We knew even before the election that the right was going to be trying to delegitimize Barack Obama's and the Democrats' electoral victory, since it would be their only hope of hanging on to their own few rapidly vanishing strands of legitimacy, not to mention relevance.

Well the whole "ACORN used fraud to win" meme that was originally favored in this role didn't pan out so well, given the size and breadth of the victory.

So now they're going for the tried and true: The Librul Media Made Us Do It. That, after all, was the underlying meme in that phony Zogby poll intended to make Obama supporters look stoopid. It's looking like a desperate grasp at the strawman.

Mark Halperin, the onetime ABC News honcho now writing for Time, was out there yesterday doing his best to help. He told a crowd that the media bias in Obama's favor this election was overwhelming:

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Yeah, all that media silence about Jeremiah Wright, while they couldn't seem to stop talking about Pastor Hagee -- that was so biased! ... What's that? That's not what happened? I guess Halperin has me confused.

Now, it's probably true that the media coverage tended to make Obama look like a principled, thoughtful leader, and McCain look like a gimmick-driven hack willing to say or do anything to get elected. But then, that might be because McCain's campaign itself -- from taking on an unqualified dimwit like Sarah Palin as a running mate to dragging out Joe the Plumber at every stop -- made him look that way. As Colbert says, reality does tend to have a liberal bias.

But I have to say, Halperin's line that this was "the most disgusting failure in our business since the Iraq war" is a real piece of chutzpah.

Because when there was a chance for the media to do something about properly informing the public about the Iraq war, Halperin -- who had the reins of one of the three major network's news operations at the time -- did nothing. The media's coverage of the war, particularly during the critical runup period, was in fact a historic case of misfeasance that has had disastrous consequences for the nation. And Mark Halperin was a major player in that failure.

Continue reading »

The wingnuts have been proudly displaying Dan Rather's scalp on their trophy wall ever since they chased him out of CBS with the "Memogate" nonsense. But this particular scalp may be about to turn out not to be so dead after all.

Last year Rather filed a lawsuit against CBS that mostly drew derisive snorts from both the wingnuts and the Village Idiots, but which in fact promises to be very interesting indeed if the trial takes place. As things stand now, it's set to go to trial in February.

But already some noteworthy items are seeping out.

Felix Gillette at the New York Observer got a look at some of the documents and found a list of names that CBS executives had compiled for its "independent panel" to examine the claims against Rather.

The list includes Mr. Boccardi's name as well such seemingly reasonable potential candidates as David Gergen, Gene Roberts (former managing editor of The New York Times) and Dick Wald (former president of NBC News).

Then things get a little bit more conservative. Under the category "others" are the names of potential candidates such as… Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh.

Herein, CBS’s full list of "others":

* William Buckley
* Robert Novak
* Kate O’Beirne
* Nicholas Von Hoffman
* Tucker Carlson
* Pat Buchanan
* George Will
* Lou Dobbs
* Matt Drudge
* Robert Barkley
* Robert Kagan
* Fred Barnes
* William Kristol
* John Podhoretz
* David Brooks
* William Safire
* Bernard Goldberg
* Ann Coulter
* Andrew Sullivan
* Christopher Hitchens
* PJ O’Rourke
* Christopher Caldwell
* Elliot Abrams
* Charles Krauthammer
* William Bennett
* Rush Limbaugh

At the very bottom of the list, someone wrote in one more name. "Roger Ailes."

What, Torquemada wasn't available?

Eli has more.

Gotta love that "librul media"...
Daily Kos:

What can one say about the Associated Press these days? Rather than realize the error of their ways in becoming a conservative mouthpiece out of their D.C. office rather than an objective news source, they've apparently doubled down their bets on McCain's dying presidential campaign.

Just moments after Obama's detailed, inspirational video tonight, the AP's McCain-loving Washington Bureau came out with their latest piece:

Obama's prime-time ad skips over budget realities

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.

Obama's assertion that "I've offered spending cuts above and beyond" the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans. His vow to save money by "eliminating programs that don't work" masks his failure throughout the campaign to specify what those programs are — beyond the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

What follows is a detailed hit-piece on multiple fronts that reads as if it were taken straight from the RNC. The whole thing would be hilarious in is disingenuity, were it not such a sad piece of hackery, and were the stakes not so incredibly high.

AP is also the outfit that heavily weighted the evangelical vote to give McCain a much closer chance in their presidential polls.

Download | Play    Download | Play

So Bill O'Reilly is finally confronted with the reality that Daily Kos is nothing like a neo-Nazi hate site.

Give BillO credit: He decided to air a segment on the anti-Obama hate sites that can be found on the Web. He had on Townhall.com's Amanda Carpenter, who reported to O'Reilly that the virulent hatred of Obama found at neo-Nazi and white-supremacist websites was something truly stomach-churning.

At the height of the discussion he asks:

O'Reilly: OK, now, the Kos is a hate site on the left, uh, how would these neo-Nazi things compare to that?

Carpenter: Ah, these are ... it's, it's much worse than Kos.

O'Reilly: Yeah?

Carpenter: Because it's filled with the worst slurs you could think of against a black person. You know, they talk about aborting black children. The degree of casualness to which it's done is most alarming. I mean, I was frightened in there. I mean there's literature, you know, different kinds of bombs --

O'Reilly: Anything else? Sure. I mean, these are people like Tim McVeigh, who blow -- you know, those people --

Carpenter: Right.

Right. Those whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. And so we quickly move on ...

Except that this kind of blows a hole in O'Reilly's horseshit claim that Kos is a "hate site" just like the Nazis. As we noted at the time, there's a wee problem with this thesis: what real Nazi/hate sites are like.

Ah, but instead we quickly move on to even more specious crap ...

Continue reading »

The Jed Report put together this little video mashup of WFTV's Barbara West, giving us a nice side-by-side contrast of her respective interviews with Joe Biden and John McCain.

You can see the full Biden interview here and the full McCain video here. The latter is especially instructive in that we see just how far out there West is; mostly she's obsequious to the point of outright cheerleading with McCain, and her idea of a "tough" question for him is to ask him why he's not being wingnutty enough!

OTOH, you've just gotta love when she quotes Marx and then asks Biden why "spreading the wealth" isn't Marxist. Someone's been drinking the Bircher Kool Aid, which is in fact a direct ticket to Planet Bizarro.

Well, over at Firedoglake, they have a petition up asking for the station to apologize for sponsoring such bizarre behavior and such biased treatment. Go sign it.

"Gotta make it a horse race until the bitter end..." has to be the rallying cry of the corporate media. But the lengths that they'll go to keep that horserace going is so dishonest and so damaging to democracy that I fear we'll forever be teetering on the precipice of losing that democracy.

Yesterday morning, while perusing my news feeds for potential posts, I saw this headline on YahooNews: Endorsements Flood In: Obama gets Powell nod; McCain gets plenty too, which links to this article, unattributed to a specific reporter.

In it, they acknowledge that Obama has received endorsements from prominent Republicans like Colin Powell, Christopher Buckley and Michael Smerconish, but temper it with McCain endorsements from President Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the NRA, as if anyone expected them to endorse anyone other than the GOP candidate.

Then they go to the inane Hollywood endorsements, being sure to mention the Baldwin brothers--describing Democrat Alec as "loud" and Republican Stephen as "outspoken". Given that I fervently hope that no one is swayed one way or the other by an actor's political affiliation, my suspicion is that the inclusion is more to trivialize the notion of endorsements overall, especially considering the power of the Powell defection to Obama's campaign.

But more egregiously, citing the Editor & Publisher article that reports that Obama has received 115 newspaper endorsements to McCain's 38, YahooNews ignores the overwhelming support for Obama and instead lists what they term "key" endorsements--3 for McCain, 2 for Obama. Those key newspapers for McCain? The rabidly partisan Washington Examiner, New York Post and Boston Herald, two of which are part of Murdoch's NewsCorp. Obama's key endorsements are from those silly little papers nobody reads, the LA Times and Washington Post.

Since I can't know if they'll update or change the article, here it is in full below the fold:

Continue reading »

Download | Play    Download | Play (h/t Dave)

Finally, someone pushes back against the media's need to create false equivalencies! Nobel Economics Prize shortlister Paul Krugman tries to make a cogent point about how there are those in the Republican Party who simply cannot accept a Democrat governing:

KRUGMAN: This is also…this is not just about McCain, what he did. The fact of the matter is, for a long time, we’ve had a substantial fraction of the Republican base that just does not regard the Democrats governing as legitimate. Remember, the Clinton years, craziness, right? That they were murderers, drug smugglers, and the imminent prospect of what looks like a Democratic victory would drive a lot of these people crazy even if Sarah Palin wasn’t saying these inflammatory things. It’s going to be very ugly after the election.

Only to have Cokie Roberts try to draw the false equivalency of Democrats not accepting the results of the 2000 and 2004 elections:

ROBERTS: On both sides, that’s true. I also think you’ve had a huge number of Democrats who think the Republicans are illegitimate and that was particularly true after the 2000 election and to some degree, after 2004. And so, you really do have, at the core of each party, people who are not ready to accept the verdict of the election.

Um, Cokie? Not the same thing at all. By all standards, Bill Clinton won the elections. The witch hunt that went after him had nothing to do with the legitimacy of his election...they just threw as much mud as they could to see if something would stick, regardless of truth--Vince Foster, Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers/Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky.

The Democrats who view this administration as illegitimate do so because there is significant (and almost wholly media-ignored evidence) that the election was manipulated for George W. Bush. We don't need to make up scandals that go nowhere...we just need to find some backbone in DC to actually investigate those openly before us.

It's unfortunate, however, that Krugman is not given the opportunity to explain why he rejects such false equivalencies...allowing something other than the standard GOP framing out there.

Krugman also raises an important point that I think all of us should bear in mind even after the election. Assuming that trends stay the way they are in the next three weeks and Obama is elected, our job is far from over. It is not inaccurate to say that much of these slings and arrows pointed towards Obama are the foundation for the work the Republican Party will spend the next 4-8 years to de-legitimize an Obama presidency. At its core, this faction of the GOP believes that Obama does not deserve the presidency -- because he is not like them -- and will stop at nothing to bring him down, just as we saw with Clinton. The particulars are different: birth certificate, secret Muslim beliefs, anti-American pastor, consorting with terrorists, and if we're completely honest, the color of his skin as well. But while the specific allegations are different, the tactic is exactly the same.

The Show: ABC's 20/20 Friday 10th October. The message: young people are too dumb to vote and should stay home instead. That's the thrust of a segment by John Stossel, self-proclaimed "libertarian" and regular contributor to the hard-right's fanzine, Commentary.

Watch it here.

The folks at Future Majority are understandably ticked, calling the segment an attack on the very idea of American democracy.

There is a lot that is wrong with this piece. Yes, there are many uninformed voters, but that category is not limited to young people, who are unfortunately the main target of this piece. Anyone who has ever watched Jay Leno could tell you that many Americans are uninformed about current events. Unfortunately, some see that as an excuse to rob people of their constitutional rights, and Stossel and ABC are happy to play along.

But all is not as it appears in this report. In talking with HeadCount, the group featured in the piece, it's clear that Stossel and 20/20 were not interested in giving the young people they interviewed a fair shake. They had a narrative to their story and stuck by it - facts be damned. More than that, they worked -um, creatively - to make sure their point of view dominated the piece.

According to Head Count, Stossel's team cherry-picked responses for their piece, giving the impression that respondents were far less knowledgeable than they were. "Far more ... were knowledgeable than implied by the report" and:

Many interviewees were knowledgeable about some issues, but less so when it came to other issues. The young voter responses included in the report were cherry-picked by Stossel and ABC producers to highlight only the incorrect answers.

Indeed, the show's one producer got into an argument with one young voter when the producer tried to say that the length of single term for a congressional representative was four years. The "young and dumb" voter had the correct answer of two years.

Continue reading »

On Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews interviewed his daughter, Caroline, as one of the student members of the group Concerned Youth of America, and just didn't bother mentioning the familial relationship. Apparently his daughter had asked not to be identified as such and, rather than interview another member of the group and thus preserve his journalistic integrity (heh), Matthews went right ahead anyways.

It's such a small-beer breach of what passes for journalistic ethics nowadays as to go almost un-noticed, although in the halcyon days of journalism it would probably have gotten him fired or at least earned the censure of his peers. It simply doesn't compare, though, with the likes of Andrea Mitchell reporting on the bank bailout plan - and blaming Obama for its failure - while married to Alan Greenspan and not making full disclosure of that fact before every report.

Continue reading »

  By almost any accounting, the past few days have been calamitous for John McCain. But not according to Roger Simon of the Politico. While McCain's transparently cynical ploy to play hero in the Wall Street bailout drama was widely derided as a stunt, Simon on Thursday insisted "it isn't as dumb or as desperate as it looks." Then as polls revealed American voters saw Barack Obama as the clear winner of Friday's generally even debate, Simon instead announced "the Mac is back."

Simon's hagiographic treatment of McCain didn't start this week. After the Republican convention earlier this month, Simon regurgitated the talking points emanating from McCain Central:

John McCain is a maverick who has now done what mavericks almost never do: win. And now he must lead a party while maintaining his independence from it.

It's a dilemma, but McCain attempted to resolve it by facing it head on. "I don't work for a party," he said. "I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you."

Then as the economic crisis threatened to undermine the Republican's campaign, Simon praised McCain for "shooting craps" in trying to appropriate the Wall Street meltdown for his own political purposes:

John McCain is now shooting craps with his presidential campaign. It is high risk. But all he needs is a little luck to pull off his current gamble.

McCain has suspended his campaign to work on a solution for the nation's financial meltdown, and he has threatened to pull out of the first presidential debate scheduled for Friday unless Congress takes action by then.

McCain has been attacked from all sides for doing this, but it isn't as dumb or as desperate as it looks.

Then came Friday's debate.

Continue reading »

Gawker slaps Drudge about the phony Oprah story.   Like so many aspects of Sarah Palin's history, the Oprah story went contrary to logic and common sense.  

As they say, it's too late though.   The media have spoken.   Truth be damned.

(h/t Country Fair)

Just because Carl Cameron of FOX repeats John McCain talking points does not make them true.

Here's the DNC response:

"American flags were proudly waved by the 75,000 people who joined Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention. John McCain should applaud that, but instead his supporters wrongfully took leftover bundles of our flags from the stadium to play a cheap political stunt calling into question our patriotism. On the same day he agrees to join Barack Obama at Ground Zero on September 11, John McCain attacks the patriotism of Obama supporters who so proudly waved the American flag at our historic event in Denver just days ago."
---DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney.

I'm really shocked they didn't find lapel pins too....

Every time I turn on the TV and watch CNN and FOX (my hotel doesn't get MSNBC) every Republican operative controls the dialog and direction of the panel discussion and it's disgusting. Just one example---Hillary Clinton gave a brilliant speech last night, but every Amy Holmes-type talking head throws as much cold water on the speech as he or she can. The result is that the Dem talkers spend the rest of the time disputing the outrageous claims made and thus the GOP controls the entire framing and the entire segment. It's shameful that the networks are allowing this to happen. I saw Jeffrey Toobin tell Amy that she was out of her mind with some of her comments and the discussion continues to that end. Soledad O'Brien comes back and says "well, that was a lively discussion." Oh, no it was not. It's a calculated ratf&@k. This is going on all day and all night.

Why is the Democratic Convention being ruined by these creeps? And why do all the networks allow it to happen? Why do we need them on in force to counter what is supposed to be our event?

I'm in Denver and it's a completely different atmosphere. Party unison abounds, but you'd never know it from watching TV. Karl Rove acts like the biggest troll known to man---making sure to point out every little detail he dislikes. Well, his mission is to get McCain in the White House. But he's the expert that Chris Wallace goes to for his "unbiased" take.

Will the Democratic talkers be allowed to do the same to the Republican Convention? I think not. It will be viewed as being an incredible event.

As ThinkProgress reported, CNN on Tuesday showed a deceptive chart which wrongly suggests that John McCain's tax plan provides more Americans with greater savings than that offered by Barack Obama. But CNN's upper-crust income brackets, which start at $161,000 and represent only 5% of taxpayers, conceal the inescapable truth that Barack Obama's proposals offer working and middle class Americans steeper tax benefits at every income level up to $110,000. And according to a new Gallup poll released this week, that truth isn't lost on American voters.

By 48% to 43%, Americans surveyed by Gallup say Obama would better handle the issue of taxes than John McCain. And with good reason. As the Washington Post detailed, an analysis by the Tax Policy Center showed:

"Obama's plan gives the biggest cuts to those who make the least, while McCain would give the largest cuts to the very wealthy."

Continue reading »

Download | play   Download | play   (h/t Heather)

During the roundtable discussion on today's This Week, "journalist" Mark Halperin shows yet again that he's fully in bed with John McCain.  As Donna Brazile, Cokie Roberts and the always flaky George Will do the usual back and forth, Halperin chimes in with a zinger that is so ridiculous that even host George Stephanopoulos can't let it slide:

Halperin: " My hunch is that this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates, but it's Barack Obama. I believe this has opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers. I think that the Obama campaign agressively jumped on something -"

Stephanopolous: "Don't you think that was going to come up anyway?"

Of course it is, it already has and Halperin knows that. He speaks as though John McCain hasn't already been running a nasty, Rove-designed campaign already.  Halperin's talking points sound eerily familiar to those of another McCain hack, Joe Watkins. Perhaps they're feeding at the same trough?

UPDATE:  (Nicole) Oh, this is too good.  Balloon Juice's John Cole awards Halperin an award of merit for his servicing of McCain. (h/t Bill W.)