CNN calls Obama elitist

I just do not know where to start on this one. I once again had the profound misfortune of watching CNN while at the gym. And once again, I came away with anger.

So, here's the deal. Yesterday, at San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said the following:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Daily Kos has the summary of the back and forth between campaigns here. Personally, I don't believe the comments are that big a deal, maybe just a little accidental slippage of the truth. But that's not even what I care about here. CNN, and Kitty Pilgrim in particular, very Seriously, and responsibly, charged into the fray to make sure we understand "Senator Obama's political attack on small-town America". She wanted to make sure we knew about the "outrage" at the "stunning comments". CNN wanted to make sure we judged for ourselves the last to last night's poll: "Do you believe that Senator Barack Obama's comments reveal his elitist attitude toward every hard working American?" Just like Fox News, that poll question is exceedingly fair and balanced, isn't it?

At points during the program, Pilgrim asks several correspondents for reactions, and they seem to be trying to offer the idea that it's not nearly as condemning a moment as she wanted.

PILGRIM: Words are being parsed very, very carefully. This is quite a statement. Errol, your thoughts on this?

ERROL LOUIS, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS": I think this is a problem Barack Obama should have anticipated and could have easily avoided which is he's walking on a tight rope every time he goes and speaks. Every place I've seen him campaign, in every state, he does something that politicians don't usually do, which is to ask people to be better than they are.

And to sort of delve into it and to say for this nation to work we all have to be better, we have to be more understanding, we have to be more generous, we have to be a little less narrow minded. It's very different from what politicians normally do.

And Roland Martin:

Wow. Politically dumb because he actually told the truth. At some point we have to accept the reality that there are people in America now who are angry and are bitter. And we do blame other folks for certain things.

Basically, Kitty Pilgrim and her producers were trying to shove the storyline that this was a huge gaffe down the throats of their correspondents and viewers, with phrses like the "very important controversy". Instead, you see them call her out. Here's another exchange: Pilgrim says she'll put the remark up, but then she puts Obama's response statement, and Clinton's remarks, never actually showing what Obama said. After:

PILGRIM: What strikes me about that remark, Roland, is that Senator Clinton is using this as an occasion to talk about being presidential. Did Senator Obama do himself a disservice in this remark in not coming up with a solution in siding with the problem instead of the solution?

MARTIN: Well, first of all, we don't have -- do we have the full tape of what he said after that, as well? Or do we just have that?

Even Roland Martin on the show was trying to get her to be a little fairer, just in case, maybe the remarks are being distorted a bit. The good news is that while Pilgrim was stuffing the anti-Obama spin down our throats, CNN correspondents fought back on both her show and on the Situation Room, surprisingly enough.

I hate CNN, but maybe, just maybe, there's a small chance it won't be too bad this time despite the MSM trying it damnedest.

UPDATE: It gets so much better. I honestly can't remember the last thing Hillary attacked on that she didn't also do or that Bill didn't do in his 1992 campaign. It's hilarious.

Eminent Domain for Intellectual Property?

So, I've now seen two weird cases in the news that seem like patents are infringing on the public good.

Voting machines:

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia trade secret and cannot be handed over to any third party.

Stray satellite:

In the face of unrelated legal battles between the current patent owner Boeing and the satellite's owner SES Americom - any efforts to salvage AMC-14 have been cast aside.

Primarily this is because SES is currently suing Boeing for an unrelated New Skies matter in the order of $50 million dollars - and Boeing told SES that the patent was only available if SES Americom dropped the lawsuit.

Doesn't this seem wrong? Isn't intellectual property subject to eminent domain? SCOTUS said so back in 1912. Voting transparency is fundamental to our society, so I feel eminent domain definitely applies in the first case. It's a tougher argument for a privately owned satellite, but space research has been said to be good for advancement of mankind before, so maybe it applies. More likely to apply is a principle in tort law where if one party has a minor inconvenience in order to solve the entire dispute, they are made to swallow it. I feel $50 mil is a minor inconvenience compared to a likely multi-billion dollar satellite. Then again, I don't know for sure.

Fox News Documentary

I wasn't going to say anything more about Fox News specifically, because most people know how absurd it is, and I've long since given up. But this, from the Daily Show last night, is just hilarious and says it all.

Bill can also lie to be a loyal husband.

I thought he was supposed to be a master politician. The polls were just starting to turn back slightly in Hillary's favor, implying that the damage from Tusla was starting to wear off. So why, Bill, do you bring it up again? And that you manage to lie 4 times in about a minute doing so is not only poor ethics, but poor strategy at this point, no?

UPDATE: Whoops, 8 times total.

Slot Machines vs. Voting Machines

Tables are usually good for getting a point across. A greater point that this illustrates is that it is not the concept of e-voting that is the problem, merely the implementation - the lack of any oversight or security. Like everything else in society, moving towards computers in inevitable, really - we just have to work on making it incorruptible.

Duties of a Citizen

This is a problem that I'm sure we've all known about for some time.

I make it clear to my students that it is not only their right but their duty to arrive at their own conclusions. They are free to defend rendition, waterboarding, or any other aspect of America's post-9/11 armamentarium. But I challenge their right to tune out the world, and I question any system or society that can produce such students and call them educated. I am concerned for the nation when a cohort of students so talented and bright is oblivious to all such matters. If they are failing us, it is because we have failed them.

...

As a nation, we spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about illegal immigration and painfully little on what it means to be a citizen, beyond the legal status conferred by accident of birth or public processing. We are too busy building a wall around us to notice that we are shutting ourselves in. Intent on exporting democracy — spending blood and billions in pursuit of it abroad — we have shown a decided lack of interest in exercising or promoting democracy at home.

This ties into a discussion I had a while back. I think, on a moral level, voting should be mandatory. It is more than a right, it is a duty. The problem comes when you try to actually make it policy. Voting day is not a national holiday, workers are not guaranteed time off, voting credentials are constantly questioned inappropriately, etc. Also, how do you enforce it? Economic penalties? A large portion of the people that aren't voting for all these reasons are doing so because they are already poor. Several other countries do levy a fine for not voting, even absentee, but I'm just not sure that's fair, given our country's current makeup. And I suppose voting is useless if the voter is uninformed, so Gup's perspective may have more relevance. We are in complete agreement in that democracy requires participation - if there is no will to participate, how can we hope to control our own fates?

Did the General betray us after all?

I've been willing to give General Petraeus the benefit of the doubt so far. I didn't watch this last testimony, but read that he was making an effort to remain intellectually honest, and preserve his role as a general and non-politician. And he was put in an impossible position of trying to "win" a war he didn't start. I didn't see great evidence (though I didn't look all that hard) that he was a loyal more to Bush than at least what he sees as the truth, and to me, it seemed that most of the bloggers saying that were dismissing Petraeus's statements based on that assumption, rather than checking their veracity. And mostly, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and try to reserve my opinion, because the guy's son was a college teammate of mine, and it just felt wrong badmouthing the guy's father.

But this is just inexcusable. This is knowingly lying about the actual conditions in Iraq to further the story that the surge is a "success." This is precisely what all the bloggers were claiming he was doing! I had faith that he could be a stand-up man, resistant to pressure of the Bush administration and really just trying to do what is best for our military. But he knows as well as us what happens to people that tell Bush something he doesn't want to hear. And being replaced is unacceptable with his particular political ambitions. It seems MoveOn was right all along, not that I would have doubted if I had cared to look.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan gives a reader's take. It's an interesting idea that if Petraeus were to stand up to Bush, he'd just be replaced, so he might as well do the best for his soldiers but giving Bush what he wants. And I do essentially argue that the first part is true above. However, Bush trusts Petraeus to the occasionally subverting the chain of command. Thus, doesn't it make sense that in this particular case, if Petraeus both actually believed what was best is different from what Bush wants to hear (as evidenced by his manipulating the graphs), he has an obligation to say so to Bush as an honorable man and general? Isn't there a good enough relationship there to not necessarily assume he will be discarded and to do what's right? I guess not, if he perceives his own future presidency is at stake.

UPDATE 2: Petreaus says, pretty definitively, that he will never hold public office. So then, why is he lying at all? Does he think we have to believe things are going well for the army to get it's job done? Is he blind to the very idea that withdrawal might be right? Seriously, if he's not gonna run for office, then really, why not tell the truth? He may be the only person Bush will listen to.

Botnets = Dirty Bomb?

Raise your hand if you understand computer security well enough to comprehend how a massive online attack shutting down our communications and financial networks might work. Anyone? Anyone at all? Perfect, then that's the right claim for the next round of fear-mongering.

It's also reportedly just the first step in having the nation's most powerful spy agency begin to take over information security responsibility for large chunks of the net. In January, President Bush signed an order, National Security Presidential Directive 54, that begins that process. The details are murky, since the order itself is classified.

To sell the plan to the private sector, Chertoff and other officials will likely talk about Chinese hackers infiltrating the military's most secure unclassified servers, and perhaps offer another iteration of the claim that a serious computer attack against the United States would deal an economic blow that makes the September 11 terrorist attack look like a parking ticket.

Beyond the hype, of course, there are some serious threats that will go under the microscope at RSA -- most prominently the pernicious influence of botnets, the large collections of compromised Windows machines that are used for online crime ranging from spam to phishing. The largest of these are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of computers strong.

But in keeping with the tone set by the United States, botnets are being recast as the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Consider the title of one panel on the malware: "Protecting the Homeland: How to Win the BotNet Battle?"

THREAT LEVEL's been on this for a little while. It seems that the fear from the War on Terror is wearing off, and we need a new threat so that we can entrust the government with more spying powers over Americans. That's really what is always comes down to isn't it?

The sad thing, as the post mentions, is that there are real security issues that will be overlooked by our government in their quest for even more sweeping powers. Sound familiar?

Let's give this an Orwell rating of 3, for inventing a new war, and attempting to further implement Big Brother directly. A 4 rating would have to be a successful sweeping change, and I'm not gonna bother with rating an event like the creation of Newspeak - that would be beyond 4. I'll give a full rationale for the ratings soon.

Ah, conservatives

We must end this occupation! (via Atrios) If nothing else, conservatives are sometimes good for a laugh.

Oh, and here's Digby on what led up to that comment. Also pretty funny, but more pathetic funny than "haha" funny.

What our Media is and isn't reporting

I haven't been doing this very long, and I'm already tired of writing about how terrible the media is. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy today. Either way, I'll just pass on two links that illustrate fun new media complaints. They really are dangerous.

Greenwald:

I just received the following statement from the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, in response to my inquiries last week (and numerous follow-up inquiries from readers here) about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's claims about the 9/11 attack and, specifically, about Mukasey's story that there was a pre-9/11 telephone call from an "Afghan safe house" into the U.S. that the Bush administration failed to intercept or investigate:

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

That's the statement in its entirety, and it's hard to imagine how it could be any clearer...

In light of Hamilton's amazing comment, could journalists possibly now report on this story? One of two things is true about Mukasey's extraordinary claim about how and why the 9/11 attacks occurred. Either:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

Either way, isn't it rather self-evidently a huge story?

That's was the media is not reporting on, and here's what it is (from Digby):

Mitchell interviews Ann Kornbluth, a WaPo reporter who recently wrote a story about the anecdotes Clinton tells on the campaign trail which apparently got the attention of a hospital in Ohio. The hospital then decided to go on the record denying the veracity of this woman's story...Mitchell and Kornbluth both agree, however, that it doesn't matter whether the story is true or false (or that there are millions of similar examples of people dying for lack of insurance and proper health care.) None of that is relevant:

Mitchell: The Clinton campaign finds itself in another credibility gap, this time over a heart tugging health care story. Senator Clinton has been telling this story for weeks now out on the campaign:

Video:
Clinton: The doctors and the nurses tried hard, but they weren't able to save her baby. For fifteen days doctors and nurses worked heroically. But she died.

It is so wrong in such a good great and rich country that a young woman and her baby would die because she didn't have health insurance or a hundred dollars to get examined.

Mitchell: Well, it turns out it's not true. After reading about the story in the Washington Post, hospital officials demanded that the Clinton campaign stop using that anecdote. They say there is no indication that this woman was denied medical care, that in fact, she did have insurance.

...

Kornbluth: Well, this deputy sheriff, Brian Holman, met with her during a regular campaign stop. She had Chelsea with her and Ted Strickland the governor. He told this story, it was almost exactly as she repeated it, in the clip that you played. Uhm and she went on and started using it on the stump. And you know we all sort of hear these stories, and she doesn't use any names, so it's difficult to check it out but, but a couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about stuff she says in her speeches and started to write about this woman...the central question is, should the campaign be vetting things before Senator Clinton says them on the campaign trail, especially given her recent problems with the story from Bosnia.

Mitchell: And that is the problem isn't it? That this contributes to a perception, fair or not fair, that she's got a problem telling stories that are accurate. Not to put too fine a point on it, it does damage her credibility.

Kornbluth: And we've seen this movie before. When Al Gore, the first time he was quote unquote caught saying something that wasn't entirely accurate, again, fair or unfair, it became a storyline. After that, going forward, he was under extreme scrutiny for that.The same thing happened with John Kerry, when he was seen as being for something before he was against it, constantly looked for flip-flopping in his stories.

So I think Senator Clinton has discovered that there is something out there that she has to be really careful about and it's the facts of the stories that she tells, whether that's fair or not.

Notice the passive voice: "whether that's fair or not." The press apparently have nothing to do with determining whether it is fair, setting the record straight or getting the facts. It's all about "perception" --- perception that is directly caused by lies they publish, spin they present as truth and "storylines" they create.

...

You may hate Clinton with everything in your being, and that's fine. But this kind of journalism is what's killing our political system and what gets people like John McCain and George W. Bush elected. Clinton was repeating a story about bad health care which she heard on the campaign trail from an American citizen. She wasn't tooting her own horn or putting down her opponent in the telling of it. She was illustrating the plight of the uninsured in this country, which even if it turns out to not be specifically correct in the details, is certainly not something that doesn't happen every day to somebody in this country.

In fact, I suspect this particular "gotcha" is being done to degrade the argument against universal health care as much as to embarrass Senator Clinton. The Clinton Rules state that if any part of a story is proven true, the entire story is true. The corollary is that if any part of a story about a Republican is proved to be false then the entire story is false. The same concept is at work with health care here. If any detail about bad health care in the US can be shown as false, then notions that our health care system is screwed up are also false. Get ready for more of this. I don't know if it will work, but if they can get the media to play it like this, then the subliminal subtext going out there is that Democrats are lying about health care. They don't have to convince everybody, just a few.

Ladies and Gents, our Fourth Estate.

Greenwald nails it again.

The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell.

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079