Dan Hasn't Lost His Touch

Froomkin calls bullshit on all the Rahm love circulating in the media at the moment as only he can lol.

Must See TV

According to Nielsen ratings The Rachel Maddow show has lost quite a bit of its viewership over the course of President Obama's first year. I can honestly say that I can't imagine why that is. If you thought Rachel's show was interesting and worth watching before the election, it has only gotten better in my estimation since that time. And I say that even acknowledging that I don't always agree with her point of view. Last night she was particularly AWESOME in calling out the hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans which seemingly knows no bounds at this point.

The only question I have at this point is why aren't the rest of the so called news hosts on MSNBC actually paying attention to her reporting on a vast number of issues? I say reporting because that is exactly what it is. There is no denying that Rachel is a progressive through and through, but she brings facts to the table, not just hyperbole. And bigger than that she isn't above making corrections when she makes mistakes. Combine that with her appearances on Meet The Press which have been like a breath of fresh air and its high time the rest of the mainstream media, including her own network, start taking her a helluva lot more seriously!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Spencer Ackerman Cuts Through The Hyperbole

What's so hard about saying someone is lying when they are.....lying?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Had To Be Said

Make no mistake about it, the real obstacles to getting health care reform passed at the moment are a handful of asshole Democrats. Still watching Senate Republicans lie through their effing teeth every day all day about the bill is really damn irritating. Made even worse so by their enablers in the media who never call them out.

Well Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has no such qualms about calling a spade a spade.



Fiscal conservative? GTFOH wit dat!

You Lie!

I am not the world's biggest fan of Dylan Rattigan but he gets major props for giving this guest a nice steaming cup of shut the fuck up over her lying about the Stupak amendment in health care reform.

Ahem

I am not sure what this means for his job security at WaPo but Ezra Klein basically just called out Fred Hiatt over his op ed column about the House health care bill. Now he wasn't belligerent and was very respectful in his response but basically he called bullshit on Hiatt's column and there is no way of getting around that.

Fred Hiatt's column today calls the House's health-care reform bill "a step closer to bankruptcy." But he's not really talking about the House's health-care reform bill, which he admits the Congressional Budget Office has assessed as not only deficit neutral but deficit improving. He's talking about, first, a fix to Medicare reimbursement rates that really isn't part of health-care reform, and, second, the capacity of Congress to make hard decisions about, well, anything. Fair points both, but neither here nor there when it comes to the House legislation.

To take them in order, the $250 billion Medicare payment fix is actually the outgrowth of another bill: The 1997 Balanced Budget Act. That legislation created a payment formula for Medicare that tied the program's payments to the period's extremely low growth in health-care costs. But then cost growth accelerated again, and Republican and Democratic congresses alike began voting to reject the formula's cuts. Bringing the formula back into line with the growth of health-care costs will require a hefty $250 billion. But we'd have to do it whether President Obama pursued health-care reform or not. Just ask President Bush, who had no interest in health-care reform, but saw Congress reject these payment cuts in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Hiatt's more compelling objection is that Congress will continue to duck the hard questions of health-care reform and vote to avoid making the cuts and reforms that are written into the bill. As he says, "history suggests that legislators will not be deaf to the complaints of seniors and those who treat them when it comes time for the ax to fall."

This may be true. The problem, however, is that it obviates any possible solutions. For instance: In the final line of the column, Hiatt proposes that "Obama puts his clout behind the progressive ideals of thrift and cost containment." Elsewhere in the column, Hiatt laments that Congress did not "end the tax break for employer-provided insurance" or "empower an independent commission that could make cost-control decisions" or "rais[e] taxes on anyone who earns less than $250,000 per year." But if Congress will simply thwart any effort at cost containment, what's the point?

Taxes can be rolled back (see the Bush tax cuts) or indefinitely delayed (see the AMT). Commissions can be ignored or overturned. Cost controls can be repealed and weakened. I'm not necessarily arguing that Hiatt's pessimistic conception of Congress is inaccurate, but the appropriate response is either nihilistic or revolutionary. It cannot, however, be to propose different and harder cost controls than the ones Congress itself has passed.

Now I realize that I probably quoted more than what's usually acceptable but I hope he doesn't mind because I wanted you to get a very good idea of how thoroughly he PWNED Hiatt who is essentially his boss.

I have to give him major respect for not letting Hiatt's BS stand even though they work together and I can only hope that there is no retribution. Ezra is a monster when it comes to health care policy and WaPo would be a fool to let him go any damn way!

He's On A Roll

FINALLY someone or something has woken up Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and he has started attacking the Republicans for their unprecedented obstructionism!!!

Now if he could just take some of that and aim it at certain members of his own caucus...

One Of The Best Answers EVAH!

Dan Froomkin was interviewed by "The Economist" whom asked him seven questions. His answer to question number 2 was one of the best I have seen about the state of journalism and what journalists should be doing.

DIA: Do you think the media should strive for objectivity in its reporting?

Mr Froomkin: No. Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

Call Em Out

This ain't a post about the beyatch whose name shall not be spoken on this blog. It is a post about a response to said beyatch from the Obama administration.

Ali Soufan Calls Bullshit On Dick Cheney And The Rest Of The Torture Advocates

Former FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, is back with another op ed in the New York Times. This time he takes apart Dick Cheney's assertion that the CIA IG report vindicated his position that torture "worked". Spencer Ackerman has a really good post up about it and I suggest reading that in addition to the op ed but I wanted to highlight a particular part of the op ed which should be repeated over and over like an echo whenever Dick Cheney or his wingnut daughter Liz appears on any cable news shows again.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

The Mr. Mohammed Soufan is referring to is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Now this is the central point that I feel like liberals and progressives are loathe to explore because whether torture worked or not, it was illegal and should have never been pursued. I get the sense that many of us on the left also are hesitant to press the case because we think there is a chance that torture did yield useful information. Now on the one hand I am sure that torturing normal people is prone to making them tell more than they would without it. But members of Al Qaeda are not regular people anymore than our soldiers are regular people. And above and beyond that no matter how much information was given up, there still is the question of if it was credible. We have a culture whereby we have been conditioned to believe that because torture works in movies or on popular Tee Vee shows then it works in real life. But the truth, as counterintiutive as it might be to some of us, is that it doesn't.

As Ali Soufan points out, if torture was so effective then why the hell haven't we caught the Al Qaeda leadership, all of whom were know to KSM? Why didn't he tell us where they were and what they were up to? Why don't we have bin Ladin's head on a platter right now when instead, 8 years after 9/11 the guy is still putting out propaganda tapes? Can anybody answer that one? Can one single torture advocate answer that question?

Traditional interrogation was never tried on KSM, and that's the dirty little secret that nobody, including the mainstream media, ever wants to talk about. Soufan points out in the op ed all the information extracted from other HVDs who were tortured because the FBI was still allowed to use traditional interrogations either before or after the torture. When they were able to use traditional interrogtions prior to the torture they were able to extract information just fine and the torture wasn't even necessary and only ended up making the detainee shut down to the point where the FBI had to be called back in time and time again just to get them to start back talking. In the cases where traditional interrogation was used after the detainees were tortured the interrogators had to work their asses off to undue the harm the torture had done just to get the detainees to talk. In short, torture made it harder and less likely to get information out of the detainees in just about every single instance. This isn't some DFH saying it, its a hardened FBI interrogator who actually was in the room and got good information from several members of Al Qaeda and helped prosecute them both here and abroad.

Now I realize that torture advocates will never admit that torture didn't work and actually harmed our efforts to head off more attacks, but its time for everyone else to start calling bullshit on them too. Its not enough just to stick to the legality of the situation when the other side is appealing to people's primal instinct for revenge. People need to know that our ability to extract revenge was actually hurt by people like Dick Cheney ordering torture. As Soufan infers with his rhetorical question the very reason we don't have Al Qaeda's leadership dead or in custody now is precisely because Cheney ordered the torture of the men who could have led us right to them.

At some point we have to say that and keep repeating it until it sinks in to the public's consciousness. Otherwise we leave open the possibility that Dick Cheney gets to revise history to his benefit. And I don't think any of us wants that to happen.

Some Things Just Never Get Old

Like Dan Froomkin calling bullshit on Dick Cheney and the media coverage of him.

Beautiful!

Attackerman Ethers Dick Cheney

Thanks to Spencer Ackerman's fine work on the two torture documents that Dick Cheney sought to release, ostensibly to prove that torture worked, we now have it confirmed that Cheney is a lying sack of shit!

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children’s lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as “KSM” largely provide intelligence about “historical plots” pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his “rolodex” — that is, what intelligence experts call “pocket litter,” or the telling documentation found on someone’s person when captured. As well, traditional intelligence work appears to have done wonders — including a fair amount of blundering on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s part:

In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.

This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn’t have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn’t attempt to present a case that the “enhanced interrogation” program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.

The second newly released document — a June 2005 overview of information extracted from detainees — is, if anything, more caveated. In making a case that “detainee reporting” was “pivotal for the war against [al-Qaeda],” it says that “detainee reporting is often incomplete or too general to lead directly to arrests; instead, detainees provide critical pieces to the puzzle, which, when combined with other reporting, have helped direct an investigation’s focus and led to the capture of terrorists.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the prime example here.

The document also discusses unraveling the network of Indonesian al-Qaeda affiliate Hambali after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. There are repeated references to the value of “debriefings,” which the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report says are distinct from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” but can be used after they occur. For instance, “Debriefings of mid-level [al-Qaeda] operatives also have reported on specific plots against U.S. interests.” Indeed, in a section titled “Aiding Our Understanding [al-Qaeda],” a listed example is:

Abu Zubaydah’s identification early in his detention of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of 11 September and [al-Qaeda's] premier terrorist planner and of ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri as another key [al-Qaeda] operational planner corroborated information [REDACTED].

Those revelations, as former Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan has testified, came before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

snip

Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what’s released within them does not remotely make that case. Cheney’s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don’t.

I had to exerpt heavily because everything in the piece was tied together and notable but again this is all Spencer Ackerman who put the pieces of he puzzle together and he deserves all the credit. Hopefully there will be some Democrats on the Hill with balls big enough and spines strong enough to use his analysis to beat back the whinefest that we all know is now coming from the GOP.

Give Us The Truth

I highly recommend this op-ed from Neal Gabler in the LA Times entitled 'Truth' vs. 'facts' from America's media

I am just going to excerpt the ending:

Why don't we get the truth? Part of it, as I've said, is fear -- fear that if journalists dispel the rumors they will be bashed by the right, which is implacably against the president's reforms no matter how much sense they make. Part of it is a lack of expertise. Most reporters are not equipped to quickly and authoritatively tell truth from spin on an issue such as healthcare. And part of it, frankly, is sheer laziness.

Telling the truth requires shoe leather. It requires digging up facts that aren't being handed to you, talking to experts, thinking hard about what you find. This isn't easy. It takes time and energy as well as guts, especially when there are conflicting studies, as there are on healthcare. But finally, we may not have a journalism of truth because we haven't demanded one. Many of us are invested in one side of the story; we are for Obama or against him, for healthcare reform or against it. These are a priori positions. Truth won't change them.

Yet the danger of not insisting on the truth in a brave new world of constant lies is that it subjects our policies to whichever side shouts the loudest or has the most money to spend to mislead us. That is likely to lead to disastrous governance: a needless war, a great recession, a continuation of a failing healthcare system.

What it comes down to is that sometimes the media have to tell the truth not because anyone really wants them to but because it is the right thing to do -- the essential thing to do -- for the sake of our democracy.

#STFUMACHINE In Action!

If you twitter you know what hashtags are. For those who don't know, on twitter when you are talking about a particular subject and you want people who aren't following you or just people who are also talking about the same subject to be able to find your tweet you signify it with a hashtag. A hashtag can pretty much be anything you want it to be as long as it begins with a "#".

Well Lawrence O'Donnell does such a good job of pushing back on right wing ideologues on MSNBC that a bunch of us created the #STFUMACHINE hashtag for when we want to talk about a new clip where he PWNS some hapless wingnut. Today, as the guest host for "Hardball", he took it to a whole new level interviewing Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas. Not only did he call him out for hypocrisy in the debate on health care reform, he also flat out called him a liar several times, something that you hardly EVER see on cable news no matter how bad a guest is full of shit.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I'm kinda hoping that they end up giving him the 10pm time slot. Olberman, Maddow and then LOD would be one helluva lineup!

Steven Pearlstein Brings The Noise

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress -- I've made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.

Good on Steven Pearlstein for calling bullshit on the Republican attacks on health care reform. He better watch his back though because if he keeps it up he will likely be Froomkined.

Jello Jay Bashes Baucus Over Co-Ops

I gotta give it to Senator Jay Rockefeller, he brought the noise today on the Ed Show over Max Baucus' ill advised plan to replace a public option with co-ops in the Senate Finance committee health care reform bill.

The End

Well not really, literally the end, but the end of Dan Froomkin's time with the Washington Post.

His last column:

Today's column is my last for The Washington Post. And the first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you to all you readers, e-mailers, commenters, questioners, Facebook friends and Twitterers for spending your time with me and engaging with me over the years. And thank you for the recent outpouring of support. It was extraordinarily uplifting, and I'm deeply grateful. If I ever had any doubt, your words have further inspired me to continue doing accountability journalism. My plan is to take a few weeks off before embarking upon my next endeavor -- but when I do, I hope you'll join me.

It's hard to summarize the past five and a half years. But I'll try.

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described a disengaged president "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people", encircled by "a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.
And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Now, a little over five months after Bush left office, Barack Obama's presidency is shaping up to be in large part about coming to terms with the Bush era, and fixing all the things that were broken. In most cases, Obama is approaching this task enthusiastically – although in some cases, he is doing so only under great pressure, and in a few cases, not at all . I think part of Obama's abiding popularity with the public stems from what a contrast he is from his predecessor -- and in particular his willingness to take on problems. But he certainly has a lot of balls in the air at one time. And I predict that his growing penchant for secrecy – especially but not only when it comes to the Bush legacy of torture and lawbreaking – will end up serving him poorly, unless he renounces it soon.

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

So classy.

The Washington Post didn't deserve him...