Tonight's debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah "Main Street, Wasilla" Palin yielded few fireworks, but Biden did a good job of keeping the focus where it should be -- on John McCain, his miserable voting record and the fact that a McCain presidency would look a lot like the disaster we've seen from George Bush.

Biden: "Past is prologue, Gwen. The issue is how different is John McCain's policy going to be than George Bush's? I haven't heard anything yet. I haven't heard how his policy is going to be different on Iran than George Bush's. I haven't heard how his policy will be different with Israel than George Bush's, I haven't heard how his policy on Afghanistan will be different than George Bush's, I haven't heard how his policy in Pakistan will be different than George Bush's. It may be, but so far, it is the same as George Bush's, and you know where that policy has taken us. We will make significant change, so once again, we're the most respected nation in the world. That's what we're going to do."

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does.

Couric: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?

Palin: Well, let's see. There's, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but …

Couric: Can you think of any?

Palin: Well, I could think of … any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today. <!-- sphereit end -->

To be fair, it's probably easier to come up with a case that you agree with, but that's what skilled and smart politicians do: they re-frame the question the way they want to answer it. I'm just afraid that if the question were phrased the other way around, she still would have been stumped. This is what people mean when they say she is unqualified to be (Vice-) President. Just contrast her answer with Biden's and that becomes crystal clear.  

(h/t Heather)

  She really is George Bush in lipstick. Katie Couric asks Palin another one of those "gotcha" questions, this time about which publications she reads to learn about the world.

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COURIC: And when it comes to establishing, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and understand the world?

PALIN: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

COURIC: Like what ones specifically?

PALIN:  Umm... all of them. Any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news... Alaska isn't a foreign country where it's kind of suggested it seems like, wow how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, DC may be thinking and doing, when you live up there in Alaska. Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

Good Lord. Put this poor woman out of her misery already. 

DIGG IT!

UPDATE: Glenn gets it.

In order to learn the source of her political knowledge, Katie Couric asked her three times what specific newspapers she read prior to being selected as Vice President, and Palin -- after trying to answer a couple times with her trademark rambling incoherence ("all of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me all these years . . . a vast variety") -- abruptly decided that the question was an elitist, condescending East Coast media assault on Alaska and chided Couric accordingly, without answering. How could you mock that other than by repeating it verbatim?

UPDATE II: Holy crap. It completely slipped my mind that Plain has a degree in journalism. Yes, someone who studied journalism can't name a single magazine or newspaper.

  John McCain and Sarah Palin appeared on CBS Evening News Monday night to rebut claims that Palin agrees with Obama's policy of launching unilateral strikes within Pakistan if there is actionable intelligence that high-value targets are in the area. According to McCain/Palin, it's "gotcha journalism" when a politician gives their opinion on any given issue.

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Couric: Is that something you shouldn't say out loud, Sen. McCain? 

John McCain: Of course not. But, look, I understand this day and age of "gotcha" journalism. Is that a pizza place? In a conversation with someone who you didn't hear … the question very well, you don't know the context of the conversation, grab a phrase. Gov. Palin and I agree that you don't announce that you're going to attack another country …

[...]

Couric: What did you learn from that experience?

Palin: That this is all about "gotcha" journalism. A lot of it is. But that's okay, too. 

How is it possibly a controversial proposition that the United States ought to act, unilaterally if necessary, when the target includes those who are responsible for killing Americans? In bizarro Republican world it's OK to sing a little ditty about bombing a country that never attacked us, but it's not OK to take out people who actually did. This truly is silly season.

Jon Perr notes that McCain did in 2002 what he's now condemning Obama for doing.

  Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked John McCain if he regretted helping the deregulation of Wall Street back in 1999 and McCain said no because it helped grow our economy to where it is today. Yes, that's his story and he's sticking to it. It helped out economy so much that President Paulson is asking for 700 billion dollars with no strings attached to save McCain's economy that is a step away from turning into another great Depression. Is he kidding me? We have another Enron type scandal on our hands in the financial markets only this scandal is on Super steroids. Paul Krugman shares a few thoughts with on us...

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Pelley: In 1999 you were one of the senators who helped pass deregulation of Wall Street. Do you regret that now?

McCain: No, I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy.

McCain has been an advocate of deregulation most of his career, but Thursday he endorsed the biggest bailout in history - a plan for the government to take on the bad debts of financial institutions.

 "We're gonna take over these bad loans. We're gonna take over these bad - these bonds and we're gonna keep you alive. And we're gonna have the taxpayer help you out. But when the time comes and the economy recovers then anything that's gained back is gonna go to the taxpayers first. I'm not saying this isn't gonna be messy. And I'm not saying it isn't gonna be expensive. But we have to stop the bleeding," the senator said.

Pelley: But why would you let the Wall Street executives...

 McCain: I'm not.

 Pelley: ...sail away on their yachts and leave this on the American taxpayer?

 McCain: Well, it's not the greedy Wall Street people that I worry about, although I am, like most Americans, frankly, enraged. It's basically a Ponzi scheme, as you know, that sooner or later was gonna collapse. And I'd like to get that money back from them. But we've gotta fix the average citizen who's the innocent bystander that is in danger of losing their pensions, their 401(k)'s, their IRAs. Their very life savings are at risk here. 

He doesn't worry about the greedy Wall Street people. They had nothing to do with it in McCain's mind. They did it because it was raining one day and they got a little bored. My God, please help us. A basic tenet of Conservatism is deregulation. Sorry Sully, yes, you've been conned...Get rid of all the rules that corporations have to follow, which in most cases cuts back on their profits so they can have an unfettered hand to do what they like without consequences. The end result is what we have now. A complete meltdown of our financial institutions.

It's also geared to destroy the New Deal and keep all the acquired wealth of the nation in only a very select group of people and corporations so they can have complete control of our nation. They all say how much they hated England back in the day, but that's what they really want. Kings and Queens and Dukes, oh my! A ruling class of moneychangers while the rest of us bow down to their awesome power.

Many bloggers have been covering the Couric/McCain editing scandal since it began. CNN's Reliable Sources picked it up for a few minutes and even the MSMers agreed.

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KURTZ: That is not what McCain said right after Katie said, "What's your response to that?" And we see these pictures now of McCain with General Petraeus. That was used to cover an editing break, where then they substituted -- not substituted, but added another answer that McCain had given from elsewhere in the interview.

STEVE ROBERTS: Well, I teach ethics at George Washington University. I would use this as a case study of what you should not do.

I was able to get the text of CBS' own in-house guidelines on their editing practices.

Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response. In short, we cannot create an answer merely because we wish the subject had said it better.

CBS violated their own standards. At the end of the segment, Howard Kurtz said this:

KURTZ: CBS says that this was, in fact, a mistake made by a young producer under deadline pressure.

CBS's latest excuse for breaking their own journalistic ethics is a farce. Their first response to this story was to say that it was no big deal:

Of the 14-minute interview, a little less than three minutes was used on the Evening News. A CBS spokesperson tells TVNewser, “As all news organizations do with extended interviews, last night’s Obama and McCain interviews were edited to fit the available time and to give viewers a fair expression of the candidates’ major differences. The full transcript and video were and still are available at CBSNews.com.”

Now they blame a young producer for being under time pressure. OK, let's get this straight. <added>Sources have told me that The CBS Evening News is their major "hard news" program of the day and they certainly would not have had a rookie running the show for a major John McCain interview with Katie Couric. And there are many others involved in the editing process that know the CBS guidelines who would have caught this blunder. Sorry, their excuse doesn't pass the smell test.

(full transcript below the fold)

Continue reading »

Is there any doubt that the media is in the bag for McCain? Maybe I should say---at his barbeques? McCain was profiled on 60 Minutes Sunday night and it was the type of softball profile we're used to seeing for Republicans, but when they brought up waterboarding----well then, it's time to at least be serious. McCain unequivocally says it's torture and brings up the prosecution of the Japanese and their use of it in WWII to make his point.

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Pelley asked him about American interrogation methods today. Asked if water boarding is torture, McCain said, "Sure. Yes. Without a doubt."

"So the United States has been torturing POWs?" Pelley asked.

"Yes. Scott, we prosecuted Japanese war criminals after World War II.
And one of the charges brought against them, for which they were convicted, was that they water-boarded Americans," McCain said.

"How did we lose our way?" Pelley asked.

"I don't know the answer to that. I think one of the failures maybe was not to listen more to our military leadership, including people like General Colin Powell, on this issue," McCain said.

How then did John McCain lose HIS way on torture? Why didn't he ask him the reason he flip flopped and voted in favor of waterboarding if in fact McCain believes it's torture? Isn't that the type of question that America needs an answer to? Howard Kurtz even brought it up on his show and criticized the media over their treatment of it a few weeks ago.

KURTZ: But another Senator McCain was on display this week, one who seemed to differ from the former prisoner of war who has made his signature issue out of opposing torture tactics by American interrogators. McCain voted against the bill to ban tactics such as waterboarding, saying he felt agencies like the CIA needed flexibility in terror investigations. Why has this received so little media attention?

“The New York Times” today has a story about this five days after the vote. “The Washington Post” did it yesterday. But most of the establishment media kissed it off.

McCain closes by saying he can win in November because he's a conservative Republican, but Pelley had nothing in the piece about the contempt held for him by conservatives---especially the talk show hosts that skewer him constantly. And what about the Hagee endorsement? Can't mention that either? Contact Scott Pelley/ 60 Minutes and ask them why these most important issues were either purposefully left out of the segment and why journalistic malpractice was committed.

ADDRESS:
60 Minutes
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

EMAIL: 60m@cbsnews.com

PHONE: (212) 975-3247

More and better Democrats....that's the plan. And don't think for a minute that the leadership isn't getting very nervous. Blue America and its other ActBlue counterparts are having an impact on Washington DC, and we can't do that without you.

WSJ:

On Tuesday night, two veteran Maryland congressmen became the first members of Congress to lose re-election bids this year, and the first significant notches on the belts of activists unhappy with party moderates.

The decisive losses of both moderates -- Democrat Rep. Albert Wynn and Republican Rep. Wayne Gilchrest -- highlight tension brewing in both parties, where activists representing more extreme factions are raising thousands of dollars online to fund primary challengers and run ads against incumbents.

For most incumbents, primary challengers generally aren't much of a threat because they often struggle to raise money and improve their name-recognition. This year, however, several high-profile lawmakers are facing something of a scare. Republican presidential challenger Ron Paul has pulled back from his national campaigning somewhat to work on getting re-elected to his congressional seat in Texas, where he faces a challenge from a Galveston city councilman. In Ohio, Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich is facing four primary challengers and some grumbling back home in Cleveland that he has spent more time running for president than taking care of business for his district.

Matt Stoller, a prominent Democratic blogger, has launched a campaign against 39 so-called Bush Dog Democrats -- House members who voted in favor of Iraq war funding and warrantless wiretapping -- whom he considers to be unworthy of being in office.[..]

Criticized for his vote to authorize the war in Iraq, Mr. Wynn drew the ire of liberal activists and bloggers, who spent months dissecting his votes and examining fund-raising reports. Much of Ms. Edwards money came via donations on the Democratic fund-raising site ActBlue.com, but MoveOn.org also became involved, sending out a fund-raising email and asking supporters to held defeat "right-wing Democrat Al Wynn."

"We'll be working this fall for 'more' Democrats, but today we struck a blow on behalf of better Democrats," wrote Markos Moulitsas Zuniga on the popular blog DailyKos.com Tuesday night. "Our caucus is once again on notice. If they continue to serve corporate interests rather than their constituents, if they insist on remaining aloof to the nation's popular sentiment, they'll get booted in a Democratic primary like Joe Lieberman in 2006 and Al Wynn in 2008."

(correction) Another huge sweeping victory as far as the total number of voters for the Democratic Party in what has become another important election narrative:

In last week's SC GOP primary, McCain and Huckabee (the top 2 finishers), got 147,283 and 132,440 votes respectively. That's a total of 279,723. Obama just pulled down 291,000 by himself.

So the totals are roughly: GOP - 442,918 Dems 530,322

(It looks like we're back up!)

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In a perfect world, there are some areas for which we would no longer need a "debate" and could move on to finding solutions.  The question of whether waterboarding is torture should not need debate.  The question of global warming should not need debate.  Global warming is real.  The scientific community agrees--that is, those not on the payrolls of major polluters like Exxon.  

But leave it to CBS and anchor Katie Couric to keep pushing the framing that the debate lies with the existence of global warming and its causes.  And in the interest of "informing" the electorate (when in reality, they are simply retarding the discussion), Couric poses that question to the 10 major candidates.  Of course, two of the candidates question global warming--Republican Fred "Why'd I wake up for this?" Thompson and Mike "I reject evolution, why not all other scientific documentation?" Huckabee.

Think Progress:  Huckabee responds that "scientifically," he doesn't know whether global warming is "overblown." Thompson goes a step further, claiming that the "state of entitlements" and "extremists" who "want to do drastic things to our economy" are the real problems:

THOMPSON: There are a lot of unanswered questions. We don't know to the extent this is a cyclical thing. This may or may not effect very much. The extremists are the ones who want to do drastic things to our economy before we have more answers as to how much good we can do and whether people in the other parts of the world are going to contribute. It's the fact that our entitlements are bankrupting the next generation. We're spending the money of those yet to be born and we can't continue that way.

Thompson and Huckabee are wrong. The debate is over about whether manmade global warming is a threat. Even members of the Bush White House have admitted so.

Part I: Courtesy Watchdog.org

Part II: Download | play Download | play (h/t Heather)

CBS News aired the results of their 5 month investigation into veteran suicides this evening and what they found was devastating. In 2005 alone, 125 veterans committed suicide each week and of the more than 88,000 vets returning from Iraq, more than 28% of them have experienced mental health problems. CBS' Armen Keteyian talked with Paul Sullivan of Veterans For Common Sense who had this to say about the dismal system the VA has for tracking veteran suicides;

Sullivan: "We call it the don't look, don't find policy. If the VA doesn't collect the data, then they don't have to do anything about it."

  Katie Couric admitted this week that she felt “corporate pressure” when she was at NBC to ease off of Condi Rice and the Bush Administration after a “tough interview.”

After the interview, Couric said she received an email from an NBC exec "forwarded without explanation" from a viewer who wrote that she had been "unnecessarily confrontational."

"I think there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations," she said in an interview with former journalist and author Marvin Kalb during "The Kalb Report" forum at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Here’s my follow-up: an NBC exec takes a single email from a viewer that seriously? Should we start writing more emails to NBC to get them to lean on their on-air talent to be more confrontational with administration officials?

AP Via Yahoo:

Former CBS news anchor Dan Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit Wednesday against the network, former corporate parent Viacom Inc., and three of his former bosses.

Rather's complaint stems from "CBS' intentional mishandling" of the aftermath of a discredited story about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also names CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, and Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News.

Rather is seeking $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

The Wall Street Journal has a .pdf of Rather's filings.

  A few days ago, I posted a video that MoveOn produced on Katie Couric's stenography and encouraged C&Lers to write into CBS and express their disappointment at the lack of journalistic standards in Couric's reports.

Several of you have and both C&L and MoveOn have received feedback that is...oh, let's just say a little prickly:

From our comments:

Here is the response they sent me:

"Sorry you didn't get a chance to see much of the reporting from Iraq....if you had, you wouldn't have written such a note...imagine all your info came from a blog...too bad."

And to a MoveOn member (from a very polite letter):

"Actually most intelligent people were very impressed by the quality of our reports from Iraq and Syria ...Apparently you missed most of the interviews that were done over there...imagine you got your information from a blog somewhere..."

Hmmm....defensive much, Katie?  Christy at Firedoglake:

Oh, I get it. Legitimate criticism from viewers can simply be ignored if you dismiss it as coming from a blog.  But not asking the critical questions, repeating talking points wholesale, failing to follow-up when you are being snowed and charmed, and buying military spin outright while feeding it by the spoonful to your adoring public is just peachy?  So much for the whole "journalistic integrity" canard.  And the tanking ratings.

The two senior producers at CBS Evening News are Jim McGlinchy (jmp@cbsnews.com) and Betty Chin ( bc2@cbsnews.com).  I'm working on e-mails to both them asking whether (a) this is the usual response of CBS to legitimate viewer criticism and (b) whether they would officially like to disavow this sort of customer non-service.  I'll certainly let you know what, if any, response I get.  No matter how snippy the response may be, the dodge and weave on the real issues on journalistic integrity come across loud and clear.   Perhaps they should hear from you as well?

From their email:

The media's failure to ask tough questions helped President Bush get us into Iraq. Now, it's happening again--blind repetition of Bush's Iraq lies. If the media doesn't shape up, our troops could be stuck in Iraq for years.

This past week, CBS News anchor Katie Couric reported from Iraq. Rather than asking tough questions to Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, Couric asked softballs and then repeated White House talking points--over and over again. Bush's troop escalation is failing miserably, but Couric's viewers got the opposite impression. [..]

Our nation can't afford Couric's lapdog journalism--we need strong watchdog journalism. Can you watch the video exposing Couric's bad reporting and email her today?

If you do email Katie, please let MoveOn know that you did.

UPDATE: Christy at FireDogLake has more...