A Reporter Who Does Not Do Stenography

Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings:

The writer whose Rolling Stone article brought down Gen. Stanley McChrystal said he never thought his reporting would bring about the effective end of McChrystal’s career, as well as a crisis for the Obama administration...

But, Hastings told Lauer, he did receive pressure from the general’s staff to change some of his intended reporting.

“They tried to pressure me not to write about some things that were on the record. I told them I can’t really play that game,” Hastings said.

A generation ago, Rolling Stone gave America the “gonzo” reporting of Hunter S. Thompson. That tradition has continued today with the unfettered reportage of a new generation of writers who do not operate by the conventions of the mainstream media, including Matt Taibbi and Hastings.

“One of the things that happens in journalism, especially with powerful figures, is that they give journalists access in exchange for favorable coverage and future access,” Hastings said. “That dynamic didn’t apply to me and the story I was writing, or just my general style of journalism.”

OMG, a reporter who actually reports instead of simply doing stenography. No donuts from you Mr. Hastings:

And do not expect to be invited to any Beach party's:

From the Right or from the Left, sucking up to The Powers That Be is equal opportunity B*LL SH*T.

Update - 25 June 2010

As always, the master Political Satirist John Stewart nails the Beltway Presstitutes to the wall:

Mr. Stewart, the American News Media started to "kind a suck" 15 years ago at the start of the Hunting of the President, on to the War on Gore and fininally mutating into the Lapdog press. The problem is NOBODY but you and Colbert had the guts to call them out.

Family Values and the Fantasy of the Village

Parker’s Fantasy World of the village:

In Canteyville, USA, a warning for Washington lawmakers
By Kathleen Parker
Sunday, April 4, 2010; A13

CANTEYVILLE, S.C.
If thy name is Incumbent, you might want to start packing up those D.C. tchotchkes.

November is likely to be a cruel month.

That, at least, is the view from "Canteyville," which you won't find on a map. There is no town by this name in South Carolina, though there ought to be. Canteys are as common as front porches in this part of the country.

For these purposes, Canteyville is a state of mind, a late-night invention born of spirited conversation at a sporting clay club in the state's unfortunately dubbed "Midlands."

...The Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress have acted on the conviction that they know best and that citizens eventually will come around. This may sometimes have been historically true, but here's another truth: If you can't convincingly explain the beauty of a policy to the educated, hardworking people of Canteyville, you might have a policy problem.

Meanwhile, back in the Reality Based Community:

Steele, strip clubs and the GOP's family values
By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

Poor Michael Steele. In the latest line of "when did you stop beating your wife" questioning, the RNC Chairman is having to deny that he spent any funds at a high-cost strip club.

The Republican National Committee went on the offensive Monday, saying it will investigate the expense by an unnamed RNC official of $1,946 at the Voyeur West Hollywood strip club in February.

Here's the media report that started the ruckus Monday.

And here's part of the RNC's response about Steele's potential involvement in the strip club spending:

The chairman was never at the location in question, he had no knowledge of the expenditure, nor does he find the use of committee funds at such a location at all acceptable.

Take that.

Still, the use of Republican National Committee funds for that kind of expense would appear to violate one of the GOP's cardinal rules:

Don't do anything that makes us look hypocritical when we talk about good old American values.

The Community’s #1 Spokeswoman (Spot on as ever Ms. D):

Ersatz America

by digby

…But contrary to Parker's romantic view of what life is like outside the green room, there are actually a whole lot of Americans who aren't white, conservative Republicans. And they actually are far more indicative of "salt-of-the-earth-hardworking-regular folks" since virtually none of them are wealthy southerners living on faux farms playing at being good old boys on the week-end.

When these Villagers make one of their anthropological treks out into the country and come back with their report, the Real Americans they seek are always either white midwestern conservatives, white western conservatives or white Southern conservatives --- usually rural, always "small town" and often sitting around a table eating and and complaining about how the world has gone to hell and a handbasket. It's like they all set out to find Real America based on their memories of 1960s TV Mayberry --- a world that never really existed and certainly doesn't exist now except among wealthy land-owners trying to create a bucolic vacation spot to entertain their urban socialite friends.

Her America is a nation that exists only in the Villagers' and Disney Imagineers' minds. But it ends up infecting the politics of this country because these people all reinforce each others' fantasies when they get back to the "greenrooms and talkshows" and give a completely skewed impression of who "Real Americans" are and what "Real Americans" think. Oddly, it turns out they always think exactly the same way the villagers do. Go figure.

Go Figure Indeed.

Governor Gay Basher and Grandpa Munster

One of the celebrity's I most admire in the liberal progressive wing was an actor named Al Lewis, who's most famous part was that of Grandpa Munster. He was an uncompromising leftist from the old school, and in an interview with the underground NY Newspaper Shadow on October 21, 1997, he gave the following quote:

"We used to have a saying: "If you don't get the asses of the masses out in the street, forget it." And you get enough of them out there, the ruling class gets scared. That's the only thing they're afraid of, is numbers. Numbers!"

Flash forward some 12 years later to the Virginia Governor's Office, and an executive order issued by Gov Bobby Mac that Rolls Back Non-Discrimination Protections for gay state workers. Not to be out done, the Gov's equally homophobic Attorney General Kenny "Cooch" Cuccinelli sent out a memo advising the state's public colleges that they don't have the authority to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The response these right wing A-holes received validated the quote from Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis:

March to Capitol follows anti-Cuccinelli protest at VCU
By Karin Kapsidelis
Published: March 11, 2010
Updated: March 11, 2010

The protest began with the Pledge of Allegiance, but the emphasis was on "justice for all."

More than 1,000 people rallied at Virginia Commonwealth University yesterday against an attempt by the state attorney general to negate anti-discrimination policies that protect gays.

"VCU is not a place where you can bring bigotry and expect not to be challenged," said Cameron Hunt, a senior who after the rally led about 150 students on a march to the state Capitol in protest of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli...

THE ASSES

OF THE MASSES

OUT IN THE STREET

But does the Ruling Class get scared. Hell yeah:

Va Governor Robert McDonnell: Gay Discrimination Fireable Offense
By Susan Marie Kovalinsky
March 11, 2010

As Virginia's college campuses experience an uproar over gay rights, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has now issued a directive to all 102,000 state employees Wednesday that prohibits discrimination in the state workforce, including on the basis of sexual orientation. In his directive, the Governor warns he will fire anyone who engages in such discrimination."

Because of the outrage among students, college presidents and others, the Governor seemed forced to address discrimination in his formal statement.

Gov Bobby Mac has the joy of being squeezed by two opposing forces, the small minority of Christian Creeps social conservatives from the Family Foundation who want to turn Virginia into a Theocracy and the Majority of Virginians who do not like their state to become a segment on The Daily Show, ex specially if they are trying to lure high tech Company's like Northrup Grumman. In the words of the Blog Bacon's Rebellion:

...Who's running the store? Both McDonnell and Cuccinelli are...die-hard, right wing social conservatives who want to cash in on the backlash against Barack Obama...McDonnell ran a smart campaign by downplaying the extreme views of his political past. The rumor was that he was trying to keep Cuccinelli on a tight leash...Do we really buy McDonnell's excuse that he has had to rein in "Cooch" when he was the one that set the whole thing up in the first place?

Meanwhile, McDonnell has extended lots of corporate welfare offers to get Northrop Grumman to locate in Virginia...has threatened to drive the defense contractor away with these homophobic policies.

So, we are left with two rather frightening questions. Is the McDonnell gang simply incompetent? Or is there a much broader agenda?

The agenda was to legally equate homosexuality with drug abuse and pornography as evils that "the government must restrain, punish, and deter." The incompetence was believing that his election in 2009 gave him a mandate to actually implement this policy.

The Asses of the Masses proved him wrong.

Susan, Scott and Stealth

About 13 Months ago, an ex News anchor and board member of the Seattle based Discovery Institute lost an election For King County Executive, home of the Liberal city of Seattle.
About 13 days ago, a onetime Nude model and Lieutenant Colonel in the Army National Guard took a seat in the US Senate that was held by the Liberal Lion Ted Kennedy for over 40 years.
As noted by Ms. Tarico at Huffington Post, Susan Hutchison and Scott Brown were part of the not so new Republican strategy called the stealth campaign:

As the Right Wing base sinks to new levels of insanity taking the Republican brand with it, “going stealth” has become the campaign strategy of choice in districts where an all-out, Teabagger Town Hall, Palin-Beck, froth-mouthed feeding frenzy would just turn stomachs. The Right’s agenda isn’t evolving, just its tactics…

They still want to drown government in a bathtub…They still think that some hubba hubba god made women “separate but equal"—men with brains and biceps, women with vaginas…They still think we can teach creationism in schools and…They still think we can end drug use by jailing addicts. They still think that guns don’t kill people..They still think the problem with their marriage is my brother. And they still think that you can give the free market absolute power without it corrupting absolutely.

But in some of the best run Republican and Religious Right (Rebiblican) campaigns in the country, you’d never know it.

Scott Brown and his counterpart in Virginia Bob McDonnell succeeded. Susan Hutchison and TEA Bagger extraordinaire Doug Hoffman went down in Flames. And the Main Stream Media (with the exception of McClatchy Newspapers) stuck to its script (AKA Republican Talking Points):

Brown said his win in a solidly-Democratic state, along with the interest in the Q&A session President Obama and House Republicans had on Friday, is proof that voters want more transparency and less backroom dealing.

"What it means is that now there will be full and fair debate," Brown said of his 41st Republican vote in the Senate that erased a Democratic supermajority. "And there will be no more behind-closed-doors actions."

Transparency? Yeah right. Ms. Hutchison and Mr. Hoffman received a lot of transparency, but it sure as hell was not from Gods Own Party (the blog, yes. The GOP, not so much) or the media lapdogs. Again from Ms. Tarico:

What’s interesting is that the same stealth strategy failed miserably in Washington State. Palin-wannabe Susan Hutchison was defeated by fourteen points after being ahead in the polls just weeks ago.

What happened? It’s very simple: Word got out about who she is, and it made King County’s voters a bit queasy... By November 3, the voting public knew who Susan Palin Hutchison is, and for a stealth campaign, that’s lethal…When Rebiblicans pose as moderates and change agents, they have just exposed soft tissue.

But can those of us who dream of a more progressive society cut the rotting tissue away? With Less then 11 months to go before the midterm elections of 2010, I will not give up hope, but I will equally not succumb to self-delusion: the Corporate Bastard's funding the GOP/TEA Party/Anti Health care ads have won big bidness a number of victory's.

The Supremos have handed the Corporates the ability to buy any Candidate of their choice (Chief Justice Johnny the Robber is a lying corporate hypocrite shill. Strip search Sammy is the same; and with his behavior at the SOTU he is now a political (rather than judicial) hero to Republicans and a political enemy of Democrats [hammer on the nail Mr. Greenwald]).

And finally we have the greatest asset toward a GOP sweep in November, a 24 hour News Channel that has dropped all attempts at impartiality and is now a fundraising Political Action Committee of the Republican Party.

The D's are running scared, the R's are crowing, and it's 1994 all over again (at least according to my local paper). Meanwhile, those of us in the reality based community are pissed off that my Democratic Party has the power, but is afraid to use it. Stinks.

A conversation about Race relations

Spoke to my sister yesterday, and we had an interesting conversation about Race relations in America. As I recall, the whole thing started when I mentioned that her oldest son was going to be 18 in a few years, and if he was considering his future after High school. She said that while R**** had considered going into the military, he would not do so while President Obama was in office. I pressed her on this, did she feel it was political, or was it because of the "O" man's skin color? She said she did not know, but if it was about politics then she was surprised, her son never seemed to have any political thoughts.

This eventually led to our discussion on race. Like my 2 brothers, my sister is born again and hard right, so conversations with her can be similar to those I had with my father before he passed away. We talked about Rodney King, and the New Haven Firefighters, and how my Sister believed that the Firefighters were "victims of reverse discrimination because the were white". She was disturbed because I disagreed, and that I sounded like a ?Racist? or someone who was ashamed of being white because I supported Affirmative Action. She quoted Martin Luther King, and judging people by the "Content of their Character". And when I tried to explain about segregation de facto rather then de jure, she did not get it.

Anyone who has read any of my previous post's on women's rights, civil rights and voting rights knows where I stand on these issues. The New Haven decision became a rallying cry for the followers of the Southern Strategy, but an article in Slate.com shows that when Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected the New Haven firefighters' claim she was following established precedent:

...the city (New Haven) rejected the firefighter exam because the test violated Title VII..Title VII requires employers to consider the racial impact of their hiring and promotion procedures in order to prevent discrimination that's inadvertent as well as intentional. Ricci's claim is that the city's effort to comply with Title VII is itself race discrimination...

An employer can also discriminate by using a selection process that has a disparate impact—in other words, that screens out a particular group for no good reason...Eight black, 25 white, and eight Hispanic firefighters took New Haven's test for promotion to captain; three black, 16 white, and three Hispanic candidates passed. Nineteen black, 43 white, and 15 Hispanic firefighters took the test to become lieutenant; six black, 25 white, and three Hispanic candidates passed. This result counts as discriminatory under the rules of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. New Haven was right to worry about the possibility of a lawsuit from black firefighters if it accepted the results of the tests.

The city was also in a bind because its agreement with the firefighters union required that the exam count for 60 percent of the decision about whether to promote each candidate and because a city charter rule required that every promotion go to one of the three top-scoring candidates. These rules magnified the disparate racial impact of the exam—no black candidate and only one Hispanic candidate was eligible for promotion, even though several of them passed the test. More reason for the city to worry about a lawsuit by the African-Americans who were to be passed over.

Like his previous ruling against the Seattle school District, Johnny the Robber is determine to dismantle 40 years worth of Civil Rights protection under the guise of "reverse discrimination". Reading her descenting opinion from the bench, Justice Ruth Ginsberg stated the obvious:

The white firefighters who scored high on New Haven’s promotional exams...attract this Court’s sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them. New Haven maintains that it refused to certify the test results because it believed...it would be vulnerable to a Title VII disparate-impact suit if it relied on those results.

By order of this Court, New Haven, a city in which African-Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60 percent of the population, must today be served—as it was in the days of undisguised discrimination—by a fire department in which members of racial and ethnic minorities are rarely seen in command positions.

A 60% minority population, and yet they have only one African American captain and no battalion chiefs.

But he is a Conservative Activist Judge, so it is okay...

The O man nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice "Silent" Souter on the Supremo's. As predicted, the RWNM is in full rant mode (Great Stuff Joe), with the lead attack centering around that most favorite phrase of Movement Conservatives: Judicial Activism (oh the horror).

As typical, the lazy members of the news media cheerfully spread this manure without: "explain(ing) what that means, give any examples, or explain why it would be a bad thing".

An excellent article by Jeff Toobin in the New Yorker on The Chief Justice of the Supremo's Johnny the Robber Roberts shows that being a Judicial Activist is acceptable; as long as your a Conservative Activist:

(Chief Justice ) Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules...His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative... In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party (emphasis mine).

The majority on the Court who are affiliated with The Modern Republican Party not only believe in Judicial activism, they consistently practice it.

It is the activism that allows a Corporation to pay a women less money as long as she does not find out about it within 180 days of the offense (never mind what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has previously ruled).

It is the activism that will ensure that non white students will continue to remain in the substandard schools as a matter of fact if not law (Brown Vs. Board of Education was so 1950's).

It is the Ultimate in Judicial Activism that allows the Majority Conservative members of the Court rather then the Majority of Voters to decide who will be the next President of the United States; in an unsigned one page opinion that must never be used as precedent.

With Spector flipping to the D's, the Republic Party is left with on 40 seats in the Senate and 178 in the House. Any attempt to block the nomination of Judge Sotomayor as only two outcomes (slim and none), so the R's are not even going to make the attempt.

What they will do is continue to ram home the talking points and make sure that they are constantly regurgitated by a media that does not do analysis, only Stenography. They are thinking long term (Elections of 2010, 2012 and 2016) and believe this may rally the base.

Unfortunately it may also rally the growing Hispanic Community in the United States.

Let Them Eat Bonuses

So the pheasants seem to be in revolt. Who could have predicted?

Bonus Outrage: AIG Employees Are Living In Fear
JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN March 20, 2009 05:22 PM EST

FAIRFIELD, Conn. — Pillars of the community are now pariahs fearing for their safety in a ritzy area of Connecticut home to many executives at American International Group Inc., hit with a backlash over bonuses it paid to top brass even as it accepted federal bailout money.

AIG Employees Worried That They'll Be Killed
Henry BlodgetMar. 19, 2009, 12:08 PM

FAIRFIELD, Conn. — Remaining employees in AIG's financial products group are worried that the angry America mob will tear them limb from limb.

Inside AIG-FP, Feeling the Public's Wrath
By Brady Dennis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 19, 2009; Page C01

They watched quietly as members of Congress referred to them as greedy and incompetent. They heard more than one demand that their names be released to the seething American public. They heard the chairman of American International Group, Edward M. Liddy, tell lawmakers that people, in e-mails sent to AIG-FP, suggested that the firm's leaders "should be executed with piano wire around their necks."

Your old Sarge has a day job working security at a local military post. Most of my coworkers are right of center, and exist on a steady diet of right wing talk radio. The vast majority buy into the talking points that have permeated American Society for the last 29 years, starting with Saint Ronnie.

It has been this constant flow of propaganda, coupled with a News media that has been bought and paid for by the corparates that has always insulated the 1/100th from any negative consequences of their actions. No act of theft, no matter how brazen or outrageous could get people to stop paying attention to the next American idol.

Thus it comes as somewhat of a shock to the New American Royalty that ordinary Americans might start to reject “bidness as usual”:

And the idea that the system might possibly be rigged so that those on top got their money not by being the most productive, but simply because they were the most successful at gaming the system.

While not quiet as long as the first one 100 years ago, the 2nd gilded age enjoyed a remarkable run in the face of one scandal or another that resulted in the Screwing of the Average Man (Read the book if you can find a copy).

Its time, however, may be past.