They're calling it the largest natural disaster on record, destroying homes, land, crops and water supplies, and yet the coverage in the U.S. media has been relatively low-key. Sadly, now it looks like things will be getting even worse:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan issued new flood warnings on Thursday that could last into the weekend as government and relief agencies strained to confront the toll from a growing humanitarian disaster.

The new warnings to several cities in Punjab and Sindh Provinces added to the desperation of many across the country facing a daily struggle for survival as Muslims around the world began to observe the holy month of Ramadan.

[...] The United States Embassy in Islamabad announced that two Marine helicopters had arrived in the country, the first of a contingent of 19 American military helicopters that has been ordered to assist the Pakistani government in relief efforts. The United States has pledged $71 million for flood relief, and American officials have called for more.

“Americans have been very focused on other, equally heart-wrenching issues, like Haiti,” Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Wednesday at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I hope they will turn their attention as well to this extraordinary crisis that Pakistan is facing.”

The aid deliveries could help the United States improve its image here and blunt a growing anti-American sentiment. The Taliban have already urged Pakistanis to shun American aid and have used the crisis to expand their influence and outreach in the flood-affected areas of the northwest.

The United Nations has estimated that at least one-fifth of the country is flooded, but the scope of the damage seems far greater. About 14 million people have been affected by the floods, and 6 million of them are children, according to Unicef. Estimates of the dead have ranged from 1,200 to 1,600.

NY Times, Wash. Post omitted Democratic response to Bush, Cheney attacks on Iraq War critics

This works beautifully for the GOP.

One of the biggest criticisms rank-and-file Democrats have of the Democratic leadership is that they don't fight back - but what difference does it make if the news media never goes to them for a response? They should be asking them directly, but even if they are too lazy they could check their various websites (some of them even have blogs) to see what they have to say about these things.

Posted by Avedon

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

via SeeingtheForest

Is there enough going on to make you nervous yet? The Vice President of the United States was the keynote speaker at a conference where other speakers called for "a new McCarthyism" to bring "terror" to intellectuals, saying "let's oppress them [liberals]," and "the entire Harvard faculty" are "traitors." A Congressman said, "America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," ? Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators talk about killing American journalists, their premier blogs talk about former president Carter as being on the side of the enemy and leftists have "seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism". I have provided only afew examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this,in thecompany of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comesnext isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in agood direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, youknow that more and more people are becomming concerned that the Right'srhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious peoplehave started referring tothe"f-word." (See alsohere,here,here,here and manyother places.)

Oliver Williswrites,

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort ofaccomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democraticsenators in Washington who still ? still ? refuse to vote theirconscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civilityin Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that theirright-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for agive-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of JoeLieberman as a terrorist sympathizer. . I have provided only a few examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this, in the company of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comes next isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in a good direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, you know that more and more people are becomming concerned that the Right's rhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious people have started referring to the "f-word." (See also here, here, here, here and many other places.) read on

Clinton rips media, Ken Starr after opening of presidential library

Video

In a prime-time television outburst, Bill Clinton ripped old nemesis Kenneth Starr and what the former president portrayed as a gullible media eager to report every "sleazy thing" leaked from a prosecutor bent on bringing him down.

"I misspoke"

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Crook and Liars
perseverance pays off. We called CNN and demanded an on-the-air apology by Novak himself because of the lie he spread about Howard Dean. Earlier in the week Judy Woodruff issued an apology for Novak's lie, but we felt that wasn't enough. We called and spoke to a PR person who said they would talk to the producers of Inside Politics and get back to us. We promised that we would not go away.

Since Novak claimed on February 26 edition of CNN's The Capital Gang: "Howard Dean gave a speech at Cornell on Thursday of this week in which he said that 80 percent -- over the years, 80 percent of the Social Security benefits will be lost." Then he repeated the lie on Inside Politics the following Monday. Off course Dean actually said: "if Social Security were left alone for 30 years, benefits would be reduced to 80 percent of what it is now." The GOP repeated his lie with video on their website (scrubbed now) and subsequently Rush Limbaugh used the same quote on 3/3. Novak came on the air today and apologized saying: "On Monday I said, I misspoke myself...what I meant to say..."

We know that he knew the actual quote being a seasoned "journalist," but chose to try and tarnish Dean with a lie. Also he claimed to have said it on Monday only, which of course is not true. The fact that he got on the air at all shows what can be done if we put our minds to it. Media Matters was on top of the story as well and proved invaluable in getting Novak to denounce himself. Thanks to all that called and emailed their concerns to CNN.

(Update-many feel it wasn't a good enough apology. We do agree. He still tried to say that Dean didn't "toe" the party line, which of course is incorrect. However, we still feel that it was important to get him to acknowledge his lie on the air, "something that had to kill him to do," even in the under handed way that he did it. We never expected him to admit much more. We tried our best.)

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Horrible news:

North Korea found two U.S. journalists it has held since March guilty of illegal entry and sentenced them to 12 years hard labor, its official KCNA news agency said on Monday.

The journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, of U.S. media outlet Current TV, were arrested while working on a story near the border between North Korea and China. Their trial opened on Thursday.

"The trial confirmed the grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing as they had already been indicted and sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor," KCNA said in a brief dispatch.

There just aren't words to express my anger and frustration for Lee and Ling. Al Gore, whose CurrentTV has remained curiously silent on Lee and Ling's plight, may go to Pyongyang to negotiate for their release:

The United States might send former US vice president Al Gore to Pyongyang in order to negotiate the release of two American journalists on trial in North Korea for illegal entry.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly did not rule out such a possibility when asked if it would make sense to send Gore, who is chairman of the California station Current TV, which employs the two journalists.

"It's a very, very sensitive issue, I'm not going to go into it," Kelly told reporters who pressed him on the matter.

"This is such a sensitive issue, I'm just not going to go into those kinds of discussions that we may or may not have had," he added when asked whether Gore himself had raised the matter with the State Department.

"The bottom line is that these two young women should be released but I'm not going to go into any kind of details on what we will or won't do," Kelly said when asked again if it would help to send Gore.

The Petition Site has a petition you can sign (and a Facebook group you can join) to ask the State Department to bring Lee and Ling home.

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Bill O'Reilly's been on a jag the past couple of months claiming that the mainstream media are dying on the vine because of their "far left" bias, which he think is killing them economically. Last night on his Talking Points Memo segment, he continued this thesis by pointing to a couple of cases.

The first is the swine flu story, which he says so confused him and his staff they just didn't report on it. So up front, we get an admission these may not be the sharpest journalistic tools in the shed.

Then he continues:

O'Reilly: Second example: In early March, reports out of Sacramento, California, said a very important story was a homeless camp featuring hundreds of people damaged by the recession, was a very important situation.

[video clip]

O'Reilly: Wow! Can you believe it?

Guess what? Story's bogus!

The Economist magazine, a British publication, writes, quote: "the tent city had actually been around for close to a decade. There may have been a foreclosed homeowner or two among its denizens, but ... almost all of the people there have problems with mental health, drug abuse or both."

Again, it took a British magazine to tell the truth about a false story generated by the U.S. media.

But if you actually read read the Economist piece, you can see clearly that its intent is not to "debunk" the "tent city" story but to argue that it's not important.

It attempts this with a shoddy and shallow piece of reporting; if the writer was only able to find "one or two" foreclosed homeowners among the tent city residents, he wasn't trying very hard. Indeed, he likely wasn't looking at all; MSNBC's Chris Jansing (in the piece O'Reilly clips) was able to interview three of them for her piece. Indeed, a more honest journalistic effort -- such as that from the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago -- makes clear that it's a complex story, but there's no question that the recession is a major driver in the very real expansion of California's homeless population.

As for the camp having existed in some form or another in that locale for some time, that in fact had already been widely reported -- including by, among others, O'Reilly's arch-nemesis, the New York Times -- over a month ago:

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McCain's Media is finally waking up to the fact that despite his impressive biography and (now defunct) honesty and straightforwardness, John McCain has some serious character flaws.

WaPo:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

When this election first started, I opposed John McCain because I fundamentally disagreed with his position on the issues. But as the campaign has progressed, I've come to realize that McCain -- not Obama -- is the truly dangerous choice to succeed George W. Bush. He simply doesn't have the right temperament to lead in an increasingly dangerous and perilous world.

For another perfect example of McCain "losing his head," see this notorious episode from 1989 during the Keating Five hearings.

Paul Krugman on the media:

"Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff?" This stuff being deception. "Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being 'balanced' at all costs. If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that 'some Democrats say' that he's wrong. Or a grotesque line from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty."

They're probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being "McCain campaign lies," it becomes "Obama on defensive in face of attacks."

Need I say more?

Qwerty's Qoncepts: Giddy up.

Shakespeare's Sister: McCain has "ties" to a well-known felon.

Zaius Nation: That rabbit trick never works, except...

News Media Tube: McCain's election tactics remind us of...Zimbabwe?

Off the beaten path: 2 millionth weblog, The Missisippifarian, Betty Cracker, and Either Relevant or True (which at the moment has the best. blog header. ever.).

Guest posted by Blue Gal, who contrary to rumor, does not have a birth control device with Tom Brokaw's name on it.