Dig A Little, Find A Nugget

Take a look at this from today's Tribune-Review:

Contrary to President Obama's statements, ObamaCare hardly is “settled” and “here to stay,” as it faces numerous legal challenges in federal courts — including one that questions the constitutionality of its passage.

Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now before the D.C. Court of Appeals, “a traditional stepping-stone to the U.S. Supreme Court,” The Washington Free Beacon reports.

We've seen this before, haven't we?  You do know where I'm going with this, don't you?

That's right, the Sissel case.  Where did it come from?

Here:

In early 2010, the federal government enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Act), which forces every American to purchase government - approved health insurance coverage, or pay a fine. This legal requirement to buy health insurance is known as the “individual mandate,” and it is the target of a federal lawsuit filed by Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) on behalf of Iowa entrepreneur Matt Sissel. [Emphasis added.]

The Pacific Legal Foundation describes itself as:

Established in1973, Pacific Legal Foundation is the oldest and most successful public interest legal organization that fights for limited government, property rights, individual rights and a balanced approach to environmental protection.

And:

Pacific Legal Foundation is devoted to a vision of individual freedom, responsible government, and color-blind justice.

And so on.

Now let's talk money.  According to the Bridgeproject,The Pacific Legal Foundation has received $12,089,270 in foundation money since 1985.  Of that 12 million, more than a third ($4.355 million or 36%) came from foundations controlled by the editor and publisher of the Tribune-Review, Richard Mellon Scaife.  Interestingly enough, for the first decade after 1985, Scaife was responsible for an even larger percentage of PLF funding.  In that decade, the PLF received $2.112 million in foundation money and a solid 70% ($1.48 million) came from Carthage and Sarah Scaife foundations.

Such solid financial connections between the Scaife foundations and the legal foundation his newspaper is discussing.  And yet no discussion of any of those connections.

 This is how the right wing noise machine works.

Fact-Checking A Fact-Checker - Colin McNickle Edition

In a rather scathing indictment of a Republican (and conservative, though obviously not conservative enough) member of Congress by a conservative columnist writing for the conservative paper in that Congressional district, the Trib's Colin McNickle writes this about Congressman Tim Murphy:

“We were promised a website where people could easily compare plans and costs,” said Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., on Thursday during a contentious hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the many failures of the ObamaCare website.

“Five-hundred million dollars later” (it's actually something like $700 million and counting) “we find that the American people have been dumped with the ultimate Cash for Clunkers, except that they had to pay the cash and still got the clunker,” the Upper St. Clair legislator said.

It's a great line but one laced with hubris, irony, hypocrisy and whistling past the graveyard.

For you see — and many of you might have forgotten and Mr. Murphy obviously is hoping you have — Murphy voted for Cash for Clunkers, that odoriferous multibillion-dollar government intervention that would have been funny if it weren't such a perversion.

What McNickle also left out was Congressman Murphy's support of the strained rollout of Medicare Part D in 2006.  Here's what Murphy said THEN about that glitchy Bush-era guv'ment program:

It is of no value, as a matter of fact, it is a negative value and of questionable ethical value I think sometimes if people only spend their time criticizing the glitches that have been in the program, as with any program that occurs, whether it is a public or private program, criticizing it, standing on the outside and frightening seniors, frightening seniors into thinking that because there was complexities and difficulties, therefore they should not sign up. [Congressional Record, Page H1665]

But that's a minor point - the major fail of McNickle's fact-check is the cost of the Obamacare website.  He says it's something like "$700 million" and reality says otherwise.

From the Washingtonpost's Glenn Kessler.  His initial assessment is admittedly fuzzy:

So here’s where we stand.

A conservative figure would be $70 million. A more modest figure would be $125 million to $150 million. Or one could embrace the entire project, as outlined by GAO, and declare that it is at least $350 million.

But he added a few updates - one with an upper/lower limit:

The floor for spending on the Web site to date appears to be at least $170 million, with an upward potential of nearly $300 million.

Significantly lower than the "factual" numbers so innocently slipped by your eyes by the "fact-checking" Colin McNickle.

According to Mediamatters, there's only one place where such a large number as McNickle's is found (though they go up to a billion).  That would the the Scaife-owned Newsmax.

And, as we all know, Scaife owns the Tribune-Review.  Where Colin McNickle hangs his fact-checking hat.  How interesting.

Um...P-G?

I'm usually a fan of the P-G's Tim McNulty but I think he got this one a just teensy bit wrong (or maybe the snark's too subtle for me to see this Sunday morning).

He's writing about Potter's Slag Heap post that is itself about this hit piece in the Tribune-Review.

And as I said, unless I am missing the snark McNulty writes that while the entire essay is worth reading, the protesters are to blame for the bad press:

Surely they knew they were signing up for this kind of public flagellation when they targeted -- among all the corporate properties spread around Pittsburgh -- one owned by Mellon.

That last link (to "Mellon") gets you to an old Brooks Jackson CNN piece from 1998.  (The formating is kinda quirky so you might find that you can read it clearer here.)  The entwining of Scaife money with right wing causes are well known to anyone reading this blog.  But that's beside the point.  I should point out that BNY Mellon owns the land upon which Occupy Pittsburgh's continuing its protest and I am not sure Richard Mellon Scaife has any direct connection to BNY Mellon.  In a piece from 2007 describing the banking concerns of the various branches of the Mellon family, we learn:

Another well-known member of the Richard Beatty branch is Richard Mellon Scaife, who publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and is the chairman of several foundations, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Allegheny Foundation. His mother was Sarah Cordelia Mellon, the daughter of Richard Beatty Mellon. There was a time when Mr. Scaife had a direct connection to the family institution; he was a member of Mellon Financial's board back when it was Mellon Bank from 1958 to 1979. [emphasis added.]

Past tense.  Perhaps things have changed. Perhaps not.  Perhaps he still owns Mellon stock, perhaps not.  No way to know for sure, is there?  Unless I can see a direct connection, I can't assert that there's a direct connection.  But again, that's beside the point.

The point is, take a disinterested step back and take a look at what McNulty is saying. He's saying that the protesters are to blame because they should have known that a backlash like this was going to take place - that the conservative paper in town would counter attack either at the behest of its connection to a wealthy multinational corporation or as a favor to it or in philosophical sympathy with it.

But isn't that (too much corporate influence if not outright control of the news media) among the issues the OWS movement is protesting?

Doesn't Vidonic's hit piece prove that they're right?

Or maybe I missed McNulty's snark.  Maybe he's saying that all along and I just missed it.

UPDATE: An astute reader whose opinion I value big time emailed in to let me know that I, indeed, missed McNulty's snark. Apologies all around.

What Must My Friend Scaife Think?

From thinkprogress:

The hard-right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.

Heritage fellows held event after event, wrote article after article, report after report, blog post after blog post, attacking the treaty.

And then:

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

Let's not forget the closely intertwined political and financial relationship between Heritage and the Tribune-Review's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife.

So how was START treated in the fine pages of the Trib?

As you'd expect. December 21:

Harry Reid sure has a warped sense of Christmas gifts.

If the Democrat Senate majority leader gets his way today, the upper chamber will vote to end debate on the abomination known as New START -- a successor nuclear arms treaty with Russia -- and then, likely on Thursday, vote to saddle the United States with a hand-tying, national-security-threatening "deal."

It's this simple, as stated by Reagan administration Defense official Richard Perle and Heritage Foundation defense scholar Kim Holmes: "(A)rms-control treaties should serve our security interests now and in the longer term. New START does neither."

Yea, that's this Richard Perle:

Perle contended before the invasion that the US could topple Saddam without a sizable military effort. On PBS, he said, "I would be surprised if we need anything like the 200,000 [troops] figure that is sometimes discussed in the press. A much smaller force, principally special operations forces, but backed up by some regular units, should be sufficient." And in May 2002, he told me, "The Army guys don't know anything" about the number of troops necessary for success in Iraq. Perle said that only 40,000 soldiers would be required. After the war, it was clear that the 200,000 or so troops deployed by the Bush-Cheney administration was not a large enough force for the mission.

David Corn in the above piece also reminds us that despite what Perle asserted, Iraq was not "on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons."

So he's not much of an expert on nuclear arms (obviously) so tell me again why he's so nobly quoted by the Trib?

The Trib. Again. And Again.

On today's ep-ed page at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Richard Mellon Scaife's braintrust proves, yet again, how easy it is to spin a story by omitting important facts.

First on the CFLs (and no, we're NOT talking about the Argonauts or the Roughriders), they write:

Better late than never? Yes -- but the newfound eagerness of Republicans vying for the House Energy and Commerce Committee's chairmanship to repeal the impending ban on incandescent light bulbs raises another question: What was Congress smoking when it banned them?

Interesting question, no?

Perhaps the braintrust should check out the legislation phasing out the CFLs. And perhaps check with the many Republican Senators who voted for it, including:

• Lamar Alexander of Tennessee
• Sam Brownback of Kansas
• Saxby Chamblis of Georgia
• John Cornyn of Texas
• Chuck Grassley of Iowa
• Mitch McConnell of Kentucky
• David Vitter of Louisiana

And so on. Perhaps they should check with some of the many many many Republican House members who voted for the bill, (and there are too many to list - sorry).

Or perhaps they should check with the Republican President who signed the bill into law in 2007.

Then there's this from the Thursday Wrap:

Another Western Pennsylvania community has buckled to the politically correct Nativity scene crowd. Canonsburg, fearing a lawsuit that taxpayers could not afford, has moved its creche, long displayed outside its borough building, to private property a few blocks away. The late Canonsburg native Perry Como surely is turning in his grave.

It's not "political correctness" my friends. It's unconstitutional. As spelled out in County of Allegheny vs. ACLU which was a Supreme Court case from way back in 1989. According the decision, the Establishment Clause:

[A]t the very least, prohibits government from appearing to take a position on questions of religious belief or from "making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person's standing in the political community."

Huh. I thought conservatives respected the Constitution. I thought they believed in what it said.

I guess it depends on what spin they're trying to make.

Even On Election Day, My Work Is Never Done.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Braintrust:

The folks at Seattle's KTVA-TV insist the incident was not as nefarious as some made it out to be. But it certainly wasn't very complimentary and it might very well be representative of the unfair treatment Republicans can expect if they surge to victory in today's elections.

Here's what happened: A telephone call to discuss Alaska GOP U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's upcoming appearance on a newscast never disconnected when it was "over." Station staffers then can, among other things, be heard laughing at the possibility of reporting on the appearance of sex offenders at a Miller rally.

The Miller campaign claims the station was plotting to fabricate stories. The station denies that interpretation as "out of context." Nevertheless, it was enough to prompt former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to label those involved at the CBS affiliate as "corrupt bastards."

See, this is how the great smear works. The braintrust is counting on you not checking the story, not checking the facts (or "facts") for yourselves. They're hoping you'll trust them that they're telling the whole truth.

Of course they're not.

The story popped up at Andrew Breitbart's website first. That should be the first clue that something's amiss. Breitbart, let's all take a minute to remember, lied about Shirley Sherrod. He championed another liar, James O'Keefe. In a rational journalistic world, that would completely undermine any claim of credibility Breitbart has, has ever had or ever will have.

And this is where this "corrupt bastard" story began.

But let's leap like a frog over that part and look at some examples of skepticism regarding the recording.

Ben Smith at Politico:

The transcript does not, in fact, make it terribly clear what they're talking about. KTVA General Manager Jerry Bever, in a statement to my colleague Byron Tau, confirms the authenticity of the recording left (in error) on the voice mail of a Miller aide but says that Miller's claims are wrong abut the details and "absurd" on their face.

If Politico is not good enough a source for skepticism, how about Brit Hume of Fox News? About a 1:20 in, he says that while "it doesn't sound very good" he added that it was still "not utterly conclusive."

Brit Hume said that. NOT UTTERLY CONCLUSIVE.

But let's even assume the "not utterly conclusive" smear that Breitbart and Palin are doing - that this tape is evidence of the TV station making stuff up. What, then, do we make of this?


About 2:15 in, Fox News reporter Dan Miller says that his staff could find no bias or "hit pieces" against Joe Miller.

So, the charge itself floats up from a less-than-credible source. It's not clear from the tape or the transcript what they're talking about. Brit Hume himself says it's not utterly conclusive and then no bias can be found in the station's reporting on Miller himself.

Tell me again who the corrupt bastards are?

Speaking of My Friends at The Trib...

Vice President Joe Biden was in town yesterday.

Something very subtle and interesting happened in the coverage. First the set-up from Early Returns 2.0:

The White House, divvying up the pool duty today, has the Trib's Mike Wereschagin providing color from this evening's reception with Vice President Joe Biden stumping for gubernatorial hopeful Dan Onorato...

Then the P-G quotes the press pool story that Mike wrote.

He also wrote (not surprisingly) the Trib's coverage of the same event.

Reading both, I noticed some differences in the coverage. From the press pool:

On anonymous donors and the post-Citizens United fundraising landscape: “You don’t know where it’s coming from, but you know where it’s coming from. It’s coming from some of the biggest interests – the Mellon Scaife types of the world. Folks, these guys are playing for keeps. These guys are playing for keeps because they know we mean what we say, and we want to put the middle class back in the driver’s seat.” [Emphasis added.]

Try as I might, I just can't seem to find anything even remotely similar in the Trib' coverage.

I guess my good friends at the Trib didn't think that was an important enough detail to include in Richard Mellon Scaife's newspaper.

Scaife v. O'Reilly

The Right feeds on its own - and even then the braintrust gets the facts wrong.

After reading this astounding editorial from Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review, one has to wonder what's going on over there? The Trib's calling Bill O'Reilly a blowhard?

The fun comes, as always when deconstructing the braintrust, from tracking down the facts (or rather "facts") they use.

First the editorial:

Once upon a time, Fox News talk-show host Bill O'Reilly truly served well his role as the overseer of the "no-spin zone." With the greatest of precision, he dissected the prevailing shibboleths of the day and restored fact-based common sense to so many debates.

That was then, this is now. And you know something has changed, dramatically, when those on the left start referring to Mr. O'Reilly as "the moderate voice of conservatism."

Ok, ok. That last part - that quotation. Where did it come from? Of you google the quotation AND the word O'Reilly, you get one site - this one. From February of this year. No one has used the phrase the Trib quoted until now. No one.

Granted, Jon Stewart called O'Reilly "the voice of sanity":

Comic Jon Stewart told Bill O'Reilly that the "no spin zone" ringleader had become the voice of sanity on Fox News Channel, although "that's like being the thinnest kid at fat camp."

And "left wing":

Stewart continued that when it comes to Fox News, O'Reilly has "been overtaken by a more extreme version of you." On Fox News, Stewart chided O'Reilly, "you're left-wing."

Why? The right has moved so much farther right that O'Reilly seems sane in comparison.

Back to Ryan Witt at the Examiner.com:

The debate between Limbaugh and O' Reilly reflects upon a changing conservative movement. As Fox News and the conservative world have gone further to the right Bill O' Reilly has strangely emerged as the "moderate" voice of conservatism. Formerly O' Reilly was known as one of the most extreme conservatives but his rhetoric now sounds moderate compared to people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. While O' Reilly accuses the President of being wrong for adopting some arguably "socialist" measures Limbaugh and Beck argue that Obama is a socialist who is trying to take over all private property. [italics in original]

So while the braintrust is writes that O'Reilly has softened his conservatism, the site they quote rather mockingly points out that it's the rest of the conservative world that has moved "further to the right" and thus turned O'Reilly "moderate". And notice Witt's use of the quotation marks - it was intended to be ironic.

Don't they get things like that at the Trib? Or are they hoping no one will check their work?

Back to the Trib:

O'Reilly has become a classic blowhard (not to mention a Butcherer Royale of the King's English). Indeed, Rush Limbaugh was not far off the mark (in Zev Chafets' recently published biography of Mr. Limbaugh) in describing O'Reilly as "Ted Baxter," the buffoonish news anchor from the old Mary Tyler Moore series.

Um, not that recent. Chafets wrote published Limbaugh's characterization of O'Reilly way back in the summer of 2008:

Limbaugh told me he is no longer concerned about the opinions of his colleagues and rivals, and he makes no effort to disguise his contempt for most of them. Michael Savage, ranked No. 3 among talk-radio hosts by Talkers magazine? “He’s not even in my rearview mirror.” Garrison Keillor? “I don’t even know where to find NPR on the dial.”

At dinner the night before, Bill O’Reilly’s name came up, and Limbaugh expressed his opinion of the Fox cable king. He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted it on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

It was in the New York Times and everything. They coulda looked it up.

Then there's this:

Absolutely horrid has been O'Reilly's rationalizing of President Obama's predilection for advancing socialist policies. And does O'Reilly truly believe that America has secured its borders against illegal aliens, as he claimed in a July interview with Sarah Palin? Or that man-made global warming is real, as he appeared to stipulate in the summer of 2009?

O'Reilly said America had secured its borders?

Um, no. Take a look at the video:


And that last part? "Man made global warming" is real. How many academies of science have to say it for the know-nothings to finally believe it? It's undeniable.

Another Saturday, another typically badly researched, badly conceived, badly thought out editorial from Richard Mellon Scaife's braintrust.

Trib's Anti-Science

Yesterday, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wasted some ink and paper (and I guess bandwith) trying yet again to debunk the science of climate change:

The scientific bankruptcy of blame-mankind global-warming orthodoxy is made plain by a Canadian climatologist's observation that every United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prediction and projection has been wrong.

Writing for Canada Free Press, Dr. Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, demolishes IPCC's "settled science."

Among his devastating points: Climatology, which studies "one of the most complex systems in nature," suffers from scientific overspecialization. That means lots of researchers know lots of minutiae but don't understand how those minutiae fit together in the real world.

And so on.

Funny that I've never seen on the venerable pages of the Trib any mention of the not-so recent report by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA for short) that climate change is "undeniable." Not even a snarky editorial about it (as far as I know - someone please correct me if I am wrong here. HAS the Trib ever mentioned the NOAA "undeniable" report??)

But they'll go all the way to the Great White North to find a climate skeptic at a conservative Canadian newspaper.

What does that tell you?

Should tell you lots.

The Trib

This won't take long.

From today's Sunday Pops at Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review:

More than 300 economists have signed a letter stating that failure to extend the Bush-era tax cuts will devastate growth. Obamanomics hasn't worked. What a novel idea -- return to fundamental economics. [Bold in original]

I know you're all chomping at the bit with some questions; What letter? Who sent it? Where can I see it?

Took a few seconds, but here's the letter. It's posted at the National Taxpayers Union website.

Guess who (c'mon, just frickin guess) is a huge financial supporter of the NTU?

That's right, Richard Mellon Scaife - owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

According to mediamatters, in fact, the Sarah Scaife Foundation offered up the single largest financial support of the NTU, with $1.23 million in support from 1991 to 2007. This does not count the $275,000 in support from the Scaife-controlled Carthage Foundation from 1993 to 2003 or the

• $50,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2009.
• $75,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2008.

By my calculations, that's $1.63 million in financial support over the years.

Considering the fact that Scaife is more than likely among those wealthy who'll see their taxes go back to up Clinton-era levels once the Bush-era tax cuts end, he stands to benefit personally if the tax policy positions suggested by those 300 economists are implemented.

His foundations supported the NTU, the NTU posted the letter saying the tax cuts should be extended, his paper lauded the letter as the right thing to do.

The circle jerk continues.

Oy! AGAIN With The Bedbugs and DDT!

In an editorial/commercial for a new documentary, Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's editorial board takes yet another unscientific swing at environmentalism and in the process gets many many things plain wrong. The braintrust begins the projection:

A new documentary, "3 Billion and Counting," sets the record straight on DDT, malaria, bald eagles -- and America's current bedbug plague.

The title refers to all the human lives ended by malaria, which annually kills 1.5 million and debilitates millions more -- needlessly, because banned DDT eradicates malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Producer and physician Rutledge Taylor's film connects the underlying dots of environmental fanaticism, misguided policies and disregard for science.

We've already address the bedbugs here. But if you're in a hurry and don't have the time to sift through a Jack Kelly Sunday column, here's the upshot - DDT is ineffective against bedbugs. Has been for a few decades. Since before DDT was banned, in fact. From Newsweek (again):

[L]ong before the United States banned most uses of it in 1972, DDT had lost its effectiveness against bedbugs—which, like many fast-breeding insects, are extremely adept at evolving resistance to pesticides. “Bloggers talk about bringing back DDT,” says Bob Rosenberg, director of government affairs for the National Pest Management Association, “but we had stopped using it even before 1972.”

Nor is there any reason to think it would work better today; according to Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, an urban entomologist at Cornell, among a wide variety of pesticides tested against bedbugs within the last two years, DDT performed the worst.

But let's move on to malaria as that's the largest concern of the editorial. The braintrust writes:

The title refers to all the human lives ended by malaria, which annually kills 1.5 million and debilitates millions more -- needlessly, because banned DDT eradicates malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Actually they get it right.

Inadvertantly and ironically, of course.

Look at that last line: banned DDT eradicates malaria-carrying mosquitoes. That's absolutely correct. Why do I write this? Because according to this report from the much-despised (by the Trib) UN (World Health Organization, actually), DDT is being used to eradicate malarlia-carrying mosquitoes:

[Indoor Residual Spraying] with WHO-approved chemicals (including DDT) remains one of the main interventions for reducing and interrupting malaria transmission by vector control in all epidemiological settings. In 2008, 44 countries, including 19 in the African Region, reported implementing IRS. (page ix)

And:

DDT has comparatively long residual efficacy (≥ 6 months) against malaria vectors and plays an important role in the management of vector resistance. Countries can use DDT for IRS for as long as necessary and in the quantities needed, provided that the guidelines and recommendations of WHO and the Stockholm Convention are met and until locally appropriate, cost-effective alternatives are available for a sustainable transition from DDT. (page 4)

Indeed, the title of this WHO Document is:

THE USE OF DDT

IN MALARIA VECTOR CONTROL

And section 2 of that document is titled:

Why is DDT still recommended?

Still recommended??? But the braintrust said Ruckelshaus buckled under environmental fanaticism and banned DDT and that led to 3 billion deaths by malaria!

I guess the Scaife's braintrust gets yet another one wrong.

Yawn - The Trib Spins

One can sometimes see in the tiniest of places an echo of the whole. This week we can see in a slip of an editorial jab, how Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review editorial page spins, folds and mutilates reality to score a cheap political point.

To whit:

The White House denies it but French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy says Michelle Obama told her that being America's first lady is "hell." "I can't stand it!" she supposedly said, reports London's Daily Mail. Hey, we're sure voters will be happy to ease Mrs. O's pain in 2012.

Does Bruni-Sarkozy really say that? Had they done their homework, the braintrust would have found out a few things - enough to at least taint the credibility of the story.

First the DailyMail:

Michelle Obama thinks being America’s First Lady is ‘hell’, Carla Bruni reveals today in a wildly indiscreet book.

Miss Bruni divulges that Mrs Obama replied when asked about her position as the U.S. president’s wife: ‘Don’t ask! It’s hell. I can’t stand it!’

Details of the private conversation, which took place at the White House during an official visit by Nicolas Sarkozy last March, emerged in Carla And The Ambitious.

The book was written by journalists Michael Darmon and Yves Derai in what they claim is collaboration with Miss Bruni.

Wait. What? They "claim" it's a collaboration? So the book isn't from Bruni-Sarkozy herself? Apparently. The DailyMail again:

The Elysee Palace has denied that the Miss Bruni co-operated with the biography.

So not only does the White House deny the story, the French Government denies it as well.

That's all echoed by this from the AP:

The co-author of a new book about French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy defended his sources Friday amid a media buzz over a passage that cites Michelle Obama as calling life in the White House "hell."

Mrs. Obama's spokeswoman has denied the first lady said such a thing, and a spokesman at the French Embassy in Washington said Bruni-Sarkozy "distances herself completely" from the book, which appeared in French bookstores on Thursday.

The unauthorized book, called "Carla et les ambitieux," or "Carla and the Ambitious Ones," describes the scene of a March dinner at the White House, during which the two first ladies were purported to have had a conversation in English in which they compared notes on their experiences as wives of presidents.

Hmm...she distances herself "completely" from a book that's "unauthorized." Isn't that enough to put the braintrust off the trail? Apparently not, so here's more:

Author Yves Derai stood by the explosive dialogue, insisting it was based on interviews with "reliable sources" — though he declined to name them, in accordance, he said, with his journalistic principles.

Am I missing something here? Does he say that Bruni-Sarkozy said it or not? If he does, I'm not seeing it. Could be the line came from one of his reliable sources.

And then there's this:

Derai acknowledged the French word used in the passage, "enfer," might not precisely correspond directly with the English word "hell."

"I don't know, maybe translated into English, hell is Dante's Inferno where they burn sinners, but in French it's really a rather common expression to say that sometimes it's just 'a real drag,'" Derai explained. He did not say what the original word allegedly pronounced by Mrs. Obama was.

So on top of everything else, we have a translation problem. Was it "hell" or just "a real drag"? Did it even occur at all?

Not that any of this would ever get in the way of Scaife's braintrust trying to score a cheap point. Oh no.

Took me all of 30 minutes to find this stuff out. Did Scaife's braintrust even bother to do their homework on this? If they didn't, then why not? If they did, then why include the jab at all?

And that's the tiniest of places echoing the whole.

Thus endeth the lesson.

They Noticed But Did Not Name

The Tribune-Review editorial board lets slip that it reads at least one local blog (but still gets the story wrong).

Take a look:

BUT HE CAN'T DENY THE CAT CARTOONS ARE CUTE. Cancel U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle's subscription to The New Yorker.

Doyle, D-Forest Hills, is disputing the magazine's account of his participation in unsuccessful interventions designed to get his former roommate, U.S. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., to end an extramarital affair.

Doyle contacted a local blog to deny that he was actively involved in attempts to persuade Ensign to stop seeing the wife of his former top aide. The interventions occurred in the controversial Capitol Hill townhouse they used to rent with several other lawmakers.

The living arrangement sparked an ethics complaint against the lawmakers in April by a government watchdog group that claimed they were paying below-market rents to stay at the house. Doyle said he moved out of the house, which is owned by a Christian prayer group, before the complaint was filed. [emphasis in original]

Notice that the third paragraph starts with:

Doyle contacted a local blog...

Um, that "local blog" would be this local blog right here. But as this is Scaife's braintrust we're talking about it's not overly difficult to find the spin. See how they less-than casually mention the ethics complaint without ever saying that that ethics probe has been dropped.

From Roll Call:

The Office of Congressional Ethics has dropped its investigation into whether several Members of Congress received an improper gift in the form of below-market rent at a Capitol Hill townhouse, five of the lawmakers’ offices have confirmed.

TPM has a little more from the Roll Call piece (the rest of the Roll Call piece is behind a subscription wall)

Aides to Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) said Friday that each lawmaker received a letter from the OCE informing him that it closed the investigation.

This was back in June. You'd think a responsible editorial page would close the circle and point out all the relevant facts.

But this is the Tribune-Review editorial board we're talking about here.

The Trib And Climate Change - What They Say And Don't Say

It's always a pleasure to tussle with the Scaife's braintrust over climate change. It's always quick work and they always end up looking more or less sillier for the effort. 

Today is no different. You should note that the Braintrust has yet to address the report from NOAA establishing that the science of climate change is "undeniable."

Keep that in mind as you read an editorial that begins with:

An independent group's recommendations might improve the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process. But the real test is whether the next IPCC report's conclusions reflect genuine science, not blame-mankind extremism.

The 12-member group was chosen by the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council. The recommendations seek to bolster IPCC's credibility, justifiability diminished by errors in its 2007 report and the Climategate e-mails showing data irregularities.

And ends with:

Yet when it comes to substance, the group is brimful of alarmist Kool-Aid, saying humanity "very likely" is to blame for climate change. Until the IPCC takes that as a hypothesis to be evaluated objectively via the uncorrupted scientific method -- not as the foregone conclusion its "science" must support -- real reform won't occur. [italics in original]

So what's the subtext of the Trib's message here?  First that the IPCC report does NOT reflect "genuine science" (or else there'd be no need for a change).  Second, the IPCC's credibility was diminished by "errors" such as the Climategate e-mails (even though those emails did not show data irregularities) and third that the science of the 2007 IPCC report is the product of a corrupted scientific process.

Now, what does the IAC report say?  Let's check their own press release.  It begins with this:

The process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce its periodic assessment reports has been successful overall, but IPCC needs to fundamentally reform its management structure and strengthen its procedures to handle ever larger and increasingly complex climate assessments as well as the more intense public scrutiny coming from a world grappling with how best to respond to climate change, says a new report from the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an Amsterdam-based organization of the world’s science academies.

And on those errors:

Given that the IAC report was prompted in part by the revelation of errors in the last assessment, the committee examined IPCC’s review process as well. It concluded that the process is thorough, but stronger enforcement of existing IPCC review procedures could minimize the number of errors. To that end, IPCC should encourage review editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that all review comments are adequately considered. Review editors should also ensure that genuine controversies are reflected in the report and be satisfied that due consideration was given to properly documented alternative views. Lead authors should explicitly document that the full range of thoughtful scientific views has been considered.

The use of so-called gray literature from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources has been controversial, although often such sources of information and data are relevant and appropriate for inclusion in the assessment reports. Problems occur because authors do not follow IPCC’s guidelines for evaluating such sources and because the guidelines themselves are too vague, the committee said. It recommended that these guidelines be made more specific — including adding guidelines on what types of literature are unacceptable — and strictly enforced to ensure that unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature is appropriately flagged.

But it's the last rhetorical gesture of the braintrust that most fully shows their hand.

They still insist that climate change is a "hypothesis" that has yet to be evaluated in spite of all the real science showing otherwise. Did I mention NOAA saying it was "undeniable"? Has the Trib even mentioned that yet?

See? Sillier and sillier, they get.

Happy Friday.

Compare and Contrast

Sometimes, when the stars are situated just right (...when the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars...) the Trib and the P-G both editorialize on the same subject.

Such as it is today, though it's surprising to see what the Trib say that the P-G don't. The subject this time, The President's recent Oval Office speech.

First the P-G:

President Barack Obama delivered an important speech Tuesday night, from the Oval Office as befitting the occasion. His address to the nation closed the door on the Iraq war, praised the U.S. forces who waged it and stated that the "central mission" of the American people, and he as president, is now to restore the health and vigor of the American economy.

Oddly, while the comments the P-G editorial board has about the war itself are remarkably middle of the road:

Now at least the Iraq part is on the way to going away, as Mr. Obama promised during his campaign. He pointed out that the two wars have cost the United States at least a trillion dollars and left tragic numbers of dead and severely damaged veterans.

He paid tribute to the men and women who paid the price for the partly politically motivated, unwise Iraq war, and he pledged that the country would do its best to do right by them with a GI education bill and postwar care. [emphasis added]

The Trib's editorial's comments (well some of them) warm this balding lib'rul's heart:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday officially declared the United States' combat mission in Iraq over. He didn't so much prosecute the war that this nation never should have started as he did manage the American withdrawal. He gave a left-handed tip of the hat to former President George W. Bush, who, forced to confront the enormity of his administration's miscalculations, had to mount a "surge" to quell all those greeting us as "liberators." [emphases added]

Look at that. While the P-G rightly calls the war "politically motivated" and "unwise," the Trib goes further and says that it's a war "this nation should never have started" (so we DID start it! so it WASN'T a retaliation!) and that there were "enormous" miscalculations by the former President.

Not only that, but did you catch the whiff of sarcasm in the description of the surge (note the use of ironic quotation marks around the word liberators - that explains everything).

To be fair (and I am nothing if not fair) this particular line is nothing new from the Trib. Take a look at this piece of treason from 2007:

Perhaps Jack Murtha put it best: The Pennsylvania congressman, among the first to make the cogent argument that staying the course in Iraq was the exercise in futility that indeed the war has become, says President Bush is delusional.

Based on the president's recent performance, we could not agree more. "Staying the course" is not simply futile -- it is a prescription for American suicide.

We've urged for months to bring our troops home. Now is the time.[italics in original]

The Trib said that Bush was delusional in 2007? Wait wait, it gets better:

And quite frankly, during last Thursday's news conference, when George Bush started blathering about "sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don't enable you to be loved," we had to question his mental stability.

I am not making this up. The Tribune-Review questioned George W Bush' mental stability in 2007.

So next time someone posts a rhetorical question on their facebook page (Hey, Dimitri - how's it going?) asking whether the War in Iraq was worth it, we can now all give a hearty hell no and then happily add that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review agrees.

Has so for a long long time.

The Trib Spins Heritiage's Spin

Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review this morning spun them some Heritage spin:

It's bad enough that the Obama administration joined the United Nations' Human Rights Council of world reprobates. For this privilege, must the U.S. also affix a sign to its back that says, "Kick us"?

As a member, the U.S. is required to file a "periodic review," which gives China, Cuba and other "peers" ammunition to slam America's record on rights. And while these cretins freely fabricate their own rights assessments, the U.S. report invites criticism.

Of course, the review gushes about the Obama administration (it's mentioned 20 times in 25 pages, according to The Heritage Foundation). And it includes liberaled-up apologies for America's shortcomings.

In doing so they leave out some important information, hoping (I guess) that their readers will assume they're getting the whole picture.

From The Trib. As it quotes the Heritage Foundation, while conveniently omitting the huge steaming piles of money funneled to it from the Scaife Foundations.

What's also omitted is the fact that all UN member states (not just the Human Rights Council) have to submit the report. How do I know this? The UN says so:

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a unique process which involves a review of the human rights records of all 192 UN Member States once every four years. [emphasis added.]

Took me all of 30 seconds to find this. Why couldn't The Trib do the same? Perhaps they didn't want to disagree with the millions of dollars of money Scaife's given to the Heritage Foundation over the years. I dunno.

Second part that's omitted (and this is the big spin from the Trib). The reports submitted are not the final say. From the UN:

The documents on which the reviews are based are: 1) information provided by the State under review, which can take the form of a “national report”; 2) information contained in the reports of independent human rights experts and groups, known as the Special Procedures, human rights treaty bodies, and other UN entities; 3) information from other stakeholders including non-governmental organizations and national human rights institutions.

How does this gibe with how the Trib describes the process? Here's The Trib:

Compare this with China's assessment that its citizens "enjoy freedom of speech" and "democratic" elections. Or Cuba's guarantees of "freedom of opinion, expression and the press." All of which pass U.N. scrutiny.

It's that last sentence that's the tell. Issuing the report is just the first step. The Council then meets to discuss all the information collected, not just that country's report.

The Trib is spinning you.

Not that that's a surprise.

Happy Wednesday.

UN-AMERICAN!

That's what the Tribune-Review called it: UN-AMERICAN (in all caps, no less).

Take a look:

The Obama administration has shelved its plans to prosecute Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He's alleged to have coordinated the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. Seventeen U.S. soldiers were killed. Another 39 were injured.

"(N)o charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future," the Justice Department said in a filing made in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. (That was news to the Defense Department, which insisted charges still are being developed against him.)

And a president has spat upon the dead and the injured and America itself.

And the reason given? "Politics," they write. And charge:

Welcome to the latest manifestation of Barack Obama's foreign policy deferentialism. What un-American injustice will this administration serve up next?

But when you look at the, you know, facts and stuff, you see a much MUCH different picture. After pointing out that al-Nashiri was to be tried in by a military commission, the Washington Post writes:

But critics of military commissions say the Nashiri case exemplifies the system's flaws, particularly the ability to introduce certain evidence such as hearsay statements that probably would not be admitted in federal court. The prosecution is expected to rely heavily on statements made to the FBI by two Yemenis who allegedly implicated Nashiri. Neither witness is expected at trial, but the FBI agents who interviewed them will testify, said Nashiri's military attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Stephen C. Reyes. "Unlike in federal court, you don't have the right to confront the witnesses against you," he said.

Such indirect testimony could be critical to a conviction because any incriminating statements Nashiri might have made are probably inadmissible under the 2009 Military Commissions Act, which bars the use of evidence obtained through torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Al-Nashiri was tortured.

This has been public knowledge for at least a year. The Washington Post from August 22, 2009:

CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday.

The tactics -- which one official described Friday as a threatened execution -- were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA's inspector general's report on the agency's interrogation program. Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA's "black site" prisons, ultimately became one of three al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.

Not only that, but:

In one instance, an interrogator showed Nashiri a gun and sought to frighten the detainee into thinking he would be shot, the sources said. In a separate encounter, a power drill was held near Nashiri's body and repeatedly turned on and off, said the officials, who spoke about the report on the condition of anonymity because it remains classified.

The federal torture statute prohibits a U.S. national from threatening anyone in his or her custody with imminent death.

He was waterboarded. Waterboarding is torture. He was threatened with execution. That's considered torture, too.

Torture is illegal. The Obama Administration should be prosecuting the torture. They have a legal obligation to prosecute the torture.

But tell me again about "Un-American" justice. Tell me again about who's "spitting on America." And now tell me who's defending (or at least ignoring) the torture.

TORTURE IS UN-AMERICAN.

Talk About A Selective Quotation

From today's Tribune-Review (naturally):

Housing sales have tanked. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. Companies won't hire because they know they're about to be taxed to death. "Consumer confidence" is an oxymoron. And Vice President Joe Biden says the economy's moving in the right direction? These cats couldn't find their own litter boxes if they were tied to them.

Now let's take a look at how the original story. It's from a blog at the Chicago Tribune and Biden's remarks are tucked in at the tail end - last paragraph, by the way:

Biden conceded that the economic recovery was not proceeding as fast as the administration had hoped, but claimed there was "no doubt we're moving in the right direction." [emphasis added.]

See how that changes things? See how the Trib, by a careful selection of the VP's words, makes it seem as if he said something he didn't say? See how dishonest that is?

Naturally, that's what's in the Trib.

They're At It Again

From today's Op-Ed page of Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review:

It's a huge weekend in the nation's capital for patriotic Americans.

Tonight, it's the "Take America Back Convention" at the DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, sponsored by FreedomWorks. Participants will learn of the hottest congressional races of the year and learn how to get out the vote in November.

And Saturday, it's the "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial, co-hosted by Fox News host Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, the Republicans' vice-presidential nominee in 2008.

From the title of this blog post, you can guess where this is going. You're smart. You know you are.

The Take America Back Convention is sponsored by FreedomWorks, right?

Guess, just guess, who's given a ton of money TO FreedomWorks. That's right. Richard Mellon Scaife, owner of the newspaper that contains the op-ed that's "reporting" on the event.

How much money?

According to Mediamatters, the Scaife-controlled Carthage Foundation has given $200,000 and the Scaife-controlled Sarah Scaife Foundation has given $2,960,000 to FreedomWorks and Empower America (as it had been called until 2004) between 1985 and 2007. And this $3.5 million doesn't include the Scaife money from 2008 and 2009:

• Sarah Scaife Foundation $132,500 in 2009.
• Sarah Scaife Foundation $70,000 in 2008.

In case you're wondering, that's an extra 200 large.

So Scaife money is helping bring about the "Take America Back" convention and yet when the convention is being written about in Scaife's own newspaper, there's no mention of the money.

The circle-jerk continues.

The Trib Conveniently Forgets Our History

I don't have much time - but that's OK because this won't take much time.

From today's Thursday Wrap:

What a guy: As you know, U.S. taxpayers have sent controversial Ground Zero imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on a "religious tolerance" tour of the Mideast. This would be the same imam who, according to Human Events, told an audience at the University of Australia in 2005 that the United States is worse than al-Qaida. Specifically: "(T)he United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims." It takes all kinds, doesn't it?

What they left out is the key to their mendacity.

From mediamatters this is, in fact, the entire paragraph from which they snipped that one sentence:

The complexity arises, sir, from the fact that - from political problems and the history of the politics between the West and the Muslim world. We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the U.S.-led sanction against Iraq lead to the death of over a half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it.

Yea, remember the sanctions? Remember the sanctions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? Iraqi children? Muslim children?

Unicef:

[I]f the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998.

Reason Magazine (even after substantial skepticism of Unicef's numbers):

It seems awfully hard not to conclude that the embargo on Iraq has been ineffective (especially since 1998) and that it has, at the least, contributed to more than 100,000 deaths since 1990.

Um - now go back and look at the Trib-spittle. They're trying to invalidate the imam's words by pointing out how ridiculous that sentence is.

But what happens when it turns out to be true?

Takes all kinds.