This is why people think there is media bias.

Why you never see the 'D' when there is a scandal. [Link]

It is such common sense as to be undeniable that basic journalism requires a party label to be affixed to a story about an elected public official, the president excepted. It is the DNA of the “who” in a news report. “Senator Robert Byrd, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, died today.” Take out “Democratic” and try that sentence. It doesn’t work. “Mike Lee, GOP senator from Utah and God’s gift to mankind, coasted to reelection last night.” Ditto.

It follows that the rule applies to stories about political scandal, precisely because it’s just that — politics. But what happens when that cardinal rule is applied to one party but ignored for the other? Favoritism? Bias? No, it’s far worse than just that. It is a commitment to abide by the rules of journalism with one party and then a deliberate attempt to protect the other, even if it means violating the most basic rules of news reporting.

Now wait a minute, Bozell. What about another possibility? Why can’t it be an honest mistake? Cannot we believe that even if such an egregious violation is committed it might not just be an accident, a reckless, sloppy oversight? If it happened once, fine. Stunning but fine. Twice? I don’t believe in coincidences. The record, however, shows it is much worse than that.

On Friday, September 29, 2006, Representative Mark Foley of Florida resigned after ABC News exposed him for having sent explicit e-mails to male House pages. That evening and on the next day’s morning news shows, ABC, CBS, and NBC all tied Foley to the GOP. “This is more than just one man’s downfall,” Today co-host Matt Lauer solemnly declared on NBC. “It could be a major blow to the Republican party.”

On March 10, 2008, news broke that New York governor Eliot Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring. It took NBC News four nights to acknowledge Spitzer’s party affiliation. In its first two days of coverage, Matt Lauer’s Todayshow ran 18 segments on the scandal and never once identified him as a Democrat.

But what happens when a Republican elected official is linked to a prostitute? In July 2007, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana was revealed as a client in the phone records of the so-called D.C. Madam. Every broadcast network ran stories on the scandal and every story underscored that Vitter was a Republican.

The previous month, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho had been arrested at the airport in Minneapolis for the infamous toe-tapping men’s-room solicitation. When the news became public in August, the networks jumped on the story. Every morning and evening news show pointed out he was a Republican. On NBC’s Today, Lauer drilled further, tying him ideologically to conservatives. “Can the right wing withstand yet another scandal involving one of its own?”

On June 16, 2009, Senator John Ensign of Nevada admitted to an extramarital affair. In the following day’s reports, all three broadcast networks covered the scandal and all three reported that he was a member of the GOP. One week later they were back in action, this time giving major attention to the story that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford also had admitted to cheating on his wife. Again the perfunctory declaration that he was a Republican.

Four years later, after weeks of tumultuous scandal involving allegations of multiple cases of sexual harassment involving numerous women, on August 22, 2013, San Diego’s Democratic mayor (and former congressman), Bob Filner, finally resigned. All three networks covered the story in both their morning and evening broadcasts, but only CBS mentioned his party affiliation.

Still not convinced? Okay, so we’ll continue.

Journalistic malpractice.

Catching real criminals and terrorists is hard

It is so much easier to make them up. [Link]

Earlier this year, we noted that the FBI had quietly changed its own description about how it was primarily focused on "law enforcement" to claiming that it was now primarily focused on "national security." That is, over the past decade, the FBI has shifted from being a law enforcement agency, looking to stop crimes, to an intelligence agency, spying on Americans and searching for "terrorists." Of course, this focus has meant that it has basically ignored tons of criminal activity including things like mortgage fraud, which helped create the economic crisis a few years ago. Instead, the FBI has expended so much effort on creating and busting its own fake terrorist plots. 

As we've seen over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and overand over and over again, the FBI seems to spend an awful lot of time creating totally fake terrorist plots, luring some gullible individual into the plot (where every other participant is FBI, and where all the "weapons" are fake) and then arresting the individual and scoring big headlines about stopping another "plot" -- despite the fact no plot would have existed without the FBI. 

When new FBI boss James Comey took the job, he had suggested that he might move the FBI back towards a law enforcement agency, but according to the NY Times, he's been convinced to stick with focusing on terrorism plots. He insists that the risk is much bigger than he thought before he was in the job, though all of the examples he gives are of terrorism happening overseas, not in the US. Given that it must be a lot easier to concoct bogus terrorist plots and ensnare gullible individuals, than it is to track down actual criminals, it's not hard to see why many in the Bureau might have pushed Comey to continue these current efforts.

Cooking the books on Obamacare

Malice or incompetence? Why can't it be both? [Link]

For several months now, whenever the topic of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act came up, I’ve been saying that it was too soon to tell its ultimate effects. We don’t know how many people have paid for their new insurance policies, or how many of those who bought policies were previously uninsured. For that, I said, we will have to wait for Census Bureau data, which offer the best assessment of the insurance status of the whole population. Other surveys are available, but the samples are smaller, so they’re not as good; the census is the gold standard. Unfortunately, as I invariably noted, these data won’t be available until 2015.

I stand corrected: These data won’t be available at all. Ever.

No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. The New York Times reports that the Barack Obama administration has changed the survey so that we cannot directly compare the numbers on the uninsured over time.

The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said.

An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.

“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau.

I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report is supposed to be “people who lacked insurance for the entire previous year,” but people tend to answer with their insurance status right now.

But why, dear God, oh, why, would you change it in the one year in the entire history of the republic that it is most important for policy makers, researchers and voters to be able to compare the number of uninsured to those in prior years? The answers would seem to range from “total incompetence on the part of every level of this administration” to something worse.

Yes, that’s right, I said “every level.” Because guess who was involved in this decision, besides the wonks at Census?

The White House is always looking for evidence to show the benefits of the health law, which is an issue in many of this year’s midterm elections. The Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Council of Economic Advisers requested several of the new questions, and the White House Office of Management and Budget approved the new questionnaire. But the decision to make fundamental changes in the survey was driven by technical experts at the Census Bureau, and members of Congress have not focused on it or suggested political motives.

Sarah Kliff of Vox says we shouldn’t freak out, because these are the numbers that the census collects for 2013, so the change is actually giving us a good baseline. But I’m afraid I’m not so sanguine. AsAaron Carroll says: “It’s actually helpful to have a trend to measure, not a pre-post 2013/2014. This still sucks.”

The new numbers will suffer, to some extent, from the same bias that the old questions suffered from: People are better at remembering recent events than later ones. Quick: On what day did you last get your oil changed? What month was the wedding you attended last summer? If it was in the last few months, you probably know. If it was someone you’re not that close to … well, the summer months kind of blend into each other now that you’re a grownup, don’t they?

And what has been happening in the most recent months? A whole lot of change! Policies were canceled, benefits changed, people shifted around their coverage in anticipation of the new law. That doesn’t make for a very good baseline. It will be a very good measure of who has insurance right now, in 2014, but it’s not where I’d want to start my 2013 baseline for our new law. That’s why they should have done this for 2012 -- or waited until 2016 -- to give us actual comparable data for the transition period. So by your leave, I think I’ll continue to freak out for a bit.

I find it completely and totally impossible to believe that this problem didn’t occur to anyone at Census, or in the White House. It would be like arguing that the George W. Bush administration might have inadvertently overlooked the possibility that when the U.S. invaded Iraq, there would be shooting. This is the biggest policy debate of the last 10 years, and these data are at the heart of that debate. It is implausible that everyone involved somehow failed to notice that they were making it much harder to know the effect of this law on the population it was supposed to serve. Especially because the administration seems to have had a ready excuse as soon as people reacted to the news.

Even if the administration genuinely believes this is defensible, why would they give anyone reason to believe that it is cooking the books? Because those charges are being made, and they’re a lot harder to dismiss than the complaints about birth certificates or dark intimations that the administration has simply made up its enrollment figures out of whole cloth.

I just don’t get it.

I mean, I can certainly think of explanations, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe the worst of them. Which leaves me with the only slightly-less-utterly-appalling conclusion: At some point, very early on in the process, folks noticed that asking the new questions would make it difficult to compare Obamacare’s implementation year to prior years, and decided that assessing the effects of the transition wasn’t nearly as important as making urgent changes to … questions we’ve been asking basically the same way for a decade and a half.

No, wait, that doesn’t make any sense, either. Let’s go back to inexplicable, shall we?

If the administration is really serious about transparency and data-driven policy, as I’ve been told for a year now, then it will immediately rectify this appalling mistake and put the old questions back into circulation double-quick. But we’re more likely going to hear the most transparent and data-driven administration in history citing these data -- without an asterisk -- to tout the amazing impact of its policies.

This is not how you regain our trust

Asking the Fox to investigate what happened to all those chickens. [Link]

It seems like, as with absolutely everything in this discussion, Clapper and the administration are choosing their words very, very, very carefully. Here they're saying that he won't be "leading" the group or "directing" the group. But no one has argued that. They're saying -- as the White House did -- that he's in charge of setting up the group. Now, the White House seems to be suggesting that "establishing" the group is different from "selecting the members," which is possible if the process for "establishing" the group is James Clapper holding out his hands and saying, "poof, this group has been established" and then someone else picks the members. 

Also, while Clapper may not be a "member" of the group and won't "lead" it, the group is clearlyreporting to Clapper. From President Obama's letter:

the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.

So, yes, Clapper isn't leading the day-to-day review by the group, but its report is going straight to him, which makes it anything but independent. 

Honestly, this kind of doubletalk is the exact kind of thing that's pissing so many people off about this. If President Obama's goal here was to rebuild trust, telling Clapper to "establish" this group and to have the group report to Clapper... and then, a day later, having the White House carefully choose their language to pretend that Clapper is separate from the group is not the way to do it. Involving Clapper in the first place was a mistake. Actually, having Clapper still on the job after his admitted lying to Congress was a big mistake. Dancing around the fact that he's involved is just making the administration look worse and worse.

U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

Welcome to the surveillance state. Now used for drug crime, but it will inevitably expand to more and lesser crimes. Where does it end? [Link]

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD."

A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.

But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to "recreate" an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

"PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION"

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.

A QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONALITY

"That's outrageous," said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. "It strikes me as indefensible."

Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin "would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional."

Lustberg and others said the government's use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant's identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.

"You can't game the system," said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. "You can't create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don't draw the line here, where do you draw it?"

Some lawyers say there can be legitimate reasons for not revealing sources. Robert Spelke, a former prosecutor who spent seven years as a senior DEA lawyer, said some sources are classified. But he also said there are few reasons why unclassified evidence should be concealed at trial.

"It's a balancing act, and they've doing it this way for years," Spelke said. "Do I think it's a good way to do it? No, because now that I'm a defense lawyer, I see how difficult it is to challenge."

CONCEALING A TIP

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.

A senior DEA official said he was not aware of the case but said the agent should not have misled the prosecutor. How often such misdirection occurs is unknown, even to the government; the DEA official said the agency does not track what happens with tips after the SOD sends them to agents in the field.

Parallel Construction - making shit up.

Misplaced Trust

The Government wants us to trust them about security. [Link]

The United States government lies.

The people who represent the United States government lie.

In fact, the entire framework of secrecy and privilege is founded in lies by the United States. The state secret privilege — the half-century-old doctrine that holds that the government may ignore the rule of law by invocation of claims of secrecy — was premised on a lie by the United States. This shouldn't surprise us. The United States government, through its employees, lies about a great many things. The United States government lies to us — perhaps giving us the "least untruthful" story — when we question its use of power, and then lies to us about having lied to us. The United States government lies to us about war, its purpose, and its progress. The United States government lies to us about its treatment of detainees and its justifications for that treatment. Nor are the lies all about "security." The United States government is the sort of entity — made up of the sort of people — that will tells impoverished black men that it is treating them for "bad blood" when it is actually experimentally observing their untreated syphilis.

Yet America's modern surveillance state — and the secrecy that cloaks it — is premised at every level upon the United States government saying "trust us." But how is it even minimally rational to do so? Would the United States government or its advocates repose trust in anyone who lies as frequently and unabashedly as they do? How can you trust an organization with a proven record of lying — an organization so devoted to lying that itseeks to enact rules explicitly permitting it to lie to us?

Slaying the Cable Monster

Tests prove $3 no name HDMI cable is just as good as $120 Monster HDMI cable. [Link]

You've probably experienced this when shopping for a new HDTV: A store clerk sidles up and offers to help. He then points you toward the necessary HDMI cables to go with your new television. And they're expensive. Maybe $60 or $70, sometimes even more than $100 (You could buy a cheap Blu-ray player or a handful of Blu-ray discs for that price!). The clerk then claims that these are special cables. Superior cables. Cables you absolutely need if you want the best possible home theater experience. And the claims are, for the vast majority of home theater users, utter rubbish.

HDMI BasicsThe truth is, for most HDTV setups, there is absolutely no effective difference between a no-name $3 HDMI cable you can order from Amazon.com and a $120 Monster cable you buy at a brick-and-mortar electronics store. We ran five different HDMI cables, ranging in price from less than $5 up to more than $100, through rigorous tests to determine whether there's any difference in a dirt-cheap cable and one that costs a fortune.

The first thing to remember about HDMI is that it is a digital standard. Unlike component video, composite video, S-video, or coaxial cable, HDMI signals don't gradually degrade, or get fuzzy and lose clarity as the signal fades or interference grows. For digital signals like HDMI, as long as there is enough data for the receiver to put together a picture, it will form. If there isn't, it will just drop off. While processing artifacts can occur and gaps in the signal can cause blocky effects or screen blanking, generally an HDMI signal will display whenever the signal successfully reaches the receiver. Claims that more expensive cables put forth greater video or audio fidelity are nonsense; it's like saying you can get better-looking YouTube videos on your laptop by buying more expensive Ethernet cables. From a technical standpoint, it simply doesn't make sense.

Creative accounting in education

Budget cuts that aren't. [Link]

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently claimed: "Districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh and into bone ... ."

Really? They cut spending five to seven consecutive years?

Give me a break!

Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, writes that out of 14,000 school districts in the United States, just seven have cut their budgets seven years in a row. How about five years in a row? Just 87. That's a fraction of 1 percent in each case.

Duncan may be pandering to his constituency, or he may actually be fooled by how school districts (and other government agencies) talk about budget cuts. When normal people hear about a budget cut, we assume the amount of money to be spent is less than the previous year's allocation. But that's not what bureaucrats mean.

"They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year's spending," Coulson writes. "What they're doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initiallydreamed about having."

So if a district got more money than last year but less than it asked for, the administrators consider it a cut. "Back in the real world, a K-12 public education costs four times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars)," Coulson says.

Taxpayers need to understand this sort thing just to protect themselves from greedy government officials and teachers unions.

It was on the basis of this fear and ignorance that President Obama got Congress to pass a "stimulus" bill this summer that included $10 billion for school districts. The money is needed desperately to save teachers from layoffs, the bill's advocates said. We must do it for the children!

When you look at the facts, the scam is clear.

I guess he wasn't really surprised

Obama knew of Lockerbie terrorist release. [Link]

“THE US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be “far preferable” to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya.

Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison.

The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer.

The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama’s claim last week that all Americans were “surprised, disappointed and angry” to learn of Megrahi’s release.”

It's almost like they had an ax to grind

New Texas educational standards. [Link]

[I]f you choose to paraphrase and not even link, and I have to look up the text myself, and your paraphrase is not accurate, it is my job to embarrass you by pointing that out.

Let me embarrass the Washington Post. Below, the material from the WaPo article, written by Michael Birnbaum, is indented. After the indented part, I've located the relevant quote from the Board of Education text, found here. (I'm searching 3 PDF documents: Economics with Emphasis on the Free Enterprise System and Its Benefits Subchapter A. High School; Social Studies Subchapter B. Middle School; Social Studies Subchapter C. High School.)

The Washington Post writes:

The Texas state school board gave final approval Friday to controversial social studies standards....

The new standards say that the McCarthyism of the 1950s was later vindicated -- something most historians deny --...

The students are required to "describe how McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the arms race, and the space race increased Cold War tensions and how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government..." The word "vindicated" is inflammatory and unfair. What is the Washington Post saying historians deny? One can be informed of the reality of what the Venona Papers revealed about communist infiltration into the U.S. government and still understand and deplore the excesses of "McCarthyism." 

Government can't agree on which made up jobs number to use

Jobs saved or created. How do you measure that?  [Link]

The most cynical view of the discrepancy between three top Obama advisers coming up with three different numbers of 'saved or created' jobs on the same day is that they could not agree on which made up number to use. It does not help that the range is from 'thousands and thousands' to 'more then two million. It may be the most cynical, but it is also the most logical; three of the top people came up with numbers that had a range of two million for what you would think would be a pretty strait forward question. The truth is that they do not know; no one knows, which may really be the whole point. It looks pretty amateurish though that they can not get on the same page and work with a consistent 'estimate'.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31914.html

"White House advisers appearing on the Sunday talk shows gave three different estimates of how many jobs could be credited to President Obama’s Recovery Act.

Obama gets an A- from Time

Are they looking at some other President? [Link]

Oh, come on. On one hand you know they're desperate to give him the A. On the other hand, you can't believe they'd actually do it.
They did it. A minus, baby! (See, we're not just over-the-moon schoolgirl crush partisan hacks! We gave him the minus, too! We're "balanced"!)

Instantly comfortable and highly skilled at the hardest job in the world — proving his supporters' contention that all the traits that made him a great candidate would serve him well in the White House... ...
A handful of public missteps (particularly on his international trips and on torture issues) and a failure to ameliorate the partisan divide are the only true blemishes so far.

$1.4 trillion dollar deficit this year and $2 trillion next year and thereafter we'll get to halving the deficit down to a very manageable trillion per year.
A-.
Oh, and he hasn't accomplished a single campaign promise, and has either reneged on, or is paving the way to repudiate, almost every promise he made.
A-.
17% real unemployment rate.
A-.
Iran's about to get the bomb, and, given Obama's plan, in a couple of years so might Al Qaeda.
A-.
As Tom Maguire says, I shudder to think what a "B" would have looked like.

Too difficult to post health care bill online

Tell us all another one. I'm sure we could find people who could put it online sooner than the two weeks quoted. Although, it is pretty obvious that technical difficulties are a smokescreen. They don't want to post it because they don't want us to know what is in it until it is too late. Emphasis added. [Link]

A proposal by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., that would have required the Senate Finance Committee to post the final language of the $900 billion health care reform bill, as well as a Congressional Budget Office cost analysis, on the committee’s website for 72 hours prior to a vote was rejected 12-11.

 

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., was the only Democrat to side with Bunning. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, who is not a member of the Finance Committee, said she also supported Bunning’s proposal.

Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., himself admitted that “This probably sounds a little crazy to some people that we are voting on something before we have seen legislative language.” Indeed.

Baucus’ excuse - that it would take his committee staff two weeks to post the bill online – sounds a little crazy too. Finance Committee members are the only ones who vote based on the “plain English” version of a bill, not the legally-binding language.

Having the Race Card Played

Lots here. Can we please stop accusing people who disagree with the President racists? [Link]

Legal Insurrection:

The increasingly hysterical use of the the race card by liberal columnists, bloggers and politicians reflects the last gasps of people who, being unable to win an argument on the merits, seek to end the argument. While the false accusation of racism is not a new tactic, it has been refined by Obama supporters into a toxic powder which is causing damage to the social fabric of the country by artificially injecting race into every political issue.. . . .The effect of these accusations is poisonous. Race is the most sensitive and inflammatory subject in this country. By turning every issue, even a discussion of health care policy, into an argument about race, liberals have created a politically explosive mixture in which the harder they seek to suppress opposing voices, the harder those voices seek to be heard.

I’ve got a long piece being featured on the main page of First Things, picking up from where Ann Althouse left off on Maureen Dowd’s bigoted NY Times column. An excerpt:

Whether subconsciously racist or not, Maureen Dowd does, in fact, betray a glaring bigotry in her piece, when she immediately declares that she heard a “You lie, boy,” beneath Joe Wilson’s inappropriate shout. She betrays a mind prejudiced against white Southerners, content to know nothing about them beyond the stereotypes we have all explored with distaste for the last forty or so years, aided in our imaginings by the condescending white racist sheriff of In the Heat of the Night and countless other films. Dowd does love her movies and pop culture, after all. The popular culture is the wellspring from which all of her deathless prose is watered.

We have moved, as neoneocon says, from “truthers” to “birthers” to “racers”.
Also, since I’m talking Althouse, she has quick thoughts on the New York Times reportage on ACORN. What jumps out at me is the sneering headline and the way the paper managed to minimize almost-out-of-existence the president’s long association with that organization. What jumps out to Duane Patterson is everything left out or distorted.
Jimmy Carter, who cannot avoid a toxic fray, puts his presidential seal on the One may only disagree with Obama if one is a racist meme. He adds: “”The president is not only the head of government, he is the head of state,” he said. “And no matter who he is or how much we disagree with his policies, the president should be treated with respect.”
Well, I happen to agree with that, but I just find it remarkable coming from Jimmy Carter’s lips, since he spent the last 8 years dissing the American President, even when overseas. This was the man, recall, who gladly (pathetically) accepted a Nobel Peace Prize even after folks in Oslo said they were basically giving it to Carter as a “kick in the legs to George Bush.”

Medical advice on Libyan bomber 'in doubt'

Only one doctor said he was dying. [Link]

JUSTICE secretary Kenny MacAskill was last night under pressure to reveal more details of the medical evidence that led to the release of the Lockerbie bomber, after it emerged that only one doctor was willing to say Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi had less than three months to live.

Labour and Conservative politicians have demanded the Scottish Government publish details of the doctor's expertise and qualifications, amid suggestions he or she may not have been a prostate cancer expert.

The parties have also raised questions over whether the doctor was employed by the Libyan government or Megrahi's legal team, which could have influenced the judgment.

The evidence provided by the doctor is crucial as compassionate release under Scots law requires that a prisoner has less than three months to live.

Doubts about Megrahi's life expectancy have already been raised by American relatives of the 270 victims of the bomb that blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December, 1988. But last night the Scottish Government said it would not publish details of the individual who gave the crucial advice.

Mr MacAskill has said he based his decision to release Megrahi on the opinions of a range of experts.

But this is contradicted by a decisive report sent to Mr MacAskill on 10 August.

This one you can't hang on the TSA

They're just a convenient scapegoat for Continental to divert blame from the plane left on the runway all night. [Link]

Now comes this word from Continental:
"We are working closely with ExpressJet to resolve the issues surrounding this extended delay as service provided to customers on this flight was completely unacceptable. We are apologizing to our customers and will be offering them a full ticket refund and a certificate good for future travel."
The plane, which left Houston about 9:30 p.m. Friday, arrived in Rochester about midnight, and passengers weren't allowed to leave the plane until 6 a.m. Saturday.
One alternative that night, chartering a bus, couldn't be worked out. And letting the passengers into the Rochester airport was not possible, ExpressJet said, because they would have to go through security screening again, and the screeners had gone home for the day.
ExpressJet spokeswoman Kristy Nicholas said the passengers could have entered the terminal only "if we had resources to allow the customers to deplane safely and were able to comply with federal regulations." Nicholas added that "upon arrival of TSA [security personnel] ... at approximately 6 a.m. Central, the customers were allowed to deplane the aircraft."
However, Rochester airport manager Steven Leqve disagreed today, saying that while screeners had gone home for the night, passengers could have "come into a secure area of the building."

The TSA has a dissenting opinion. [Link]

Earlier today, there were media reports that led some to believe TSA regulations prevented the passengers from deplaning.

TSA does not make decisions on whether or not passengers can deplane. We do however have the ability to recall our officers and open a checkpoint at the request of an airline or airport. No requests were made by ExpressJet on Friday or Saturday. The checkpoint resumed normal operations at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday.

Also, passengers did not need to be screened or rescreened to deplane and re-board as long as they didn’t exit past the checkpoint and leave the non-screened sterile area of the airport.

Democrats worried about lack of stimulus

Why, it could never have impacted it at all like they claimed. Most of the money hasn't been spent and won't be spent until 2010. It was always about paying off constituents and expanding programs. Now they're talking about another stimulus! [Link]

And well they should. Democrats put down an $800 billion bet and locked Republicans out of the room in placing it. They know their party and their President completely owns the results — and those aren’t looking good at all. And like any bad gambler, they want to double down on a lost hand:

Five months after Congress approved a massive package of spending and tax cuts aimed at reviving an ailing economy, the jobless rate is still climbing and the White House is scrambling to reassure an anxious public that President Obama’s prescription for economic recovery is on the right track.

Yesterday, Obama took time out of his first presidential trip to Moscow to defend the $787 billion stimulus package, arguing that the measure was the right medicine at the right time. “There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he told ABC News.

Back in Washington, senior Democrats on Capitol Hill were nervously contemplating whether additional government stimulus spending may be needed to pull the nation out of the worst recession since the 1930s. Senior administration officials acknowledged that the effects of the stimulus package have been overshadowed by an unexpectedly sharp drop-off in employment since the measure passed in February. But they reported that only about $100 billion has so far been spent and that as increasingly large sums flow out of Washington, the program is on pace to save or create 600,000 jobs over the next 100 days.

“It is clear from the data that there needs to be more fiscal stimulus in the second half of the year than there was in the first half of the year,” White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers said. “Fortunately, the stimulus program designed by the president and passed by Congress provides exactly that.”

But that wasn’t what the White House or the Democrats promised when they passed Porkulus. Barack Obama’s economic advisers demanded fast action, rather than reasoned debate and negotiation, to adopt their recommendations in order to avoid a spike in unemployment in the near term. They got what they wanted — a spending plan that funded just about every liberal fantasy of the last 30 years, save universal health care — and it didn’t do anything to stop rapid unemployment.

I also hate the 'save or create' jobs line. That doesn't mean anything and can't be measured. I know it's expecting too much to hope that the media might call them on this crap. Unemployment is already higher than they claimed it would be if we didn't pass the stimulus.

Saved or Created

I was wondering when someone in the media would notice how dishonest this is. [Link]

Tony Fratto is envious.

Mr. Fratto was a colleague of mine in the Bush administration, and as a senior member of the White House communications shop, he knows just how difficult it can be to deal with a press corps skeptical about presidential economic claims. It now appears, however, that Mr. Fratto's problem was that he simply lacked the magic words -- jobs "saved or created."

"Saved or created" has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs. His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula "save or create" allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." And on his blog, he acknowledges the political attraction.

"The expression 'create or save,' which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius," writes Mr. Mankiw. "You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus."

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

It's not only former Bush staffers such as Messrs. Fratto and Mankiw who have noted the political convenience here. During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula.

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," said the Montana Democrat. "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

Now, something's wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It's true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn't tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.

If the "saved or created" formula looks brilliant, it's only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don't expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration's line that the stimulus has already "saved or created" 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.