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November 11, 2009 CNN

The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.

The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.

In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

From the LA Times read more...

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Sometimes something you see on TV does come as a surprise no matter what the motivation behind it. The Factor highlights Goldberg with a Weekdays With Bernie segment so that FOX can bang the drum on librul bias. Bernie Goldberg has made a living out of trying to uncover and expose all the dirty hippie liberal bias in the media, but as BillO was playing the usual conservative victim card that FOX News lives on, Bernie stunned the loofah man. Oh Bernie, said BillO. Why oh why are we attacked so much? We're the only network that is fair and balanced and ... sniff...sniff ... we pay such a heavy price for it.

Bernie begins by sticking up for Roger Ailes and his right wing propaganda network, but then Bernie took a U-turn into reality. He praised FOX for breaking stories that the MSM won't and they are sooo jealous that they throw spitballs at the battles ship ... BUT ....

Goldberg:...this is what the so called mainstream media do. They get angry at FOX. This is wrong. This is the spitballs at the battleship argument, but sometimes Bill -- and whether you acknowledge it or not I'm going to state it -- sometimes FOX brings on the criticism itself. There are some programs on FOX that are not only NOT fair and balanced, they're commentary shows. They don't have to be, but they brag about how fair and balanced they are. They don't cover rallies and tea parties, they cheerlead rallies and tea parties, and as a journalist I am totally against that.

O'Reilly: All right ...

Goldberg: And to that extent the criticism is legitimate. By and large it's not...

O'Reilly: The problem there though is that all editorial pages cheerlead for their crew so if you read any newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, any newspaper in the country, they'll be cheerleading for the country global warming and they'll be saying, hey get out on Earth Day...

Goldberg: Right.

O'Reilly: Do this, do that, OK, fine and I don't have any problem with that. Wait Bernie. I don't have any problem with get out on Earth Day and be environmentally correct. No problem, they all do it. But if you then take a commentary, clearly label this and then they say, hey you tea party people, go on out there and show them that you don't like this big government intrusion. What's the difference?

Goldberg: the difference...I don't want to get too inside baseball with you.

O'Reilly: Come on, Bernie. What's the difference?

Goldberg: Here's a good answer. Don't pretend that you're being objective. Don't go on the air ... I don't mean you, I mean others on this network. Don't go on the air and say these tea parties are a cross section of America, they are not a cross section of America. Don't pretend to be a journalist if you're not a journalist. If you want to be a commentator and comment then be ...

BillO:...well let's get Glenn Beck do, Glenn beck comes on and he basically says I'm every man, I'm not a journalist, he says he's not a journalist, "I'm every man and I'm worried about the country and this is why I'm worried," and he has the blackboard and he has this and this is who I like, tea party guys and this is who I don't like, whoever Beck doesn't like...I don't see any subterfuge there, Sean Hannity comes on right after the Factor and Hannity says look, I'm a Reagan Republican, that's who I am, Sean Hannity. He's not trying to fool anybody, not trying to say anything like that. he says, "I'm a Reagan Republican so this is how I see the world. I mean, come on Bernie, these are legitimate stances, every man, Reagan Republican. What's the beef.

Goldberg: The commentary part of it is totally legitimate, but to give false information to because you're a commentator is unacceptable.

O'Reilly: If it's false information I agree, but I haven't seen a lot of that.

Goldberg: Wait a minute, are you telling me that you think those people at the tea parties were a cross section of America. There are as many liberal democrats as conservatives, there are as many people who support Obama

O'Reilly:I didn't hear any person say there were as many liberal democrats...

Goldberg: Oh, I did..I did, you want a few names?

O'Reilly: No!

Goldberg: You want a few names? Yea I know you don't...
Those people pretend that they're journalists at the same time I'm not a journalist. Well, if you're not a journalist don't pretend to be one ...

---

Goldberg: They go on the air and give their opinions, which is fine with me. They then state as facts things..

O'Reilly: Facts?

Goldberg:Facts, things that aren't facts at all.

Bernie called them liars. Wow, and he got hot and bothered with BillO in this segment -- and when he challenged Bill, The O Dog backed down. Why wasn't Beck worried about the country for eight years under Bush when this country was almost demolished by the conservative movement? Because a Republican was in office -- so his everyman act is a lie, but we know that. The folks here at C&L understand that. Hannity and Beck aren't the only two people making a mockery out of the FOX News brand. I wish Bernie would have gotten mad enough to drop a few names to BillO's audience. He may have gotten fired over it.

It's the whole network that cheers on the tea parties, that attacks almost every position President Obama was elected to legislate and that make up facts to conform to their opinions.

No doubt Goldberg is thinking of scenes like this one from Sean Hannity's show, featuring "reporter" Griff Jenkins positively cheerleading the Tea Party Express crowds.

BillO uses false equivalencies to justify FOX's behavior, which is wrong. FOX bills itself as the only fair and balanced network and even runs ads denouncing other cable news networks ... for their failures to cover the tea parties the way they did.

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The stupid, it hurts. From the LA Times- Glenn Beck and the Society for (In)sanity in Art:

Last night Fox News ranter Glenn Beck went off on the art made more than 70 years ago for Rockefeller Center, corporate headquarters of NBC and -- not coincidentally -- supposed arch-enemy of Rupert Murdoch's television empire. To the surprise of no one, but to the great amusement of the blogosphere (here, here and here) -- Beck donned his art critic's tin-foil conspiracy hat to find hidden evidence of "progressives, fascists and communists" in the carved reliefs and paintings of a landmark Manhattan building complex that was made a national historic monument in 1987. (Let's see; who was president that year? Oh, yeah: Commie-symp Ronald Reagan.)

How nutty did Beck get? As nutty as usual. He pointed to a portrait of Lenin in Mexican master Diego Rivera's destroyed Rockefeller lobby mural, "Man at the Crossroads," but forgot to mention that old John D. had the mural removed because of it. (Facts are stubborn things -- even more stubborn than demagoguery.) With comedy stylings like that, Beck is turning out to be the Harold Harby of our day.

Who was Harold Harby? A Los Angeles city councilman in the early 1950s, Harby took up propaganda-arms with a paranoid group of right-wing loonies called the Society for Sanity in Art. They made it their patriotic duty to search out Communist symbols they just knew were hidden in that weird, postwar abstract art.

Continue reading...

And here he finishing up his rant about MSNBC.

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Obsidian Wings: Are there really two sides to the torture question? The WaPo declares itself unable to find the truth.

Balloon Juice: Stupid and Proud of It

The Reality-Based Community: There's been a lot of hand-wringing about the financial troubles of newspapers, but now it's quite obvious how reporters are handling the situation: they are just moonlighting for the insurance industry and the RNC. Nice work if you can get it.

Nameless Cynic: We're Communicating ll

Politics in the Zeros: Zero Hedge Whols. They don't want you to find them

HOLY CRAP: Oh ye hypocrites...GWB antichrist...Ugly Christian...No Gimmick Church...How Shall You Die?...Proof we're a 'Christian' nation...Hard-Wired for sin...Catholic Bishops assail health plan...Pious torturers...Followers of the Way... Atheists' Armageddon pet rescue...The last nail...

Harold's Left: The socialism of Firemen

Majikthise: Emerging narrative: Shut up liberals, you're ruining it. But the squeeky wheel gets the grease

Mondoweiss: LA Times columnist: Jerusalem is 'apartheid city' in 'apartheid country'

Calitics: The deliberate strangulation of democracy

Threat Level: Guantanamo defense lawyers being investigated over CIA photos

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Anatomy of a column...Don Hewitt, RIP...I. F. Stone and Robert Novak...When wingnut CEOs write op/ed pieces...Murdoch outs Rove as a liar...The Anal Cyst...Where do they find these people?...Apparently this business rag is run by hacks...News Corp. pushing for consortium...An explosion of truthiness...Ask This...Zell sells the Cubs...A Taylor-made Globe?

After reading this, I have to conclude that Conservatives really can't tell reality from fantasy and are easily manipulated by movies and TV. I'm starting to understand why the Brent Bozells are always trying to sue some TV show or other. They think it's real; I mean, why would anyone sue a Buffy TVS episode, right?
Anyway, Digby's post covers the Jack Bauer influence on the right wing party.

It's very creepy and disturbing.

The Wapo also reports that the thing was just about to be operational before the plug was pulled last month. The plot thickens.

The LA Times says that the "CIA Was A Long Way From Jason Bourne" but when I read that description of a secret hit squad with no limits, I was reminded of something else, which I wrote a year ago:
Fanboy Interrogations

Dahlia Lithwick has a great column in this week's Newsweek about the biggest influence on the thinking of members of the Bush administration in regards to its "interrogation" policies: Jack Bauer.

I've written a ton about this shocking phenomenon over the years, but even I didn't know that John Yoo actually cited the show in his book:

"What if, as the Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?"...read on

Read her full article because she ends with this.

Rush was actually asking the right question. I laughed at him at the time,thinking he was an embarrassing torture fanboy. But it turns out that the military really was getting ideas from the show:

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas."

This probably worries me as much as anything I've heard about the antics of the Bush administration. These people are so fundamentally unserious that they found inspiration in a television show when the stakes were about as high as they could possibly be. It's horrifying to think these powerful people were this daft. But they were.
It seems it was actually worse than I thought.

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We're finally making progress on passing a federal hate-crimes bill: On Thursday, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Protection Act passed out of the House Judiciary Committee.

Sure enough, as Kyle at RightWingWatch predicted, the right-wing freakout has begun. Unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck is already leading the way.

He invited on wingnut talk-show host Sandi Rios, who promptly declared hate crimes "thought crimes" (uh-huh, right). She also attacked Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, who was defending the bill from Republican attempts to nullify it by adding categories or victims by claiming:

Rios: Well, she's saying that anybody that's killed or harmed is not a real victim -- unless they're homosexual or gay or Jewish. Then they're real victims. So you can murder more severely if they happen to homosexual or Jewish. It makes no sense.

Beck: Whatever happened to equal protection under the law? If you kill someone, you should go to jail!

Well, as I've explained previously, hate-crimes laws in fact do offer equal protection under the law:

This ... is precisely how the laws work: they are intended to protect everyone equally from these kinds of crimes. Everyone, after all, has religious beliefs of one kind or another; we all have a race, a gender, an ethnicity, a sexual orientation. A quick look at the FBI's annual bias-crime statistics bears this out; anti-white bias crimes are the second-largest category of racial crimes, and anti-Christian crimes constitute the second-largest in the religion category. If the laws were written as McGough suggests, they couldn't possibly pass the Constitution's equal-protection muster; yet these laws have.

Bias-crime laws aren't about "special categories" of victims; in fact, the victim's actual ethnic or sexual status is of secondary importance -- what matters is the motivation of the perpetrator. This is why a gay-bashing assault against a person mistaken for being gay is still a bias crime.

As for why this law is important to pass, read more here.

I wrote about the former L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea's basically being ousted from the paper because he refused to make budget cuts that would effect their capabilities to "report" and at the heart of the cuts would be their presidential coverage. LA Observed is carrying his entire comments to the newsroom which are very illuminating:

One thing I want put on the record, though, is that I disagree completely with the way that this company allocates resources to its newsrooms, not just here but at Tribune newspapers all around the country. That system is at the core of my disagreements with David. I think the current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists....

Lastly I want to make it clear that I didn’t quit. Anyone in a top newsroom management job during tough times always wrestles with a crucial question: Where is the line? At what point do you go from “I can deal with this” to “this is simply wrong. ”

We need to tell readers more about Barack Obama and less about Britney Spears...read his full statement.

The LA Times is a very important institution to the country and that's why I focus on it so much. In O'Shea's eyes the paper has made tremendous strides and he proves it with some hard facts so why is Hiller cutting the coverage of this all important presidential race news and not the tabloid junk? To keep coverage of important issues down which are then subject to more opinions than real facts in the media---which in turn has the effect of distorting the issues to the public. Sometimes it's a simple as that.

(correction to the title) More trouble at the LA Times:

The top editor of The Los Angeles Times has been forced out for resisting newsroom budget cuts, executives at the paper said Sunday, marking the fourth time in less than three years that the highest-ranking editor or the publisher has left for that reason.

The departure of Mr. O’Shea appears to contradict statements by Samuel Zell, the Chicago real estate magnate who took over the company last month and is now its chairman and chief executive. Mr. Zell has repeatedly criticized the previous regime of the financially troubled company for trying to improve the bottom line by cutting costs, and he has said that he thinks the path to profit lies in finding new revenue, not paring costs.

Here's the key point if it holds true:

Officials at The Times said Mr. Hiller had ordered a $4 million cut in the newsroom budget. Some said he specifically sought to cut expenses related to covering the heated presidential campaign, during a time when such expenses usually spike. Some editors and reporters said Mr. Hiller told them in a meeting in November that he wanted to reduce staff somewhat by the end of this year.

Now why would O'Shea quit over cuts in ELECTION coverage? Hmmmm....It's not like that's very important to our country at this point in time.<snark> I've said in the past that Hiller & The Chicago Tribune aren't trying to slant their reporting like FOX as much, but rather are cutting back reporting capabilities which allows for more opinion to seep into the news coverage instead of actual reporting. This leads to the inane debates on important issues we see instead of hard facts. The "fog" of news so to speak...More shall be revealed....

(correction to the title. The article says he was forced out. )

Can someone please email Jim Newton and explain to him why this article with video is so offensive....Jim.Newton@latimes.com

I mean Starr made a mockery out of the role of the "independent counsel." Read this LA Times opinion piece in amazement:

To meet Kenneth Starr is to question the anger of his most partisan critics and the ardor of his most ideological admirers. As few have forgotten, Starr's pursuit of President Clinton endeared him to Clinton's enemies but also made him, for some, a modern Inspector Javert, sneeringly derided in one publication as a "pious lawman."

And yet, here Starr is, atop the law school at Pepperdine University, cheerfully imagining a culture of engaged and conscientious young lawyers, wistfully harking to a time when the nation was less divided and acrimonious.

His critics might be surprised, but Starr is neither monster nor prude. He is genial, reflective and easygoing, lighthearted even. Committed to public service, he speaks most eloquently on the notions of service and compassion. .

OK, it gets much worse.

So, this is Los Angeles' Kenneth Starr -- not the pursuer of a president but rather the educator and public servant, the lawyer guided by faith, leading from a hilltop in Malibu. And yet he struggles to shed his polarizing past, trying his best to claim an old mantle of centrism despite those who still are angry at him...read on

Newton would have you believe that he's just a simple man now, smoking a pipe in his rocking chair and gazing out into the Pacific ocean on a sunny day with a bible in his hand. Salon paints a much darker picture . And what type of faith would lead a man to do this?

Prosecutors: Ex-independent counsel fabricated letters on inmate’s behalf. Lawyers for a death row inmate, including former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, sent fake letters from jurors asking California’s governor to spare the man’s life, prosecutors said Friday.

I guess Newton forgot to tell his readers that he was hired to defend Blackwater too.

Blackwater USA, the private military contractor in the Bush Administration's "war on terror," has a new lawyer working to defend it against a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit brought by the families of four of its contractors killed in Iraq. The new "counsel of record" for the North Carolina-based company is none other than former Whitewater investigator Kenneth Starr--the independent counsel in the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

I'm still trying to figure out why Newton would write an almost revisionist piece about Kenneth Starr at this time. Is there some ulterior motive behind it or just blind ignorance?

UPDATE: And I forgot to mention that Starr:

...argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that an Alaska school had the right to suspend a student for unfurling a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner.

and...

BILLIONAIRE money manager Jeffrey Epstein has brought in a hired gun to help defend charges brought against him in Palm Beach, Fla., of soliciting prostitutes for sex---"Epstein is worried he could be targeted by federal prosecutors, and Starr is still very well-connected with Republicans," said one source.

That's some "educator and public servant guided by faith," wouldn't you  say?