The wingnuts do get themselves all worked up, don't they?

The fringey-right are upset at the news that Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow attended an off-the-record briefing at the White House:

A day after key White House officials declared the Fox News Channel wasn't a news organization, President Obama met with MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Talk about your delicious hypocrisy.

Fittingly, the news was broken by FNC's Bret Baier during Tuesday's "Special Report" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, relevant section at 1:45, h/t Hot Air via NBer Thomas Stewart):

BRET BAIER, HOST: And finally, during this morning's off-camera White House briefing with reporters, ABC's Jake Tapper asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the ongoing White House attacks on FOX News Channel.

After being asked about the charge that FOX isn't a real news organization, Gibbs answered, quote "We render opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness of that coverage."

Tapper: "That's a sweeping declaration that they're not a news organization. How are they different from say, ABC, MSNBC, Univision?"

Gibbs: "You and I should watch around 9:00 tonight or 5:00 this afternoon."

Tapper: "I'm not talking about the opinion programs or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying that thousands of individuals who work for a media organization do not work for a news organization. Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?"

Gibbs: "That is our opinion."

Well, the White House's strong opinions about our opinion shows - - Glenn Beck runs at 5:00 p.m. and Sean Hannity at 9:00 p.m. -- apparently do not extend to similar shows on other networks.

A White House official confirms to us that the audience for Monday's off the record briefing with President Obama included MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

Hmmm. So the White House thinks Fox isn't a news organization because it has a perspective, and specifically points fingers at Beck and Hannity.

What does the Adminstration think Olbermann and Maddow have?

I guess it's not a problem for a new organization and its members to have a perspective so long as it's one the White House shares.

They seem to miss the big difference between people like Olbermann and Maddow: They attempt to gather and present facts on their shows. Sometimes they slip up, but it's not usually intentional. Get it?

And they're suffering from memory loss again:

The guest list included Sean Hannity, Neal Boortz, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham, and Mike Gallagher. (Rush Limbaugh was unable to attend.) Friday’s off-the-record talk, set for 30 minutes, ended up lasting 90 minutes, where Bush told his guests that the war on terror has to be about right versus wrong, “because if it’s about Christianity versus Islam, we’ll lose.” He also showed them the pistol Saddam Hussein had when he was captured.

On the day I was born, said my father, said he
"I've an an elegant legacy waitin' for ye.

'Tis a rhyme for your lips and a song for your heart

To sing it whenever the world falls apart.

"

Look, look, look to the rainbow

Follow it over the hill and the stream
Look, look, look to the rainbow

Follow the fellow who follows a dream.

For those of you who are younger, who may not quite get exactly what the Kennedys meant to us, this lovely piece from Bob Herbert explains it well - they made us feel better than we were, and made us want to be better people. He suggests that their theme song, rather than "Camelot," should instead be "Follow the Rainbow" from "Finian's Rainbow":

The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”

Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”

Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.

“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”

Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.

“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”

That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.

Far-right, religious zealot and GOP hack Ben "Larry Craig was framed" Stein has finally been purged from the New York Times:

Ben Stein's TV ads for a scuzzy "free" credit product have finally caught up to him: The New York Times has fired Stein as a Sunday business columnist for violating ethics guidelines.

Stein was pilloried online for his endorsement of the bait-and-switch operation, which offers a free credit score but charges an outrageous $30 per month to see the credit report behind the score. As Reuters blogger Felix Salmon pointed out, consumers can get a free online report under federal law.

The Times' issue, though, is that Stein has violated its ethics policy, which states "it is an inherent conflict for a journalist to perform public relations work, paid or unpaid." Salmon blogged about that issue, too. It's surprising that it hasn't come up until now; Stein has been a regular contributor to the Times for four years, and is quite recognizable to TV audiences. After playing a high-school teacher in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off (R.I.P. John Hughes), Stein went on to host two shows on Comedy Central, including the Emmy-award-winning Win Ben Stein's Money, and a show on VH1. He also frequently appeared in cameo roles on sitcoms like Seinfeld.
Read on...

Stein?....Stein?....Stein?....

Earlier this month, George Washington University professor and New Republic legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen turned to anonymous sources in a blistering - and controversial - attack on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's judicial temperament. Now just days after the raging right predictably made Rosen's smears a centerpiece in the battle against Sotomayor, the mainstream media are following their lead.

As it turns out, 24 hours after McClatchy claimed, "Sotomayor's take-no-guff demeanor could alter court dynamics," Thursday's New York Times headline announced, "Sotomayor's sharp tongue raises issue of temperament."

That conservative mouthpieces like Michael Gerson, Karl Rove and the Washington Times would amplify Rosen's second-hand smear that Sotomayor is "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench" is unsurprising. (For his part, Rove this week called Sotomayor "a schoolmarm" and a "lightweight.")

But two days after even Rosen acknowledged, "Of course, Judge Sotomayor should be confirmed to the Supreme Court," the New York Times built on his earlier critique. In a piece featuring a preponderance of positive assessments from her judicial colleagues and attorneys appearing before her court, the Times instead emphasized the negative:

But to detractors, Judge Sotomayor's sharp-tongued and occasionally combative manner -- some lawyers have described her as "difficult" and "nasty" -- raises questions about her judicial temperament and willingness to listen. Her demeanor on the bench is an issue that conservatives opposed to her nomination see as a potential vulnerability -- and one that Mr. Obama carefully considered before selecting her...

Other lawyers, though, are not so enamored. In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which conducts anonymous interviews with lawyers to assess judges, she has gone from generally rave reviews to more tepid endorsements. Among the comments from lawyers was that she is a "terror on the bench" who "behaves in an out-of-control manner" and attacks lawyers "for making an argument she doesn't like."

"I felt she could be very judgmental in the sense that she doesn't let you finish your argument before she jumps in and starts asking questions," said Sheema Chaudhry, who appeared before Judge Sotomayor in an asylum case last year. "She's brilliant and she's qualified, but I just feel that she can be very, how do you say, temperamental."

Which apparently is the exact discussion TNR's Jeffrey Rosen would like to see. After all, in his 2007 PBS series and accompanying book, The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America, Rosen declared judicial temperament as embodied by the great John Marshall the key to determining success or failure on the Court. Of course, early on Rosen praised incoming Chief Justice John Roberts as "resurrecting Marshall's vision." Ultimately, a disappointed Rosen expressed buyer's remorse over Roberts' utter disregard for precedent and unanimity, lamenting, "Will Roberts ever get better?"

Sadly, only Rosen's first opinions and initial judgments seem to make it into the mainstream media.

(Glenn Greenwald has more on Rosen, the New York Times and anonymous sources. This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

Men may not be necessary to Maureen Dowd, but a professional ethicist appears to be.
TPM:

Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

TPM's Josh Marshall on Thurs:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Almost verbatim. Look, we bloggers take shortcuts and copy and paste others all the time. I do it because there are a whole host of people out there who write better than I. But we GIVE CREDIT when we do it, as I did above when acknowledging that this post came from TPM. For a Pulitzer Prize winner to lift work done by bloggers and pass it off as her own on the pages of the NY Times is just not cool.

UPDATE: MoDo admits to HuffPo that she lifted the words and will give Josh Marshall proper credit...but I'm puzzled by her alibi:

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.
we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Now am I mistaken, or did MoDo just excuse her plagiarism by saying that she actually was trying to plagiarize her friend?

Glenn Greenwald points out why the use of unnamed sources is so misleading to the public:

In order to assuage concerns among progressives that the Obama administration intends to follow in the Bush administration's footsteps by trying to cut Social Security benefits, high-level Obama officials have been telling journalists such as The American Prospect's Ezra Klein -- on the condition of anonymity -- that they have no intention of touching Social Security, producing reports which then faithfully communicate that message, such as this one from Klein, two weeks ago:

What people at the White House have told me on Social Security -- and what I wrote in the post she's referencing -- is that there's no intention to touch Social Security in the foreseeable future. It's not a priority and it's not a political winner. . . . The problem, they say, is health care, not Social Security, and that's where the White House is focusing.

Based on those same anonymous conversations, Klein wrote other posts telling progressives who are worried about Obama's intention to cut Social Security that they were worrying about something that doesn't exist.

But in The New York Times today, David Brooks recounted what he described as "conversations with four senior members of the administration." Those unnamed Obama officials all called Brooks in order to refute his column from last week which argued "that the Obama budget is a liberal, big government document that should make moderates nervous." Brooks -- like Klein -- granted anonymity to and then proceeded to quote all four "senior members of the Obama administration" (a) without explaining why he did so, (b) without describing efforts, if any, to persuade them to use their names and (c) without providing any information about who they are or what their motives might be (all flagrant violations of the supposed NYT policy governing the use of anonymity). These paragraphs were the result of the anonymity Brooks gave to the Obama White House (emphasis in original):

Besides, the long-range debt is what matters, and on this subject President Obama is hawkish.

He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending.

What Klein's anonymous White House sources told him ("there's no intention to touch Social Security in the foreseeable future") is directly contrary to what Brooks' anonymous White House sources, two weeks later, told him (Obama "is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security"). But there's no way to resolve those contradictory White House claims because Klein and Brooks allowed these officials to hide behind anonymity when making these claims. That's what anonymity does -- it allows dubious or even false government claims to be spouted with impunity and without any accountability.

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This could affect the blogosphere as we know it, most specifically news aggregators:

A copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit filed last month against The New York Times Co., owner of The Boston Globe and its Boston.com website, is being watched closely by news organizations, Internet researchers, independent bloggers, and companies that aggregate news online by linking to a variety of news sites.

At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites.The case has been scheduled for trial in US District Court in Boston as early as Monday.

"This is the first case where these intellectual property issues have come to a head," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge. "If the judge was to rule for GateHouse on every point, it would have far-reaching implications for the news and information ecosystem that underlies the Web as we know it."

Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a school for professional journalists, said the case could result in new guidelines for how much, if any, content from one website can be used by another. "This is standard procedure across the Internet now," she said. "Newsrooms adopted the procedure from other practitioners."

I think I've made my feelings about Bill Kristol very clear in the past, but allow me to reiterate: He is never right. He is wrong constantly. Anything and everything he says is a pathetic mix of lies and ignorance.

Now that we're clear, I have to ask, what will it take before the New York Times realizes that they are paying for utter and complete wrongness to pollute their paper?

In less than six months since his column began, the New York Times had already issued at least three corrections for factual errors in Bill Kristol columns.

Today, he's given his editors another reason to keep their red pens close at hand.

Kristol's assertion that the 9/11 attacks "did not result in a much-feared (by intellectuals) wave of popular Islamophobia or xenophobia" in this country will surely come a surprise to the millions of Muslims and immigrants in this country.

This goes against plentiful data and the lived experience of Muslims, Arab Americans and immigrants in our country. Many Muslim Americans reported increased hostility toward them after 9/11. Shockingly, Kristol's "non-existent" Islamophobia and xenophobia have also proved deadly for a number of Americans who became victims of hate crimes after 9/11. (See Divided We Fall for a moving account of this painful reality.)

Considering the amount of xenophobia that Bill Kristol and his PNAC buddies have unleashed on this country in pursuit of their agenda, I'm surprised he thinks he can write this without bolts of lightening striking him down.

    In the midst of all the convention hooplah, some important stories get missed. That seems to be the case with the tale of Bush ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been engaged in some very irregular cozying up with Pakistani presidential hopeful Asif Zardari.

Mr. Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts, a senior United States official said. Other officials said Mr. Khalilzad had planned to meet with Mr. Zardari privately next Tuesday while on vacation in Dubai, in a session that was canceled only after Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, learned from Mr. Zardari himself that the ambassador was providing “advice and help.” “Can I ask what sort of ‘advice and help’ you are providing?” Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry e-mail message to Mr. Khalilzad. “What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personnel?” Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to The New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.

A senior American official said that Mr. Khalilzad had been advised to “stop speaking freely” to Mr. Zardari, and that it was not clear whether he would face any disciplinary action.

State and White House officials from Negroponte on down are said to be furious with Khalilzhad for his planned vaction with Zardari and his unofficial contacts at a time when the US wants to be seen as neutral in the Pakistani presidential race. Zalmay is an old political hand who knows the rules and White House plans but decided to break them anyway. Why?

Well, maybe its just that, like other neocons, Khalilzhad doesn't think the rules apply to him. The founding PNAC member certainly didn't mind interfering in Afghan elections to get his old buddy Karzai elected (although that was probably on White House orders). Maybe he felt he could do the same for his new friend Zardari with impunity.

But the worrying element is that there have been rumors for a while that Khalilzhad, who is Afghan born, has his sights on the Afghani presidency himself. While Karzai has been confrontational with Pakistan about its ISI intelligence agency and their support for the Taliban (something Zardari has been helpless to do anything about). He's also allied himself strongly with India in response to Pakistani treatment of Afghanistan -something that led to the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul recently, carried out by ISI proxies.

If Khalilzhad does have his sights on the presidency, then he could be a very different matter. Despite his neocon credentials he was an early and staunch supporter of the Taliban - chaperoning their officials to a Unocal Oil party in their honor and declaring in a 1996 WaPo op-ed that "The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran." He went on to say that the Taliban's brand of Islam was more akin to that of Saudi Arabia...

Zardari is by some accounts quite unstable and paranoid - if an alliance with the ambassador would definitely appeal to the highly corrupt Pakistani politico. He might think that he would thereby get U.S. protection, just like Musharraf did, by default even if the Bush administration didn't originally intend to extend it. Kalilzhad might be thinking that Zardari can leverage him into power. India, I'm sure, has thought of all this already and will have been burning up the phones to the White House since the story broke, demanding to know what the runaway ambassador thinks he was doing.

  Boy, this is great. On the same day Bill Kristol says this:

"NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. [...] 'What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.'

"That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge."

The newspaper in which he said it says this:

"Senator John McCain was not in a “cone of silence” on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California. "

What's even worse is that his editors were forced to change the online version of the article and make a note at the bottom that a different version was published in the print version. How many more times does Bill Kristol have to be proven completely and utterly wrong before the Times fires him?

  This week, Americans were introduced to Wrong-Way McCain. To be sure, it's the same John McCain ("McSame") who would continue the policies of George W. Bush that 80% of Americans believe have put the country on the wrong track. It's also the same "Jukebox John" who has changed his tune 61 times on issues foreign and domestic, including a dizzying 10 times in two weeks back in June. But as he showed repeatedly over the past several days, Wrong-Way McCain is also the Republican presidential nominee who simply can't keep his stories straight.

Whether the result of crass political opportunism, transparent deceit or just plain confusion, on at least 7 occasions this week alone, Wrong Way McCain couldn't remember what he stood for, if anything at all.

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(via HuffPo. click for full-size image of both horrendous photoshop jobs)

In case you needed any more proof that FOX News is produced by 12 year olds with the temperament of 5 year olds (not to mention the Photoshop skills of 8 year olds), here you go. After NYT reporters Jacques Steinberg and Steve Radicliffe wrote a story critical of the propaganda news station, Fox & Friends hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade get their revenge by showing very poorly photoshopped images of the two.

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MediaMatters has more:

After putting up the photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe, Fox & Friends also featured a photograph of Steinberg's face superimposed over that of a poodle, while Reddicliffe's face was superimposed over that of the man holding the poodle's leash.

Below is a screenshot of Fox & Friends featuring the photo it used of Steinberg, with the original photo on its left. Comparing the two photos, it appears that the following changes have been made: Steinberg's teeth have been yellowed, his nose and chin widened, and his ears made to protrude further.

UPDATE: The Times responds:

Neither Steinberg nor Reddicliffe were reachable for comment Wednesday. But Times Culture Editor Sam Sifton called the Fox photo work "disgusting," and the criticism of the paper's reporting "a specious and meritless claim."

"It wasn't a hit piece," Sifton told E&P. "It was straight news. This was a hit piece by Fox News. It is beneath comment." Asked if the paper planned to respond to Fox's actions, he said no: "It is fighting with a pig, everyone gets dirty and the pig likes it."

As my esteemed colleague Logan noted the other day, Bill Kristol embarrassed himself (again) last week when he claimed on the pages of The New York Times that he couldn't find a single instance where an eventual Presidential nominee lost by a primary by a 41%+ margin. The Old Gray Lady finally caught up with blogosphere and has issued a "correction" to Kristol's column.

Correction: May 21, 2008

In his column on Monday, Bill Kristol said he could not find a recent primary in which the candidate who would go on to win the nomination lost by as big a margin as
Barack Obama lost by (41 points) in West Virginia.
Mitt Romney won the essentially uncontested Utah primary on Feb. 5 with about 90 percent of the vote.

Also, the California Supreme Court is based in San Francisco, not the state capital, Sacramento.

Jeremy Jerry Skurnik of RoomEight, the blogger who first caught Kristol's error, isn't satisfied with the dismissive apology. Read why here.

John Cole says it best:

I am noticing a trend here. Kristol claims government is inefficient, ineffective, and bad, gets a bunch of his buddies elected, and proves it. He also rails against the MSM, claims they can’t get their facts straight, gets a job at the NY Times, and proves it.

For years now, FOXNews pundit William Kristol has been wrong on nearly every subject he's chosen to write about or speak to. His follies at Fox are legendary, and since bringing his special brand of fact- & research-free hackery to the pages of the New York Times, he's made not one, not two, but now three glaring gaffes to add to his comical body of work.

Think Progress:

In his New York Times column today, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol tried to find reasons for conservatives to be optimistic about 2008 elections, despite the claims of some Republicans that “the Republican brand is in the trash can.” To support his argument, Kristol pointed to Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) 41-point loss in the West Virginia primary:

On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary — by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.

Apparently Kristol didn’t look hard enough. Writing at Room Eight, New York political consultant Jerry Skurnik says it took him “all of 2 minutes to find what Kristol couldn’t find.” On Feb. 5, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney beat presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) by 85 points in the Utah primary: Read on...

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In one of the odder transformations seen this primary season, some of the harshest critics of Hillary Clinton are now championing her candidacy with great gusto. Kristol seems to lead this pack of concern trolls from the vast rightwing conspiracy, but we've also seen Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough,and Karl Rove among others rush to her defense. And then last month's bizarre endorsement from her once arch nemesis Richard Mellon Scaife.

In this clip from yesterday's Fox News Sunday Kristol rallies to her side saying, "She is a better candidate than he is. "

And Kristol continues today in the NY Times:

I normally don’t claim to speak for other members of the vast right-wing conspiracy. After all, we’re each nefarious in our own, individual way. Indeed, we often disagree with one another.

But I do think I can speak for most of my fellow right-wingers when I say this: We once looked forward with unambivalent glee to the fall of the house of Clinton. Many of us still do. But we also see the liberal media failing to give Hillary Clinton the respect she deserves. So, since we conservatives believe in giving credit where credit is due, it falls to us to praise Hillary.

Of course, the disdain for all things Clinton has not lessened one iota among these people. The annoying clucking sound we hear is only Republicans savoring the prospect of Democratic discord, their only real means to retaining the White House.