To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
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Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
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In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.
Uncapping the payroll tax reveals still another cultural misstep by Sen. Obama. He apparently has a difficult time understanding that nowadays, a veteran fireman or a veteran cop, married to a veteran schoolteacher, will make well over $100,000. In fact, they can make close to $200,000. Yet Obama still wants to go ahead and tax both the first and last payroll dollar of this group at a very high marginal tax rate by uncapping the Social Security (FICA) tax.
The FICA cap is an individual cap, unaffected by income earned/payroll taxes paid by your spouse.
BAGHDAD - Anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is threatening a new uprising if an American-Iraqi crackdown against his followers continues. ADVERTISEMENT
The cleric says he is giving his final warning to the Iraqi government to stop working with the U.S. military against him or he will "declare an open war until liberation."
Saturday's statement has been posted on al-Sadr's Web site.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Twice-divorced former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took Communion at a Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict on Saturday, breaching rules that bar those who remarry outside the Church from doing so.
As he left New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral with his third wife, Judith, the failed presidential candidate confirmed to Reuters that he took Communion from a priest.
Asked if he was uncomfortable with having broken the Church ban on the divorced and remarried taking Communion, Giuliani said, "No."
...adding that while it's nice on the rare occasions when the press reports on conflicts between action and stated religion in Republicans, this is a pretty dumb story. Perhaps if Rudy were still running for office it might have some relevancy if there was something else going on make it relevant. But what Rudy does in church is his business absent some other consideration.
“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.”
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In longer discussions on the subject, Mr. McCain often goes into greater specificity about the entities jockeying for control in Iraq. Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain’s portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a “perfectly reasonable catchall phrase” that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that “does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
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Few, including Mr. McCain, expect Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group, to take control of Shiite-dominated Iraq in the event of an American withdrawal. The situation they fear and which Mr. McCain himself sometimes fleshes out is that an American withdrawal would be celebrated as a triumph by Al Qaeda and create instability that the group could then exploit to become more powerful.
I've been trying to get a handle on just why attacking Move On is problematic in a way that criticizing other organizations isn't. It's certainly fair to criticize the leadership of Move On, and specific actions the group takes, but dismissing and marginalizing the entire organization is something else entirely. The issue is, I think, that Move On basically has no credibility other than what its members give it. Their power comes not from having a seat at any table, but they are instead empowered largely by the actions of its members. To dismiss Move On is to dismiss the large block of people that comprise it.
In the late 90s, the dirty fucking hippies were the crazy people who thought that Bill Clinton should neither resign nor be impeached. They were marginalized by the corrupt elites in our mainstream media who felt otherwise. In the great wasteland of our mainstream media there was almost no place one could turn to find someone expressing the majority view of the American public, that this whole thing was insane.
No one denies that the trivial things in politics can often matter much more than policy. The problem with our political press today isn't simply that too often they focus on the trivial at the expense of any substance, it's that they regularly send the message that the trivial is what's important. Not to them, they claim, but it's what's important to the great unwashed. Who knows where the great unwashed who turn on the teevee and see very important journalists telling them about the stuff that matters could have gotten that crazy idea.
Unemployment hits 7.4% in Riverside County in California. That's getting towards widespread economic pain territory. It's much lower than that nationally, but pain is increasing in areas.
I don't know if it's this evening's Obama rally or just the nice weather generally but this town's a zoo today. So many people out. Doesn't anyone work for a living anymore?
Think the economy sucks. That's pretty astounding. People are more optimistic about their personal finances, lending some credibility to the inevitable Republican "liberal media lying about the economy" charges. Kidding, of course, but I am curious how much this is hitting people or those in their circle personally or how much it's just echoing back media reports about the economy. What portion of the public is in some way experiencing bad times either personally or within their circle of friends/acquaintances/broader family/etc.? Not sure there's any real way to know the answer to that.
It's true that "yuppies" are much less likely to ride buses. The possibly apocryphal quote (the internet seems to make all quotes possibly apocryphal) from Margaret Thatcher is "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." There are good and bad reasons for this.
Obviously there is the Thatcheresque class association. Poor people ride buses! Paint it green and tart it up to look like a fake trolley and such people will ride them because they associate those with tourism.
But there are good reasons people don't like buses, though some of them can be improved upon. Buses are generally slower and less predictable. The rides are bumpier and less pleasant. The routes aren't as fixed, and people are less sure where they go. Get on the wrong train and you can just get off at the next stop and return. It's less clear what to do if you go wrong on a bus.
But you can make a better bus system. With GPS systems you can have real time information at bus stops about when (and what) bus is arriving. The simple step of having good up to date maps and schedules, along with fare information, at bus stations is a big help. Transfers to/from other buses and trains should be free and easy. Express buses which don't stop every block should be on some routes. Giving buses the ability to force a stoplight change improves speed.
Lots of ways to make buses better, some of which require little in the way of capital expenditures.
Still they aren't a substitute for fixed rail. An important element of a transit system is to have it impact land use patterns, to have denser development around transit routes. Since bus routes aren't fixed, they're less likely to lead to land use changes.
After my nightmarish confrontation with Roger Simon, I rode the elitist bus home.
As we know the perennial question about your modern conservatives is if they're stupid or evil, or if both what's the balance between the two. This isn't about all conservatives, just the modern conservative movement as it's currently represented in stupid crappy blogs, magazines, pundits, and NYT columnists.
A similar question can be asked about people like Michael O'Hanlon and Fred Hiatt. Do they push forever war in Iraq because they are conscienceless monsters who have no concern for the consequences of what they advocate? Or do they push for forever war because they have just enough conscience to care, but their ego requires them to be "right" so they keep dreaming of ponies? That is, they have consciences but their egos won't let them face them.
The thing is, it's their job to have at least a vague notion what "middle class" is. Charlie Gibson is paid millions of dollars every year to deliver a half hour of the news every night. He has a large staff and plenty of people to do research for that. He's greatly concerned with what "regular people" think of things, supposedly. And he's an idiot!
It's become so trite to suggest this, I know, but imagine if a Democrat had Bush's disapproval ratings. There would be nightly calls for his/her resignation!
I suppose class and Social Security are actually much the same. They're the "third rail" because the former freaks out elites and the latter angers them. The country loves Social Security and probably could handle a conversation about class if the Villagers didn't nuke any candidate who dared bring it up.
It's actually kind of funny thinking about how for so many years I'd internalized this notion of Social Security as the "third rail." You know, it's so dangerous that only really brave politicians would mess with it. Of course it's incredibly popular because it's a great program, people like it, and there's no reason to mess with it. But we've had decades of elites and the "pain caucus" and other wankerific manifestations of people who really can't stand the idea that old people get a modest guaranteed income after paying into an insurance system their whole lives.
There are a lot of dimensions to this, but, yes, media outlets of all kinds should consider whether they're really giving the people what they want or not. Obviously in advertising-based businesses advertisers are also their customers so this complicates things.
I think this plays out in different ways in different areas. George and Charlie are near the top of the pyramid, so they know what's best for you! Elitism, basically. And the you have local newspaper monopolies who justified their monopolies by imagining they were Very Important Institutions. Elitism again! Though different. Then you have CNN and MSNBC who wriggle around within the confines, roughly, of what they imagine journalism is supposed to be (not saying they live up to this concept, just that it impacts how they do things), though for some reasons various things like "informing the public" seem to come beneath odd arcane journalistic practices that no one but journalists care about.
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