Bridget Johnson writes a screed screed against the Marxist insurgency in Hollywood. “It’s time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism!” The proof? The Motorcycle Diaries won an Oscar. Or, at least a song from that movie did. Nevermind that Hollywood didn’t invent the decades-old Che fad – and nevermind that said film (which, although I haven’t seen it, doesn’t have any actual communism in it) is just cashing in, belatedly. No, it’s a good excuse for bringing out that old dusty Anti-Red essay, which won her an AEI scholarship when she was in high school. And there’s never a bad time to point out how out of touch Hollywood is.

Soon, the only movies allowed will be elegies for the conservative revolution. Viva Sowell! (Thanks to World O’ Crap.)

Bush’s permanent campaign stopped in Albuquerque, where he unleashed this howler:

For younger workers, he delivered a grim message: By 2027, Social Security will be $200 billion in the hole.

False. Inaccurate. Not true.

As we’ve explained many times, under a pessimistic projection of economic growth, Social Security will begin drawing on its trust fund in 2018 or 2020, and that fund is expected to last through 2042 or 2052.

Is Bush not aware of that fact that, since 1983, workers have been paying extra in payroll taxes to accumulate trillions of dollars for this exact situation?

Bush and McCain… both recalled 1983, when McCain said President Reagan worked with Democrats to increase the retirement age and raise taxes as a means to extend the life of Social Security.

Oh, I guess he is aware. What do you call it when you say something false while knowing the truth? There’s a word for that ….

Bush&Co continue their efforts to try to install Paul Wolfowitz as head honcho at the World Bank, as usual glibly bypassing the obvious in all their spin efforts, that Wolfowitz is about as horrendous a mismatch to the World Bank’s mission as John Bolton is to the UN’s, or Alberto “What, Me Torture?” Gonzalez is to that of the Geneva Conventions, or…well, you get the picture. The list goes on and on.

Wolfowitz is known inside and out for his ultra-hawkish ways, and in particular for his penchant for preemptive war philosophy. He began planting the seeds of this extreme idea when he drafted the “Defense Planning Guidance of 1992″ (later reworked and renamed “Defense Strategy for the 199os” by a surprisingly wary Cheney). It’s this same sickness that eerily resonates in W’s 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, which PBS’s Frontline folks have characterized as:

offer[ing] the administration’s first comprehensive rationale for a new, aggressive approach to national security. The new strategy calls for pre-emptive action against hostile states and terror groups, and it states that the U.S. “will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting pre-emptively.” The NSS also focuses on how diplomacy and foreign aid can and should be used to project American values, including “a battle for the future of the Muslim world.”

Yuck. Sounds like a cult to me. If Paul Wolfowitz is in any way responsible for the Manifest Destiny wierdness that’s been forced upon us, via the war in Iraq, he is hardly the right guy to have run the World Bank, right? Right. ‘Cause the World Bank wants to empower less developed sovereign states by assisting them financially with the development of educational, agricultural and industrial programs, right? Not pulverize them through radical ideology, cultural hegemony and imperialism, yes? You got it. Sheeesh, Paul’s motives are way scarier than Halicheney’s simple lust for money.

Of course (sigh), as Georgie sees it, Paul is great, will be great, and can- do-no-wrong-what’s-the-problem? Who cares if Wolfowitz turns everything he touches into crud, including Iraq, East Timor and the Pentagon?

Fortunately, many of our saner types are way up in arms about this particularly ridiculous proposition. Most European countries are reported to be furious over what amounts to yet another abuse of power by the Bush Administration. Standing with the continent in general are actual World Bank employees, fiesty staffers who are reportedly so alarmed by the possibility of working for Wolfowitz that they’ve talked of rioting and protesting. And Dr. A. P. Williams, former director of personnel at the World Bank, has blasted a letter to the editor of the Financial Times, in which he, among other things, defines Wolfowitz as “seriously wrongheaded.”

Hopefully Europe will succeed this time in challenging Bush&Co.’s latest game of paleoconservative political hegemony. Hopefully they can force W’s ever-present penchant for producing appointees, who have an historical aversion to what and/or whom they are being asked to represent, back into Pandora’s airtight, locked-down, dark black box.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had my own problems with journalistic ethics. But when called to task I stood up and took full responsibility for my actions. Because if you don’t, how can the readers ever trust what you write?

That’s our old friend Armstrong Williams, whining about bias in the Washington Post. But of course, as we have noted time and time again, Williams never took responsibility for his actions, and the public-relations professional still pretends to be a “journalist.” Spare us your high road!

P.S. Who paid for this one?

$400,000 FOIA charges got you down? Poll shows concern about government secrecy:

Americans feel strongly that good government depends on openness with the public, with seven out of 10 people concerned about government secrecy, a new poll says.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs for Sunshine Week, a coalition of media organizations and other groups pressing for government access, found that more than half of Americans believe government should provide more access to its records.

Even more — 70 percent — are either “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” about government secrecy. Nearly as many felt access to public records was “crucial” to good government.

Following a New York Times article on the wide scope and persistence of government video press releases disguised and distributed as independent news, the Washington Post jumps in on a crucial point: the administration has vowed to continue the practice. As reported here and elsewhere, the Government Accountability Office declared some of these video news releases (VNRs) to be illegal “covert propaganda"; unfortunately, the GAO is toothless.

Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said in memos last week that the administration disagrees with the GAO’s ruling. And, in any case, they wrote, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, not the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, provides binding legal interpretations for federal agencies to follow.

The legal counsel’s office “does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency’s role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or ‘covert,’ regardless of whether the content of the message is ‘propaganda,’ ” Bradbury wrote. “Our view is that the prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency.”

This administration has proven itself immune from accountability — the GAO can’t touch it, nor can Democrats from their minority perch, and I’m not expecting Attorney General Gonzales to scold his old patron.

In fact, the only recourse seems to be public outcry. But thanks to efforts like this to control the press, even that can be stifled.

After our article this week about Scalia’s role in pushing for a new Supreme Court in his image, if you had any doubts about his feigned outrage, here he is again:

In a 35-minute speech Monday, Scalia said unelected judges have no place deciding issues such as abortion and the death penalty. The court’s 5-4 ruling March 1 to outlaw the juvenile death penalty based on “evolving notions of decency” was simply a mask for the personal policy preferences of the five-member majority, he said.

“If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again,” Scalia told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. “You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.”

“Why in the world would you have it interpreted by nine lawyers?” he said.

As we explained, “evolving standards of decency” has been used by the Court for almost fifty years to decide what punishments “cruel and unusual” applies to. Like all questions of individual rights granted by the Constitution, it is specifically not a matter of majority rule. In his dissent, Scalia made his case on whether the right applied to executing children, and he lost — but now, this fifty-year-old precedent, used often by Scalia, is suddenly a newsworthy offense.

Scalia is complaining that the Court is too “politicized” — but here he is, out on the street, trying to influence the political process in court appointments.

Read Body and Soul on the persistent lack of public interest in torture. Amazingly, torture is something people need to be persuaded against.

“A culture of abuse doesn’t stay in the box.”

An article in today’s New York Times details efforts by liberal bloggers to reach out to the mainstream media to help boost their message by setting up conference calls with reporters. This seems like a noble effort as in the aftermath of Rather/Gannon blogs have become an odd, quasi-journalistic entity. Unfortunately, the article seems to offer minimal insight as most of the quotes are from those paragons of progressive blogdom: FreeRepublic.com! Only one liberal blogger is quoted in the article versus two right-wingers (whose efforts are also given more space). Stupid liberal media bias!

Jonathan Chait writes on the politics of privatization in The New Republic; his take will be no suprise to regular readers of this site. Privateers are disingenuous in their motives and deceptive in their claims.

One window into Bush’s ideological disposition is his constant refrain that private accounts would offer “a better rate of return on your money than that which the Social Security system gets.” On a technical level, that’s a deeply misleading claim. One reason is a theoretical concept called “legacy debt.” Social Security started paying out retirement benefits almost immediately after it came into existence, which meant that the early generations of beneficiaries collected benefits while paying little or nothing into the system. This created the legacy debt. Every subsequent generation, whose taxes support previous generations, must bear a higher tax burden to compensate for the first generation’s free ride. That’s the cost of the legacy debt, and it’s why Social Security will always earn a below-market rate of return.

Now, any generation could decide to stop paying into the system and keep their contributions in private accounts for their own retirement. These private accounts would appear to earn a higher rate of return going forward–but only if you ignore the cost of trillions of dollars that must then be borrowed to pay off current Social Security obligations. When these transition costs are factored in, private accounts don’t earn a market rate of return either.

Chait advocates that Dems stonewall this debate. Read the rest.

Max Sawicky has this take:

In short, all Social Security reform aimed at “solvency” is about assigning sub-market rates of return to current and future generations of workers. The younger people targeted by the Administration for support are precisely the ones who get reamed under Bush’s reform. Private accounts are not a free lunch. They’re an overpriced lunch. Fooled once, it won’t be necessary to be fooled again.

At this moment, conservatives are still winning in the war of ideas, and that success cannot be chalked up only to the power of their ideas. It is because these ideas have a winning organization behind them.

So concludes a report on foundation spending (pdf) by Andrew Rich of the Stanford business school. He looks at grants made by the largest mainstream (Ford, Pew, etc.), progressive (MacArthur, Mott, etc.), and conservative (Scaife, Olin, etc.) foundations and finds that, although conservative trusts spend much less money on public policy institutes, the money is targeted much more towards advocacy and communication. (Via Political Theory Daily Review.)

James Piereson, director of the John Olin Foundation ("We don’t resist being called conservative. We sort of acknowledge it; that’s essentially our philosophy"), puts it this way: “That liberal foundations became too project oriented — they support projects but not institutions. … We provide the infrastructure for institutions.”

Other highlights:

As one longtime think tank leader observed, “Liberal foundations are liberal not just in their belief in social and economic justice, but also in their belief in the possibility of neutrality, which makes them uncomfortable with making grants that seem too ‘political.’” The comments of a research director of a new progressive think tank are even more pointed: “If you’re on the left, you have to go to the foundations and say you’re neutral, unbiased — not politicized. You’re certainly not liberal. If you’re ideological, they don’t want to support you. It’s frustrating — because, by contrast, if you’re on the right, the foundations will only fund you if you toe the ideological line, if you want to do battle for the conservative cause.“
[…]
The Brookings Institution is qualitatively different from the Heritage Foundation. Brookings and its researchers and not so concerned, in their work, in affecting the ideological direction of the nation. Brookings tends to be staffed by researchers with strong academic credentials, whereas Heritage is staffed by researchers with more political experience.

And while Brookings devotes most of its budget to research, Heritage puts a substantial portion into media and government relations. [3% versus 20%.] Herb Berkowitz, Heritage’s former vice president for communication, observed: “Our belief is that when the research product has been printed, then the job is only half done. That is when we start marketing it to the media. … We have as part of our charge the selling of ideas, the selling of policy proposals. We are out there actively selling these things, day after day. It’s our mission.“

Rich calls this “the marketing of ideas,” and this fills in some gaps left by Matt Bai’s July article in the New York Times Magazine (reprinted here) about the rise of conservative think tanks. It also confirms comments by some that liberals tend to empiricism, looking for what works and pushing policies rather starting from ideological assumptions and practicing politics. (Cf. Mark Schmitt, 1, 2, 3 .)

If we really want to take part in the war of ideas, we need to have the same structure of funding for the marketing of ideas. So, if you’ve got a load of cash, throw it at your local progressive advocacy group!

These guys will not quit it with the state propaganda! (Via American Street) Now there is a new government-run website, “strengtheningsocialsecurity.gov”, and it reads like this:

In 2018, just 13 years from now, the government will begin to pay out more in Social Security benefits than it collects in payroll taxes – and shortfalls then will grow larger with each passing year.

By the year 2027, the government will need to come up with an extra $200 billion a year to keep the system afloat.

By 2033, the annual shortfall will be more than $300 billion a year.

By 2042, when workers in their mid-20s begin to retire, the system will be bankrupt.

This would be frightening, if only it were not a complete lie.

As we’ve explained many times, Social Security will not be “bankrupt” in 2042. In fact, that is the date when Social Security is predicted (assuming rather gloomy growth) to first run a shortfall. The shortfall in that projection will still pay about 80% of planned benefits, which is more than current retirees receive today.

What this state-run website fails to mention is that Social Security will have built up a Trust Fund by 2018. Workers have been paying extra for the last 20 years to prepare for the retirement of Baby Boomers – but according to this taxpayer-funded campaign website, that was all a joke.

Will the government have to “come up with” the money to repay the Treasury bonds that the Social Security Trust Fund has been invested in? The answer is no, or at least no more than we have to “come up with” the money to pay for Bush’s massive tax cuts or “come up with” the money to pay for building up the military. In other words, it’s a matter of the solvency of Bush’s budget, not the solvency of Social Security.

I’ll bet you’re wondering how this online propaganda proposes to “strengthen Social Security.” In fact, it offers zero proposals! Are you surprised? I’m not. Instead, the site echoes our Dear Leader an offers a “solution” to a different “crisis.” Privatization does not “strengthen” the finances of Social Security at all – instead, it phases out the old system. But the “insolvency” remains. The only “crisis” the private accounts “solve” is the “crisis” of having the most popular and effective government program in history.

Best of all, [private accounts] would replace the empty promises of the current system with real assets of ownership.

Our Dear Leader says Social Security is an “empty promise.” It’s a promise we’ve kept for seventy years, and it will take more than a propaganda website for us to be tricked into breaking it.

Bill Moyers writes an essay in the New York Review of Books called, disturbingly, Welcome to Doomsday:

There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.
[…]
I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists’ fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President “was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God’s master plan.”

That will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don’t see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush’s master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration’s multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.

(See also “The end-times of politics” from PoliAnna.)

Needless to say, the idea of appointing John Bolton as the United States’ UN ambassador is a terrible idea! A Poliblog post earlier in the week did a great job illustrating this point.

Right now, there is a campaign going on to dissuade Senators from voting for John Bolton’s nomination. Steve Clemons, a colleague of mine at New America Foundation and the author of The Washington Note, is spearheading this campaign and Polianna is going to help with the cause. In 2001, John Bolton was approved as the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security by a vote of 57-43 in the Senate. All 43 nays came from Democrats.

The Senate currently has a total of 44 Democrats. 35 of those sitting Democrats voted against John Bolton in 2001. A friend and I spent all day yesterday calling Senate offices to determine the Democratic Senators’ position on the Bolton matter. Most Senators are not in favor of Bolton’s appointment, but many Senators have yet to make up their minds about how they will vote. The only Democratic Senator to lend support to John Bolton was Senator Ben Nelson.

This is a very important matter. As many Senators have not taken an official position on the John Bolton matter yet, now is the time to contact Democratic Senators and let them know that you are against Bolton’s nomination. For further updates on the Bolton situation, please see The Washington Note.

Though not actually as absurd as what really happened with Jeff Gannon, recently a visionary and ingenious salesman named “tiger_peanut” decided to see how much he might make off of James Guckert’s supposed White House Press credentials (not really) by auctioning them off on ebay. Well, they were just made-up press credentials, but so what? They were so much fun.

Tiger_peanut, also known as route66 at dailykos.com, re-auctioned the item after the first buyer refused to go through with the purchase. The buyer just didn’t want to rain on the parade we were having at Jeff James’ expense. Read this hilarious commentary, in the form of buyers’ questions and tiger_peanut’s brilliant, biting replies, on ebay, item #3960124087.

In the netherregions of the far right they know very clearly where those pesky Iraqi WMD are: Syria! And now it turns out that it was the dasterdly Russians who moved them with elite Spestznatz troops. Never mind that the Russian military is so weakened they could barely mount operations in Chechnya.

The reason it’s important to strongly note postings like these is it’s eaten up and believed by the right-wing base. Remember that 72% of Bush supporters believed Saddam had WMD or a major program. These allegations cannot be debunked enough.

Meanwhile, the NewsMax people really need to hook up with this guy who believes the Russians are preparing an invasion of the United States in the very near future.

Hunter S. Thompson taught us all that “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” But the going may have gotten too weird even for one of America’s finest writers. More than ever, professional journalism is viewed as anathema by the decidedly weird Bushies. Not only that, the journalists have to be left alive to write it. The buzz out there is that Duke’s death may not have been so suicidal after all.

At the time of his death, it was well known that Hunter was working on a piece about 9/11 and the World Trade Center attacks, and he had obtained what appeared to be hard evidence showing that the Towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that supposedly flew into them, but by explosive devices planted in their foundations. Now begs the question: did Hunter kill himself, or did someone do it for him?

Good God Almighty, not Hunter, our national treasure!

Now, mind you, the Associated Press’ version tells us that on that fateful day Hunter was on the phone with his wife, making plans to spend the afternoon with her, when he put the phone down and, apparently, suddenly, decided to shoot himself in the head. Hmmmm…is this story making any sense yet? No, not really. His wife Anita said Hunter had just asked her to come home so they could spend time working on his weekly ESPN column.

Hunter had not been the first to question the chain of events on 9/11, as reported by the America media, that led to not only the crumbling of the Twin Towers but the deaths of over 5,000 people. Folks at Physics911.org, reopen911.org, and 911research.wtc7.net are among the dozens and scores who subscribe to the explosives theory. And, for the satisfaction of all the mainstreamists out there, Anderson Cooper of CNN conducted a survey in November of 2004, wherein about 90% of those polled (approx. 8,000 citizens) said that they believe the U.S. is involved in some kind of cover-up regarding the 9/11 attacks.

Conspiracy theories are as common in our country as Walmart Supercenters and super-highways, and the idea that Hunter Thompson was murdered on 2/24, not to mention those supposed explosives in the Twin Towers, may belong in exactly that category. But when one of the most lauded journalists of our time decides it’s worth it to sink his teeth into something like this, and winds up dead, one has to pause, and wonder.

Suicide or not, our loss is enormous. RIP, Duke.

Jan Frel writes a more complete story about the role of paid bloggers as opposition research cum media critics in the Thune campaign (via Oliver Willis):

Additionally, the Alliance bloggers posted dozens of arcane documents, dubious factoids, and .pdf images of old newspaper articles about Daschle, which had all appearances of being campaign opposition research. Lauck told me that he did not get research from the Thune campaign, but added that some of the best material he posted came from Charlene Haar – a former high school teacher of Lauck’s – who ran against Daschle in 1992. Most of the oppo research-style blog postings concluded with sentiment along the lines of “Where’s the Argus on this story?”

OK, it’s not Michael Bolton. It’s John Bolton, the man Bush has nominated to be Our Ambassador to the United Nations.

And he just happens to be an outspoken tin-foil hat detractor of the UN (via Digby).

“Moreover, many Republicans in Congress - and perhaps a majority - not only do not care about losing the General Assembly vote but actually see it as a “make my day” outcome. Indeed, once the vote is lost, and the adverse consequences predicted by the U.N.’s supporters begin to occur, this will simply provide further evidence to many why nothing more should be paid to the U.N. system.” Washington Times, 10/24/98

At a 1994 panel discussion sponsored by the World Federalist Association Bolton claimed “there’s no such thing as the United Nations,” and stated ‘’if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.'’

“There’s no such thing as the United Nations"! He’s going to look pretty stupid showing up to work on the 10th floor of nowhereville now, isn’t he?

This is getting a little ridiculous. When the CIA was under fire for providing politically expedient “intelligence,” Bush appointed to head it a Republican congressman who was campaigning against Kerry. Facing increasing criticism for executive-level torture policy, he appointed the torture memo guy himself to oversee “Justice.” At the same time that rumors of U.S.-backed death squads coming to a theater of operation near you soon surfaced, Bush appointed as directer of intelligence John Negroponte, whose name is Italian for “death squads.” Now, just as Bush returns from his European voyage of forgotten diplomacy, he appoints as UN ambassador a man who doesn’t believe the UN even exists.

What’s next? “Jeff Gannon” for press secretary? Ken Lay for SEC?

Here at Polianna and throughout the progressive community we spend most of our time concentrating on what’s going wrong in the world. Of course this is vital since we’re living through incredibly troubling times. Still it seems important to note that we aren’t loosing every fight. The good folk over at The Nation magazine have started a column called “Sweet Victories” that will showcase progressive triumphs throughout the country. This week starts in Kansas where Topeka’s city council voted down a bid to ban homosexuals from being hired while at the same time the city voted in its first openly gay council member.

This is just a start so we look forward to hearing of more “sweet victories” in the future.

There was an interesting little volley at the end of Sunday’s panel on Meet the Press between Joe Klein and Paul Krugman. Krugman (bless that man) sees the barn burning while Klein took the ‘don’t be too liberal’ position ("radical left"?. . . although I like his take on Clinton):

MR. KLEIN: Paul, I have a question for you: What was it about the peace and prosperity of the eight years of the Clinton administration that you didn’t like?

MR. KRUGMAN: No, I liked the way the country ran.

MR. KLEIN: I think that he had a real governing philosophy. It wasn’t triangulation. It was moving us from the industrial age to the information age, and that’s where the Democratic Party is going to have to move…

MR. KRUGMAN: There’s a radical right…

MR. KLEIN: …if it wants to have any role in American politics.

MR. KRUGMAN: There’s a radical right challenge to America as we know it that’s under way, and I think the Democrats–I mean, maybe Hillary Clinton can do this. I’m actually not opposed to her, right? But they need to make clear that they are going to turn back that tide, not blur it.

MR. KLEIN: The answer to a radical right challenge isn’t a reactionary left response.

Concerned about the display of the Ten Commandments at courthouses? Fear not, the Court has a simple precedent to follow. The New Republic (via Kevin Drum):

In the past, the Supreme Court has subscribed to what lawyers call a “three plastic animals” rule for religious displays: If a creche in a town square, for example, is surrounded by a wishing well and a laughing clown, it’s constitutional. The logic is that reasonable observers perceive unadorned religious displays to be endorsements of religion, while the addition of kitschy accoutrements turns the display into a celebration of Americana. Judged by this kitsch test, the Hollywood version of the Ten Commandments, surrounded by equally garish secular monuments, arguably passes muster.

Also, in case you weren’t aware, we’re dealing with a movie advertisement:

The Ten Commandments were donated in 1961 by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, an association of theater owners who were working with Cecil B. DeMille to promote his movie retelling the story of Moses. The Eagles modeled their monument on publicity shots from DeMille’s picture, hired Charlton Heston to dedicate it, and consulted an interfaith committee of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics to make it as ecumenically tacky as possible.

Heston tried a similar stunt for his 1973 film Soylent Green, but strangely, most funeral homes weren’t willing to put up the phrase, “Soylent Green is made out of people! It’s people!” above their coffin displays…

Garance Franke-Ruta ties up a number of threads in an article in the American Prospect: Gannon, Eason Jordan, Dan Rather, and the GOP war against the free press:

Along has come a new group of bloggers who aren’t mere “citizens” at all. On the left side, some of these became deeply enmeshed with political parties, “527s,” and campaign advocacy groups – and are now a new generation of no-holds-barred partisans and major party fund-raisers, the liberal equivalent of George W. Bush’s “Rangers” and “Pioneers.” On the right, a number of these bloggers were already political operatives or worked at long-standing movement institutions before taking up residence online. They are, at best, the intellectual heirs of L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and Reed Irvine, who founded the ultraconservative, media-hounding nonprofit organization Accuracy In Media (AIM) in 1969 as part of the first generation of post–Barry Goldwater right-wing institutions. At worst, they’re the protégés of conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and dirty-tricks master Morton Blackwell, who has tutored conservative activists since 1965, most recently mocking John Kerry at the Republican national convention by distributing Band-Aids with purple hearts on them.
[…]
But there’s another a key difference between the effort against Gannon and conservative blog firestorms: The targets of the liberal blogosphere are conservative activists; the target of the conservative blogosphere is the free and independent press itself, just as it has been for conservative activists since the 1960s. For the Republican Party, pseudo-journalism Internet sites and the blogosphere are just another way to get around “the filter,” as Bush has dubbed the mainstream media. […]

“The way I look at this,” says Daily Kos’ Gardner, “[Gannon] is just one more piece to a bigger puzzle that we’ve seen for the past couple months – attempts by the Republican media complex not necessarily to fight the media but to become the media.”

But unlike traditional news outlets, right-wing blogs openly shill, fund raise, plot, and organize massive activist campaigns on behalf of partisan institutions and constituencies; they also increasingly provide cover for professional operatives to conduct traditional politics by other means – including campaigning against the established media. And instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism. This will have to change – or it will prove serious journalism’s undoing.

Kurt Anderson, who is some kind of New York media personality (Spy Magazine and public radio’s Studio 360), belatedly endorses the Bush-Cheney ticket in a sick and twisted screed in New York Magazine. His cocktail-circuit friends, he bemoans, ignored the Iraq elections because they refused to grant a “victory” to Bush.

Each of us has a Hobbesian choice [sic] concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

Keep in mind, this writer claims to be speaking for “liberals.” What he is trying to say is that we “liberals” have no choice in this conflict but to adhere to the absolutist Bush vision of the world.

This Kurt Anderson is nothing more than a caricature of a “liberal,” a real live New York media elite who is so suffused in “conventional wisdom” that, try as he might, he is unable to think of himself outside the imaginary box drawn around him by conservative rhetoric. His mind struggles against the confines of this box:

During these past few years, I have heard it said again and again that liberals’ ineffectiveness derives from their inability to see the world in the simple blacks and whites of the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Bushes. (Why else, the argument goes, did John Kerry lose?)

Maybe. But now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.

He has accepted the exact terms of surrender demanded by the Manichaean demagogues of the right. Not only does he accept the ridiculous premise that you’re either with us or with the terrorists, he goes even further and accepts the decimation of history that is required to become faithful to our Dear Leader. He forgets, as he is trained to, that Bush’s war has already been lost — the war that America foolishly signed up for, the war against WMDs. Bush not only cannot be “vindicated” on this premise — he has already been proven completely and utterly wrong.

It is the conservatives who have made a blood-sport out of mortgaging the future of Iraq on their military doctrine and what they insist to be the character and fate of America. This is just as stupid as the notion, claimed by no-one, that our defeat in Vietnam “vindicated” the superiority of Communism over American democracy. While he does not endorse either-or in principle, our Mr. Anderson has taken that pill in practice, and entered the matrix of imaginary neoconservative politics.

James Wolcott recognizes him as the vapid, defeated bien-pensant that he is:

He’s glib in a Manhattan Mandarin manner that conceals the glibness behind a knowingness that itself conceals a lack of deeper, driving conviction.

I suppose what I’m saying is that Andersen has always struck me as one of those media personalities who’s always “positioning” himself without ever taking a real position.

To which Anderson responds:

[M]y loathing of political discourse reduced to crudely partisan A and B ideological choice – you’re either a red-stater or a blue-stater, a believer in Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, a Bush-hater or a Bush-lover, no complexity allowed – was the whole point of the column in New York.

No, the point of your article was to demonstrate to your peers that you have the “courage” to defame “your side.” In order to accomplish this self-serving end, you had to testify first that the Republican straw-man liberal was real, and second that the right-wing vision of what the war signifies was valid. You are wrong on both counts.

For a guy who used to come out of his cave once a year during the Clinton administration, only to utter roughly two words and return to his dark fires, Alan Greenspan has sure been talkative this week.

Paul Krugman has some harsh words about our Fed chief, the People’s Banker:

When Mr. Greenspan made his contorted argument for tax cuts back in 2001, his reputation made it hard for many observers to admit the obvious: he was mainly looking for some way to do the Bush administration a political favor. But there’s no reason to be taken in by his equally weak, contorted argument against reversing those cuts today.

Krugman adds, on an unusually cheerful note:

The best bet now is that Mr. Bush will manage to make the poor suffer, but fail to make a dent in the great middle-class entitlement programs.

The Bush Administration: lowering the bar since 2001.

CIA Director Porter Goss admitted to an Associated Press reporter that “the jobs I’m being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal….I’m a little amazed at the workload.” This is an amazing admission. Mr. Goss goes on to say that he spends about 5 hours a day preparing and giving Presidential briefings.

While Mr. Goss is spending 5 hours a day giving briefings to a President who obviously ignores such briefings (see the CNN article about the memo President Bush ignored in the month leading up to 9/11), what is he not doing? What is not getting done and being overlooked at the CIA because of Goss’ workload? When John Negroponte becomes the country’s first national intelligence director, he should alleviate some of Goss’ workload. But what does it say about the Bush administration when it is supposedly fighting a war on terrorism, but also neutralizes the CIA director?

Armstrong Williams, the Patsy Propagandist who was paid a cool quarter million to shill for Bush on his TV, radio, and print “commentary” outlets, is actually being given a radio show in New York. The New York Times (via Romenesko):

Mr. Williams said he expected callers to badger him about the controversy at first. “That goes with the turf,” he said. “You don’t just recoup your credibility in two months. I’m going to have to spend some time earning the trust and credibility of others again. They can’t just judge me by the rhetoric of my apology; they have to judge what I do.”

Ms. Gaines, the station manager, said she did not believe Mr. Williams had been compromised as a political commentator. “We feel it’s something that unfortunately happened but we can all move on,” she said.

Did I miss something? Did Williams close down his PR company and divulge all of its contracts, without me noticing? I think not.

No, Williams’ strategy of “regaining his credibility” is to continue to lie about his true job of PR shill, while waiting for people to forget that we all know what he’s done and is no doubt still doing.

And if this Times article is any indication, he will succeed. The article repeats the error made by Salon.com yesterday in accepting Williams’ fake apology on its word:

Mr. Williams was paid to produce and present television commercials promoting the Bush education platform. Around the same time, he also wrote at least four positive columns about No Child Left Behind. He has since said the columns had nothing to do with his government contract.

That was Williams’ mea culpa: paid advertisements, that’s all. Incorrect. His contract, among other things, required him “to regularly comment on [No Child Left Behind] during the course of his broadcasts,” as reported by USA Today. Memo to the “free press": do not trust Armstrong Williams! Duh!

The Wall Street Journal, the stock market’s paper of record, weighs in on privatization:

Donning their green eyeshades in the traditional GOP fashion, they’ve talked about Social Security “solvency,” “transition costs,” “trust funds” and other accounting abstractions, all in all giving reform the appeal of Marine boot camp without the expensive haircut. “Do your fiscal pushups” will never be enough to transcend the fear-and-loathing thrown up by opponents.

That’s rich — as if the GOP hasn’t long been the borrow-and-spend party of “fuzzy math.” What they really mean is: Privateers have lost the battle of facts, but they can still win the battle of empty words.

Apparently they got the Frank Luntz playbook: “To dwell too long in numbers will ultimately lose the interest and passion of the audience, and sink your argument.”

When Privateers start using facts and figures, they get into trouble:

The Administration’s proposal to limit the accounts to no more than four percentage points of the 12.4% payroll levy strikes us as too miserly. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is even more ungenerous, talking about two-percentage points or less.

This is why Fuzzy Math Republicans are losing the reality-based argument. It’s not “four percentage points of the 12.4% payroll levy” — implying half a percent — it’s four of the percentage points out of those 12.4 percentage points, or one-third of Social Security.

As it stands, millions of Americans still believe in the fiction that their payroll taxes are being squirreled away in a savings account in their name somewhere in the U.S. Treasury.

Millions of Americans also believe in UFOs, in an Iraq-9/11 link, and in the Loch Ness Monster.

As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress yesterday in his most vigorous support yet for personal Social Security accounts, one of their virtues “is that money allocated to the personal accounts would no longer be available to fund other government activities.” He added that “if existing promises need to changed, those changes should be made sooner rather than later.” In other words, the longer Congress waits to reform Social Security, the more likely it is that the politicians will repudiate their benefit promises.

No, that’s not what he said. Markets tend to pay very close attention to Greenspan’s utterances, and if he said that the government was going to default on bonds issued to Social Security, there would be catastrophic consequences.

Of course, Greenspan, who came up with the large Trust Fund in the first place back in 1983, should know better. What he’s really saying, in his typical supply-side ideologue way, is we should cut off an easy line of credit to the government in order to “starve the beast.” Another solution exists to make accounting more honest that doesn’t involve eliminating Social Security: the lockbox. (We’ll have more on that next week.)

Finally, the crux of their so-called argument:

Americans need to understand that as of now they have no such property right. While politicians have made promises to pay future benefits at gradually rising levels, the Supreme Court’s 1960 Fleming v. Nestor decision makes clear that such promises are not an individual asset and that the taxes people pay today guarantee nothing at all down the road.

Americans are not contractually promised a specific amount of money; rather, they are democratically promised an adequate amount of retirement security, an amount that changes as our standards of living change, not as the stock market fluctuates. For 75 years this promise has been kept — it’s only today that the president is threatening to renege on this guarantee. The Journal is trying to scare people into thinking the government is going to take Social Security guarantees away, but their proposal is to do just that.

Eric Boehlert writes a fantastic piece on Salon.com about Bush’s war against the free press. He highlights the growing concern over the Republican marketing strategy, which has gone far beyond simple message discipline and secrecy and into the realm of undermining reality-based media entirely, and supplanting them with a state-run propaganda mill.

Just one detail he missed:

[Armstrong] Williams, the radio talk show host and conservative columnist who was paid by the administration to write allegedly independent, legitimate pieces supporting Bush policies, was among several pundits who accepted contracts from the administration while at the same type hyping White House initiatives.

In fact, it was not merely unethical coincidence of PR and punditry – Williams was explicitly paid to promote No Child Left Behind in his role as a commentator. Here’s USA Today:

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams “to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,” and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

John Adams wrote “Facts are stubborn things” (they were downgraded by Reagan into “stupid things"), but reality has found someone even more stubborn in our Dear Leader.

Over in Clown Hall, Paul Jacob wrote a column called “Government by propaganda”:

And in government today, the kids not unreasonably see little hint of freedom — despite all the talk. Instead, they see deliberate government manipulation of the populace. They see government take the people’s money and then tell the people what to do, as if no one could parent or eat without being told how by some authority. And then even more frightening, governments have begun regulating what the people may say about government itself.

Of course, he’s not looking at the evidence we presented of state propaganda under Bush. No, he cites public service announcements ("Karl Malone says don’t do drugs") and tourism ads featuring a governor, etc. These are valid cause for concern, although his encomium against Campaign Finance Reform only makes sense if you assume money is speech and corporate behemoths can never be as threatening as big gummint.

As if someone on high were trying to make a point, the very next Clown Hall column is by none other than Armstrong Williams, the Patsy Propagandist who was paid $250,000 by the Bush administration to promote a Bush policy over his supposedly independent media commentary empire. And Williams’ column is also about propaganda! He writes:

The jig goes something like this: Corporations underwrite the construction of vast conservative complexes that awe people into regular attendance.  The commentator’s image is projected onto a big screen. His calm baritone is beamed out by state of the art speakers. From all sides, his voice fills the room. The seats shake as he gives expression to the word of Bush. It’s a rousing experience to be sure, and one that is increasingly paid for by corporations. In return for their funding, the commentators circulate corporate promotional calendar, fliers, and, if the corporation is really lucky, broadcast an endorsement straight from the pulpit. Trusting the commentator’s judgment, the voters simply surrender their money to whatever service the corporation is hawking. In such a manner, countless conservatives are fleeced every year.

Just kidding! He actually wrote this:

The jig goes something like this: Corporations underwrite the construction of vast religious complexes that awe people into regular attendance.  The preacher’s image is projected onto a big screen. His calm baritone is beamed out by state of the art speakers. From all sides, his voice fills the room. The seats shake as he gives expression to the word of God. It’s a rousing experience to be sure, and one that is increasingly paid for by corporations. In return for their funding, the churches circulate corporate promotional calendar, fliers, and, if the corporation is really lucky, broadcast an endorsement straight from the pulpit. Trusting the pastor’s judgment, the flock simply surrenders their money to whatever service the corporation is hawking. In such a manner, countless Christians are fleeced every year.

But who says conservatives don’t have a sense of humor? I guess the only real puzzle, since Williams has been revealed as a paid PR shill, is who is paying him this time?

Christopher Hitchens, on the conspiracy of dunces in Ohioda (via Rox Populi):

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

I don’t know whether there was really any foul play, or whether it would have made a difference in the outcome. What is certain is that the electronic voting machines in use across the country are not by any measure designed for democratic purposes. I mean, come on, Microsoft Access? It’s beyond being so easy to use that my grandmother could vote on it; these machines are so flimsily assembled that my grandmother could hack them.