Glenn Greenwald reports:

Beginning last night, St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be, even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 -- with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas canisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies. Numerous protesters and observers were tear gassed and injured.

... Perhaps most extraordinarily, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now -- the radio and TV broadcaster who has been a working journalist for close to 20 years -- was arrested on the street and charged with "conspiracy to riot." Audio of her arrest, which truly shocked and angered the crowd of observers, is here. I just attended a Press Conference with St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Police Chief John M. Harrington and -- after they boasted of how "restrained" their police actions were -- asked about the journalists and lawyers who had been detained and/or arrested both today and over the weekend. They said they wouldn't give any information about journalists who had been arrested today, though they said they believed that "one journalist" had been, and that she "was a participant in the riots, not simply a non-participant."

Tear gas has also been used.

Do you think maybe that events in St. Paul would have gotten more attention already if we weren't all distracted by the Palin circus show?

Update: Amy has been released, but her two producers, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, are still being held.

"I was down on the convention floor interviewing delegates when I heard that two of our producers had been arrested," said Goodman. "I ran down to Jackson and 7th Street, where the police had moved in."

Goodman said that when she ran up to find out what was going on, she was also arrested.

"They seriously manhandled me and handcuffed my hands behind my back. The top ID [at the convention] is to get on the floor and the Secret Service ripped that off me. I had my Democracy Now! ID too. I was clearly a reporter."

Goodman, who was released after being charged with a misdemeanor, said that Salazar had been hurt in the face, while Kouddous had been thrown up against a wall and hurt his elbow.

"Nicole told me that as they moved in on three sides, she asked them 'How do I get away from this?' and they jumped on her."

Both Kouddous and Salazar could be held for up to 36 hours.

"One of the police kept shouting at me 'Shut up, shut up," she said. "It was extremely threatening."

Update 2: Democracy Now! reports that both Kouddous and Salazar have now been released too. (H/t Kat)

Continue reading »

I see Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, but where'd Amato get to?  Dare I guess he was trying to work that Amato mojo on some hot female Democrat delegates to get into the party?

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

Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! looks at the Blue Dogs' party at the DNC and how secretive they are being towards the press about their get together.  Medea Benjamin and Code Pink show up as well to let the Blue Dogs know how they feel.   

However, they're not being completely discreet, as Matt Stoller points out at Open Left.   Gotta love that democracy in action.

According to Glenn, and anyone who follows American politics, this is the Democrats' grand strategy: Give Bush everyone he wants so that the Republicans can't attack them as weak and spineless. How's that working out so far?

Salon:

Historians writing about the Bush era were given a great gift yesterday -- an iconic headline that explains so much of what has happened in this country over the last seven years:

Their rationale for doing that is that it prevents the Republicans from depicting them as "weak," because nothing exudes strength like bowing. Here's more evidence of the brilliance of the Democratic strategy to show how "strong" and "tough" they are by bowing to Bush and all of his demands, from this morning's New York Times article by Eric Lichtblau:

WASHINGTON — The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government's surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues...

There comes a point when you have to wonder whether or not the Democrats actually support some of these disastrous bills they help usher through Congress. President Bush is the most unpopular President since the advent of polling, yet time after time they cave and give in to every one of his demands, despite overwhelming opposition to the policies he seeks. Save for the few in Congress who actually vote against these monstrosities, it's hard to deny that the majority of them actually think things like telecom immunity are a bad idea. After all, as we learned last week, it pays off.

Glenn Greenwald writes a post called : Keith Olbermann: Then and now.

Olbermann responds to Glenn here. 'Well, You Stumped Me'

Markos joins in Countdown:

MOULITSAS: Well, if that's the strategy, he has said nothing to indicate that and this is not the sort of thing that I think you have to keep quiet and secretive. I mean, if that's his strategy, he can say, "This is a bill that's flawed," but, really at the end of the day he has a chance to stand for the Constitution and to show that he will protect it against forces that seek to undermine it and he will show that he has, like I said before, that he is a leader and will take the mantle of leadership on this issue and take control of the Democratic Party. 

Glenn then continues: 

Markos -- who observed: "I don't think he's going to lose any support, I mean, let's be honest. I mean, it's either Obama or John McCain" -- nonetheless added:
I think what's at stake, though, is a lot of the intensity of support for Barack Obama. And he spent the last two years telling us how he's going to be the leader of the free world, not to mention the Democratic Party and this nation . . . . I don't want to hear him talk about leadership. I don't want to hear him talk about defending the Constitution; I want to see him do it.
That is precisely the point, and of course those who believe in defending core constitutional liberties shouldn't remain quiet when any politician -- including Obama -- takes actions to erode them 

John Dean clarifies a statement he made on KO's show here....

I gotta go with Glenn on this one...And Jane follows up with this:

It's also interesting to note that the tools created to help organize Obama supporters against his opponents are now being used to organize themselves to communicate with him. There's a new group on "MyBarackObama.com" called "Senator Obama -- Please Vote Against FISA." Stop by and tell the Senator that you'll be voting for him in November and hoping that in the meantime, he does the right thing.

I was fortunate enough Thursday to interview Glenn Greenwald about his new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. In this podcast exclusive, we discuss the major theme of his book in the context of John McCain and the press' reverence for him, as well as the successful campaign we waged to kill the AT&T bill and what it says about the emerging power of the blogosphere.

Download | play

I'll post the transcript once it's complete. In the meantime, you can find some excerpts here and here, as well as some of the other reviews from around the blogosphere:

• Digby, and another one in the context of the ABC debate
  
• Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon
• Buzzflash
• Daily Kos

And don't forget to pick up a copy and support one of our own.

Glenn notes how well the media is doing its job:

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

The sad thing is that the mainstream press really does believe that things like Obama's poor bowling skills and the Clinton's tax returns are more important stories than, say, the trillion dollar war that continues to rage on with no end in sight or a collapsing economy. Like Glenn says, people care about the petty stuff because the media loves to tell themselves that they do.

We all helped Glenn's book reach #12  today when it was #212 yesterday.  Go Blogoshere. It would be great to push him into the Top Ten list. Jane makes an excellent point: "Nobody rips the right like Glenn Greenwald. Since there's no Richard Mellon Scaife to buy boxloads of books and force it onto the New York Times bestseller list, you can help do it the democratic way by buying the book."

Pre-order your copy today.

It would be great to move it into the top ten on Amazon. And I agree on this point all the way:

In a minimally rational world, a Republican presidential candidate like John McCain who has enabled all of that would have no chance. But -- in the absence of anything changing the way this works -- the establishment press will remove those considerations from its election coverage and the GOP's exploitation of bottom-feeding personality-based psychological, cultural and gender themes will predominate. In 2008, the GOP will dedicate itself single-mindedly to these same personality-based, manipulative electoral tactics because that is their only hope for winning.

There simply cannot be any greater priority than preventing a John McCain Presidency, one which would empower the same faction and continue the same policies that have been slowly though inexorably destroying this country, its institutions and political values. Understanding and neutralizing these tactics and the enabling media behavior is a prerequisite for preventing that...read on

Update: FDL makes a good point: Jane says:

The wingnut welfare queens have their books bought onto the New York Times bestseller list, and their ideas thus are able to penetrate much further than if they had to survive on their own merits. Please help us do the same for our team's very best, Glenn Greenwald -- without whose heroic efforts I have no doubt we'd have retroactive telecom immunity today.

...but the media ignores the candidate, does it really happen?

Glenn Greenwald looks at the media narratives that can't say enough about McCain's "rise from the dead" but ignore John Edwards' rise completely. (h/t Atrios)

Aside from the fact that these endless prediction games completely overwhelm any substantive discussions, their guesses -- which are really wishes -- are almost always dreadfully wrong and plainly designed to advance their concealed agenda for which candidates they like and dislike. Why is any of that something that reporters ought to be doing at all? Is there any distinction between what a "reporter" does and what a "pundit" does covering this campaign? There doesn't seem to be any.

As but one example, consider this new daily tracking poll today from Rasumussen Reports. At least according to this poll, it is true that there has been one candidate who has been genuinely surging in the last week or two among Democratic voters nationally -- John Edwards [..]

Yet to listen to media reports, Edwards doesn't even exist. His campaign is dead. He has no chance. They hate Edwards, hate his message, and thus rendered him invisible long ago, only now to declare him dead -- after he came in second place in the first caucus of the campaign.

Harry Reid mentions the blogs at around the 1:39 mark.  Yes, Senator, we're paying attention...

Why am I always saying "you've gotta be kidding me?" every time the "Democratic" "Majority" "Leader" takes a step?

Seriously, think about those three words and how completely meaningless each one of them is with this Congress.

Glenn Greenwald has the details,

The summarized version is that there were two competing bills which Reid could have brought to the floor -- the Senate Intelligence Committee version engineered by Jay Rockefeller and Dick Cheney which gives the administration most of what it wants, and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which does not contain telecom amnesty and contains far more extensive oversight protections. Reid could have brought the bill to the floor using whatever process he wanted, and he has decided -- contrary to weeks of assurances -- that the SIC bill will serve as the "base" bill, meaning that improving it (by removing amnesty and increasing oversight) will require 60 votes, rendering such efforts virtually impossible. In doing so, Reid is brazenly ignoring the demands of 14 Senators -- including all of the Democratic presidential candidates -- to have the Judiciary Committee bill be the base bill.

and Glenn sums it up this way...

The criticism isn't that Harry Reid is being insufficiently aggressive in opposing the White House. It's that he's doing what he can to support the White House, serving as their key ally. Read more...

As usual, we can also count on FireDogLake to keep us all up-to-date.

And if being "Democratic" "majority" "leader" is too much for Mr. Reid, maybe we can find another Senator. Just saying....

Oh and if you'd like to give Senator Reid a call (remember to be on-topic and respectful), his numbers are here (thanks, FDL).

UPDATE: Dodd will filibuster.

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters:

Attentive readers of Howard Kurtz's washingtonpost.com weekday media column may have noticed that on the fifth and final page of his 3,000-word December 6 post, Kurtz finally addressed the media controversy that erupted when Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald highlighted an egregious error made by Time magazine columnist Joe Klein. Klein had mocked a supposed Democratic legislative maneuver in Congress for being "well beyond stupid" and stressed how Democrats remain soft on the war on terror.[..]

The story, which raged online for more than two weeks and was commented upon by virtually every major liberal blogger, unfolded at the intersection between politics and media -- the same intersection that Kurtz writes about for a living as perhaps the most-read media writer in the country. Yet for weeks Kurtz remained silent about the Klein story; nothing in the Post, nothing in his online daily column, and nothing on CNN's Reliable Sources, the weekly media program that he hosts.

The deafening silence was baffling. As Greenwald noted in an email to me, "The story involved the most-read political journal in the country and one of the best-known pundits. It entailed numerous key media issues which Kurtz is assigned to cover, including the corrupt use of anonymous sources, uncritical reliance by reporters on partisan spin, and a media outlet's refusal to correct its errors honestly and clearly."

Unsurprisingly, nearly 3 pages of Kurtz's 5 page post was about either Bill or Hillary Clinton, neither getting particularly flattering coverage.

Glenn Greenwald has been following Time Magazine's Joe Klein and his increasingly bizarre (and demonstrably false) assertions on FISA and the Democratic majority.

Salon (watch ad for site pass):

Joe Klein has just posted yet again about his FISA confusion, and it has now moved well beyond farce into an almost pity-inducing realm. If Time has any dignity at all, someone there will intervene and put a stop to this. It's actually difficult to watch.

In the last five days alone, Klein has now written five separate times about his FISA debacle, and is further away than ever from having any idea what he's even talking about -- first was the column itself; second was the Swampland post the same day in which he emphatically defended the accuracy of what he wrote in response to my post; third was the post yesterday in which Klein said he "may have made a mistake in [his] column this week about the FISA legislation" -- the understatement of the year; fourth was an Update he added to that post this morning claiming that he did speak to a Democrat but "may have misinterpreted a Democratic source's point" and "if [he] did, a correction will appear in the print magazine next week"; and now, his fifth effort in tonight's post, actually worse than all the others, in which he still professes confusion after "spen[ding] the past few days nosing around in the ongoing dispute about what the House FISA Reform bill actually says."

The result of all this "nosing around": "I've reached no conclusions." And he then unleashes this:

I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right.

Yeah, Joe. God forbid you do some research before smearing a political party falsely. But wait, there's more. FDL's Jane Hamsher then wanted to check which editor at Time let untrue and unresearched assertions go out under Time's flagship banner multiple times, and guess what the editor's response was?

I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.

"That assumes that there are errors," she said. And hung up on me.

Nice. And not the first time that Painton has had this response. Rep. Rush Holt thinks that Time and Joe Klein got some 'splaining to do.

So again, the question must be asked: why would anyone give any credibility to Joe Klein or Time Magazine when reporting factual and researched stories are so patently unimportant to them?

UPDATE:  Glenn has more... 

This is insane. Whenever you confront authoritarian, conservative hacks---they always lash out because they can't stand anyone questioning their "authority!" The military and the Bush administration have been using the right wing blogs and their radio/TV pundits to funnel their propaganda for a long time now and the TNR saga is just another example of it. Check out this exchange between Public Affairs Officer Col. Boylan and Glenn Greenwald.

The subject line of the email -- which I am publishing in full, unedited form here -- is "The growing link between the U.S. military and right-wing media and blogs," which is the title of the post I wrote earlier this week regarding the politicization of the Army in Iraq, as evidenced by its constant coordination with, and leaking to, the likes of Matt Drudge, The Weekly Standard, and the most extremist right-wing blogs -- in the TNR/Beauchamp case and also more generally....read on

The military leadership in this instance is acting very---biased---as Cole points out.

Compare the almost matter-of-fact responses that right-wing PR bots like the Confederate Yankee get, and the taunting and juvenile tone Boylan uses when addressing Greenwald...

I've been writing a lot about the propaganda the military has been using to try unsuccessfully to promote the Iraq war to the American people. We need to thank Dan Froomkin bunches for his fine work also...And then there's the fine documentary called: "War Made Easy," that spells it out for us too....

Glenn Greenwald looks at the massive rationalizations that WaPo's Howie Kurtz and Shailagh Murray employ to pretend that they are fair "journalists."

Glenn Greenwald:

As we learned from both our Senate and House last week, in the United States we must never "attack the honor and integrity . . . of members of the United States Armed Forces." All good patriots from both parties agree on this.

That is why I was so shocked and outraged -- and more than a little upset -- when I went to FoxNews.com this morning and saw this:

I naturally assumed that the "disgraceful military leaders" attacked by the Fox headline must be those of another country, not those of the United States leading our Nation, putting themselves in harm's way, during a Time of War. Yet when I clicked on the item, this is the anti-military filth that I found:

And the text of the article -- by Fox News Contributor and frequent O'Reilly guest David Hunt -- is even more Despicable, as it repeatedly attacks the honor and integrity of members of the United States Armed Forces in one smearing paragraph after the next, beginning with this first sentence:

Our generals are betraying our soldiers . . . again.

And yet, Brit Hume still couldn't keep himself from making a few anti-MoveOn.org slams this morning on FOX News Sunday. Et tu, Brit?

Check mate.

Ledeen is perfectly content to urge war with Iran based on the moronic slogan -- now a right-wing article of faith -- that they have been "at war with us since 1979," but he is completely unwilling to account for his own behavior or that of the Reagan administration towards Iran during that time. And he's eager to leave all sorts of dark innuendo about Gen. Abizaid ("suppressing evidence" of Iranian acts of war) but refuses to state what he means or why he thinks Abazaid would engage in such treacherous behavior.

This is how neoconservatives function. Ledeen's intellectually dishonest tactic is found in virtually every one of Bill Kirstol's columns and Fox News television sneers. For instance, Kristol -- attacking Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's invitation to New Adolph Hitler President Ahmadinejad to speak -- says today: "A perfect synecdoche for too much of American higher education: they are friendlier to Ahmadinejad than to the U.S. military." So is Bollinger anti-American? A Traitor? As always, Kristol merely leaves the dirty innuendo against anyone who opposes more wars against Israel's enemies, but always lacks the courage explicitly to make the argument.

(Nicole:) Now contrast Glenn's excellent analysis with the news that Rudy Giuliani has brought on one of the PNAC elders, Norman Podhoretz, as a senior advisor on foreign policy for his campaign. Does that mean that if elected, Rudy will be making plans to bomb Iran (that assumes GWB won't beat him to it)?