Sarah Palin's highly anticipated visit to Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor saw the famously tough-as-nails host ask the tough questions of the right-wing leader:

O'REILLY: OK. The latest poll has you with a 23 percent favorable, 37 percent don't know. You do the math, OK. And you're up at 60 percent of people who could like you. You are the biggest threat because you are a star, media star, whereas you're the only Republican. There aren't any other Republicans who are media stars but you. Now, that's why they're attacking you so vehemently. Do you know that?

In other words, "You could be really popular some day, and don't know you know how that makes liberals crazy?"

Nothing but the tough questions from that guy.

A headline in today's Los Angeles Times (11/20/09): "Democrats Risk Taxing the Wealthy for Healthcare."

The paper explains:

Embracing the progressive--and sometimes politically risky--principle that the cost of carrying out public policies should fall to the well-off more than the disadvantaged, both the House and Senate bills would place new taxes on the wealthy to help pay for expanded insurance coverage.

Since mostly people aren't "well-off," and raising taxes on the wealthy tends to be rather popular with most people, what exactly is the political risk here? Surely the article will tell us. Oh, here it is:

In a recent Associated Press poll, 57 percent of those surveyed favored taxing people who earn more than $250,000 a year to pay for the healthcare overhaul. Of a variety of financing options tested in the survey, that tax was the only idea supported by a majority.

In other words, the not-very-risky idea of raising taxes on the wealthy.

The remarkable ability to engage in in-depth discussion of lawmakers' opposition to healthcare reform efforts without ever mentioning the massive contributions such lawmakers tend to receive from the healthcare industry is not confined to the Washington Post--as Dan Ward noted in his Extra! piece (11/09).  Another recent example of the phenomenon was provided by the New York Times, which ran a piece (11/18/09) on three Democratic senators --Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas--who may help filibuster the reform bill to death.

The piece, by Carl Hulse, informs us that the three "have all been skeptical of a public health insurance option," and that all "represent states won handily last year by Sen. John McCain."  An accompanying chart provides more data:  when they each were first elected and when they're next up for re-election; their margin of victory in their last race and their state's presidential results in 2004 and 2008; the population and median income of their states; and what percentage of their constituents are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid or are uninsured.

The implication is that these figures might help readers better understand these senators' stances on healthcare reform.  But one obvious potential influence goes unmentioned: the money these politicians get from healthcare interests.  For Nelson, the figure $664,000 in the 2005-10 election cycle; for  Landrieu, it's $615,000;  and for Lincoln, $763,000.

By providing readers with information about state residents' income and health insurance status, and leaving out the sums contributed by health interests, the Times is suggesting that the politicians take their voters' interests into account and ignore their own.  If that sounds like the kind of politicians you're familiar with, then you're likely to find the Times' coverage of the politics of healthcare reform highly informative.

One of the odder outbreaks of outrage from conservative pundits is the horror expressed at the idea that people accused of being connected to the September 11 attacks would actually be put on trial.  Here's Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson (11/18/09) on Attorney General Eric Holder's "destructive" decision to prosecute Khalid Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects in an actual court:

There is one serious argument for this course: that a civilian court will provide greater legitimacy for the imposition of the death penalty than a military tribunal. But the guilt of these terrorists is not in question. And it is difficult to imagine that those repulsed or impressed by Khalid Sheik Mohammed's confessed crimes will care much about the procedures surrounding his sentencing.

Gerson seems to be saying in that last sentence that nobody actually cares about the rule of law.  That's not literally true, of course, but from the vitriol expressed toward the idea of  defendants having constitutional rights, you do get the idea that its stock is at a low ebb.

The Washington Post reports its latest polling on the Afghanistan war, and once again have managed to put together a baffling question that seems intended to muddy up the debate over a troop surge. The lead and headline ("Poll Finds Guarded Optimism on Obama's Afghanistan Plan") stress the idea that the public still seems to have faith in the White House. But the strangest part comes when the paper asked people about sending in more troops. As the Post's write-up explains:

Asked to choose between a larger influx of troops to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and train the Afghan military, and a smaller number of new U.S. forces more narrowly focused on training, Americans divide 46 percent for the bigger number, 45 percent for the lower one.

Apparently the Post thinks the debate is between a smaller surge to train the Afghan military, or a larger one to do that plus defeat bad guys. No surprise, then, that a lot of people would find the larger surge option appealing. But does that resemble the actual military debate going on over Afghanistan? And why exclude the option of sending no additional troops, or bringing the ones already there back home?

This is the second time in the last few weeks that the Post's polling on Afghanistan has seemed designed to inflate support for a surge of some sort. As FAIR noted, the paper's October 21 report featured this poll question:

U.S. military commanders have requested approximately 40,000 more U.S. troops for Afghanistan. Do you think Obama should or should not order these additional forces to Afghanistan?

The Post had previously asked the question in a more neutral manner-- i.e., without referring to "U.S. military commanders" or to Obama, which seemed to significantly increase the level of support for a troop surge (from 24 percent to 47 percent).

It seems fairly clear that the Post's editorial page is strongly supportive of a troop surge; is someone trying to make sure the paper's polling helps them make that argument?

The big news out of the Middle East yesterday was the Israeli government's decision to approve an expansion of the Gilo settlement near Jerusalem. The White House's muddled position on settlement expansion has been a key part of Israel-Palestine negotiations. Many headlines framed the news as you'd expect (New York Times: "Plan to Expand Jerusalem Settlement Angers U.S.", for example) .

The Washington Post, though, went with this headline today: "Housing Plan for Jerusalem Neighborhood Spurs Criticism."

The article by Howard Schneider refers to a "disputed neighborhood of Jerusalem," the "Jewish neighborhood of Gilo," a place "annexed to the city in a step not recognized by the international community."

There is also a reference to White House policy, noting that the Obama administration "has vacillated in its stance on Israeli construction in areas claimed by the Palestinians."  This is downright bizarre; the entire discussion about "Israeli construction" concerns illegal Israeli settlements--or, perhaps more accurately, colonies--in the West Bank. Why, then, refuse to label Gilo accurately? It's an old story, actually; as Extra! pointed out in 2002, Gilo was a cause for pro-Israeli media activists, who pressured outlets like CNN to stop referring to Gilo as a settlement and use terms more innocuous like "neighborhood." It's still working, it would seem.

New York Times on the pending trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed ( 11/15/09--emphasis added):

Mr. Mohammed's initial defiance toward his captors set off an interrogation plan that would turn him into the central figure in the roiling debate over the C.I.A's interrogation methods. He was subjected 183 times to the near-drowning technique called waterboarding, treatment that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has called torture. But advocates of the C.I.A's methods, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have said that the interrogation methods produced a trove of information that helped dismantle Al-Qaeda and disrupt potential terrorism attacks.

Apparently Holder's views need to be balanced by Dick Cheney's.

More to the point, what Eric Holder thinks is torture is mostly irrelevant: If something is torture, then it should be called torture. The Times has failed on this question before; in 2004, the paper's public editor Daniel Okrent wrote this response to a FAIR Action Alert (6/10/04):

But just as a terrorist is sometimes, in fact, a terrorist, torture is inescapably torture. The reader who moved me out of the muddled center on this did it with a simple question: "If the same things [that happened at Abu Ghraib] had been done to American prisoners by Iraqi authorities, would the Times have hesitated to use ‘torture’ over and over again?"

Over the past five years, the paper has used the word to describe the actions of authorities in Iraq, China, Mexico, Turkey, Chad and elsewhere, including a precinct house in Brooklyn, in the Abner Louima case. In each case, I believe, there was a sense that the torturers were characterized, in part, by their otherness--other nationalities, other political systems, or in the Louima instance other, depraved moral codes.

In Iraq, the perpetrators of the prison horrors were our representatives--ordinary Americans whose behavior may have been altered by circumstances, but who in their origins and histories are as familiar to us as our neighbors and co-workers.

[New York Times standards editor Allan] Siegal, who notes that the Times has no policy on the use of "torture," cautioned me in an e-mail that his sense of the word (and of "abuse") was "impressionistic rather than researched," but I buy what he ended up with: "Torture occurs when a prisoner is physically or psychologically maltreated during the process of interrogation, or as punishment for some activity or political position. Abuse occurs when the prisoner’s jailers maltreat her or him separately from the interrogation process."

Siegal also acknowledges that there's a continuum that has to be measured. If, for instance, a man is kept hooded for an hour, is that in itself torture? What about five hours? What about 24? If the headline language has in fact been delicate, maybe that's because the distinctions are delicate. But as good reporting brings us greater knowledge of what has gone in prisons and detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the distinctions become firm enough to be indisputable.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas (11/14/09) on Washington gridlock and partisanship:

Diehard right-wing congressmen do not deserve all the blame. Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn't try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left. Obama seems reduced to fencing with Fox News, which won't get him very far or earn him a place in the history books.

I'm not sure how much more ground Obama (or Democrats in general) is supposed to give. They added a bunch of non-stimulative tax cuts into their stimulus package in order to attract Republican support (which didn't work). They took the most progressive ideas off the table in the health care debate (single-payer and a robust public option), and in the House adopted the "Stupak amendment" limiting abortion rights. The White House almost immediately sent almost 20,000 troops to Afghanistan, and seems ready to send more.

If the notion is that the Democrats (in Congress or the White House) have pushed hard-left policies, I'd like to see some evidence. Thomas (like Doyle McManus in the L.A. Times last week) points to the White House's criticism of Fox News Channel as an example of their partisanship--perhaps because there aren't many other actual examples.

So what, exactly, is the point of all this "Obama isn't bipartisan enough" chatter? Here we go--presidents move to the right to be successful:

The two greatest postwar presidents understood this. Dwight Eisenhower governed in the 1950s by deftly uniting center and right, and Ronald Reagan did the same in the 1980s.

And:

Since taking office, Obama has so far failed to win the battle for the center. The post-election polls show that the country is, if anything, drifting to the right. Obama needs to win some of those drifters back if he wants to get things done.

A Democrat needs to go further right--somehow you just knew that would be the advice from the corporate media.

From ABC World News, 11/11/09:

CHARLIE GIBSON: We understand he's raising new questions about a number of plans that are in front of him. What new questions are there to be asked after all this time?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Well, you would think he'd be through with the questions, Charlie.

Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (11/15/09):

Barack Obama is in danger of giving deliberation a bad name.

David Broder, Washington Post (11/16/09-- headline: "Enough Afghan Debate")

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.

CNN's Lou Dobbs (11/9/09) on the Fort Hood shootings:

I think we should point out, too, for the first time in my memory in eight years, we have seen quickly CAIR step up on the day of the shootings, the largest representative of the Islamic faith step up, and condemn the shootings instantly.

CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations--a group that has, by its own count, issued dozens of statements condemning terrorist acts over the years, and coordinated an anti-terrorism fatwa endorsed by 340 U.S. Muslim organizations. As CAIR put it:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a clear record of consistently and persistently condemning terrorism. Yet American Muslim groups like CAIR get repeatedly asked the question why have Muslims not spoken out against terrorism? The fact is they have, but who is listening?

Not Lou Dobbs, apparently.

The headline and lead of a New York Times piece today:

Trick for Democrats Is Juggling Ideology and Pragmatism
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON -- Democrats have displayed a striking degree of pragmatism in seeking to push the health care bill through Congress, embracing or rejecting ideological considerations as needed to keep the legislation moving.

By "ideology," the Times means policy ideas that are popular with voters and that would be more likely to reduce the costs of the healthcare system and cover more people (single-payer, a truly robust public plan). By "pragmatism," they mean the things that are less likely to reduce costs, or the trade-offs Democratic leaders have made in an attempt to win conservative support (excluding coverage for abortion services, for example). The choice of such language is intended to send a political message about what policy ideas are wise, and which are not--based on ideology, not pragmatism.

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.