Man, ABC News seriously loves them some torture.

Because for them, the Bin Laden capture and killing is a triumph of intelligence derived from waterboarding, therefore the question of whether we should continue to torture should very much still be on the table. And who better to confirm that than the poster girl for waterboarding, Liz "Demon Spawn" Cheney.

But as I've written before, there's a logic drop off to their allegations. By all accounts, the use of waterboarding stopped in 2003. The Bush Administration closed down the Bin Laden unit in 2005 and did nothing for the intervening five years. If there was actionable intelligence obtained by waterboarding, why then did they close down the unit hunting for Bin Laden?

What Leon Panetta told the media was that they did receive actionable intelligence from individuals who had been waterboarded in the past but the name of the courier that enabled them to directly track Bin Laden was not known until 2007, after waterboarding allegedly ended. But the media en masse, with their giant hard on for Jack Bauer theatrics, turns that around into Panetta admitting that they got intelligence from waterboarding. Now it is possible that having already experienced waterboarding, the detainees they interrogated were more forthcoming with information, but that begs the question why they weren't more forthcoming earlier.

If Christiane Amanpour wanted to have an intellectually honest discussion of whether torture--and please, give up the "enhanced interrogation techniques" euphemism, it's TORTURE, pure and simple--works, perhaps she should have employed some logic as I have rather than serve up that nice little softball to Liz Cheney, whose only purpose on these shows is to defend her dad's evil and criminal tactics.

AMANPOUR: Liz, does this reignite this debate as to whether these enhanced interrogation techniques work and should be brought back?

CHENEY: I think it does. I think the fact that you clearly have the current CIA director saying that part of the intelligence came from enhanced interrogation, it's important to remember, you know, Chip Burlingame, who was the pilot on American Airlines Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon, he himself was subjected to these techniques when he went through SERE training.

These are not torture. These are techniques that we know work. That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.

It seems to me the key question now is, we've got this trove of intelligence, what looks to have been perhaps the biggest trove we've ever been able to get a hold of. If that leads us to other Al Qaida operatives, it's not clear to me that we have any way to effectively interrogate them. We don't have enhanced interrogation anymore. We read people their Miranda rights. We are not detaining people at Guantanamo anymore. We're not detaining people in the secret prison sites. It's not clear to me what the administration will be able to do to get this information.

Shame on ABC News and Christiane Amanpour for not only framing the debate to assume that torture worked, but to then give Liz Cheney a platform to undermine the Obama administration's success where the Bush administration with all their war criminal tactics failed.

He who frames the debate, controls the debate.

There's a reason that this saying exists--it's absolutely true and there's no greater evidence of it than watching the Sunday news shows.

Case in point: the Tea Party Caucus in the House. Now this group of newcomers rode into Congress last year on a wave of fear, lies and dissatisfaction with the pace of economic recovery. Their understanding of how government and the economy works is simplistic and single-minded, counting on the ignorance of voters.

I'm more than a little annoyed by the overused analogy of running the country is like running a household writ large. Really? How many households have to negotiate trade agreements with other households? How many households issue bonds (which is where most of our debt lies)? Yet Christiane Amanpour allows Reps. Renee Ellmers, Steve Southerland, Joe Walsh and Allen West talk in exactly these terms without challenge or interruption.

Okay. I'm sure that if the executive producer of This Week responded to my emails, he would say that having representatives from the majority party is an appropriate booking and that the Tea Party caucus is a notable movement of today. That's an arguable position to take. However, how many freshman Democratic reps did ABC book after the Democratic sweep of 2008. None. I would also suggest that the media seems more enthralled by the tea party movement than most Americans. Why else would they cover exhaustively a few dozen protesters in Boca Raton and ignore the thousands protesting BP's environmental violations?

Furthermore, is it too much to ask Amanpour to have her research done to be able to point out that cutting spending in a fragile economic recovery would send the country spiraling into a depression and that any threat of not raising the debt ceiling will extend the economic crisis worldwide? How about merely pointing out that cutting taxes on corporations has not actually helped the economy over the last 10 years?

Since ABC sees their role as simply a platform for ideas, the obvious question to ask is when will the Progressive Caucus get their turn? They've offered up a budget alternative to Paul Ryan's. When's their turn in the sun, ABC? Or is it that you just don't want to frame the debate that way?

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You could read this, which makes it sound like there was an actual rational discussion on This Week about repealing DADT (and there was, sort of -- but only with some of the participants), or you can take my word for it that the the two far-right nutjobs who came on to plead that allowing people to be openly gay in the military would undermine the nation's mission (I guess because they'd all be off organizing drag parties or Gay Bingo Nite) are just plain barking insane, and swimming upstream against reality.

But the entire argument against repealing DADT was distilled in one statement by director of National Security and Joint Warfare at the Marine Corps War College Tammy Schultz and reinforced by R. Clarke Cooper, an Iraq War Vet and member of the Log Cabin Republicans, who are spearheading the campaign for repeal:

SCHULTZ: Nothing will be good enough for the opponents who do not want to repeal "don't ask/don't tell." It's not about the evidence; it's about the ideology. They're saying, oh, you can't compare the U.S. military to other militaries. We're bigger, we're in war, et cetera, et cetera. But then they simultaneously want to say we have the most professional forces in the world, which we do.

And that's true of almost all of conservative obstructionism. Nothing is good enough to knock them out of their world view: no facts, no studies, no other opinions. And no matter what you say, they'll constantly stay with their unsubstantiated talking points.

But at least Christiane Amanpour challenged them. A little.

Southern Beale: Your country is addicted to cheap labor

Climate Progress: NYT front page story: In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming

Unqualified Offerings: The whole GOP is going insane

Billablog: Sarah Palin asked some questions of Obama. Bill has a few for her

ginandtacos: A very special time warp FJM

The Bobblespeak Translations: ABC's This Week -August 16, 2010

There are some moments on TV that should just be sent to the cutting room floor before they ever hit the screen. This is one of them.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck proves that she doesn't listen, she doesn't think, and she's as much of a troll as Breitbart when she wants to be.

This is a classic example of what I keep ranting about. There's no issue here, and anyone with half a brain knows it. But Hasselbeck concern trolls over the Hatch Act (inapplicable to the speech and group Sherrod was speaking to) as if it is the NEXT HORRIBLE RACIST THING.

Transcript:

HASSELBECK: There's another bit from your speech that's actually raising a second wave of controversy.

[from clip, SHERROD:]I haven't seen such a mean-spirited people as i've seen lately over this issue of health care. now we endured 8 years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.

HASSELBECK: So what about that epiphany, where is that epiphany where it's not about color and it's not about race. What do you then say?

SHERROD: You know, why is it that there's such opposition to something that's so important to poor people. Again, I'm coming at it from the angle of poor people. Poor people need health care!

[applause]

HASSELBECK: And i hear you because I listened to your entire speech and I read the entire transcript but when someone listens to that they're thinking 'yeah, well all of a sudden it's back to black and white, why did we have to get there' .

And then is it also because being a civil servant are you not allowed to have such a partisan opinion? I thought --

[crosstalk]

-- I thought that was not okay.

SHERROD: Poor white people need health care too. You know, so I wasn't talking about health care for just black people. I'm talking about health care for poor people. I know what happens to folks who don't get a chance to go to doctors. I know what's happening to hospitals and their emergency rooms with all of the load of dealing with the person after it's too late.

WENTWORTH: It's too bad, and I know we're going to come back and talk with you again, but it's too bad everything has to immediately take the road of racism. It's poverty. Poverty.

GOLDBERG: Hang on a second -- this is going to be great. you won't forget it.

[break]

After the break and re-intro, Hasselbeck gets another chance at the well of the Concern Trolls:

HASSELBECK: You know, we had just shown a clip where the tail end of it you say "we endured 8 years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff the Republicans are doing because we have a black President." Second part of my question: Doesn't the Hatch Act prohibit civil servants from making partisan and political statements? SO isn't that reason enough to look into okay, is this something even legal going on?

Wow, isn't it really nice of Elisabeth Hasselbeck to be concerned that Shirley Sherrod might have violated the Hatch Act? And it certainly plays well to the Fox/Breitbart crowd out there who loves the "scary black person doing illegal and racist things" trope. Only, Elisabeth really didn't know what she was talking about, because the Hatch Act does not rob government employees of their First Amendment rights. It simply limits political activity while they are ON DUTY. Here's all you ever wanted to know about the Hatch Act from the Office of Special Counsel.

And once again, Shirley Sherrod puts Hasselbeck right back in her place:

SHERROD: You know, maybe the Hatch Act would have been meant only for me, because I don't know any government official who was gagged, especially during the Bush administration.

[applause]

BEHAR: You know, I want to support what Shirley said before, which is that during the Bush administration you had tax cuts for the wealthiest and he did not -- that whole adminiistration did not give a damn about poor people and everybody knows it. That's why Obama was elected in the first place.

[crosstalk]

-- and even now, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment insurance but they're okay with tax cuts to the wealthy --

[crosstalk]]

Let me finish. So now you have Obama in office, and he does give a damn about black people

HASSELBECK: Black/white or rich/poor? Which is it?

BEHAR: A lot of people are poor because they were black --

[crosstalk]]

HASSELBECK We're supposed to be postracial here --

[crosstalk]

GOLDBERG: There is no postracial yet. this was a media idea that sounded great, that sounded wonderful, but the truth is that these issues, these questions of race have never come up this way before because there has never been a black president before, so people are now trying to figure out how they feel, how they deal how they talk. this is a new world for us.

WENTWORTH: Obama has a very fine line to walk. I mean, can you imagine being the first black president having to deal with all these issues?

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Thank you Robert Green, England's goalkeeper. He let in a very, very soft goal for the always resourceful Clint Dempsey after we started out poorly and the USA nabs a point and a tie in their first World Cup game. Jozy Altidore almost broke the tie when his shot went of the goalie and hit the inside post in the second half. Tim Howard played another excellent game and is considered one of the top goalkeeper's in the world.

I wish I could hear the Brit announcers after this game. If you've ever watched soccer, the announcers are brutal when a player makes a mistake and this one was a whopper. England's Steve McManaman, who's calling the WC for ABC/ESPN was describing his feelings afterwards:

I was exasperated, I was upset, I was distraught at times and I'm worried...

A tie is still a great outcome for the US against the heavy favorite and now they move on to Friday's game against Slovenia. There's plenty of time for England, it's only the first game, but it's an awesome start for the USA. They need to make it to at least the final 16 for this to not be considered a failure in the 2010 World Cup.
As for the bet, we're all even too. Occam, who took the challenge can breath a little easier.

Here's the guardian, live-blogging the match.

GOAL! ENGLAND 1-1 USA (Green og) Oh my God, that's a horror show from England goalkeeper Rob Green, who spills a soft Clint Dempsey strike from distance over his own line. That's as bad a goalkeeping gaffe as you'll see in this tournament.42 min: "Taibi-esque," says James Richardson and he's not wrong. That was shocking - Dempsey tried his luck from 30 yards, his low shot bounced twice, Green hunkered down to gather it in his hands, somehow palmed it diagonally behind him and then watched in horror as it trickled over the line.

(h/t Raf, who's blogging about the World Cup)

Ari over at Media Matters asked Rupert Murdoch if it's appropriate for his network to be supporting the Tea Party movement. He said "no," and that they shouldn't support any party. He must have missed David Frum saying that Republicans actually work for FOX News.

You are probably puking now if you finished watching this short clip. FOX News created the Tea Party movement, period.

The goal of Murdoch and his uber-minion, Roger Ailes, is to undermine any Democratic administration or support any Republican administration -- and they have succeeded. It's all about winning the TV wars to both men; Ailes made it very clear that it's all about ratings when he was on ABC's This Week, which is why he lets Beck turn into an embarrassing lunatic and the network become transmitters of '90s type conspiracy theories.

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I wrote this about his appearance.

If you read Rogers Ailes' dialogue on ABC's This Week, you will see just how entrenched his rhetoric is with what Fox News, the Teabaggers and the GOP puts on the air day in and night out. His own words are an indictment of his politics and the station he falsely calls "fair and balanced."

In the process Ailes whipped up the most extreme right-wing nuts we have in America to such a frenzy that members of Congress are getting death threats on almost a daily basis lately.

David and I have been following this story like nobody else and we've been predicting this type of behavior from the beginning.

I hope I'm wrong, but if things keep escalating like they have been and with the help of the Limbaugh/Beck/Fox News Orkestra of Propaganda playing their paranoid Junta symphony--Doctor Tiller was just the warm-up act.

Digby has more.

The announcement of Christiane Amanpour's selection for host of ABC's This Week was certainly a little surprising. As someone who has watched the Sunday shows every week for the last four years for C&L, I was somewhat heartened by the hope of thoughtful discussions for once. And Amanpour, mindful of where her skills lie, has reportedly plans to make some pretty big changes to the show, moving it outside the Beltway to New York and not focusing on Washington politics exclusively.

Well, as you can imagine, a cerebral Iranian-British female reporter with a reputation for comprehensive work and a lack of interest in the cocktail class of DC and the endless pit matches between Republican and Democratic politicians that serve as Sunday show fodder has some people feeling a little tetchy. Longtime WaPo television reporter Tom Shales issued a prickly op-ed on Amanpour's hiring:

In a way, Amanpour, scheduled to leave CNN after 18 years of international coverage and take over the program in August, could be seen as the opposite of the perfect candidate. "This Week" deals mainly in domestic politics and inside-the-Beltway palaver, an area where Amanpour is widely considered to deficient. Consider: Whenever CNN has thrown one of its big election-night, convention, or presidential debate spectaculars, drafting nearly every living staff member to appear, Amanpour has had a conspicuously low profile.

And even though Amanpour has often been touted for her expertise on foreign affairs, she has vocal and passionate critics in that arena as well. Supporters of Israel have more than once charged Amanpour with bias against that country and its policies. A Web site devoted to criticism of Amanpour is titled, with less than a modicum of subtlety, "Christiane Amanpour's Outright Bias Against Israel Must Stop," available via Facebook.

Amanpour grew up in Great Britain and Iran. Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity, telling Leslie Stahl last year relative to her coverage of Iran: "I am not part of the current crop of opinion journalists or commentary journalists or feelings journalists. I strongly believe that I have to remain in the realm of fact."

Get that? Amanpour can't be objective because she lived in Iran. (For the record, Amanpour left Iran to study in England in 1969. Her family left Iran at the start of the revolution. Amanpour came to the US for college, graduating in 1983, per Wikipedia). So obviously, being part Iranian, she's unable to cover Israel objectively, so her "expertise" in foreign affairs is entirely suspect. It's quite a leap of logic, as Glenn Greenwald points out:

Without having the courage to do so explicitly, Shales links (and even bolsters) charges of her "anti-Israel" bias to the fact that her father is Iranian and she grew up in Iran. He sandwiches that biographical information about Iran in between describing accusations against her of bias against Israel and her defensive insistence that she's capable of objectivity when reporting on the region.

So here we finally have a prominent journalist with a half-Persian background -- in an extremely homogenized media culture which steadfastly excludes from Middle Eastern coverage voices from that region -- and her national origin is immediately cited as a means of questioning her journalistic objectivity and even opposing her as a choice to host This Week (can someone from Iran with an Iranian father possibly be objective???). Could the double standard here be any more obvious or unpleasant?

Wolf Blitzer is Jewish, a former AIPAC official, and -- to use Shales' smear-campaign formulation -- has frequently "been accused" of pro-Israel bias; should CNN bar him from covering those issues? David Gregory is Jewish, "studies Jewish texts with a top Jewish educator in Washington," and has conducted extremely sycophantic interviews with Israel officials. Should his background be cited as evidence of his pro-Israel bias? The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg is routinely cited as one of America's most authoritative sources on the Middle East, notwithstanding numerous accusations of pro-Israel bias and, even more so, his choice to go enlist in the IDF and work in an Israeli prison where Palestinians are encaged; do those actions (far beyond his mere ethnicity) call into question his objectivity as a journalist such that The Atlantic should bar him from writing about that region? Jake Tapper -- who Shales suggests as an alternative to Amanpour and who I also previously praised as a choice -- is Jewish; does that raise questions about his objectivity where Israel is concerned?

Besides objectivity towards Israel--Shales' overriding standard apparently for a This Week host--what other traits do they share? Could it be that we're talking about a bunch of white guys? Could it be that Amanpour being a female is threatening for a medium that has consistently underrepresented minorities and women? Could it be that she's not as enthralled as they are about themselves? Even Krugman, a frequent guest on This Week, found the criticism odd:

Um, maybe the idea is to do a bit less “inside-the-Beltway palaver”? You know, we’ve got a global economic crisis, a budding confrontation with China, a major row with Israel; maybe someone who’s knowledgeable about the world rather than the DC party circuit might be just the right choice?

Heather posted on George Will's mumbo jumbo hackery with Paul Krugman on ABC's THIS WEEK already, and after Brad DeLong watched the horror unfold he asks the question that we've all been asking for way too long.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

I think what it comes down to is that there just aren't any conservative pundits out there who can argue in the reality-based world. So we get either George Will's hackery or Peggy Noonan's overwrought gobbledygook-soap star-punditry method. Which is not to be confused with Lee Strasberg's 'Method acting'. And Cokie at times is the worst offender of them all.

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Having a little Sunday talk show fun. It was reported by Steve Schmidt and others in the McCain camp that Sarah Palin couldn't get Joe Biden's name right and kept calling him O'Biden.

Palin had a reflexive tendency to refer to Biden as "O'Biden," Schmidt revealed. He says other people on the campaign staff came up with a solution. "It was multiple people -- and I wasn't one of them-- who all said at the same time, 'Just say, 'Can I call you Joe?'' which she did."

What's funny is that she still called him O'Biden at the debate, so there's that. So when I heard Dick Cheney do the same thing on ABC's THIS WEEK, I couldn't help but laugh for a while.

Cheney: Of course, O'Biden and -- Obama and Biden campaigned from one end of the country to the other for two years criticizing our Iraq policy.

Biden explained what he meant on MTP when he used the word "success in Iraq" and it's not the way Cheney tries to frame his answer.