I promise I will not do a lot of “meta” here on C&L, but I couldn’t help myself after I read something this morning. Apparently the Politico’s Ben Smith is experiencing a little bit of “blog neurosis.” He feels confused on how to navigate through his news chores of both blogging and tweeting as he lamented to AdWeek that Twitter is “sort of draining the life from the blog.” His boss Jim VandeHei seems to feel his pain suggesting blogs many not “thrive as robustly as it did four years ago” because of the rise of Twitter.

Well the thoughts from both Smith and VandeHei seem amusing because they give us a peek of the mindsets of traditional media reporters who never fully appreciated the concept of blogging. It is interesting that these reporters are looking at the 2008 election cycle as the time when blogs really came into prominent. This platform actually came into prominence during progressive netroots emergence following the march to Iraq war. I am sure Amato can share his own thoughts on that.

Moreover, reporters like Smith, VandeHei and their colleagues from traditional media outlets in the DC bubble fundamentally misconstrue the purpose of blogging. I have a newsflash for those guys: blogging is not just about breaking news stories with a provocative headline slapped together with a 2-4 paragraph excerpts and 2-3 sentence superficial takes. It is lot more than that. Blogging can have many different purposes including but not limited:

• Aggregating all the news in place to give the readers a sketch of the narrative
• Offering analysis and break-down on micro-angle of a story
• Using it as an organizing platform for community related events
• Using it to lay out a vision/plan – applicable for that community – in the coming months
• Using it as a place to solicit substantive feedback from the community on targeted issues and stories

One can just scroll through years of Crooks and Liars archive to get a sense of the multi-dimensional aspects of blogging which can come in so many different forms, making it a richer place for knowledge (especially when it is run in a smart and strategic way like Amato has done here and also in places like DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo etc).

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On Thursday morning I attended a breakfast and roundtable discussion sponsored by the Missouri Health Advocacy Alliance that discussed the Affordable Care Act one year on, and how it has benefited Missouri small businesses since the first provisions started kicking in last September.

When I walked up to the table to sign in, I was surprised that they were so thrilled to see a B-list blogger show up with a netbook and a digital recorder to capture and report on the event. Then when I walked into the room I knew why. There was not another soul in that room that even remotely resembled a reporter, even though a press release went out last week announcing the event.

This meeting was held at the Plaza Marriott, at 45th and Main in Kansas City. The KKFI studio is at 39th and Main, the KCUR studio is at 48th and Troost and the Kansas City Star is at 17th and Grand. It isn't like it was held in an inconvenient location. I didn't expect television cameras, but I did expect some coverage by either the print or radio press.

I mean, if 50 teabaggers who are against healthcare reform get together and wave misspelled, grammatically incorrect signs around, the Star covers that. But 50 small business owners and administrators who have benefited from the provisions of the law that have already kicked in, gathered in a meeting room to discuss those benefits? Nothing to see there, they don't even bother to send a reporter.

They will report on people who scream about "death panels" and "government takeover of healthcare" -- both rated "lies of the year" by PolitiFact for 2009 and 2010, respectively -- but they don't report on the very real benefits of the legislation.

No wonder the law isn't more popular.

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Dishonest morons motivated purely by ideology have decided to throw a scream-fest over a proposed "stay in school" speech from the President to children.

President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.

This is no small, isolated fit, thrown by random nutjobs. The New York Times, Washington Post,LA Times, AP, and others all ran stories this morning about the coordinated national effort to either keep children at home so they can't hear their president's pro-education message, or demanding that local schools block the message altogether.

The people organizing this protest and the people mad about the President daring to "indoctrinate" their children are the people who said nothing when Ronald Reagan talked favorably about tax cuts to schoolkids, when George Bush sat in a classroom on 9/11, and when they waged a campaign to put PRAYER in American schools. It's OK, then, to indoctrinate your children to almighty God, but not for them to hear a speech about hard work from the elected President of the United States. Conservatives have waged war on respect.

But the award for lack of self-awareness has to go to NBC News, which asks today:

Finally, here’s one more thought about the entire controversy over Obama’s education speech on Tuesday: Since the White House has said the text of the speech will be available for 24 hours before he delivers it and since they altered the lesson plan language, why is this still a controversy? The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing. In fact, this is an example of a story that percolates where it becomes harder and harder for some to claim there's some knee-jerk liberal media bias. (Does anyone remember these kinds of controversies in the summer of 2001?) The ability of some conservatives to create media firestorms is still much greater than liberals these days.

Now, at least they admit that it's impossible to claim liberal media bias, meaning they understand who's to blame here. But do they really have to say "The ability of the conservative media machine to generate a controversy for this White House is amazing"? Isn't the answer that the non-conservative media will simply blindly follow whatever conservative media decides to gun up? Don't media types privilege conservative mini-controversies and hissy fits? Isn't there literally no way they could lay off something like this? Isn't that the problem?

Conservatives have cracked the code: yell real loud about some invented outrage, and watch the media chase the soccer ball. They actually don't have to cover it.

I don't want war! All I want is peace...peace...peace...!

A little piece of Poland,

A little piece of France,

A little piece of Austria

And Hungary, perchance!

A little slice of Turkey

And all that that entails,

And then a bit of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales!"

-Mel Brooks, To Be Or Not To Be

I guess the news peg for this is the anniversary of the start of WWII in September 1939, but Pat Buchanan has gone ahead and apologized for Hitler, claiming he sought no empire or wider war with Europe, and had merely benign interests of German unification at heart:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Matt Yglesias does quick work of the historical inaccuracies - Hitler invaded Russia as soon as he achieved a border with them by conquering Poland. And this is a decent riposte as well - Buchanan seems to expect a crazy person to also be a rational military strategist, and when he's not, searches for alternative explanation ("Hitler couldn't have wanted war because he didn't have enough planes! So it's Britain's fault!").

But I'll take the less dainty approach. In 1939, in a small town called Averduct on the German-Polish border, practically every member of my family was rounded up by Nazi authorities, herded into a local synagogue, and burned alive inside. This would fall in Buchanan's revisionism as part of the supposedly honest and forthright effort by Hitler to annex Danzig and restore the German homeland (hey, Hitler just wanted some Lebensraum - why not let him annex whatever he decided was part of Germany, right? Don't you want to save lives?). But my dead ancestors didn't live in Danzig (now Gdansk). They had nothing to do with such a conflict. Maybe that was the work of a few bad apple Nazis acting alone. That and the other 6 million incidents.

But the bigger point here to be made is that Pat Buchanan is paid by the allegedly liberal cable news network MSNBC, he has been on it for years, if you add up all his appearances throughout the day he probably spends as much time on the air as anyone outside of the Morning Joe crowd, and that's... OK. Calling Hitler misunderstood is not a firing offense at the liberal cable news network MSNBC.

Good to know.

My favorite comment in the Buchanan thread, by the way:

summarex

Great Article Pat.

But what’s your beef with general Pinochet?

Must be a follower of Milton Friedman.

(Disclosure: I'm working with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign, exposing insurance industry practices. Check us out on Facebook.)

The New York Times published a very nice press release from the desk of Humana, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies. The reporter interviewed a bunch of employees at Humana, all of whom were horrified to see themselves depicted as "villains" in the health care debate. I agree with Yves Smith, this is an absurd angle for a story, an extreme example of selection bias. The people who work at Humana probably have a sense that their employer, um, pays their salary, and thusly, what's good for the employer is probably good for them. Similarly, most people hold a favorable opinion of themselves just as a matter of getting through the day. Not to mention the fact that their understanding of the functioning of Humana is limited to their job description. It is not possible to gain much of a perspective on the health care debate or industry practices by asking a midlevel manager "Do you think you're the worst person alive?"

Since when is it legitimate, much the less newsworthy, to get a company's perception on its embattled status, at least without introducing either some contrary opinion or better yet, facts, to counter the views of people who will inevitably see what they are doing as right? I hate to draw an extreme comparison to make the point, but staff in Nazi concentration camps also thought they were good people. It is well documented that for all save the depressed, people's assessments of their own behavior is biased in their favor.

There is some revelatory stuff in the article, however. David Sirota flags one employee saying that Humana believes in keeping down costs by "controlling utilization":

Now, I know we're supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don't ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do - but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that's just not the case. The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to "control utilization" - that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are "controlled" (read: prevented) from getting it.

Sure, we're all against excessive testing - and there are good ways to deal with those inefficiencies. But that's not what the insurance industry is talking about. It is talking about its practice of rationing care - and now that reality is right there in black and white for all to see.

The truth of the matter is that many of the charges that insurance companies like WellPoint level at the public option and regulatory changes sought in the health reform bill mirror accepted industry practices. WellPoint, which emailed its own customers yesterday attacking the Democratic plan, claimed that health reform will “increase the premiums of those with private coverage.” Yet WellPoint routinely hikes their own premium prices by close to double digits annually, leading to ever-increasing profits. The email stated that millions of Americans would lose their private coverage and be forced onto a government-run option if the Democratic bill passed (nothing could be further from the truth); yet WellPoint routinely uses the practice of rescission to drop their own customers from coverage if they ever try to use it, and they've admitted they would continue doing so unless forced to stop by law.

The email is an example of the astroturf practices from the industry, including, no doubt, pitching to the New York Times a story putting the human face on insurers. Many of these astroturf efforts spring from the same sources as the corporate lobby groups activating the tea party protests at town hall meetings throughout the country this August. They're trying to change the subject, away from facts, like how they're spending less of their premium revenue on medical care over the years, from 90% in the early 1990s to around 80% today. Or how they use rescission and pre-existing condition to make profits off cherry-picking the healthy and denying everyone else care. House and Senate leaders have requested more and more information about insurance company practices; Dennis Kucinich has joined that effort. But the insurance industry, while nominally siding with reform, wants to keep the focus on efforts against it, in service to de-fanging it.

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[Editor's note: Please welcome D-Day to the Crooks and Liars team. Most of you are no doubt familiar with him through his always-impressive work at Digby's Hullabaloo, where he'll continue to contribute; you'll just get to read more of him here. D-Day also helped fill in a few weeks back while I was on vacation. John's trying to swim against the tide of blogs pulling, so he's hired D-Day to write several posts a week for us. We're lucky to have him. -- DN]

Keith Olbermann talks with Jane Mayer in this clip about the release of the CIA IG report and the preliminary investigation into some of the worst practices of the torture regime. She talks about how the IG report reads like "a crime scene," foregrounding the idea that the architects of the policy at CIA were warned in this 2004 report and repeatedly thereafter that their agency would be in deep legal trouble for continuing these actions, and yet they kept justifying them and/or actually engaging in them for years afterward. Nobody took the warnings seriously, knowing both the makeup of the Justice Department and the Presidency at that time, and perhaps banking on how Washington would view these efforts, as part of the past and best kept their, given the Establishment culpability for torture.

Here's just a few of the facts of what CIA interrogators did in our name, just the ones that come from this IG report, as masterfully summarized by Glenn Greenwald:

• Threats of execution, using semi-automatic handguns and power drills

• Threats to kill detainee and his children

• Threats to rape detainee's wife and children in front of him

• Restricting the detainee's carotid artery

• Hitting detainee with the butt end of a rifle

• Blowing smoke in detainee's face for five minutes

• Multiple instances of waterboarding detainees, of the type we prosecuted Japanese war criminals for using:

• Hanging detainee by their arms until interrogators thought their shoulders might be dislocated

• stepping on detainee's ankle shackles to cause severe bruising and pain

• choking detainee until they pass out

• dousing detainee with water on cold concrete floors in cold temperatures to induce hypothermia

• killing detainees through torture techniques, whether accidental or not

• putting detainee in a diaper for days at a time to live in their own filth

On that last point, Digby notes that this could have been used in tandem with another technique we know about, the use of forced enemas, a particularly degrading technique, part and parcel of the humiliations heaped on prisoners that were psycho-sexual in nature. A lot of these stem from misreadings of books like Raphael Patai's "The Arab Mind," which presumed a host of dubious generalizations about Muslims and their predispositions, all of it willingly lapped up by neoconservatives willing to believe that their opponents were somehow subhuman. As if anyone would react favorably to being made to live in their own shit. These stereotypical projections that manifested themselves in essentially an allowance for torturing brown-skinned people have dangerous and deadly repercussions.

more...

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The Henry Louis Gates situation is mainly a distraction, where the media has decided to document a sideshow instead of the hundreds of millions of people struggling every day with substandard health care coverage.

But there's also a serious policy component. Policemen should not be allowed to arrest someone for being an asshole in their own home. If that was the case, right-wing bloggers would all be doing 10-20. It appears clear, and I guess there may be audio tape to this effect, that the cop came to Gates' house, figured out that he was not a burglar, words were exchanged, and then the cop arrested him for disorderly conduct. That's really over the line of what cops should be allowed to do, regardless of the motivations, racial or otherwise.

The crime of disorderly conduct, beloved by cops who get into arguments with citizens, requires that the public be involved. Here's the relevant law from the Massachusetts Appeals Court, with citations and quotations omitted:

The statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct, G.L. c. 272, § 53, has been saved from constitutional infirmity by incorporating the definition of "disorderly" contained in § 250.2(1)(a) and (c) of the Model Penal Code. The resulting definition of "disorderly" includes only those individuals who, "with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof ... (a) engage in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior; or ... (c) create a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose of the actor.' "Public" is defined as affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.

The lesson most cops understand (apart from the importance of using the word "tumultuous," which features prominently in Crowley's report) is that a person cannot violate 272/53 by yelling in his own home.

Read Crowley's report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates's Harvard photo ID. I don't care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates. Any further investigation of Gates' right to be present in the house could have been done elsewhere. His decision to call HUPD seems disproportionate, but we could give him points for thoroughness if he had made that call from his car while keeping an eye on the house. Had a citizen refused to leave Gates' home after being told to, the cops could have made an arrest for trespass.

But for the sake of education, let's watch while Crowley makes it worse. Read on. He's staying put in Gates' home, having been asked to leave, and Gates is demanding his identification. What does Crowley do? He suggests that if Gates wants his name and badge number, he'll have to come outside to get it. What? Crowley may be forgiven for the initial approach and questioning, but surely he should understand that a citizen will be miffed at being questioned about his right to be in his own home. Perhaps Crowley could commit the following sentences to memory: "I'm sorry for disturbing you," and "I'm glad you're all right."

Spoiling for a fight, Crowley refuses to repeat his name and badge number. Most of us would hand over a business card or write the information on a scrap of paper. No, Crowley is upset and he's mad at Gates. He's been accused of racism. Nobody likes that, but if a cop can't take an insult without retaliating, he's in the wrong job. When a person is given a gun and a badge, we better make sure he's got a firm grasp on his temper. If Crowley had called Gates a name, I'd be disappointed in him, but Crowley did something much worse. He set Gates up for a criminal charge to punish Gates for his own embarrassment.

By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53. He gets Gates out onto the porch because a crowd has gathered providing onlookers who could experience alarm. Note his careful recitation (tumultuous behavior outside the residence in view of the public). And please do not overlook Crowley's final act of provocation. He tells an angry citizen to calm down while producing handcuffs. The only plausible question for the chief to ask about that little detail is: "Are you stupid, or do you think I'm stupid?" Crowley produced those handcuffs to provoke Gates and then arrested him. The decision to arrest is telling. If Crowley believed the charge was valid, he could have issued a summons. An arrest under these circumstances shows his true intent: to humiliate Gates.

The cop baited the guy into leaving the house so he could arrest him for making a cop feel bad.

I appreciate the work of law enforcement. But regardless of race, too many cops have the belief that if they get insulted, they have the right to turn that into an arresting offense. That's not the law whatsoever, nor should it be. It creates a chilling effect among the public not to call out bad behavior in law enforcement or raise your voice in any way. I know we're all supposed to believe that cops are saintly, but I live in LA. Police misconduct happens all the time, and we should be vigilant when it does.

Instead, the media takes the soccer ball and chases it into the corner, without any semblance of factual records or perspective. It becomes an emotional argument instead of a factual record of misconduct. We pay cops with tax money. We should not risk arrest when arguing with them.

Prometheus 6: This is pure evil and McCain will love it!

FP Passport: Europe is Obama country

The Cunning Realist: Growing Gills

Threat Level: Anti-Robocall crusader pushes for a crackdown on political phone droids

Each week until the election the producers of Uncounted - The New Math of American Elections, will release a clip from the film because now, more than ever, people need to see stories that will motivate them to stand up and help save our democracy.

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: The Hacktacular Mickey Kaus...The History Commons - an online tool for journalists...Austin paper pulls, apologizes for, article on Netroots...Obama (and Big Media) turn a blind eye to Israeli apartheid...Pre-programmed ideological idiots continue to be welcomed on WaPo op-ed page...Usury is quaint...He's exotic, dammit...MSNBC prez on Fox "You can't trust a word they say"...McCain's bid should've ended last week...The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic reponsibility to inform the public...Stephanopoulos also hacktacular...Nas delivers...He wants journalism, but journalism doesn't want him...The year the L.A. Times died...What traditional media can learn from blogs...Israelis accused of abusing journalist...

How many times have we rolled our eyes at the notion of a "liberal media"? How often have we accused the traditional media of being nothing but stenographers instead of the actual journalists we want them to be? Wouldn't it be wonderful, just once, to able to ask a journalist to explain his story and actually have a dialogue with him/her?

Well, Media Bloodhound did just that. After critiquing Michael Powell's profile of Rudy Giuliani in the NY Times, who should turn up to defend his work than Mr. Powell himself? Not to put too fine a point on it, Powell was a wee bit defensive at first. But to his credit, he did engage with Media Bloodhound and the exchange is an interesting one, with Powell conceding some of MB's points.

I do think that Powell deserves some kudos here...can you imagine Joe Klein or David Broder being at all receptive to a blogger's points, no matter how cogently made? *snort* Neither can I.

A tip of the hat to Media Bloodhound as well, for keeping the discourse civil (especially when Powell initiates his first post with a "your mama..." Seriously.) There's a lot of anger and feelings of betrayal in the blogosphere and then anonymity here makes it easy to write things you would not necessarily say face to face. However, look how much further this discussion goes, when the impulse to slap down is checked. This may not be the great "a-ha" moment that we're all hoping from the traditional media, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Now if we can just get CNN on board...

Mia Culpa caught this little gem at MSNBC.com:

(R)ight now on MSNBC, this is what a paragraph states in the article on the Senate backing the March '08 deadline for withdrawal of troops from Iraq:

"The effect of the timeline would be to "snatch defeat from the jaws of progress in Iraq," agreed Lieberman, who won a new term last fall in a three-way race after losing the Democratic nomination to an anti-war insurgent."

Lieberman's continual hackery and slavish devotion to neo-con ideals, reality be damned aside, can I just say anti-war INSURGENT???? I'll take "Loaded Terminology" for $1000, Alex. So Ned Lamont (with his netroots support) should be viewed as an insurgent? Nice of the traditional media to finally (albeit tacitly) admit to what we've been saying for some time now: there is a war going on here at home too. The war between the truth of how everyone outside the Beltway perceives this country and her actions and those inside the Beltway desperately trying to hang on to the status quo.

Screen capture of the article (in case they scrub it) below the fold:

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