle that.

Glenn Beck, smarting from losing 57 advertisers in a few weeks, took a scalp in the form of Van Jones. Fox News may have a whole other problem before too long.

Why Do Hissy Fits Succeed?

Dishonest morons motivated purely by ideology have decided to throw a scream-fest over a proposed "stay in school" speech from the President to children.

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

This is no small, isolated fit, thrown by random nutjobs. The New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, AP, and others all ran stories this morning about the coordinated national effort to either keep children at home so they can't hear their president's pro-education message, or demanding that local schools block the message altogether.

The people organizing this protest and the people mad about the President daring to "indoctrinate" their children are the people who said nothing when Ronald Reagan talked favorably about tax cuts to schoolkids, when George Bush sat in a classroom on 9/11, and when they waged campaign to put PRAYER in American schools. It's OK, then, to indoctrinate your children to almighty God, but not for them to hear a speech about hard work from the elected President of the United States.

And yes, we were told for a while, under a Rpeublican President, that criticizing him was a form of treason.

But the award for lack of self-awareness has to go to NBC News, which asks today:

Finally, here’s one more thought about the entire controversy over Obama’s education speech on Tuesday: Since the White House has said the text of the speech will be available for 24 hours before he delivers it and since they altered the lesson plan language, why is this still a controversy? The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing. In fact, this is an example of a story that percolates where it becomes harder and harder for some to claim there's some knee-jerk liberal media bias. (Does anyone remember these kinds of controversies in the summer of 2001?) The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days.

Now, at least they admit that it's impossible to claim liberal media bias, meaning they understand who's to blame here. But do they really have to say "The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing"? Isn't the answer that the non-conservative media will simply blindly follow whatever conservative media decides to gun up? Don't media types privilege conservative mini-controversies and hissy fits? Isn't there literally no way they could lay off something like this? Isn't that the problem?

Conservatives have cracked the code: yell real loud about some invented outrage, and watch the media chase the soccer ball. They actually don't have to cover it.

Insta-Rebuttal

Media Matters has filled a grave need in the progressive movement, bringing awareness to conservative lies and media malpractice for years. Now they're filling yet another niche with Email Checker, a simply superb idea.

You can send them that conservative email forward your friends or relatives send you, and they will write a full fact-based response that you can send back. It's countering viral emails with viral rebuttals. Spectacular. Here's one from their site:

The following email has been widely forwarded. Media Matters Action Network has written a response to the text below. Please feel free to copy and paste it and send to your friends.

[note - all mistakes below are original to text of email]

From: XXXXXX@aol.com
To: XXXXXX@hotmail.com
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:01:57 -0400
Subject: AARP AGREE OR DISAGREE... a note to seniors.... but something to think about

About two years ago Winnie and I dropped our membershipin the AARP because of their leanings.This is even more so since they baacked Obama in the election and are now supporting his health reform bill. This bill with reduce benefits to Medicare by abour $500,000,000,000 to help pay the costs of his health reform. This means seniors will be denyed life saving care. AARP no longer represents seniors, but their high paid executives and their business partners. They contributed more to the Democrats than to Repbulicans in the elections. I suggest seniors should rebedl by dropping their memberships.

Herb Jones

RESPONSE

Hi there.

This email is interesting, but I have some questions.

The articles I've read say that the cuts they're talking about are going to be to the parts of Medicare that waste money and not benefits to actual seniors. And why shouldn't we be using the money to treat seniors instead of wasting it on needless paperwork and on the few doctors who manipulate the system so as to receive a higher repayment? Here is one of those articles: http://www.newsweek.com/id/214254

Plus, the House bill increases payments made to doctors so that they can afford to take in more seniors. I know I want my doctor to get paid more so they can continue to afford to treat me. I read that without an act of Congress, my doctor could get paid around 20% less for treating Medicare patients next year. I don't want to risk losing my regular doctor.

You, I'm sure, are entirely aware that prescriptions cost way too much. The New York Times says that this bill will decrease the amount seniors will have to pay for their medications. If the bill doesn't pass, the price of prescriptions will go up 20% in the next ten years. If you want to read that article, here is the link - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/health/policy/31drug.html

And, frankly, I'm tired of people trying to tell me that the government is going to deny seniors life saving care. Congress would never write a law like that, mostly because they're good people but also because more seniors vote than any other group! Politicians are smart - they're not going to tell the largest group of voters they can't go to the doctor.

AARP and President Obama are working towards making health care affordable for all Americans - including seniors! Those efforts will mean changes, but isn't it worth it if everyone will be able to afford to go see a doctor? Imagine where you would be now if you hadn't been able to go see a doctor when you were younger.

Look - if nothing changes, Medicare will go broke. Something has to give, and I'm not willing to give up on this program.

Let's talk soon.

Fucking great. It's one thing if a media outlet writes "The Top 5 Lies About Obama's Health Care Reform". That's useful. But the majority of people predisposed to believe ridiculous email forwards don't trust traditional media sources. They get a letter from someone they know debunking the myths, and they'll be far more likely to believe it. And these are well written.

Loving this tool. Fills a gaping hole.

Lies Of Steele

Michael Steele doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to health care. This is an uncontroversial statement. He's still talking about death panels and rationing, and he's still vowing to keep government hands off of seniors' Medicare. He's talking about the $500 billion that can be excised from Medicare and Medicaid payments, through reducing lobbyist-driven overpayments to things like Medicare Advantage that do nothing to improve treatment, as if those are direct reductions of Medicare outcomes for patients.

They are lies. And Steele's column is a collection of outright lies. But considering that this is no penalty for lying, you can hardly blame Steele for getting away with as much as possible.

Howard Kurtz moans that the "death panels" wouldn't die in spite of journalistsic efforts to debunk the ridiculous notion, writing that "even when they report the facts, [journalists] have had trouble influencing public opinion" and calling the experience "a stunning illustration of the traditional media's impotence." Let me identify a problem that has helped create this impotence: a lack of follow-through.

Having identified Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Chuck Grassley, John McCain and, today, Michael Steele, as spreading falsehoods about health care reform even after they have been broadly discredited, will the journalists Kurtz mentions offer them any sanction? Or will these public figures continue to be extensively quoted in newspapers and on television?

We saw another one this week, as Fox News decided to bring us the new scare tactic, "death books." But media like those Kurtz cover have two choices in this respect. They can ignore the lie, and let it confine itself to Fox News, Drudge, the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio, which is arguably larger than the traditional media's reach. Or they can report on the lie, debunk it, and hope their debunk trumps the initial lie. Now, I don't really respect how media covers the lies, by hyping them endlessly and getting around to the debunks a few days later. But Kevin Drum is on to something here.

It's true: crankery used to go largely unreported. But that's not much of an option these days — or at least, the media doesn't treat it as an option. And the reason is obvious: crankery isn't limited to beady-eyed obsessives with mimeograph machines in their basements anymore. It's beamed out in practically raw form to an enormous audience by Drudge, talk radio, Fox News, and the blog/Twitter/Facebook channel. Once that's happened, mainstream outlets don't feel like it's ignorable.

Plus there's the fact that although news pages (and perhaps the straight news reports from TV anchors) may have mostly debunked the death panel story, op-ed pages and chat shows retailed it with vigor. What's more, even in the news pages most of the debunkings came days or even weeks after the crankery had already reached a fever pitch.

What do do? Fighting back is the obvious answer, but that's a two-edged sword since it also gives the crankery an even higher profile. Ditto for faster reaction from the news desks.

I dunno. We now live in an era of mass-market crankery ("saturation bullshitting," in g.powell's memorable phrase), and that's that. Either some bright cognitive researcher needs to figure out how to actually fight crankery, or else the rest of us have to figure out how to get things done even in the face of a permanent lunatic fringe. All legal ideas welcome.

I believe that progressives and Democrats could go on the offensive a bit more, and make Republicans defend their own positions rather than allowing them the space to concoct false memes about the opposition. But with Washington still wired for conservatism, and Drudge still the traditional media assignment editor, there's not a lot to do here. You will always have that push and pull between giving lies legitimacy and letting them fester unanswered.

I do agree with Matt Yglesias' assessment of Steele's op-ed, particularly its appearance in the Washington Post. If the claims in an op-ed aren't factual, newspapers are not required to print them.

So congratulations to Fred Hiatt for landing such a buzzworthy piece of nonsense for his publication and I hope the right-wing enjoys the giant tax hikes we’ll be enacting down the road once they show the political world that any attempt to trim Medicare spending, no matter how modest, will be savaged by opportunists on the other side.

Yep. Seems to me like Steele and his counterparts are walking right into a trap here, even if it's not realized for decades.

...I liked Anthony Weiner's take: "I have never heard such a ringing defense of a single-payer program like Medicare than I heard from Michael Steele today."

The Wit And Wisdom Of Arthur Laffer

The economist Arthur Laffer is often cited as one of the most influential in modern conservative history. This is what he said on CNN today.

If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.

Yes, just wait until you see Medicare and Medicaid done by the government. Once the government gets their hands on those government-run insurance programs, they might balloon administrative costs all the way up to 3% versus the private insurance industry's 20-30%!

Again, this is a prominent conservative economist who either doesn't know, or doesn't want you to know, that Medicare is a government-run program. I'd bet on the latter.

Also, I agree with Krugman, since when did the post office deserve a reputation as a whipping boy? Last I checked, they take a piece of paper that you give them anywhere in the country for 44 cents! That's a ridiculous bargain, and for the most part terribly efficient. I've been on enough customer service lines with private companies - I'm sure everyone has - to know that their bureaucracy and systems are plenty awful in their own right. This idea that the government screws everything up and private industry is teh roxxor is a total myth.

Bigmouth Strikes Again

Betsy McCaughey has popped up before this year, claiming that the stimulus package included funding for comparative effectiveness research, which would "have the government essentially dictate treatments." It played into the worst fears, stoked for years by conservatives, of the government running health care and "getting between you and your doctor," unlike the great system we have now, where an insurance company bureaucrat does that. It's the same strategy as trying to get Americans to fear the Canadian health care system, even though the opposite is closer to reality.

It must be fun to be McCaughey, as her entire job appears to be misreading Congressional legislation and writing columns about it. This is what she did in 1994, writing the seminal piece "No Exit" in The New Republic, filled with distortions about the Clinton health care plan, that set the conventional wisdom against it. She's like an inverse I.F. Stone, ferreting out government malfeasance where none exists. The difference, of course, is that McCaughey is funded by powerful interests: she sits on the board of directors of a medical device company, has received stock options from that same company, and is part of a think tank funded by pharmaceuticals. So she's well-compensated for her deliberate misreadings.

The most recent installment, playing out over a number of days, is her contention that the House health care bill "would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner." Once again, she plays into the usual conservative tropes with false attacks about government taking control of your life.

And these claims get the standard fact-check treatment, and reporters try to pin her down, and McCaughey says things like "it doesn't say that in so many words, but it would allow for it to happen in the future," and eventhe President has to go ahead and rebut this in a town hall:

Q I have heard lots of rumors going around about this new plan, and I hope that the people that are going to vote on this is going to read every single page there. I have been told there is a clause in there that everyone that's Medicare age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to die. This bothers me greatly and I'd like for you to promise me that this is not in this bill.

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I guarantee you, first of all, we just don't have enough government workers to send to talk to everybody, to find out how they want to die.

I think that the only thing that may have been proposed in some of the bills -- and I actually think this is a good thing -- is that it makes it easier for people to fill out a living will.

Now, Mary, you may be familiar with the principle behind a living will, but it basically is something that my grandmother -- who, you may have heard, recently passed away -- it gave her some control ahead of time, so that she could say, for example, if she had a terminal illness, did she want extraordinary measures even if, for example, her brain waves were no longer functioning; or did she want just to be left alone. That gives her some decision-making power over the process.

The problem is right now most of us don't give direction to our family members and so when we get really badly sick, sadly enough, nobody is there to make the decisions. And then the doctor, who doesn't know what you might have preferred, they're making decisions, in consultation with your kids or your grandkids, and nobody knows what you would have preferred.

So I think the idea there is to simply make sure that a living will process is easier for people -- it doesn't require you to hire a lawyer or to take up a lot of time. But everything is going to be up to you. And if you don't want to fill out a living will, you don't have to. But it's actually a useful tool I think for a lot of families to make sure that if, heaven forbid, you contract a terminal illness, that you are somebody who is able to control this process in a dignified way that is true to your faith and true to how you think that end-of-life process should proceed.

You don't want somebody else making those decisions for you. So I actually think it's a good idea to have a living will. I'd encourage everybody to get one. I have one. Michelle has one. And we hope we don't have to use it for a long time, but I think it's something that is sensible.

But, Mary, I just want to be clear: Nobody is going to be knocking on your door; nobody is going to be telling you you've got to fill one out. And certainly nobody is going to be forcing you to make a set of decisions on end-of-life care based on some bureaucratic law in Washington.

And that's that! Whew, we dodged a bullet there!

Except House Republicans will continue to pronounce that Obama wants to kill old people. And not just the rank and file, but the Minority Leader. And Democrats still get the cards and letters about how that nice Ms. McCaughey tells them that government agents will descend on their house with some rope and a pillow good enough for suffocatin':

But Representative G. K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, said he heard many expressions of concern from constituents when he answered telephone calls to his office on Tuesday.

“The longer we wait to vote,” Mr. Butterfield said, “the more opportunity our opponents have to put out false messages. Seniors fear they will lose Medicare. They worry they will have to discuss plans for end-of-life care every five years.” [...]

The House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.”

Representative Robert E. Andrews, Democrat of New Jersey, said, “I have met seniors who think their Medicare will be taken away, which is false.”

Not that some people even know that Medicare is a government program anymore.

So this is the game. McCaughey gets on conservative media, pretends to be an expert about all things health care, and just makes shit up about the bill. This lays a near-impossible trap for anyone who cares about honesty - leave the claims alone and watch them fester, or debunk them and give them even more attention. If you're Politico, and your core mission is to start controversy, you can achieve a two-fer by printing headlines like "Will proposal promote euthanasia? and debunking the story deeper inside the article.

Democrats had this game figured out by 1995.



And yet it persists. Because the bullshit flies so fast that tamping it down is just an impossibility. John Thune yesterday went ahead and claimed that "most Americans" would pay 50 cents of every dollar in taxes under the health care bill. You can blame corporate media for failing to get out in front of the nonsense, but you're not going to get Fred Thompson's radio show, which is where this latest McCaughey smear originated, to value the truth.

The strategy of delay from those who want to kill the health care plan relies on a steady stream of bullshit from all areas of the conservative noise machine. Some of this opposition gets privileged by the media, some of it rebutted. But it's all "out there." And it has a cumulative effect, piece by piece, until the plan no longer seems worth doing (which, if it's the Senate Finance Committee version, might be true). You have politicians literally arguing for speed in the process because they don't want their opponents to have time to mainline more lies into the media bloodstream.

McCaughey won't go away. And no matter how discredited Republicans get, their ability to find outlets for their bullshit will probably only grow. All of it goes back to a central argument about the nature of government, an argument that Democrats all too often don't want to have. If the majority of people had any belief that government could act as a positive force in people's lives, the barrage of lies would not matter nearly so much. If you never make that argument, you leave the field to people like Betsy McCaughey.

Privileging the Opposition

Howard Kurtz finally opened his trap about the Birther movement yesterday on CNN, actually appearing to understand the issue.

On his Reliable Sources show today, CNN’s Howard Kurtz criticized Dobbs and others in the media who have given airtime to the “fringe of the fringe” that is the “birther” crowd. “These are ludicrous claims, there is no factual basis for them,” said Kurtz. “Why give the birthers any airtime?” He then specifically criticized Dobbs for not acting “responsible”:

KURTZ: Callie Crossley, Lou Dobbs on his radio show said, “I believe the president is a citizen of the United States.” But he keeps raising these questions, complaining about criticism from “limp-minded, lily-livered lefties.” Is it responsible for Dobbs and others to go on the air, talk about these claims, demand proof, when we have seen a copy of the birth certificate? When Hawaii officials say that Barack Obama was born there in 1961?

CROSSLEY: It absolutely is not responsible.

"Giving airtime" is precisely the point. The news media, whether legitimizing the Birthers or disputing them, have paid far more attention to them than they ever did the 9-11 Truthers or any other crazy and actually irrelevant conspiracy theorists:

Ask yourself this: What would have happened if, in July of 2002, Lou Dobbs would have conducted respectful interviews with various Truthers, in the course of which Dobbs called on the Bush administration to prove by documentary evidence that the U.S. government hadn’t actually carried out the 9/11 attacks?

The answer is obvious: Dobbs would have been fired before the next morning—which is another way of saying that it’s inconceivable that he or any other mainstream media figure would ever do such a thing. Similarly, it’s equally inconceivable that any Democratic member of Congress would go on a program like Hardball and repeatedly refuse to say whether he rejected the idea that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks.

The short answer is that conservative media figures and politicians are essentially afraid of and courteous to the craziest part of their right-wing base, while liberal politicians hold them in contempt. This is true even in those cases where the "conspiracy" has a fair bit of evidence, say, in the stolen election in Florida in 2000.

I don't doubt that the Birther issue is a headache for the GOP, but they respond to it seriously, giving it some breathing space, rather than self-loathing Democrats like Collin Peterson, who are so contemptuous of their own citizens that they'd rather cancel all access to their constituents.

Out-party politicians have long had to deal with conspiracy theorists on their side — the people who think that the Clintons killed Vince Foster or that the Bush administration helped orchestrate the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down,” said Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents a conservative Republican district in Minnesota. “That’s why I don’t do town meetings.”

Now I don't want to get into an argument about which crazy conspiracy theorists get more respect from official discourse. But this doesn't stop there. It seeps into the mainstream in other ways, on other issues. The best recent example concerns Chris Matthews' harping on abortion funding in the health care bill based on 100% conservative framing, plucked out of The Weekly Standard (by his own admission):

MSNBC's Chris Matthews is illustrative of the approach to the topic some have taken. Matthews, who acknowledges his approach to this topic has been shaped by the conservative Weekly Standard, has made his opposition to coverage for abortion clear, claiming President Obama "says they're going to reduce the number of abortions, and that same week he pushes to subsidize abortion? You can't do that."

On a recent Hardball, Matthews questioned Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch about the topic, asking leading questions that encouraged them to state their opposition to insurance coverage of abortion. But Matthews didn't ask them -- and hasn't asked any other guest -- one simple question: Why shouldn't abortions be covered, given that the procedure is legal? Nor has he asked if there are any other legal procedures that shouldn't be covered.

Instead, Matthews has adopted the premise that taxpayer funds shouldn't be used to pay for abortions, no matter how indirectly, because some taxpayers believe abortion to be immoral. On Wednesday's Hardball, for example, Matthews asked Obama adviser David Axelrod: "[I]f the federal government spends money on abortions, that means people who believe abortion is evil would be forced to have their tax money go to pay for abortions. How do you justify that?"

That premise is only superficially compelling, and has no business underlying an impartial news report. After all, millions of Americans believe the death penalty and wars of choice are immoral. But the moral beliefs of pacifists and death penalty opponents are not granted the privilege the media grants opposition to legal abortion -- and so you rarely see a news report premised on the idea that taxpayer funding for war or capital punishment is inappropriate.

How the Birther issue has been handled in Washington is a teachable moment, one that shows how the Beltway remains wired for conservatives, no matter how crazy.

Wind Up The Wurlitzer

Joe Conason has a good piece on the firing of Bush Administration appointee and Americorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, which has all the earmarks of a full-fledged hissy fit. Conason thinks the right is attempting to gin up Whitewater redux.

According to the wingnut version, Walpin is a heroic investigator who was ousted simply because he exposed misspending of hundreds of thousands of federal dollars by an Obama ally, namely former NBA star Kevin Johnson, who ran a nonprofit organization in Sacramento that received Americorps funding before he was elected mayor of the California state capital last fall. Walpin had to be removed on June 11, after he refused the president's request that he resign, because the White House was trying to cover up Johnson's wrongdoing and permit his city to receive federal stimulus money.

That simple and sinister scenario, like so many of the media descriptions of Whitewater, omits crucial facts.

It is true that Walpin found evidence of misuse and waste of Americorps funds by St. Hope Academy, a nonprofit community group started by Johnson after he retired from the NBA. It is true that Johnson and St. Hope have acknowledged that they must refund roughly half of the money that the group received from Washington. But it is also true that Walpin, a Republican activist attorney and trustee of the Federalist Society before Bush appointed him as inspector general, went well beyond his official mandate last year by publicizing supposed "criminal" wrongdoing by Johnson in the days before the Sacramento mayoral election.

And it is true as well that Lawrence Brown, the United States attorney in Northern California who received Walpin's findings, decided not to bring any criminal charges against Johnson and instead reached a settlement with him and St. Hope.

That settlement, filed last April, is a public document that reflects no great honor on Johnson, to put it mildly. But it also voided any possibility of a "coverup" by Obama or anyone in his administration. The case against Johnson had concluded months before the president acted to dismiss Walpin -- and in fact only drew attention to the case by doing so, as he must have known would happen.

Just as salient as the accusations against Johnson, however, are those brought by Brown against Walpin. A Republican named as the acting U.S. attorney by Bush, Brown filed a sharply worded complaint against Walpin with the oversight office for the federal inspectors general that charged him with ethical violations in an overzealous assault on Johnson and St. Hope. The U.S. attorney said that Walpin had "overstepped his authority by electing to provide my office with selective information and withholding other potentially significant information at the expense of determining the truth" -- in other words, Walpin had failed to provide substantive exculpatory facts to the U.S. attorney, while trying to push the government into opening a criminal probe of Johnson. During the election season in Sacramento, Brown noted that Walpin had sought publicity for his findings against Johnson in the local media before discussing them with the U.S. Attorney's Office, "hindering our investigation and handling of this matter."

Here the parallels with the early history of Whitewater seem nearly perfect. Brown's levelheaded handling of Walpin's exaggerated charges against Johnson are much like the dismissal of the original Whitewater complaints by Charles Banks, the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark., and an honest Republican who refused to gin up a phony indictment of the Clintons before the 1992 election (and lost his job as a result). And Walpin's excessive zeal and lust for publicity bear a startling resemblance to the antics of L. Jean Lewis, the Resolution Trust Corp. official who concocted a series of implausible theories implicating the Clintons in the looting of an Arkansas savings and loan.

Walpin, incidentally, is a longtime movement conservative and a trustee of the Federalist Society. He obviously has plenty of friends ready to publicize his martyrdom. Already Judicial Watch has offered their aid, which again is a rerun, as they were the wingnut front organization largely responsible for so many drummed-up Clinton scandals in the 1990s. Darrell Issa, the Congressman who bankrolled the recall of Gray Davis in 2003, is trying to attack the credibility of Lawrence Brown by asking him to explain his complaint against Walpin. And Walpin himself wants Congressional hearings.

You can pretty much write the rest of this script yourself. Obviously it may go nowhere and just get relegated to the back pages of conservative fundraising newsletters and "Obama Body Count" email forwards. But at least some elements of the right are trying to turn this into a Whitewater Reunion Tour. And all we know the conservative noise machine/traditional media "jump/how high" relationship.

Keep an eye on this.

Wired For Conservatism

E.J. Dionne is one of the first traditional media journalists, to my knowledge, to openly state that the media tilts to the right, in the context of how the chattering class leaps at any utterance from the Newt Gingrichs and Rush Limbaughs and Dick Cheneys of the world, and he explains how this distorts the debate in Washington and what people pick up in the cultural milieu.

If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina [...]

This was brought home at this week's annual conference of the Campaign for America's Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.

In other words, they see Obama not as the parody created by the far right but as he actually is: a politician with progressive values but moderate instincts who has hewed to the middle of the road in dealing with the economic crisis, health care, Guantanamo and the war in Afghanistan.

Dionne goes on to describe a panel he witnessed Tuesday with Jared Polis, Donna Edwards and Raul Grijalva - three of the most progressive members of Congress, but three whose names aren't in the Village Rolodex, and whose views have almost no impact on the way the debates in Washington are presented to the public. That doesn't mean they don't have power and importance - their decision along with the Progressive Caucus to pool their power and force the public option into the health care debate was masterful - but it confuses the way Obama is presented, and the space to criticize him from the left. Edwards explained this very specifically:

Polis, Edwards and Grijalva also noted that proposals for a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system, which they support, have fallen off the political radar. Polis urged his activist audience to accept that reality for now and focus its energy on making sure that a government insurance option, known in policy circles as the "public plan," is part of the menu of choices offered by a reformed health-care system.

But Edwards noted that if the public plan, already a compromise from single-payer, is defined as the left's position in the health-care debate, the entire discussion gets skewed to the right. This makes it far more likely that any public option included in a final bill will be a pale version of the original idea.

Her point has broader application. For all the talk of a media love affair with Obama, there is a deep and largely unconscious conservative bias in the media's discussion of policy. The range of acceptable opinion runs from the moderate left to the far right and cuts off more vigorous progressive perspectives.

And actually, this SUITS Obama. If he wanted to pick his enemies, he's much rather have Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney than Jared Polis, Donna Edwards and Raul Grijalva. For one, the public has a fairly definitive opinion of those conservatives, at least relative to Obama, and the President wins those debates without saying a word. For another, Obama has no need to move from the moderate center if the Beltway criticism doesn't approach him from that perspective. His choice of advisers and policy options clearly put him in that moderate mainstream of the Democratic Party, and it's where he feels - has always felt - the most comfortable.

The media has an interest in defining the terms of the debate, indeed a self-interest, given the conglomerates that they are. When ABC News gives the same amount of space to Sean Hannity as they do to the Secretary of State, implicit in that editorial decision is the fact that Hannity has spent many years as part of the ABC Radio Network. When business stories betray a perspective more sympathetic to corporate America than the working class, the very fact of the corporate behemoths that populate modern media bear a lot on that decision. But these decisions also enable Obama to operate without equal pressure from all sides of the policy argument, essentially a free hand. This may keep conservatism alive, but it also co-opts the Democratic Administration by giving them the only pressure they consider important - pressure from the right.

Conservatives Now So Crazy They Think Obama Is Closing Chrysler Dealerships for Political Advantage

I'm a little late to this, but let me agree that the idea of Barack Obama having nothing better to do than to punish conservative car dealers for their donations to Republicans was always going to end up as a massive FAIL. Car dealers are a conservative lot - older, more male, more suburban, more business-friendly and more wealthy than the general population. Nate Silver does with graphs and statistics what should be immediately clear.

Overall, 88 percent of the contributions from car dealers went to Republican candidates and just 12 percent to Democratic candidates. By comparison, the list of dealers on Doug Ross's list (which I haven't vetted, but I assume is fine) gave 92 percent of their money to Republicans -- not really a significant difference.

There's no conspiracy here, folks -- just some bad math.

One of the insaneosphere denizens explains why they'll keep pushing this despite the lack of evidence.

Of course I want this looked into, of course. It's my guess it's a non-story, not my expert opinion.

But the MSM is so ridiculously biased that they make honesty a dangerous and politically counterproductive business.

The only way to even get the MSM to do their jobs and take a look is to pressure them by claiming Worst Scandal Eveh, even if we don't all necessarily buy that. But we have to claim that in order to spur any sort of media interest whatsoever. (That interest, of course, coming in the form of stories like Conservatives Now So Crazy They Think Obama Is Closing Chrysler Dealerships for Political Advantage, which isn't exactly the headline we seek, but that's the best we can hope for from the MSM.)

I obliged Ace with the suggested headline.

I understand the persecution complex; it's been conservative bread-and-butter for years. But that's quite an interesting admission, that the right will literally run with anything, no matter the truth, just to start up the Wurlitzer and make the media dance. That this ends up making them look relentlessly stupid in the end apparently doesn't matter.

The Early Winner In The Sotomayor Battle

As I said before, despite the bluster, Republican Senators are considering it unlikely to mount a filibuster against Sonia Sotomayor. But there's an entire architecture of movement conservative organizations designed to push a filibuster fight, and they will be hard to ignore. After all, this is how they make their bacon:

Organizations that have been preparing for a major confirmation battle — and that depend on such fights to raise money, motivate supporters and galvanize enthusiasm for their agendas — made it clear they don't intend to sit out the debate, filibuster or no. The debate over Sotomayor could also lay groundwork for fights over later high court nominations the president might make.

Never mind the longer game of making Sotomayor illegitimate, calling into question all her future opinions, and rousing the base even more now that such a woman sits on the nation's highest court ready to persecute them.

TPMDC profiles these movement actors, the same few people you'll see quoted in every paper and appearing on every cable show in the next couple months. There's Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice (who used Sotomayor's taste in Puerto Rican cuisine to call into question her judicial philosophy - really, he did), Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who I heard on NPR criticize Sotomayor for her "silence" in an opinion she participated in but didn't write, and Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice. There are more groups, like Judicial Watch, The Federalist Society, plus the usual think tanks, et al. Why you need this many overlapping judicial organizations is beyond me, but I guess the goal is to employ as many movement conservatives as possible, plus you can mix and match them in the media to give the illusion of a broad perspective. And filibuster or not, they have to be out there raising hell and raising money. A Supreme Court fight without storefront conservative judicial organizations would be like tax season without accountants.

But TPMDC missed the one individual who has certainly gained the most in the early going of this nomination - New Republic writer Jeffrey Rosen. After all, his use of gossipy talking points has driven the entire discussion in the media, and made him ubiquitous even if he hasn't graced the camera with his presence. And though his reputation ought to be in tatters for pushing such demeaning talking points into the mainstream, as it turns out, he has the lead story in this week's New York Times magazine.

The article sidesteps the Sotomayor controversy, preferring instead to define liberalism on the Court in the 21st century, and the term "democratic constitutionalist." But the meta question of "why the hell is the NYT allowing Jeffrey Rosen a platform?" can never be far from the informed reader. Far from being punished or blackballed for his role in trying to destroy the reputation of a soon-to-be sitting Supreme Court Justice, Rosen has been celebrated and promoted. Of course, in the Village, Rosen is "one of us," and Sotomayor is "one of them."

Of Empathy, Identity and Double Standards

I've been trying to make this point about Sonia Sotomayor and the empathy talking point, but I don't know if it's come through, so I'll outsource to Ezra:

So far, most of the commentary has focused on Frank Ricci, a dyslexic firefighter who studied endlessly and hired someone to read him flash cards before a tough test that would decide a promotion. Ricci passed, but the test results were thrown out. The reason? Not enough African Americans cleared the exam, and the department worried it would be sued under Title VII. Ricci's tale is troubling. It's hard not to feel for him.

Ricci's experience, however, is not related to the legal questions presented by the case. As Dylan Matthews explains at Campus Progress, Sotomayor appears simply to have addressed the question before the court: That question was whether the county had reason to believe that the test results left it vulnerable to a lawsuit. Indeed, as Dahlia Lithwick and Doug Kendall argue over at Slate, Sotomayor is being attacked for something relatively odd: Rather than empathizing with Ricci, she ruled on the legal issue at hand. And that meant ruling against Ricci.

Conservatives, thus, are in the awkward position of choosing one of two lines of attack. You can argue that Sotomayor is too empathetic to make a good justice, or you can argue that her ruling in Ricci was cold and unfair. But you can't argue both.

Exactly. And Sotomayor almost makes a fetish of following the law in her opinions, so any question of her use of "empathy" only comes from the very natural way human beings, unlike robots, are shaped by their experiences and points of view.

Which is why the racialism argument is also so bogus, because it assumes that white men have absolutely no life experience upon which to draw.

Taylor's objection is based on two social assumptions that need to be utterly destroyed, the first being the idea that social perspective of white, Christian, heterosexual males are somehow "objective" and uncolored by life experience, and the second being the idea that acknowledging cultural specificity among non-whites is the same thing as assertions of white supremacy by whites. The fact is that many Latinos have faced a specific experience of systemic and social discrimination not shared by non-Latinos, and this experience colors their perspective just as not having it does. If there's anything problematic about Sotomayor's statement, it's that it is as nonspecific about "whiteness" as Taylor's is.

What people like Taylor find so offensive about Sotomayor's statement is that it properly exposes the perspective of white, Christian heterosexual men as specific to their experience, rather than the omniscient eye of G-d they're used to presenting it as. Does anyone seriously believe Dred Scott or Plessy v. Fergueson would have been upheld by any court that had the remotest idea of what it was like to be black or a slave? Or similarly that the court would have held in Minor v. Happersett that being a citizen didn't mean you had a right to vote if you were a woman? Do we really believe that judges in these cases were "simply upholding the law" in the absence of the cultural and social prejudices of their times?

I think this nomination has revealed far more about the conservatives who object to Sotomayor than the nominee herself. They really feel entitled by dint of birth and circumstance, and yet simultaneously feel that they are the most objective, neutral observers possible. Sotomayor provided an uncomfortable truth with that statement, one that her white male detractors refuse to acknowledge. Indeed, they are colored by their perspective and life experience in opposing her - a perspective of perpetual victimhood.