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The Climate Change CensorIt is a race against the eraser. By the end of the Bush administration, we could all be rubbed out.
Utterly unashamed, the White House heavily deleted yet another major document on global warming. It blanched out the Senate testimony of Julie Gerberding, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the report that she delivered last week, she said climate change "is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans and the nation's public health infrastructure."
Gerberding said that the CDC "can serve as a credible source of information on health risks and actions that individuals can take to reduce their risk."
What was missing, according to a draft testimony made available to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's website by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, were these far more direct conclusions:
"The public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed. CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern."
(Obviously, that had to go because that raised the question of why the White House left such a serious concern unaddressed.)
The chain (email) gang[T]he e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing model of the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer…. The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult talking…during the playing of the National Anthem–kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ…and the American Soldier").
For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore…. Mike D'Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York, received so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting recipients. "I suddenly have connected to all these people who receive these right-wing forwards from their brothers-in-law," D'Asto told me. "Surprisingly, a very large number of people receive these."
And that, of course, is the problem.
And what a problem it is. It's difficult enough to push back against nonsense disseminated by Fox News or Limbaugh, but manufactured right-wing gossip spread via email is even more nefarious.
Hayes' whole article is definitely worth reading, but I just wanted to highlight a couple of points. First, it's not a bipartisan problem.
From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.
"A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000 were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry," says John Ratliff, who runs a site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself to debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour," Ratliff says.
And second, remember the chain email accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim? Hayes digs into that, too, and highlights the bogus attack's origin.
Where Does the Right-Wing End and the Media Begin?Rory O' Connor: You speak in your book about "movement conservatism," which you call a "radical new force in American politics that took over the Republican Party." What role if any do the media play in movement conservatism?
Paul Krugman: The media are a very important force in it. They shape perceptions, and they conceal issues. Look at the 2000 presidential campaign, for example, where the media were so heavily biased against Al Gore. That's what brought Bush to within a Supreme Court decision of the White House. So if you look at, certainly these last seven years, the role of the media in not telling you reasons why you should be skeptical about the course of the war, for example, it's enormously important.
We have a situation right now in which there are several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and in which other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got people working full-time going after me, right? But if you say a false, unflattering thing about a Democrat or a progressive, no risk ... And that shapes coverage, no question about it. It's better now, but it's still very asymmetric. The other thing we should mention about the media is their addiction to the trivial. We've got the most substantive election coming up, I think, ever. We've got clear differences on policies between parties. And what are we seeing news stories about? John Edwards' hair and Hillary Clinton's laugh ... this is horrifying! And again -- it's asymmetric. I can think of lots of unflattering things to say about any of the Republican candidates -- Mitt Romney's saying his sons are serving the country by helping him get elected! -- but it doesn't get nearly as much play in the media.
ROC: It sounds like you're saying there's a bias in the media. If you are, what is the bias?
PK: The media's bias, a large part of it is in fact right-wing bias, because they are effectively part of the right wing. Fox News ... there's nothing like Fox News on other television networks that you can look at. There is no liberal equivalent of Fox News, there is no network that, if a conservative got the Nobel Peace Prize, would have responded the way Fox News did to Al Gore's Peace Prize, by first saying nothing at all, then when they figured out the line, talking about how fat he is ... So there's no correspondence there.
Beyond that, there's two things at least; first, the hatred of substance -- they really want to talk about all that trivia -- and there's also the fetish of evenhandedness. If one candidate says something that's completely false, and the other something that's true, the media will say, "Some people believe what that guy said was false, and some people say it was true." Way back in the 2000 campaign, I wrote a piece in which I said that if Bush said the earth was flat, the headline would read: "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Planet." I was thinking specifically about what Bush was saying about taxes and Social Security, which were just out and out lies! But no one would say that, and they still won't. It's better now, a little, but they still won't say it, and that tends -- I imagine in some future environment that might work to the advantage of some dishonest candidates on the left -- but the fact of the matter is the Big Lies are all on the right right now. So it works much more to their advantage.
The Spies Who Shagged Your Fourth AmendmentDemocrats had a chance to stop the Bush administration's domestic spying. Twice. In June they surrendered to a law that lets secret, warrantless spying continue, sidelining a special court's oversight role. They promised the measure would be temporary. But they're about to do it again, and let the blank check stand for six years, never once asking the question that disintegrates the administration's argument about needing that dictatorial authority: If the wiretapping of phone or internet communications targets only suspected al-Qaida operatives (as long as one of the parties is abroad, supposedly), and potentially millions of such communications are being targeted, is the administration suggesting that millions of Americans are having contact with suspected terrorists? In effect, yes. It's an absurd proposition. Don't expect Democrats to muster the capacity to shatter it.
We need a new "Crucible" — a morality play that, like Arthur Miller's classic of 1953 that linked Cold War McCarthyism to the Salem witch trials, updates the genealogy to include the hysterical age of Sept. 11.
New CO2 evidence means climate change predictions are 'too optimistic'Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are increasing much faster and will be harder to control than scientists have predicted, a study has found.
An international team of researchers has found that, since 2000, the rate at which CO2 has been pumped into the atmosphere is 35 per cent greater than most climate change models have allowed for.
The conclusions have serious implications for forecasts of how much and how quickly the world's temperature will rise and mean that global warming will be harder and more expensive to control than feared. The results also mean that international efforts to bring CO2 emissions under control will need to be more far-reaching.
Professor Nicholas Owens, of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said that the findings were so worrying that they made previous widely accepted forecasts of climate change seem unduly optimistic.
CNN provided one Limbaugh explanation for "phony soldiers" remark, ignored his subsequent contradictionOn the October 19 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, national correspondent Susan Candiotti provided one of Rush Limbaugh's original explanations for his remarks characterizing U.S. service members who support U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as "phony soldiers," but she failed to note Limbaugh's subsequent, contradictory explanation of that comment. Describing the controversy surrounding Limbaugh's September 26 comments, Candiotti stated that Limbaugh "denied" he was "criticizing soldiers who are publicly opposed to the war," and "instead said that he was criticizing just one individual, someone who was actually convicted for pretending to be a soldier, who had bashed the war."
Indeed, on his September 28 nationally syndicated radio show, Limbaugh insisted he was "talking about one soldier with that 'phony soldier' comment, Jesse MacBeth." MacBeth pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for pretending to be an injured Iraq war veteran. Later in the September 28 broadcast, Limbaugh again asserted, "I was talking about one genuine, convicted, lying, fake soldier." But as Media Matters for America noted, Limbaugh actually referred to "phony soldiers," plural when he made the remark during his September 26 broadcast. Responding to a caller's statement that supporters of withdrawal "like to pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and talk to the media," Limbaugh responded, "The phony soldiers" [emphasis added]. While Candiotti noted that Limbaugh had "used the term 'phony soldiers,' " she did not point out the contradiction.
Republicans Launch Baseless Smear Campaign on ChildrenGraeme Frost two weeks ago gave the Democrat's response to the President's radio address. You will remember that his family is middle class, and he had public health insurance that saved his family from financial ruin after he and his sister were grievously injured in a car wreck, both needing physical therapy. But, the Neo-con attack dogs immediately and shamelessly Swiftboated him.
The Real Iraq We Knew - 12 Former Army CaptainsThe inability to govern is exacerbated at all levels by widespread corruption. Transparency International ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And, indeed, many of us witnessed the exploitation of U.S. tax dollars by Iraqi officials and military officers. Sabotage and graft have had a particularly deleterious impact on Iraq’s oil industry, which still fails to produce the revenue that Pentagon war planners hoped would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction. Yet holding people accountable has proved difficult. The first commissioner of a panel charged with preventing and investigating corruption resigned last month, citing pressure from the government and threats on his life.
Against this backdrop, the U.S. military has been trying in vain to hold the country together. Even with “the surge,” we simply do not have enough soldiers and marines to meet the professed goals of clearing areas from insurgent control, holding them securely and building sustainable institutions. Though temporary reinforcing operations in places like Fallujah, An Najaf, Tal Afar, and now Baghdad may brief well on PowerPoint presentations, in practice they just push insurgents to another spot on the map and often strengthen the insurgents’ cause by harassing locals to a point of swayed allegiances. Millions of Iraqis correctly recognize these actions for what they are and vote with their feet — moving within Iraq or leaving the country entirely. Still, our colonels and generals keep holding on to flawed concepts.
U.S. forces, responsible for too many objectives and too much “battle space,” are vulnerable targets. The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks — on U.S. troops, civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.
'Our humanity has been compromised' Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America's recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he "never laid hands on anyone" in his many interrogations, adding, "I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."
Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those "good Germans" who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It's up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war's last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country's good name.
Study Reveals Economic Pain as Millions of American Workers Struggle to Make Ends MeetThe Bush recovery has been good for Wall Street, but not Main Street. The economic recovery that began in 2001 has brought slow job growth, limited wage gains, and continued rising inequality. While families at the top of the income ladder have seen their incomes rise faster than inflation, those in the middle and bottom have seen theirs fall.
....The reality, however, according to research we released this week, is that nearly 41 million people live in families that don't earn enough to make ends meet, and government benefits do not fill in the gap. These families work, but their earnings aren't enough. Most low-wage workers don't get the kinds of employer-sponsored benefits common for higher-waged workers, so without government help, these families are left out in the cold, often unable to afford health insurance, decent child care or other necessities.
Is Mitch McConnell(R-Ky) Secretly Financing Right Wing Attacks On a 12-Year-Old?
The NYTimes parses the disgusting all-out spitefest against this family, and coughs up another quote from a "an aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell" -- gee, they sure do get around, don't they?
Ms. Pelosi on Tuesday said, "I think it's really a sad statement about how bankrupt some of these people are in their arguments against S-chip that they would attack a 12-year-old boy."...
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who were gearing up to use Graeme as evidence that Democrats have overexpanded the health program to include families wealthy enough to afford private insurance, have backed off, glad to let bloggers take the heat for attacking a family with injured children.
An aide to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, expressed relief that his office had not issued a press release criticizing the Frosts.
But Michelle Malkin, one of the bloggers who have strongly criticized the Frosts, insisted Republicans should hold their ground and not pull punches. (emphasis mine)
Smells like a political bait and switch maneuver to me, with the GOP leadership leaving the skeezy tactical bag holding to the more than happy to hold it foaming at the mouth wingnuttia denizens. News flash to Sen. McConnell: if you had anything to do with this, the slime stops at your door as well. Attacking minor children for political gain is craven and wrong. Period. Was this coordination on attacks against a 12 year old done with Sen. McConnell's approval -- or is his control over his staff so lax that he had no idea this was being done? And, either way, how does this qualify as "leadership?"
Is anyone in the media going to actually dig into this and find out how involved the McConnell oppo shop has been in all of this? Because I would love to hear a yes or no answer on any of the above questions.
Free Republic Nut Jobs Swiftboat 12 Year OldConservatives have more recently turned their targets on young Graeme Frost himself. A poster at the Free Republic propagated information alleging that Frost was actually a rich kid being pampered by the government. Among other bits of information, the post by the Freeper "icwhatudo" asserts that Graeme and his sister Gemma attend wealthy schools that cost "nearly $40,000 per year for tuition" and live in a well-off home.
The smear attack against Graeme has taken firm hold in the right-wing blogosphere. The National Review, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Powerline, and the Weekly Standard blog have all launched assaults on the Frost family. The story is slowly working its way into traditional media outlets as well.
Here are the facts that the right-wing distorted in order to attack young Graeme:
1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.
2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.
3) They bought their "lavish house" sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.
4) Last year, the Frost's made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.
5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.
Desperate to defend Bush's decision to cut off millions of children from health care, the right wing has stooped to launching baseless and uninformed attacks against a 12 year old child and his family.
Right wing bloggers have been harassing the Frosts, calling their home numerous times to get information about their private lives. Compassionate conservatism indeed.
Truth about the "Drug War"• As of 2005, drug offenders accounted for 55 percent of the federal prison population. About 45 percent of them were in prison for possession, not trafficking.
• The number of people incarcerated in federal prisons for drug crimes rose from 14,976 in 1986 to 68,360 in 1999.
• It costs U.S. taxpayers $3 billion per year to keep drug offenders behind bars in federal prisons.
• Drug offenders have accounted for nearly half the meteoric growth in prison populations since 1995.
• About half the population of U.S. jails and prisons are nonviolent offenders, more than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.
FACT CHECK: "Phony Soldiers" and Limbaugh's Revisionist HistoryWashington, DC - As the controversy over Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" comments continues to grow, Media Matters for America would like to highlight the falsehoods that Limbaugh, America's top conservative talk-radio host, has used to claim that he was taken out of context.
Limbaugh claims he referred only to Jesse MacBeth, but smeared other veterans
Misinformation: On September 28, Limbaugh asserted that his "phony soldiers" comment was a reference to Jesse MacBeth, who pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for pretending to be an injured Iraq war veteran.
Fact: Limbaugh did not refer to MacBeth during his September 26 broadcast until 1 minute and 50 seconds after making his "phony soldiers" comment. Indeed, at no point during his September 26 radio show did Limbaugh refer to any soldiers he considered to be fake prior to making his "phony soldiers" comment.
Drug addict draft dodger Limbaugh selectively edited "phony soldiers" clip, claimed it was "the entire transcript"In response to Media Matters' documentation of his recent description of service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as "phony soldiers," Rush Limbaugh claimed that he had not been talking "about the anti-war movement generally," but rather "about one soldier ... Jesse MacBeth." Limbaugh then purported to air the "entire" segment in question. In fact, the clip he aired omitted a full 1 minute and 35 seconds of discussion that occurred between Limbaugh's original "phony soldiers" comment and his subsequent reference to MacBeth.
