Feds slug state's poor

That was the surprising, large-type headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily News this morning. And it goes on to report:

Budget cut aimed at poor, young, old, sick

California's needy families will lose more than $550 million a year under a deficit-reduction bill approved Wednesday by the U.S. Senate, marking the first cuts to welfare, Medicare and other entitlement programs in nearly a decade.

The Daily News is more conservative than the Los Angeles Times and for the most part serves a suburban readership (San Fernando Valley) which in earlier days could be considered "moderate Republican" - a now meaningless term or extinct constituency. That's why the headline was a surprise.

Could it be that the Republicans in Congress will suffer politically for their cuts to programs that serve the "poor, young, old, and sick"? That's not something we expect, but it just might happen.


posted by Quiddity at 12/22/2005 08:18:00 AM

Bill O'Reilly, here's another outfit you might want to tangle with:

Screenshot (partial) showing the Screen Tip.




posted by Quiddity at 12/21/2005 07:50:00 AM

Not a strict constructionist or textualist any more?

Does this mean we really do have a "living constitution" after all?



[First quote in black is genuine.]

Thanks to the folks at Busy,Busy,Busy for the inspiration.


posted by Quiddity at 12/19/2005 07:37:00 PM

Both interpretations are correct:




posted by Quiddity at 12/19/2005 02:11:00 PM

It's not the MSM anymore:

It's the LJM (Liberal Jew Media)

At least it is over at Townhall.com - "When it comes to pushing the ... anti-Christian agenda, you find ... Jewish journalists"     (via Seeing the Forest's blogpost)


posted by Quiddity at 12/19/2005 11:05:00 AM

Why not ask your Saudi friends?

In Bush's press conference today, he made the following remark in support of renewing the Patriot Act:

I mentioned in my radio address -- my live TV radio address -- that there was two killers in San Diego making phone calls prior to the September the 11th attacks. Had this program been in place then, it is more likely we would have been able to catch them. But they're making phone calls from the United States, overseas, talking about -- who knows what they're talking about, but they ended up killing -- being a part of the team that killed 3,000 Americans.

Back in November of 2002 we looked into stories about these guys and diagrammed the connections that allowed them to operate. Turns out that they were funded (by proxy) by the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the US.



Who knows what they're talking about? Ask your friends on Embassy Row.


posted by Quiddity at 12/19/2005 09:55:00 AM

Juan Cole summarizes our view:

[Al-Qaeda's] monstrous "theatrical" terrorism on a large scale has paralyzed the US political and judicial elite in the face of Cheney's and Bush's New American Empire, an Empire in which the US Constitution has been turned into a dead letter.

posted by Quiddity at 12/19/2005 09:30:00 AM

Post Bush Sunday speech headlines:

• USA Today: Don't Give Up
• Daily News (Los Angeles): Don't Give In
• Los Angeles Times: Bush Urges Patience for Iraq Mission
• New York Times(NY & Nat'l editions): Asking Patience, Bush Cites Progress in Iraq

Hardly an enthusiastic response.


posted by Quiddity at 12/19/2005 08:39:00 AM

How many people knew about the spying and told the New York Times?

Here are some interesting lines from the initial New York Times story about NSA spying on US citizens without court approval.

• Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in U.S. After 9/11, Officials Say
• Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.
• According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters.
• While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it said the N.S.A. eavesdropped without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time.
• Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search.
• One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program.
• A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation.
• Several senior government officials say that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A.
• A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said.
• One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court.
• Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal.

Now many of these officials were probably contacted after the initial disclosure to the newspaper, but there is a sense when reading the article that a lot of mid-level professionals were troubled by the program. And may have talked.


posted by Quiddity at 12/17/2005 06:24:00 PM

The Sunbaked King:




posted by Quiddity at 12/17/2005 05:34:00 PM

Weren't you paying attention at the time?




posted by Quiddity at 12/17/2005 11:20:00 AM

Brazen it out:

That's the White House policy in reaction to the exposure of NSA spying on US citizens. They have no other choice.


posted by Quiddity at 12/17/2005 08:41:00 AM

Huh?



UPDATE/CORRECTION: Rice was the National Security Advisor, not the head of the NSA. Uggabugga regrets the error.


posted by Quiddity at 12/16/2005 02:20:00 PM

Bush: Democrats get the same amount of money from crooks

10 Jan 2002

"I got to know Ken Lay when he was head of the — what they call the Governor's Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994."

FACT: Mr. Lay and his wife gave Mr. Bush three times more money than Ms. Richards in their gubernatorial contest.

14 December 2005

"Abramoff — I'm frankly, not all that familiar with a lot that's going on up there on Capitol Hill. But it seems like to me that he was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties."

FACT: According to campaign finance reports, Abramoff and his clients contributed money to Democrats but substantially more to Republicans.

Bush is trying to sell the notion that both parties are equally at fault. And he might succeed. A recent NBC poll had 72% of Americans holding that position. Which isn't that surprising when you have "reporters" like Jeffrey Birnbaum saying things like:

"... now Abramoff was a very big Republican lobbyist but he also headed a whole lobbying shop in a law firm that included Democratic lobbyists as well and it looks like the public, so far at least, is not branding one party or the other as most responsible for this decline in the proper way of dealing with money and politics on Capitol Hill."

posted by Quiddity at 12/16/2005 09:14:00 AM

Der Sturmer 2.0



Essay here.


posted by Quiddity at 12/14/2005 11:24:00 AM

Washington Post to change "identification" of Froomkin's column:

Before:

After:

For more see firedoglake and TPM (1,2,3,4)


posted by Quiddity at 12/14/2005 09:34:00 AM

WIBA sells name of its newsroom to a business:

Story: (excerpts, emp add)

Beginning Jan. 1, the WIBA newsroom will be called the Amcore Bank News Center.

"This simply means they get 'name branding' with the description of the news center on air," confirmed Jeff Tyler, vice president of Clear Channel Radio-Madison, which owns WIBA-AM 1310 and FM 101.5. "What listeners will hear on air is something like, 'Now from the Amcore Bank News Center, here's WIBA's Jennifer Miller.'"

Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics trainer for the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., opposed the plan. "The idea is that a newsroom is an advocate for the public," McBride said. "It's Madison's news, not Amcore's news. If you have corporate branding, that is going to taint the whole product as a marketing product."

But James Baughman, professor and director of UW- Madison's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said he's not disturbed by the sale. He said it's a return to broadcast practices of the 1950s, a topic he's exploring for his next book.

"From 1948 to 1956 the NBC nightly news was the Camel News Caravan," said Baughman. The name was tied to a cigarette manufacturer. "They even had a rule that they would not show a cigar or a 'no smoking' sign on air, although they made an exception for Winston Churchill."

Baughman said naming rights are part of a broader media trend. "Clear Channel is trying to maximize its profits. Advertisers are trying to find new ways of getting their brand out there. We're going to be seeing more of this."

And Tyler said the high cost of producing quality news necessitates such an arrangement.

Baughman's citation of Camel cigarettes makes exactly the point: That explicit corporate ties to the news will affect what is broadcast. And a professor of journalism isn't disturbed by that?

And as to having to do it in order to produce "quality news" - they've got a property (radio frequency) from the government in exchange for serving the public interest. That (broadcasting quality news) is a cost of having the monopoly, and should not be treated like any other entertainment programming.


posted by Quiddity at 12/13/2005 01:05:00 PM