Pay2Play Connolly’s Sources Are “Mystified”

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Before I get into the jist of this story, note two things.

First, Ceci Connolly, the reporter the WaPo was selling in their Pay2Play salons, is one of the bylined authors. (In fact, Connolly was the one recruited to convince Nancy Ann DeParle–Obama’s health care czar and the recipient of millions for serving on the board of corrupt health care companies–to attend, which sort of makes Connolly a broker rather than a reporter.)

And second, Connolly and her co-author egregiously break the WaPo’s rules on anonymity, which Ombud Andy Alexander reviewed just a few days ago.

Those are the two details I’d use to answer Aravosis’ puzzle–are these guys lying or idiots?

Neither. They’re trying to pivot their failure back onto progressives.

Here are the anonymous quotes that, for some reason, Ceci and friend couldn’t see fit to present in a way that accorded with the WaPo’s anonymity rules.

President Obama’s advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president’s top legislative priority.

Administration officials insisted that they have not shied away from their support for a public option to compete with private insurance companies, an idea they said Obama still prefers to see in a final bill.

But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.

"I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It’s a mystifying thing," he added. "We’re forgetting why we are in this."

Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president’s sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.

"It took on a life of its own," he said. [my emphasis]

Remember how we got to the stupid co-ops. Read more →

The Cost Of Obama’s Beer Fest Failure Is More Tasered Moms

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I wrote a series of posts about the incident surrounding Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. First, it was an illegal and unconstitutional arrest because of the abuse of police power and discretion. Second, irrespective of whether it was a racially motivated moment, it was one from which serious discussion could, and should, ensue. Third, that it was a teaching moment being given short shrift by the clumsy way Barack Obama inserted himself into it and then tried to extricate himself through the bogus "beer summit".

The thing that got me up in arms, from the start, is the undeniable fact that Gates’ arrest was illegal and an abuse of police power. As I described, take Gates’ conduct at its worst as described by the Cambridge police report, and the conduct simply does not meet the elements of disorderly conduct as arrested and charged on under the Massachusetts statute. There was no probable cause or legal basis for the arrest; it was simply a case of contempt of cop, and Sergeant Crowley decided to use the time honored police way of dealing with citizens in such situations, he abused his authority and badge by arresting the citizen.

The only thing unique about the Gates case is that it ended without serious harm to the citizen and it pierced the national conscience. The same base conduct plays out every minute of every day somewhere in the US. But the Gates/Crowley moment appears to have been lost without any intelligent discussion of the rampant abuse of police power and authority. Save for the opinions of Jonathan Turley and Jeff Toobin, which were minimized by MSNBC and CNN television coverage, there was precious little recognition by major media outlets of the root point of police power abuse.

Well, the scene in the video attached hereto is what happens in a society that refuses to address overreaching authoritarianism and unrestrained police projection. Moms with kids in minivans get Tasered and roughed up. In front of their children. Why? Because the cops can with relative impunity. The "Blue Line" circles the wagons around their fellow officers, prosecutors need their cooperation for prosecution and trials in actual major cases, and politicians are too cravenly worried about their next election to care. As Digby says:

If this is what they do when they have a video camera rolling Read more →

Dana Milbank’s Time Management Problems

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Dana Milbank reveals what really doomed Mouthpiece Theater.

Dana Milbank says it was clear that "Mouthpiece Theater" wasn’t working even before the "Bitch Beer" brouhaha. "We were trying to squeeze it into our daily routines, writing and filming it while still keeping up our other responsibilities, in my case writing four columns a week and in [Chris] Cillizza’s case writing umpteen blog items a day …If anybody has an idea about a video format that might work, please let me know." [my emphasis]

Now, the last time I heard Milbank complain about his oppressive workload of 4 columns a week, he also noted that those columns were 750 to 800 words (and that some weeks, he does just three columns). 

After which, in backstage discussions here at FDL, we’ve routinely made fun of this new unit, the "Milbank Unit." The context is usually something like, "Hey Gregg, I’ve published three Milbank Units this morning, can I break for lunch yet?" Or, "I’m kind of tired today, maybe I’ll produce just two Milbank Units today."

Poor, poor Dana Milbank–whose job appears to be attending important events like the latest Mohammed Jawad hearing and then going home to write about the Beer Summit he watched on TV instead.

In spite of the fact that his Beer Summit column was somewhat derivative of the legendarily crappy Mouthpiece Theater that got pulled, after his terribly taxing workload Dana just doesn’t have anything left to be funny, I guess.

And that, Dana explains, is why Mouthpiece Theater sucked so badly.

Mark Ambinder Thinks Granny “Really” Is a Clunker

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Mark Ambinder wrote a controversial post in which he compared efforts to protect social security in 2005 with the GOP’s Rent-a-Mobs now. His argument, basically, is that just because the Rent-a-Mobs were organized by the corporations trying to doom healthcare reform doesn’t mean we can assume the anxiety expressed by people at Town Halls isn’t "real" justifiable anxiety. And if that anxiety is "real," we need to deal with it.

When you find Astroturfing, the next question ought to be: but does it reflect anything real? If it does, then you’ve got work to do.

Now, Ezra has the best rebuttal to claims that the press should treat the Rent-a-Mobs as reflecting "real" anxiety. If it’s so important to report what goes on at these town halls, then why hasn’t the press reported the consistent call for single payer at town halls–sustained over a much longer period of time?

I’ve been attending health-care panels and events on a pretty regular basis for four or five years now. Each event, of course, is its own precious snowflake, with its own set of graphs and bullet points and dweebish jokes. But one thing is perfectly predictable: The Q&A session will be dominated by single-payer activists asking about HR 676.

[snip]

The media hasn’t shown the slightest inclination to cover their presence at event after event after event.

That’s worth keeping in mind as people begin to focus on the anti-health-care tea parties. The political system does not have some sort of consistent reaction to grassroots pressure. Rather, it picks and chooses when it wants to listen to the views of the very, very non-representative groups of people who sit through at town halls and panel discussions.[my emphasis]

Aside from Ambinder’s seeming fascination with Rent-a-Mobs to the detriment of single payer activists, there’s another problem with his argument. He argues that we can’t assume that the concerns expressed by the Rent-a-Mobs aren’t "real" concerns because there is "real" uncertainty about how health care reform will turn out. Fair enough. But to make his case, he chooses a wonky issue not really raised by the Rent-a-Mobs. He suggests the anxiety of those at the Rent-a-Mobs stems from their understanding of how iMAC will work (or, more specifically, whether it’ll even be passed by the Senate).

Take, for example, the question of whether people would have to change their policies or their doctors as the result of a robust public plan. Read more →

Rosenberg Guilty of “Unnecessary Profanity” But Not Harassment

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The Miami Herald has done an investigation into the allegation that their excellent Gitmo reporter, Carol Rosenberg, had sexually harassed a Gitmo officer, Jeffrey Gordon. The investigation concluded that Rosenberg used "unnecessary profanity," but had not harassed her accuser.

In a letter Monday to the Pentagon, Miami Herald Vice President of Human Resources Elissa Vanaver wrote that the newspaper’s internal investigation ‘‘did not find corroboration” for the complaint of sexual harassment and abusive behavior made last month by Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon.

Herald executives interviewed military officials and journalists from other news outlets, some of whom had witnessed the incidents Gordon cited in his complaint. "We found some inconsistencies in [Gordon’s] version of events," said Miami Herald Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal.

[snip]

The written complaint, which is available on the Internet and has been a hot topic on blogs that follow the Guantánamo story, prompted dozens of people familiar with the sometimes-contentious relationship between Gordon and Rosenberg to contact The Herald in support of Rosenberg, Gyllenhaal said.

"We even heard from generals," he added.

Aside from my, um, solidarity with someone guilty of unnecessary profanity (though I insist that "blowjob" is not a profanity), this conclusion makes me ask the question I asked earlier.

Did Gordon file a complaint about Rosenberg because she’s doing the best reporting from Gitmo?

The Stealing Wars: What’s Good for Gawker Is Good for WaPo’s Slate

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While a number of bloggers think Ian Shapira is a big baby, I think he’s got a point. He shows how Gawker took a story he worked eight hours on and–with 30 to 60 minutes of work–used much of his story for a post.

Sharpira’s got a point for two reasons. First, the Gawker post in question practiced god-awful linking etiquette–taking big chunks of Shapria’s story and only at the end posting a link to the WaPo. And it didn’t add much to the story. Gawker did do what it does best–wrapping the appropriate layer of snark around the abursdities or the world otherwise presented as serious. But it did use a whole lot of Shapira’s interview in the process.

But what Shapira is complaining–rightly–about is that Gawker, a creature of the internet world, did not use good etiquette according to the internet world’s rules. Curiously, though, while he did note that bloggers, too, make news,

And that wild world is killing real reporting — the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.

… He didn’t acknowledge that the WaPo at times does not itself always credit those it steals stories from (not even after Nick Denton pointed out that even when newspapers lift Gawker’s stories and credit them, they never give hot links). In other words, this bad etiquette thing is a two-way street, and newspapers have their own share of bad etiquette. (Incidentally, Eric Lieberman, WaPo’s General Counsel quoted in the story, admitted to me several years ago that his office followed FDL’s liveblog religiously during the Scooter Libby trial, and not the work of the three WaPo reporters also reporting full time from the court house. We didn’t get paid for prepping WaPo to represent its five reporters testifying at the trial. But that’s because FDL hadn’t figured out how to monetize the best coverage from the trial. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it–what comes around goes around?) 

But Shapira absolutely does not make the case when he glibly says Gawker is hurting the WaPo, when his evidence actually shows it is possible to make money online, but that for some reason WaPo can’t monetize the links others give it.

Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post’s bottom line?

More readers are better than fewer, of course. Read more →

How Many Reporters Does It Take to Cover a Beer Summit?

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Sheesh!! I really did think NYT’s three reporters to liveblog the "beer summit" took the cake.

I was wrong. The AP far outdid the NYT.

By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer

[snip]

Associated Press writers Ben Feller, Cal Woodward, Darlene Superville, Jennifer Loven, Liz Sidoti and Charles Babington in Washington and Karen Testa in Boston contributed to this report.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

Eight reporters! It takes eight reporters to cover a stupid photo op!

This Bud Is For You Mental Midgets Of The Media

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obama-beerThere are three irreducible minimums emanating from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates at his home in Cambridge Massachusetts. First, it was an illegal and unconstitutional arrest because of the abuse of police power and discretion. Second, it may or may not (my inclination is not, at least at the outset) have been a racially motivated moment; either way it is one from which serious discussion could, and should, ensue. Third, it is an event that has become embedded in the national consciousness from which the nation could learn and grow as one.

Despite the above, the trained Skinner rats in the national media have glommed onto the most trivial and inane aspects to convey to the public audience. To half wit USA Today:

We guess this qualifies as breaking news.

President Obama will drink Bud Light at the Thursday meeting with the African-American professor and white police officer who got in a dust-up earlier this month. Press secretary Robert Gibbs just made the announcement to the press pool on Air Force One.

The full menu looks set. Sgt. James Crowley, whose arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates at his home, touched off the incident, has indicated a preference for Blue Moon. Gates has said he likes Red Stripe.

"So we’ll have the gamut covered tomorrow afternoon," Gibbs said.

Walter Cronkite is barely in his grave and already he is rolling over. And ABC News doubles down on the boys’ brews. Here is the AP with the same basic drivel. And Bloomberg. The Pulitzer Prize material is front and center at every news source imaginable as well as the cable and broadcast outlets.

The only teachable moment we are going to be treated to out of the lofty potential available from the moment is to learn once again what lowest common denominator dregs we have in the American media and what little they think of the American national intelligence and conscience. Quite frankly, President Obama has not acquitted himself well in leading here either.

What is really on tap for tomorrow’s "teachable moment"? The Washington Post (probably piqued they cannot turn the event into a "Salon") sets the social table:

Gates and Crowley will gather for a beer and chat with President Obama at a picnic table outside the Oval Office as the sun sets Thursday. The president has called the incident a "teachable moment," but the trio is not expected to Read more →

Sexual Harassment Claim or Attempt to Silence?

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I don’t know whether there’s any merit to the claim a Gitmo commander just filed against the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg or not.

In a letter to the paper’s editor, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon accused Carol Rosenberg of "multiple incidents of abusive and degrading comments of an explicitly sexual nature." Gordon, who deals primarily with the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison, said in the letter that this was a "formal sexual harassment complaint" and asked the Herald for a "thorough investigation."

"Her behavior has been so atrocious over the years," Gordon said in an interview. "I’ve been abused worse than the detainees have been abused."

But I do know two things. Rosenberg’s reporting from Gitmo has consistently been the best reporting from the military commissions.

And this accusation from Gordon sounds suspiciously like treatment US soldiers inflicted on detainees in military custody.

While watching Sept. 11, 2001, co-defendant Mustafa al-Hawsawi seated on a pillow in court last year, Rosenberg told Gordon: "Have you ever had a red hot poker shoved up your [butt]? Have you ever had a broomstick shoved up your [butt]? . . . How would you know how it feels if it never happened to you? Admit it, you liked it."

That is, the comment could be as much a comment about American members of the military dismissing torture as it is about harassment.

I’m not advocating ignoring a claim of harassment (note, Gordon claims Rosernberg made insinuations about his sexual orientation). But I do find it suspicious that this claim is being leveled against the best journalist covering our Kangaroo Courts.

A New Mission for the WH Press Corps

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Update: Politico reports that Obama has released the records, considering releasing all their visitor logs.

Remember when NPR posted a picture of all the lobbyists attending a health care committee meeting and asked its readers to crowd source those lobbyists identities?

Well, given the news that the Obama White House is treating the health industry executives who have visited with the same secrecy that Dick Cheney accorded his oil buddies, perhaps it’s time the White House press corps did something similar?

Invoking an argument used by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Secret Service asking about visits from 18 executives representing health insurers, drug makers, doctors and other players in the debate. The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.

The Secret Service sent a reply stating that documents revealing the frequency of such visits were considered presidential records exempt from public disclosure laws. The agency also said it was advised by the Justice Department that the Secret Service was within its rights to withhold the information because of the "presidential communications privilege."

Think about it. The White House press corps has ready access to the outsides of the White House. A significant number of them hang around in their virtual office for hours on end. Wouldn’t they be much more productive if they started–collectively–documenting who was coming and going at the White House? Wouldn’t creating a record of who had the access at the White House be a better use of their time than serving as props in the next stage managed press conference?

I know this is a tall order, given that most of the outlets covering the White House full time would rather charge those White House visitors than expose them. But it might make these journalists’ efforts worthwhile.