Under the Onion-ready headline "Obama Calls for Earmark Reform, Signs Earmark-Laden Spending Bill," (3/12/09), the L.A. Times' James Oliphant and Christi Parsons begin their story:

President Obama railed against pork barrel projects on Wednesday. Then he signed a massive spending bill stuffed with them.

I'm not sure what the cut-off for something being "stuffed" with something else is, but I'm pretty sure that 2 percent doesn't qualify. Maybe the word they're looking for is "sprinkled"?

In the wake of Charles Freeman's withdrawal from consideration for a top intelligence post, the Washington Post today published and editorial headlined "Blame the 'Lobby'":

For the record, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee says that it took no formal position on Mr. Freeman's appointment and undertook no lobbying against him. If there was a campaign, its leaders didn't bother to contact the Post editorial board.

This is true--no one was talking to the editorial board. They were talking to reporters--at least, that's what one learns elsewhere in the Post today:

For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), often described as the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, "took no position on this matter and did not lobby the Hill on it," spokesman Josh Block said.

But Block responded to reporters' questions and provided critical material about Freeman, albeit always on background, meaning his comments could not be attributed to him, according to three journalists who spoke to him. Asked about this yesterday, Block replied: "As is the case with many, many issues every day, when there is general media interest in a subject, I often provide publicly available information to journalists on background."

That's what USA Today seems to think--and it's a message that CNN anchor Lou Dobbs unsurprisingly latched on to as well.

The factoid was born at the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which released a report saying that 300,000 construction jobs created by the stimulus package would go to undocumented immigrants. That report found its way to USA Today on March 9 ("Illegal Immigrants Might Get Stimulus Jobs, Experts Say"). The paper made it seem like this conclusion was not at all controversial-- "experts on both sides of the issue" agree. But that seemed a stretch: The pro-immigrant source, Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, "said it is impossible to predict with certainty" how many construction jobs would be done by undocumented workers.

And the Center's numbers are certainly subject to debate. The Immigration Policy Center, for example, argued that the group is making some questionable assumptions. For starters,  they rely on jobs projections from the Federal Highway Administration for highway projects--which may not be the best way to predict job creation in the construction industry overall.  And they estimate the undocumented share of the construction workforce from 2005--when the building industry was in much better shape than it is now, which would have attracted more undocumented laborers.

Of course, the underlying premise of the Center's report--that you ought to be able to stimulate the economy without benefiting unauthorized immigrants--is silly. If the stimulus works, any worker in the country, legally or otherwise, is going to find it easier to get a job.  Hoping that no undocumented worker gets a job as a result of the stimulus is hoping that that the stimulus doesn't create any jobs, period.

What caused the financial crisis, according to an online educational primer from textbook publisher McGraw-Hill? "Good Intentions"--i.e., the government encouraging banks to make loans to low-income homebuyers.

What did not cause the financial crisis, according to McGraw-Hill? Bogus estimates of credit risk issued by ratings agencies like Standard & Poor's--owned by McGraw-Hill.

See Extra!: "Scapegoating Minorities for Failure of Banking" (1/09) by Mary Kane.

"10 Things You Didn't Know About Rush Limbaugh," item #10:

10. Limbaugh shares a secluded 24,000-square-foot beachfront mansion in Palm Beach with his cat, Pumpkin. A life-size oil portrait of Limbaugh hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

In his regular Salon feature (3/10/09, ad-viewing required), Glenn Greenwald is having a hard time stomaching corporate media pundits' righteous "lectures to other countries":

The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt today condemns the Obama administration generally and Hillary Clinton specifically for "continu[ing] to devalue and undermine the U.S. diplomatic tradition of human rights advocacy." Hiatt is angry that on her trips to China, Egypt and Turkey, Clinton failed to issue sufficiently stern and condemning lectures about those countries' human rights abuses. The depths of the fantasy world in which our political elite reside--and their complete lack of self-awareness--borders on pathological.

While it's true that there is something ugly about hearing Clinton proudly announce that "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family"--that wonderful "friend of her family" is one of the world's most repressive dictators--the idea that the U.S. is in any position to play the role of human rights arbiter for the world is about the most unhinged notion imaginable. Few things have degraded international conceptions of human rights more than American actions over the last decade--not only what we've done, but what we continue to do. As [fellow blogger] Billmon once wrote, the U.S., under the Bush administration, has "forfeited forever its ability to chastise the human rights abuses of others without triggering a global laughing fit."

Greenwald incredulously notes that, "Yet Hiatt--who cheered on many of the abuses and continues to do so--actually fancies America as the country that goes around the world credibly wagging its finger at other nations for their human rights inadequacies." Read the recent FAIR study of media human-rights duplicity in our magazine Extra!: "Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall.

Writing that someone needs to "Tell the WSJ: Workers Can Already Unionize Without a Secret Ballot Election" (Beat the Press, 3/10/09), Dean Baker details how big media still gets this wrong:

Okay, let's see if we can teach the Wall Street Journal something this morning. In an article reporting on the prospects for the Employee Free Choice Act in the Senate, the WSJ told readers that "the bill would allow unions to organize workers without a secret ballot, giving employees the power to organize by simply signing cards agreeing to join."

Wrong! The current law already allows workers to organize by majority sign-up. They can also have a union de-certified by majority sign-up. The difference is that under current law it is the employer's option to accept majority sign-up or to demand an NLRB election. Employers who wish to prevent unionization can demand an election. They can then delay the actual election for several years. They can use time to require workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions. They can also fire the key organizers, thereby undermining the organizing drive and intimidating workers.

Summing up that "the main change in the law" is that "under the Employee Free Choice Act is that workers, not employers, would decide the method for union certification," Baker insists "the WSJ should be able to get this one right"--or are these misrepresentations willful? Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (2/09) by Janine Jackson

Jane Kim of CJR.org (3/9/09) quotes some of the reactions to a New York Times reporter asking Barack Obama if he is "a socialist as some people have suggested": Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post cracks that "the New York Times was THAT CLOSE to a journalistic coup!" and American Prospect's Ezra Klein wants to know, "Did they really think he would slip and admit that his stimulus plan was cadged from a footnote in Das Kapital?"

NYT reporter Peter Baker defended the question to Greg Sargent: "We were…interested in exploring how a new president defines his political philosophy, something that has been the subject of intense debate." That would explain, to some extent, why the Times also chose to ask Obama: "Is there one word name for your philosophy? If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal? Are you progressive? One word?"

If it’s one-word, yes/no answers that we're looking for, I've got a question that might elicit one: Is the discussion of whether Obama's economic policies signify a shift in our country's guiding political framework at all advanced by a simplistic "So, are ya?" query from the New York Times?

Admitting that "being direct can be effective sometimes," Kim still thinks "it's a shame that the Times chose to employ the Are you this? Are you that? questioning technique," because "in this case... the questions weren't nuanced enough to lift the discussion up and away from political ass-covering."

With all the recent headlines posing Rush Limbaugh as the GOP's de facto leader, Media Matters' Julie Millican and Nathan Tabak provide a timely look back (3/3/09) at the well-documented record of hateful views espoused by the most popular talk radio host in the United States:

On August 23, 2006, discussing the CBS reality TV program, Survivor, in which contestants were originally divided into competing "tribes" by ethnicity, Limbaugh stated that the contest was "not going to be fair if there's a lot of water events" and suggested that "blacks can't swim." Limbaugh stated that "our early money" is on "the Hispanic tribe"--which he said could include "a Cuban," "a Nicaraguan" or "a Mexican or two"--provided they don't "start fighting for supremacy amongst themselves."

Limbaugh added that Hispanics have "probably shown the most survival tactics," that they "have shown a remarkable ability to cross borders," and that they can "do it without water for a long time, they don't get apprehended and they will do things other people won't do." When the Survivor producers decided to dissolve the show's racially segregated "tribes" after only two episodes, Limbaugh declared that "there can only be one reason for this ... that is the white tribe had to be winning."

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you can stomach it, read lots more in this vein on FAIR's website.

Writing about the Employee Free Choice Act, Melanie Trottman and Brody Mullins of the Wall Street Journal write (3/10/09):

At least six Senators who have voted to move forward with the so-called card-check proposal, including one Republican, now say they are opposed or not sure--an indication that Senate Democratic leaders are short of the 60 votes they need for approval.

It really is worth being specific on this: It does not take 60 votes to pass an ordinary bill in the Senate; it takes a majority of the senators voting. If everyone is present, it takes 51 votes, or 50 votes if the vice president votes to break the tie. Under the current rules of the Senate--which can be altered by a majority vote--it takes 60 votes to proceed to a vote on a bill when some senators want to continue debate forever, or filibuster.

It has not traditionally been the custom that every bill gets a filibuster and so requires 60 votes in order to pass; plenty of bills in the past have passed the Senate with fewer than 60 votes. In recent years, the filibuster has changed from an occasional gambit to a more routine part of the process. Since  the Democrats took back the Senate after the 2006 elections, it has become almost a matter of course that a bill opposed by most of the minority party will have to overcome a filibuster in order to pass.

But that doesn't mean that a bill needs 60 votes to be approved; it means 41 senators can keep a bill from being voted on.  The distinction is worth making, particularly since the ability of the minority to obstruct is dependent on the willingness of the majority to be obstructed.

Today's Democracy Now! (3/9/09) features Amy Goodman reporting that "a House Appropriations subcommittee has... asked the FCC to look into the allegations" of media activists across the country:

Community media groups are accusing the telecom giant AT&T of discriminating against local public access channels across the nation, and the deadline for public comment is midnight tonight. The dispute centers around how AT&T delivers public television stations to customers. Instead of putting the stations on individual channels, AT&T has bundled community stations onto a generic channel that can only be navigated through a complex and lengthy process. Public television advocates say AT&T is imposing unfair restrictions that will severely restrict audiences.

AT&T itself declined to have representatives on Goodman's broadcast, so she went ahead with three community media advocates, including the "former head of the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers, now known as the Alliance for Community Media," which is encouraging those concerned to participate in the Federal Communications Commission "public comment period [that] ends at midnight eastern time tonight."

Asserting that "one positive aspect of the wreckage left by the Bush presidency is that many of the most sacred Beltway pieties stand exposed as intolerable failures, prominently including our self-destructively blind enabling of virtually all Israeli actions," Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald (3/9/09, ad-viewing required) cites "the last three New York Times columns by Roger Cohen" as evidence of "a substantial--and very positive--change in the rules for discussing American policy towards Israel":

Two weeks ago, Cohen--writing from Iran--mocked the war-seeking cartoon caricature of Iran as The New Nazi Germany craving a Second Holocaust. To do so, Cohen reported on the relatively free and content Iranian Jewish community (25,000 strong). When that column prompted all sorts of predictable attacks on Cohen from the standard cast of Israel-centric thought enforcers (Jeffrey Goldberg, National Review, right-wing blogs, etc. etc.), Cohen wrote a second column breezily dismissing those smears and then bolstering his arguments further by pointing out that "significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist" in Iran; that "Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries"; and that "hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve" given the ascension of Avigdor Lieberman in Benjamin Netanyahu's new Israeli government.

Today, Cohen returns with his most audacious column yet: Noting the trend in Britain and elsewhere to begin treating Hezbollah and Hamas as what they are--namely, "organizations [that are] now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible," rather than pure "terrorist organizations" that must be shunned--Cohen urges the Obama administration to follow this trend.

Not prone to rose-tinted views, Greenwald reminds us that "in the very recent past, not even our Constitution's First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel's enemies," writing that "the U.S. government has made it illegal merely to broadcast Hezbollah television stations and has even devoted its resources to criminally prosecuting and imprisoning satellite providers merely for including Hezbollah's Al Manar channel in their cable package."

Now if only the Times didn't feel compelled to "balance" such sensible views with outright calls for terrorism by Israeli forces. See the FAIR Action Alert: "Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Friedman Supports Civilian Suffering as 'Education'" (1/14/09)

In the latest installment of a Columbia Journalism Review series on "special interest groups... at Obama's table" and "how the media are covering them," Trudy Lieberman (CJR.org, 3/6/09) reports that

Saul Friedman, who writes a popular column called Gray Matters for Newsday, has been almost alone in writing about what he has called a "blackout" on discussions of a single-payer health system. Last month, AARP's chief (and super influential) lobbyist, John Rother, told Friedman that although there is broad support for single-payer, the cognoscenti didn’t feel that it was a pragmatic solution.

While stating that "there are vocal pockets of single-payer activism around the country," Lieberman turns to an independent outlet when noting that "a woman named Laura Bonham wrote an impassioned piece for OpEdNews.com urging Americans to reject the lockdown on a single-payer discussion." See our Media Advisory about the new FAIR Study: "Media Blackout on Single-Payer Healthcare: Proponents of Popular Policy Shut Out of Debate" (3/6/09)

This column by Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl has received some well-deserved criticism, largely for its peculiar claim that reforming the U.S. healthcare system is a lot like invading Iraq.  What jumped out at me was this supposed parallel between George W. Bush and Barack Obama: After September 11, Diehl wrote, "The president failed to ask a willing nation for sacrifice." Likewise, in explaining his stimulus program, Obama said, "You will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime. In fact, the recovery plan provides a tax cut . . . and these checks are on the way."

It's true that if your nation launches a war, that's going to take resources, and that means that people are going to have to sacrifice. But reversing an economic downturn isn't about taking stuff away from people; it's about encouraging them to spend money so that people who are unemployed can be put back to work. The implication that Obama should have told people he was raising their taxes in order to combat the recession is sheer neo-Hooverism.

Steve Benen of Political Animal points out a couple of strange questions posed by corporate journalists--one to each of last year's major presidential candidates. In this post, Benen quotes an unnamed New York Times reporter (apparently either Sheryl Gay Stolberg or Steven Lee Meyers) basically red-baiting Barack Obama: "The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?" The same reporter, or maybe a different one--I guess they were speaking ex cathedra--later pressed Obama: "If you're not a socialist, are you a liberal?"

In a later post, Benen ponders Fox News' Chris Wallace asking John McCain, "You ever feel like saying 'I told you so'?" (McCain declined to do so, though he said, "I'm sure that would be a pleasant feeling.") As Benen notes, it's not clear what McCain told us, or what in the first six weeks of the Obama administration would cause us to reevaluate it. But as he says, the implication is clear: "Looking back at the presidential campaign, McCain was right about...something."

Fox sometimes points to Wallace to show that they're not out of the mainstream of corporate media.  The scary thing is that they might have a point.