Yesterday we showed you video of Erich “Mancow” Muller, a Chicago-based right-wing shockjock, appearing as a guest on Keith Olbermann’s show to discuss his being waterboarded. He claimed it led to an ideological conversion! But now a tipster has provided information that suggests the whole thing may be a hoax.
[Update: Mancow tells us on Friday morning: "'Hoax' is probably not the right word, but we did think it was going to be a joke."]
The information provided to Gawker by our tipster came in a series of emails and is somewhat layered, so we’ll try to lay it all out as unconfusingly as possible. Where the story begins is last Thursday afternoon, the day before Mancow was scheduled to be waterboarded, when the person slated to do the waterboarding suddenly backed out, sending Mancow’s publicity team into a mild frenzy to find someone to replace him. A chain of emails followed, emails that were subsequently forwarded to Gawker by our tipster.
There are three main players in the following sequence of events:
-The first is a Chicago-based publicist named Linda Shafran whose clients include the Jerry Springer and Steve Wilkos shows, in addition to Erich “Mancow” Muller. In describing Shafran our tipster added:
“Linda Shafran is Springer’s current publicist until the show starts shooting in CT. Since Springer is her primary source of income, she’s now trying to help promote Mancow nationally as a shock jock alternative to Howard Stern.”
-The second person involved in this is a man named David Kupcinet. He runs a Chicago-based foundation for veterans called Kup’s Purple Heart Foundation. He is the grandson of Irv Kupcinet, a somewhat legendary Chicago gossip columnist who wrote a column for the Chicago Sun Times for over 60 years. At the behest of a friend, Linda Shafran contacted Kupcinet on Thursday hoping that his relationships with Chicago-area veterans and military personnel could help her find a replacement waterboarder.
-The third person involved here, to a much lesser degree, is another Chicago-based publicist named Kathy Posner. According to our tipster, Posner is Jerry Springer’s former flack and a friend of both Linda Shafran and Erich “Mancow” Muller. According to one of the emails we were forwarded, it was Posner who suggested that Shafran contact David Kupcinet to find a replacement waterboarder.
Now, with all of that background established, here are some of the emails that followed between Shafran and Kupcinet, the first being the initial contact between the two on the matter:
From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:15 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: URGENT
Don’t shoot the messenger
Mancow has been promoting all week that he is getting waterboarded tomorrow between 8-9am on-air. We have camera crew shooting it for WGN
The swat guy he had to do the waterboarding now can’t do it. Do you know any military guy that might come down to WLS radio tomorrow (190 N. State Street) to waterboard Mancow????
Kathy said you know lots of military guys that might do it…or a policeman or fireman or EMT.
HELP
Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
cell: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]
Kupcinet, or “Kuppy,” responded a few minutes later:
From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:28 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: Re: URGENT
What exactly do you mean? You mean really tortured? What exactly would it consist of and do they need to bring gear or does Cow have what he needs or what?
Get back to me quick an ill find u a guy.
Kuppy
(P.S. Love you)
Sent from my iPhone
Now, here’s the key email in the exchange, with Shafran saying in no uncertain terms that the whole thing is being staged as a hoax:
From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:38 PM
To: [redacted]
Cc: [redacted]
Subject: Re: URGENT
You are a ROCK STAR!!!
It is going to have to look “real” but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning. It will be a hoax but have to look real. Would be great if they could dress in fatigues and bring whatever is needed. We will supply the water
xxxx
Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
cell: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]
After getting this email from Shafran, David Kupcinet suggested she contact Marine Sgt. Clay South, the person who eventually carried out Mancow’s waterboarding. We include this next email only because we find the compensation offer extended to South from Mancow via Shafran to be somewhat amusing:
From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 2:02 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: MANCOW WAS ALL OVER IT
I tried to call you but got voicemail. I talked to Mancow and he said “Are you kidding – of course he can mention the charity and talk about his experiences over there”
I am going to call Klay now. Mancow will pay gas and parking.
Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
FX: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]
We contacted Linda Shafran last night for a statement about this and she emailed us back with an emphatic denial that anything was faked:
It was NOT a hoax. Early on when we were looking for someone to waterboard, an email was sent out looking for someone to do it and I mistakenly said it would be staged. That was my mistake and a misunderstanding.
But that was early and NOT TRUE AT ALL. It was not staged. NOT AT ALL. When it happened several days later, it was real, honest, actual, not staged.
Any info you have was my mistake. THE WATERBOARDING OF MANCOW WAS REAL!!!!!!
The glaring discrepancy in Shafran’s statement to us is that her emails to Kupcinet are dated Thursday, May 21st, the day prior to Mancow’s waterboarding, while she now claims that these emails were sent out “early on” and that the waterboarding took place “several days later.” Additionally, she even mentions that Mancow “is getting waterboarded tomorrow” in her first note to Kupcinet.
Regarding the emails between Safran and Kupcinet, our tipster also informed us that they were shared with Keith Olbermann’s producers prior to Mancow’s appearance on his show. We were told that they were beyond livid when they found out about them and expressed their extreme displeasure for the whole situation with Linda Shafran over the phone, but went ahead with the planned segment anyway, making no mention of the fact that they’d received advance word that the whole thing may have been staged. However, we were unable to confirm this with anyone at MSNBC.
Now, we’re obviously no experts on the art of waterboarding, but we’ve done a bit of research on it and also went back and watched the video of Christopher Hitchens‘ waterboarding in 2008 to compare and contrast his waterboarding against Mancow’s, and we couldn’t help but notice some rather striking differences.
In the Hitchens video, everything is carried out pretty much according to universal waterboarding protocol as we’ve come to understand it. His limbs and torso are tightly bound by restraints. The platform on which he lays appears to be tilted slightly downward so that his head is positioned below his heart. His head is also completely covered and the water used looks as though it’s poured directly into his breathing passages.
In contrast, Mancow isn’t bound by restraints at all, he doesn’t appear to have his body positioned at a decline, only a portion of his face from the nose up is covered, and the water is being poured on him inappropriately.
In short, when we watched the Mancow video for the first time it struck us in a “well that doesn’t look TOO awful” sort of way. For a brief moment it even made us want to call some friends over so we could all waterboard each other and see what all the fuss is about. On the other hand, the Hitchens video is somewhat nightmarish, making us want to never have anything to do with a waterboarding, ever.
In our post yesterday we actually praised Mancow for having the courage to undergo the infamous interrogation technique AND then going so far as to appear as a guest on a show hosted by television’s shoutiest liberal to proclaim how wrong and misguided he’s been all along. Here’s part of what we said:
We suppose it’d be easy to mock and ridicule “Mancow” here, as he does seem to be an extraordinarily massive tool, not even taking into consideration that he was one of the main guys spreading the “Obama is a closet Muslim” rumors during the election, but there’s something truly admirable in a) being sufficiently curious and willing to undergo the procedure personally to truly see what it was like to be on the receiving end of a waterboarding, and b) appearing on the air with arguably the most unabashedly liberal host on television to profess how horribly wrong he’d been previously.
Despite the emails indicating that the whole thing may have been staged, there’s a small part of us that still wants to extend Erich “Mancow” Muller the benefit of the doubt, despite his being no stranger to controversy, but our skepticism at this point is pretty dang high, and we can’t help from feeling as though we, along with a host of others, have been duped by a cheap publicity stunt.
Maureen Dowd’s wholesale, uncredited copying of a paragraph written by Josh Marshall (an act Dowd has now admitted) — for what I yesterday called her “uncharacteristically cogent and substantive column”– highlights a point I’ve been meaning to make for awhile. One of the favorite accusations that many journalists spout, especially now that they’re searching for reasons why newspapers and print magazines are dying, is that bloggers and other online writers are “parasites” on their work — that their organizations bear the cost of producing content and others (bloggers and companies such as Google) then unfairly exploit it for free.
The reality has always been far more mixed than that, and the relationship far more symbiotic than parasitical. Especially now that online traffic is such an important part of the business model of newspapers and print magazines, traffic generated by links from online venues and bloggers is of great value to them. That’s why they engage in substantial promotional activities to encourage bloggers to link to and write about what they produce. Beyond that, it is also very common — as the Dowd/Marshall episode illustrates — for traditional media outlets and establishment journalists to use and even copy content produced online and then present it as their own, typically without credit. Many, many reporters, television news producers and the like read online political commentary and blogs and routinely take things they find there.
Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.
Since I read many blogs, I notice this happening quite frequently — ideas and stories that begin on blogs end up being featured by establishment media outlets with no credit. Here’s just one recent and relatively benign example of how it often works: at the end of March, I wrote a post that ended up being featured in many places concerning the unique political courage displayed by Jim Webb in taking on the issue of criminal justice reform and the destruction wreaked by our drug laws. The following week, I was traveling and picked up a copy of The Economist in an aiport, which featured an article hailing Jim Webb’s political courage in taking on the issue of criminal justice reform and the destruction wreaked by our drug laws.
Several of the passages from the Economist article were quite familar to me, since they seemed extremely similar to what I had written — without attribution or credit:
Salon
America has easily surpassed Japan — and virtually every other country in the world — to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a “a nation of jailers” whose “prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.”
Economist
“A Leviathan unmatched in human history”, is how Glenn Loury, professor of social studies at Brown University, characterises America’s prison system.
Salon
Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue state (he’s not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite: he’s a first-term Senator from Virginia, one of the “toughest” “anti-crime” states in the country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen’s macaca-driven implosion.
Economist
Mr Webb is far from being a lion of the Senate, roaring from the comfort of a safe seat. He is a first-term senator for Virginia who barely squeaked into Congress. The state he represents also has a long history of being tough on crime: Virginia abolished parole in 1994 and is second only to Texas in the number of people it executes.
Salon
Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.
Economist
Mr Webb also has some powerful forces ranged against him. The prison-industrial complex (which includes private prisons as well as public ones) employs thousands of people and armies of lobbyists.
Salon
That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near . . . .[T]here is virtually no meaningful organized constituency for prison reform. To the contrary, leaving oneself vulnerable to accusations of being “soft on crime” has, for decades, been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer.
Economist
Few mainstream politicians have had the courage to denounce any of this. People who embrace prison reform usually end up in the political graveyard. There is no organised lobby for prison reform.
I don’t consider that at all similar to what Dowd did, since there wasn’t wholesale copying. In fact, since there wasn’t really full-on copying, I don’t think there’s any ethical issue involved in this example. I don’t think the writer of that article did anything wrong at all. And anyone who spends any time writing a blog, or anything else for that matters, should consider it a good thing when their work is used, with or without credit. Nobody would engage in that activity in the absence of a belief that they have something worthwhile to say and a desire that it have some impact on political discussions.
I raise this only to illustrate how one-sided and even misleading is the complaint that bloggers are “parasites” on the work of “real journalists.” Often, the parasitical feeding happens in the opposite direction, though while bloggers routinely credit (and link to) the source of the material on which they’re commenting, there is an unwritten code among many establishment journalists that while they credit each other’s work, they’re free to claim as their own whatever they find online without any need for credit or attribution (see here for a typical example of how many of these news organizations operate in this regard).
It’s difficult to quantify, but a large percentage of political reporters, editors, television news producers, and on-air pundits read political blogs or other online venues now. Many do so precisely because blogs are a prime source for their story ideas. Contrary to the myth perpetrated by establishment media outlets, there is substantial original reporting, original analysis and the like that takes place on blogs. That’s precisely why so many journalists, editors and segment producers read them. And while some are quite conscientious about identifying the online source of the material they use — The New York Times‘ Scott Shane recently credited Marcy Wheeler for a major, front-page story on torture and previously wrote an article hailing FireDogLake as having the best coverage of any news organization of the Lewis Libby trial — credit of that sort is still rare enough that it becomes noteworthy when it happens.
The tale of the put-upon news organizations and the pilfering, parasitical bloggers has always been more self-serving mythology than reality. That’s not to say that there’s no truth to it, but the picture has always been much more complicated. After all, a principal reason for the emergence of a political blogosphere is precisely because it performed functions that establishment media outlets fail to perform. If all bloggers did was just replicate what traditional news organizations did and offered nothing original, nobody would read blogs. And especially now, as bloggers and online writers engage in much more so-called “original reporting” and punditry, the parasitical behavior is often the reverse of how it is depicted. The Maureen Dowd/Josh Marshall episode is a particularly vivid and dramatic example of that, but it is far from uncommon.
UPDATE: A blogger who writes on TPM’s open blog site, Boyd Reed, reacted to the Maureen Dowd story today by randomly entering some of his own posts in Google, and found that a reporter at Salem News, Dorsett Bennett, copied several paragraphs of Reed’s post on Michelle Bachmann verbatim for Bennett’s column on the same topic. Reed writes about his discovery today here (h/t Liberal Artist). Compare Reed’s February 20 TPM post with Bennett’s February 27 Salem News column. The copying is extensive and shameless. Parasitical indeed.
WASHINGTON – The parents of slain U.S. Army Ranger and American football star Pat Tillman said Tuesday they have misgivings that the general who played a role in mischaracterizing their son’s death could be put in charge of military operations in Afghanistan.
In a brief interview with The Associated Press, Pat Tillman Sr. accused Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal of covering up the circumstances of the 2004 slaying.
“I do believe that guy participated in a falsified homicide investigation,” Tillman Sr. said.
Separately, Mary Tillman called it “imperative” that McChrystal’s record be carefully considered before he is confirmed.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Defense Secretary Robert Gates has complete confidence in McChrystal, whom he hopes can be confirmed by the Senate before month’s end.
“We feel terrible for what the Tillman family went through, but this matter has been investigated thoroughly by the Pentagon, by the Congress, by outside experts, and all of them have come to the same conclusion: that there was no wrongdoing by Gen. McChrystal,” Morrell said.
Aides to the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will consider the nomination, said they were unaware of any opposition to McChrystal.
Silver Star awarded
McChrystal, a former “black ops” special forces chief credited with capturing one of the most-wanted fugitives in Iraq, was tapped Monday to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Gen. David McKiernan, who was fired in an unusual wartime shake-up.
In April 2004, McChrystal approved paperwork awarding Tillman a Silver Star after he was reported killed by enemy fire, even though McChrystal suspected the Ranger had been killed accidentally by fellow American soldiers, according to Pentagon testimony later obtained by the AP.
The testimony showed that McChrystal sent a memo to top generals imploring “our nation’s leaders,” specifically the president, to avoid cribbing the “devastating enemy fire” explanation from the award citation for their speeches. In 2007, the Army overruled a Pentagon recommendation that McChrystal be held accountable for “misleading” actions.
In a book published last year, Mary Tillman accused McChrystal of helping create the false story line that she said “diminished Pat’s true actions.”
Her one-sentence e-mail to the AP on Tuesday said: “It is imperative that Lt. General McChrystal be scrutinized carefully during the Senate hearings.”
Smooth confirmation? Last year, however, the Senate unanimously approved promoting McChrystal from a two-star general to a three-star general as director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
Similarly, this time around, Senate Armed Services’ Democratic Chairman Carl Levin “does not foresee any problems with Gen. McChrystal’s confirmation” with the committee, a Levin aide said Tuesday.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the committee’s top Republican, backs the decision to change leadership in Afghanistan and will support McChrystal’s nomination, said Brooke Buchanan, a McCain spokeswoman. Tillman was a star member of the Arizona Cardinals National Football League team.
McCain was highly critical of the Army’s handling of the Tillman investigation, and in April 2007 he called the service’s actions “inexcusable and unconscionable.”
His departure from the station doesn’t necessarily mean the end of his news career, he says.
By Greg Braxton
April 27, 2009
Veteran news anchor Paul Moyer may be done with KNBC-TV Channel 4, but he may not be finished with local news.
“I’m officially retired from Channel 4, but that doesn’t mean I’m officially retired from the news business forever,” Moyer told The Times on Friday. “I can’t predict what will happen in the future. I’m not closing the door, but there’s nothing out there at the moment.”
While on vacation early this month, Moyer unexpectedly announced he was retiring from KNBC after 22 years but would return for a short time before selecting a final broadcast date. However, station News Director Robert Long told staffers Friday that Moyer had “decided to make the transition from vacation to retirement a seamless one, and he will not be returning to our air to say goodbye.”
“I just didn’t feel there was anything to gain by going back and working for another few weeks,” said Moyer. “I hope that people understand why I’m not going back. I get very uncomfortable with big formal goodbyes.”
Moyer is considered one of the last of a breed of well-paid and highly promoted local news anchors. His departure follows speculation that his salary, estimated at more than $3 million a year, had been too costly for the station in a time of declining revenue and viewership industrywide.
The newscaster said he has been moved by viewers who have expressed their sense of loss about his departure. “What really touches me is they thank me for being there,” he said. “I really feel like I have a relationship with the people of Southern California. I feel connected to them. I will really miss that.”
For now, Moyer said his focus will be on his family and his children: “I’ve got two kids, 16 and 19, and they need their dad. Now they’ve got him, full time.”
That House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been a disappointing leader for House Democrats, few serious observers of the congressional condition will deny. But now, she appears to be something more troubling: a serious hindrance to the fight against the use of the crudest and most objectionable torture techniques.
Democrats and Republicans with a conscience have gotten a good deal of traction in recent months in their battle to identify the use by U.S. interrogators of waterboarding – a technique that simulates drowning in order to cause extreme mental distress to prisoners — as what it is: torture. Arizona Senator John McCain, a GOP presidential contender, has been particularly powerful in his denunciations of this barbarous endeavor. And Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, and key members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have effectively pressed the issue on a number of fronts.
Now, however, comes the news that Pelosi knew as early as 2002 that the U.S. was using waterboarding and other torture techniques and, far from objecting, appears to have cheered the tactics on.
The Washington Post reports that Pelosi, who was then a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, was were informed by CIA officials at a secret briefing in September 2002, that waterboarding and other forms of torture were being used on suspected al-Queda operatives. That’s bad. Even worse is the revelation that Pelosi was apparently supportive of the initiative.
According to the news reports, Pelosi has no complaint about waterboarding during a closed-door session she attended with Florida Congressman Porter Goss, a Republican who would go on to head the Central Intelligence Agency, Kansas Republican Senator Pat Roberts and Florida Democratic Senator Bob Graham.
“The reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement,” recalls Goss.
How encouraging? It is reported that two of the legislators demanded to know if waterboarding and other methods that were being employed “were tough enough” forms of torture to produced the desired levels of mental anguish to force information from suspects who, under the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, cannot be subjected to cruel or unusual punishment.
Was Pelosi one of the “tough-enough” cheerleaders for waterboarding? That is not clear, as the speaker has refused to comment directly regarding her knowledge of torture techniques and encouragement of their use. Another member of the House who is closely allied wit Pelosi did tell the Post, however, that the California Democrat attended the session, recalled that waterboarding was discussed, and “did not object” at the time to that particular torture technique.
If this is the case, Pelosi has provided aid and comfort to the Bush administration’s efforts to deviate not just from the standards set by international agreements regarding war crimes but from the provision of the Bill of Rights that establishes basic requirements with regard to the treatment of prisoners who in the custody of the United States.
Those deviations are precisely the sort of impeachable offenses that Pelosi has said are “off the table.” Her association with the administration on the matter of torture necessarily calls into question the speaker’s credibility on questions of how and when to hold the administration to account. It also begs a more mundane political question: At a point when Republicans like John McCain are earning points with their forthright stances against waterboarding, isn’t the credibility and the potential effectiveness of the House Democratic Caucus as an honest player in the debate profoundly harmed by the involvement of its leader in behind-the-scenes meetings that by all accounts encouraged the use of that technique?
The Federal Reserve significantly scaled back the size of the capital hole facing some of the nation’s biggest banks shortly before concluding its stress tests, following two weeks of intense bargaining.
In addition, according to bank and government officials, the Fed used a different measurement of bank-capital levels than analysts and investors had been expecting, resulting in much smaller capital deficits.
The overall reaction to the stress tests, announced Thursday, has been generally positive. But the haggling between the government and the banks shows the sometimes-tense nature of the negotiations that occurred before the final results were made public.
Government officials defended their handling of the stress tests, saying they were responsive to industry feedback while maintaining the tests’ rigor.
When the Fed last month informed banks of its preliminary stress-test findings, executives at corporations including Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. were furious with what they viewed as the Fed’s exaggerated capital holes. A senior executive at one bank fumed that the Fed’s initial estimate was “mind-numbingly” large. Bank of America was “shocked” when it saw its initial figure, which was more than $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
At least half of the banks pushed back, according to people with direct knowledge of the process. Some argued the Fed was underestimating the banks’ ability to cover anticipated losses with revenue growth and aggressive cost-cutting. Others urged regulators to give them more credit for pending transactions that would thicken their capital cushions.
At times, frustrations boiled over. Negotiations with Wells Fargo, where Chairman Richard Kovacevich had publicly derided the stress tests as “asinine,” were particularly heated, according to people familiar with the matter. Government officials worried San Francisco-based Wells might file a lawsuit contesting the Fed’s findings.
The Fed ultimately accepted some of the banks’ pleas, but rejected others. Shortly before the test results were unveiled Thursday, the capital shortfalls at some banks shrank, in some cases dramatically, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bank of America’s final gap was $33.9 billion, down from an earlier estimate of more than $50 billion, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
A Bank of America spokesman wouldn’t comment on how much the previous gap was reduced, though he said it resulted from an adjustment for first-quarter results and errors made by regulators in their analysis. “It wasn’t lobbying,” he said.
Wells Fargo’s capital hole shrank to $13.7 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Before adjusting for first-quarter results and other factors, the figure was $17.3 billion, according to a federal document.
“In the end we agreed with the number. We didn’t necessarily like the number,” said Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Howard Atkins. He said the company was particularly unhappy with the Fed’s assumptions about Wells Fargo’s revenue outlook.
At Fifth Third Bancorp, the Fed was preparing to tell the Cincinnati-based bank to find $2.6 billion in capital, but the final tally dropped to $1.1 billion. Fifth Third said the decline stemmed in part from regulators giving it credit for selling a part of a business line.
Citigroup’s capital shortfall was initially pegged at roughly $35 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The ultimate number was $5.5 billion. Executives persuaded the Fed to include the future capital-boosting impacts of pending transactions.
SunTrust Banks Inc. also persuaded the Fed to significantly reduce the size of its estimated capital gap to $2.2 billion, after identifying mathematical errors in the Fed’s earlier calculations, according to a person familiar with the matter.
PNC Financial Services Group Inc., saw a capital hole materialize at the last minute. As recently as Wednesday, PNC executives were under the impression they wouldn’t need to find any new capital, according to people familiar with the matter. Thursday morning, the Fed informed PNC that it had a $600 million shortfall.
Regulators said other banks also were told they needed more capital than initially projected.
The Fed’s findings were less severe than some experts had been bracing for. A weeklong rally in bank stocks continued Friday, with the KBW Bank Stocks index surging 10%. Investors were especially relieved by the relatively small capital holes at regional banks. Shares of Fifth Third soared 59%, while Regions Financial Corp.’s $2.5 billion deficit led to a 25% leap in its stock.
With the stress tests, government officials were walking a fine line. If the regulators were too tough on banks, they risked angering their constituents and spooking markets. But if they were too soft, the tests could have lost credibility, defeating their basic confidence-building purpose.
All the back-and-forth is typical of the way regulators traditionally wrap up their examinations of banks: Regulators often present preliminary findings to lenders and then give them time to respond. The process can result in changes to the regulators’ initial conclusions. Some of the stress-test revisions, for instance, were made to account for the beneficial impact of the industry’s strong first-quarter profits.
On Friday, some analysts questioned the yardstick, known as Tier 1 common capital, that regulators chose to assess capital levels. Many experts had assumed the Fed would use a better-known metric called tangible common equity.
According to Gerard Cassidy, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, the 19 banks’ cumulative shortfall would have been more than $68 billion deeper if the government had used the latter metric, which accounts for unrealized losses.
Federal officials said their projections reflected the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the industry.
The test results showed that the 19 banks faced a total of $599 billion in losses over the next two years under the government’s worst-case, Depression-like scenario. The Fed directed 10 banks to add a total of nearly $75 billion to their capital buffers to insulate themselves from potential losses.
Banks pressed ahead on Friday with plans to fill their capital holes by tapping public markets. Wells Fargo raised $7.5 billion in stock through a public offering. The bank originally planned to raise $6 billion, but expanded the offering, which was valued at $22 a share, due to robust demand. Shares of Wells Fargo rallied $3.42, or 14% to $28.18.
Morgan Stanley, which is facing a $1.8 billion capital hole, raised $4 billion by selling stock. Shares of Morgan rose $1.06, or 4%, to $28.20.
—Robin Sidel and Maurice Tamman contributed to this article.
WASHINGTON — The United States is in the midst of a devastating recession, mired in two overseas wars and grappling with a swine flu outbreak, but conservative critics are assailing President Barack Obama on another pressing issue: his choice of burger topping.
Dijongate is in full force, with Fox News and a conservative blogger leading the charge against the president for his choice of the apparently un-American mustard atop his cheeseburger during a recent impromptu lunch stop with Vice-President Joe Biden.
There’s no evidence of wiretapped hotel rooms or a Deep Throat lurking in the shadows, but there are indeed accusations of a coverup – MSNBC, apparently, edited out the president’s request for Dijon in order to help Obama maintain his “man of the people” street cred.
Fox’s Sean Hannity has been telling his viewers that MSNBC – and reporter Andrea Mitchell in particular – are trying to hide Obama’s Dijon-loving ways from the public.
Hannity has been referring to the president’s lunch as his “fancy burger.”
“It was Grey Poupon, which is equally snotty,” alleged one commenter on Hannity’s website.
William Jacobson, a Cornell law school professor who has also been blogging about Dijongate, noted that Mitchell “didn’t mention one arugula-like fact” about Obama’s order earlier this week at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Va.
Jacobson said the MSNBC video of the stop at Ray’s cuts out just as Obama asks for Dijon. He refers to MSNBC as “Obama’s favourite network.”
“MSNBC edited out the audio when Obama ordered his Hell Burger just at the moment when Obama asked for Dijon mustard,” Jacobson wrote in a Thursday post entitled “Thou Shalt Not Mock Obama’s Mustard.”
“Now, I have nothing against Dijon mustard, but the image didn’t fit with the image being spun by the White House and MSNBC. Dijon mustard on a Hell Burger had a very John Kerry-ish quality about it.”
Jacobson blogged about other incidents in which Obama has revealed his weakness for the spicy French condiment.
It’s a key ingredient, for example, in the president’s favourite tuna salad, and he also had the gall to request it during his first trip on Air Force One.
“And the mainstream media didn’t cover it,” Jacobson wrote.
It all hearkens back to those silly days of “freedom fries,” the name given to French fries by hawkish conservatives in 2003 when France expressed strong opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The French stance resulted in a call from American right-wingers for a boycott of French goods and the removal of the country’s name from products. That left America’s best-selling mustard – French’s – in a bit of a quandary.
French’s, in fact, figures prominently in a Dijon-related anecdote Obama himself chronicled in his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
He told the story of his first tour through Illinois, when he ordered Dijon on his cheeseburger at a TGI Friday’s.
His panicked political aide assured the waitress that Obama didn’t want Dijon at all and waved her away, thrusting a bottle of French’s at him instead. The waitress, perplexed, assured Obama that she had Dijon if he wanted it.
“As the waitress walked away, I leaned over and whispered that I didn’t think there were any photographers around,” Obama wrote.
The anecdote underscored Obama’s thoughts on what he viewed as the absurdity of focusing on non-issues in politics.
“What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics-the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial,” he wrote.
One commenter on Jacobson’s blog mocked Dijongate on Thursday: “Wait till the right finds out he eats guacamole, then he’ll be seen as a pro-immigrant nut job. God forbid he ever takes a bite of hummus!”
Jacobson, however, insists that alleged efforts to cover up Obama’s choice of mustard this week are newsworthy.
“I don’t think anyone is ‘upset’ with his choice of mustard, although that is how some are spinning it,” Jacobson said in an e-mail. “It is the absurd level of image control, which is not trivial.”
Nonetheless, some of the right’s attacks on Obama have bordered on the inane, subjecting conservatives to ridicule.
Comedian Bill Maher, a longtime libertarian, recently maligned the right and their fixation on the trivial in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times.
“Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law,” Maher wrote.
“And here’s the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a TelePrompTer too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes.”
Conservatives, Maher wrote, are now behaving like “the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him – obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will,” he wrote.
“But … your country is not coming back to you. She’s found somebody new. And it’s a black guy.”
By JASON STRAZIUSO and RAHIM FAIEZKABUL (AP) - Afghanistan’s leading human rights organization said Sunday it was investigating the possibility that white phosphorus was used in a U.S.-Taliban battle that killed scores of Afghans. The U.S. military rejected speculation it had used the weapon but left open the possibility Taliban militants did.
Afghan doctors are concerned over what they are calling “unusual” burns on Afghans wounded in last Monday’s battle in Farah province, which President Hamid Karzai has said may have killed 125 to 130 civilians.
Allegations that white phosphorus or another chemical may have been used threatens to deepen the controversy over what Afghan officials say could be the worst case of civilian deaths since the 2001 U.S. invasion that ousted the Taliban regime. The incident in Farah drew the condemnation of Karzai who called for an end to airstrikes.
Nader Nadery, a commissioner for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said officials were concerned white phosphorus may have been used, but he said more investigation was needed.
“Our teams have met with patients,” Nadery told The Associated Press. “They are investigating the cause of the injuries and the use of white phosphorus.”
White phosphorus is a spontaneously flammable material that can cause painful chemical burns. It is used to mark targets, create smoke screens or as a weapon, and can be delivered by shells, flares or hand grenades, according to GlobalSecurity.org.
Human rights groups denounce its use for the severe burns it causes, though it is not banned by any treaty to which the United States is a signatory.
The U.S. military used white phosphorus in the battle of Fallujah in Iraq in November 2004. Israel’s military used it in January against Hamas targets in Gaza.
Col. Greg Julian, the top U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, said the U.S. did not use white phosphorus as a weapon in last week’s battle. The U.S. does use white phosphorous to illuminate the night sky, he said.
Julian noted that military officials believe that Taliban militants have used white phosphorus at least four times in Afghanistan in the past two years. “I don’t know if they (militants) had it out there or not, but it’s not out of the question,” he said.
A spokesman for the Taliban could not be reached for comment Sunday.
The U.S. military on Saturday said that Afghan doctors in Farah told American officials that the injuries seen in wounded Afghans from two villages in the province’s Bala Baluk district could have resulted from hand grenades or exploding propane tanks.
Dr. Mohammad Aref Jalali, the head of the burn unit at the Herat Regional Hospital in western Afghanistan who has treated five patients wounded in the battle, described the burns as “unusual.”
“I think it’s the result of a chemical used in a bomb, but I’m not sure what kind of chemical. But if it was a result of a burning house – from petrol or gas cylinders – that kind of burn would look different,” he said.
Gul Ahmad Ayubi, the deputy head of Farah’s health department, said the province’s main hospital had received 14 patients after the battle, all with burn wounds.
“There has been other airstrikes in Farah in the past. We had injuries from those battles, but this is the first time we have seen such burns on the bodies. I’m not sure what kind of bomb it was,” he said.
U.N. human rights investigators have also seen “extensive” burn wounds on victims and have raised questions about how the injuries were caused, said a U.N. official who asked not to be identified talking about internal deliberations. The U.N. has reached no conclusions about whether any chemical weapons may have been used, the official said.
Afghan officials say up to 147 people may have died in the battle in Farah, though the U.S. says that number is exaggerated.
The U.S. on Saturday blamed Taliban militants for causing the deaths by using villagers as human shields in the hopes they would be killed. A preliminary U.S. report did not say how many people died in the battle.
The investigation into the Farah battle coincides with an appeal by Human Rights Watch for NATO forces to release results of an investigation into a March 14 incident in which an 8-year-old Afghan girl was burned by white phosphorus munitions in Kapisa province.
The New York-based group said Saturday white phosphorus “causes horrendous burns and should not be used in civilian areas.”
In the world of banking, too-big-to-fail may be in the process of morphing into too-big-to-exist.
After hundreds of billions in federal aid and even more in lost investment capital, both the government and investors may be ready for a big sea change.
The only question, for some, is how quickly it will happen.
“In the next few months, we’ll see the tacitly nationalized banks—Bank of America, Citigroup —sold off rapidly into pieces, turned into much smaller banks,” Sanders Morris Harris Group Chairman George Ball predicted on CNBC Thursday, adding the government wants to send a strong message, to “punish too-big-to-fail banks that have blotted their copy and not exonerate their management.”
“Five years from now, these banks will be broken up,” is how FBR Capital Markets bank analyst Paul J Miller sees it.
From Washington to Wall Street to Main Street, a dramatic change in conventional thinking appears to underway.
That conclusion became painfully obvious in the two faces of the financial crisis.
On one side, the federal government had to provide billions in aid —and on more than one occasion—to the likes of to Bank of America , Citigroup and the giant insurer AIG , which has its own lending unit, to prop them up.
On the other side, the failure of Lehman Brothers—which might have been averted with federal intervention—reverberated throughout the global economy.
Months later, the Obama administration and Congress now appear keenly focused on the dilemma and are expected to create legislation that will empower regulators to intervene in the affairs of big financial institutions and essentially wind down their operations in an orderly fashion with limited collateral damage to the economy. Such authority would also apply to investment banks tirned bank holding companies, such as Goldman Sachs .
“They need it and they’ll get it,” said Robert Glauber, who was a top Treasury official during the government rescue of the savings and loan industry two decades ago.
Regulatory reform is also likely to include new antitrust authority to block mega-mergers creating financial firms whose problems could adversely affect the overall system. Analysts say, if that’s the case, the government won’t want the too-big-to-fail companies of the past essentially hanging around.
Exactly how the government does that is unclear, but experts say there are ways without resorting to a heavy-handed approach such as nationalization.
“If once there is some kind of coherent policy toward systemic risk, whomever is managing that policy can start to make life difficult for an entity that is too big to fail,” says former S&L regulator and White House economist Lawrence White, at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “It wouldn’t upset if they were providing subtle nudges.
“The Fed doesn’t want them that big and might make them hold more capital,” suggests Miller.
Some speculate that any further government aid to certain firms might come with such strings attached.
Others say a fresh look at regulation will help the process and unveil the complex, diverse and, at times, incompatible operations of the bank holding companies and their commercial bank subsidiaries.
“They can’t assess the risks of the big banks,” says Frank Sorrentino, Chairman and CEO of North Jersey Community Bank, which recently acquired a failing bank in a transaction assisted by federal regulators at the FDIC.
Risk, or a disregard of risk, may also have factored into the decision-making of big bank executives, who assumed the too-big-to-fail doctrine would catch them if they fell, which the bailouts obviously did.
Small banks clearly have a financial interest in seeing the end of the big bank era, but that alone doesn’t undercut their arguments. In some cases it may be good for business, consumers and the overall marketplace.
“It’s an appealing idea to our clients because it will make them more competitive,” says Robert C. Schwartz, a partner at Smith, Gambrell & Russell, which represents big and small banks in the Southeast. “Changes may leave gaps for the regional banks and the community banks.”
“If the government does the right thing, it will be the private sector that forces these companies to do what they need to do for the benefit of their shareholders,” says Sorrentino, whose bank has $400 million in assets. (By contrasts, the 19 firms involved in the government’s recently completed stress tests have assets of $100-billion or more.)
Investors have clearly been focused on shrinking earnings and stock prices and what some consider diminished prospects for the future, even with a positive resolution to the financial crisis.
“I also think investors are going to realize that they’ll be low-single digit growth rates,” says Miller
Some analysts say recent events highlight a fundamental problem that has been somewhat ignored for years; the financial supermarket structure of the big institutions makes them difficult, if not, impossible to operate with great success.
“Investors will say,That business unit hidden in there; let’s spin that off,” says Sorrentino. “Either the regulators are going to force it or the shareholders are going force it.”
The U.S. Justice Department under the Obama administration has decided to drop its appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that 1st Lt. Ehren Watada cannot face a second court-martial resulting from his high-profile 2006 refusal to go to Iraq with his Fort Lewis brigade.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday granted the Justice Department’s request to drop its appeal of a federal judge’s earlier ruling that the second court-martial of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada on that count would represent double jeopardy and a violation of Watada’s constitutional rights.
This is the latest development in the long legal battle of Watada, whose 2006 decision not to join his Stryker brigade in Iraq turned the Hawaiian-born officer into a national symbol of the anti-war movement.
But Watada’s legal troubles may not be over.
He could still face a military tribunal for two other counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, according to a Fort Lewis spokesman.
Those counts were not thrown out by the federal court. They result from two interviews Watada gave in 2006, in which, among other comments, he attacked then-President George Bush for betraying the trust of the American people. He also said that Bush’s conduct made him ashamed to wear his Army uniform.
“At this point the leadership at Fort Lewis is considering a full range of judical and adminstrative options, which could range from court martial to adminstrative actions and discharge,” said Joe Piek, a Fort Lewis spokesman.
Watada’s first court martial, in February 2007, ended with a mistrial.
To block a second court martial, Watada’s attorneys sued in U.S. District Court. The unusual move left the U.S. Justice Department arguing the case on behalf of the Army.
In October, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle in Tacoma ruled that Watada could not be prosecuted again by the Army on charges of missing his deployment to Iraq. He also blocked court-martial for comments made in a news conference and while speaking at a Veterans for Peace national convention.
But Settle left open the possibility that the Army could retry Watada on the two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer.
The Army has consistently maintained that a second trial on all the counts would not be double jeopardy. In December, in the waning days of the Bush Administration, the Justice Department filed a notice of appeal that kept open the option of trying to overturn Settle’s ruling.
After a more lengthy review, the Justice Department in the Obama administration opted to withdraw that appeal. That decision was made by the department’s Office of Solicitor General, which determines what cases should be appealed, according to Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorneys Office in Western Washington.
Through the course of this legal battle, Watada has been assigned a desk job at Fort Lewis. Eventually, he hopes to return to civilian life and attend law school, said Kenneth Kagan, one of Watada’s attorneys.
The 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division that left for Iraq without Watada was deployed for 15 months. The brigade returned to Fort Lewis and is preparing to serve again in Iraq later this year.
The Franken campaign has released this statement on Al Franken’s meeting today at the White House with Vice President Biden:
MINNEAPOLIS [05/06/09] – This afternoon, Senator-elect Al Franken visited the White House to meet with Vice President Biden. Franken updated the Vice President on the state of Minnesota’s second U.S. Senate seat, and discussed the administration’s agenda and its potential benefits for the people of Minnesota. Franken was accompanied by his wife, Franni.
Al Franken: “I deeply appreciate the administration’s ongoing support and the opportunity to meet with Vice President Biden today. Minnesotans are eager to see Congress make progress on the administration’s agenda – and I’m eager to do my part in that effort. From investments in alternative energy to the expansion of high-speed rail to the Twin Cities, we have a lot to do to help Minnesota’s working families, and I was pleased to discuss these important issues with the Vice President.”
……
Late Update: Vice President Biden has released this statement:
“The election process and recount in Minnesota have lived up to the state’s reputation for organization, transparency, and bipartisanship. The officials have been meticulous and every ruling has been unanimous.
“While Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the hardest working members of the United States Senate, Minnesotans deserve their full representation.
“Once the Minnesota Supreme Court has issued its final ruling in this case, the President and I look forward to working with Mr. Franken on building an economy for the 21st century.”
After it was announced earlier this week that Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) would replace Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) as the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, bloggers, including ThinkProgress, noted that Sessions had a record of racial insensitivity that stopped his appointment to the federal bench in 1986. Now, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is hitting back at the blogs:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Republicans would fight back hard if Democrats or liberal groups try to make the Supreme Court confirmation process about Sessions’ record, rather than about Obama’s nominee to replace Justice David Souter.
“If people try to go down that road, it’ll blow up in their face, because Jeff is a good guy,” Graham said. “My hope is that our Democratic colleagues — if you start listening to the bloggers — if we’re going to let the bloggers run the country, then the country’s best days are behind us.”
PICTURE ME, IF YOU WILL, as I settle at my desk to begin my workday, and feel free to use a Vermeer image as your template. The pale-yellow light that gives Dutch paintings their special glow suffuses the room. The interior is simple, with high walls and beams across the ceiling.
The view through the windows of the 17th-century house in which I have my apartment is of similarly gabled buildings lining the other side of one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Only instead of a plump maid or a raffish soldier at the center of the canvas, you should substitute a sleep-rumpled writer squinting at a laptop.
For 18 months now I’ve been playing the part of the American in Holland, alternately settling into or bristling against the European way of life. Many of the features of that life are enriching. History echoes from every edifice as you move through your day. The bicycle is not a means of recreation but a genuine form of transportation. A nearby movie house sells not popcorn but demitasses of espresso and glasses of Dutch gin from behind a wood-paneled bar, which somehow makes you feel sane and adult and enfolded in civilization.
Then there are the features of European life that grate on an American sensibility, like the three-inch leeway that drivers deign to grant you on the highway, or the cling film you get from the supermarket, which clings only to itself. But such annoyances pale in comparison to one other. For the first few months I was haunted by a number: 52. It reverberated in my head; I felt myself a prisoner trying to escape its bars. For it represents the rate at which the income I earn, as a writer and as the director of an institute, is to be taxed. To be plain: more than half of my modest haul, I learned on arrival, was to be swallowed by the Dutch welfare state. Nothing in my time here has made me feel so much like an American as my reaction to this number. I am politically left of center in most ways, but from the time 52 entered my brain, I felt a chorus of voices rise up within my soul, none of which I knew I had internalized, each a ghostly simulacrum of a right-wing, supply-side icon: Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Rush Limbaugh. The grim words this chorus chanted in defense of my hard-earned income I recognized as copied from Charlton Heston’s N.R.A. rallying cry about prying his gun from his cold, dead hands.
And yet as the months rolled along, I found the defiant anger softening by intervals, thanks to a succession of little events and awarenesses. One came not long ago. Logging into my bank account, I noted with fleeting but pleasant confusion the arrival of two mysterious payments of 316 euros (about $410) each. The remarks line said “accommodation schoolbooks.” My confusion was not total. On looking at the payor — the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, or Social Insurance Bank — I nodded with sage if partial understanding. Our paths had crossed several times before. I have two daughters, you see. Every quarter, the SVB quietly drops $665 into my account with the one-word explanation kinderbijslag, or child benefit. As the SVB’s Web site cheerily informed me when I went there in bewilderment after the first deposit: “Babies are expensive. Nappies, clothes, the pram . . . all these things cost money. The Dutch government provides for child benefit to help you with the costs of bringing up your child.” Any parents living in the country receive quarterly payments until their children turn 18. And thanks to a recently passed law, the state now gives parents a hand in paying for school materials.
Payments arrive from other sources too. Friends who have small children report that the government can reimburse as much as 70 percent of the cost of day care, which totals around $14,000 per child per year. In late May of last year an unexpected $4,265 arrived in my account: vakantiegeld. Vacation money. This money materializes in the bank accounts of virtually everyone in the country just before the summer holidays; you get from your employer an amount totaling 8 percent of your annual salary, which is meant to cover plane tickets, surfing lessons, tapas: vacations. And we aren’t talking about a mere “paid vacation” — this is on top of the salary you continue to receive during the weeks you’re off skydiving or snorkeling. And by law every employer is required to give a minimum of four weeks’ vacation. For that matter, even if you are unemployed you still receive a base amount of vakantiegeld from the government, the reasoning being that if you can’t go on vacation, you’ll get depressed and despondent and you’ll never get a job.
Such things are easy for an American to ridicule; you don’t have to be a Fox News commentator to sneer at what, in the midst of a global financial crisis, seems like Socialism Gone Wild. And stating it as I’ve done above — we’ll consume half your salary and every once in a while toss you a few euros in return — it seems like a pretty raw deal.
But there’s more to it. First, as in the United States, income tax in the Netherlands is a bendy concept: with a good accountant, you can rack up deductions and exploit loopholes. And while the top income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the numbers are a bit misleading. “People coming from the U.S. to the Netherlands focus on that difference, and on that 52 percent,” said Constanze Woelfle, an American accountant based in the Netherlands whose clients are mostly American expats. “But consider that the Dutch rate includes social security, which in the U.S. is an additional 6.2 percent. Then in the U.S. you have state and local taxes, and much higher real estate taxes. If you were to add all those up, you would get close to the 52 percent.”
But to ponder relative tax rates is only to trace the surface of a deeper story.
Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.
But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.
The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.
“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.
Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.
“I was terrified,” Lundeby’s mother said. “There were guns, and I don’t allow guns around my children. I don’t believe in guns.”
Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.
Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.
“There were no bomb-making materials, not even a blasting cap, not even a wire,” Lundeby said.
Ashton now sits in a juvenile facility in South Bend, Ind. His mother has had little access to him since his arrest. She has gone to her state representatives as well as attorneys, seeking assistance, but, she said, there is nothing she can do.
Lundeby said the USA Patriot Act stripped her son of his due process rights.
“We have no rights under the Patriot Act to even defend them, because the Patriot Act basically supersedes the Constitution,” she said. “It wasn’t intended to drag your barely 16-year-old, 120-pound son out in the middle of the night on a charge that we can’t even defend.”
Passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Patriot Act allows federal agents to investigate suspected cases of terrorism swiftly to better protect the country. In part, it gives the federal government more latitude to search telephone records, e-mails and other records.
“They’re saying that ‘We feel this individual is a terrorist or an enemy combatant against the United States, and we’re going to suspend all of those due process rights because this person is an enemy of the United States,” said Dan Boyce, a defense attorney and former U.S. attorney not connected to the Lundeby case.
Critics of the statute say it threatens the most basic of liberties.
“There’s nothing a matter of public record,” Boyce said “All those normal rights are just suspended in the air.”
In a bi-partisan effort, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., last month introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives a bill that would narrow subpoena power in a provision of the Patriot Act, called the National Security Letters, to curb what some consider to be abuse of power by federal law enforcement officers.
Boyce said the Patriot Act was written with good intentions, but he said he believes it has gone too far in some cases. Lundeby’s might be one of them, he said.
“It very well could be a case of overreaction, where an agent leaped to certain conclusions or has made certain assumptions about this individual and about how serious the threat really is,” Boyce said.
Because a federal judge issued a gag order in the case, the U.S. attorney in Indiana cannot comment on the case, nor can the FBI. The North Carolina Highway Patrol did confirm that officers assisted with the FBI operation at the Lundeby home on March 5.
“Never in my worst nightmare did I ever think that it would be my own government that I would have to protect my children from,” Lundeby said. “This is the United States, and I feel like I live in a third world country now.”
Lundeby said she does not think this type of case is what the Patriot Act was intended for. Boyce agrees.
“It was to protect the public, but what we need to do is to make sure there are checks and balances to make sure those new laws are not abused,” he said.
While I’m enjoying the sight of Specter’s seniority reduced, he did bring a lot of money to Pennsylvania and I’m hoping my state doesn’t suffer too much as a result:
The Senate last night stripped Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) of his seniority on committees, a week after the 29-year veteran of the chamber quit the Republican Party to join the Democrats.
In announcing his move across the aisle last week, Specter asserted that Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) had assured him he would retain his seniority in the Senate and on the five committees on which he serves. Specter’s tenure ranked him ahead of all but seven Democrats.
Instead, though, on a voice vote last night, the Senate approved a resolution that made Specter the most junior Democrat on four committees for the remainder of this Congress. (He will rank second from last on the fifth, the Special Committee on Aging.) Reid himself read the resolution on the Senate floor, underscoring the reversal.
Democrats have suggested that they will consider revisiting Specter’s seniority claim at the committee level only after next year’s midterm elections.
“This is all going to be negotiated next Congress,” Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman, said last night.
Specter’s office declined to comment.
The loss of seniority could prove costly to Specter in his campaign to win reelection in 2010, denying him the ability to distinguish himself from a newcomer in his ability to claim key positions.
Specter said last week that becoming chairman of the Appropriations Committee was a personal goal of his, and his Senate service seemed to put him in position to be the third-ranking Democrat there. Now, though, he will not hold even an Appropriations subcommittee chairmanship in 2011 — a critical foothold Specter has used to send billions of dollars to Pennsylvania.
On the sixth anniversary of “Mission Accomplished,” Mitchell recalled the way big pundits recorded Commander Bush’s splashdown on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The commander strutted about in his flight suit, producing some of the most god-awful “commentary” in the history of pseudo-journalism. We all recall the lunacy of Chris Matthews and Gordon Liddy, gaping at the commander’s manly assets on Hardball (text below). But thanks to Mitchell’s review, we could also recall what Maureen Dowd wrote, some four days earlier. Take the children—and the pets—to some distant chamber:
DOWD (5/4/03):The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds.
Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics.
Compared to Karl Rove’s ”revvin’ up your engine” myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like Lizzie McGuire.
This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MiG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.
Yes, that sounds like crazy stuff. But uh-oh! Missing from Mitchell’s post was a bit of elementary fairness. In her column, Dowd was actually mocking Bush for his manly, cock-of-the-walk presentation (to read the whole column, click here). Her attack on Bush begins at the point in the column where Mitchell stops quoting. Soon, she has an alter ego saying this to Bush:
DOWD: You can fly, Maverick. But you, Cheney and Rummy are strutting around on a victory tour when you haven’t found Osama or Saddam or WMD; you haven’t figured out how you’re going to stop tribal warfare and religious fanaticism and dangerous skirmishes with our soldiers; you don’t yet know how to put Afghanistan and Iraq back together so that a lot of people over there don’t hate us. And why can’t you stop saying that getting rid of Saddam removed “an ally” of Al Qaeda and was payback for 9/11? You know we just needed to jump somebody in that part of the world.
In fairness, that was salient stuff. Dowd had her Bush figure respond this way, using the kind of Dems-are-fems lingo she herself practically invented: “Hey, Miss Iceman, why don’t you head to the Ladies Room? John Kerry and John Edwards are already there, fixin’ their hair all pretty-like. Howard Dean’s with ‘em, trying on a dress, and Kucinich is hemming it for him.”
We’d have to say that Mitchell’s quotation of Dowd was a bit unfair. But then, bungled quotation—and tortured paraphrase—are key parts of the modern landscape. If you could wave a magic wand and remove Bad Paraphrase from Campaign 2000, for example, there’s no way Bush could have reached the White House. The history of our modern politics is a history of this technique.
We humans love tendentious paraphrase! We see this again in Dowd’s new column, a column in which she actually gets something semi-right about Condi Rice. Dowd uses a tortured semi-paraphrase first—but lurking inside her central passage, Dowd does say something that’s basically accurate.
Even Dowd sees the basic framework here! Why can’t our progressive TV hosts?
Dowd is discussing the questions Rice took from some Stanford students last week. Before we get to her central passage, let’s enjoy a good solid laugh as she sets the scene:
DOWD (5/3/09): Condi Rice, who plans to go back to being a professor of political science at Stanford, got grilled by a student at a reception at a dorm there on Monday.
I’ve often wondered why students haven’t been more vocal in questioning the architects of the Iraq war and ”legal” torture who landed plum spots at prestigious universities. Probably because it would have taken the draft, like the guillotine, to concentrate the mind. But finally, the young man at Stanford spoke up. Saying he had read that Ms. Rice authorized waterboarding, he asked her, ”Is waterboarding torture?”
Too funny! Dowd often wonders why college students don’t question these people more! That’s odd! We’ve often wondered the same darn thing about our multimillionaire journalists! (And their young, millionaire-track colleagues.) Appropriate guffaws to the side, Dowd continues with her tale. In our view, she essentially misparaphrases Rice in the passage we highlight. But she makes a sound point in the process:
DOWD (continuing directly): She replied: ”The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s—and by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency.”
This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.
The student pressed again about whether waterboarding was torture.
”By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture,” Ms. Rice said, almost quoting Nixon’s logic: ”When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
She also stressed that, ”Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after Sept. 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans.”
Reyna Garcia, a Stanford sophomore who videotaped the exchange, said of Condi’s aria, ”I wasn’t completely satisfied with her answers, to be honest,” adding that ”President Obama went ahead and called it torture and she did everything she could not to do that.”
In fairness, no—Rice really didn’t“almost quot[e] Nixon’s logic.” (Please note the slick use of “almost.”) She really didn’t say what Nixon is said to have said: If the president orders it, that makes it legal. But by the time Dowd typed her column, everyone else had enjoyed some good fun with this rather tendentious claim. So Dowd went ahead and typed it too—hiding behind her “almost.”
No, Candidate Gore didn’t say that he invented the Internet (the most consequential mis-paraphrase in American history). Candidate McCain didn’t say he wanted a hundred-year war (the press corps dropped that one quickly). And no: Condi Rice didn’t really say that if the president orders X, that means that X is legal. But in the midst of her fumbling fun, Dowd raised a very good point in this passage, which we quote again:
DOWD: This was precisely Condi’s problem. She simply relayed. She never stood up against Cheney and Rummy for either what was morally right or what was smart in terms of our national security.
Rice may not have made the decisions, Dowd said. But she didn’t push back either.
Dowd raises an excellent point in that passage, though her history may be imperfect. In this morning’s Times, Mark Mazzetti offers a history of the torture/enhanced techniques regime (just click here). Among other things, he attempts to report what Rice actually did about this regime at various junctures. His reporting could be wrong, of course. But in Mazzetti’s account, Rice offered “strong support” for the torture/enhanced techniques program at least until May 2004, when a critical internal report began to raise essential questions. He describes her pushing back against Cheney on several points during Bush’s second term, even winning at least one fight. (At other times, she accepts Cheney’s wins.) You can read Mazzetti’s full report for yourself. But his account of Rice’s conduct isn’t quite as one-sided as Dowd’s.
That said, Dowd raised an excellent point: By normal standards, serious questions should be asked about the role officials like Rice played in Bush’s regime. What role did she play in the move to war? What role did she play in the creation of the torture regime? Even Dowd understands that this is a basic, essential framework. That’s why we remind you again of the work which occurred when Rice’s number-one man, Philip Zelikow, appeared on our most liberal TV show.
Appearing on the Rachel Maddow Show, Zelikow was allowed to skate. No questions were asked about any of this—and the same policy obtained two nights later, when Colin Powell’s top aide appeared (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/27/09). But then, when Powell himself appeared on this show, he wasn’t asked the world’s most obvious question. Was water-boarding discussed in your presence? The question was screaming out to be asked. But your new imaginary best friend completely forgot to ask it.
Citizens need to lobby their journalists! More specifically, progressives need to tell people like Maddow that they expect her to ask these questions. That they expect her to challenge these public figures. That they want her to stop kissing up to every big star who drifts by.
Progressives need to lobby that way. Unless this nightly “journalism” is really just a social event, a way to define our glorious clan. A way to feel good for an hour each night. A way to feel good—and superior.
Even Dowd can see the shape of this problem! Why on earth does our new best friend keep giving big Bush aides a pass?
Yes, they actually said it: We think Mitchell’s quote is unfair to Dowd. But here’s what Liddy and Matthews said—and yes, the boys really meant it! In his opening question, Matthews refers to Democratic criticisms of Bush’s glorious splashdown:
MATTHEWS (5/8/03): Gordon, my buddy, thanks for joining us. I’m now giving you a shooting gallery of opportunity here.
LIDDY: Yes, you are.
MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?
LIDDY: Well, I—in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man.
And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know—and I’ve worn those because I parachute—and it makes the best of his manly characteristic.
You go run those—run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count—they’re all liars. Check that out!
Please note: Four years later, Liddy went straight to the smutty sexual trashing dished to Gore and Naomi Wolf—a sexual trashing which was thoroughly accepted by the “career liberal” world in real time. And make no mistake—Matthews took Liddy’s side on this program, ridiculing the silly folk who had been criticizing Bush’s splashdown. In fairness, that would have included Dowd, in her earlier column. Matthews thought they were all nuts:
MATTHEWS: And I’ve got to say why do the Democrats, as you say, want to keep advertising this guy’s greatest moment?
LIDDY: Look, he’s, he’s coming across as a—well, as women would call in on my show saying, what a stud, you know, and then guy—they’re seeing him out there with his flight suit, and he’s—and they know he’s an F-105 fighter jock. I mean it’s just great.
MATTHEWS: Let’s let him talk for himself. Here’s President Bush expressing his confidence that he did the right thing…
The boys were full of admiration for Bush’s manly splashdown. Of course, Matthews had always swum in this sea. Searching today on “Hardball and Bush and manly,” we hit this earlier bit of misery, from Campaign 2000. At this time, Hardball was soliciting and airing comments from insightful viewers:
MATTHEWS (4/27/00): Our second caller says that Al Gore and George W. Bush are both attractive candidates, but in very different ways.
CALLER: I really can’t believe that Chris Matthews thinks that Al Gore is the more attractive of the two presidential candidates. Al Gore is attractive in a sort of limp-wrist sort of way. However, George Bush is attractive in a manly sort of way.
MATTHEWS: Well, Susan, as I said last night, I’ve been polling women, by the way, on this subject, because I don’t know what—have any idea what the right answer is, which of these two bucks women find most appealing or least appealing. I’ll remember to include, however, your comments in my current tally. And if you want to play Hardball yourself, just call us at 202-824-6799, or e-mail us at hardball@msnbc.com.
Each candidate was attractive—Gore in a limp-wrist sort of way, Bush in a manly manner.
Of all the comments he had received, Matthews chose to read just two on the air. This was one of the comments he chose. Five months before, in November 1999, he had played an aggressive, leading role in the sexual trashing of Wolf and Gore.
Career liberals cowered and stared at all this. They still don’t discuss it, to this very day. Olbermann licks Matthews’ keister on air. Bush ended up you-know-where.
By a twist of fate, Jane Harman actually appeared at the AIPAC convention over the weekend, bringing full circle the recent controversy over her comments picked up on a wiretap offering help to get AIPAC staffers out of a Justice Department probe in exchange for help getting the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. She vowed to begin a crusade against illegal wiretapping and overreach from the surveillance state.
Harman has described the wiretap as an abuse of government power. But sources have told The Washington Post that she was not being surveilled; the tapped phone belonged to the suspected Israeli agent, who happened to talk to her.
“I will not quit on this until I am absolutely sure this can never happen to anyone else,” Harman told the AIPAC audience, which warmly applauded her. She said the incident was having “a chilling effect” on members of Congress who “care intensely about the U.S.-Israeli security relationship . . . and have every right to talk to advocacy groups.”
Later, she called herself a “warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against abuse of power”. Which, coming from Harman, is utterly absurd, a magic act where she transforms herself from a vigorous defender of executive prerogatives on wiretapping to a civil liberties zealot who wants to take down the surveillance state.
Jane Harman is a warrior on behalf of the Constitution and against abuse of power — that’s the same Jane Harman who tried to bully The New York Times out of writing about Bush’s illegal spying program, who succeeded in pressuring them not to publish their story until after Bush was re-elected, who repeatedly proclaimed the program to be “legal and necessary” once it was revealed, who called the whistle-blowers “despicable”, who went on Meet the Press and expressed receptiveness to a criminal investigation of The New York Times for publishing the story, who led the way in supporting the Fourth-Amendment-gutting and safeguard-destroying FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and who demanded that telecoms be retroactively immunized for breaking multiple laws by allowing government spying on their customers without warrants of any kind.
That is who is a self-proclaimed “warrior on behalf of our Constitution and against abuse of power.”
As Atrios notes, Jane Harman is primarily concerned about wiretapping of People Named Jane Harman. And her point that this represented a potential abuse of government power, which by the way is entirely plausible, was the entire point of people like me when we decried an illegal wiretapping program that would be ripe for abuse. You know, the one Jane Harman defended.
Worse, in the “Fact Sheet” Harman is sending around to supporters in the district, she characterizes herself as, among other things, a longtime critic of warrantless wiretapping in the most fantastical way possible:
• Harman has never supported so-called “warrantless wiretaps” on Americans. “We must use all lawful tools to detect and disrupt the plans of our enemies; signals intelligence and the work of the NSA are vital to that mission. But in doing so, it is also vital that we protect the American people’s constitutional rights.” (Press release of Dec. 21, 2005 — four days after the President declassified the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program).
• Harman introduced the LISTEN Act (H.R. 5371) with House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to add resources to the Justice Department to ensure the issuance of individualized warrants under FISA. (Press release of May 11, 2006).
• Harman, Senator Obama, and Speaker Pelosi supported amendments to FISA to expand protections to US citizens, and give limited court-reviewed immunity to telecommunications firms that prove they relied in good faith on what they believed was a valid order to produce records. (Vote date of June 20, 2008).
She must think we’re all idiots. That vote of June 20, 2008, the amendments to FISA to “expand protections to US citizens,” in addition to providing retroactive immunity for the telecoms for breaking the law, actually granted sweeping new powers to the federal government, including the ability to “conduct mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications coming into and out of the United States, without any individualized review, and without any finding of wrongdoing.” The fact that this lack of oversight or judicial review could lead to abuses of surveillance power has been confirmed by reports that the NSA overstepped its legal authority to wiretap by intercepting the private emails and phone calls of Americans, problems which grew “out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers.” The fact that Barack Obama supported that bill, considering that he was massively criticized by progressives for that FISA vote, doesn’t exactly help the cause.
Harman’s record on wiretapping is well-known and her efforts to wiggle out of it are frankly laughable. And the rest of her record, as demonstrated by Swing State Project today, shows her to be among the top 20 Democrats voting less liberal than what their districts would support. That, more than this hypocrisy on civil liberties, is why she’ll draw a primary challenge next year, should she choose to run again.
“Chuck” obsessives will have to chow down on Subway foot-longs for at least another week, but fans of the flick “Parenthood” can stop donating disposable diapers to Octomom, or whatever grass-roots campaign it is they’ve hatched to persuade NBC suits to adapt it into a prime-time series starring Peter Krause, Maura Tierney and Craig T. Nelson. It’s a done deal.
“Parenthood,” from Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, is one of six new scripted series the network unveiled to advertisers Monday at NBC’s 30 Rock HQ.
The list of lucky new series includes two medical dramas — you’re going to hear about a lot of new doc dramas in the next few weeks as all the broadcasters look for the next “ER.” “Trauma” is about a first-response team of paramedics in San Francisco, where helicopters plunge from the sky and cars turn into flying fireballs. The other, “Mercy,” is about a nurse, just back from a tour of duty in Iraq, who is married to a nice guy and in love with a hot doctor at her hospital.
Two comedies made the cut: “100 Questions” is about a bunch of 20-something BFFs — think “Friends,” if Rachel were using an online dating site because she’s so gorgeous she’s having trouble finding guys.
The other comedy, “Community,” is about a study group that perfectly reflects the student body at a community college — community colleges, NBC notes, being a gathering ground for losers, newly divorced housewives and old people trying to keep their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity. The old-person role has gone to Chevy Chase, while Joel McHale of “The Soup” is our hero/loser — a lawyer stripped of his law degree because he lied about graduating from college.
Rounding out the list of new NBC shows: drama series “Day One,” about a global event in which millions of mysterious thingummies from outer space rocket into Earth and pretty much nuke everything — except, that is, an apartment building in Van Nuys, Calif. Residents of this building are now trying to rebuild society — so how lucky is it they’re all young and hot? “Day One” is a midseason order.
NBC also announced it would return Amy Poehler’s not-”The Office”-spinoff “Parks and Recreation” and John Wells’s new cop drama, “Southland,” both of which debuted recently.
Among returning NBC series, “Heroes” made the cut, and NBC has ordered at least six more episodes of those “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” half-hours it ran in prime time last fall — but then that was during a presidential election when interest is always high in “SNL”; this year, of course, it’s not.
NBC Entertainment/Universal Media Studios co-chair Ben Silverman anticipated just that issue Monday afternoon, when he and his NBC Universal colleagues gave a repeat performance of their morning presentation to advertisers, to The Reporters Who Cover Television.
“Can you imagine Joe Biden and swine flu this week?” Silverman said of the prime-time faux news show’s possibilities.
Poehler helped NBC suits unveil their new series pickups to the press: She came out wearing a mask over her nose and mouth because, she said, she is “afraid of monkey sniffles,” she told Silverman onstage. This did not play well with reporters; possibly they thought she was calling them a bunch of monkeys.
Silverman also trotted out Donald Trump so he could ask The Donald why his “Celebrity Apprentice” has been such a groundbreaking show.
“Last night was Chicken of the Sea night. We had a two-hour show about Chicken of the Sea,” Trump reported, adding that the chief of Chicken of the Sea had called him Monday to thank him personally.
“This stuff kills with the advertisers!” Silverman said of the celebrity appearances as The Donald stepped offstage. “It’s like I want to do the moonwalk.”
He did the moonwalk.
This world is a better place because Ben Silverman delivers NBC’s pickups presentation.
Long before Monday’s announcement, NBC had committed to picking up Trump’s show next season. Also returning to NBC are comedies “The Office” and “30 Rock,” but the outlook for “My Name Is Earl” is not bright now that NBC has opted to bring back those “SNL” prime-time half-hours in the fall.
NBC also had already announced it was bringing back “Friday Night Lights,” “Heroes,” “Dateline, “The Biggest Loser” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” though the network still has no deal to bring back its stars, Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, who reportedly are holding out for an equity stake in the show. “The show is coming back with or without them,” Silverman’s counterpart, NBCE/UMS co-chair Marc Graboff told the press, adding that NBC has an offer on the table to the two thespians and hopes they accept it. Brrrrr!
Not announced are the fates of “Chuck,” “Kath & Kim,” “Medium,” “Life” and “Law & Order: The Mother Ship.”
The word from the stage yesterday, in response to reporters’ questions about the shows’ chances of returning next season: maybe, no one thought to ask, probably, not a chance and most likely.
NBC suits also waxed rhapsodic about Jay Leno’s move to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“He’s one of the most advertiser-friendly people I know,” said NBC Universal sales and marketing president Mike Pilot, adding that this “doesn’t damage the integrity of the show.”
Monday’s announcements were not comprehensive. Silverman said the rest of the series pickups and the network’s actual prime-time schedule will be unveiled the week of May 8 during the traditional Broadcast Upfront Week, when the rest of the broadcast networks will trot out their new lineups. However, figuring out the basics of NBC’s sked isn’t rocket science, now that the 10 p.m. hour is otherwise occupied by Leno.
During Monday’s clambake, Silverman confirmed what the network’s schedule will probably look like. Monday: “Heroes” and another drama night. Tuesday: “The Biggest Loser” night. Wednesday: “Law & Order” franchise night. Thursday: Four-comedy night. Friday: Lower-expectation original programming night. Saturday: Rerun Theater. Sunday: Football.
Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Democrat, said part of the reason that he left the Republican Party last week was disillusionment with its health-care priorities, and suggested that had the Republicans taken a more moderate track, Jack Kemp may have won his battle with cancer.
Mr. Specter, responding to a question from CBS’ Bob Schieffer over whether he had let down Pennsylvanians who wanted a Republican to represent them, said he thought his priorities were more in line with those of the Democrats.
“Well, I was sorry to disappoint many people. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Republican Party didn’t want me as their candidate,” Mr. Specter said on “Face the Nation.” “But as a matter of principle, I’m becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats’ approach. And one of the items that I’m working on, Bob, is funding for medical research.”
Mr. Specter continued: “If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”
Mr. Kemp died Saturday of cancer. He had been the running mate of 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole
Last week, in an appalling show of corporate greed, “a small group of speculators” sank the Obama administration’s proposed Chrysler deal for just “an extra fifteen cents on the dollar.” The selfish greed of the hedge funds may, however, have produced a good result by forcing Chrysler into the bankruptcy process.The New York Times reported on Friday, “whatever the outcome, this bit of brinkmanship — which many characterized as a game of chicken with Washington — has become yet another public relations disaster for Wall Street.” But instead, this story of corporate greed has now been turned into a right-wing attack on President Obama. Here’s how it happened in three simple steps.
Step 1: Right-Wing Radio Gives Corporate Hedge Funds A Venue To Attack ObamaIn an interview with Detroit-based conservative talk show host Frank Beckmann on Friday, Tom Lauria — a corporate lawyer representing the hedge funds calling themselves the Committee of Chrysler Non-Tarp Lenders — alleged that one of its members, the investment firm Perella Weinberg, was “directly threatened by the White House” if it did not cooperate with the Obama’s administration’s rescue plan. (Perella was Rahm Emanuel’s former investment partner.)Lauria claimed that Perella withdrew its opposition to the government deal because the White House threatened “that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.” (Listen here.)
Step 2: Right-Wing Pressures White House Reporters To Take Up Its AttackAfter the story was cooked up by right-wing hate radio, it was peddled to members of the White House press corps, at least one of whom took the bait. On his radio show on Friday, right-wing talker Mark Levin discussed Lauria’s claims against Obama, and then called on his listeners to pressure the White House press corps — specifically ABC’s Jake Tapper — to report the story:
LEVIN: Somebody needs to pursue what’s going on in the White House behind the scenes! And stop playing games and making nice! American citizens — whatever walk of life they’re in — should not be threatened by the White House! Should not be told we’re going to drag you through the mud with the White House press corps! So confident is the White House that they have the White House press corps wrapped around their little finger! Maybe Jake Tapper will take a look at this. Ask that doofus — Gibbs.
Listen here:
Levin works for the ABC Radio Networks. Tapper works for ABC News.Step 3: ABC’s Jake Tapper Picks It Up, Drudge Promotes ItA day after Levin’s show aired, ABC’s White House correspondent Jake Tapper gave the right-wing attacks the platform they were looking for. Tapper reported, “A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms.” After Tapper reported it, Drudge linked to his story and helped give it further amplification:Both the White House and Perella Weinberg have released statements to ABC News denying the accusations made by Tom Lauria and the right-wing echo chamber. Bottom line: the right wing has morphed a story of corporate greed into a false political attack against Obama.
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Both the White House and 
