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SNL spoofs Fox News for their coverage of the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races and the NY-23 Congressional race. Jason Sudeikis' Glenn Beck impersonation is eerily close to the mark.
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Gotta' love that GOP/Fox News echo chamber with this latest talking point. Lamar Alexander repeats his 'enemies list' accusation made earlier in the day on the Senate floor.
For the past couple of weeks, Fox News’ Sean Hannity has been aggressively pushing the talking point that the Obama White House is compiling an “enemies list.” That wild accusation came in response to Obama communications director Anita Dunn’s suggestion that Fox News operates as a “communications arm” of the GOP.
“I mean, is this an enemies list? Seems like it to me,” Hannity said on his program last Wednesday. “They want to come after the Fox News Channel,” the right-wing pundit complained. Almost every night in recent weeks, Hannity has badgered his guests, demanding that they take up his talking point. Last night, Liz Cheney took the bait:
HANNITY: It seems to me, it’s almost like an enemies list. Is that a fair description?
CHENEY: Well, uhh, yeah.
[...]
Yesterday, Hannity won his biggest convert yet. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) took to the Senate floor and read Sean Hannity’s talking points into the congressional record:
ALEXANDER: I want to make what I hope will be a friendly suggestion to President Obama and his White House, and it is this: don’t create an enemies list. […]
So in conclusion Mr. President, here’s my point. These are unusually difficult times with plenty of forces encouraging us to disagree. Let’s not start calling people out and compiling an enemies list.
Watch a compilation:
As Think Progress also noted, Karl Rove accused the White House of keeping an enemies list on Fox News Sunday last weekend. And now we have Alexander following suit. For someone complaining that the White House is being unfair in claiming that Fox News is a communications arm of the Republican party, Alexander is certainly doing a good job of proving it as he does it. My only question might be which one is leading and which is following? I would imagine it's Fox following since I'm pretty sure Hannity gets all of his talking points straight from the RNC.
While I don't doubt this will make for weeks of breathless speculation on Fox News, and give a wide variety of pundits endless entertainment, that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
The most obvious problem here is that Republicans are defining Nixonian tactics down. In effect, Alexander argued this morning that the White House's opponents and detractors will go after the president and his team, but if they respond in any way, they're necessarily acting in ways similar to the disgraced 37th president.
Look at Alexander's list. Is the White House pushing back against the Chamber of Commerce's efforts to derail the administration's agenda? Sure, what's wrong with that? Did the White House impose a "gag order" on Humana? Of course not, that's absurd. Is the White House pointing out that Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party? Yep, as well it should. Has the president criticized financial institutions that brought the global economy to the brink of a depression? Yes, but I'm not sure what's wrong with that. Has the White House criticized an insurance industry that screwed over its customers and continues to fight against sensible reform efforts? You bet, but again, that's a good thing.
Alexander, Gregg, and assorted political reporters make it seem as if the White House should be a non-partisan, non-political, take-punches-but-don't-respond entity. In other words, Obama and his team are expected to just lose every fight, and take every criticism. To do anything else leads to Nixon comparisons.
It's possible the political world has a very short memory, but it's worth remembering, as Eric Boehlert does, that Nixon's White House "declared war on his enemies (including news outlets), and used the full power of the federal government to exact his bouts of revenge."
When Nixon didn't like a news outlet, he directed federal prosecutors to investigate journalists, including going through their taxes. Nixon assembled actual enemies lists, and used the power of his office to target and try to destroy his adversaries.
That any serious person would compare these tactics to routine political efforts at the White House is insane.
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White House communications director Anita Dunn has said Fox News "often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party." Karl Rove, former senior advisor to George W. Bush, responded by saying "the White House is engaging in its own version of [Nixon's] media enemies list" Sunday.
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I hadn't seen Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters, on TV previously, but he appeared on Countdown with David Shuster yesterday, and finally said what has needed saying for some time:
Fox News is not a news source. It's a political propaganda operation. And it needs to be treated that way.
Shuster and Burns were launching off Fox's most ludicrous recent endeavor to smear the Obama administration, by using videos of schoolchildren to charge that Obama wants to "indoctrinate" them. As they discuss, this is so hypocritical and absurd that it's hard to believe anyone actually is buying it:
SHUSTER: So explain to me, why is it indoctrination when kids sing about President Obama, but it's patriotism when kids sing about President Bush and FEMA?
BURNS: Well, David, it's not indoctrination to anybody except Karl Rove, Josh Bolten, Roger Ailes -- the rest of the Bush administration in exile over at Fox News, because they are trying to push a political agenda. And they're trying to destroy this administration, and they'll use any means necessary to do it.
And just to give you a little example of this, James O'Keefe, who is the author of one of the suspect ACORN videos that there have been a lot of questions surrounding, told Chris Wallace recently on Fox News that he was employing tactics that would, quote, "destroy his political enemies." So that's what this is about.
There's nothing abnormal about folks talking and children learning about their president and learning to be -- learning about their democracy through talking about the president. I did it when I was a kid.
Then they got to what this is really all about:
SHUSTER: And is that the general theme here with the right-wing media, I mean, undermining the president by manufacturing controversies, because many of the actual Obama policies are favored by the majority of Americans?
BURNS: Absolutely. We've seen it day after day. You know, Glenn Beck is the smearer in chief over at Fox News. And we see new charts, you know, documenting some new vast conspiracy theory every day, new attacks, and it's a constant barrage.
And I'll tell you, this right-wing noise machine has been ginned up. It's never been more ferocious, and their goal is simple -- as Rush Limbaugh stated at the beginning of the year -- they want Obama to fail. Roger Ailes said that this is the Alamo for conservatives and that Fox is the voice of the opposition.
So, this is no longer a news organization. This is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda. They'd rather win in the ballot box than see any sort of real debate on health care. It's a real shame.
Every liberal who even considers going on Fox to act as props for their propaganda machine should stop and think again.
Moreover, every consumer of the news -- conservative, centrist, or liberal -- needs to understand that Fox is not a reliable source of information.
Mainstream media in general have become less reliable, but most of them strive to be factually accurate, even if they skew ideologically somewhat. But this skew has more to do with framing and news selection than the actual reporting.
This is not the case at Fox. It deliberately broadcasts falsehoods and fake information to serve its ideological agenda.
No doubt this makes the Kool-Aid drinkers of the right happy. But for anyone else -- particularly anyone who relies on accurate information for their business or occupation or the livelihoods -- Fox News is a wasteland or outright disinformation that anyone with smidgen of intelligence will avoid.
We need more people like Eric Burns making this point.
Jon Stewart takes the GOP hypocrites to task for wanting ACORN investigated while defending the likes of Karl Rove and refusing to investigate torture, and for freaking out over a video of school children praising President Obama.
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Rachel Maddow talks to former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias about the pressure put on him to go after ACORN for voter fraud allegations and how Karl Rove wanted to use the issue of voter fraud as a wedge issue to win elections. As Rachel notes sadly, that plan is still paying dividends with the Democrats being all too happy to cave into political pressure by the Republicans instead of standing up for ACORN.
MADDOW: We have previously reported on this show how corporate interests opposed to ACORN`s really successful efforts to raise the minimum wage targeted the group using Republican-allied P.R. firms that proudly specialized in demonizing their opposition.
But ACORN has not just been targeted by corporations who worry that ACORN`s advocacy for living-wage ordinances and an increased minimum wage will hurt their corporate bottom line. ACORN has also been the subject for years of a purely political smear campaign, a campaign engineered by Republicans who are threatened by ACORN`s work to register young and poor and minority voters.
The American voter is typically older and more wealthy than the typical American, and that tends to give the Republicans an electoral edge among voters as compared to the preferences of the populations at large. But ACORN`s registration drives have gone some distance to changing that. Over the past five years, ACORN registered close to 2 million voters. And, yes, the groups of people that ACORN typically registers tend to vote for Democrats.
Over the last few election cycles, fear of a younger, less wealthy, and, frankly, less white electorate led Republicans, especially in swing states, to go after ACORN aggressively, and, in fact, to try to gin up charges against them, to try to make their voter registration efforts in general seem suspect and perhaps to bring down the group entirely. And when I say "ginned up," I`m not exaggerating.
Do you remember the U.S. attorney scandal, the alleged fire ring of U.S. attorneys because of U.S. political considerations? Recall what that scandal was really about. In 2006, nine U.S. attorneys were fired, surprisingly and suddenly, by the Department of Justice under George W. Bush.
Former U.S. attorney David Iglesias -- one of those U.S. attorneys who lost his job despite positive job reviews -- maintains that his pink slip came after he resisted pressure from Republicans to pursue bogus voter registration cases involving ACORN. The pressure began as early as 2002 when Mr. Iglesias says in his book "In Justice," he received an e-mail from the Department of Justice in Washington, quote, "suggesting, in no uncertain terms" that U.S. attorneys "offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases."
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I always find myself uttering low mordant chuckles whenever Karl Rove comes on the teevee (always Fox) to complain about how mean and nasty those Democrats are.
And as you would expect, he is appalled that not just Jimmy Carter but Bill Clinton as well happen to believe that there is a powerful racial element coursing through the more venomous opposition to President Obama's efforts to obtain health-care reform. Or so he told Sean Hannity last night:
Rove: Look his [Clinton's] comment was like Jimmy Carter -- irrational and unbelievably partisan. This is the kind of stuff that he said routinely during the 1990s about his political opponents, denigrating them personally, questioning their motivations.
Yes, that was coming from the mouth of Karl Rove. And not even a whisper of irony.
Rove: Why can't he just accept the fact that people disagree with President Obama's health care plan as they disagreed with his health care plan, because they represent a spirit of liberalism and a government control and government domination of a very personal decision that ought to be left between a doctor and his patient as to the decision for our health.
Problem is, there is in fact data out there that strongly suggests there's a powerful connection between opposition to health-care reform and voters with racist attitudes about Obama. In other words, that Carter and Clinton are right, and Karl Rove and the entire Fox network are wrong.
As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.
Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.
Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.
No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.
It would be silly to assert that all, or even most, opposition to President Obama, including his plans for health care reform, is motivated by the color of his skin. But our research suggests that a key to understanding people's feelings about partisan politics runs far deeper than the mere pros and cons of actual policy proposals. It is also about a collision of worldviews.
This is correlative, of course; the data doesn't indicate a cause-effect relationship. Rather, as Levingston explains, both arise out of a right-wing authoritarian worldview.
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I thought the president was very good Wednesday night and his speech has seemed to change the media's dynamic on health care as well as start to bring people back to reality on this issue. He was more forceful combating Republican lies than ever been before and that was much appreciated.
It did freak Karl Rove out a little bit on FOX. On The Factor, he was upset that the president debunked the phony "death panel" lies that conservatives and teabaggers have been yelling about every since they discovered Isakson's amendment. (Isakson is a Republican, I might add.) Karl said that conserva-teabaggers were only upset about the living will option and never brought up death panels, so he tried to call Obama a liar, but that's the lie.
Still, I thought Obama was too nice to the Republicans all night. I know it was more theater than reality because he still wants America to believe that there's hope for bipartisanship, but it bothers me. All they have done is spread lies about health-care reform the entire time, but the president just isn't going to be as partisan as I'd like him to be. I have to accept it.
I actually didn't think he would mention the public option at all since the Queen, Olympia Snowe, asked him not to, but he had to because of us. We can still battle to have it included because he's still talking about it and has campaigned on it.
He wasn't as forceful about it as I wanted, but he's talking to many people that have been lied to for months by Republicans, so I kind of understand his phrasing of it. He did open up the possibility of other options which made me shudder, but we'll keep pushing. We're his base and the base will help save him in the long run.
Sen. Tom Harkin had another take on it today on MSNBC. He said that because Obama said the public option was only a small part of the solution for health care then that would force many others to vote for the bill even if a public option is included. By downplaying its significance he believes it strengthens the chances that it gets passed. I hadn't looked at it that way before, but with Rahm and his Blue Dogs trying to undo the public option I don't have as much faith in his premise. There's still a long way to go and we'll keep fighting.
Looks like there's some news in the speech after all. Quite a bit.
On the policy front, President Obama tonight endorses, clearly and unambiguously, a requirement that everybody obtain insurance--that is, an individual mandate. He has not done that before, not this explicitly.
He also says employers will have to provide insurance or bear some of the costs. That's not news exactly; he's said that before. But it's part of the same package.
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Also of interest: A promise to provide low-cost, bare-bones policies right away--merely as a stopgap, until full reforms kick in. (This is an effort to make sure Americans see at least some benefits right away.) Elsewhere, Obama talks about malpractice reform--again, more explicitly than he has before, presenting it as an effort to reach across the aisle.
And the public plan? He gives a lengthy, strong defense of the idea. It could have come straight out of the literature of groups like Health Care for America Now -- or the writings of Jacob Hacker. But he also makes clear, to left as well as right, that he's open to compromise.
Those seem like the major developments on the policy front. The tone is pretty striking, too. Obama reaches out to Republicans in several places. But he also comes down hard--very hard--on opponents who are merely out to defeat reform.
And I wish he would have mentioned more liberals to the nation that have been working hard to reform health care instead of praising John McCain, but he did close with a nice ode to Ted Kennedy.
The Kennedy passage was beautiful. He even used the dreaded "L" word, which I haven't heard in that setting without a sneer for ... well, ever. I don't know how many people can hear that plea for empathy and community, but I hope some did.
By the way, FOX had their news scroll running during the entire speech and it highlighted as many crazy stories as it could. And then the first ad they broadcast after the speech was one where a Canadian woman said Canada's government-run health care almost killed her. That was timed just right for the teabagger audience.
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Who better for Bill O'Reilly to get a "fair and balanced" opinion from following President Obama's speech to Congress than serial liar Karl Rove? Media Matters has the run down on this one.
Purporting to examine President Obama's health care speech, Karl Rove claimed that while discussing "the so-called lies and misstatements about his proposal," Obama "made a series of very glaring misstatements or distortions." In fact, it was Rove who was advancing falsehoods and distortions.
[.....]
Rove distorts "what people were concerned about" regarding "panels to kill off senior citizens".
[.....]
Contradicting CBO, Rove suggests "most companies" will "dump the coverage" under House bill.
[.....]
Rove distorts Obama statement to claim he is "not shooting straight" on deficit.
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Rachel Maddow takes Karl Rove to task for his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal complaining that he's been "wronged by the press for years" and it's time for the press to own up for their mistakes about him. Rachel rehashes Rove's role in the US Attorney's scandal and tells Rove, good luck with your complaints.
Someone needs to ask the Obama Justice Department why they're not doing something about getting rid of these "Bushies" that are still in place in the Justice Department, and why Don Siegelman hasn't seen any justice yet.
MADDOW: In the opinion pages of today`s "Wall Street Journal," there is a startling claim by former Bush senior advisor Karl Rove. According to Mr. Rove, he has been wronged by the press for years and it`s time for the press to finally own up to its mistakes about him.
Specifically, Mr. Rove rails against allegations to the U.S. Attorney scandal, that he manipulated the judicial process for political reasons. He says in "The Journal" today that his role in the firing of U.S. Attorneys was minimal and entirely proper and that critics should just let up on him about these demonstrably untrue allegations.
You know what? The press actually doesn`t need to let up on Mr. Rove at all. Let me explain. In his article today, Mr. Rove emphatically disputes the claim that, quote, "The judicial process had been manipulated for political reasons."
Always willing to milk every possible drop out of an Obama scandal, even one of their own imagination, Fox News host Martha McCallum asks Bush's former Press Secretary Dana Perino--a highly impartial source, to be sure--if sending out "unsolicited" emails is a problem for the Obama White House.
Of course, the ever-so-concerned Perino thinks it is, and of course, thinks the Obama White House is getting a free ride on it:
PERINO: Imagine this: imagine if it was three years ago, and all of the sudden, people across the country who, unsolicited, started getting emails from Karl Rove. The media would have gone ballistic. They would have demanded answers, and I would have felt obligated to give some. And I think that standard should be….that the Obama administration should be held to the same standard. I know that if I all of the sudden started getting emails, I would wonder how did they get my email address. People get your email address through various ways, but when it’s the White House Political Advisor, it’s a little bit different and kind of creepy.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the big deal is. I got an email from David Axelrod myself. It was hardly unsolicited, as I know that the Obama administration kept their campaign email list, of which I was also a part. In fact, I was on McCain's email list as well, so I could keep tabs of what he was sending out to supporters. Methinks Fox News would not be so up in arms if President McCain had sent out an email to his supporters list.
But the attempt to claim that the mean ol' media would have beaten up on poor, persecuted Karl Rove for a similar infraction is laughable on its face. Karl Rove LOST FOURTEEN MILLION EMAILS which could potentially have implicated him in a whole host of infractions and the media yawned. Rove was improperly using his RNC email address to avoid the oversight law demands, and the media shrugged. Karl Rove had his stubby, sticky little paws in sandbagging Don Siegelman, the fired US Attorneys and the media didn't say boo. In fact, the media was so deep in the pocket of the Bush administration that they were part of the reason that the Valerie Plame investigation didn't go further than Scooter Libby.
So, yeah, Dana, let's try to draw an equivalency over Axelrod sending emails to a list culled from passionate supporters over a two year campaign and all manners of impropriety and illegality that Rove committed. It's so fair and balanced of you.
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Rachel reports on the latest revelations to come out of the U.S. Attorney firings scandal.
Maddow: In 2006, nine U.S. federal attorneys, prosecutors, were surprisingly and suddenly fired by the Department of Justice under George W. Bush. U.S. Attorney Paulson Charlton of Arizona was fired while he was in the midst of building a case against Republican Congressman Rick Renzi for an allegedly illegal land swap deal that would eventually lead to a 35-count indictment, including charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and extortion.
And in San Diego, U.S. Attorney Carol Lam had spearheaded the corruption investigation that brought down Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, who eventually pled guilty to accepting at least $2.4 million in bribes. The "Dukester" is still doing more than eight years in prison for that.
And then there was U.S. attorney David Iglesias. And Mr. Iglesias' dismissal really caught people's attention and the House Judiciary Committee has been looking into his case and the cases of the eight attorneys for more than two years now.
Well, today, that committee released emails and transcripts of closed-door testimony by Bush's White House counsel, Harriet Miers, and Bush's political guru, Karl Rove. Ms. Miers testified that the White House, specifically Karl Rove and his staff, were intimately involved in the decision-making process about whether or not the supposedly independent U.S. attorneys, the supposedly apolitical prosecutors, were going to be allowed to keep their jobs.
Yeah, we were right about the U.S. Attorney firings. (See above video, which is ten months old.) Even Karl Rove and Harriet Miers admit it now:
The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.
A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then- Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight releection race, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias's dismissal earlier than previously known.
The disclosures mark the end of a two-and-a-half year investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, which sued to gain access to Bush White House documents in a dispute that struck at the heart of a president's executive power. House members have reserved the right to hold a public hearing at which Rove, Miers, and other aides could appear this fall.
House Judiciary Chairman John M. Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) Tuesday characterized the role of Bush White House figures in the firing episode as improper and inappropriate.
