In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week's midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and conservatives have their own media machines and think tanks, Brooks writes:

Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don't have any of this. They don't have institutional affiliations. They don't look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren't many commentators who come from an independent perspective.

If he's talking about centrists, it doesn't make much sense; actually, middle-of-the-road think tanks tend to dominate the media discussion.  (Perhaps Brooks has heard of Brookings?) But he tries to explain their significance this way:

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

While that does sound suspiciously like a think tank catering to, well, those think tank-less independents, are those numbers very alarming? An Ipsos/Reuters survey from June found that 80 percent of Americans knew someone who lost a job. A July Marist poll on New York state residents found that "82 percent of city voters and 79 percent of those in the suburbs" knew someone who'd lost a job in the past six months. Maybe Brooks' suburbs aren't so special after all.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, commenting on a tax increase in California:

That could happen on the federal level. Already Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That's not capitalism. That's Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn.

Setting aside the truth of the charge against Pelosi, Fidel Castro must have been the president of the United States in 1982-86, when the top rate was 50 percent. Or maybe all of the 1970s, when it was 70 percent. Or from 1950-63, when it was 91 percent.

The Washington Post reported (11/5/09) that some Democrats are "questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president's agenda." A couple paragraphs later, reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane elaborate:

Moderate and conservative Democrats took a clear signal from Tuesday's voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt.

The implication that "job creation" is somehow at odds with "mounting spending" and "ambitious" or "far-reaching" government proposals is a another example of the neo-Hooverism that corporate reporters seem to instinctively subscribe to. In reality, spending money is one of the basic tools governments have for creating jobs during a recession--and cutting government spending is one of the surest ways to make that recession deeper.

It's worth noting that none of the sources actually quoted in the article makes the case that cutting federal spending would be a good way of creating jobs.

O'Reilly interviewing John Stossel, who left ABC for Fox Business Network (11/3/09):

O'REILLY: You committed the cardinal sin of all time. You left a liberal network, and you went to a traditional right-leaning network. So you're never, ever going to be liked again by anyone. Does that make you sad?

STOSSEL: Well, I live with these people. They all live in my neighborhood. So that makes me sad.

O'REILLY: Move out to Long Island where I live, because I live with the folks.

STOSSEL: I like taking the subway to work.

O'REILLY: You're a pansy. Come out to Long Island. All right?

For anyone keeping score, you can find aerial maps of what is purportedly O'Reilly's humble Long Island home. Man of the people, indeed.

Under the headline "Va., N.J. Give GOP Reason to Celebrate," USA Today's front-page election report (11/4/09) featured this quote from GOP strategist Frank Donatelli:

The warning is that if you're in a moderate district, or you're in a moderate-to-conservative state, you should think twice before you rubberstamp Obama's agenda.

Well, there were two districts choosing representatives and two states picking governors yesterday. Both the districts, including the one generally described as "moderate," went for the Democratic candidate, so it's not clear what warning that sends about Obama's agenda.

In both states, the Democrat lost the governor's race, and one of them, New Jersey incumbent Jon Corzine, can fairly be described as politically close to Obama. But New Jersey, which has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, is not a "moderate-to-conservative" state;  Corzine lost the race based on local issues involving corruption and property taxes.

In the state that can be described as moderate-to-conservative, Virginia, Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds went out of his way not to "rubberstamp Obama's agenda"--coming out against allowing "card check" union certification, suggesting he would opt-out from a "public option" health insurance program, running ads touting his opposition to Obama's climate change proposals, and declaring in the final debate of the campaign, "I'm not afraid of going against my fellow Democrats when they're wrong."

So of the four top electoral contests, only one fit Donatelli's model of Democrats getting a warning about how they should appeal to moderate or conservative voters; in that race, the Democrat took Donatelli's advice--and was soundly trounced, based on the Obama voters from 2008 staying home in 2009.

One is tempted to ask whether a source's claims have to make any kind of logical sense to appear on the front page of USA Today. But given that "move to the right" is always the corporate media's advice to Democrats after an election--whether they win or lose--it's a safe bet that they thought Donatelli was making sense.

In this week's cover story, Newsweek's Sharon Begley seems to think Al Gore's new book is good--but he's still too wonky:

To anyone with bad memories of how Gore's fact-filled debate performances against George W. Bush in 2000 failed to connect with voters, it may come as no surprise that Our Choice has a graphic on "how a wind turbine works," and a long section that begins: "Conventional hydrothermal plants are built according to one of three different designs. The steam can be taken directly through the turbine and then recondensed...."

A wind turbine GRAPHIC! In a book about green energy!? What on Earth was he thinking.

As to our memories of those 2000 debates, maybe Begley meant to type "reporters" instead of "voters." As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has been doggedly remembering for years now,  actual voters seemed to think Gore did pretty well in those debates--"instant polls of viewers credited Gore with a rather decisive win." The media created a different narrative--one of a petulant and sighing Gore who couldn't behave himself. And that's the way that they want everyone else to remember it.

On November 1, New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin has a look back at her experience as a war correspondent in Iraq. It's mostly interesting, though when she gets to the part where she draws the big lessons, things turn for the worse:

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide" to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.

"Americans, too" committed violence in Iraq? Well, yes.  And "among the worst they did was wishful thinking"? Well, that's one way to put it.

The Los Angeles Times (11/2/09) gives readers a mostly upbeat account about the use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan-- weapons that have killed hundreds in Pakistan in recent years. But Times reporter Julian Barnes tells us their popularity with U.S. military officials has "changed the nature of the current policy debate in Washington."  The evidence:

The technology allows us to project power without vulnerability," said a senior Defense official. "You don't have to deploy as many people. And in the modern age you want as little stuff forward as long as you can achieve the effects as if you had lots of people forward."

But some officials caution that policymakers should not rely too heavily on the unmanned drones.

"It has made some people feel there can be a pure counter-terrorism mission without any counter-insurgency strategy," said a government official. "But that isn't truly viable without taking on a certain amount of risk."

Huh. So some anonymous government officials really seem to love them, while other anonymous government officials think they should be used in conjunction with other types of warfare. What a debate!

In the same piece, readers are told that in Pakistan the drones are unpopular--"much of the population believes they have killed civilians as well as militants." In other words, they believe in things that happen to be true.

Once you've given up trying to defend the idea that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan can be understood as anything other than irony, the fallback position is generally that everyone else is just as biased.  Or as the headline over John Harwood's piece in the New York Times (11/2/09) puts it, "If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone."

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.

Today's Washington Post (11/2/09) notes the White House's apparent softening towards the Israeli side in Mideast negotiations (the headline is "Israel Putting Forth 'Unprecedented' Concessions, Clinton Says," a good indication of the current administration stance). The Post tells us that the Palestinian position "appears to have hardened in recent days," with "little room to negotiate on the key demand for a settlement freeze."

But the paper's summary of the Palestinian position does little to explain this "key demand":

The Palestinians regard the land occupied by about 300,000 West Bank settlers as part of a future Palestinian state, and consider continued settlement activity an effort to influence negotiations.

Israel promised to halt settlements under previous international agreements, and Palestinian officials say they want those promises fulfilled.

The primary Palestinian objection to Israeli settlements is not that they are "an effort to influence negotiations," or because Israel has "promised" to do something about them. These settlements, as colonies established in the wake of a military occupation, are violations of international law; any attempts to obscure that reality misinform readers.

Afghan activist and politician Malalai Joya has been in the U.S. to discuss her book A Woman Among Warlords. As noted by Eric Garris at Antiwar.com, Joya's was treated very differently by CNN than by CNN International. Specifically, Joya's mention of the military occupation of her country seemed to offend CNN host Heidi Collins (10/28/09):

Again, "occupation" would certainly be your word. A lot of people would take great issue with you calling the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in your country an" occupation."

It's not clear to whom Collins is referring when she speaks of people who would take "great issue" with Joya's characterization. As Juan Cole put it, "that the U.S. and NATO are militarily occupying Afghanistan is recognized by the U.N. Security Council and is a simple fact of international law."

Or ask the International Committee of the Red Cross:

Once a situation exists which factually amounts to an occupation the law of occupation applies--whether or not the occupation is considered lawful.

Therefore, for the applicability of the law of occupation, it makes no difference whether an occupation has received Security Council approval, what its aim is, or indeed whether it is called an "invasion", "liberation", "administration" or "occupation." As the law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian considerations, it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application.

Dick Morris was on the O'Reilly Factor the other night (10/28/09) advocating a troop escalation in Afghanistan--and his argument was characteristically peculiar:

Listen, terrorist gangs like Al-Qaeda are like HIV virus. They swim in your bloodstream. They don't make you sick. When they latch on to a cell, a nation state, and they use the DNA of that cell, they then become a threat. When they use the accoutrements of nationhood--secure boundaries, a diplomatic corps, an export and import trade, and air force and navy, a tax
system, a conscript population--then they can knockdown the World Trade Center. We have got to stop Al-Qaeda from taking over Afghanistan. And that means stopping the Taliban.

It's hard to say what exactly Afghanistan's diplomatic corps, let alone the landlocked nation's navy, had to do with the September 11 attacks, which were largely planned and executed by Saudi Arabian students based in Germany and the United States. But you have to give Morris credit for being loopy enough to make the case that occupying Afghanistan is necessary to prevent terrorism in the United States; generally corporate media pundits consider that assumption to be self-evident, and don't bother to explain it.

"Tax Refugees Staging Escape From New York," a New York Post headline declared yesterday (10/27/09). In an ordinary newspaper, you might take that as a signal that the story below was prepared to offer evidence that tax refugees were leaving New York--but the New York Post is no ordinary newspaper.

Instead, the piece by Andy Soltis (which is likely getting extra attention thanks to link from the Drudge Report headlined "'RICH' NEW YORKERS FLEEING AT ALARMING RATE") describes a report by a branch of the right-wing Manhattan Institute that says that people moving from New York, and particularly from New York City, make more money than people moving to New York. Soltis writes:

The average Manhattan taxpayer who left the state earned $93,264 a year. The average newcomer to Manhattan earned only $72,726.

As an explanation for this phenomenon, the Manhattan Institute "blames the state's high cost of living and high taxes," according to the story.  People who make less money are moving to New York City because it costs so much to live there? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's an alternative explanation: People often move to the city at the beginning of their careers, and leave when they get enough money to buy a house in the suburbs or retire.  Maybe that would explain the fact that the top two states New Yorkers moved to, according to the story, were Florida and New Jersey. At any rate, I've just given you more evidence to substantiate my theory than the Post offered to back up its "tax refugees" headline.

But then, it's hard not to think that the conscious aim of this story was to bamboozle its readers. Look at the lead paragraphs:

New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers--and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows.

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City--meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

How many people reading that would suspect that the population of New York state  actually grew by about half a million people between 2000 and 2008--despite 1.5 million people "fleeing" the state?  Or that New York City gained about 200,000 residents from 2000 to 2006 (the latest Census estimate)? Or, based on the Manhattan stats cited earlier, that the median household income of Manhattan actually rose 20 percent from 2000 to 2007 (in 2007 dollars)?

For the New York Post reader, life is full of surprises.

I just received an email (from this guy's PR outfit) with the subject line:

President Obama's Attacks on Free Speech Opposed by Most Americans, Zogby/O'Leary Poll Finds

Tell me more!

Here's one of the "questions" asked in the poll, tailor-made for Fox News Channel:

Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions.  Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?

It's worth noting that this question only elicited 51 percent support.

Are there any other non-existent administration policies that polling outfits should be asking people about?

When Fox News Channel was developing Sean Hannity's TV show, it was known as Hannity & Liberal To Be Determined. That liberal turned out to be Alan Colmes, who would eventually leave the gig after doing his part by playing the Washington Generals to Hannity's Harlem Globetrotters. It hardly mattered who sat in the "left" chair--they were there to get roughed up by the home team.

Until recently, professor Jane Hall was a regular guest on the O'Reilly Factor, debating conservative Bernie Goldberg. She's left Fox, and as she explained to CNN's Howard Kurtz (10/25/09), she never considered herself a liberal anyway:

KURTZ: When you appeared regularly on O'Reilly, were you there as a token from the dreaded MSM?

HALL: Well, I was there as a defender of the MSM. And you wouldn't believe how many famous journalists I talked to, who said better you than me. Let me tell you my side of the story. They didn't want to come on. It is hard to do, because it was like, when did you quit beating your wife? That was usually the question. But I felt it was worth doing.

KURTZ: Do you consider yourself a liberal?

HALL: No.

KURTZ: You were paired with Bernie Goldberg, the conservative point of view, who wrote a book about the media's slobbering love affair with Barack Obama?

HALL: Right.

KURTZ: So was that a fair pairing, to have someone who has that point of view, and you? You consider yourself a journalist.

HALL: I consider myself a journalist. I'm now able to say opinions because I'm a professor. I consider myself a moderate. In that universe, I was probably considered a wacky professor by O'Reilly. He would sort of pat me on the head and say, now, Jane, I know you liberals feel this way. And I'd say, I'm not really a liberal. So, yes, there's not necessarily a left/right comparison on there.