Must Reads

James A. Feldman: The flawed case against Donald Verrilli

Eugene Robinson: Mitt Romney can’t shake away impressions he’s made

Bob Cesca: Another Right-Wing Terrorist Hits Planned Parenthood

Jim Hightower: The Truth About the U.S. Postal Service

Dan Froomkin: Karl Rove's NAACP Analogy Runs Afoul Of Law, History

Mike Sacks: President Obama Locks Horns With Chief Justice Roberts Over Health Care Case

Adam Davidson: The Real Reason Gas Costs $4 A Gallon

Rachel Maddow: RNC chairman reflects on women, caterpillars

Sara Robinson: Did Rick Santorum just declare the next right-wing crusade?

Brendan McCarthy: Judge imposes stiff sentences on 5 NOPD officers convicted in Danziger shootings

Paul Buchheit: Five Preposterous, Persistent Conservative Myths

Sam Parry: If the Supreme Court Goes Rogue

Must Reads

Paul Campos: Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench

David Edwards: Exclusive: Limbaugh’s parent company still using actors to fake radio call-ins, exec tells Raw

Dan Froomkin: A Reagan Republican Makes A Case Against The War -- And His Own Party

Marcus Baram: Sarah Palin 'Not Afraid' Of Jon Stewart, Says Aide

Joan Walsh: Newt Gingrich, hypocrite in chief

E.J. Dionne: What Wisconsin Democrats can teach Washington Democrats

Linda Greenhouse: Justice Scalia Objects

Richard Pérez-Peña: Christie’s Talk Is Blunt, but Not Always Straight

Tim Murphy: Birther Bill Author: What's a Long-Form Birth Certificate?

Eugene Robinson: Peter King's Modern-Day Witch Hunt

Dana Milbank: Rep. King's Red Scare

Paul Krugman: Dumbing Deficits Down

E.D. Kain: Michigan Governor Plays Fast and Loose with Democracy, Invokes Radical New Powers

Matthew Rothschild: Scott Walker Believes He’s Following Orders from the Lord

Gail Collins: Eye of the Newt

Dan Taylor: Wisconsin Republicans Have Done Progressives a Huge Favor

Angry Black Lady: Liberals, It’s Time to Stop Bitching and Start Organizing. Just Shut Up and Get to Work

Quote of the Day

"The Rahm Emanuel that Obama hired is the poster child for the timid, pseudo-pragmatism that is inimical to the idealistic Obama agenda so many excited voters responded to last November. And it's a pragmatism that is absolutely killing the Democratic Party in the long run, because American voters have an intrinsic distrust of politicians they see as tacking with the polls or shying away from a fight."

~Dan Froomkin on the latest Obama administration sabotage and the recent Washington Post love affair with Rahm Emanuel.

Must Reads

The Rude Pundit: Fox "news" Takes Us To Its Leader

Dan Froomkin: Want Obama To Be Bolder? Take To The Streets!

Bob Cesca: Hope, Change and The Long Road: One Year Later

Robert Fisk: America is performing its familiar role of propping up a dictator

Mahablog: Republican Health Care Still an Oxymoron

Brian Beutler: Reid Continues To Target Republican Obstruction

Must Reads

Robert Reich: Why Wall Street Reform is Stuck in Reverse

The Rude Pundit: Photos That Make Christian Conservative Brains Short Out and Pat Buchanan Hearts the Oath Keepers, Does Not Heart Black People

Jason Linkins: Fake Obama Thesis Story Goes Viral, Because Of Stupidity

Dan Froomkin: Why Journalists Shouldn't Be Defending Fox News

Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Texas, the Eyes of Justice Are Upon You

Christopher Brauchli: The Prolonging of Palin

David Michael Green: Paranoia For Breakfast

Must Reads - UPDATED

Dan Froomkin: Cheney Still Manipulating People -- Now In Public

Bob Cesca: The Public Option is Popular, Moral and Inexpensive, Therefore it Must Die

The Rude Pundit: In the Realm of "You Have to Be Fucking Kidding": Obama's School Speech Makes Conservatives Cry

Michael Winship: Coming Soon to a Democracy Near You...

David Sirota: Progressives Pay the Price for Confusing a Party With a Movement

John Nichols: Give States an Option to Lead on Single-Payer

Richard Wolf: White House to reveal visitor names

Megan Tady: Will ‘Astroturf’ Groups Block Net Neutrality Reform?

MUST SEE: Anthony Weiner Blasts Critics of Health Reform VIDEO (You can catch a ton of other Weiner videos as well.)

Armadillo Joe recommends...

James Moore: The Lies of Texas Are Upon You

ADDING...

Davenoon, LGM: While we're at it, let's privatize the fire department, too

US Dept. of Labor: The History of Labor Day

Must Reads

Chris Kelly: Sarah Palin Wins

Rude Pundit: Umm, Townhall Protesters? Jefferson Was Actually Talking About Your Blood, Too

Robert Scheer: Letting the Banking Rats Out of the Bag

Linda Bergthold: Town Halls: Don't Confuse Me with the Facts, My Mind Is Made Up

Joshua Holland: 10 Awesome Things That Would Happen If Health Reform Passes

Dan Froomkin: The Truth Will Out

Bob Herbert: Hard To Believe!

Robert Parry: Olbermann-O'Reilly 'Truce' Frays

Armadillo Joe recommends...

BooMan: Diagnosing the Threat from the Right

"Dr. Leo Strauss": Why Democrats, Obama And Liberals Deserve Obliteration?

Rick Perlstein: In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition - Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

Froomkin Hired by HuffPo

According to Glenn Greenwald:

...[Dan] Froomkin to be [Huffington Post's] Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger. Froomkin will oversee a staff of five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page. I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning.

...Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper's most popular.

The old media establishment keeps having heart palpitations every time another newspaper goes down failing to realize that boneheaded moves like these are causing their demise.

Stenographers to Liars

posted by Armadillo Joe

Considered against the backdrop of the kerfuffle between Nico Pitney and Dana Milbank this week (appropriately covered by Broadway Carl's DBOTW yesterday), Dan Froomkin's firing makes perfect sense. The big, fat, well-trained and meekly compliant traditional media is accustomed to strolling the cocktail party circuit in Washington D.C. like some roly-poly dog at a suburban pool party trolling for scraps off the grill. They fear anything that threatens to muss up that really cozy deal they've got for themselves wherein they unquestioningly re-print the lies of those in power in exchange for "Access" which gives them the panache to be blow-dried media celebrities which gets them on the list to receive the lies which they re-print, etc...

Now, whether those lies bore out or not, whether they proved correct or not on a factual level (to say nothing of the underlying rightness and wrongness on a moral level) was less important than taking all possible measures not to upset the very lucrative, reputation-enhancing apple cart. So Milbank gets his knickers in a twist because a DFH (a blogging DFH, popular with the rabble) gets to speak with the president over a room full of people who have scraped and bowed and crawled through shit to be among the soulless but powerful chosen few. All that guy ever did was talk to a people in Iran, collect sources, do his homework and act like he was a journalist or something. He never actually ate a cocktail weenie at any cozy little Washington parties, so he's just a nobody and a show-off who won't play ball.

And the Dirty Fucking Hippie Dan Froomkin (I mean, hell, look at the guy) simply never wanted to play ball either, which was fine when the captain of the red team was in the White House because Froomkin got to be a sop to all his fellow DFH's on the Inter-Webs while Very Important People went about the Very Important Business of Running The World.

But even after one of his moonbat lefties took the White House and all those DFH's invaded Congress, he continued to have -- you know -- standards, evenly applied, as though he had proved right about torture and Iraq and the economic meltdown and the domestic surveillance and all those Establishment-types had been proven wrong. Over and over and over again.

Hey, man, your guy's in office now -- ease up, OK? You're making us look bad.

So he had to go. And he does go. He goes out in a blaze of glory.

And he names names:

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve.

[...]

The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Will somebody hire this guy, please?

Douchebag of the Week: Dana Milbank

President Obama's press conference last Monday afternoon apparently ruffled the feathers of Washington press insiders when he called on The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney for a question regarding Iran. Anyone following Pitney on a regular basis knows that he has spent the last two weeks trying to contact Iranian protesters on the ground through various technological means, like Twitter and Facebook.

When called upon, Pitney asked, "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian. We solicited questions on tonight from people who are still courageous enough to be communicating online. And one of them wanted to ask you this: Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of -- of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?"

Pretty pertinent question, don't you think? Well Dana Milbank didn't. In fact, Milbank probably didn't even hear the question because he was so incensed that a mere blogger would be called upon instead of, well the Washington Post's Dana Milbank for example, perhaps to ask about President Obama's bathing suit paparazzi photo again. Titillating.

Milbank immediately took to his blog after the press conference and inaccurately "reported" the exchange between Pitney and the White House and spent the rest of the week trashing President Obama and his "staged" press conference, while Pitney continued the work of a real journalist getting as much information as possible from sources literally on the streets of Iran.

Staged press conferences, Dana? How quickly we forget Jeff Gannon. Or is that James Guckert? How quickly we forget the cabal of Fox reporters and conservative pundits doing the bidding of the Bush White House; an exclusive little group including the repugnant Neil Boortz and the crying lunatic, Glenn Beck.

Pitney then appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources, in an apparent "pre-arranged, staged" ambush flanked on either side by Milbank and the Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter, to accuse him of "collusion" with the White House, but Nico held his own, called Milbank out on his bathing suit silliness and slapped the whiny little bitch into next week.




According to multiple sources, at the end of the segment Milbank leaned in to Pitney and said, "You're such a dick." Perhaps if Milbank would do some actual journalistic work instead of the equivalent of a political gossip column for a newspaper who's credibility is continually fading (see: Dan Froomkin firing), maybe he'll get called on to ask a question. As long as it's not: "President Obama: Boxers or briefs?"

The Washington Post's faux reporter, Dana Milbank: Douchebag of the Week.

_______________
Adding... I would be remiss not to remind readers of the staged news conference conducted by FEMA during the California wildfires in October of 2007, and this dipshit Milbank is seriously going to call Pitney a staged White House plant? Fuck you, Dana.