Is anyone in charge at Fox News?
This week was a bit of a mixed bag for the journalistic ethics of Fox News.
On the upside, we confirmed that News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is familiar with the idea of journalistic standards. On the downside, Murdoch appears to be completely unaware that his news network doesn't have any.
Responding to a question from Media Matters VP Ari Rabin-Havt about whether Murdoch thinks it is appropriate for a news organization to aggressively promote the tea party movement, Murdoch stated that Fox shouldn't be "supporting the Tea Party or any other party." Murdoch added, "I'd like to investigate what you are saying before I condemn anyone."
First, a point of agreement with Murdoch: It's certainly true that a news organization shouldn't be promoting political movements. However, a question arises as to whether Murdoch has taken the opportunity to flip to Fox News at any point over the last year. If he had, odds are good that he would have stumbled across evidence of Fox's incessant promotion of the tea party movement.
Since he is apparently too busy to keep an eye on his own news network, we offered some assistance with Murdoch's "investigation." Some lowlights:
Fox Business anchor and "business journalist" Stuart Varney on April 13, 2009: "It's now my great duty to promote the tea parties. Here we go."
In the 10 days leading up to the Tax Day Tea Parties last year, Fox News aired more than 100 commercials promoting the protests and Fox's coverage of them.
Glenn Beck encouraged viewers to "please go" to "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."
Fox Nation hosted a "virtual tea party" that was promoted on-air by news anchor Megyn Kelly, news host Bill Hemmer, and Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson.
On April 3, 2009, Hannity directed viewers to his website to "get all the details about our special 'Tax Day Tea Party.' " He later added, "We hope you'll join us."
And if that isn't enough to convince Murdoch, Fox News explicitly branded the protests "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties," and ran this image on multiple shows:
Murdoch didn't even need to watch Fox to learn of the network's promotion. After the tea parties, dozens of articles on local tea parties reported that Fox News helped to promote turnout at the events.
And all of those examples are just from the lead-up to the Tax Day Tea Parties last April. Since then, Fox's promotion of the tea party movement has continued unabated.
In fact, just two weeks ago Fox spent an entire day promoting "Conservative Woodstock." It was just like the real Woodstock, except it was an anti-Harry Reid tea party protest in Searchlight, Nevada, featuring the musical stylings of former Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson instead of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane.
If Murdoch wants an even more recent example, this week Neil Cavuto started running ads promoting his coverage of an upcoming tea party protest that "some say could be a very, very heated rally."
But do let us know how that investigation turns out, Mr. Murdoch.
Other stories this week
Fox News' idea of a Democrat
Unfortunately for Murdoch, his comments about Fox's tea party promotion may not have been the most laughably absurd thing he said during his appearance at the National Press Club. After Murdoch called out the other networks for a perceived lack of balance, he was asked to name the Democrats at Fox News. Murdoch responded:
I could give you a couple of names but they're certainly there. Uh, if Roger [Ailes] were here he'd certainly spit them out very quickly. I think probably every night Greta Van Susteren is certainly close to the Democratic Party.
Oh, boy. This brings us to that "other party" that Fox News "shouldn't be promoting," according to Murdoch. As we've documented extensively, Fox News has essentially given up any attempt to hide the fact that it is an arm of the GOP rather than an actual news outlet.
But perhaps we've been too quick to judge. Let's have a look at who Rupert Murdoch describes as "probably every night ... certainly close to the Democratic Party."
Between March 21 and April 6, Van Susteren continued Fox's promotion of the GOP's efforts to overturn health care reform, hosting 15 guests who said that the health care bill is unconstitutional, and only one who called it constitutional.
Her roster of guests attacking the health care reform bill as unconstitutional included Republican attorneys general from seven different states, as well as four different Republican governors. Van Susteren's nonstop promotion of the GOP's efforts to overturn health care reform led the Republican attorney general from Michigan to praise her coverage of the issue.
This was after his third appearance in eight shows.
But to be fair to Murdoch and Van Susteren, she does occasionally show her closeness to the Democratic Party. For example, in the lead-up to the health care reform vote, she repeatedly hosted Rep. Bart Stupak to misinform about abortion funding in the health care bill. That counts, right?
Back in November, Media Matters senior fellow Eric Boehlert wondered why Rupert Murdoch is "so clueless about Fox News." This came after Murdoch, among other outrageous statements, called Sean Hannity an "academic" and falsely claimed that nobody at Fox News had compared Obama to Stalin.
In light of his performance at the National Press Club, we are left with two options: either Rupert Murdoch can't be bothered to watch his own network, or he isn't interested in telling the truth. Murdoch's lack of interest in researching the subjects he is discussing and his willful disregard for reality would make him a great fit as a host at ... oh, right.
Here we go again: Justice Stevens announces retirement
We've seen this movie before.
Last year, when Justice David Souter announced his retirement, conservatives started spreading their favorite myths about the Supreme Court. As they can never let a good smear die, we expect to see some of the classics return in the coming weeks.
To quickly recap, conservatives have pushed the idea that liberals -- but not conservatives -- engage in "judicial activism." Not true. They have also suggested that diversifying the court is somehow at odds with picking nominees based on merit. It isn't. They have claimed that a judge espousing "empathy" conflicts with a commitment to the law. Another miss. The have distorted comments Obama made to claim he said it was a "tragedy" that the Supreme Court had not pursued the "redistribution of wealth." He didn't. Lastly, they have suggested that the GOP has been consistent on the appropriateness of judicial filibusters. They haven't.
When Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee, media figures launched false -- and often viciously personal -- attacks on her. They frequently relied on gender stereotypes. With news reports naming at least two women on the short list of replacements, we can probably expect the media to fall into their old habits.
So far, we're off to a bit of a weird start in response to the news of Stevens' retirement. After spending several months last year smearing Sotomayor as an "extreme" "ideologue" who is a "racist," Fox News today announced that Sotomayor is "mainstream." Good to know.
Glenn Beck apparently missed the Fox memo that Sotomayor is now mainstream, because he attacked her as a "radical" today after suggesting that Obama will find a "gay, handicapped, black woman, who's an immigrant" to replace Stevens.
Beck's comment echoes a line that Rush Limbaugh delivered back before the Sotomayor nomination, when Rush said that "we need a teenage single mother, who's gay, is a lesbian, who's dirt poor, African-American, and disabled."
It's nice to see that the leading lights of the conservative movement can still manage to fit race-baiting, homophobia, class-warfare, and gender stereotypes into one sentence.
Some things never change.
CNN's Erickson is all grown up
Speaking of Supreme Court justices, let's check in quickly with the man who once called Justice Souter a "goat-fucking child molester." I'm referring to the newest addition to CNN's "Best Political Team on Television," Erick Erickson.
Two weeks ago, Howard Kurtz confronted Erickson on his long history of outrageous comments. In response, Erickson explained how he "had to grow up."
ERICKSON: Being a blogger, up until that moment, I always considered I was just a guy chatting with friends, even on Twitter, and realized that I've actually reached the point where people listen to what I say and care about what I say and, frankly, it was a wake-up call to me that I had to grow up in how I write.
Well, that newfound maturity didn't last too long. As we've documented, a mere four days after his conversation with Kurtz, Erickson announced that he would "[p]ull out my wife's shotgun" if they try to arrest him for not filling out the American Community Survey.
On Tuesday, the White House responded to Erickson's "remarkably crazy" comments by saying that they "should concern CNN." All of this led Media Matters president Eric Burns to ask on MSNBC, "What is CNN going to do about it?"
In response to the growing controversy, CNN apparently attacked Bill Press for asking Gibbs about Erickson. A CNN source told Mediaite that "[w]e think its important that Erick explain those comments, and he has done just that." If CNN's treatment of its Lou Dobbs problem is any indication, perhaps we should anticipate a prolonged wait for the network to take definitive action.
Perhaps CNN puts up with Erickson's outrageous comments due to his astute political analysis? This might be plausible if Erickson wasn't a complete buffoon.
On Wednesday night, in the wake of the bombing-attempt-that-wasn't, Erickson took to RedState to explain how we should "get some answers" prior to "throwing blame." Great advice. Of course, this was after he had spent several paragraphs blaming President Obama's policies for the "bombing" attempt.
Yesterday, Erickson read half of a news article to proclaim that Obama wants to "ban college internships." He took this as evidence that "Barack Obama is destroying another aspect of the free enterprise system." Had he read the second half of the article he cited, it would have been clear that Obama is proposing no such thing. The Labor Department is trying to address unpaid internships that violate labor laws, not ban internships. Whoops.
Nice hire, CNN.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
PROOF USA POPULATION STUPID, STILL!
Washington Post poll finds split on health-care law remains deep
By Jon Cohen and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2010; A01
Americans overwhelmingly see the new health-care law as a major shift in the direction of the country, but they remain as deeply divided today over the changes as they were throughout the long congressional debate, according to a Washington Post poll.
In the days since President Obama signed the farthest-reaching piece of social welfare legislation in four decades, overall public opinion has changed little, with continuing broad public skepticism about the effects of the new law and more than a quarter of Americans seeing neither side as making a good-faith effort to cooperate on the issue.
Overall, 46 percent of those polled said they support the changes in the new law; 50 percent oppose them. That is virtually identical to the pre-vote split on the proposals and similar to the divide that has existed since last summer, when the country became sharply polarized over the president's most ambitious domestic initiative.
The health-care debate galvanized the country to a remarkable extent. About a quarter of all adults say they tried to contact their elected representatives in Congress about health care in recent months, including nearly half of those who say they are "angry" about the changes. In general, opponents of the measure were more than twice as likely as supporters to say they had made the effort.
But there are signs that Democrats have started to rally, with the party's base firming up after intense internal battles over a public insurance option and provisions covering abortion funding. Fifty-six percent of Democrats now "strongly support" the recently enacted health-care changes; last month, 41 percent were solidly behind the proposals. Eight in 10 Democrats now approve of the way Obama is handling health care, the most since last summer.
Obama's overall approval rating is at 53 percent in the poll, about the same as it has been in Post-ABC polls in the past several months; 43 percent disapprove.
Obama has renewed his effort to sell the legislation to the public ahead of the November midterm elections, with more rallies planned this week. His success could be crucial to Democratic fortunes in this fall's midterm elections, with about six in 10 saying the congressional votes on health care will be a factor in their choice at the ballot box.
At this point, Democrats hold a razor-slim edge (47 to 43 percent) on the "generic ballot," the question about which party's candidate people support in their local districts. Independents, who swung solidly for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008, now divide 42 percent for the GOP candidate and 39 percent for the Democrat.
Democratic officials have long argued that once the debate ended and health-care legislation was enacted, the public would begin to see the changes in a far-more-favorable light. The new poll suggests that the president and his party still face significant obstacles in this new phase of the debate.
Passions remain strongest among the plan's detractors, as 26 percent of all adults said they are angry about the changes enacted by Congress, up from 18 percent in August. That includes 54 percent of all Republicans. Fewer Americans, 15 percent, said they are enthusiastic about the new measure, including 40 percent of liberal Democrats.
Among opponents, there is near-universal support (86 percent) for efforts to cancel the changes either through a new vote in Congress or through the courts. Since passage, Republican leaders have called for repeal of the new law and replacement with more modest changes.
Many key provisions of the new law have been highly popular in recent polling, particularly insurance changes such as extending coverage to young adults and eliminating exclusions based on preexisting conditions. But the intensity of the overall opposition adds to the Democrats' challenge in pitching those benefits to voters, with just over seven months until the midterm elections.
More people see the changes as making things worse, rather than better, for the country's health-care system, for the quality of their care and, among the insured, for their coverage. Majorities in the new poll also see the changes as resulting in higher costs for themselves and for the country.
Most respondents said reform will require everyone to make changes, whether they want to or not; only about a third said they believe the Democrats' contention that people who have coverage will be able to keep it without alterations. And nearly two-thirds see the changes as increasing the federal budget deficit, with few thinking the deficit will shrink as a result. The Congressional Budget Office said the measure will reduce the deficit.
About half of all poll respondents said the plan creates "too much government involvement" in the health-care system, a concern that is especially pronounced among Republicans.
Senior citizens, who typically make up about one in five midterm voters, represent a particularly valuable but tough audience on this issue. More than six in 10 of those 65 or older see a weaker Medicare system as a result of the changes to the health-care system. Overall, seniors tilt heavily against the changes, with 58 percent opposed and strong opponents outnumbering strong supporters by a 2-to-1 ratio.
At the same time, seniors who say they understand the upcoming changes are much more apt to back the new law than those who say the plan is too complicated.
Support for the changes is significantly higher among Democrats and independents who say they understand the legislation than it is among those who do not. Republicans are solidly opposed, regardless of whether they think they understand the changes.
The overall political landscape continues to look favorable for Republicans to make gains in November, with six in 10 Americans seeing the country as pretty seriously off on the wrong track and that broad dissatisfaction likely to fall hardest on incumbents.
At this point, more poll respondents said they are likely to oppose a lawmaker who backed the president's health-care initiative than said they would support such a candidate (32 percent to 26 percent), with more passion again on the negative side. Forty percent said the health-care vote will make no difference in their decision this fall.
The Democrats hold a 13-point advantage over the GOP when it comes to dealing with health care in general. That's a significant, but far slimmer, lead than they carried into the 2006 elections, which returned them to the majority. Similarly, Democratic advantages on the economy, taxes, immigration and the deficit are all severely attenuated.
Republicans now have a six-point edge when it comes to handling terrorism, a historical GOP strong point that Democrats had neutralized. Democrats are favored on Afghanistan policy, an area that remains a strong point for the president.
The largest Democratic lead in the new poll is on energy policy, where the party holds a 49 to 32 percent advantage.
A big concern for both parties may be that significant numbers in the poll -- 10 percent or more -- see neither as more trustworthy on each of those major issues.
Public approval of Obama's handling of health care has rebounded somewhat, but a slim majority continues to disapprove of the way he is dealing with issue No. 1: the economy. About half of respondents (49 percent) said Obama won't be a factor in their vote in November. The rest split about equally between saying they would vote in part to express support for the president and saying it would be to show opposition.
The poll was conducted March 23 to 26 among a random national sample of 1,000 adults; the results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
By Jon Cohen and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2010; A01
Americans overwhelmingly see the new health-care law as a major shift in the direction of the country, but they remain as deeply divided today over the changes as they were throughout the long congressional debate, according to a Washington Post poll.
In the days since President Obama signed the farthest-reaching piece of social welfare legislation in four decades, overall public opinion has changed little, with continuing broad public skepticism about the effects of the new law and more than a quarter of Americans seeing neither side as making a good-faith effort to cooperate on the issue.
Overall, 46 percent of those polled said they support the changes in the new law; 50 percent oppose them. That is virtually identical to the pre-vote split on the proposals and similar to the divide that has existed since last summer, when the country became sharply polarized over the president's most ambitious domestic initiative.
The health-care debate galvanized the country to a remarkable extent. About a quarter of all adults say they tried to contact their elected representatives in Congress about health care in recent months, including nearly half of those who say they are "angry" about the changes. In general, opponents of the measure were more than twice as likely as supporters to say they had made the effort.
But there are signs that Democrats have started to rally, with the party's base firming up after intense internal battles over a public insurance option and provisions covering abortion funding. Fifty-six percent of Democrats now "strongly support" the recently enacted health-care changes; last month, 41 percent were solidly behind the proposals. Eight in 10 Democrats now approve of the way Obama is handling health care, the most since last summer.
Obama's overall approval rating is at 53 percent in the poll, about the same as it has been in Post-ABC polls in the past several months; 43 percent disapprove.
Obama has renewed his effort to sell the legislation to the public ahead of the November midterm elections, with more rallies planned this week. His success could be crucial to Democratic fortunes in this fall's midterm elections, with about six in 10 saying the congressional votes on health care will be a factor in their choice at the ballot box.
At this point, Democrats hold a razor-slim edge (47 to 43 percent) on the "generic ballot," the question about which party's candidate people support in their local districts. Independents, who swung solidly for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008, now divide 42 percent for the GOP candidate and 39 percent for the Democrat.
Democratic officials have long argued that once the debate ended and health-care legislation was enacted, the public would begin to see the changes in a far-more-favorable light. The new poll suggests that the president and his party still face significant obstacles in this new phase of the debate.
Passions remain strongest among the plan's detractors, as 26 percent of all adults said they are angry about the changes enacted by Congress, up from 18 percent in August. That includes 54 percent of all Republicans. Fewer Americans, 15 percent, said they are enthusiastic about the new measure, including 40 percent of liberal Democrats.
Among opponents, there is near-universal support (86 percent) for efforts to cancel the changes either through a new vote in Congress or through the courts. Since passage, Republican leaders have called for repeal of the new law and replacement with more modest changes.
Many key provisions of the new law have been highly popular in recent polling, particularly insurance changes such as extending coverage to young adults and eliminating exclusions based on preexisting conditions. But the intensity of the overall opposition adds to the Democrats' challenge in pitching those benefits to voters, with just over seven months until the midterm elections.
More people see the changes as making things worse, rather than better, for the country's health-care system, for the quality of their care and, among the insured, for their coverage. Majorities in the new poll also see the changes as resulting in higher costs for themselves and for the country.
Most respondents said reform will require everyone to make changes, whether they want to or not; only about a third said they believe the Democrats' contention that people who have coverage will be able to keep it without alterations. And nearly two-thirds see the changes as increasing the federal budget deficit, with few thinking the deficit will shrink as a result. The Congressional Budget Office said the measure will reduce the deficit.
About half of all poll respondents said the plan creates "too much government involvement" in the health-care system, a concern that is especially pronounced among Republicans.
Senior citizens, who typically make up about one in five midterm voters, represent a particularly valuable but tough audience on this issue. More than six in 10 of those 65 or older see a weaker Medicare system as a result of the changes to the health-care system. Overall, seniors tilt heavily against the changes, with 58 percent opposed and strong opponents outnumbering strong supporters by a 2-to-1 ratio.
At the same time, seniors who say they understand the upcoming changes are much more apt to back the new law than those who say the plan is too complicated.
Support for the changes is significantly higher among Democrats and independents who say they understand the legislation than it is among those who do not. Republicans are solidly opposed, regardless of whether they think they understand the changes.
The overall political landscape continues to look favorable for Republicans to make gains in November, with six in 10 Americans seeing the country as pretty seriously off on the wrong track and that broad dissatisfaction likely to fall hardest on incumbents.
At this point, more poll respondents said they are likely to oppose a lawmaker who backed the president's health-care initiative than said they would support such a candidate (32 percent to 26 percent), with more passion again on the negative side. Forty percent said the health-care vote will make no difference in their decision this fall.
The Democrats hold a 13-point advantage over the GOP when it comes to dealing with health care in general. That's a significant, but far slimmer, lead than they carried into the 2006 elections, which returned them to the majority. Similarly, Democratic advantages on the economy, taxes, immigration and the deficit are all severely attenuated.
Republicans now have a six-point edge when it comes to handling terrorism, a historical GOP strong point that Democrats had neutralized. Democrats are favored on Afghanistan policy, an area that remains a strong point for the president.
The largest Democratic lead in the new poll is on energy policy, where the party holds a 49 to 32 percent advantage.
A big concern for both parties may be that significant numbers in the poll -- 10 percent or more -- see neither as more trustworthy on each of those major issues.
Public approval of Obama's handling of health care has rebounded somewhat, but a slim majority continues to disapprove of the way he is dealing with issue No. 1: the economy. About half of respondents (49 percent) said Obama won't be a factor in their vote in November. The rest split about equally between saying they would vote in part to express support for the president and saying it would be to show opposition.
The poll was conducted March 23 to 26 among a random national sample of 1,000 adults; the results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance
Obama health insurance requirement taken from GOP
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Associated Press Writer
Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.
The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.
Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed.
Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.
Starting in 2014, the new law will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it directly. That year, new insurance markets will open for business, health plans will be required to accept all applicants and tax credits will start flowing to millions of people, helping them pay the premiums.
Those who continue to go without coverage will have to pay a penalty to the IRS, except in cases of financial hardship. Fines vary by income and family size. For example, a single person making $45,000 would pay an extra $1,125 in taxes when the penalty is fully phased in, in 2016.
Conservatives today say that's unacceptable. Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans — the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most experts agree some kind of requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance doesn't work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.
"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits — two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received — by the George H.W. Bush administration.
"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
Obama rejected a key part of Pauly's proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it's a rational solution to America's health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.
Romney's success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who failed in the 1990s to require employers to offer coverage, embraced the individual requirement, an idea advocated by her Republican opponents in the earlier health care debate.
"Hillary Clinton believed strongly in universal coverage," said Neera Tanden, her top health care adviser in the 2008 Democratic campaign. "I said to her, 'You are not going to be able to say it's universal coverage unless you have a mandate.' She said, 'I don't want to run unless it's universal coverage.'"
Obama was not prepared to go that far. His health care proposal in the campaign required coverage for children, not adults. Clinton hammered him because his plan didn't guarantee coverage for all. He shot back that health insurance is too expensive to force people to buy it.
Obama remained cool to an individual requirement even once in office. But Tanden, who went on to serve in the Obama administration, said the first sign of a shift came in a letter to congressional leaders last summer in which Obama said he'd be open to the idea if it included a hardship waiver. Obama openly endorsed a mandate in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September.
It remains one of the most unpopular parts of his plan. Even the insurance industry is unhappy. Although the federal government will be requiring Americans to buy their products — and providing subsidies worth billions — insurers don't think the penalties are high enough.
Tanden, now at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says she's confident the mandate will work. In Massachusetts, coverage has gone up and only a tiny fraction of residents have been hit with fines.
Brown, whose election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy almost led to the collapse of Obama's plan, said his opposition to the new law is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal overreach on a matter that should be left up to states. Not so much the requirement, which he voted for as a state lawmaker.
"In Massachusetts, it helped us deal with the very real problem of uncompensated care," Brown said.
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Associated Press Writer
Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.
The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.
Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed.
Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.
Starting in 2014, the new law will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it directly. That year, new insurance markets will open for business, health plans will be required to accept all applicants and tax credits will start flowing to millions of people, helping them pay the premiums.
Those who continue to go without coverage will have to pay a penalty to the IRS, except in cases of financial hardship. Fines vary by income and family size. For example, a single person making $45,000 would pay an extra $1,125 in taxes when the penalty is fully phased in, in 2016.
Conservatives today say that's unacceptable. Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans — the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most experts agree some kind of requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance doesn't work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.
"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits — two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received — by the George H.W. Bush administration.
"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
Obama rejected a key part of Pauly's proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it's a rational solution to America's health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.
Romney's success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who failed in the 1990s to require employers to offer coverage, embraced the individual requirement, an idea advocated by her Republican opponents in the earlier health care debate.
"Hillary Clinton believed strongly in universal coverage," said Neera Tanden, her top health care adviser in the 2008 Democratic campaign. "I said to her, 'You are not going to be able to say it's universal coverage unless you have a mandate.' She said, 'I don't want to run unless it's universal coverage.'"
Obama was not prepared to go that far. His health care proposal in the campaign required coverage for children, not adults. Clinton hammered him because his plan didn't guarantee coverage for all. He shot back that health insurance is too expensive to force people to buy it.
Obama remained cool to an individual requirement even once in office. But Tanden, who went on to serve in the Obama administration, said the first sign of a shift came in a letter to congressional leaders last summer in which Obama said he'd be open to the idea if it included a hardship waiver. Obama openly endorsed a mandate in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September.
It remains one of the most unpopular parts of his plan. Even the insurance industry is unhappy. Although the federal government will be requiring Americans to buy their products — and providing subsidies worth billions — insurers don't think the penalties are high enough.
Tanden, now at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says she's confident the mandate will work. In Massachusetts, coverage has gone up and only a tiny fraction of residents have been hit with fines.
Brown, whose election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy almost led to the collapse of Obama's plan, said his opposition to the new law is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal overreach on a matter that should be left up to states. Not so much the requirement, which he voted for as a state lawmaker.
"In Massachusetts, it helped us deal with the very real problem of uncompensated care," Brown said.
BRAVE GOP!!??
Police Say Stray Bullet Hit Office of Lawmaker
By MICHAEL COOPER
On Thursday, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking Republican leader in the House, said that Democratic members of Congress were not the only ones who had been the targets of threats and vandalism in recent days. He said that he had been threatened, too, and that a bullet had been fired through the window of his campaign office in Richmond.
But a preliminary investigation indicated that the bullet was probably not aimed at his office, the Richmond police said Friday.
“We believe it was a stray bullet as a result of random gunfire,” said Gene Lepley, a spokesman for the Richmond Police Department.
Mr. Cantor drew attention to the incident at a news conference he held Thursday to criticize Democrats for publicizing the threats and vandalism several Democratic lawmakers have faced since they voted for the health care bill. Then he made a dramatic announcement.
“Just recently, I have been directly threatened,” he said. “A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I have received threatening e-mails. But I will not release them because I believe such actions will only encourage more to be sent.”
A preliminary investigation indicated that the incident in question took place around 1 a.m. Tuesday, when a bullet was apparently fired into the air, striking the office window as it traveled back downward, the Richmond police said in a statement.
The bullet struck the window with enough force to break a pane, the police said, but did not penetrate the blinds inside the window. The bullet landed about one foot inside the office, which Mr. Cantor had occasionally used for meetings, the police said.
At his news conference, where he declined to take questions from reporters, Mr. Cantor had urged that threats be left to law enforcement officials, and not used for publicity purposes.
“Legitimate threats should be treated as security issues, and they should be dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement officials,” he said. “It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain.”
A spokesman for Mr. Cantor did not return two calls or respond to an e-mail message seeking comment on Friday.
By MICHAEL COOPER
On Thursday, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking Republican leader in the House, said that Democratic members of Congress were not the only ones who had been the targets of threats and vandalism in recent days. He said that he had been threatened, too, and that a bullet had been fired through the window of his campaign office in Richmond.
But a preliminary investigation indicated that the bullet was probably not aimed at his office, the Richmond police said Friday.
“We believe it was a stray bullet as a result of random gunfire,” said Gene Lepley, a spokesman for the Richmond Police Department.
Mr. Cantor drew attention to the incident at a news conference he held Thursday to criticize Democrats for publicizing the threats and vandalism several Democratic lawmakers have faced since they voted for the health care bill. Then he made a dramatic announcement.
“Just recently, I have been directly threatened,” he said. “A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I have received threatening e-mails. But I will not release them because I believe such actions will only encourage more to be sent.”
A preliminary investigation indicated that the incident in question took place around 1 a.m. Tuesday, when a bullet was apparently fired into the air, striking the office window as it traveled back downward, the Richmond police said in a statement.
The bullet struck the window with enough force to break a pane, the police said, but did not penetrate the blinds inside the window. The bullet landed about one foot inside the office, which Mr. Cantor had occasionally used for meetings, the police said.
At his news conference, where he declined to take questions from reporters, Mr. Cantor had urged that threats be left to law enforcement officials, and not used for publicity purposes.
“Legitimate threats should be treated as security issues, and they should be dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement officials,” he said. “It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain.”
A spokesman for Mr. Cantor did not return two calls or respond to an e-mail message seeking comment on Friday.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Dragging down the health care debate
Media Matters: Dragging down the health care debate
Earlier this week, two very important things happened in the fight for health care reform, one flowing directly from the other. The first was that the public option was officially jettisoned from the Senate bill. The Democratic Senate caucus dropped it along with the proposed Medicare buy-in and will push the bill toward passage without these hotly controversial (within the Senate, if not among the American people) provisions.
The death of the public option then caused a fissure among progressives pushing to reform our health care system, effectively splitting left-leaning wonks and commentators into two camps: those who think that a bill without a public option will be a toothless waste of time and money; and those who think that the bill, while substantially weaker, will still be a vast improvement over the unsustainable status quo.
It's been an interesting debate to watch. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas have argued against passing the public option-less Senate bill, calling it a gift to the already entrenched private health insurance monopolies. Meanwhile, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein and The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn have defended the stripped-down bill's merits, focusing on cost controls and the extension of health insurance to millions of people. Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich occupies something of a middle ground, saying the bill is worth passing, but only just barely. Their arguments have the dry weight of substance and reflect a genuine engagement with the issue.
The same can't really be said about the right side of the aisle.
Rush Limbaugh smeared health care reform supporters as "mentally disturbed" before announcing: "People are going to die prematurely with the government in charge of all this." He called Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) "stupid," "ignorant," and "uninformed" for saying she wants to see a health reform bill pass, and said her "ignorance" was born of a failure to recognize that "people are going to be dying." Limbaugh stridently defended the insurance companies' prerogative to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, was outraged that the bill would extend coverage to victims of domestic violence, and advocated "shutting down the government" to prevent its passage.
Glenn Beck theorized that the health care reform bill is purposefully unconstitutional, and that Democrats are ramming it through Congress to set up some sort of framework in which Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the most powerful person in the country. Rather than bemoan the bill's allowance for victims of domestic violence, Beck compared the bill itself to an abusive spouse. He also offered a rousing defense of those tea partiers who protest health care reform by holding signs comparing President Obama to Hitler and the Nazis.
Speaking of tea partiers, they were at it again this week, holding poorly attended anti-health reform rallies at the Capitol and were cheered on, once again, by Fox News. On the December 15 Fox & Friends, "blind ideologue" Laura Ingraham hyped an Americans for Prosperity-sponsored "Code Red" rally against the "government takeover" of health care. When the rally actually got started, Fox News gave it some fawning live coverage augmented with RNC talking points about how great the tea partiers are for the Republican brand.
Fox Nation gave some love to the "Tea Party 'Die-In' " -- an event where tea partiers would storm the Capitol and pretend to die as a consequence of being denied health care by the government. As David Weigel of The Washington Independent reported, the event itself died a very real death.
And just today, Weekly Standard editor and professional temporary newspaper columnist Bill Kristol argued -- and it's hard to believe that this is actually what he wrote -- that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) should kill the Senate health bill today by supporting the Republican filibuster because it's going to snow in Washington, D.C., this weekend and it will be too dangerous for Hill staffers to drive to work. Incidentally, the conservative media had a lot to write about Ben Nelson this week. More on that below.
There exists right now a yawning divide in the quality of commentary and argumentation regarding health care reform. As the Senate bill has gone through the legislative meat grinder, leading progressive voices have shifted their rhetoric and opinions based on the changing conditions. Top-flight conservatives like Limbaugh and Beck, on the other hand, were screaming "Hitler" and "dictatorship" when the public option was on the table, and their tune hasn't changed now that it's no longer under consideration.
If anything, they're only going to get more shrill and irrational as the Senate bill moves closer and closer to a vote. The last thing they want is reasoned discourse. They'd much rather cancel the vote on account of weather.
Other major stories this week
White House threatens Nelson? Oh come Offutt
Let's do a quick thought experiment. Imagine that you are a nameless, faceless, party-less Senate aide who doesn't much like Obama or the Democratic push for health care reform and you're eager to discredit both with some kind of juicy scandal. But here's the problem -- because you have no name, face, or party, most people aren't going to give you a whole lot of credence. Also, the allegation you're trying to peddle has some pretty glaring credibility issues, so you can't risk taking it to the legitimate press because they might do a little fact-checking before running with it, which would inevitably kill it.
So what do you do?
The answer, actually, is quite simple. Take it to that one sector of the media that will believe any ridiculous smear as God's honest truth and won't let facts or common sense get in the way of an otherwise good story: the right-wing media.
This is in reference, of course, to Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb's shockingly implausible report, sourced to an anonymous "Senate aide," that the White House had threatened to close Nebraska's Offutt Air Force base in order to pressure Sen. Nelson to vote in favor of health care reform. The White House denied it, Nelson's office denied it, the whole thing stands athwart sense and reason, and Goldfarb has changed the story as inconvenient facts have undermined his allegations.
But, as is often the case, none of that matters. Soon after Goldfarb filed his report, the ridiculous story was picked up by Limbaugh, Beck, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin. Beck accused the White House of something approximating "treason," and Investor's Business Daily slammed Obama for "playing politics with our national security." And that was the point from the beginning -- just get the story out there and get people talking about it. If the facts come out later, who cares?
It's a formula that's worked well in the past -- remember when candidate Obama "snubbed" wounded troops in Germany because he couldn't bring cameras along? Remember when Obama demanded that Jesus be covered up for a speech he gave at Georgetown University? Or how about when Obama's college thesis was unearthed and it was discovered that he trashed the Constitution? All three of these allegations were poorly sourced, ridiculous on their face, and easily proven false with just a minimum of fact-checking. And yet, they were embraced wholeheartedly by the right-wing media.
People who want to get ridiculous smears like this into the public debate know how the process works. Just feed the remarkable "scoop" to one of the many right-wing ideologues posing as journalists and trust that they'll be incurious enough to repeat it without any fact-checking or skepticism. If the anonymous "Senate aide" behind the Offutt allegation even exists, then he at least deserves some credit for playing Michael Goldfarb like a well-made fiddle.
Budget, credibility, and deficits
One of the favorite conservative arguments against health care reform, particularly when the public option was still on the table, was that an overhaul of the country's health care system would badly exacerbate the already huge budget deficit Obama created with his stimulus program, bank bailouts, and other big-government spending initiatives.
The argument suffered from two big setbacks. First, the Congressional Budget Office found that both the House and Senate health care reform bills, even with the public option, would reduce the deficit. Second, as much as conservatives would like to think that Obama, the big-spending liberal, is responsible for the deficit, the real blame lies with his predecessor.
A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study released this week found that the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan account for over $500 billion of this year's $1.4 trillion deficit, with the economic downturn accounting for another $400 billion. Over the next 10 years, Bush's tax cuts and war spending will account for $7.1 trillion. The CBPP's data meshes nicely with a New York Times analysis from June finding that Bush's tax cutting and war spending were the major contributing factors to this year's deficit.
With that in mind, it was interesting to see conservatives who wholeheartedly supported Bush's economic policies take to the airwaves this week to trash Obama and lie about his economic policies.
Karl Rove, who just might have an ulterior motive for bashing the president, declared that the stimulus package "impeded" economic recovery, even though CBO found that it created or saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and added greatly to the GDP. The crew of Fox & Friends also took a few jabs at the stimulus, falsely claiming that the government spent money to "save" a wine train in Napa Valley (the money was actually for the Army Corps of Engineers project to keep downtown Napa from flooding).
Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal responded to an increase in the number of people filing for unemployment in early December by attacking Obama for predicting "strong job growth" after the Labor Department released a report on November's dropping unemployment rate. Obama had actually said that "there are going to be some months where the [unemployment] reports are a little better, some months where the reports are worse."
And then there's Limbaugh. To have an intelligent discussion on economics, one must first have a semi-firm grasp of reality. Limbaugh has demonstrated that he can't fulfill even that basic requirement, declaring the two Bush presidencies, which oversaw three recessions, "eight years of prosperity."
You get the sense that they might be trying to cover their tracks. After eight years of conservative stewardship of the economy that they supported, media conservatives look at the mess that was left to us, blame it all on the guy who's been in office for 11 months, and attack him for not pursuing the policies that got us into this mess in the first place.
Earlier this week, two very important things happened in the fight for health care reform, one flowing directly from the other. The first was that the public option was officially jettisoned from the Senate bill. The Democratic Senate caucus dropped it along with the proposed Medicare buy-in and will push the bill toward passage without these hotly controversial (within the Senate, if not among the American people) provisions.
The death of the public option then caused a fissure among progressives pushing to reform our health care system, effectively splitting left-leaning wonks and commentators into two camps: those who think that a bill without a public option will be a toothless waste of time and money; and those who think that the bill, while substantially weaker, will still be a vast improvement over the unsustainable status quo.
It's been an interesting debate to watch. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas have argued against passing the public option-less Senate bill, calling it a gift to the already entrenched private health insurance monopolies. Meanwhile, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein and The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn have defended the stripped-down bill's merits, focusing on cost controls and the extension of health insurance to millions of people. Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich occupies something of a middle ground, saying the bill is worth passing, but only just barely. Their arguments have the dry weight of substance and reflect a genuine engagement with the issue.
The same can't really be said about the right side of the aisle.
Rush Limbaugh smeared health care reform supporters as "mentally disturbed" before announcing: "People are going to die prematurely with the government in charge of all this." He called Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) "stupid," "ignorant," and "uninformed" for saying she wants to see a health reform bill pass, and said her "ignorance" was born of a failure to recognize that "people are going to be dying." Limbaugh stridently defended the insurance companies' prerogative to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, was outraged that the bill would extend coverage to victims of domestic violence, and advocated "shutting down the government" to prevent its passage.
Glenn Beck theorized that the health care reform bill is purposefully unconstitutional, and that Democrats are ramming it through Congress to set up some sort of framework in which Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the most powerful person in the country. Rather than bemoan the bill's allowance for victims of domestic violence, Beck compared the bill itself to an abusive spouse. He also offered a rousing defense of those tea partiers who protest health care reform by holding signs comparing President Obama to Hitler and the Nazis.
Speaking of tea partiers, they were at it again this week, holding poorly attended anti-health reform rallies at the Capitol and were cheered on, once again, by Fox News. On the December 15 Fox & Friends, "blind ideologue" Laura Ingraham hyped an Americans for Prosperity-sponsored "Code Red" rally against the "government takeover" of health care. When the rally actually got started, Fox News gave it some fawning live coverage augmented with RNC talking points about how great the tea partiers are for the Republican brand.
Fox Nation gave some love to the "Tea Party 'Die-In' " -- an event where tea partiers would storm the Capitol and pretend to die as a consequence of being denied health care by the government. As David Weigel of The Washington Independent reported, the event itself died a very real death.
And just today, Weekly Standard editor and professional temporary newspaper columnist Bill Kristol argued -- and it's hard to believe that this is actually what he wrote -- that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) should kill the Senate health bill today by supporting the Republican filibuster because it's going to snow in Washington, D.C., this weekend and it will be too dangerous for Hill staffers to drive to work. Incidentally, the conservative media had a lot to write about Ben Nelson this week. More on that below.
There exists right now a yawning divide in the quality of commentary and argumentation regarding health care reform. As the Senate bill has gone through the legislative meat grinder, leading progressive voices have shifted their rhetoric and opinions based on the changing conditions. Top-flight conservatives like Limbaugh and Beck, on the other hand, were screaming "Hitler" and "dictatorship" when the public option was on the table, and their tune hasn't changed now that it's no longer under consideration.
If anything, they're only going to get more shrill and irrational as the Senate bill moves closer and closer to a vote. The last thing they want is reasoned discourse. They'd much rather cancel the vote on account of weather.
Other major stories this week
White House threatens Nelson? Oh come Offutt
Let's do a quick thought experiment. Imagine that you are a nameless, faceless, party-less Senate aide who doesn't much like Obama or the Democratic push for health care reform and you're eager to discredit both with some kind of juicy scandal. But here's the problem -- because you have no name, face, or party, most people aren't going to give you a whole lot of credence. Also, the allegation you're trying to peddle has some pretty glaring credibility issues, so you can't risk taking it to the legitimate press because they might do a little fact-checking before running with it, which would inevitably kill it.
So what do you do?
The answer, actually, is quite simple. Take it to that one sector of the media that will believe any ridiculous smear as God's honest truth and won't let facts or common sense get in the way of an otherwise good story: the right-wing media.
This is in reference, of course, to Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb's shockingly implausible report, sourced to an anonymous "Senate aide," that the White House had threatened to close Nebraska's Offutt Air Force base in order to pressure Sen. Nelson to vote in favor of health care reform. The White House denied it, Nelson's office denied it, the whole thing stands athwart sense and reason, and Goldfarb has changed the story as inconvenient facts have undermined his allegations.
But, as is often the case, none of that matters. Soon after Goldfarb filed his report, the ridiculous story was picked up by Limbaugh, Beck, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin. Beck accused the White House of something approximating "treason," and Investor's Business Daily slammed Obama for "playing politics with our national security." And that was the point from the beginning -- just get the story out there and get people talking about it. If the facts come out later, who cares?
It's a formula that's worked well in the past -- remember when candidate Obama "snubbed" wounded troops in Germany because he couldn't bring cameras along? Remember when Obama demanded that Jesus be covered up for a speech he gave at Georgetown University? Or how about when Obama's college thesis was unearthed and it was discovered that he trashed the Constitution? All three of these allegations were poorly sourced, ridiculous on their face, and easily proven false with just a minimum of fact-checking. And yet, they were embraced wholeheartedly by the right-wing media.
People who want to get ridiculous smears like this into the public debate know how the process works. Just feed the remarkable "scoop" to one of the many right-wing ideologues posing as journalists and trust that they'll be incurious enough to repeat it without any fact-checking or skepticism. If the anonymous "Senate aide" behind the Offutt allegation even exists, then he at least deserves some credit for playing Michael Goldfarb like a well-made fiddle.
Budget, credibility, and deficits
One of the favorite conservative arguments against health care reform, particularly when the public option was still on the table, was that an overhaul of the country's health care system would badly exacerbate the already huge budget deficit Obama created with his stimulus program, bank bailouts, and other big-government spending initiatives.
The argument suffered from two big setbacks. First, the Congressional Budget Office found that both the House and Senate health care reform bills, even with the public option, would reduce the deficit. Second, as much as conservatives would like to think that Obama, the big-spending liberal, is responsible for the deficit, the real blame lies with his predecessor.
A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study released this week found that the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan account for over $500 billion of this year's $1.4 trillion deficit, with the economic downturn accounting for another $400 billion. Over the next 10 years, Bush's tax cuts and war spending will account for $7.1 trillion. The CBPP's data meshes nicely with a New York Times analysis from June finding that Bush's tax cutting and war spending were the major contributing factors to this year's deficit.
With that in mind, it was interesting to see conservatives who wholeheartedly supported Bush's economic policies take to the airwaves this week to trash Obama and lie about his economic policies.
Karl Rove, who just might have an ulterior motive for bashing the president, declared that the stimulus package "impeded" economic recovery, even though CBO found that it created or saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and added greatly to the GDP. The crew of Fox & Friends also took a few jabs at the stimulus, falsely claiming that the government spent money to "save" a wine train in Napa Valley (the money was actually for the Army Corps of Engineers project to keep downtown Napa from flooding).
Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal responded to an increase in the number of people filing for unemployment in early December by attacking Obama for predicting "strong job growth" after the Labor Department released a report on November's dropping unemployment rate. Obama had actually said that "there are going to be some months where the [unemployment] reports are a little better, some months where the reports are worse."
And then there's Limbaugh. To have an intelligent discussion on economics, one must first have a semi-firm grasp of reality. Limbaugh has demonstrated that he can't fulfill even that basic requirement, declaring the two Bush presidencies, which oversaw three recessions, "eight years of prosperity."
You get the sense that they might be trying to cover their tracks. After eight years of conservative stewardship of the economy that they supported, media conservatives look at the mess that was left to us, blame it all on the guy who's been in office for 11 months, and attack him for not pursuing the policies that got us into this mess in the first place.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
The right goes guerilla - With "Climategate" and Jennings smears
from: Media Matters
The conservative reaction to President Obama's election is turning downright Faustian.
As the rhetoric on the right has grown increasingly shrill, a few conservatives have raised their voices in alarm, counseling their ideological kin to step back from the abyss. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in August that "the increasingly angry tone of incitement being heard from right-of-center broadcasters" is likely to lead to politically motivated violence. Not two weeks ago, conservative blogger Charles Johnson articulated the reasons behind his departure from the right, citing conservative support for "anti-science bad craziness" and "[h]atred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies."
If the past week is any indication, those warnings have been roundly ignored. The conservative media, in their quest to derail the president's progressive agenda, have thrown their lot in with the grisly underbelly of political activism -- dumpster-diving thieves, extremist hate groups, and scam-artist videographers who sacrifice credibility for sensationalism and value Web traffic over truth.
Take, for example, the hackers who illegally accessed email servers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of emails. From Fox News on down to the conservative blogs, right-wingers have seized on the stolen documents as "proof" that climate change science is a "hoax" and attacked the global scientific consensus on climate change as a "cult." As Media Matters explained last week, the emails show nothing of the sort, and they are being wildly distorted. But the right not only wholeheartedly embraced these illegally obtained documents, it actively took steps to hide the fact that they were obtained by theft. Fox News spent an entire week describing the emails as "leaked," "revealed," and "uncovered." The conservative media critics at NewsBusters chastised the media for "paint[ing] the 'stolen' e-mails not as laudatory whistle-blowing, but as an unwanted impediment to the left's global warming agenda."
There were also new developments this week in another bogus "controversy" being stoked by right-wingers: the ongoing homophobic smear campaign against Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. Led by Andrew Breitbart and The Washington Times, conservatives falsely accused Jennings' organization of handing out explicit sexual materials to children, and smeared Jennings, who is gay, as a "deviant," a "pedophile," the "buggery czar," and a "mega-pervert." It was later revealed that the falsehoods upon which these smears are based originated with a group called MassResistance, a Massachusetts-based anti-gay hate group that purports to chronicle the "brutal fascist tactics" of the "homosexual movement," and whose leader compared the gay rights movement to Nazism.
Speaking of Andrew Breitbart, the Drudge-protégé and Twitter fiend received some bad news this week. An investigation by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger into Breitbart's much-publicized videos purporting to show ACORN aiding an undercover pimp and prostitute in tax evasion determined that the videos contained no evidence that the organization acted illegally. The report also found that the videos, shot by conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, "appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles' comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding." Perhaps he'll have better luck with his next project -- rooting through ACORN's trash to find incriminating documents.
The newest right-wing smear centers on a deceptively cropped undercover video shot by an anti-abortion activist at a Planned Parenthood office in Wisconsin. The Fox Nation and other right-wingers claimed the video shows Planned Parenthood trying to force women to have abortions. In reality, the video is so heavily edited it's impossible to determine the context of any of the Planned Parenthood staffer's supposedly damning statements.
These are the big stories for conservatives right now, and they're all based on thievery, the smears of an extremist fringe group, and disreputable hucksters with video cameras.
Now, it's probably not completely accurate to say that the right's embrace of these types of people is a Faustian bargain -- after all, such an arrangement typically involves the good being corrupted or seduced by the evil. When it comes to the conservative media, which are already notorious for slander and falsehood, it's more like the next step of a natural progression. The real danger is that they are helping to mainstream these fringe characters. The Washington Post published an op-ed by Sarah Palin who used the -- ahem -- "publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center" as a pretext to lie and mislead on climate science. The Post defended publishing Palin's op-ed by claiming that it didn't have time to fact-check it and that Palin "is someone who stirs discussion."
And that's exactly the mindset these conservatives are preying upon: Forget the facts; we just want eyeballs on the screens.
Other major stories this week
O say can you CO2?
Don't for one minute think that with the Copenhagen conference in full swing that the "Climategate" faux-scandal was the only bit of climate-related nonsense coming from the right this week. In accordance with a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, on December 7, the Environmental Protection Agency released its endangerment finding on carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases, which stated that the six gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people." As The Washington Post reported, the ruling enables the Obama administration "to limit emissions across the economy even if Congress does not pass climate legislation."
Of course, when media conservatives catch a whiff of anything that even hints at increased government regulation -- even over substances that threaten to disrupt the climate and cripple global economies -- the default reaction is to loudly freak out over the corruption of "big government" and the demise of America. This time around, the preferred buzzword was "blackmail." Glenn Beck said: "This is blackmail. It is a bogus gun to our heads." Rush Limbaugh screeched that the EPA is "blackmailing elected officials -- representatives of the people." Charles Krauthammer chimed in, saying the EPA finding is "command and control, which is a polite way of saying Soviet control, meaning it's all regulation, it's all sort of arbitrary on the part of the EPA. It's an amazing admission, and it is a kind of blackmail."
The EPA finding also offered an opportunity to revisit one of the sillier fake scandals from earlier in the year -- the saga of "silenced" EPA "scientist" Alan Carlin. To recap, back in June, it was revealed that Carlin, an EPA economist (not climate scientist), had authored an unsolicited report challenging the agency's endangerment finding on CO2 (a report Carlin himself acknowledged was hastily prepared and full of errors). Carlin complained to his superiors that his findings were being ignored, at which point emails were "leaked" (starting to sound familiar?) and the right embraced Carlin as a "whistleblower" who had been "silenced." The official release of the endangerment finding brought Carlin back to the fore, with Fox Nation and Human Events pulling out the "silenced scientist" shtick. Unfortunately for them, neither Carlin's allegations nor his scientific bona fides have improved with age.
What it all comes down to is that the conservative media would have you believe -- contrary to common sense and the glut of scientific evidence accumulated over the decades -- that there is no climate change, but rather, as Laura Ingraham put it on December 8 on Fox News, "a concerted global effort to reduce the standard of living for all Americans -- bring us down so the rest of these countries can float up."
Yep, it's crazy. But there is a potential upside -- perhaps the tin foil on their heads will reflect a little sunlight safely back into space.
Health care fearmongering on the rise
We're fast approaching the point where there can be no reasonable response to the conservative commentary on the health care reform bills before Congress. Sure, a few of them are sticking to easily debunked falsehoods, like Fox News' Martha MacCallum, who claimed Senate Democrats were not willing to enroll in the public option even though Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, and Barbara Mikulski co-sponsored an amendment mandating members of Congress do exactly that. But the big names in conservative talk are gunning for complete and total nonsensical hysteria.
Glenn Beck, after somehow arriving at the conclusion that health care reform opponents are painted as "Holocaust deniers," offered a full-throated defense of the American health care system that consisted mainly of making fun of Indians and the funny-sounding things they have in their country, like "that one big river they have there that sounds like a disease." You'll remember, of course, that a couple of years ago, Beck had nothing but bad things to say about his "eye-opening experience" of "receive[ing] health care in the United States."
Rush Limbaugh, for his part, cast health care reform as part of Obama's grand scheme of "aborting the private sector," and predicted that by pushing health care reform, the Democrats are "guaranteeing a revolt." And these attacks were in conjunction with the garden-variety Nazi-Cuba-totalitarian references and the "death panel" smear that just won't die.
You know you've reached a bad point in the health care debate when Nazi comparisons become garden-variety.
NPR's Fox News problem
It was revealed this week that National Public Radio executives had approached national political correspondent Mara Liasson and asked her to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News in light of the channel's increasingly partisan programming. Liasson rebuffed her bosses, explaining that she appears only on the network's news programming, not its opinion shows. Her explanation likely elated Fox News executives, who have been pushing the "hard news"-versus-opinion distinction in response to White House criticism of the network's overt partisanship. To have NPR's national political correspondent make that argument for them was quite the credibility boon.
And that's exactly the problem. There is no discernable distinction between Fox News' opinion programming and its news content. Special Report and Fox News Sunday -- Liasson's homes away from home -- are every bit as capable of the same dishonest and partisan hackery as Sean Hannity. The fact that they engage in the same shenanigans behind the fig leaf of "hard news" actually makes them in some ways worse than their openly opinionated colleagues. Liasson brings with her NPR's good reputation and credibility and confers them upon Fox News, even though it routinely undermines its credibility with ideologically-driven agendas.
And this isn't the first time NPR has faced this problem. Earlier in the year, the organization asked news analyst Juan Williams, who had been making a habit of going on The O'Reilly Factor to trash Michelle Obama, to stop identifying himself as an NPR employee when he went on Fox News.
NPR's executives clearly recognize what an embarrassment Fox News is, it's a shame Liasson and Williams don't.
The conservative reaction to President Obama's election is turning downright Faustian.
As the rhetoric on the right has grown increasingly shrill, a few conservatives have raised their voices in alarm, counseling their ideological kin to step back from the abyss. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in August that "the increasingly angry tone of incitement being heard from right-of-center broadcasters" is likely to lead to politically motivated violence. Not two weeks ago, conservative blogger Charles Johnson articulated the reasons behind his departure from the right, citing conservative support for "anti-science bad craziness" and "[h]atred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies."
If the past week is any indication, those warnings have been roundly ignored. The conservative media, in their quest to derail the president's progressive agenda, have thrown their lot in with the grisly underbelly of political activism -- dumpster-diving thieves, extremist hate groups, and scam-artist videographers who sacrifice credibility for sensationalism and value Web traffic over truth.
Take, for example, the hackers who illegally accessed email servers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of emails. From Fox News on down to the conservative blogs, right-wingers have seized on the stolen documents as "proof" that climate change science is a "hoax" and attacked the global scientific consensus on climate change as a "cult." As Media Matters explained last week, the emails show nothing of the sort, and they are being wildly distorted. But the right not only wholeheartedly embraced these illegally obtained documents, it actively took steps to hide the fact that they were obtained by theft. Fox News spent an entire week describing the emails as "leaked," "revealed," and "uncovered." The conservative media critics at NewsBusters chastised the media for "paint[ing] the 'stolen' e-mails not as laudatory whistle-blowing, but as an unwanted impediment to the left's global warming agenda."
There were also new developments this week in another bogus "controversy" being stoked by right-wingers: the ongoing homophobic smear campaign against Department of Education official Kevin Jennings. Led by Andrew Breitbart and The Washington Times, conservatives falsely accused Jennings' organization of handing out explicit sexual materials to children, and smeared Jennings, who is gay, as a "deviant," a "pedophile," the "buggery czar," and a "mega-pervert." It was later revealed that the falsehoods upon which these smears are based originated with a group called MassResistance, a Massachusetts-based anti-gay hate group that purports to chronicle the "brutal fascist tactics" of the "homosexual movement," and whose leader compared the gay rights movement to Nazism.
Speaking of Andrew Breitbart, the Drudge-protégé and Twitter fiend received some bad news this week. An investigation by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger into Breitbart's much-publicized videos purporting to show ACORN aiding an undercover pimp and prostitute in tax evasion determined that the videos contained no evidence that the organization acted illegally. The report also found that the videos, shot by conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, "appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles' comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding." Perhaps he'll have better luck with his next project -- rooting through ACORN's trash to find incriminating documents.
The newest right-wing smear centers on a deceptively cropped undercover video shot by an anti-abortion activist at a Planned Parenthood office in Wisconsin. The Fox Nation and other right-wingers claimed the video shows Planned Parenthood trying to force women to have abortions. In reality, the video is so heavily edited it's impossible to determine the context of any of the Planned Parenthood staffer's supposedly damning statements.
These are the big stories for conservatives right now, and they're all based on thievery, the smears of an extremist fringe group, and disreputable hucksters with video cameras.
Now, it's probably not completely accurate to say that the right's embrace of these types of people is a Faustian bargain -- after all, such an arrangement typically involves the good being corrupted or seduced by the evil. When it comes to the conservative media, which are already notorious for slander and falsehood, it's more like the next step of a natural progression. The real danger is that they are helping to mainstream these fringe characters. The Washington Post published an op-ed by Sarah Palin who used the -- ahem -- "publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center" as a pretext to lie and mislead on climate science. The Post defended publishing Palin's op-ed by claiming that it didn't have time to fact-check it and that Palin "is someone who stirs discussion."
And that's exactly the mindset these conservatives are preying upon: Forget the facts; we just want eyeballs on the screens.
Other major stories this week
O say can you CO2?
Don't for one minute think that with the Copenhagen conference in full swing that the "Climategate" faux-scandal was the only bit of climate-related nonsense coming from the right this week. In accordance with a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, on December 7, the Environmental Protection Agency released its endangerment finding on carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases, which stated that the six gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people." As The Washington Post reported, the ruling enables the Obama administration "to limit emissions across the economy even if Congress does not pass climate legislation."
Of course, when media conservatives catch a whiff of anything that even hints at increased government regulation -- even over substances that threaten to disrupt the climate and cripple global economies -- the default reaction is to loudly freak out over the corruption of "big government" and the demise of America. This time around, the preferred buzzword was "blackmail." Glenn Beck said: "This is blackmail. It is a bogus gun to our heads." Rush Limbaugh screeched that the EPA is "blackmailing elected officials -- representatives of the people." Charles Krauthammer chimed in, saying the EPA finding is "command and control, which is a polite way of saying Soviet control, meaning it's all regulation, it's all sort of arbitrary on the part of the EPA. It's an amazing admission, and it is a kind of blackmail."
The EPA finding also offered an opportunity to revisit one of the sillier fake scandals from earlier in the year -- the saga of "silenced" EPA "scientist" Alan Carlin. To recap, back in June, it was revealed that Carlin, an EPA economist (not climate scientist), had authored an unsolicited report challenging the agency's endangerment finding on CO2 (a report Carlin himself acknowledged was hastily prepared and full of errors). Carlin complained to his superiors that his findings were being ignored, at which point emails were "leaked" (starting to sound familiar?) and the right embraced Carlin as a "whistleblower" who had been "silenced." The official release of the endangerment finding brought Carlin back to the fore, with Fox Nation and Human Events pulling out the "silenced scientist" shtick. Unfortunately for them, neither Carlin's allegations nor his scientific bona fides have improved with age.
What it all comes down to is that the conservative media would have you believe -- contrary to common sense and the glut of scientific evidence accumulated over the decades -- that there is no climate change, but rather, as Laura Ingraham put it on December 8 on Fox News, "a concerted global effort to reduce the standard of living for all Americans -- bring us down so the rest of these countries can float up."
Yep, it's crazy. But there is a potential upside -- perhaps the tin foil on their heads will reflect a little sunlight safely back into space.
Health care fearmongering on the rise
We're fast approaching the point where there can be no reasonable response to the conservative commentary on the health care reform bills before Congress. Sure, a few of them are sticking to easily debunked falsehoods, like Fox News' Martha MacCallum, who claimed Senate Democrats were not willing to enroll in the public option even though Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Al Franken, and Barbara Mikulski co-sponsored an amendment mandating members of Congress do exactly that. But the big names in conservative talk are gunning for complete and total nonsensical hysteria.
Glenn Beck, after somehow arriving at the conclusion that health care reform opponents are painted as "Holocaust deniers," offered a full-throated defense of the American health care system that consisted mainly of making fun of Indians and the funny-sounding things they have in their country, like "that one big river they have there that sounds like a disease." You'll remember, of course, that a couple of years ago, Beck had nothing but bad things to say about his "eye-opening experience" of "receive[ing] health care in the United States."
Rush Limbaugh, for his part, cast health care reform as part of Obama's grand scheme of "aborting the private sector," and predicted that by pushing health care reform, the Democrats are "guaranteeing a revolt." And these attacks were in conjunction with the garden-variety Nazi-Cuba-totalitarian references and the "death panel" smear that just won't die.
You know you've reached a bad point in the health care debate when Nazi comparisons become garden-variety.
NPR's Fox News problem
It was revealed this week that National Public Radio executives had approached national political correspondent Mara Liasson and asked her to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News in light of the channel's increasingly partisan programming. Liasson rebuffed her bosses, explaining that she appears only on the network's news programming, not its opinion shows. Her explanation likely elated Fox News executives, who have been pushing the "hard news"-versus-opinion distinction in response to White House criticism of the network's overt partisanship. To have NPR's national political correspondent make that argument for them was quite the credibility boon.
And that's exactly the problem. There is no discernable distinction between Fox News' opinion programming and its news content. Special Report and Fox News Sunday -- Liasson's homes away from home -- are every bit as capable of the same dishonest and partisan hackery as Sean Hannity. The fact that they engage in the same shenanigans behind the fig leaf of "hard news" actually makes them in some ways worse than their openly opinionated colleagues. Liasson brings with her NPR's good reputation and credibility and confers them upon Fox News, even though it routinely undermines its credibility with ideologically-driven agendas.
And this isn't the first time NPR has faced this problem. Earlier in the year, the organization asked news analyst Juan Williams, who had been making a habit of going on The O'Reilly Factor to trash Michelle Obama, to stop identifying himself as an NPR employee when he went on Fox News.
NPR's executives clearly recognize what an embarrassment Fox News is, it's a shame Liasson and Williams don't.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
'Climategate' distracts from a crucial issue - Glen MacDonald
The purloined e-mails of climate scholars raise legitimate questions that must be addressed.
But their work is a drop in a global flood of evidence that something critical is going on.
For the past week, I have been riveted by the disclosures and diatribes swirling around Climategate. If you haven't followed the story, it began when a hacker gained access to e-mails at the Climatic Research Unit at the British University of East Anglia and released private correspondence.
Some of the leaked correspondence implies that Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, used a "trick" based on splicing together different data sets to hide an apparent decrease in 20th century temperatures. The origin of the trick was attributed to another scientist, Michael E. Mann of Penn State. Other e-mails suggest a conspiracy to keep data out of the hands of climate warming skeptics, to destroy communications and to suppress certain scientific publications.
Global warming skeptics have pounced on the e-mails as proof that climate scientists manipulate data and arbitrarily dismiss the work of scholars who hold contrarian views.
The snippets from the purloined e-mails do not provide a full context to the disturbing quotes, and I am not willing to condemn two highly talented and dedicated scientists without a full accounting. Investigations are taking place at East Anglia and Penn State. I trust these will be thorough and fair.
As illegal and unethical as this electronic theft may be, the e-mails do raise legitimate questions that must be addressed by the scientists involved and the climate community at large. The troubling questions fall into two categories -- those of scientific ethics and responsibility, and those related to the veracity of evidence that the world is warming at an alarming rate and magnitude.
Even under the best-case scenario, it can be argued that the science of climate change has been let down by what is contained in the e-mails. The perceived value of scientific research in formulating and implementing policy is greatly reduced if there is any question about its validity or any evidence of overriding bias by the researchers. The release of the stolen e-mails on the eve of the Copenhagen summit seems aimed to impede any real progress there. Even if they were nothing more than verbal rants and without underlying malfeasance, the troubling statements have handed the militant skeptics a platform from which to cast aspersions on the conclusion that the Earth is warming.
So, what if we faced a worst-case scenario and the climatic records from Jones and Mann were spurious? Do we have reason to discount the whole corpus of evidence that the 20th and 21st centuries have experienced an unusual spike in temperatures? The answer is a simple and clear no.
The climatic data from both Jones and Mann are only two instances of such evidence. Instrumental climate records of 20th century warming trends have been developed by other groups, including NASA. Well before Mann produced his famous "hockey stick" record of unusual 20th century warming relative to the past 1,000 years, there were centuries-long tree-ring records reported from places such as the Arctic that displayed unusually high and persistent warming over the 20th century. Hundreds of records of unusual 20th century warming from glaciers, lake and marine sediments, soil temperatures, tree rings, climate model estimates, etc., have been produced independently by many scientists in many countries.
In the Arctic, where I have worked for 30 years, there is evidence of environmental changes in sensitive ecosystems such as lakes that appear to be unprecedented in recent millenniums. In some cases, Arctic lakes, including ones that I visited as a student, have simply disappeared. Similar temperature-related changes are occurring in many places. We've seen disappearing glaciers from Mt. Kilimanjaro to the Andes, terrestrial plant and animal species expanding their ranges to higher altitudes or latitudes, increasing abundance of tropical/subtropical plankton species off the coast of California, and on and on.
The Jones and Mann reconstructions are drops in a global flood of evidence that something is going on with the world's climate and environments that we had better take note of. The climate change summit in Copenhagen remains completely justified in tackling the issue of climate warming now rather than later. In this regard, Climategate is a dangerous distraction from a frighteningly urgent threat.
We are facing a world of many environmental challenges, of which climate change is one important facet. We will not be able to confront all the threats at once and are faced with difficult decisions of environmental priorities and strategies. One important lesson from Climategate for all environmental scientists is that we must redouble efforts to hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards -- and be seen to be upholding those standards. Transparency and openness are not just virtues, they are necessities. For in a world of environmental triage, the production of sound science and public faith in such science are crucial to the ultimate health of the planet.
Glen MacDonald is a climate change scientist, UC presidential chair and director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.
But their work is a drop in a global flood of evidence that something critical is going on.
For the past week, I have been riveted by the disclosures and diatribes swirling around Climategate. If you haven't followed the story, it began when a hacker gained access to e-mails at the Climatic Research Unit at the British University of East Anglia and released private correspondence.
Some of the leaked correspondence implies that Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit, used a "trick" based on splicing together different data sets to hide an apparent decrease in 20th century temperatures. The origin of the trick was attributed to another scientist, Michael E. Mann of Penn State. Other e-mails suggest a conspiracy to keep data out of the hands of climate warming skeptics, to destroy communications and to suppress certain scientific publications.
Global warming skeptics have pounced on the e-mails as proof that climate scientists manipulate data and arbitrarily dismiss the work of scholars who hold contrarian views.
The snippets from the purloined e-mails do not provide a full context to the disturbing quotes, and I am not willing to condemn two highly talented and dedicated scientists without a full accounting. Investigations are taking place at East Anglia and Penn State. I trust these will be thorough and fair.
As illegal and unethical as this electronic theft may be, the e-mails do raise legitimate questions that must be addressed by the scientists involved and the climate community at large. The troubling questions fall into two categories -- those of scientific ethics and responsibility, and those related to the veracity of evidence that the world is warming at an alarming rate and magnitude.
Even under the best-case scenario, it can be argued that the science of climate change has been let down by what is contained in the e-mails. The perceived value of scientific research in formulating and implementing policy is greatly reduced if there is any question about its validity or any evidence of overriding bias by the researchers. The release of the stolen e-mails on the eve of the Copenhagen summit seems aimed to impede any real progress there. Even if they were nothing more than verbal rants and without underlying malfeasance, the troubling statements have handed the militant skeptics a platform from which to cast aspersions on the conclusion that the Earth is warming.
So, what if we faced a worst-case scenario and the climatic records from Jones and Mann were spurious? Do we have reason to discount the whole corpus of evidence that the 20th and 21st centuries have experienced an unusual spike in temperatures? The answer is a simple and clear no.
The climatic data from both Jones and Mann are only two instances of such evidence. Instrumental climate records of 20th century warming trends have been developed by other groups, including NASA. Well before Mann produced his famous "hockey stick" record of unusual 20th century warming relative to the past 1,000 years, there were centuries-long tree-ring records reported from places such as the Arctic that displayed unusually high and persistent warming over the 20th century. Hundreds of records of unusual 20th century warming from glaciers, lake and marine sediments, soil temperatures, tree rings, climate model estimates, etc., have been produced independently by many scientists in many countries.
In the Arctic, where I have worked for 30 years, there is evidence of environmental changes in sensitive ecosystems such as lakes that appear to be unprecedented in recent millenniums. In some cases, Arctic lakes, including ones that I visited as a student, have simply disappeared. Similar temperature-related changes are occurring in many places. We've seen disappearing glaciers from Mt. Kilimanjaro to the Andes, terrestrial plant and animal species expanding their ranges to higher altitudes or latitudes, increasing abundance of tropical/subtropical plankton species off the coast of California, and on and on.
The Jones and Mann reconstructions are drops in a global flood of evidence that something is going on with the world's climate and environments that we had better take note of. The climate change summit in Copenhagen remains completely justified in tackling the issue of climate warming now rather than later. In this regard, Climategate is a dangerous distraction from a frighteningly urgent threat.
We are facing a world of many environmental challenges, of which climate change is one important facet. We will not be able to confront all the threats at once and are faced with difficult decisions of environmental priorities and strategies. One important lesson from Climategate for all environmental scientists is that we must redouble efforts to hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards -- and be seen to be upholding those standards. Transparency and openness are not just virtues, they are necessities. For in a world of environmental triage, the production of sound science and public faith in such science are crucial to the ultimate health of the planet.
Glen MacDonald is a climate change scientist, UC presidential chair and director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Difference between BUSH & OBAMA - `a brain!"
How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan
By PETER BAKER NYTimes
WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.
How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.
The economic cost was troubling him as well after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan. Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.
“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.
When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight.
The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar in Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”
Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information, taxing analysts who prepared three dozen intelligence reports for him and Pentagon staff members who churned out thousands of pages of documents.
This account of how the president reached his decision is based on dozens of interviews with participants as well as a review of notes some of them took during Mr. Obama’s 10 meetings with his national security team. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but their accounts have been matched against those of other participants wherever possible.
Mr. Obama devoted so much time to the Afghan issue — nearly 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving alone — that he joked, “I’ve got more deeply in the weeds than a president should, and now you guys need to solve this.” He invited competing voices to debate in front of him, while guarding his own thoughts. Even David Axelrod, arguably his closest adviser, did not know where Mr. Obama would come out until just before Thanksgiving.
With the result uncertain, the outsize personalities on his team vied for his favor, sometimes sharply disagreeing as they made their arguments. The White House suspected the military of leaking details of the review to put pressure on the president. The military and the State Department suspected the White House of leaking to undercut the case for more troops. The president erupted at the leaks with an anger advisers had rarely seen, but he did little to shut down the public clash within his own government.
“The president welcomed a full range of opinions and invited contrary points of view,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview last month. “And I thought it was a very healthy experience because people took him up on it. And one thing we didn’t want — to have a decision made and then have somebody say, ‘Oh, by the way.’ No, come forward now or forever hold your peace.”
The decision represents a complicated evolution in Mr. Obama’s thinking. He began the process clearly skeptical of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, but the more he learned about the consequences of failure, and the more he narrowed the mission, the more he gravitated toward a robust if temporary buildup, guided in particular by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
Yet even now, he appears ambivalent about what some call “Obama’s war.” Just two weeks before General McChrystal warned of failure at the end of August, Mr. Obama described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.” When he announced his new strategy last week, those words were nowhere to be found. Instead, while recommitting to the war on Al Qaeda, he made clear that the larger struggle for Afghanistan had to be balanced against the cost in blood and treasure and brought to an end.
Aides, though, said the arduous review gave Mr. Obama comfort that he had found the best course he could. “The process was exhaustive, but any time you get the president of the United States to devote 25 hours, anytime you get that kind of commitment, you know it was serious business,” said Gen. James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser. “From the very first meeting, everyone started with set opinions. And no opinion was the same by the end of the process.”
Taking Control of a War
Mr. Obama ran for president supportive of the so-called good war in Afghanistan, but he talked about it primarily as a way of attacking Republicans for diverting resources to Iraq, which he described as a war of choice. Only after taking office, as casualties mounted and the Taliban gained momentum, did Mr. Obama really begin to confront what to do in Afghanistan.
Even before completing a review of the war, he ordered the military to send 21,000 more troops there, bringing the force to 68,000. But tension between the White House and the military soon emerged when General Jones, a retired Marine four-star general, traveled to Afghanistan in the summer and was surprised to hear officers already talking about more troops. He made it clear that no more troops were in the offing.
With the approach of Afghanistan’s presidential election in August, Mr. Obama’s two new envoys — Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s special representative to the region, and Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired commander of troops in Afghanistan now serving as ambassador — warned of trouble, including the possibility of angry Afghans marching on the American Embassy or outright civil war.
“There are 10 ways this can turn out,” one administration official said, summing up the envoys’ presentation, “and 9 of them are messy.”
The worst did not happen, but widespread fraud tainted the election and shocked some in the White House as they realized that their partner in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, was hopelessly compromised in terms of public credibility.
At the same time, the Taliban kept making gains. The Central Intelligence Agency drew up detailed maps in August charting the steady progression of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, maps that would later be used extensively during the president’s review. General McChrystal submitted his own dire assessment of the situation, warning of “mission failure” without a fresh infusion of troops.
While General McChrystal did not submit a specific troop request at that point, the White House knew it was coming and set out to figure out what to do. General Jones organized a series of meetings that he envisioned lasting a few weeks. Before each one, he convened a rehearsal session to impose discipline — “get rid of the chaff,” one official put it — that included Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and other cabinet-level officials. Mr. Biden made a practice of writing a separate private memo to Mr. Obama before each meeting, outlining his thoughts.
The first meeting with the president took place on Sept. 13, a Sunday, and was not disclosed to the public that day. For hours, Mr. Obama and his top advisers pored through intelligence reports.
Unsatisfied, the president posed a series of questions: Does America need to defeat the Taliban to defeat Al Qaeda? Can a counterinsurgency strategy work in Afghanistan given the problems with its government? If the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, would nuclear-armed Pakistan be next?
The deep skepticism he expressed at that opening session was reinforced by Mr. Biden, who rushed back overnight from a California trip to participate. Just as he had done in the spring, Mr. Biden expressed opposition to an expansive strategy requiring a big troop influx. Instead, he put an alternative on the table — rather than focus on nation building and population protection, do more to disrupt the Taliban, improve the quality of the training of Afghan forces and expand reconciliation efforts to peel off some Taliban fighters.
Mr. Biden quickly became the most outspoken critic of the expected McChrystal troop request, arguing that Pakistan was the bigger priority, since that is where Al Qaeda is mainly based. “He was the bull in the china shop,” said one admiring administration official.
But others were nodding their heads at some of what he was saying, too, including General Jones and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.
A Review Becomes News
The quiet review burst into public view when General McChrystal’s secret report was leaked to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post a week after the first meeting. The general’s grim assessment jolted Washington and lent urgency to the question of what to do to avoid defeat in Afghanistan.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the regional commander, secretly flew to an American air base in Germany for a four-hour meeting with General McChrystal on Sept. 25. He handed them his troop request on paper — there were no electronic versions and barely 20 copies in all.
The request outlined three options for different missions: sending 80,000 more troops to conduct a robust counterinsurgency campaign throughout the country; 40,000 troops to reinforce the southern and eastern areas where the Taliban are strongest; or 10,000 to 15,000 troops mainly to train Afghan forces.
General Petraeus took one copy, while Admiral Mullen took two back to Washington and dropped one off at Mr. Gates’s home next to his in a small military compound in Washington. But no one sent the document to the White House, intending to process it through the Pentagon review first.
Mr. Obama was focused on another report. At 10 p.m. on Sept. 29, he called over from the White House residence to the West Wing to ask for a copy of the first Afghanistan strategy he approved in March. A deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, brought him a copy to reread overnight. When his national security team met the next day, Mr. Obama complained that elements of that plan had never been enacted.
The group went over the McChrystal assessment and drilled in on what the core goal should be. Mr. Biden asked tough questions about whether there was any intelligence showing that the Taliban posed a threat to American territory. But Mr. Obama also firmly closed the door on any withdrawal. “I just want to say right now, I want to take off the table that we’re leaving Afghanistan,” he told his advisers.
Tension with the military had been simmering since the leak of the McChrystal report, which some in the White House took as an attempt to box in the president. The friction intensified on Oct. 1 when the general was asked after a speech in London whether a narrower mission, like the one Mr. Biden proposed, would succeed. “The short answer is no,” he said.
White House officials were furious, and Mr. Gates publicly scolded the general, saying advice to the president should remain confidential. The furor rattled General McChrystal, who, unlike General Petraeus, was not a savvy Washington operator. And it stunned others in the military, who were at first “bewildered by how over the top the reaction was from the White House,” as one military official put it.
It also proved to be what one review participant called a “head-snapping” moment of revelation for the military. The president, they suddenly realized, was not simply updating his previous strategy but essentially starting over from scratch.
The episode underscored the uneasy relationship between the military and a new president who, aides said, was determined not to be as deferential as he believed his predecessor, George W. Bush, was for years in Iraq. And the military needed to adjust to a less experienced but more skeptical commander in chief. “We’d been chugging along for eight years under an administration that had become very adept at managing war in a certain way,” said another military official.
Moreover, Mr. Obama had read “Lessons in Disaster,” Gordon M. Goldstein’s book on the Vietnam War. The book had become a must read in the West Wing after Mr. Emanuel had dinner over the summer at the house of another deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and wandered into his library to ask what he should be reading.
Among the conclusions that Mr. Donilon and the White House team drew from the book was that both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to question the underlying assumption about monolithic Communism and the domino theory — clearly driving the Obama advisers to rethink the nature of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The Pakistan Question
While public attention focused on Afghanistan, some of the most intensive discussion focused on the country where Mr. Obama could send no troops — Pakistan. Pushed in particular by Mrs. Clinton, the president’s team explored the links between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, and Mr. Obama told aides that it did not matter how many troops were sent to Afghanistan if Pakistan remained a haven.
Many of the intelligence reports ordered by the White House during the review dealt with Pakistan’s stability and whether its military and intelligence services were now committed to the fight or secretly still supporting Taliban factions. According to two officials, there was a detailed study of the potential vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, posing questions about potential insider threats and control of the warheads if the Pakistani government fell.
Mr. Obama and his advisers also considered options for stepping up the pursuit of extremists in Pakistan’s inhospitable border areas. The president eventually approved a C.I.A. request to expand the areas where remotely piloted aircraft could strike, and other covert action. The trick would be getting Pakistani consent, which still has not been granted.
On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.
“Why wasn’t there a 25 number?” one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: “It would have been too tempting.”
Mr. Gates and others talked about the limits of the American ability to actually defeat the Taliban; they were an indigenous force in Afghan society, part of the political fabric. This was a view shared by others around the table, including Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., who argued that the Taliban could not be defeated as such and so the goal should be to drive wedges between those who could be reconciled with the Afghan government and those who could not be.
With Mr. Biden leading the skeptics, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen increasingly aligned behind a more robust force. Mrs. Clinton wanted to make sure she was a formidable player in the process. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” said one senior adviser. She asked hard questions about Afghan troop training, unafraid of wading into Pentagon territory.
After a meeting where the Pentagon made a presentation with impressive color-coded maps, Mrs. Clinton returned to the State Department and told her aides, “We need maps,” as one recalled. She was overseas during the next meeting on Oct. 14, when aides used her new maps to show civilian efforts but she participated with headphones on from her government plane flying back from Russia.
Mr. Gates was a seasoned hand at such reviews, having served eight presidents and cycled in and out of the Situation Room since the days when it was served by a battery of fax machines. Like Mrs. Clinton, he was sympathetic to General McChrystal’s request, having resolved his initial concern that a buildup would fuel resentment the way the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did in the 1980s.
But Mr. Gates’s low-wattage exterior masks a wily inside player, and he knew enough to keep his counsel early in the process to let it play out more first. “When to speak is important to him; when to signal is important to him,” said a senior Defense Department official.
On Oct. 22, the National Security Council produced what one official called a “consensus memo,” much of which originated out of the defense secretary’s office, concluding that the United States should focus on diminishing the Taliban insurgency but not destroying it; building up certain critical ministries; and transferring authority to Afghan security forces.
There was no consensus yet on troop numbers, however, so Mr. Obama called a smaller group of advisers together on Oct. 26 to finally press Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates. Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she was comfortable with General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops or something close to it; Mr. Gates also favored a big force.
Mr. Obama was leery. He had received a memo the day before from the Office of Management and Budget projecting that General McChrystal’s full 40,000-troop request on top of the existing deployment and reconstruction efforts would cost $1 trillion from 2010 to 2020, an adviser said. The president seemed in sticker shock, watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him. “This is a 10-year, trillion-dollar effort and does not match up with our interests,” he said.
Still, for the first time, he made it clear that he was ready to send more troops if a strategy could be found to ensure that it was not an endless war. He indicated that the Taliban had to be beaten back. “What do we need to break their momentum?” he asked.
Four days later, at a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 30, he emphasized the need for speed. “Why can’t I get the troops in faster?” he asked. If they were going to do this, he concluded, it only made sense to do this quickly, to have impact and keep the war from dragging on forever. “This is America’s war,” he said. “But I don’t want to make an open-ended commitment.”
Bridging the Differences
Now that he had a sense of where Mr. Obama was heading, Mr. Gates began shaping a plan that would bridge the differences. He developed a 30,000-troop option that would give General McChrystal the bulk of his request, reasoning that NATO could make up most of the difference.
“If people are having trouble swallowing 40, let’s see if we can make this smaller and easier to swallow and still give the commander what he needs,” a senior Defense Department official said, summarizing the secretary’s thinking.
The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.
He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.
“What I’m looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”
That represented a contrast from when Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, staunchly opposed President Bush’s buildup in Iraq. But unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama wanted from the start to speed up a withdrawal as well. The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly.
And in another twist, Mr. Obama, who campaigned as an apostle of transparency and had been announcing each Situation Room meeting publicly and even releasing pictures, was livid that details of the discussions were leaking out.
“What I’m not going to tolerate is you talking to the press outside of this room,” he scolded his advisers. “It’s a disservice to the process, to the country and to the men and women of the military.”
His advisers sat in uncomfortable silence. That very afternoon, someone leaked word of a cable sent by Ambassador Eikenberry from Kabul expressing reservations about a large buildup of forces as long as the Karzai government remained unreformed. At one of their meetings, General Petraeus had told Mr. Obama to think of elements of the Karzai government like “a crime syndicate.” Ambassador Eikenberry was suggesting, in effect, that America could not get in bed with the mob.
The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone else then passed word of the cable to reporters in what some in the process took to be a calculated attempt to head off a big troop buildup.
The cable stunned some in the military. The reaction at the Pentagon, said one official, was “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” — military slang for an expression of shock. Among the officers caught off guard were General McChrystal and his staff, for whom the cable was “a complete surprise,” said another official, even though the commander and the ambassador meet three times a week.
A Presidential Order
By this point, the idea of some sort of time frame was taking on momentum. Mrs. Clinton talked to Mr. Karzai before the Afghan leader’s inauguration to a second term. She suggested that he use his speech to outline a schedule for taking over security of the country.
Mr. Karzai did just that, declaring that Afghan forces directed by Kabul would take charge of securing population centers in three years and the whole country in five. His pronouncement, orchestrated partly by Mrs. Clinton and diplomats in Kabul, provided a predicate for Mr. Obama to set out his own time frame.
The president gathered his team in the Situation Room at 8:15 p.m. on Nov. 23, the unusual nighttime hour adding to what one participant called a momentous wartime feeling. The room was strewn with coffee cups and soda cans, caffeine being the lubricant keeping the participants going.
Mr. Obama presented a revised version of Option 2A, this one titled “Max Leverage,” pushing 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by mid-2010 and beginning to pull them out by July 2011. Admiral Mullen came up with the date at the direction of Mr. Obama, despite some misgivings from the Pentagon about setting a time frame for a withdrawal. The date was two years from the arrival of the first reinforcements Mr. Obama sent shortly after taking office. Mr. Biden had written a memo before the meeting talking about the need for “proof of concept” — in other words, two years ought to be enough for extra troops to demonstrate whether a buildup would work.
The president went around the room asking for opinions. Mr. Biden again expressed skepticism, even at this late hour when the tide had turned against him in terms of the troop number. But he had succeeded in narrowing the scope of the mission to protect population centers and setting the date to begin withdrawal. Others around the table concurred with the plan. Mr. Obama spoke last, but still somewhat elliptically. Some advisers said they walked out into the night after 10 p.m., uncertain whether the president had actually endorsed the Max Leverage option or was just testing for reaction.
Two days later, Mr. Obama met with Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker and a critic of the Afghan war. The president outlined his plans for the buildup without disclosing specific numbers. Ms. Pelosi was unenthusiastic and pointedly told the president that he could not rely on Democrats alone to pass financing for the war.
The White House had spent little time courting Congress to this point. Even though it would need Republican support, the White House had made no overtures to the party leaders.
But there was back-channel contact. Mr. Emanuel was talking with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who urged him to settle on a troop number “that began with 3” to win Republican support. “I said as long as the generals are O.K. and there is a meaningful number, you will be O.K.,” Mr. Graham recalled.
The day after Thanksgiving, Mr. Obama huddled with aides from 10:30 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. refining parameters for the plan and mapping out his announcement. He told his speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, that he wanted to directly rebut the comparison with Vietnam.
On the following Sunday, Nov. 29, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office. He had made his decision. He would send 30,000 troops as quickly as possible, then begin the withdrawal in July 2011. In deference to Mr. Gates’s concerns, the pace and endpoint of the withdrawal would be determined by conditions at the time.
“I’m not asking you to change what you believe,” the president told his advisers. “But if you do not agree with me, say so now.” There was a pause and no one said anything.
“Tell me now,” he repeated.
Mr. Biden asked only if this constituted a presidential order. Mr. Gates and others signaled agreement.
“Fully support, sir,” Admiral Mullen said.
“Ditto,” General Petraeus said.
Mr. Obama then went to the Situation Room to call General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry. The president made it clear that in the next assessment in December 2010 he would not contemplate more troops. “It will only be about the flexibility in how we draw down, not if we draw down,” he said.
Two days later, Mr. Obama flew to West Point to give his speech. After three months of agonizing review, he seemed surprisingly serene. “He was,” said one adviser, “totally at peace.”
By PETER BAKER NYTimes
WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.
How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.
The economic cost was troubling him as well after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan. Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.
“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.
When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight.
The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar in Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”
Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information, taxing analysts who prepared three dozen intelligence reports for him and Pentagon staff members who churned out thousands of pages of documents.
This account of how the president reached his decision is based on dozens of interviews with participants as well as a review of notes some of them took during Mr. Obama’s 10 meetings with his national security team. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but their accounts have been matched against those of other participants wherever possible.
Mr. Obama devoted so much time to the Afghan issue — nearly 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving alone — that he joked, “I’ve got more deeply in the weeds than a president should, and now you guys need to solve this.” He invited competing voices to debate in front of him, while guarding his own thoughts. Even David Axelrod, arguably his closest adviser, did not know where Mr. Obama would come out until just before Thanksgiving.
With the result uncertain, the outsize personalities on his team vied for his favor, sometimes sharply disagreeing as they made their arguments. The White House suspected the military of leaking details of the review to put pressure on the president. The military and the State Department suspected the White House of leaking to undercut the case for more troops. The president erupted at the leaks with an anger advisers had rarely seen, but he did little to shut down the public clash within his own government.
“The president welcomed a full range of opinions and invited contrary points of view,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview last month. “And I thought it was a very healthy experience because people took him up on it. And one thing we didn’t want — to have a decision made and then have somebody say, ‘Oh, by the way.’ No, come forward now or forever hold your peace.”
The decision represents a complicated evolution in Mr. Obama’s thinking. He began the process clearly skeptical of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, but the more he learned about the consequences of failure, and the more he narrowed the mission, the more he gravitated toward a robust if temporary buildup, guided in particular by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
Yet even now, he appears ambivalent about what some call “Obama’s war.” Just two weeks before General McChrystal warned of failure at the end of August, Mr. Obama described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.” When he announced his new strategy last week, those words were nowhere to be found. Instead, while recommitting to the war on Al Qaeda, he made clear that the larger struggle for Afghanistan had to be balanced against the cost in blood and treasure and brought to an end.
Aides, though, said the arduous review gave Mr. Obama comfort that he had found the best course he could. “The process was exhaustive, but any time you get the president of the United States to devote 25 hours, anytime you get that kind of commitment, you know it was serious business,” said Gen. James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser. “From the very first meeting, everyone started with set opinions. And no opinion was the same by the end of the process.”
Taking Control of a War
Mr. Obama ran for president supportive of the so-called good war in Afghanistan, but he talked about it primarily as a way of attacking Republicans for diverting resources to Iraq, which he described as a war of choice. Only after taking office, as casualties mounted and the Taliban gained momentum, did Mr. Obama really begin to confront what to do in Afghanistan.
Even before completing a review of the war, he ordered the military to send 21,000 more troops there, bringing the force to 68,000. But tension between the White House and the military soon emerged when General Jones, a retired Marine four-star general, traveled to Afghanistan in the summer and was surprised to hear officers already talking about more troops. He made it clear that no more troops were in the offing.
With the approach of Afghanistan’s presidential election in August, Mr. Obama’s two new envoys — Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s special representative to the region, and Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired commander of troops in Afghanistan now serving as ambassador — warned of trouble, including the possibility of angry Afghans marching on the American Embassy or outright civil war.
“There are 10 ways this can turn out,” one administration official said, summing up the envoys’ presentation, “and 9 of them are messy.”
The worst did not happen, but widespread fraud tainted the election and shocked some in the White House as they realized that their partner in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, was hopelessly compromised in terms of public credibility.
At the same time, the Taliban kept making gains. The Central Intelligence Agency drew up detailed maps in August charting the steady progression of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, maps that would later be used extensively during the president’s review. General McChrystal submitted his own dire assessment of the situation, warning of “mission failure” without a fresh infusion of troops.
While General McChrystal did not submit a specific troop request at that point, the White House knew it was coming and set out to figure out what to do. General Jones organized a series of meetings that he envisioned lasting a few weeks. Before each one, he convened a rehearsal session to impose discipline — “get rid of the chaff,” one official put it — that included Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and other cabinet-level officials. Mr. Biden made a practice of writing a separate private memo to Mr. Obama before each meeting, outlining his thoughts.
The first meeting with the president took place on Sept. 13, a Sunday, and was not disclosed to the public that day. For hours, Mr. Obama and his top advisers pored through intelligence reports.
Unsatisfied, the president posed a series of questions: Does America need to defeat the Taliban to defeat Al Qaeda? Can a counterinsurgency strategy work in Afghanistan given the problems with its government? If the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, would nuclear-armed Pakistan be next?
The deep skepticism he expressed at that opening session was reinforced by Mr. Biden, who rushed back overnight from a California trip to participate. Just as he had done in the spring, Mr. Biden expressed opposition to an expansive strategy requiring a big troop influx. Instead, he put an alternative on the table — rather than focus on nation building and population protection, do more to disrupt the Taliban, improve the quality of the training of Afghan forces and expand reconciliation efforts to peel off some Taliban fighters.
Mr. Biden quickly became the most outspoken critic of the expected McChrystal troop request, arguing that Pakistan was the bigger priority, since that is where Al Qaeda is mainly based. “He was the bull in the china shop,” said one admiring administration official.
But others were nodding their heads at some of what he was saying, too, including General Jones and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.
A Review Becomes News
The quiet review burst into public view when General McChrystal’s secret report was leaked to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post a week after the first meeting. The general’s grim assessment jolted Washington and lent urgency to the question of what to do to avoid defeat in Afghanistan.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the regional commander, secretly flew to an American air base in Germany for a four-hour meeting with General McChrystal on Sept. 25. He handed them his troop request on paper — there were no electronic versions and barely 20 copies in all.
The request outlined three options for different missions: sending 80,000 more troops to conduct a robust counterinsurgency campaign throughout the country; 40,000 troops to reinforce the southern and eastern areas where the Taliban are strongest; or 10,000 to 15,000 troops mainly to train Afghan forces.
General Petraeus took one copy, while Admiral Mullen took two back to Washington and dropped one off at Mr. Gates’s home next to his in a small military compound in Washington. But no one sent the document to the White House, intending to process it through the Pentagon review first.
Mr. Obama was focused on another report. At 10 p.m. on Sept. 29, he called over from the White House residence to the West Wing to ask for a copy of the first Afghanistan strategy he approved in March. A deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, brought him a copy to reread overnight. When his national security team met the next day, Mr. Obama complained that elements of that plan had never been enacted.
The group went over the McChrystal assessment and drilled in on what the core goal should be. Mr. Biden asked tough questions about whether there was any intelligence showing that the Taliban posed a threat to American territory. But Mr. Obama also firmly closed the door on any withdrawal. “I just want to say right now, I want to take off the table that we’re leaving Afghanistan,” he told his advisers.
Tension with the military had been simmering since the leak of the McChrystal report, which some in the White House took as an attempt to box in the president. The friction intensified on Oct. 1 when the general was asked after a speech in London whether a narrower mission, like the one Mr. Biden proposed, would succeed. “The short answer is no,” he said.
White House officials were furious, and Mr. Gates publicly scolded the general, saying advice to the president should remain confidential. The furor rattled General McChrystal, who, unlike General Petraeus, was not a savvy Washington operator. And it stunned others in the military, who were at first “bewildered by how over the top the reaction was from the White House,” as one military official put it.
It also proved to be what one review participant called a “head-snapping” moment of revelation for the military. The president, they suddenly realized, was not simply updating his previous strategy but essentially starting over from scratch.
The episode underscored the uneasy relationship between the military and a new president who, aides said, was determined not to be as deferential as he believed his predecessor, George W. Bush, was for years in Iraq. And the military needed to adjust to a less experienced but more skeptical commander in chief. “We’d been chugging along for eight years under an administration that had become very adept at managing war in a certain way,” said another military official.
Moreover, Mr. Obama had read “Lessons in Disaster,” Gordon M. Goldstein’s book on the Vietnam War. The book had become a must read in the West Wing after Mr. Emanuel had dinner over the summer at the house of another deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and wandered into his library to ask what he should be reading.
Among the conclusions that Mr. Donilon and the White House team drew from the book was that both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to question the underlying assumption about monolithic Communism and the domino theory — clearly driving the Obama advisers to rethink the nature of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The Pakistan Question
While public attention focused on Afghanistan, some of the most intensive discussion focused on the country where Mr. Obama could send no troops — Pakistan. Pushed in particular by Mrs. Clinton, the president’s team explored the links between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, and Mr. Obama told aides that it did not matter how many troops were sent to Afghanistan if Pakistan remained a haven.
Many of the intelligence reports ordered by the White House during the review dealt with Pakistan’s stability and whether its military and intelligence services were now committed to the fight or secretly still supporting Taliban factions. According to two officials, there was a detailed study of the potential vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, posing questions about potential insider threats and control of the warheads if the Pakistani government fell.
Mr. Obama and his advisers also considered options for stepping up the pursuit of extremists in Pakistan’s inhospitable border areas. The president eventually approved a C.I.A. request to expand the areas where remotely piloted aircraft could strike, and other covert action. The trick would be getting Pakistani consent, which still has not been granted.
On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.
“Why wasn’t there a 25 number?” one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: “It would have been too tempting.”
Mr. Gates and others talked about the limits of the American ability to actually defeat the Taliban; they were an indigenous force in Afghan society, part of the political fabric. This was a view shared by others around the table, including Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., who argued that the Taliban could not be defeated as such and so the goal should be to drive wedges between those who could be reconciled with the Afghan government and those who could not be.
With Mr. Biden leading the skeptics, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen increasingly aligned behind a more robust force. Mrs. Clinton wanted to make sure she was a formidable player in the process. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” said one senior adviser. She asked hard questions about Afghan troop training, unafraid of wading into Pentagon territory.
After a meeting where the Pentagon made a presentation with impressive color-coded maps, Mrs. Clinton returned to the State Department and told her aides, “We need maps,” as one recalled. She was overseas during the next meeting on Oct. 14, when aides used her new maps to show civilian efforts but she participated with headphones on from her government plane flying back from Russia.
Mr. Gates was a seasoned hand at such reviews, having served eight presidents and cycled in and out of the Situation Room since the days when it was served by a battery of fax machines. Like Mrs. Clinton, he was sympathetic to General McChrystal’s request, having resolved his initial concern that a buildup would fuel resentment the way the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did in the 1980s.
But Mr. Gates’s low-wattage exterior masks a wily inside player, and he knew enough to keep his counsel early in the process to let it play out more first. “When to speak is important to him; when to signal is important to him,” said a senior Defense Department official.
On Oct. 22, the National Security Council produced what one official called a “consensus memo,” much of which originated out of the defense secretary’s office, concluding that the United States should focus on diminishing the Taliban insurgency but not destroying it; building up certain critical ministries; and transferring authority to Afghan security forces.
There was no consensus yet on troop numbers, however, so Mr. Obama called a smaller group of advisers together on Oct. 26 to finally press Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates. Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she was comfortable with General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops or something close to it; Mr. Gates also favored a big force.
Mr. Obama was leery. He had received a memo the day before from the Office of Management and Budget projecting that General McChrystal’s full 40,000-troop request on top of the existing deployment and reconstruction efforts would cost $1 trillion from 2010 to 2020, an adviser said. The president seemed in sticker shock, watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him. “This is a 10-year, trillion-dollar effort and does not match up with our interests,” he said.
Still, for the first time, he made it clear that he was ready to send more troops if a strategy could be found to ensure that it was not an endless war. He indicated that the Taliban had to be beaten back. “What do we need to break their momentum?” he asked.
Four days later, at a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 30, he emphasized the need for speed. “Why can’t I get the troops in faster?” he asked. If they were going to do this, he concluded, it only made sense to do this quickly, to have impact and keep the war from dragging on forever. “This is America’s war,” he said. “But I don’t want to make an open-ended commitment.”
Bridging the Differences
Now that he had a sense of where Mr. Obama was heading, Mr. Gates began shaping a plan that would bridge the differences. He developed a 30,000-troop option that would give General McChrystal the bulk of his request, reasoning that NATO could make up most of the difference.
“If people are having trouble swallowing 40, let’s see if we can make this smaller and easier to swallow and still give the commander what he needs,” a senior Defense Department official said, summarizing the secretary’s thinking.
The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.
He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.
“What I’m looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”
That represented a contrast from when Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, staunchly opposed President Bush’s buildup in Iraq. But unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama wanted from the start to speed up a withdrawal as well. The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly.
And in another twist, Mr. Obama, who campaigned as an apostle of transparency and had been announcing each Situation Room meeting publicly and even releasing pictures, was livid that details of the discussions were leaking out.
“What I’m not going to tolerate is you talking to the press outside of this room,” he scolded his advisers. “It’s a disservice to the process, to the country and to the men and women of the military.”
His advisers sat in uncomfortable silence. That very afternoon, someone leaked word of a cable sent by Ambassador Eikenberry from Kabul expressing reservations about a large buildup of forces as long as the Karzai government remained unreformed. At one of their meetings, General Petraeus had told Mr. Obama to think of elements of the Karzai government like “a crime syndicate.” Ambassador Eikenberry was suggesting, in effect, that America could not get in bed with the mob.
The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone else then passed word of the cable to reporters in what some in the process took to be a calculated attempt to head off a big troop buildup.
The cable stunned some in the military. The reaction at the Pentagon, said one official, was “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” — military slang for an expression of shock. Among the officers caught off guard were General McChrystal and his staff, for whom the cable was “a complete surprise,” said another official, even though the commander and the ambassador meet three times a week.
A Presidential Order
By this point, the idea of some sort of time frame was taking on momentum. Mrs. Clinton talked to Mr. Karzai before the Afghan leader’s inauguration to a second term. She suggested that he use his speech to outline a schedule for taking over security of the country.
Mr. Karzai did just that, declaring that Afghan forces directed by Kabul would take charge of securing population centers in three years and the whole country in five. His pronouncement, orchestrated partly by Mrs. Clinton and diplomats in Kabul, provided a predicate for Mr. Obama to set out his own time frame.
The president gathered his team in the Situation Room at 8:15 p.m. on Nov. 23, the unusual nighttime hour adding to what one participant called a momentous wartime feeling. The room was strewn with coffee cups and soda cans, caffeine being the lubricant keeping the participants going.
Mr. Obama presented a revised version of Option 2A, this one titled “Max Leverage,” pushing 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by mid-2010 and beginning to pull them out by July 2011. Admiral Mullen came up with the date at the direction of Mr. Obama, despite some misgivings from the Pentagon about setting a time frame for a withdrawal. The date was two years from the arrival of the first reinforcements Mr. Obama sent shortly after taking office. Mr. Biden had written a memo before the meeting talking about the need for “proof of concept” — in other words, two years ought to be enough for extra troops to demonstrate whether a buildup would work.
The president went around the room asking for opinions. Mr. Biden again expressed skepticism, even at this late hour when the tide had turned against him in terms of the troop number. But he had succeeded in narrowing the scope of the mission to protect population centers and setting the date to begin withdrawal. Others around the table concurred with the plan. Mr. Obama spoke last, but still somewhat elliptically. Some advisers said they walked out into the night after 10 p.m., uncertain whether the president had actually endorsed the Max Leverage option or was just testing for reaction.
Two days later, Mr. Obama met with Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker and a critic of the Afghan war. The president outlined his plans for the buildup without disclosing specific numbers. Ms. Pelosi was unenthusiastic and pointedly told the president that he could not rely on Democrats alone to pass financing for the war.
The White House had spent little time courting Congress to this point. Even though it would need Republican support, the White House had made no overtures to the party leaders.
But there was back-channel contact. Mr. Emanuel was talking with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who urged him to settle on a troop number “that began with 3” to win Republican support. “I said as long as the generals are O.K. and there is a meaningful number, you will be O.K.,” Mr. Graham recalled.
The day after Thanksgiving, Mr. Obama huddled with aides from 10:30 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. refining parameters for the plan and mapping out his announcement. He told his speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, that he wanted to directly rebut the comparison with Vietnam.
On the following Sunday, Nov. 29, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office. He had made his decision. He would send 30,000 troops as quickly as possible, then begin the withdrawal in July 2011. In deference to Mr. Gates’s concerns, the pace and endpoint of the withdrawal would be determined by conditions at the time.
“I’m not asking you to change what you believe,” the president told his advisers. “But if you do not agree with me, say so now.” There was a pause and no one said anything.
“Tell me now,” he repeated.
Mr. Biden asked only if this constituted a presidential order. Mr. Gates and others signaled agreement.
“Fully support, sir,” Admiral Mullen said.
“Ditto,” General Petraeus said.
Mr. Obama then went to the Situation Room to call General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry. The president made it clear that in the next assessment in December 2010 he would not contemplate more troops. “It will only be about the flexibility in how we draw down, not if we draw down,” he said.
Two days later, Mr. Obama flew to West Point to give his speech. After three months of agonizing review, he seemed surprisingly serene. “He was,” said one adviser, “totally at peace.”
Friday, December 04, 2009
The FOX News(?) is just like PRAVDA only worse!!
MediaMatters:
On Afghanistan, Fox News decides, then reports
President Obama never had a chance ...
It didn't matter what decision he came to regarding troop levels in Afghanistan, or what he said about the ongoing conflict there, because Fox News and the rest of the conservative media had already reached two conclusions. First, he took too long. Second, he was wrong.
Since the Bush administration stuck him with the untended-to mess in Afghanistan, Obama had to make a choice -- more troops, fewer troops, withdrawal. When Obama signaled that he actually wanted to consider his options before making a decision, the Fox News followed the lead of Dick Cheney -- one of the primary authors of the Afghanistan debacle -- in accusing the president of "dithering" and "inaction." Glenn Beck, never one to be subtle or reasonable, accused the president of "letting our troops literally bleed and die" and said Obama would "pay for it" in the hereafter.
Of course, Cheney's idea of "dithering" is another man's idea of a "substantive discussion" that came as part of a "good" process. That other man just so happens to be Gen. David Petraeus, who was asked by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on December 2 if Obama had been "dithering" as Cheney alleged. Petraeus responded: "This process was actually quite good, Joe. It was a very substantive discussion. Everybody's assumptions and views were tested. I think out of this have come sharpened objectives, a very good understanding of the challenges and the difficulties and what must be done in a much more detailed and nuanced fashion."
But the big moment finally arrived, and Obama made his decision -- 30,000 more troops, with a set time limit of July 2011. The decision was announced during a prime-time speech to the nation on December 1. Before the teleprompters had even cooled down, Fox News got right to the mischief. Bill O'Reilly chastised the president for not "saying, 'Look, these are bad guys. We're fighting evil.' " While it's true that Obama didn't use those exact words, he did use some that sounded awfully similar, like when he called Al Qaeda "extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam ... to justify the slaughter of innocents," and when he called the Taliban "a ruthless, repressive, and radical movement."
Other Fox News personalities got in on the fun -- the crew of Fox & Friends complained that Obama never said the word "win" during the speech, even though he spoke several times about the "successful" conclusion to the war. And when they weren't complaining about things that Obama didn't (but really did) say, conservatives were complaining that it wasn't the best speech the world had ever seen. O'Reilly said it was "not exactly the Gettysburg Address." Sean Hannity said: "I didn't hear Winston Churchill, I didn't hear Ronald Reagan, I didn't hear George Bush." Charles Krauthammer was hoping to get his Shakespeare fix, lamenting that it wasn't "exactly the kind of speech that you would have heard from Henry V."
And speaking of history, conservatives took the occasion of Obama's speech to do a little rewriting of the historical record. Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Obama was "in no position whatsoever to criticize what President Bush did" in Afghanistan because "at the time, he didn't speak out on this." Rove must've been too busy ignoring subpoenas to have noticed the many, many, many times that Obama spoke out against the Bush administration's Afghanistan policy. And then there was Hannity, who disregarded the many thousand troops Obama sent to Afghanistan earlier this year in claiming that the president has "had a "less-than-consistent stance on the issue of Afghanistan."
The bottom line is that for conservatives, there are plenty of substantive ways to disagree with Obama's policy prescriptions. He's a Democrat, he's going to propose policies that fall on the left side of the spectrum, and conservatives can and should bring to the table what facts they can in making their counter-arguments. But judging by their treatment of Obama's Afghanistan policy, Fox News isn't interested in that. They're simply going to reflexively gainsay anything Obama does. That's why you get superficial, ludicrous, and transparently false claims like these -- the point isn't to be right; the point is to say the other guy is wrong.
Other major stories this week
Snapping the "Climategate" shut
It's no secret that the American right has had a contentious relationship with science. They've made clear that they don't really care all that much for practical science (embryonic stem cell research, for example), but also have a soft spot for anti-science (creationism) and anti-science dressed up to look like science (intelligent design). When forced to choose between scientific fact and ideological purity, they'll more often than not show anyone wearing a lab coat to the door.
And in that great conflict between science and ideology, there is no greater battle than climate change, and the weight of scientific evidence stacked against the right has put it into a precarious position, forcing it to engage in asymmetrical warfare. Take, for example, the email messages illegally hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that, according to the right-wing commentariat, are prima facie evidence that climate change is nothing more than an elaborate hoax perpetrated over many generations by legions of scientists who want to undermine capitalism across the globe.
Or something like that.
Here's what it comes down to -- much of what the right is saying about those emails is wildly out of context, an outrageous distortion, or just plain false. But let's assume, just for one moment, that these emails actually do say everything that the right claims. If that were the case, then the emails would be a damning indictment of the scientists whose names appear on them. What they would not be, however, is compelling evidence that the entirety of climate change science is "unproven" or a "hoax," as conservatives are claiming. They've put themselves in the laughably silly position of claiming that a few private messages between scientists outweigh the glut of scientific data accumulated over the decades, the volumes upon volumes of peer-reviewed publications on the topic, and the findings of thousands of scientists working with several independent scientific bodies.
To use a subject-appropriate metaphor, it's as if they pulled a pebble from a glacier and held it up as proof that the glacier weren't made of ice.
On Afghanistan, Fox News decides, then reports
President Obama never had a chance ...
It didn't matter what decision he came to regarding troop levels in Afghanistan, or what he said about the ongoing conflict there, because Fox News and the rest of the conservative media had already reached two conclusions. First, he took too long. Second, he was wrong.
Since the Bush administration stuck him with the untended-to mess in Afghanistan, Obama had to make a choice -- more troops, fewer troops, withdrawal. When Obama signaled that he actually wanted to consider his options before making a decision, the Fox News followed the lead of Dick Cheney -- one of the primary authors of the Afghanistan debacle -- in accusing the president of "dithering" and "inaction." Glenn Beck, never one to be subtle or reasonable, accused the president of "letting our troops literally bleed and die" and said Obama would "pay for it" in the hereafter.
Of course, Cheney's idea of "dithering" is another man's idea of a "substantive discussion" that came as part of a "good" process. That other man just so happens to be Gen. David Petraeus, who was asked by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough on December 2 if Obama had been "dithering" as Cheney alleged. Petraeus responded: "This process was actually quite good, Joe. It was a very substantive discussion. Everybody's assumptions and views were tested. I think out of this have come sharpened objectives, a very good understanding of the challenges and the difficulties and what must be done in a much more detailed and nuanced fashion."
But the big moment finally arrived, and Obama made his decision -- 30,000 more troops, with a set time limit of July 2011. The decision was announced during a prime-time speech to the nation on December 1. Before the teleprompters had even cooled down, Fox News got right to the mischief. Bill O'Reilly chastised the president for not "saying, 'Look, these are bad guys. We're fighting evil.' " While it's true that Obama didn't use those exact words, he did use some that sounded awfully similar, like when he called Al Qaeda "extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam ... to justify the slaughter of innocents," and when he called the Taliban "a ruthless, repressive, and radical movement."
Other Fox News personalities got in on the fun -- the crew of Fox & Friends complained that Obama never said the word "win" during the speech, even though he spoke several times about the "successful" conclusion to the war. And when they weren't complaining about things that Obama didn't (but really did) say, conservatives were complaining that it wasn't the best speech the world had ever seen. O'Reilly said it was "not exactly the Gettysburg Address." Sean Hannity said: "I didn't hear Winston Churchill, I didn't hear Ronald Reagan, I didn't hear George Bush." Charles Krauthammer was hoping to get his Shakespeare fix, lamenting that it wasn't "exactly the kind of speech that you would have heard from Henry V."
And speaking of history, conservatives took the occasion of Obama's speech to do a little rewriting of the historical record. Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Obama was "in no position whatsoever to criticize what President Bush did" in Afghanistan because "at the time, he didn't speak out on this." Rove must've been too busy ignoring subpoenas to have noticed the many, many, many times that Obama spoke out against the Bush administration's Afghanistan policy. And then there was Hannity, who disregarded the many thousand troops Obama sent to Afghanistan earlier this year in claiming that the president has "had a "less-than-consistent stance on the issue of Afghanistan."
The bottom line is that for conservatives, there are plenty of substantive ways to disagree with Obama's policy prescriptions. He's a Democrat, he's going to propose policies that fall on the left side of the spectrum, and conservatives can and should bring to the table what facts they can in making their counter-arguments. But judging by their treatment of Obama's Afghanistan policy, Fox News isn't interested in that. They're simply going to reflexively gainsay anything Obama does. That's why you get superficial, ludicrous, and transparently false claims like these -- the point isn't to be right; the point is to say the other guy is wrong.
Other major stories this week
Snapping the "Climategate" shut
It's no secret that the American right has had a contentious relationship with science. They've made clear that they don't really care all that much for practical science (embryonic stem cell research, for example), but also have a soft spot for anti-science (creationism) and anti-science dressed up to look like science (intelligent design). When forced to choose between scientific fact and ideological purity, they'll more often than not show anyone wearing a lab coat to the door.
And in that great conflict between science and ideology, there is no greater battle than climate change, and the weight of scientific evidence stacked against the right has put it into a precarious position, forcing it to engage in asymmetrical warfare. Take, for example, the email messages illegally hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that, according to the right-wing commentariat, are prima facie evidence that climate change is nothing more than an elaborate hoax perpetrated over many generations by legions of scientists who want to undermine capitalism across the globe.
Or something like that.
Here's what it comes down to -- much of what the right is saying about those emails is wildly out of context, an outrageous distortion, or just plain false. But let's assume, just for one moment, that these emails actually do say everything that the right claims. If that were the case, then the emails would be a damning indictment of the scientists whose names appear on them. What they would not be, however, is compelling evidence that the entirety of climate change science is "unproven" or a "hoax," as conservatives are claiming. They've put themselves in the laughably silly position of claiming that a few private messages between scientists outweigh the glut of scientific data accumulated over the decades, the volumes upon volumes of peer-reviewed publications on the topic, and the findings of thousands of scientists working with several independent scientific bodies.
To use a subject-appropriate metaphor, it's as if they pulled a pebble from a glacier and held it up as proof that the glacier weren't made of ice.
Just we need MORE GUNS in trained unstable killers hands
LATimes
Veterans and gun safety
Legislation to loosen restrictions on buying guns by mentally unstable veterans is misguided.
Reasonable people agree that precautions should be taken to keep psychologically impaired individuals from buying guns. In the enduring debate over gun regulation, this has been one area of consensus. That's why it is difficult to fathom legislation proposed by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) that would make it more difficult to keep guns out of the hands of veterans who have been deemed mentally incompetent by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Currently, such veterans fail their federal background checks if they attempt to buy a gun. So Burr wants to add another step to the background check: He proposes that the VA's medical diagnoses be subject to the approval of a judge or magistrate. But that's unnecessary; the VA already offers extensive due process to veterans whose mental capabilities are questioned, and the legal presumption is in favor of their competence. In fact, one reason the gun lobby supported the National Instant Criminal Background Check System improvement act was because it had been amended to protect the ability of veterans who have been successfully treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological conditions to own guns.
Burr has gotten some traction for the bill by cherry-picking from a long list of factors involved in a determination of mental incompetence, such as an inability to manage personal finances, to make the rules sound unreasonable. But a VA doctor doesn't ask for a veteran's checkbook and then rescind the right to bear arms if the columns don't balance. Even the National Rifle Assn. admits the process is more thoughtful than that. A recent article in the NRA's magazine said that VA records are reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System only "if a patient has been adjudicated as a mental defective, a lengthy process that includes opportunities for hearings, appeals, etc."
After the Virginia Tech massacre by a student who had been diagnosed with psychological disorders, the NRA and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence worked together on a bill encouraging states to submit records of the dangerously mentally ill (as well as felons, fugitives and others) to the system. The bill also created a process to help veterans get their gun rights reinstated if they'd been improperly taken away.
Adding another layer of bureaucracy to the process is pure political pandering. About 100,000 veterans are currently deemed unfit to have access to guns, and under Burr's bill, they would automatically be removed from the background check system until judicial review. Treating these veterans fairly is important, but making it easier for them to get firearms should be low on everyone's list of priorities.
Veterans and gun safety
Legislation to loosen restrictions on buying guns by mentally unstable veterans is misguided.
Reasonable people agree that precautions should be taken to keep psychologically impaired individuals from buying guns. In the enduring debate over gun regulation, this has been one area of consensus. That's why it is difficult to fathom legislation proposed by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) that would make it more difficult to keep guns out of the hands of veterans who have been deemed mentally incompetent by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Currently, such veterans fail their federal background checks if they attempt to buy a gun. So Burr wants to add another step to the background check: He proposes that the VA's medical diagnoses be subject to the approval of a judge or magistrate. But that's unnecessary; the VA already offers extensive due process to veterans whose mental capabilities are questioned, and the legal presumption is in favor of their competence. In fact, one reason the gun lobby supported the National Instant Criminal Background Check System improvement act was because it had been amended to protect the ability of veterans who have been successfully treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological conditions to own guns.
Burr has gotten some traction for the bill by cherry-picking from a long list of factors involved in a determination of mental incompetence, such as an inability to manage personal finances, to make the rules sound unreasonable. But a VA doctor doesn't ask for a veteran's checkbook and then rescind the right to bear arms if the columns don't balance. Even the National Rifle Assn. admits the process is more thoughtful than that. A recent article in the NRA's magazine said that VA records are reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System only "if a patient has been adjudicated as a mental defective, a lengthy process that includes opportunities for hearings, appeals, etc."
After the Virginia Tech massacre by a student who had been diagnosed with psychological disorders, the NRA and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence worked together on a bill encouraging states to submit records of the dangerously mentally ill (as well as felons, fugitives and others) to the system. The bill also created a process to help veterans get their gun rights reinstated if they'd been improperly taken away.
Adding another layer of bureaucracy to the process is pure political pandering. About 100,000 veterans are currently deemed unfit to have access to guns, and under Burr's bill, they would automatically be removed from the background check system until judicial review. Treating these veterans fairly is important, but making it easier for them to get firearms should be low on everyone's list of priorities.
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