MediaBloodhound

Story of the Day:Even a Fox Poll Has Bush at 33%

All right. Is this finally a sign that Resident George may be in deep bat squeeze?

A Fox News poll has Bush's approval rating at 33%. First, let's address the obvious: if a poll conducted by Fox News is telling me he's at 33%, then a) the ship might actually be nosing southward and b) there are damn good odds his rating is even lower.

Now, consider this. During the Senate Watergate hearings, when reports of Nixon's misdeeds were greeting Americans at their dinner table, Nixon's approval rating was at 31%. So Bush’s approval rating is just two percent higher than Nixon’s at that juncture, and this is before any trial or hearing has begun. Before most Americans have a firm grasp on the extent to which this administration has flagrantly broken the laws of the land. Imagine if they did.

On an ironic note, due to its source, you'll be hard-pressed to find this poll discussed in the more respected corners of the mainstream media. Yet it is its source that makes this poll news.

This kind of thing happens about as often as a triple play in baseball. Maybe less.

04/20/06 FOX Poll: Gloomy Economic Views; Bush Approval at New Low
By Dana Blanton
Fox News

Story of the Day:Carl Bernstein Back in Crusading Watergate Form

Story of the Day, primarily, serves two purposes: to point out incompetent and irresponsible journalism in the mainstream media, without shooting fish in a barrel (i.e. Fox News and its cloven-hoofed minions), and to call attention to vital news items you might otherwise miss.

Today's story, an exhaustive article entitled "Senate Hearings on Bush, Now" by famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, falls in the latter category. Except an asterisk might be placed next to it. Something, anything, to denote its impressive scope and acuity. What you are about to read, what you are one click away from, is simply the alpha and omega of the argument for the impeachment of George W. Bush. Yes, it's a lengthy article. Save your eyes, print it out. But I urge you not only to read it, but to read the whole bloody thing. No skimming. Read it like it's a fine wine. Let the images breathe. Whiff its notes of hope. Sup the clarity of his argument. This, my friends, is a veritable feast for the soul...of our country.

Click. Print. Enjoy.

Senate Hearings on Bush, Now, by Carl Bernstein
Vanity Fair

Story of the Day:Rumsfeld's Air Defense

The “Heckuva Job, Rummy” Tour continued today in Washington.

The day began with our Demander-in-Chief in the Rose Garden, reiterating his support for Emperor Rumsfeld. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best," Bush said, barely containing a "naaa-na, na-naaa-na" from escaping. "And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense." Well said. Presidential. Give yourself a treat.

As the tour moved on to the Department of Defense later in the day, Emperor Rumsfeld, alongside Gen. Peter Pace, Chairpuppet of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a press conference. Here’s the breakdown.

Rumsfeld opens with a tactical strike of wind:

"Good afternoon, folks. One of the interesting things about this city is that there are so many distractions that people sometimes lose track of how fortunate we are to be a part of what may very well be the most innovative and successful society in world history.  In a relatively short amount of time on this planet, our republic has found its way through a whale of a lot of tough challenges."

And he's only just begun. While the press corps patiently awaits their emperor’s permission to ask questions, he blathers on at length, piecing together a wet Freedom Fries narrative that could compel a monk to break a vow of silence. This formidable claptrap culminates with – eight paragraphs later, people – “Anyone who doubts our future need only think about those troops, their families and the millions of Americans who honor and support them. They are outposts of hope and a tribute to the American spirit that has not faltered and will not falter.”

Next come words from Chairpuppet of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace. Summed up: “You are a great leader, Emperor Rumsfeld. May I gingerly and respectfully touch your hem? Turning to the press: “I would kill for this man. Well, I am killing for this man, but I mean to use a variance of that context here. You follow?”

Finally, it’s question and answer time. A snapshot of these proceedings: Banter. Question. Obfuscation. Running out the clock. Laughter. Banter. Question. Obfuscation. Running out the clock. Laughter.

Busy entreating their emperor to assess his own psychological makeup and job effectiveness as well as the legitimacy of criticisms leveled against him by highly decorated retired generals, the press corps manages to disregard the actual results of his reign. The facts on the ground that speak directly to Emperor Rumsfeld’s miserable record: calling for insufficient troop levels from the war’s start, not supplying troops with necessary body armor, and sanctioning torture, renderings and gulags.

Get your tickets before the “Heckuva Job, Rummy” Tour is over. Blackout dates include any period during direct military conflict with Iran and/or dates subsequent to the end of the world.

Rock on.

DoD News Briefing with Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Pace from the Pentagon
Transcript

Story of the Day:Ex-Colonel Upset at Current Operations in Iran

Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, appearing on Democracy Now!, re-frames the debate on Iran by pointing out the unconstitutionality of U.S. military actions already underway there. Something the national media is loathe to do. Play-by-play commentary is their game. 

COLONEL SAM GARDINER: Now, the question that really follows from that is “Who authorized that?” See, there is no congressional authorization to conduct combat operations against Iran. There are a couple of possibilities. One of them is that it's being justified under the terrorism authorization that occurred in 2001. The problem with that is that you would have to prove a connection to 9/11. I don't think you can do that with Iran. The second possibility is that it's being done under the War Powers Act. I don't want to get too technical, but the War Powers Act would require the President to notify the Congress 60 days after the use of military force or invasion or putting military forces in a new country under that legislation, and the President hasn't notified the Congress that American troops are operating inside Iran. So it's a very serious question about the constitutional framework under which we are now conducting military operations in Iran.

And, as someone who conducted a war game in 2004 with Iran as its target, what is Colonel Gardiner's opinion of striking Iran?

COLONEL SAM GARDINER: Well, let me say something first about a war game. It's a little bit like Dickens in A Christmas Carol, and that is, you go out in Christmas future and you muck around, then you come back and say, “What did I learn from being there?” And I would summarize that by saying by being in the future, by going through how the United States might attack Iranian nuclear facilities, I have to tell you that there is no solution in that path. In fact, it is a path towards probably making things in the Middle East much worse. It's not a solution to either stopping the Iranians or spreading democracy in the Middle East or getting us out of Iraq. It's a path that leads to disaster in many dimensions.

In the buildup to Iraq, the airwaves were clotted with talking heads nattering about the efficacy of various military strategies while ignoring the issue of whether or not there was ample justification for war. Now the talking heads, as if having learned nothing from Iraq, are busy sussing out how to bring Iran to its knees - sanctions (don't make me laugh, bleeding heart!) or bombs, or even tactical nuclear strikes, as "liberal" journalist Joe Klein of Time defended leaving on the table just this past weekend.

Meanwhile, though reports (most notably the piece by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker) detail evidence that covert military actions have been ongoing in Iran and a major military strike may already have been set in motion, the discourse in the mainstream media remains once removed from this reality.

With America teetering down another "path that leads to disaster in many dimensions," the mainstream media is again content to play along.

Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner on Iran War Plans: "The Issue is Not Whether the Military Option Would Be Used But Who Approved the Start of Operations Already"
Transcript of Host Amy Goodman and Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner
Democracy Now!

Story of the Day:Media "Fair and Balanced" on Rummy's Record

It's plain as the smiley sneer on his face that Rummy's Iraq strategy has been grossly flawed for years. Inadequate U.S. troop levels. Firing Saddam's army, especially without first seizing their weapons. Leaving munitions caches unguarded, which has been directly linked to materials in roadside bombs, the number one cause of death for our soldiers. Instituting torture as a standard interrogation method and extending its practice long after the photos of Abu Ghraib exposed "a few bad apples." Providing insufficient body armor, then, just recently, making it illegal for soldiers to obtain non-military-issued armor to protect themselves. And finally, what's at the heart of any sound plan, the flexibility to change course if something isn't working.

And this isn't, by any means, an exhaustive rehashing of Rummy's strategic botches. (That'd be like pinpointing each and every one of Bush's lies since entering the White House.) Yet with so much glaring evidence of abject failure, and on the heels of the chorus of respected retired generals calling for Rummy's ouster, the mainstream media still manages to reduce this issue to casual subjectivity, one man's opinion versus another.

So former Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard B. Meyers, a lapdog unequivocal in his willingness to perpetuate lies for this White House, comes out and defends Rummy, saying that he allowed "tremendous access" for opposing points of view. Aside from the fact that everything we know about Donald Rumsfeld flies in the face of Meyers' assertion, the underlying attacks the retired generals leveled on Rummy were based on the facts on the ground in Iraq. Not on the opinions of someone's demeanor.

Quite frankly, at this point, it wouldn't matter if Rummy had been all ears to naysayers in his ranks. His failure, as the chief architect and strategian of this war, speaks loud and clear in the seething morass that is present-day Iraq. But the volume of this fact is muffled by a mainstream media that allows for such insipid debate. 

Myers Defends Rumsfeld's Management Style, by Douglass K. Daniel
The Associated Press

Story of the Day:Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace Illustrated

It's Saturday. Laugh a little:

Poltical Cartoon by Ted Rall

Story of the Day:Cheney Makes a Killing

According to The Associated Press, Dick Cheney is expecting a $1.9 million refund. What this AP article leaves out, of course, is what percentage of this return and his income for 2005 was earned on the backs of dead American soldiers and Iraqis. And let's not forget Uncle Dick's Manifest Destiny Cleanup Tour post-Katrina.

If Dick Cheney were a fictional character in, say, a movie, the audience would be waiting on the edge of their seats to see his comeuppance. In real life, his comeuppance would be a fairytale ending to his reign of thuggery and mendacity.

Most Americans, and citizens around the world, believe that's the refund he deserves.

Bushes Pay $187,768 in Taxes for 2005, by Deb Riechmann
The Associated Press

Story of the Day:Nuclear Journalism

How far is Iran from possessing a viable nuclear arsenal?

Well, yesterday Bloomberg News (not Fox, or The National Enquirer or Weekly World News, mind you) hysterically reported that Iran was a mere fortnight and 48 hours away. Though this assertion was completely preposterous, Bloomberg News has yet to release a retraction. So millions of Americans - with the help of right-wing tv, print, radio and blogs to spread this lie - now have reason to believe that if we don't bomb Iran, then we might face an imminent nuclear attack. The statement, made by Stephen Rademaker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, was based on the wildly hypothetical notion that Iran had already secured enough centrifuges to build a nuclear weapon. They haven’t. In fact, they aren't even close.

As today's New York Times article reports, "The United States government has put that at 5 to 10 years, and some analysts have said it could come as late as 2020."

For further perspective, here's an example of where Iran presently stands with their nuclear ambitions:

"It took Tehran 21 years of planning and 7 years of sporadic experiments, mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link 164 spinning centrifuges in what nuclear experts call a cascade. Now, the analysts said, Tehran has to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production. It is as if Iran, having mastered a difficult musical instrument, now faces the challenge of making thousands of them and creating a very large orchestra that always plays in tune and in unison."

Piece of (yellow) cake.

We've already seen how an irresponsible mainstream media can help shoehorn us into an unjustified war. Yesterday’s misleading, irresponsible and incendiary article by Bloomberg News is just the kind of propagandistic journalism that whipped up public support for invading Iraq. Ironically, The New York Times, promoting Judy Miller's WMD fictions, led the charge as the Paper of Record. Though it will never bring back the hundreds of thousands - and counting - of lives lost in this ongoing nightmare in Iraq, hopefully the Times has learned a lesson that may serve us better this time around.

And hopefully as a people, from here on forth, we are better prepared to see through misinformation and hawkish rhetoric and demand en masse a stop to another unjust war before it begins.

Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away
By William J. Broad, Nazila Fathi and Joel Brinkley
The New York Times

Story of the Day:Press Corps Accepts McClellan's Theatrics

White House Press Secretary Scotty "It's My Party So I'll Pout If I Want To" McClellan raised the Orwellian stakes today when he demanded a public apology from the media for, uh, doing their job.

Here's the skinny: President Bush, on May 29, 2003, said, “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.” The funny thing is, as reported this morning in the story broken by the Washington Post, a Pentagon field report transmitted to Washington on May 27, 2003 “had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.”

Gee. Shocker, huh?

And now...Scotty McClellan in his own glaringly disingenuous words:

"You know, I saw some reporting talking about how this latest revelation — which is not something that is new; this is all old information that’s being rehashed — was an embarrassment for the White House. No, it’s an embarrassment for the media that is out there reporting this.

"I brought up with some of you earlier today some of the reporting that was based of this Washington Post report. And I talked to one of network about it…they expressed their apologies to the White House.

"I hope they will go and publicly apologize on the air about the statements that were made, because I think it is important given that they had made those statements in front of all their viewers. So we look forward to that happening as well."

Sadly, no one in this spineless White House press corps, to whom these words were addressed, took Scotty to task for the sheer absurdity of his demand. For framing the latest revelation of evidence that this administration wholly manufactured the war in Iraq as, somehow, a transgression perpetrated by an unfair media.

Incidentally, why is it that no one in the White House press corps can laugh at such maniacal doublespeak, yet find little problem chuckling obsequiously if Scotty delivers his lame frat-boy banter.

People are always talking about the power of laughter, usually referring to its health benefits. But think of the potential impact if even one member - though the more the merrier - of the White House press corps burst out laughing at such utter nonsense.

One honest snort of laughter would be more incisive than any question posed to Scotty during this ultra-surreal press briefing.

My kingdom for a chortle!

McClellan: Media Should “Publicly Apologize” for Reporting On Mobile Weapons Lab Story
Think Progress

Story of the Day:Mad Cow Media Spreads Its Disease

AP Food and Farm Writer Libby Quaid strikes again!

Recently, if you recall, she was busy shilling for the U.S.D.A. when the latest case of mad cow disease in the U.S. was confirmed (see Story of the Day, March 13). Today, she's back to cover for another federal agency officially tasked to preserve our well-being, the Food and  Drug Administration, as well as the manufacturers of carcinogenic soft drinks.

The topic is benzene, a known cancer-causing agent linked to leukemia that is formed when ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and either sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate are combined. This concoction has long been in our soft drinks, and the FDA has known about it for years. Ironically, it's also in many carbonated beverages that claim to be healthier since they contain some fruit juice. The kind of beverage that millions of American moms and dads allow their children to drink because they think they're giving them something less wretched than pure sugar and artificial flavors and colors.

Well, now some parents have filed a class-action lawsuit against two soft-drink companies who knowingly sold this volatile mix.

Journalist Libby Quaid starts her article with a flourish of objectivity:

"Two soft-drink companies were sued Tuesday by parents complaining that there might be cancer-causing benzene in kids' drinks."

"...parents complaining..."? She slips the shiv right in them with this judgment call, when, more accurately and fair-mindedly, she might have employed the phrase "...parents concerned..."

Next, Quaid gives an interesting spin to scientific findings:

"The presence of those ingredients doesn't mean benzene is present. Scientists say factors such as heat or light exposure can trigger a reaction that forms benzene in the beverages."

Framed as it is to downplay the dangers of this mixture, it hardly dispels concern. If merely heat or light can cause the two ingredients to form benzene, then it's not hard to think of everyday situations in which this can easily occur. First, soft drinks are often shipped unrefrigerated for the cost-effective reason that refrigeration isn't necessary, as it is with, say, meat and dairy products. Second, people commonly drink soda on picnics, at the beach, during outdoor sporting events, et cetera, where the beverage is exposed to both heat and light.

Finally, Quaid, our crack food and farm writer, doesn't offer potential victims any benefit of the doubt. Rather, she reserves that for the powerbrokers in big business and Washington. Accordingly, Quaid (similar to her journalistic fiascos covering the recent case of mad cow) nearly spends the entire article presenting views that counter the parents' concern.

Served up are quote after quote, line after line, of corporate and government PR, such as, "Polar [one of the companies being sued] is committed to ensuring the safety of our products through in-depth research and testing," said CEO Ralph D. Crowley Jr. Or, "FDA officials maintain there is no safety concern and that levels are still relatively low compared with other sources of exposure to benzene."

Ms. Quaid, I raise my benzene-laden soft drink, warmed by a sunny spring day, in a toast to another job well done.

Oh, and in case any of you have forgotten, our FDA Commissioner is none other than Mark McClellan, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's brutha from the same mutha.

File this one under "family values."

Parents Sue Soft Drink Cos. Over Benzine
By Libby Quaid, AP Food and Farm Writer 
The Associated Press