The Politico Web site has been doing an awful lot of good, new media stuff and has really made an impact on political reporting inside the beltway.
They’ve come up with a new feature, and, while it may not always pan out (this week’s is pretty good), it’s innovative and fun.
The Shuttle: Rep. Scott Garrett
By DANIEL LIBIT | 5/16/08 3:32 PM
Politico offers members a lift out of town. The price of the ride? The tape recorder is running.
Sort of. You’ll recall earlier this week I criticized The New York Times reporting on the back-and-forth between the McCain and Obama camps over the latter’s desire to have talks with Iran without preconditions.
Today, we got a half-hearted and incomplete correction.
An article on Saturday about Senator John McCain’s criticism of Senator Barack Obama’s Middle East policy incompletely described Mr. Obama’s position on negotiating with the leaders of countries, including Iran, with which the United States currently has little contact. While Mr. Obama and his aides have indeed described various conditions and limitations on such negotiations, Mr. Obama himself, in a Democratic debate in July 2007, also said he would be willing “to meet separately, without precondition” with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.
Incompletely described Obama’s position?
Ummm…no. You inaccurately described Obama’s position. And by describing his position inaccurately, you used your inaccurate reporting as an unwarranted cudgel to criticize McCain.
This correction is dishonest. If Obama does have preconditions on meetings with the likes of Iran, then why didn’t the reporter quote him instead of a policy adviser? Why not honestly note the discrepancy between the policy adviser’s statements and Obama’s own Web site which still — a week later — says that he will engage with Iran “without preconditions.”
Of course, describing this particular debate accurately would give ample grounding for McCain’s criticisms of Obama and would leave the Times having to take a different tack. The reporter wouldn’t be able to write this:
But important nuances appear to have been lost in the partisan salvos, particularly on Mr. McCain’s side. An examination of Mr. Obama’s numerous public statements on the subjects indicates that he has consistently condemned Hamas as a “terrorist organization,” has not sought the group’s support and does not advocate immediate, direct or unconditional negotiations with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.
Except that he does advocate immediate, direct and unconditional negotiations with Iran.
The “correction” also only notes the July 2007 debate quote. It ignores the Web site and a more recent, November 2007 interview with the Times itself all of which emphasize the immediate and unconditional nature of his policy.
I will try once again to get the paper’s Public Editor to weigh in on this issue, but I won’t be holding my breath.
My original letter requesting the correction is after the jump. No, the reporter never responded to my e-mail.
Continue reading ‘We get a correction’
Yesterday, the California Supreme Legislature Court decided that gays and lesbians — but not bigamists, polygamists, first-cousins, brothers and sisters — can marry.
This may not last, as an initiative to overturn the decision is likely to make it on the November ballot. There’s extensive, thoughtful coverage of the issue over at National Review’s “Bench Memos” blog.
However, I wanted to highlight just one line in the increasingly centrist San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial on the subject.
Our view remains that current law allowing homosexuals to enter into civil unions is preferable to same-sex marriage. But that did not stop us from opposing Proposition 22 in 2000 as divisive and dubious….
Prop. 22 simply wrote into law (not the state constitution) the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman.
If Prop. 22 was divisive, what the heck was yesterday’s court ruling.
And, in light of yesterday’s ruling, it doesn’t seem so dubious anymore.
I concur with this editorial in the New York Times.
The farm bill is an abomination — proof that no matter what party is in power, the impulse to throw around the public’s money for political advantage is universal.
I did chuckle, however, when the editorial writer referred to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “reformer.”
Yeah, and I’m a supermodel.
John McCain gave a global warming/climate change speech on Monday. (The term used by the scaremongers depends on the weather the day they give their speech.) McCain favors an approach known as “cap and trade” which will have the net effect of raising energy costs for everyone. You’ll need the Bush tax cuts then.
For those of you, like me, who are less than enthusiastic about a McCain presidency — the Democrats plans are far worse.
You really have to wonder why McCain would even bother doing this. Yes, it’s an effort to reach out to independents who by-and-large buy the global warming scaremongering put out by the mainstream media. If he’s elected president and gets something like this through congress, which with a Democrat congress he likely will, he won’t get any credit for it. President George W. Bush raised the standards on diesel emissions shortly after he came into office — something President Bill Clinton neglected to do — and what did he get for it? Nothing.
But McCain, and everyone else for that matter would do well to look at the science.
Regular visits to Climate Audit would be helpful. (Though the science discussed there is often very complicated, it’s not difficult to tell that proprietor Steve McIntyre is offering up effective critiques of the anthropogenic global warming and its adherents andherence to basic scientific principles.) As would studying the work of Anthony Watts who is building a pretty effective case that the U.S. ground temperature monitoring stations reported temperature rise is indicative of what is known as the Urban Heat Island effect and not global warming.
Finally, here’s another couple of videos from that rowdy professor from Down Under, Bob Carter, on the proposition that CO2 is causing a global temperature rise.
There’s a real danger that scaremongers are aiming to increase human misery on this Earth for nothing. By limiting CO2 output and the benefits that go along with it — think about how poor Africans could benefit from even rudimentary gasoline-powered farming equipment over the human- and animal-powered variety — we are attempting to turn back the technological clock. We here in the U.S. may be able to adapt. We can, to a certain extent, afford to handicap our economy and still get by.
Banning DDT in the U.S. didn’t have a noticable effect on mosquito-borne diseases because we could afford more expensive chemical concoctions to achieve the same result. Banning DDT in Africa has resulted in millions of deaths because they couldn’t afford the more expensive pesticides.
It looks like we’ll be replaying that sad song again.
UPDATE
National Review interviews “The Skeptical Environmentalist” author Bjorn Lomborg on McCain’s plan and The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins also weighs in.
Hoystory has been upgraded to WordPress v2.5.1. As I was searching my archives for a particular post, I discovered that someone had managed to hack into some of my posts and place links to various Bob Dole-type drugs. You know the ones I’m talking about.
I don’t know how it was done, though I recall getting a warning a couple months ago that my blog wasn’t secure. I discounted it at the time because the warning was anonymous and non-specific.
I didn’t upgrade to the latest (read: most secure) version of WordPress at the time, because I was unsure how the numerous changes in the latest version of WordPress would affect my Redoable theme. It appears, thus far, that my concerns were misplaced.
However, if you do come across something funky that wasn’t there before while navigating the site, leave a comment on this post, or e-mail me at hoystory-at-gmail-dot-com. (My cox.net address is inoperable at the moment as it is affected by unscheduled maintenance.)
The Jerusalem Post reports:
When Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, Sendler was just shy of her 30th birthday.
“The whole of Poland was drowning in blood, but the Jewish nation was suffering the most, with the Jewish children the most vulnerable,” she recalled.
Sendler and a group of friends in the Warsaw municipality’s social welfare department started producing false documents to provide Jews in the ghetto with monetary assistance that the Germans had cut off.
After 1940 the ghetto was closed off to non-Jews, and Sendler and her friends could not get in to distribute the funds.
She soon learned that one sanitation company was still allowed into the ghetto. Sendler got the Polish director of the service to employ her and 10 friends so they could continue helping Jews.
For the next two years, dressed as nurses, Sendler and her friends carried food, money, and medicine hidden in their dresses to ghetto residents. As conditions deteriorated, and the liquidation of ghetto began, Sendler came to the realization that the only chance for the children to survive was to escape.
In 1942, she joined the Polish underground movement, “Zegota,” and, with the help of a dozen friends, initiated a large-scale clandestine campaign to save Jewish children. “You know the people, we have the money,” the president of the organization told her, she recalled.
Acting on information provided by two Jewish policemen in the ghetto, Sendler and her friends went to Jewish homes in areas that were to be liquidated first and offered to save the children.
“We would go into the houses slated for deportation, and would tell the family members we can’t help everybody, but we will help the children,” she said.
When asked by the families what guarantee she could give that the children would survive, Sendler could only tell them that she was not even sure that she and the children would get out of the ghetto alive.
Sendler and her friends managed to save 2,500 children.
Read the whole thing.
Experts: ‘Indiana Jones’ pure fiction
Good thing we got that straight.
The reality of archaeological field work is not a lone hero dashing into hidden chambers with a bullwhip and a pistol and coming away with a priceless relic. It’s large groups of academics and students painstakingly sifting through grids to retrieve artifacts as mundane as pottery fragments.
“It is rather adventurous in a way, because for the most part, you’re going to some exotic country and delving into their past. But it’s not an adventure with a whip and chasing bad guys and looking for treasure,” said Bryant Wood, an archaeologist with Associates for Biblical Research.
“You’re working at one site tediously, probably for many, many years and spending more time processing the finds and writing reports than you do actually digging at the site. But that wouldn’t make for a very good story, spending 70 percent of the time in a library.”
Good thing Indy is fiction, otherwise I can’t imagine many people going to see it in the theaters.
President George W. Bush has gotten hammered for years by many in the media for his religious beliefs. While Bush is positively secular in comparison to many presidents pre-Truman — take a look at some of FDR’s speeches, not to mention Abraham Lincoln’s — that hasn’t stopped many on the left from vilifying him.
“Christianist” and “Christianism” have become the loaded terms of choice for use not only by the secular left, but also the religious left. Bestselling books have been written warning of the incipient doom that would come to all when a conservative Christians took hold of power. One wag (I’m pretty sure it was “American Fascists” author Chris Hedges, but don’t hold me to that) even posited that if the late Rev. Jerry Falwell had become president one of his first moves would be to have all homosexuals executed.
President Bill Clinton, though he often spoke in religious terms, did not garner this kind of outrage or scaremongering in the mainstream medai. Why? I’ve got two theories on that. First, a lot of God-talk can be forgiven if your policies are the “right” ones. Second, I think a lot of people in the media didn’t think that Clinton really meant it, as evidenced by his serial philandering.
Which brings us to the current presidential race. Remember, Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Christmas ad that had a “floating cross” which was actually a bookshelf. There was tons of media coverage and charges from the left that this was some sort of secret appeal to conservative Christians. The funny thing is, a big part of Huckabee’s campaign was his overt appeals to conservative Christians — all of the sudden the was going covert?
Which brings us to this mailer Sen. Barack Obama is sending out in Kentucky.
If John McCain had done this, there would be howls from the mainstream media. Expect this to register nary a blip.
The newspaper of record, The New York Times does some alleged fact-checking that needs some serious fact-checking of its own.
First, the facts that both sides agree on:
Now we get to where the New York Times stops being an honest broker, and starts spinning (or allowing itself to be spun) by the Obama campaign.
In particular, the McCain campaign has explicitly linked Mr. Yousef’s statements to Mr. Obama’s repeatedly stated willingness to talk to so-called “rogue states” like Iran, North Korea and Cuba.
“Well, Iran is obviously an important supporter of Hamas,” Mr. McCain said Friday.
“Senator Obama wants to sit down and have negotiations and discussions with the person who just yesterday called Israel a quote ‘stinking corpse,’ ” he said, referring to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and “who continues to advocate quote ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ ”
Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state. Mr. Obama believes “that engagement at the presidential level, at the appropriate time and with the appropriate preparation, can be used to leverage the change we need,” Dr. Rice said. “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.”
Well, the reporter obviously didn’t check the debate transcripts.
Now, let’s be as fair as we can possibly manage. Maybe Obama has changed his mind. After all, that debate was months ago.
But the reporter never brings up this statement with Obama adviser Rice. In fact, following that last quoted paragraph, the reporter transitions the thrust of the article into a strawman — that McCain was accusing Obama of being amenable to talks with Hamas instead of Iran.
Finally, here’s the kicker. From Barack Obama’s own Web site — today.
Maybe there’s some semantic difference discernable only by Ph. D. foreign policy advisers between “without preconditions” and “unconditionally,” but it escapes me.
Reporter Larry Rohter has some explaining to do. And I’ve got a note to write to the public editor.
More on this subject from:
Little Green Footballs
Hot Air
Powerline
A couple of months back Sen. John McCain was touring the Middle East. At an impromptu press briefing, McCain misspoke and mixed up Sunni and Shia. The media talking heads on the various cable talk shows leapt on the mistake and the media template of “John McCain is old and senile” took air.
Don’t expect similar discussion on this Barack Obama goof.
Obama no doubt knows how many states there are. He is not having a senior moment. He may be tired. He simply misspoke.
But the media will cut him some slack here — something they wouldn’t do for McCain.
The mainstream media is worth at least 5 points for the Dems in the general election for the combined weight of editorial decisions just like this.
Watch this video and imagine the outrage throughout the media universe if these crosses were part of a protest against the war in Iraq.
Roderick Eugene King, a sophmoric sophmore, obviously needs an education.
Also, what exactly does it take to be arrested?
Justice, in this case, would be for the university to put him through the sort of quasi-legal hell that often happens when conservative students express their views on campus.
Don’t bet on it happening.
I could see it coming from a mile away when national cable news channels reported on a huge drug probe at San Diego State University that resulted in 96 arrests and implicated students at several fraternities.
Thursday’s second-day story on the busts led with this:
The unusual move by San Diego State University officials to invite federal drug agents to infiltrate the campus is sparking concern and criticism but also drawing interest from college administrations elsewhere.
Carole Kennedy, a political science professor and head of SDSU’s faculty union, said she was dismayed by the level of drug activity on campus. But Kennedy said she also was disturbed that the university’s president “unilaterally allowed” undercover federal agents to gather intelligence from student organizations.
The unusual move by San Diego State University officials to invite federal drug agents to infiltrate the campus is sparking concern and criticism but also drawing interest from college administrations elsewhere.
It sets a bad precedent, Kennedy said.
“Now it’s drugs,” she said. “Maybe next time it’s about political dissent. . . . What happens when you have students talking about federal income tax policy, saying they’re not going to pay their taxes? Are they going to bring in IRS agents?”
Only a academic ensconsed so high in an ivory tower that oxygen is scarce could come up with this complaint. Has “academic freedom” become so all-encompassing that universities are law-free zones?
This wasn’t a couple of guys growing a few pot plants in the closet at their off-campus apartment. There was organized drug-dealing going on at this campus on a scale that is unparalleled in recent history.
Does Kennedy really think the university president would call in federal agents (or that federal agents would come if called) over mere dissent? The university president resides in that same ivory tower. The Drug Enforcement Administration was only called in when campus cops came to realize that they had more going on on that campus than they could handle — and that’s the only reason why the DEA agreed to the request.
I’d be willing to bet professor Kennedy that this incident turns out to be a one off. If another college calls in the DEA to assist in a sting of this magnitude in the next five years, I’ll buy season tickets to Aztec Football. If there’s two stings in the next five years, I’ll attend the games.
This sort of thing gets Republicans in trouble all the time — yet never is heard a discouraging word when the Democrats do the same thing.
“Tomorrow, we shall achieve the victory, that the kingdom of God may come on earth as it is in heaven, and all those who love the Lord and will vote for Obama, say Amen.”
“AAAMMMMEEENNN!”
When it comes to giving a rip-roaring pre-election invocation, you just can’t do better than Rev. Joseph Lowery. The 86-year-old civil-rights legend has come to the Ovens Auditorium here in Charlotte to work the crowd, perhaps 1,000-strong, into a prayerful mood before the last North Carolina appearance of Michelle Obama, wife of the man whose election will herald the coming of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. And as Lowery gets going, it’s clear he’s waited for this moment for a very long time.
Politics polluting religion — both sides do it. However, I’m quickly beginning to think that Democrats are in a rush to create a more toxic mix than the so-called “religious right” ever managed when it was in its heyday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Bush’s energy policy:
Veto and drill. Veto and drill. Veto and drill. That is the president’s message.
I like it!
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