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Dana Milbank wasn't the only Beltway Villager all wanked out about President Obama prearranging a question with HuffPo's Nico Pitney yesterday. On Meet the Press, David Gregory pressed David Axelrod about it, suggesting that somehow this sort of thing is anti-democratic:

MR. GREGORY: I just want to be clear. Did the White House coordinate with a reporter about a question to be asked at a press conference?

MR. AXELROD: The White House didn't coordinate with the reporter about a question, we were looking for a way to get questions from within Iran. We could--we did not have access to Iranian journalists.

MR. GREGORY: So you talked to a reporter beforehand and said, "Could you ask a question about--from--directly from Iran at a press conference?"

MR. AXELROD: We said if you--we, we, we, we, we knew that he had been and he was very publicly involved in getting--in trafficking and communications in and out of Iran, and we felt it was important...

MR. GREGORY: Well, why is it appropriate to coordinate with a reporter about what's asked at a time when we're championing democracy around the world?

MR. AXELROD: No, no, David, you miss...

MR. GREGORY: Is that, is that what you should do at a press conference?

MR. AXELROD: You're not, you're not listening to what I said. We didn't coordinate with, with him about what was asked.

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. AXELROD: In fact, he asked probably one of the most--the toughest and most probing questions at that press conference. We had no idea what he was going to ask.

MR. GREGORY: But you coordinated with him about, about that subject of a question beforehand.

MR. AXELROD: He was a, he was a, he was a, he was a vehicle to get questions from Iran asked at this press conference, and that we thought was not only appropriate but, but necessary.

MR. GREGORY: If President Bush had done that, don't you think Democrats would have said that's outrageous?

Gregory is a Beltway Villager, and like all such folk, he wants to cling to the well-honed myths that preserve their favorite fictions about themselves. One of these is that White House press conferences are actually exercises in democratic, even egalitarian questioning of government officials by the people's representatives in the press corps.

So they are loathe to admit a simple reality: White House press conferences are in cold reality carefully stage-managed affairs, and the main beneficiaries of this arrangement have been the handful of "elite" reporters from big-name media outlets who traditionally have dominated them.

We're perfectly aware that presidents have for some long time gone into these conferences with a prearranged list of reporters upon whom they are going to call. The result has been an immense trivialization of press conferences, because those "elite" reporters have demonstrated over the years their eagerness to indulge trivial, celebrity-media-driven questions at the expense of serious policy matters. In the process, they've become increasingly manipulable.

This trend reached its apotheosis back when Jeff Gannon was lobbing softball questions to President Bush and White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Not only was Gannon a phony journalist, he was being regularly selected to be among the main questioners at the daily briefings.

Considering that this same White House never came clean on exactly why it issued credentials to this fraud -- and especially considering that David Gregory never once objected to it -- his outrage over the Obama White House's calling on Pitney for the toughest question any reporter at that conference asked seems strangely misplaced.

On the other hand, considering that this White House's admission of people like Pitney into the circle of people who get to ask questions at these conferences represents a direct erosion of the "elite" status of people like David Gregory -- and in fact an opening of these questions to many more "representatives of the people" -- it's really not too surprising.

Big Brass Blog: McCain = Bush = McSame

The Moderate Voice: Sixty four percent of Israelis consider it necessary to hold a dialogue with Hamas to obtain a truce. Unfortunately, that isn't what BUSHCO wants.

Jim Hightower: The deliberate deceit of drug ads.

Cafe Talk: Obama and Clinton supporters must drop out of the race.

Orcinus: What we're confronted with is a Beltway media mindset that is systemically hostile to Democrats while simultaneously coddling conservatives.

Martini Revolution: Sometimes, words and pictures just go together..

I understand that Obama is trying to chip away at Hillary's lead, but as many have already mentioned: Social Security is not in a crisis! He shouldn't be reviving the tired Republican talking point as a way to gain some momentum. It makes him look bad to progressives that actually study this issue and like him on other issues such as Net Neutrality...

Paul Krugman explains:

But Social Security isn’t a big problem that demands a solution; it’s a small problem, way down the list of major issues facing America, that has nonetheless become an obsession of Beltway insiders. And on Social Security, as on many other issues, what Washington means by bipartisanship is mainly that everyone should come together to give conservatives what they want.

We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists — which is the case for many issues today — you end up being played for a fool. And that’s what has just happened to Mr. Obama

In the legislative debate over the RESTORE Act, the administration is focusing much of its attention on immunity for telecommunications companies that participated in Bush's legally dubious schemes. Responding to an argument from Time's Joe Klein, Glenn explains how misguided this really is.

To Klein, telecoms did not act illegally. Not at all. They were simply victims of "the Bush Administration['s] refus[al] to update the law" to make the law consistent with what the telecoms were doing. That would be tantamount to a criminal defendant charged with embezzlement going into court and saying: "Your Honor, I didn't do anything wrong. Why should I be punished just because the Bush administration refused to update the law to make my criminal behavior legal?"

Such an "argument" would trigger judicial laughing fits and probably sanctions. But our Beltway elite is so desperate to defend telcoms (and, more importantly, to close off the sole remaining mechanism for investigating the administration's illegal warrantless eavesdropping and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its illegality) that they will twist themselves into the most inane positions in order to defend something as extraordinary as granting retroactive amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms....

[E]ven more unfathomable is the idea that the Congress would pass a law that has no purpose other than to protect from all legal consequences the largest and most powerful corporations in the event that they are found to have broken our nation's surveillance and privacy laws. What possible justification is there for any of that?

Christy has been working hard on this all week, and has more.

Jonathon Schwartz gives us another example of how the insane lust for war turns into gold for the Jefferey Goldberg's of the beltway class and then of course, there are no consequences. It's mind-boggling. I can't say this often enough. We need to shame these journalists every chance we get so that their words have consequences.

A Tiny Revolution: Here's Jeffrey Goldberg, then a staff writer at the New Yorker, participating in a debate on Iraq in Slate on October 3, 2002. That was five years ago today:

The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality...read on

And Andrew Sullivan was cheering him on....

This is more garbage from the Beltway 500 crowd and why they are to be shamed when they act like fools.

Mike Finnegan is touring in Europe this summer.  Lambert Strether from CorrenteWire is filling in this week.  

Greed and fear? I don't do the greed part; if I were any good at making money, I would already have made some. Fear, I can do; but in common with most of the blogosphere, I do political fear of the criminal Bush regime, not economic fear. Of course, in the future, these two fears may merge, perhaps even quicker than we expect.

But even I noticed that the Dow dropped some large number of points yesterday. Mostly, though, the blogosphere didn't (and the wankosphere was too busy ferreting out lefties who drop the F-bomb instead of killing people, lke the Godly do).

So, when the Dow drops three million points and nobody blogs about it -- well, almost nobody (click on the man; he needs the hits!) -- did it really drop? Herewith the results of my random walk through the blogosphere.

Actually, I had a few false starts: My best hits on Technorati came from "Stocks AND Plunge," and they weren't very good. Sneaky Business at least rated the headlines. Then I checked out Brad DeLong. He's an economist! And for some strange reason, he's writing about Grover Cleveland:

The agitation seemed to [Cleveland]... a threat to law and order.... Coxey's Army was met with a barrage of injunctions and... the Capitol police.... The Pullman strike was smashed by federal troops who kept the mails moving, the union leaders imprisoned, and the union crushed. And the financial panic was dealt with through the highly orthodox and [highly] compensated assistance of Mr. Morgan.

The underlying causes... were neither understood nor dealt with... an opportunity was missed.... If, to take one of them, the problems arising out of the concentration of industrial ownership had been tackled when they were still malleable and subject to effective treatment, we might have been spared some aches and pains that are still with us.

Yes, well. But then Holden asks: Have you seen my Bush boom? Good question, and I have the answer:

Yes! It went thataway!

Continue reading »

And you wonder why I cover the beltway crowd. George Will hearts George Wallace, I mean..George Will..I mean George Wallace.. I mean....

CorrenteWire: The Beltway aristocracy, in the person of Sally Quinn, are demanding Obama's "references." These are the same people who were impressed by an AWOL/counterfeit cowboy being advised by a group of recycled wingnuts.

theWatchdogBlog: The FDA is hooked on drug money

The Reality-Based Community: The NRA is defending the Second Amendment rights of people on the terrorist watch list

Undercover Black Man: David Horowitz publishes--again--an unrepentant bigot. Anybody surprised?

Intrepid Liberal Journal: A podcast interview with international best-selling author, author Riane Eisler. Eisler is primarily known for her book The Chalice and the Blade. Her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations promotes an economic model based on "partnerships" and "caring" and challenging the "hiearchical/domination" model of most countries and corporations.

earthfamilyalpha:Foolish Wise Men

I think it's important to remember that there's a whole world out there while the media focuses solely on Beltway politics. Here's a chance for you to encourage responsibility and humanity from American corporations (don't snicker) for Darfur