Gonna make Atrios's head explode

The opening to the New York Times article on $33.9 billion being necessary to keep Bank of America solvent:

Executives sparred with the government over the amount, which is higher than executives believed the bank needed. But J. Steele Alphin, the bank’s chief administrative officer, said Bank of America would have plenty of options to raise the capital on its own before it would have to convert any of taxpayer money into common stock, a move that would effectively increase the government’s holdings in the troubled bank.

“We’re not happy about it because it’s still a big number,” Mr. Alphin said. “We think it should be a bit less at the end of the day.”

This idea that the government is forcing capital down the throats of the bankers is totally nuts. The financial institutions these people are running are bankrupt. However, they are pretending otherwise because bankruptcy involves wiping out common shareholders and replacing management (whose stock and options would also be made worthless).

That even the New York Times, whose coverage rarely dabbles in pro-banker spin, includes the quote from the poor widdle bank who has to accept $34 billion in capital (for which the government will probably pay an above-market price) I can only attribute to CNBC's dominance of business media.

The government is funneling huge amounts of money into these institutions, but their executives, stockholders and bondholders want it/us to do it without getting ownership of the banks in return. This is obviously an unreasonable request! Of course they're going to make it. They have a fiduciary duty to do so, in fact. But we, and certainly the New York Times, are not supposed to take it so seriously, and/or feel badly for them.

Can you get anything right?

This is pretty funny. BP's John Perrotto apparently reported that Pedro Martinez was about to sign with Houston, and that turned out not to be the case. In his post today entitled "Mea Culpa," he concludes:

I would love to be able to write this off as easily as saying you win some and lose some. That’s not the case, though. As a reporter, you’re [sic] No. 1 responsibility is to get the story right.

I didn’t do that and, to you the readers, I apolozige [sic].

Fortunately, he's a relief pitcher

Gordon Edes pens a column "Rodriguez Falls Short in Ambassador Role". Apparently after Venezuela beat the U.S. in their WBC game our new closer initially declined to take questions from the media. He was convinced, however, to come back out and by Edes' own estimation "was engaging, answering all inquiries at length." He was angry at some unflattering press the Venezuelan team had gotten after getting trounced by the U.S. in their first matchup.

Now while I tend not to care how much players talk to the press or whether they're good "clubhouse guys," if that's the kind of thing you concern yourself with, fine. But Edes completely loses the plot here:

"K-Rod’s inning of work was not a clean one, a foreshadowing of what Mets fans are advised to expect."

How unclean was it? He walked (former MVP) Jimmy Rollins, and another guy reached on an error before he struck out Kevin Youkilis to end it. Doesn't sound that bad, but Edes notes that Rodriguez walked 10 leadoff batters last year, compared to just one for Jon Papelbon.

Of course, Jon Papelbon is not a point of reference. He's a freak of nature who gave up fewer walks last year (8) than a lot of closers gave up home runs. "He walks more leadoff hitters than Papelbon" is the kind of criticism a moron would make.

So do your hand-wringing about K-Rod's people skills if you must, Edes, but let's not pretend he's likely to have much to apologize for pitching-wise.

When white people do it it's "political violence"

I don't think anyone had a problem calling the USS Cole bombing an act of "terrorism," even though it was a military target, so I'm not sure why the New York Times would decline to use the term anywhere in this story.

Good call, fellas

I didn't realize that Marc Ambinder and Mark Halperin thought at the time that the Terry Schiavo thing was going to be a real political windfall for Republicans. Oops.

via kos

"We'll be blowing less smoke than usual this evening."

CNBC begins its 8pm special report with the anchor saying "Well we can't understate anything tonight."

What? You guys have been understating the extent of the problems? Never.

Trooper-whatever

It's painfully clear that people just do not give a rat's ass who Sarah Palin fired or why when she was governor of Alaska. It was a one day story that won't have any influence on who the next president is or how much Obama may or may not win by. It's nice that the investigation wasn't suppressed, but you can only lead a horse to water.

She is predictably arguing that the report doesn't say what it says. Conservatives(!), to the extent they engage the issue at all, argue that a government official with firing power can fire whomever they want for whatever reason, including political affiliation (U.S. Attorneys) or personal vendetta (Monegan). But there's not even a debate about the investigation really going on.

On the positive side, the indifference may owe something to the fact that her public image as a ditz is, with Tina Fey's help, already so deeply ingrained. That's a bad image for a potential vice president to have, but it makes it harder for people to register stories in which she's also a ruthless tyrant.

Plus there's the possibility that it's just getting lost in the overarching, McCain is in dire, dire straits narrative.

Campbell Brown in the NYT

I don't watch much CNN, being a mouth-foaming partisan, and thinking theirs is closer to the Worst Political Team on Television, but for some reason I was watching Campbell Brown live when she pantsed Tucker Bounds and became queen for a day in the liberal blogosphere.

Well the New York Times has a profile on Brown today which is kinda interesting. She distinguishes herself from Olbermann and O'Reilly by saying "[you're] not going to see me ever be partisan. I’ll never take a position on a candidate or an issue." I have philosophical doubts about the feasibility of the second claim, but in general more-neutral-than-Olbermann is a worthy and attainable goal.

The great part, though, is this little bit, which I hope more journalists (especially on TV) take to heart:

“So when you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day,” she said. “I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And not have to say, ‘Well, you decide.’ Then it would be like I’m an idiot. And I’d be treating the audience like idiots.”

Good for her.

Manna from MSM heaven

What an excellent press day looks like:

• Charlie Gibson's interview of Sarah Palin is not groveling, as was feared after the McCain camp said it wanted interviews that showed "deference." Gibson actually kind of overtly quizzes her on the "Bush doctrine" among other topics, pressing her for answers that are clearly never going to deviate from the ones she was given. It was a stupid gotcha question, even if you'd still like it not to be way over the vice president's head.
  
  
• The AP's headline is "Palin Tries to Defend Qualifications in Interview", prompting TPM to hand their AP-criticism duties over to the Pantload. (n.b. "riding the tire swing" is the former's term for writing pro-McCain copy.)
  
  
• WaPo's Anne Kornblut, before getting to the humiliating bill of particulars in the Gibson interview, puts Palin on blast for linking Iraq to 9/11, a link that has "been rejected even by the president himself." This is even though the audience for the remarks in question was an Iraq-bound brigade including her son. I don't have a problem with it, exactly (although that lie was better corrected when it was Bush telling it to the country), but it's a nice surprise. [Update: Bill Kristol is hopping mad about this one, which is always a good sign]
  
  
• The AP's Charles Babington, whose piece on Obama's convention speech was so negative that Keith Olbermann wanted to fight the guy, now writes an "Analysis:" piece that begins "The 'Straight Talk Express' Has Veered Into Doublespeak." It's literally a story about how much McCain and his campaign have been lying, which is about all one could hope for.
  
  
• All one could hope for... except the fabled expose of Cindy McCain's drug habit, "A Tangled Story of Addiction"! The web version is five pages. The interview that appeared to have been scrubbed earlier today is just one source for what I'm sure is a very fair and evenhanded account of Cindy McCain's drug addiction, the inappropriate measures John McCain took to score for her, and the lives it ruined.

Paul Begala can't take it no mo'

I've never been that big a fan, but he did real good work here. I don't know if the outrage was really sincere or not, but it was convincing, and I appreciated it.

He really made John King look like an asshole, too. He had already started in on the "false debate" line when King had only gotten out "We've got 56 days..." out of his mouth. It's as if he knew that King was going to leave the question open.

VP CW

So the conventional wisdom on the VP debate is pretty well congealed: "Joe Biden is in big trouble because if he's too combative he'll look like he's picking on the poor little lady."

Serious people really come out and say this on television. It's annoying enough but today I heard someone mention that Biden also has to avoid going too easy on her, because that will be seen as condescending towards women. Obviously, the commentators who keep talking about how Biden has to play nice don't have to worry about that.

So while Joe Biden is "boxed in" and has to "navigate between the Scylla of belligerence and Charybdis of condescension" (okay that's not really a quote), no one seems to be mentioning that when Sarah Palin was asked about the Iraq War in March 2007, she said she hadn't really been following it that closely.

Word is Joe Lieberman has been brought in to coach her on the finer points of accusing Democrats of treason.

Washington Wire at its very worst

Elizabeth Holmes writes:

The Republican candidate had come under fire for associating with Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who fell from grace after his involvement with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. McCain was one of the leaders of the investigation of Abramoff's lobbying activities that led to his imprisonment. Reed was never charged.

To read this passage, you would think that the very suggestion that Ralph Reed is an undesirable associate is crazy. It is written as if there weren't emails unearthed by the House investigation between Reed and Abramoff. In those emails, Reed bragged about having Karl Rove block a nomination in the Interior Department who was seen as hostile to Abramoff's casino clients. Charged or not, Reed didn't just "fall from grace" because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was up to his eyeballs in the auctioning off of the federal government and there's proof of it.

And now McCain's going to an event "promoted" if not "hosted" by Ralph Reed, and it's wrong for Democrats to object to this, because McCain led an investigation of Abramoff after he was caught? Holmes seems to be under the impression that McCain's leading those investigations, instead of perhaps strongly approving of already-exposed government corruption, should inoculate him from charges of hypocrisy. Holmes would have us pay no mind to the fact that Reed really was intimately involved in the biggest public corruption scandal in years.

At other points, Holmes just lashes out at McCain's critics:

"Yet the Democrats jumped on the email..."
"The Democrats"? All of them?

"That didn't stop the Obama campaign from issuing a 'response' to the absence"
"Will those little jerks at the Obama campaign never be satisfied?!"

"Others took it as an assertion of his involvement with the campaign, going so far as to insinuate he was hosting the event."
Given that Reed sent out invitations to the event in his own name, you arguably have to go further to preserve the distinction between "promoting" and "hosting" than to conflate them. [Bonus points for referring to the guilty parties as unspecified "Others."]

"On Monday evening, there was no sign of Reed at the Marriott Marquis here and no mention of him by McCain during his remarks."
So... McCain's failure to acknowledge Reed's support is evidence he didn't get any? I think it just means he wants to downplay it now that he's taking criticism for it. Yes, especially given that Reed is sending emails/fundraising for him and is on his Victory 2008 team, I think the latter interpretation is more likely.

That just about covers it I guess. It's not as though the WSJ's Washington Wire garners a huge audience as far as I know, and that's all to the good, but it still carries a major news organization's brand and it's churns out more than its share of awful posts. This is just my nomination for the worst of the season so far.

Michelle Bernard: Better labeling, please

Of the non-celebrity talking heads who regularly appear on MSNBC, few get as much airtime as Michelle Bernard of the "Independent Women's Forum."

Bernard is very good at cable news, but (or so) I would say comes out with more than her share of really stupid stuff. And not necessarily random stupidity, either. At times she sounds more than a little Republican-leaning, which would fit the pattern of gross over-representation of black Republicans (in general but especially relative to black Democrats) on cable news.

Anyway it, which is to say she has been kinda bothering me but making up for it at other times for quite a while now. Tonight on the subject of imposing a windfall profits tax on ExxonMobil, which I am also against, she dropped such horrible supply-side crankery that I figured this woman must be a regular at Grover Norquist's Wednesday meetings.

So I fire up the Google, and what do you know:

Before joining IWF, Bernard had a short stint with the 2000 Bush-Cheney Presidential Inaugural Committee, Inc. Prior to that time, she was a partner at the District of Columbia's Patton Boggs LLP.

Which brings me to the real problem here: It's bad enough to let anybody spout off on TV identified only by the Independent Women's Forum. Nobody knows what that is. I get uneasy when people from the National Review or the Nation do their thing, and those organizations' leanings are widely (if not universally) known. All we can infer about her is that she's an independent woman. And we all know independents are the truth tellers.

But she really doesn't sound all that independent, and the reason for that is she worked for Bush-Cheney '00 and at one of the most high profile and most Republican law firms in D.C.

They even mention Norman Hsu

The national attention to McCain's fundraising practices may be happening at an even faster pace than I had hoped. First McClatchy, now the Washington Post has a front page story "Bundler Collects From Unlikely Sources."

The presumptuous/uppity attack

Just a couple good links on the subject:

Glenn Greenwald gives the long form treatment to the relentlessly awful Dana Milbank and marvels at the press corps' ability to take what Karl Rove tells them and actually believe that he is describing a real phenomenon that only sophisticated analysts can see, when in fact he's clearly just calling Barack Obama an uppity negro.

Attaturk looked up "uppity" at Thesaurus.com and found a ton of words that have been getting thrown around a lot recently, including of course "presumptuous." As in the lead of Milbank's smarm-fest: "Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee."

Clever, Dana! Did you think of that yourself? No of course not, you smirking, wire-rimmed monkey.

I'm 100% certain that had Obama not gone abroad and met with world leaders and given a speech in Germany that attracted 200,000 people, he would have been presumptuous/uppity for thinking he didn't need to go see other countries first hand to be prepared for the presidency. In fact that's what McCain was saying before Obama went. They were going to say he should mind his place one way or the other.

Fournier again

It turns out the AP's man in Washington, in addition to telling Karl Rove to "keep up the fight" and all the rest of it, was in talks with the McCain campaign to join it in a "senior advisory role."

I guess there's nothing inherently wrong with this, except that it fits the profile of a guy who is at a stage in his career where he's not sure if he wants to be a news editor or a Republican operative, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that he's resolved the conflict by effectively doing both, which ain't right.

Over-reaching

Just to get an idea of how dishonest McCain's free-media ad on the canceled troop visit was, today the Washington Post is running a story entitled "McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence." Not "Obama Camp Cries Like a Bunch of Little Girls Over Attack Ad" or "Liberals Insist Obama Doesn't Hate Troops", but basically "McCain Full of Shit."

The McCain campaign doesn't have a lot to work with except their candidate's reputation among the press as a straight-talking maverick who's all about personal integrity and who disdains political attacks. Sure, they have to make attacks anyway, but there are a million ways to do that while staying more or less in bounds. Their opponent is young and inexperienced, after all.

I'm not accustomed to playing Republican concern troll, and there are plenty of actual Republicans who have expressed worry about damaging the McCain brand, but I still would like to know whose idea it was to cut an ad that was so nasty and bogus that even Andrea Mitchell felt compelled to call the foul.

Generals be different from primaries

Yglesias: "Back during the primaries, everyone kept formally admitting that it was wrong to engage in the form of inference 'candidate X lost group A in a primary, and therefore he's likely to lose group A in a general election against candidate Y of the other party' but I often got the sense listening to and reading pundits that they didn't really believe that."

It's funny because it's true. I also read a news story addressing McCain's unpopularity with Hispanics that expressed bafflement that they haven't been won over by his courageously independent position on comprehensive (as opposed to enforcement/deportation first) immigration reform. It never got around to mentioning that he changed his position on immigration to shore up the Republican nomination ("I have heard the message from the American people.") and maybe that's not helping matters.

Don't want to jinx it, but...

Howard Fineman thinks Obama needs to do more groveling at the feet of those who supported the Surge. I'm not so sure about that, but in any case it's a minor gripe about what has truly been a stellar week of press coverage for Obama. After a halting start, the "Maliki favors Obama plan" meme has finally reached full flower. Even confirmed serious people like Jay Carney are saying that everything is breaking his way right now.

Unfortunately, the polls coming into the week were going the other way, in Ohio and nationally. I can't believe they'll stay that way after elite opinion has deemed this trip a rousing success. It's important to realize how easily they could have gone the other way. I mean somehow the definition of success was set at avoiding saying anything too stupid into a microphone. And he probably did better than that even had he not gone 1/1 from three in front of the troops.

On a more substantive note, the best part as far as I'm concerned was his discussion of Petraeus. He acknowledged that Petraeus would like more rather than less resources and for longer, but also pointed out that's what you'd expect the general in charge of Iraq to say (or in Obama's empathetic version: "If I were in his shoes, I would probably feel the same way").

"But my job extends beyond Iraq."

Whoa! Did he just display a basic understanding of the Constitutional relationship between the president and his generals? Like, that he tells them what to do and stuff? That's totally mindblowing these days. On MSNBC they're talking about him "staring down" the generals, and Matthews is talking about how he's like Truman, who had to "fight generals."

It doesn't make any sense. Bush defied his generals too, except he didn't defy them exactly as much as fire them, as he was well within his rights to do. But all Bush's talk about "listening to the commanders on the ground," despite being a transparent and unusually craven way of passing the buck, seems to have really sunk in among the Howard Finemans of the world. So now Obama has to have another "teaching moment" about the purview of the president's job responsibilities.

To the extent that's perceived as professorial (even though that would be sad because it's elementary school civics), I guess there's some risk, but it also makes him look assertive of presidential power and willing to take responsibility for military decisions, which is good for a Democrat. The Hardball chyron was "Who's the Boss?" I mean you know Tweety loved it.

So yeah. Good week so far.

My sentiments exactly

"I love his politics, and think he's really filled a void for the left that was missing on TV, but the guy is just a total asshole."

That's an anonymous former colleague of Keith Olbermann, in this excellent Radar Online profile of the TV personalities most hated by their peers.

Also unsurprising, but no less funny, is this vision of Chris Matthews:

"He's always running around the office with M&Ms and his diabetes medication stuffed in his blazer, amped up on sugar. He's totally self-centered and has absolutely no self-control."