From AlterNet
By Eric Boehlert

Why the Beltway press has invested so much time and energy in recent weeks defending Fox News, with one scribe even claiming that the White House’s public critique of the network was “dangerous to press freedom,” and why the press refuses to acknowledge what’s so obvious about the cable channel’s political pursuits, remains baffling.

The facts regarding Fox News’ lack of professionalism seem rather obvious (as I detail below 30 different times). And that ought to be plain for Beltway journalists as well. But whether for reasons having to do with external professional, social, or political pressures, many journalists have opted to pretend that Fox News is a serious outlet, that it’s just like its cable and network TV news competitors.

They insist that any suggestion that Rupert Murdoch’s cable channel isn’t legitimate is completely off-base and that the White House is not even allowed to have an opinion on the issue. Indeed, ABC News’ Jake Tapper suggested it was not “appropriate” for the administration to tag the channel as illegitimate. (Tapper himself can’t tell the difference between the programming that Fox News and ABC News produce.)

The rush to defend Fox News is an odd one, because I don’t remember the same type of the circle-the-wagons defense when the previous Republican administration openly waged war on The New York Times and NBC, two news outlets whose standards far outshine the kind of pseudo-reporting Fox News produces on a daily basis. That Beltway media elites have decided to rally around Fox News of all entities remains as puzzling as it is short-sighted.

The truth is, journalism is not difficult to practice, nor is it tough to identify. Journalists aren’t licensed, and anyone can try their hand at it, as the Internet has made clear. So there is no higher authority declaring what is and isn’t journalism. But the craft, like obscenity, is instantly recognizable in its true form.

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From TruthDig
By Robert Scheer

Is there a more hypocritical figure in American politics than Joe Lieberman? The Connecticut senator declared Tuesday that he would support a filibuster of any health care reform bill that has a public option—even the version with the “trigger” compromise accepted by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe—because it might cost money.

“I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free,” said Lieberman, one of the Senate’s big spenders, in a suddenly frugal mood. “It’s not. It’s going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn’t, it’s going to add terribly to our national debt.”

This from a senator who, as much as anyone, helped run up the national debt since 9/11 by pushing to raise the military budget to its highest level since World War II. It is a budget inflated by enormous expenditures on high-tech weaponry irrelevant to combating terror, such as the $2-billion-a-piece submarines—produced in his home state of Connecticut—that he claimed were needed to combat al-Qaida, a landlocked enemy holed up in caves. The same week that he and others in Congress passed a $680-billion defense bill larded with pork of the sort he has always supported, Lieberman is worried about the impact of a very limited public option on the debt.

Lieberman, whose state is also home to insurance companies that are opposed to any consumer-friendly medical coverage alternative, boldly stated that his opposition to even the most limited version of a public option should not be surprising: “I think my colleagues know for a long time that I’ve been opposed to a government-created, government-run insurance company.” Perhaps during his filibuster to prevent a vote on the public option Lieberman can square that position with his longtime support of the massive government–run insurance programs Medicare and Social Security.

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From Salon
By Garrison Keillor

The former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for, deserves all the attention he’s gotten and more. The Obama administration faces hard decisions there, and the man made a good case against deeper American involvement. He says that our presence among the Pashtun people, the rural, religious people, is only aggravating a civil war between them and the urban, secular (and, it seems, fraudulent) government of Kabul, and the role of the Taliban and al-Qaida is not central — the real issues are tribal and cultural.

American families, he said, “must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more.”

It is rare that a high-level official — he was the senior State Department guy in Zabul province — resigns in protest, and in all the to-do about his four-page resignation letter, nobody had a single bad thing to say about Matthew Hoh.

The American people tend not to admire quitters, which is maybe why protest resignations are so rare. You can get up on your high horse and talk about your principles, but we suspect that you’re just another slacker looking for an easy way out. Your old football coach told you that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and by “get going” he didn’t mean “write a four-page letter about your disillusionment with his coaching and the split-T offense in general” — he meant, Toughen Up, Assume the Three-Point Stance, Hit ‘Em Hard, Eat Some Turf, Get Up and Hit ‘Em Again.

On the other hand, you don’t want to be the last man to believe in the mission after everyone else has seen the light and gone home. Sunday in San Francisco, they set out to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock by gathering 3,000 guitarists in Golden Gate Park to play Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and 50 showed up and some of them were playing ukuleles. The ’60s are over. Time to move on.

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From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it says, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi — June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew’s brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and there is no endgame in sight.

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From The Consortium News
By Leslie Harris

George W. Bush was scheduled to be one of the “inspirational speakers” at a “Get Motivated!” seminar at the Fort Worth Convention Center Arena. The irony was not missed by many of us that Bush and his administration were less than inspirational.

Or, more to the point, much of what they had inspired was illegal, immoral, or criminally negligent — and that George W. Bush should be in The Hague, rather than being celebrated while inspiring others to be like he is.

The sizeable group of people who were ready to go to Fort Worth on Monday morning to demand accountability of Bush and his cabal waned along with the sunshine, as warnings permeated the news about thunderstorms, high winds, flash-flooding, and freeway stoppages in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex.

In the end, only “Intrepid Nel” and I were able to make it there. By the time we sloshed our way downtown from the suburbs in traffic, found a place to park (all the lots were full), did a wardrobe & prop check, stopped for a bathroom break, and walked the eight blocks in the rain, we had already missed Colin Powell.

Not to worry, Bush’s appearance was still to come. We climbed the stairs to find a huge arena, filled with thousands of wildly cheering “fans.” It was similar to walking into a professional football arena during a play-off game. Literally, the crowd roared.

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From The Regressive Antidote
By David Michael Green

Are we a sick society?

Oh yeah. You betcha. That’s why we need healthcare reform.

Pardon me, however, for wondering if the treatment is just as bad as the disease. At a minimum, the events of the last six months have demonstrated that we have a political system worthy of intensive care, to go along with the broken health of our society that that very political system is supposed to be fixing.

Not to mention, of course, that from obesity to factory farming to tobacco policy, it is the political system which is in large part causing the illnesses that have in turn demonstrated how ill the country’s politics are.

And they are sick indeed. America, alone among the developed democracies of the world, has a singular devotion to regressive ideas, no matter how much harm they cause. This patient is in grave condition nowadays, its body abused severely by three decades of regressive debauchery. Here’s the unfortunate diagnosis:

SEVERE OSTEOPOROSIS: The Democratic Party seems permanently fixed in a bent-over posture. This is, of course, quite handy if you primary function in life is getting screwed by Republicans, especially with their closeted penchant for, ahem, less conventional forms of physical relations. However, for the national health, this is a disaster. Even when Democrats win, they remain well trained as losers. Remember what George W. Bush got accomplished with bare majorities in Congress, or none at all? Democrats now have massive congressional majorities and some dude in the White House with a D after his name too. And yet they’ve done nothing for nearly a year now. Even Saturday Night Live is joking about this. The guy portraying the president brags about his key accomplishments so far: “jack” and “squat”. And these are the best of times, ladies and gentlemen. Partly due to the natural order of American politics, but especially due to their own fecklessness, the Democrats are going to get clobbered in 2010 and 2012, barring a miracle. At that point, the present inactivity of the government will look by comparison like a six-ring circus cranked out on speed – with a sound track by the Ramones, played at 78.

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From TruthDig
By David Sirota

For better or worse, our American Idiocracy has come to rely on athletes as national pedagogues. Michael Jordan educated the country about commitment and just doing it. A.C. Green lectured us about sexual caution. Serena Williams and John McEnroe taught us what sportsmanship is—and is not. And Charles Barkley outlined how society should define role models.

So when a single week like this one sees both the Justice Department back states’ medical marijuana laws and a Gallup poll show record-level support for pot legalization, we can look to two superjocks—Lance Armstrong and Michael Phelps—for the key lesson about our absurd drug policy.

This Tale of Two Supermen began in February when Phelps, the gold-medal swimmer, was plastered all over national newspapers in a photo that showed him hitting a marijuana bong. Though he was smoking in private, the image ignited a public firestorm. USA Swimming suspended Phelps, Kellogg pulled its endorsement deal and The Associated Press sensationalized the incident as a national issue about whether heroes should “be perfect or flawed.”

The alleged imperfection was Phelps’ decision to quietly consume a substance that “poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol,” as a redacted World Health Organization report admits. That’s a finding confirmed by almost every objective science-based analysis, including a landmark University of California study in 2006 showing “no association at all” between marijuana use and cancer.

Alcohol, by contrast, causes roughly 1 in 30 of the world’s cancer cases, according to the International Journal of Cancer. And a new report by the Cancer Epidemiology journal shows that even beer, seemingly the least potent drink, may increase the odds of developing tumors.

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From The Huffington Post

The White House attempted to block Fox News from a round of interviews with “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg Thursday, but the Washington bureau chiefs of the five TV networks included in the White House pool refused to interview Feinberg unless Fox News was included.

Fox News says that the White House “failed in its attempt to manipulate other news networks into isolating and excluding Fox News.”

The attempt to shut Fox News out was the latest move in the administration’s ongoing battle against the cable news channel, which several senior administration officials have claimed is not a legitimate news organization.

The decision by the network bureau chiefs to stand with Fox News is one of the first instances of the mainstream media defending Fox News against the White House’s claims.

“I’m really cheered by the other members saying “No, if Fox can’t be part of it, we won’t be part of it,’” Baltimore Sun TV critic (and regular Fox News detractor) David Zurawik said Thursday.

“What it’s really about to me is the Executive Branch of the government trying to tell the press how it should behave. I mean, this democracy — we know this — only works with a free and unfettered press to provide information,” he said.

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From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

Popular disgust over the fat premiums that financial executives bestow upon themselves is burgeoning, and rightly so. Those Wall Street piggy banks are filling up with billions upon billions of government-subsidized dollars.

But anyone infuriated by the grossly inflated compensation of the masters of finance should check out the incredible earnings of the top executives in the health insurance business. They’re among the most highly paid suits in the country—not owing to any skill in providing health care, which they don’t do, but because they have succeeded in denying care, quashing competition, driving up costs and winning federal subsidies for their companies.

Last year WellPoint, the country’s largest health insurer, paid chief executive Angela Braly just under $10 million in salary, options and bonuses, along with the use of a private jet for herself and her family. That included a raise of about $750,000 over her 2007 salary. United Health Care, the second largest, paid CEO Stephen J. Hemsley only $3.2 million last year, but in 2007 he took home $13.2 million. His biggest bonanza got away when he was forced by the Securities and Exchange Commission to surrender $190 million in falsely backdated stock options, but that was nothing compared with the nearly $1 billion in options that his predecessor was required to disgorge. The S.E.C. declined to prosecute anyone for those frauds. Meanwhile, the CEO of Aetna, Ronald Williams, earned $23 million in 2008, and the CEO of CIGNA, Edward Hanway, brought home a total of $120 million over the past five years, plus nearly $29 million in stock options.

Why are these insurance executives paid such obscene amounts? They might explain that they have improved the processing of claims and managing of risk—happy euphemisms for the notorious corporate practices of denying care wherever possible–or they might insist that their huge salaries reflect their challenging roles in a highly competitive marketplace.

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From True Blue Liberal
By Walter and Rosemary Brasch

One of the joys of Halloween is to dress in scary costumes and pretend to frighten others, who pretend to be frightened. But with less than two weeks until an evening of trick-or-treating, it’s possible there won’t be anything scarier than what’s already happened in the country.

We are being told to fear the swine flu virus, and then learn that the vaccine, which was supposed to be available in mid-October, won’t be ready for awhile.

It makes little difference anyhow, since about fifty million Americans don’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford the cost of vaccinations or treatment.

The ogres of health reform, also known as Republicans and the insurance industry, have already frightened Americans by spewing lies and hatreds no costumed kid could ever top.

The teabaggers, thousands of Americans dressed in work clothes but who seem to despise the working class, disgorge even more lies, half-truths, fear, and hatred, along with spurts of poisonous doses of racism and bigotry, since they have to blame someone for their own problems. Read the rest of this entry »