My goodness! Dana Milbank is acting like a real reporter, actually fact-checking the "truthful" Republican presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty:

“President Obama unfortunately doesn’t have the courage to look the American people in the eye and tell them the tough truth,” Pawlenty informed Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show. “I’ll do that.”

In a phone interview with Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey, he promised “a serious, tell-the-truth, courageous message.”

And in Des Moines, Pawlenty delivered an announcement speech, “A Time for Truth,” that contained 16 instances of the word “truth” in the prepared text.

But just an hour after unburdening himself of these truths in Iowa, the candidate went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and told a bit of a fib.

The talk-show host, who serves as the unofficial gatekeeper to the Republican nomination, presented Pawlenty with a 2006 newspaper article in which he said that “the era of small government is over” and that “government has to be more proactive, more aggressive.”

The truth-teller beat a hasty retreat. He claimed that he had merely been referencing somebody else’s words — “I didn’t say those words myself” — that his political opponents had “pushed that falsely,” and that the newspaper was motivated by political bias and was forced to issue a correction.

To verify Pawlenty’s truthfulness, I looked up the article, from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and discovered that Pawlenty had taken some liberties with the facts.

The article is all about Pawlenty’s efforts as governor to take on drug and oil companies and other practitioners of “excessive corporate power.” It includes his boast that many ideological Republicans “don’t even talk to me anymore” because of his support for things such as the minimum wage.

“The era of small government is over,” Pawlenty told the newspaper. “I’m a market person, but there are certain circumstances where you’ve got to have government put up the guardrails or bust up entrenched interests before they become too powerful. . . . Government has to be more proactive, more aggressive.”

The newspaper did issue a “clarification,” but only to say that Pawlenty’s quote about small government was “in reference to a point” made by the conservative writer David Brooks — one that Pawlenty, from his other comments, obviously agreed with.

Now, the funny thing is, Pawlenty would probably be a better presidential candidate carrying that message. Certainly, there are still Republicans who'd turn out to vote for a Republican candidate who isn't a right-wing nut case. Unfortunately, the basic requirement for a successful GOP primary candidate is still a noticable measure of insanity, so he's just going to have to make things up as he goes along.

There is simply no understanding the prevalence of gun violence in America - as evidenced by the recent attempted assassination of a congresswoman during a mass shooting - without discussing the nefarious role played by the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Once an organisation primarily concerned with the education and training of sportsmen, in a coup that came to be known as the Cincinnati Revolt in 1977, hardliners took over the leadership and believed that any gun regulation would take us down a slippery slope to Khmer Rougism.

In the years since, unlike the US in the wake of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy - or for that matter Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre - the response to senseless gun violence has been to discuss everything from the rhetoric on our airwaves to the weather outside.

But any public conversations regarding restricting who has access to guns has been considered verboten (although, thankfully, this time some cracks are beginning to show).

This is largely because the NRA's duping its own members, which we'll discuss below, and coming to the realisation that the real money was in actually protecting the rights of gun manufacturers, which we'll discuss in Part II of this series.

If the NRA leadership is not radical, they certainly see the benefit in playing radicals on TV in order to enrich their financial benefactors who produce and sell the weaponry of death.

In the 1990s, in a climate of fear and paranoia that produced the Oklahoma City bombing, they were all too happy to refer to the government authority that tries to enforce gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), as "jack-booted thugs". This led former president George H.W. Bush to resign his membership.

They then decided to up the ante by accusing former president Bill Clinton of murder and saying he "had blood on his hands" - all for the crime of supporting background checks at gun shows - which is among the many legislative proposals to reduce gun violence that they have repeatedly blocked.

Others include a ban on high-capacity magazines, banning sales to those on terrorist watch lists, and fully funding the aforementioned ATF (think about the latter when they say they want to "strengthen existing gun laws" after each new tragedy).

In fact, just a few days after the mass shooting in Tucson it was reported by Ryan Reilly from TPMMuckraker that a "jihadist" in America who was... "a moderator and contributor on Islamic extremist web forums, posted songs praising suicide bombers, discussed his jihad fantasies in the open..." was able to get an AK-47, no questions asked.

Emerson Begolly, the "jihadist" in question, responded when queried about this with laughter and facetiously exclaimed that "someone at the FBI showed up to work drunk". Perhaps, but if they were, it was only because the NRA forced them to do keg stands.

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Dana Milbank appeared on Keith Olbermann last night and pointed out most of the problems that the bloggers have had with Jeff (whatever his name is) Gannon having access to the White House. He gives a hat tip to World O' Crap as a source of information. Listening to Milbank talking about the much more serious issue of Jeff "G" as a shill for the White House after hearing Howard Kurtz completely glaze over the story on Blitzer, shows you the difference in reporting that can go on between "columnists from the same paper.

Milbank: As of Monday I saw whatever-his name-is waiting outside there at the White House, in fact he would probably be allowed to continue doing this as of now if their weren't some website called of all things "World O' Crap" that had gotten into all those personal allegations. It was Jeff's decision or whatever his name's decision to uhh step down. He wasn't kicked out of the White House at all. That's really where all the scandal lies in this whole thing.

The NY Daily News gets into the story and names John Aravosis of AMericaBlog as a source:

"The issue here is whether someone with connections to male prostitution was given unfettered access to the White House and copies of internal CIA documents. For a family values administration, that's pretty creepy," said John Aravosis, one of the bloggers chasing the story."

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Memo to Bill O'Reilly: There's a reason people in the media -- especially people with even a small bone of ethics in their bodies -- object to major media anchors suggesting it's OK to beat people up: It's profoundly irresponsible. Sure, you can say it's just a joke, but everyone who works in the media knows there are kooks out there who take that kind of stuff literally and act on it, which is what makes doing it so irresponsible. Or didn't you learn your lesson with Dr. Tiller?

Indeed, it seems that BillO learned at least one lesson from that episode: If you are so irresponsible as to abuse your position media power by indulging in reckless violent and eliminationist rhetoric, there is at least one entity with enough guts to call you on it: Media Matters.

Because now he's just outright hearing voices in his head as soon as the words came out of his mouth that he wanted to beat up the Washington Post's Dana Milbank for slagging Megyn Kelly's election-night work. And while it's true that Milbank's examples were weak, the reality is that Milbank's larger point was right: the entire night's broadcast overseen by Kelly was one long gloatfest, victory lap after victory lap for the election's real winner: Fox News.

But all throughout the segment, O'Reilly vacillated between wishing thuggery upon both Milbank and his boss, WaPo's Fred Hiatt, and worrying that his saying so might bring those evil nattering nabobs from Media Mattes down upon his head.

All I can say is: Good.

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Memos, 'Wing Nuts' and 'Hit Lists'

Michael Getler, Ombudsman for the Washington Post responds to Dana Milbank's column. Dana then responds to Michael.

Bush's Missing WMD 'Joke': Is the Media Still Laughing?

E&P smacks down Dana Milbank's article bashing John Conyers and the DSM, while asking the question of why the reporters who were at the event thought Bush's "missing WMD" joke was so heartily received.

" I was reminded of all this at the Thursday forum when former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, after cataloguing the bogus Bush case for WMDs and the Iraqi threat, looked out at the cameras and notepads, mentioned the March 24, 2004 dinner, and acted out the president looking under papers and table for those missing WMDs. “And the media was all yucking it up….hahaha,” McGovern said. “You all laughed with him, folks. But I’ll tell you who is not laughing. Cindy Sheehan is not laughing.” This was the woman sitting next to him whose son had been killed in Iraq. “Cindy’s son,” McGovern added, “was killed 11 days after the show put on by the president…after that big joke.” Dana Milbank, who seems to like a good laugh, did not mention this in his story the following day."

Awww, poor Dana Milbank. He's a little bit peeved about being left out of the Nuclear Safety Summit, and he thinks we should all feel vewy, vewy sorry for him as we shake our fists at the man who just led an historical meeting with several significant breakthroughs.

In the middle of it all was Obama -- occupant of an office once informally known as "leader of the free world" -- putting on a clinic for some of the world's greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press.

The only part of the summit, other than a post-meeting news conference, that was visible to the public was Obama's eight-minute opening statement, which ended with the words: "I'm going to ask that we take a few moments to allow the press to exit before our first session."

Reporters for foreign outlets, admitted for the first time to the White House press pool, got the impression that the vaunted American freedoms are not all they're cracked up to be.

My heart bleeds for him. The utter inability of mainstream reporters -- especially White House reporters -- to get even the simplest facts down with even a semblance of accuracy speaks volumes to the wisdom of the President's decision.

Does Milbank imagine reporters bearing witness to the discussion leading to the agreement with China to pressure Iran? What role does he think he or any other reporter could have played in creating an atmosphere where good-faith decisions and discussions about one of the most important global issues of our time could be made?

And while I'm at it, where was Milbank when our economy was melting down? Was he out interviewing financial executives, listening in on the meetings taking place on Capitol Hill? Why isn't he more outraged about the closed-door meeting Senator Mitch McConnell had with Wall Street honchos this morning? Does he imagine that to be something we might care about?

Yet, for Milbank, not being admitted into the inner sanctum of high-level international brainstorming sessions is akin to having his freedom stripped. Maybe he should earn that right with some real reporting instead of relying on snark and whining for his page views.

If you haven't noticed lately, the Washington Post has become the NRO for the most awesome Rahm Emanuel. Dana Milbank penned a column that could have been dictated to him by Rahm and then came another one basically saying all the same things. Rahm is teh Awesome and Obama is not.

We've had big problems with Broder, but even these weird displays of over the top Rahm leaking riled up the King of the Village:

In the space of 10 days, thanks in no small part to my own newspaper, the president of the United States has been portrayed as a weakling and a chronic screw-up who is wrecking his administration despite everything that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, can do to make things right.

This remarkable fiction began unfolding on Feb. 21 in the Sunday column of my friend Dana Milbank, who wrote that "Obama's first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter," i.e., a one-term failure.

A week later, presumably the same anonymous sources convinced Milbank to pronounce that Obama "too often plays the 98-pound weakling; he gets sand kicked in his face and responds with moot-court zingers."

And on Tuesday, The Post led the paper with a purported news story by Jason Horowitz saying that a president with Obama's "detached, professorial manner" needed "a political enforcer" like Emanuel to have a chance of succeeding, "because he [Emanuel] possessed a unique understanding of the legislative mind." Unfortunately, the story said, "influential Democrats are -- in unusually frank terms -- blaming Obama and his closest campaign aides for not listening to Emanuel."

Rahm was instrumental in recruiting many new Blue Dogs in 2006 and 2008. If he was so great, then why didn't he get the ConservaDems and Lieberman on board with health care?

Calculated Risk: Fed Chairmen never learn. Meanwhile, in the UK the gubmint is trying to rein in the bankers...

Little Green Footballs: Has seen the light!

Pulp Friction: America has become one big, crappy reality show

Pressing Issues: No terrorist angle, not news

Legal Schnauzer: A "Deep Throat" emerges in the Mike Connell plane crash

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Journalism 2009...Dana Milbank is an ass...Politico reports wingnut talking points as news...Cato rips Fox...Politico deep in the tank..."Bold Strategy"...Moonie Times to lay off 40% of 'staff'...WH Mainstream hacks object to bloggers...Watching America...Steyn/Beck's Fakes of Wrath...Celebrity Nonsense...Don't think, kill!...Ask This

Apparently the Very Serious People™ in the Village have a very different idea of journalism than they led us to believe. After their own columnist Dana Milbank lost his marbles and dignity over a DFH blogger asking a question, the Washington Post hits an all new low:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events — a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth.

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — was a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

So they're decided that the new business model for newspapers is to effectively pimp their access and reputation to the highest bidder. No wonder they got so pissy about Nico's question. They figured they could hit up some Iranian for some serious scratch to ask their question.

Apparently red-faced at being caught with their metaphoric pants down, WaPo announced this morning that they were canceling these pay-for-access salons.

UPDATED: Howie Kurtz puts out the typical CYA article: We're horrified to find pimping going on around here!