Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin.  For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra cash for something that would last longer than a cup of coffee and a trip to the bathroom.  My choices were the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Grey Lady, so I picked her.  It was, despite Maureen Dowd, Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, Judy Miller, Deborah Solomon, Elizabeth Bumiller, Frank Bruni, Jodi Wilgoren, and William Safire, not the worst choice I could have made.  After all, Paul Krugman’s lonely opposition to Bush’s onslaught on America will forever be remembered, if only for its singularity at the time, as a balm to many worried mornings of “smoke ‘em out” and whatnot.  Then, there was Frank Rich, whose fame (and astuteness) as a theater critic warranted him a reverent mention by the cynical playwright/murderer in Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap,” (a play I produced here in 1987), but he by then had blossomed into a searingly perceptive analyst of America’s Right (as well as the craven and compromised media that love it), which he continued to be until a couple of weeks ago, when he left to join New York Magazine.

It was a fitting move; New York Magazine, to which I subscribed for many years, was born out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune, whose Sunday magazine arose in the late 60′s, offering a haven for talent and journalism that the New York Times didn’t think was “fit to print.”  Seriously, a Sunday New York Times for SIX BUCKS without Frank Rich?  And a (hilariously inept) paywall, to boot?  Something, I thought, must be seriously wrong on 42nd street, and today, more evidence piles up.  Bob Herbert, it turns out, is bailing out as well.  Though Herbert was never my favorite columnist, his dogged focus on racial and economic injustice sometimes led him away from more stark and timely outrages and his earnest and plain-spoken style lacked the rapier wit of Krugman and Rich, in a paper laden with ads for furs, jewels and expensive watches, it was nice to read somebody who recognized, and compellingly wrote about, the very existence of poverty and injustice in America.  And now he’s gone, too.

This leaves an op/ed page feebly dotted with such glittering journalistic jewels as Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman the only “liberals,” aside from Krugman (who has a day job at Princeton, thankfully), on a page so degraded that it unashamedly prints the execrable, adolescent caterwauling of Ross Douthat (!), who replaced the also pre-disgraced, but nonetheless hired, Bill Kristol in the right wing slot.   Pre-disgraced William Safire preceded them, so I guess there’s a pattern here…  At the New York Times, IOKIYAR rules.

The question, then, is who will replace them?  Unlike, say, The WaPoo, which is now primarily a Graham family enrichment scheme solely dedicated to promoting the Village values of war-making abroad and austerity at home, the NYT does depend on millions of Americans ponying up the cash to read it, and virtually none of these people do so because they like Ross Douthat and nuclear power.  No conservative would be caught dead spending two bucks daily, six bucks Sunday, for the “far left” New York Times, so it might be a good idea not to cater to them quite so much, at the expense of those who actually read and support the paper.

Newspapers are, by their nature, conservative institutions, in the true sense of the word, and that is why columnists like David Broder and Mike Royko, to name just a couple, continued writing until the grim reaper got them: readers develop relationships with columnists no wise publisher would ever want to sever.  Once, this arrangement was born of competitive pressures; in today’s monopolistic environment it survived, until recently, as tradition.  Those days are clearly over in this age when even big, once-powerful papers like the NYT struggle for survival, and let go the voices that personified them.

I don’t know who will replace Rich and Herbert, but if history is any guide, they will be disappointing, indeed.

UPDATE:  Well, it looks like Joe Nocera, one of a precious few good reporters in the business section, will be moving to the op/ed page, which is good, I guess, but it weakens the business section while not bringing any new voices to the paper as a whole.  On the bright side, such a move will surely save money…  Will they pass the savings on to their readers?

Out here in the Northwest, nuclear power has a long history of being dismissed as the kooky, plutocratic boondoggle it is, even while we have been spared the worst of the fears it understandably creates.  Back in the 70′s, when our local utility, Portland General Electric, built the Trojan nuclear power plant, its remote location in Rainier, Oregon, about 40 miles from Portland, perhaps contributed to the lack of significant opposition to its initial construction, so much so that by the time it went online, a consortium of public power utilities and the State of Washington decided to build five of their own, presciently dubbed WPPSS. Just as Trojan was soon discovered to have myriad design flaws large and small that caused constant shutdowns, and regional opposition to nuclear power began to flower, WPPSS had already spent billions, primarily benefitting Trojan’s contractor, Bechtel, and other corporate welfare queens building the plants when it was discovered that both revenue projections and costs estimates used to justify the plants had been startlingly manipulated, and I’m sure you can guess in which direction, respectively.

The Keystone Kops quality that plagued nuclear power in the Northwest was so much a part of the culture that it was mockingly parodied on the local rock FM station, KGON, which had a daily “Nukes in the News” segment (to which CHNN owes its “Nudes in the News” category..), and in it, from around the world and right here at home, tales of the perfidy, stupidity, and indifference to its inherent dangers fell like rain from the nuclear industry.  After WPPSS collapsed in an embarrassing heap, with only one of its five plants completed and the rest scaled back or mothballed, Three Mile Island put an end, one would have thought for good, to the ridiculous idea that it would be smart to mine and unleash the earth’s deadliest substances to, well, boil water.

For a time, anyway.  Like any professional freeloaders, the nuclear industry found that getting real jobs, that is, finding something to do that wouldn’t require permanent government subsidy, incur uninsurable and incalculable risks, and create waste that no one on earth knows what to do with, was just too taxing.  After expensively and deceptively fighting voter initiatives to close its unseemly white elephant at its own expense rather than ratepayers, PGE finally got tired of the whole thing and closed Trojan anyway, and not only charged ratepayers for its losses, but even for the expense of dynamiting the thing, like a cat charging its owner to bury its own poop.  That sort of coup was impressive enough that Enron came calling, and soon PGE was part of that fine example of Randian Producerism.

In spite of this pretty clear-cut history, the political establishment from the Obama Administration to the New York Times all decided recently that it was time to join the kleptocratic Republicans in supporting the one thing on which the Village can all agree, taxpayer handouts to the wealthy and unscrupulous, and nuclear power obviously fit the bill.  Where would the modern day John Galts go for their welfare checks if the war machine ran a little slow for a term or two?   A plutocrat’s gotta eat, you know, and their bar tabs can be astronomical, especially if John Boehner’s there, which he no doubt usually is.

The only fly in the ointment, of course, is as ever those liberally-biased facts.  The “Green Economy” that nuclear power advocates envision is only green because that’s what happens when you have to evacuate a couple hundred thousand people, perhaps for a week, perhaps for decades, from large areas of formerly habitable planet.  Plants flourish, especially in the streets.

I feel guilty, really; I live just a few dozen miles from Hanford, where the Manhattan Project devised the fiendish nuclear devices that vaporized thousands of Japanese were concocted, and the only impact on my life from that questionable endeavor was that a large stretch of the over-engineered Columbia River  was miraculously spared the salmon-destroying overdevelopment of its safer, non-quarantined parts.  Nuclear Power, I can safely say, is dead again here.   The Japanese, on the other hand, have once again been pressed into grisly service to remind the world of the idiocy of it all.

I hope someone’s listening this time.

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

Former President George Bush lying, uncontestedly, to Oprah Winfrey.

Behaving as though he might have a future in the Democratic party, Kanye West today apologized to George Bush for calling him a racist, even though he never did.  Back in 2005 he said, watching the Katrina debacle unfold and the Bush Administration’s shockingly indifferent response, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”  Bush, who received less than ten percent of the black vote (proving that African-Americans are considerably smarter than the white kind), also headed a political operation that deliberately suppressed the black vote in several key states, and ruthlessly attacked, at least rhetorically, all programs for the poor, nonetheless was never called a racist for these things, at least by Kanye West.  Though Bush conspicuously never race-baited the way so many of his Republican colleagues have, and continue to do, the idea that he did not, politically at least, “care about black people,” is just a fact, and West happened to say so.   The thin-skinned and ever-calculating Bush never got over such uppity effrontery, as he made revealingly clear in his unwatched and unwatchable “interview” with NBC’s Matt Lauer touting his new ghost-written “book.”

Facts, of course, have a liberal bias, so Bush had to substitute a plausible lie that turned him from perpetrator to victim, unsurprisingly enough. “He called me a racist,” the still-angry overgrown toddler whined, though he appears today quite hale and hearty compared to the hundreds of (mostly black) Katrina victims who lost their lives, and thousands more who lost their homes and livelihoods.  I don’t believe, nor does West, that Bush is a racist, personally, at least since he met Clarence Thomas.  He is what he is; another puppet for a plutocratic right-wing movement that does what it has to do to fool stupid people into supporting it, and sometimes lots of other people end up on the short end of this Republican stick, whether they be black, gay, Muslim, Mexican, or what have you.  It’s not hate, it’s just politics, and it’s equal opportunity, you know.

What’s depressing about this, which Bush’s petulant grudge-holding and Kanye West’s pathetically abject apology illustrates, is how successful the right has been with separating words from deeds through this now-trite ritual of false victimhood.  In New Orleans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and yes, if only through negligence, New York and Washington, Bush has been responsible for a great deal of death and suffering, but people are supposed to be apologizing to him, because at least they weren’t all darker-hued.  He may have always had an astonishing and well-documented indifference to human suffering in general, but dammit, Karla Faye Tucker was white, and he killed her just the same.  He may be a lot of appalling things, but racist is way down on the list.  Calling someone a racist, in Bush’s eyes, is the real sin, which comes as pretty good news to racists everywhere, as you can imagine.

Bush probably first hit upon this neat trick with lying, and simply branched out when it worked so well.  Throughout his (losing) 2000 campaign, he told a series of flat-out whoppers about everything from tax cuts to climate plans, and when they all proved to be lies, he relied on the fact that members of the media are hesitant to call (Republican) Presidential candidates liars, especially when they’re too busy calling Al Gore just that.  Lying is one thing; calling someone a liar is evidently quite another, at least in the American media, and Bush rode this embarrassingly naive reticence all the way into Iraq and reelection.  Paul Krugman finally broke the ice in 2003, in a hilarious NYT column entitled “Dead Parrot Society” that tallied up the many tortured (no pun intended…) euphemisms for Bush’s serial lying that had recently turned up in the media, and Al Franken’s 2004 book, “Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” with Bush, Cheney, and Bill O’Reilly prominently featured on the cover, felt as though someone opened a window and turned on a fan in a locked roomful of Chili Eating Contest winners.

Sadly, this calling things by their real names movement never much caught on, and Bush as well as his (to this day!) Republican water-carriers learned their lesson all too well.  If calling a famous liar a liar was worse than being one, then certainly calling an admitted war criminal a war criminal was also worse than being one, calling a bloodthirsty Imperialist an Imperialist was worse than being one, calling a complete dumbshit a dumbshit was much worse, because it drips with that hated elitism, than being one, and on and on.  An incentive has thus now been created to behave as dreadfully as possible, thereby to attract the sort of inflammatory epithets one can then handily, and apparently for years afterward, use to tar their opponents as cruel, unhinged slanderers of one’s good name.

The rest of the world, fortunately, doesn’t fall for such inane claptrap about flagrant miscreants;  high officials in Britain and Germany have already responded to the many self-serving lies in Bush’s book by more or less directly calling him a liar, even as courts around the world are finally delving into the many international crimes of his infamous tenure in office.  He, of course, doesn’t care a whit about his horrendous legacy, and has repeatedly said so, even as he so desperately tries to duct-tape it together.  By the time he hits the history books, he blithely tells “interviewers” like Lauer, “I’ll be dead,” while hundreds of thousands of his victims already are.  He needn’t fear the history books; he ought to fear the dictionary, which never lies, unlike him.

Reagan took this a step further when he did away with the Fairness Doctrine, all but eliminated the public service requirements of broadcasters, and jovially needled major outlets for their imagined “liberal bias,” which at the time was a pretty laughable notion, given the reverence with which the media treated the Great Communicator, but is even funnier now, since they still do.  Before long, the AM Radio dial was (and remains) 99% conservative, even in Democrat-dominated markets, and a whole new consciousness emerged, untethered from reality.  Bill Clinton greatly exacerbated the problem with his Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is incidentally the same year Rupert Murdoch spent a half billion dollars launching Fox News, and further consolidation quickly followed.

All this time, newspapers, the last bastion of in-depth news and community service in the industry, continued to cannibalize once-revered names in journalism; clobbered by the ever-increasing demands of Wall Street for the kind of profits that would make Nike blush, formerly independent papers like the LA Times, Washington Post, and yes, the New York Times cut staff and content, raised prices, and thereby steadily drove readers to cable and the internet.  Politicians now proudly ignore the media entirely and benefit from it;  Rick Perry was elected governor in Texas without a single newspaper endorsement.  CNN’s John Avlon was moved to write about this sorry state of affairs, at some length, while ignoring the, well, elephant in the room:

Keith Olbermann’s suspension for making political contributions to three Democratic candidates is just the latest example of the problems that come with the rise of partisan media.

In the fallout, other MSNBC personalities were also found to have given to Democratic candidates, while Media Matters uncovered the fact that more than 30 Fox News hosts and contributors had donated to conservative candidates.

No such Democratic contributions have come to light, of course, but Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and other MSNBC contributors did contribute to Republicans.  Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, I say.

Whole news networks are being transformed into little more than on-air advocates for political parties. The idea of objectivity is now increasingly dismissed as a myth rather than honored as an ideal toward which the news industry should strive.

Uh, only one network is such an advocate, and that’d be FOX.  MSNBC has four liberal hosts, along with the Bush-worshipper Chris Matthews and, of course Joe Scarborough.  MSNBC has sponsored no rallies, made no large corporate contributions, and, by the way, does manage to do its advocacy without flat-out lying, unlike at Fox.

Americans are self-segregating themselves into separate political realities — responding to the proliferation of information by consuming news that confirms their political prejudices. Loyal viewers see opinion-anchors like Olbermann or Glenn Beck as the only “truth-tellers” in town, while dismissing the rest of the media as cowardly or biased. We are devolving back to the era when newspapers were owned and operated by political parties.

See, Glenn Beck is JUST LIKE Keith Olbermann, even though Olbermann doesn’t, say, compare any President to Hitler or tell people, nightly, to stockpile guns, gold, and canned goods for the imminent apocalypse.  But, as Murdoch himself said, Fox beats CNN in the ratings, and I’m beginning to see why.

The result: Partisan warfare is on the rise, and trust in media is on the decline. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has documented the trend and concluded that “virtually every news organization or program has seen its credibility marks decline” over the past decade.

Well, the abysmal performance of the media during the Bush years, with the glaringly ironic exception of Keith Olbermann, may have had something to do with this sad state of affairs, but since Avlon works for Glenn Beck’s old employer, he’s paid not to see this.

Even C-Span, which offers unedited coverage of public events without commentary, has experienced a steep — and absurd — decline in believability. In this hyperpartisan environment, people literally don’t trust what they see with their own eyes. Polarizing for profit might be good for ratings in the short run, but its bad for the country.

And who has the highest ratings?  Who is the most polarizing?  And finally, whose audience believes the most false things?  If you guessed Fox, you’re considerably smarter than Avlon.

Olbermann’s on-air protégé Rachael Maddow described the difference between MSNBC and Fox as this: “They run as a political operation, we are not.” She added, “The point has been made and Keith should be back hosting ‘Countdown’” — less than 24 hours after his suspension.

Avlon naturally sidesteps the plain factuality of Maddow’s statement…

It’s natural for Maddow to defend Olbermann — they are close colleagues, talented broadcasters cut from the same ideological cloth. What was more surprising was the number of conservative commentators who rushed to Olbermann’s defense. They embrace the idea of hyperpartisanship in all things news and opinion.

No, stupid, they embrace their own hyperpartisanship, and as expected are clinging to the coattails of a legitimate news organization to justify their own behavior.

Fox News — which rarely loses an opportunity to attack the left — gave comparatively little coverage to Olbermann’s suspension. Here’s the reason for their reaction: Conservative media warriors welcome outright liberal advocates, because they justify the right’s own ideological approach.

No, because they lie 24/7, they like to foster the idea that everyone else lies, too.  Fact checking would help here, but isn’t forthcoming.

Olbermann symbolizes a fight for public opinion that the right believes it can win. After all, at any given time roughly 50 percent more Americans self-identify as conservative rather than liberal. A 2009 Pew poll found that 15 percent of Americans call themselves conservative Republicans while just 11 percent describe themselves as liberal Democrats.

The reason the right believes it can win is because “neutral” outlets like CNN routinely give lies and truth equal billing, and as always, the lies overwhelmingly come from just one side of the political spectrum.  Further, the polls he so grandly cites are just the usual lazy and pointless ones about labels rather than policy; when people are polled about actual policies, liberal policies (regarding taxation, war, social spending, and on and on) reliably win hands-down over conservative ones.

If right-wingers give Americans false choices between the two, they know they can win. But this approach ignores the plurality of Americans who are in the center — and the fact that independent voters are the largest and fastest growing segment of the electorate. That is a huge unmet market looking for a strong advocate.

That’s what CNN thinks it’s doing, and look how that turned out.  Never mind the idiocy of anyone needing a “strong advocate” for the “center,” which has steadily marched further and further right than ever before in American history, thanks in part to muddle-minded gasbags like Avlon, who never tire of seeing Republican shit and telling America it’s really Shinola.

In the current hyperpartisan media environment, it’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always been this way. Broadcast icon Edward R. Murrow was not a registered Democrat or Republican — he was an independent. Before courageously taking on Sen. Joe McCarthy, he was considered an anti-communist, supporting, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs as spies for the Soviet Union. He wouldn’t have dreamed of giving donations to political candidates.

Murrow was anti-crazy.  CNN, on the other hand, thinks crazy people are worthy of a fair, non-fact-checked airing, balanced by someone relatively sane.  Olbermann is sick of that false dichotomy, and gave a few bucks to keep crazies out of Washington.

Murrow’s colleague Charles Collingwood said, “His politics were based on old-fashioned notions of morality and honor, not ideology.” If this sounds simply old-fashioned, it should not. This idea is at the enduring heart of both good government and good journalism.

Sounds like Keith to me, but unfortunately, not like CNN.

Sen. Patrick Daniel Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” But the current polarized political environment results in Americans engaging in civic debates armed with only their own exaggerated partisan “facts” — for example, the latest overheated myth that President Obama’s trip to India was going to cost $200 million a day and be accompanied by 34 warships — and cynicism becomes justified with the knowledge that news anchors are shilling for political parties. This is ultimately dangerous for a democracy.

See?  Republicans lie, every day, so that means liberals should just let them, for fear of being “partisan.”

The current spin cycle might be hitting such a sickening extent that there is a demand for something different — that’s the impulse that I believe was behind the success of Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity last weekend. After all, 44 percent of Americans born after 1977 identify themselves as independent, according to the Pew Center. The American people want something more than the predictable parroting of partisan talking points.

Independent on-air journalists don’t have to be without opinion to be nonpartisan — they just have to be honest brokers, punching left and right as their conscience and common sense dictates. We need to play offense from the center and create a strong alternative.

The ideal of independence is being degraded by the proliferation of partisan media. The fact that undisclosed donations by opinion anchors like Olbermann are being defended is evidence of how far off course we’ve gotten. The lines between political and media figures are blurring; we are getting used to journalists functioning as party apologists while elected officials sound increasingly like radio talk show hosts.

But the search for the truth doesn’t conform to a partisan prism. Reasserting reasonable standards of independence can help restore trust in the news media and help stop the political Balkanization of the United States.

Oh, for Pete’s sake.  It’s telling that a dozen years of Fox News’ systematic, flagrant and consequential journalistic malpractice didn’t ever spur Avlon to write this astonishingly inept and clueless piece, back when such a thing might have helped stop an idiot like George Bush from being elected, and/or stopped a disastrous war or two.  He finally got off his lazy ass yesterday to pompously and long-windedly whine about Keith fucking Olbermann’s (disclosed) contributions to a few pretty unimportant Democratic candidates.

I guess at CNN, that’s enterprise reporting.

We don't have doughy rednecks at CHNN, but the weather is still crappy.

When CNN hired the tubby, bigoted know-nothing Erick Erickson from Redstate, I yawned.  After all, the New York Times hired Ross Douthat, the Los Angeles Times hired Jonah Goldberg, and no dying media outlet could be without its beady-eyed, teenage water-carrier for for the “kill ‘em all”  faction of the right.  Notably, Douthat replaced the evil but not sufficiently dumb Bill Kristol in this sad parade of affirmative action gone awry.  Still, I winced for once-proud CNN when I read what its new star wrote at Redstate:

David Petraeus is right.

That church burning the korans in Florida will incite muslims to kill Americans, particularly American soldiers.

So far, so good, except that the apparent failure to capitalize “Koran” turns out to repeated later…  A sure sign that the right has a new, subtle jab for the dirty Ay-rabs, and is eager to roll it out.

Why? Well, in part, because David Petraeus and the media have decided to magnify the event and guarantee it’ll be featured on the front page of every major newspaper in the Middle East.

These sorts of things are supposed to be kept quiet, you know.  Just ask Rush Limbaugh.

Ramzy Kilic of the Council on American-Islamic Relations surprisingly sounds wisest here:

Because you know those murderous habibs are all kinds of things, but never wise.

“He just wants to provoke the Muslim community,” he said. “Why give him attention? No one pays attention to the drunkard walking down the street.”

Except when they’re right-wingers on CNN.

Let’s not, however, be fooled by the thinking that this act will incite Islamists in some special way. If Islamists did not have koran burnings to incite them to kill Americans, they would just find something else. Heck, they may go back to soldiers in Iraq using the koran for target practice.

Indeed, we have given them lots of reasons.  Your point?

I think it is bad form for the military to start applying pressure to influence the political activities (and this is clearly a form of political speech) of American civilians. Petraeus is essentially attributing direct responsibility for American deaths to the activities of American citizens (and I hasten to point out that he made no similar public pronouncement about the activities of antiwar demonstrators who, at least arguably, caused American deaths by giving the jihadis reason to believe they could drive us out of Iraq given enough casualties).

You see, the military’s role is to propagandize Americans for permanent war, in all cases, says this semi-able-bodied service-aged young chickenhawk, who last wore a uniform in Cub Scouts, if then.

Ultimately, this issue is not about tolerance of Islam, but about fear of Islam.

Yes.  Yours, you pants-wetting halfwit.

The elite in this country have no problem with American flag burnings or Bible burnings. Heck, the American military burned a pile of Bibles lest proselytizing happen.

Probably a lie, but if we’re bringing Bibles with our bombs to a Muslim country, or forcing Erickson’s brand of Christianity on our soldiers, the move was long overdue.

No Christians went out and beheaded troops or media talking heads. There were no riots in the streets of Washington, D.C. by aggrieved Christians.

No, they just blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, killed abortion doctors, cops, and IRS employees, and go to Glenn Beck’s rally mocking Martin Luther King.  Totally different.

Contrast that with the Islamic world. Show a cartoon of Mohammed, you die. Burn a koran, you die. Reject the faith, you die.

Let’s count up the deaths on both sides, fatso…  That is if you can count, which at this point I doubt.

Ultimately, and what is too politically incorrect for the media or David Petraeus to say, is that Islam is largely incompatible with Western values when significant portions of the religion — not just the fringe — are driven to riot over koran burnings, cartoons of Mohammed, and the like.

Switch “Islam” to, say, “Judaism,” and reread that sentence in the original German;  it sounds like something on the History Channel.

More specifically, Petraeus’s actions teach the same lesson to both us and the Islamists that the Mohammed cartoon did: Islamists learned if they are sufficiently violent Western governments and elites will fold like a cheap suit and we learned that Islam, as practiced by large swaths of the muslim world, is a violent religion that apparently can’t operate in tandem with a civil society.

That is, the “civil society” for which Erickson longs is one where all Muslims have been silenced or eliminated, and have to put up with this and worse.  Fuck yeah!  My suits aren’t cheap!  (Anymore…)

Now, all that said, I think this pastor in Florida is terribly misguided. The message of Christ is one of grace and hope. Christians are told to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything [Christ] ha[s] commanded.”

And this differs from “forcing us to obey Sharia Law” how?  Good thing Christians are so darn tolerant.  This pathetic passage is perhaps the most offensive part of a very offensive little diatribe.  The guy is too dumb to realize that his “defense” of Christianity makes it sound a lot like the worst fears he and his ilk constantly stoke about Muslims: a world-dominating crusade to convert or kill.  This jaw-dropping stupidity obviously goes over with the mouth-breathers at Redstate, but CNN is still, for the moment anyway, slightly more broad-based, and may include viewers with IQ’s above room temperature.  With Erickson on board, that ought to change pretty quickly, I’d think.

Burinng (sic) korans (sic) does not accomplish that. Neither, I am certain, does it glorify God in any way, shape, or form — particularly knowing with certainty, whether we like it or not, that this act of a Christian church showing not love, but hate, will incite people to violence.

Deservedly so.  And nice editing too.

I would encourage this pastor to stand down — but I’m not going to wring my hands over it. If not this, there’ll just be something else causing riots in the “Arab Street.” This is just today’s excuse.

Excuses, excuses.  First it was Iraq, then it was Abu Ghraib, then Guantanamo, the the Cordoba house, then the mosque vandalism, then the slashing of a cab driver…  These guys go nuts over the littlest things.  And I’m sure ol’ Erick will be giving them another excuse, as he has so often before, each time he steps on the CNN set.  I suppose that CNN decided that every news network needs to have somebody dumb violent, and sociopathic to attract that sought-after trailer park demographic, but I think with Erick they went a bit too far.  He may not be “wringing his hands,” but CNN ought to be.

“It’s not even Islamophobia, it’s beyond Islamophobia,” Daisy Khan, wife of Ground Zero mosque planner Feisal Abdul Rauf, told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour Sunday. “It’s hate of Muslims.” As we noted yesterday, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking to a Muslim gathering at Gracie Mansion, called critics of the mosque plan “un-American” and implied that they seek “to implicate all of Islam” for the 9/11 attacks.

So far, so good; quoting accurate assessments from Park51 supporters seems almost un-Murdochlike, but later you’ll find out why he led with this.

Yesterday, an ugly crime occurred in New York that seemed to confirm this narrative. Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student, allegedly stabbed taxi driver Ahmed Sharif, 43, in the throat. The Wall Street Journal has the details:

According to an account provided by Mr. Sharif through the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Mr. Enright started out asking Mr. Sharif friendly questions like how long he has been in the country, if he was Muslim and if he was observing fast during Ramadan. Mr. Enright became silent for a few minutes and “then suddenly started cursing and screaming” before the stabbing, the statement says.

Police said that Mr. Enright stabbed the driver through an opening on the side of the taxi’s protective partition. Mr. Sharif was able to scramble out of the cab, lock its doors and then call 911. An officer on patrol nearby arrived to find Mr. Enright sprawled out on the street, having fallen after climbing out one of the cab’s back windows.

Sharif is out of the hospital, but it was a close call: “Prosecutor James Zaleta said that an emergency medical technician who treated Mr. Sharif said had the wound ‘been a fraction of an inch longer or deeper, he would have been dead at the scene.’ ” Enright is charged with attempted murder, with the stipulation that the attack was a hate crime.

Seems pretty straightforward, but then the Foxified Taranto, in one of the usual “wars” the Murdoch media always tiresomely fight with their journalistic superiors, has to go all Bill O’Reilly on the New York Times:

The New York Times’s account of the crime presents it as fitting the narrative of anti-Muslim hatred. It opens with a crisply dramatic account of the incident, followed by some basic facts (Enright’s attempt to flee, his arrest, Sharif’s medical disposition, the charges, a quote from Enright’s lawyer informing us that the suspect is “terrified,” the poor baby).

It’s clear by now that there’s a conspiracy brewing;  to any self-respecting right-wing hack, “poor baby” and “liberal” are synonymous.

That takes us through 15 paragraphs. Paragraphs 16 through 18 put the crime in a broader context:

The violence that erupted during the cab ride came amid a heated and persisting national debate over whether to situate a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. Upon learning of the attack on the cabdriver, some Muslim groups called for political and religious leaders to quiet tensions.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: “As other American minorities have experienced, hate speech often leads to hate crimes. Sadly, we’ve seen how the deliberate public vilification of Islam can lead some individuals to violence against innocent people.”

In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we may pray to.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Sharif and told him “ethnic or religious bias has no place in our city.” He invited him to come to see him at City Hall on Thursday.

Get out Glenn Beck’s chalkboard….

By contrast, here’s the third paragraph of the Journal story: “The attack comes amid tensions over a planned mosque near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan, but police didn’t link it to the simmering debate.”

Yeah, just like you don’t link crabs to hookers, necessarily.

Back to the Times: Paragraphs 19 and 20 report that cops believe Enright was drunk, though that wasn’t Sharif’s impression. Paragraph 21 gives us some background about Sharif, including that he opposed the Ground Zero mosque on the basis “that there was no need to put it there.”

Paragraphs 22 through 38–the last 17 paragraphs of the story–tell us of the suspect’s background: “What is known about Mr. Enright presents a complicated picture.” He lives in Brewster, a suburb north of New York City. He goes to the School of Visual Arts. He has some previous arrests for minor crimes. He spent time embedded with Marines in Afghanistan for a film-school project called “Home of the Brave.”

Yes, James, the Times did do a great deal more reporting than the depleted fishwrap you work for, but does that constitute a media conspiracy?

Then–in paragraphs 28 and 29–comes this:

Ooh, you just know this is going to be something good!

Mr. Enright is also a volunteer with Intersections International, an initiative of the Collegiate Churches of New York that promotes justice and faith across religions and cultures. The organization, which covered part of Mr. Enright’s travel expenses to Afghanistan, has been a staunch supporter of the Islamic center near ground zero. Mr. Enright volunteered with the group’s veteran-civilian dialogue project.

Joseph Ward III, the director of communications for Intersections, said that if Mr. Enright had been involved in a hate crime, it ran “counter to everything Intersections stands for” and was shocking.

By now, if you’re a righty, of course you believe that the attacker was really a liberal Muslim-lover out to shame Real Americans, and he risked murder and hate crime charges because his Muslim-loving employers indoctrinated and probably paid him to, while the America-hating New York Times is naturally in cahoots on the whole plot.  Really.  Taranto thinks that, and says so:

It’s shocking, all right. It’s also news! The Times hasn’t exactly buried the lead here: The attack is a significant story in itself, and it’s an entirely defensible editorial decision to begin by simply telling what (allegedly) happened.

By definition, all crimes reported prior to trial are “alleged.”   I guess they don’t know that anymore at WSJ.  And they have to rely on the New York Time to actually report said news.  Sad, really.

But revealing the suspect’s association with the pro-mosque left so low in the story shows atrocious news judgment. Rehearsing the America-hates-Muslims narrative first strongly suggests that the Times’s reporting is driven more by an ideological agenda than by the facts of the case.

At least they reported it, not like your atrocious rag, so it seems unlikely that they have anything to hide, unless you’re a crazy person who thinks everyone else can’t finish a long news story either.  Which, evidently, you are:

That ideological agenda is shared by Intersections International, as evidenced by the organization’s Aug. 2 statement supporting the Ground Zero mosque:

The controversy surrounding this project stems from the fact that the proposed building location lies in close proximity to the former World Trade Center, the site of the horrific terrorist attack in New York City on September 11, 2001. Intersections grieves along with those who suffered losses in that tragedy. Intersections acknowledges that any association between that event and this project is a fabrication. Further, Intersections applauds the work of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan, principals in The Cordoba House, for their long-term and steadfast commitment to interfaith relations. While acknowledging the real pain that 9/11 continues to evoke, Intersections deplores those who would use this project to promote fear and vitriol for personal gain or partisan politics.

One of the neat things about being a righty is that you get to pretend not to know really obvious things when it’s convenient to do so, and Taranto is no exception.  Without so much as uttering a Miss Piggy-like “Moi?” he behaves as though the venomous lies spewing forth every five minutes about the project’s imagined links to terrorism, from his own employers, simply don’t exist.  Behold:

The claim that “any association” between the 9/11 attacks and the mosque “is a fabrication” is preposterous. As the Associated Press has reported, “the center’s association with 9/11 is intentional and its location is no geographic coincidence.” And when Intersections International “deplores those who would use this project to promote fear and vitriol for personal gain or partisan politics,” it adds its voice to those who falsely claim that anti-Muslim bigotry is pervasive and is the prime or only reason for Americans’ opposition to the mosque’s siting.

Of course the site was no accident; it was meant to promote interfaith healing and a memorial to those lost, hundreds of whom were Muslim New Yorkers, you racist pile of shit.  Further, mosques coast to coast are now being vandalized and opposed by the same people you’re luring from their Barcoloungers to kill ragheads hither and yon.  But go ahead and share with us your ridiculous fantasy world:

Yesterday’s crime almost certainly was the act of a lone disturbed individual. (They never tire of saying that, but lots of Americans are pretty tired of hearing it…)  But the nature of that disturbance cries out for scrutiny. A highly plausible theory of the case is that the attacker sought to advance the narrative that America is filled with anti-Muslim bigots whose hatred is behind the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque. Had Enright succeeded in fleeing the scene, there is little doubt that the propagators of that narrative would have seized upon the crime even more aggressively than they have in making their case.

Ahmed Sharif’s attacker seems to have chosen him as a victim because of his religion–a factor that, if proved, makes the attack a hate crime under New York law. If our theory is correct, the motive for this alleged anti-Muslim hate crime was bigotry against Americans.

I’m glad this guy lives in New York, where it’s unlikely he drives a motor vehicle.

No one is responsible for the crime except for the criminal. Even so, shame on Mayor Bloomberg, Daisy Khan, the New York Times and everyone else who has promoted the destructive lie that it is hateful to take offense at the Ground Zero mosque and that America is a nation of haters.

Well, James, if you left we’d be less of one….  So do us all a favor and move to Dubai like the rest of them.  But it even gets better, when he puts on his ill-fitting Coulter wig and starts hurling the whole right-wing kitchen sink into the mix….  I wonder what time it was when he typed this:

Maybe We Should Call It a ‘Partial-Earth Construction’

We noticed an interesting locution in an early story on the Times website about the attack on Ahmed Sharif. It referred to the Ground Zero mosque as “Park51, the proposed Islamic center that some critics call the ‘ground zero mosque.’ “

You see what they’re trying to do here, and it’s not necessarily indicative of bias. “Ground Zero mosque” is the most recognizable appellation for the as-yet-nonexistent whatever-it’s-supposed-to-be, but it’s not the formal name, and the pro-mosque side of the debate would prefer to call it something less in-your-face. So the Times resorts to apophasis, calling it the Ground Zero mosque by telling readers it’s not calling it that.

It reminds us of partial-birth abortion, or what the Times calls “the medical procedure critics call partial-birth abortion.” Supporters of the Ground Zero mosque may be less than thrilled with that association.

Ah, refusing, as the AP and many other real journalistic outlets have done, to use manipulative and concocted right-wing names for everything is somehow nefarious….  The Sulzbergers must be quaking in their boots.

- Frank Rich

- N.Y.T., 8/22/10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?ref=opinion

The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s onerous worldwide tax system has jumped rapidly. Even relatively high-tax nations such as the United Kingdom are attractive compared to the class-warfare system that Obama is creating in the United States. I run into people like this quite often as part of my travels. They are intensely patriotic to America as a nation, but they have lots of scorn for the federal government. Statists are perfectly willing to forgive terrorists like William Ayres, but they heap scorn on these “Benedict Arnold” taxpayers. But the tax exiles get the last laugh since the bureaucrats and politicians now get zero percent of their foreign-source income. You would think that, sooner or later, the left would realize they can get more tax revenue with reasonable tax rates. But that assumes that collectivists are motivated by revenue maximization rather than spite and envy.

As usual, imaginary friends and tinny cold war epithets form the duct tape that purportedly hold this flimsy argument together, but could it possibly have been made slightly less offensive and a bit more plausible by leaving out calling tax evasion “patriotic” and misspelling its manufactured villain’s name?  (It’s Ayers, you righty halfwit…)  The best part is that he treats “revenue maximization” as something good and holy, while “spite and envy” are sordid and evil, as a supposed justification for such greed-driven voluntary statelessness.  Anyone who has watched how the Republicans talk about the unemployed and all manner of their other chosen “lesser people”  (thanks, Alan Simpson for putting it so refreshingly bluntly…), and it’s pretty obvious where the spite, if not the envy, lies in this debate.

The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008. …There is a waiting list at the embassy in London for people looking to give up citizenship, with the earliest appointments in February, lawyers and accountants say. …“The big disadvantage with American citizens is they catch you on tax wherever you are in the world. If you are taxed only in the UK, you have the opportunity of keeping your money offshore tax free.”

Since, as we all know, but only Leona Helmsley came out and said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”  Tony Hayward calls them, perhaps in a nod to the Queen’s English, “small people,” but you get the idea.

To grasp the extent of this problem, here are blurbs from two other recent stories. Time magazine discusses the unfriendly rules that make life a hassle for overseas Americans.

See, even the “liberal media” is deeply worried about the rich…  you should be, too.  The point of the whole thing is that Time reported that wealthy people (500 or so of them), have such snazzy tax lawyers that, like Dick Cheney, they came up with a way to not pay taxes pretty much at all by buying a fake address someplace awful, then profiting off of American taxpayer money, bailouts, legal immunity, and (!) citizenship, while living wherever they damn well please.  The main complaint is that they have to report every little cash transaction over $10,000, which we all know can be so onerous.  I bet tipping will suffer from that.  Then they find the following hogwash in the New York Times, but leave out whether the author is Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, William Kristol, or Ross Douthat:

…. American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.

Oh, I see; they found a tax that wasn’t devised to tilt to the rich.  It’s like a bunch of Che Guevaras in mink.

One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, (That’s one way to put it…)  said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said. …Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.

Ah, what suffering, to have one’s multiple six-figure income, floating through the ether in banks all over the world, bothered with by one’s freeloading fellow citizens trying to get their dirty paws on it.  (Under a law dreamed up by the socialist (?) Bush Administration,  but niggling details like that don’t faze Cato…)  At least these beleaguered expats have a better chance of seeing their tax dollars at work than those of us at home do; if they’re lucky a bomb or drone might kill somebody or flatten a town in their area.  More likely, a hefty dividend check from the latest no-bid contract, a court decision relieving you of all liability for your latest crime, or a no-strings government bailout will land in your Swiss or Cayman Islands mail box with nary a thud, courtesy of the American taxpayer.  That’s what I call patriotic.

WASHINGTON — Nine days after a four-star general was relieved of command for comments made to Rolling Stone magazine, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued orders on Friday tightening the reins on officials dealing with the news media.

The memorandum requires top-level Pentagon and military leaders to notify the office of the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs “prior to interviews or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications.”

Uh, you’re the Pentagon, not a burrito cart.  Everything you do, by definition, has national and international implications, most of which are grave indeed.  All the more reason not to talk about them…  Too depressing.  As though this weren’t bad enough, Gates tosses in the word “possible,” which basically means burrito carts are to be included in the clampdown as well.

Just as the removal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal from command in Afghanistan was viewed as President Obama’s reassertion of civilian control of the military, so Mr. Gates’s memo on “Interaction With the Media” was viewed as a reassertion by civilian public affairs specialists of control over the military’s contacts with the news media.

Yay!  We get our own Baghdad Bob!

Senior officials involved in preparing the three-page memo said work on it had begun well before the uproar that followed Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal. But they acknowledged that the controversy, and the firing of one of the military’s most influential commanders, served to emphasize Mr. Gates’s determination to add more discipline to the Defense Department’s interactions with the media.

“I have said many times that we must strive to be as open, accessible and transparent as possible,” Mr. Gates wrote in the memo, which was sent to senior Pentagon civilian officials, the nation’s top military officer, each of the armed-services secretaries and the commanders of the regional war-fighting headquarters. “At the same time, I am concerned that the department has grown lax in how we engage with the media, often in contravention of established rules and procedures.”

Of course, “open as possible” doesn’t in this case mean what you think it means, clearly.  Rough translation:  We will henceforth speak with Fox News-like unanimity, on Fox News.  It’s that hopey-changey thing again.

The memo by Mr. Gates, a former C.I.A. director, also demanded greater adherence to secrecy standards, issuing a stern warning against the release of classified information: “Leaking of classified information is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.”

No wonder David Ellsberg is so exercised at the moment.  Sounds like Nixon to me.

A copy of the unclassified memo by Mr. Gates was provided to The New York Times by an official who was not authorized to release it. Douglas B. Wilson, the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, verified its content.

Nyeah, nyeah, you fascist douchebag…  A real American just gave you the biggest finger.

Mr. Gates’s memo “is based primarily on his view that we owe the media and we owe ourselves engagement by those who have full knowledge of the situations at hand,” Mr. Wilson said.

That is, only those that read the memo may speak, and repeating tired, counterfactual Bill Kristol talking points to a rightly disgusted public is somehow doing people a favor.

Mr. Gates was particularly concerned that civilian and military officials speaking to reporters sometimes had only a parochial view of a national security issue under discussion. The new orders, Mr. Wilson said, were devised to “make sure that anybody and everybody who does engage has as full a picture as possible and the most complete information possible.”

“Parochial” in this case means actual combatants.  The Big Picture guys are found in green rooms and think tanks.

The repercussions of the Rolling Stone profile have included heightened concerns that military officers will become warier of the press — and it is expected that many officers will read the new memo as an official warning to restrict access to reporters.

Is this article written for the retarded?

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Morrell rejected those assumptions, saying Mr. Gates would remain committed to having the Pentagon work closely with reporters.

That’s worked out so well so far, why not continue?  After all, now that war is a permanent thing, and the only media outlet able to expose its futility and the cynical arrogance of its promoters has ads for bongs in it, who cares?  Evidently not the NYT, as evidenced by the bland tone of this astonishing article.

“From the moment he came into the building, this secretary has said that to treat the press as an enemy is self-defeating,” Mr. Morrell said. “That attitude has been reflected in his tenure: he has been incredibly accommodating, incredibly forthright and incredibly cooperative with the news media. That said, he thinks we as a giant institution have become too undisciplined in how we approach our communications with the press corps.”

Never have I hear such errant nonsense, coming from the outfit that gave us Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, Judith Miller, Mission Accomplished, and on and on.  Stupid, yes.  Undisciplined?  Hardly.

But correspondents who cover national security issues, a realm that routinely requires delving into the classified world, have come to rely on unofficial access to senior leaders for guidance and context — and for information when policies or missions may be going awry.

Officials involved in drafting Mr. Gates’s memo cited several recent developments as central to his thinking. They included disclosure of the internal debate during the administration’s effort to develop a new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, similar public exposure of internal deliberations over the Pentagon budget and weapons procurement, and, among others, an article in The Times describing a memorandum on Iran policy written by Mr. Gates and sent to a small circle of national security aides.

Ah, just niggling things that are none of our business like the current and next few wars, the earth-shattering amounts of money to be flushed down the toilet on ridiculous toys of war, and the way in which the booty is handed out to self-interested cronies.  Nothing in that could possibly be interesting to anybody.

On behalf of the military, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was consulted during the drafting of the memo on media relations and “fully supports the secretary’s intent,” said Capt. John Kirby, the chairman’s spokesman.

He cited Admiral Mullen’s visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, last weekend, in which the admiral told American military officers and embassy personnel that “we must continue to tell our story — we just need to do it smartly, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Hello, earth to New York Times.  Haven’t you shamed yourself, your country and your craft enough, slavishly telling the Pentagon’s “stories?”  Printing an article like this, basically describing the spoken intent of the giant, unaccountable US military to just, well, drop out of this whole, “quaint” free press thing, without rebutting its falsehoods and contradictions is bad enough.  But not at least getting a little balance, however false, from someone, anyone, who agrees with the majority of Americans who think that both the wars and the Pentagon are crazy, is pretty danged pathetic.  They even do that on Fox.

Thom Shanker, please make a note of it.

The memo is expected to reanimate the professional public-affairs cadre among the Pentagon’s civilian and military staffs, who have made no secret that they have felt challenged by the growing numbers of contractors hired for “strategic communications” issues. It was one such contractor who brokered Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal.

From Halliburton, perhaps?