Bill McKibben (TheNation.com, 2/25/10)  has a good analogy that explains the success of global warming deniers:

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It's worth trying to understand how they've done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial....

The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson's defense had a problem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown's blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson's guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.

If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him "a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America's worst nightmare, and the personification of evil." His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That's what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.

Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we've ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won't be overwhelming and it's unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you'll get something wrong.

Mac Margolis, Newsweek's right-wing Latin America correspondent (Extra!, 1/10), has a small piece in the latest issue (3/1/10) that misleads in a big way. Under the headline "A Killer Deal for Russia," Margolis declares:

Russia's campaign to balance U.S. power and prestige around the globe has found a new and willing partner--Latin America--and Washington may be the unwitting facilitator.... Moscow is cutting deals across the region, selling the latest hardware, from rifles to fighter jets, in exchange for influence and access to the area's plentiful oil and gas reserves.

And the United States has only itself and its pesky ethics to blame:

Ironically, one reason for the budding East/West axis may be Washington's own rigid security agenda. The U.S. has imposed restrictions on arms sales to many nations suspected of being soft on terrorism or roiled by internal conflict. So, many on that watch list have turned to Moscow, which asks no questions. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, for example, has snapped up some $4 billion in Russian weapons in recent years.

Reality check: The United States is by far the world's largest arms dealer, making $37.8 billion in arms deals in 2008--68 percent of the world's arms traffic for that year, according to the Congressional Research Service (New York Times, 9/6/09).  Russia was a distant third with $3.5 billion.

And the United States did not actually limit its weapon sales to peaceful nations.  Among countries "roiled by internal conflicts" that have bought U.S. arms in recent years are Colombia, Morocco, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Yemen, Armenia, Azerbaijan.... The list goes on.  Apparently unlike Moscow, Washington does ask questions--like, "Is your credit good?"
Update: See Extra!'s January 2010 cover story, "Newsweek’s Name-Calling Neoliberal: Meet Mac Margolis, Their Man in Latin America," by Peter Hart--just released online.

In his Washington Post column today (2/25/10), George Will writes in defense of the filibuster, arguing that Democrats' talk of using budget reconciliation rules to pass a healthcare bill demonstrates their contempt for the Constitution.

He has been perfectly consistent on the question of minority rule--it depends on who the minority is. Back when Republicans filibustered a Clinton economic stimulus bill in 1993, he cheered them on in a column headlined "The Framers' Intent" (Washington Post, 4/25/93). Will defended "the right of a minority to use extended debate to obstruct Senate action" and praised "the generation that wrote and ratified the Constitution" for properly establishing "the Senate's permissive tradition regarding extended debates."

When the Democratic minority attempted to block a Bush judicial nominee, he was suddenly, without explanation, against the principle that the minority party should have such powers--in a piece headlined "Coup Against the Constitution" (Washington Post, 2/28/03). As Steve Rendall wrote in Extra! (9-10/03):

Concerned that "41 Senate Democrats" might succeed in stopping the confirmation of Miguel Estrada, nominated by George W. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Will wrote: "If Senate rules, exploited by an anti-constitutional minority, are allowed to trump the Constitution's text and two centuries of practice, the Senate's power to consent to judicial nominations will have become a Senate right to require a supermajority vote for confirmation."

Well, today, in a column headlined "For Liberals, the Filibuster Is Now the Enemy," Will sees it differently.  Now when he thinks back on Republicans attempts to junk the filibuster to confirm Bush's judicial nominees, he recalls that that was a bad idea:

In 2005, many Republicans, frustrated by Democrats blocking confirmation votes, wanted to ban filibusters of judicial nominees. They said such filibusters unconstitutionally prevent the president from doing his constitutional duty of staffing the judiciary. But this is not just the president's duty; the Senate has the constitutional role of consenting--or not--to nominations.

So the George  Will Constitutional Theory goes something like this: Filibusters are good when Republicans do them, and bad when Democrats do them. And he has the chutzpah to mock both parties as "situational ethicists regarding filibusters."

In his New York Times column today (2/24/10), Tom Friedman presents a bizarre view of the Iraq War. Attempting to answer the question of whether Iraq is dysfunctional because of its culture (the "conservative" argument) or because of its politics (the "liberal" argument), he writes:

Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued that culture didn’t matter in Iraq, and that the prospect of democracy and self-rule would automatically bring Iraqis together to bury the past. While many liberals and realists contended that Iraq was an irredeemable tribal hornet's nest and we should not be sticking our hand in there; it was place where the past would always bury the future.

But stick we did, and in so doing we gave Iraqis a chance to do something no other Arab people have ever had a chance to do: freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together.

Of course, most readers might recall that there was another rationale for invading Iraq--the imminent threat posed by their stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Those did not exist. Many war opponents--presumably some "liberals and realists" among them--opposed the invasion because they thought this threat was exaggerated. Others believed, just as importantly, that it was illegal to attack a country that was not about to launch an imminent attack of its own, regardless of how you feel about that country's leader. The (somewhat racist) notion that war critics saw Iraq as "an irredeemable tribal hornet's nest" is mostly a distraction.

As for Friedman's idea about what the war intended to accomplish:  Was it really to allow Iraqis to "freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together"? As Anthony Shadid recalled in the New York Times on Sunday, Order No. 1 from Paul Bremer after the invasion banned members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. The effect of that order lingers to this day, as political candidates continue to be banned from participating in Iraqi politics because of their Baathist connections.  Seth Ackerman wrote in Extra! (5-6/05) about the Bush administration's efforts to make the Iraqi elections as undemocratic as possible.

Erasing the inconvenient history of the Iraq War removes the essential lies that were told in order to sell the war.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has had a couple of posts (2/18/10, 2/22/10) on a New York Times op-ed (2/18/10) that urged the U.S. to not worry so much about killing civilians in Afghanistan. The piece was written by Lara M. Dadkhah, who is vaguely identified as an "intelligence analyst" and who notes that she is "employed by a defense consulting company." Greenwald's second post reports that Dadkhah actually works for Booz Hamilton, a very well-connected military and intelligence contractor.

Greenwald quotes from a response that media critic Charles Kaiser got from Times op-ed editor David Shipley when he asked about Dadkhah's op-ed: "We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal, work that was part of her Ph.D. dissertation at Georgetown." As Greenwald notes:

Shipley's answer strongly suggests that Dadkhah did not submit her op-ed unsolicited, but rather, the NYT purposely sought out an op-ed to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan....  Why would they do that?  Maybe tomorrow the NYT editors can actively solicit an op-ed urging the use of biological agents and chemical weapons on civilian populations in Yemen.  After that, they can search out someone to advocate medical experiments on detainees in Bagram.  Perhaps the day after, they can host a symposium on the tactical advantages of air bombing hospitals and orphanages as a means of keeping local populations in line.

Greenwald writes, "When Dadkhar reads things like this from today -- 'Airstrike kills dozens in Afghanistan . . . . Ground forces at the scene found women and children among the casualties' -- she presumably thinks:  'Yes, that's exactly what we need more of.'" One wonders if Shipley and the rest of the team at the New York Times felt a similar sense of satisfaction.

On NBC's Chris Matthews Show on Sunday (2/21/10), the main topic of conversation was a familiar one for Beltway media: Will Obama finally go to the "center"? Or as the show's website puts it, "The Crucial Crossroads: Will Obama Push His Agenda, or Move to the Middle?"

Matthews kicked things off by announcing that "the week began with that stunner from Sen. Evan Bayh, more evidence the president is losing the power of the center that got him elected." How Bayh's sudden decision to leave the Senate relates to Obama isn't obvious, but the point is perfectly clear: Obama needs to move to the right. As Matthews put it to panelist Savannah Guthrie of NBC News:

Savannah, six months from now, the experts tell us, around July 4, the All-Star Game, people make up their minds for November. Is the White House aware or thinking right now they've got to choose, go down the center and cut some deals with the Republicans, or stay with the hard liberal agenda?

It's hard to fathom how one could witness the White House's   political strategy of the past year and conclude that it was pushing a "hard liberal agenda." But it's an article of faith in the press corps.  Thus panelist David Ignatius of the Washington Post could speak of Obama wanting to move to the "radical center," whatever that is supposed to mean.

When the discussion turned to healthcare,  the fact that the White House would talk about rising premiums caused Matthews to lament: "But that sounds like, again, you're going back to the old liberal front against the conservatives. You said it again, they're trying to pin the conservatives down. It sounds like he hasn't decided to go to the center." He added:

How did he think he could move to the left in terms of big healthcare, a big government role on a lot of fronts, financial regulation, without enraging the center-right? How did he think he could do that?

Again, there is no plausible way of seeing the White House's health care plan as being "left."  They never seriously considered single-payer, and they did not support the public option--a generally popular policy the corporate media derided as too far left. Their relatively mild positions on Wall Street regulation don't fit the bill either.

Matthews, once more:

How can you be a man of the--a leader of the progressive movement, really do things that enlarge the role of government in the healthcare field, for example, and in financial regulation, and still make the country in this "Kumbaya," we all get along mood? If you change, it bothers people.

That would be a difficult question to answer, since the premise makes little sense to anyone but a corporate pundit.

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt (2/21/10) returns to the issue of Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner having a child fighting on one side of the conflict he's covering (FAIR Activism Update, 2/12/10):

Some Times journalists have taken issue with my position in this case, believing it suggests that no Jewish reporter could fairly cover the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (or, for that matter, a corollary: that a Muslim of Arab descent could not cover Iraq). Until Thomas L. Friedman was sent to Jerusalem in 1984, the Times would not assign a Jew to that post, a sorry history that nobody should want to repeat.

But there is a huge difference between being a Jewish reporter covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and being a reporter whose son has enlisted in the Israeli military. For one thing, as the letter from Ira Glunts illustrates, there is no unanimity among Jews about Israel. To suggest otherwise is to buy into stereotypes. Good reporters bring their life stories to their work and learn both to mine them for material and to correct for bias. But having a son take up arms in a foreign fight you are covering--any fight--creates intolerable pressures and appearances, in my view. I would have said the same thing if the Times had had a reporter in Northern Ireland with a son in the British military there--or fighting with the Provisional Irish Republican Army....

If it isn't acceptable for a Jerusalem correspondent's son to volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces, would it be OK for him to be in the United States Army? My answer is yes, though the reporter's assignment might be affected by what his son was assigned to do--and where. Though some journalists concerned with objectivity may not always be comfortable with it, readers expect American reporters and their family to be part of this society and to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But they don’t expect a correspondent sent to cover an intense overseas conflict to wind up heavily invested in one side--or to be perceived as such--even if it is through the action of a close family member over whom the reporter has no control.

Hoyt is right to reject the odious equation of concern over Bronner's situation with the idea that Jews (or Muslims) should be barred from reporting on the Middle East. The assumption that reporters will naturally side with their own ethnic group is bigotry, and the Times shouldn't try to appease any readers who make that leap. If there is any personal tie to a story that a journalist should not be expected to be able to set aside, however, surely it's having a child whose life or death is at stake.

Think Progress's Matthew Yglesias (2/22/10) points to a rather bizarre Economist editorial (2/18/10) blaming President Barack Obama's problems on his failure to move to the right:

It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr. Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favors. If, instead of handing over healthcare to his party's left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got healthcare through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill.

Yglesias points out that Obama did, in fact, offer tort reform to conservatives, quoting Time's Karen Tumulty (5/5/09) on a meeting between Obama and congressional Republicans:

Obama said he was willing to curb malpractice awards, a move long sought by Republicans that is certain to bring strong opposition from the trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party.

What, he wanted to know, did the Republicans have to offer in return?

Nothing, it turned out. Republicans were unprepared to make any concessions, if they had any to make.

More broadly, of course, Obama turned healthcare over not to his party's left wing but to his party's right wing, in the person of Max Baucus (the 10th most conservative Democratic senator, according to VoteView), who famously spent months unsuccessfully trying to craft a bipartisan compromise with Republican colleagues.  Can you really follow U.S. politics at all and not be aware of this?

As for nuclear power,  Obama made his call for a "new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants" in his January 27 State of the Union speech, and in the month that's followed it has produced no Republican support for climate legislation--predictably enough.

How can people who get paid to pay attention to the Washington political scene get it so wrong? There is a bias built into the D.C. press corps that Democrats' problems are on the left and their solutions are to the right. As Extra! wrote back in 1992, looking back at the elections of '84 and '88: "When the 'pragmatists' lose badly with their centrist approach, they are repainted after the fact as radicals, so the strategy of tilting to the right can be tried again and again." That's what's was done with Bill Clinton after he ran into political trouble.  And now it's happening to Obama.

From the paper's editorial today (2/22/10) on climate change deniers:

The Earth is warming. A chief cause is the increase in greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Humans are at least in part responsible, because the oil, gas and coal that we burn releases these gases. If current trends persist, it's likely that in coming decades the globe's climate will change with potentially devastating effects for billions of people.

Contrary to what you may have read lately, there are few reputable scientists who would disagree with anything in that first paragraph.

That's especially true if "what you may have read lately" includes the Washington Post, one day earlier (2/21/10), in which George F. Will declared:

A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify.

James Ledbetter (Big Money, 2/20/10) points out that Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim, the third-richest person on the planet and one of the New York Times' biggest stockholders, is a central player in a remarkable New York-based legal story--one that the Times has so far ignored.

The story involves Slim's attempt to take over a loan that  JPMorgan Chase made to a subsidiary of Grupo Televisa, Slim's major business rival--a deal that would have required Televisa to reveal virtually all its financial secrets.  A U.S. federal judge in New York City held that JPMorgan was acting in "bad faith" and put a hold on the loan's transfer (Reuters.com, 2/18/10).

Writes Ledbetter:

This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world's largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected to cover it, as the Journal and Bloomberg have. Yet as of Saturday midday, I cannot find a single mention of any aspect of this case, anywhere in the physical New York Times, or on its website--not even a blog post or a wire story. Perhaps as the lawsuit moves on, the Times will be compelled to cover it. But for the moment, it certainly appears that Carlos Slim's investment has bought the silence of one of the world's most important newspapers.

I suppose that the Times could argue that it just doesn't find judicial findings of financial wrongdoing against the biggest corporation based in New York City to be particularly newsworthy.

The New York Post (2/19/10) has an interesting front page on the anti-government protester flying his plane into an office building.  After the bad pun ("KAMIKAZE ATTAX!"), the subhead reads:

Fed-Up Madman Crashes Plane Into IRS Building

"Madman"--because unlike, say, Nidal Malik Hasan, Joseph Stack is not a "terrorist" whose actions might discredit a wider political movement. And "Fed-Up" because...maybe he has a point?

An article in the new issue of Time (3/1/10)  takes a look at the Tea Party movement--which, according to their calculations, is surprisingly large:

Whether bitter or sweetened, the tea is winning admirers. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, roughly 1 in 5 adult Americans identifies with the Tea Party movement, which scored its first major victory last month when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Democrat Ted Kennedy.

One in 5, while a lot smaller than movements considered fringe by corporate media (i.e., single-payer advocates), is pretty startling considering that other polling has shown that lots of people don't know what the "Tea Party movement" is (FAIR Blog, 12/17/09). Sure enough, if you look at the actual polling results, you see that Time is mixing up the numbers--in way that inflates Tea Party popularity.

Here's the key point from that Times/CBS poll (2/5-10/10):

So you can see lots of people still don't know what this Tea Party business is all about.

But do you see that note about the follow-up questions? The Times didn't ask follow-up questions to people who said they knew nothing about the Tea Party movement--a third of the people polled.

The final question in that series--No. 95--is where the Times asked, "Do you consider yourself to be a supporter of the Tea Party movement, or not?" Eighteen percent said yes. So while that might sounds like "roughly 1 in 5 adult Americans,"  it's not--it's 18 percent of those who've heard something about this movement.  That actually works out to not quite 12 percent of all respondents--which means less than 1 in 8.

It's an important distinction--and a reminder that corporate media seem to want the Tea Party movement to be more powerful than it really is.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: A reader pointed out that I was misreading the Times poll result, and he is correct.  The results for the follow-up questions do not add up to 100 percent, accounting for those who were not asked the questions.

Why are liberals and Democrats losing on issues like healthcare? Columnist E.J. Dionne  (Washington Post, 2/18/10) rightly points out that congressional Democrats have caved on almost every big issue: "Single-payer was out at the start. The public option died. A Medicare buy-in died." He wonders:

While liberals were arguing about public plans and this or that, and while Obama was deep into inside deal-making, the conservatives relentlessly made a straightforward public case based on a syllogism: The economy is a mess. Obama and the Democrats are for big government. Big government is responsible for the mess. Therefore the mess is the fault of Obama and the Big Government Democrats.

Simplistic and misleading? Absolutely. But if liberals and Obama are so smart, how did they--or, if you prefer, "we"--allow conservatives to make this argument so effectively? Why do the mainstream media give it so much credence?

That last question is really the answer. Conservative misinformation is effective when the media allow it to be effective. It's a pretty easy formula. The best part is that the right can take up all that space in the media debate and still complain about the media's liberal bias.

Yesterday Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times (2/18/10) turned in a piece on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus plan--a favorite target of Republican lawmakers (when they're not happily enjoying the federal funds in their states and/or districts, that is).

The piece tells us that there's a rather bitter partisan dispute over the stimulus: Democrats say that it worked to create jobs, Republicans say it was a failure.

The third paragraph of the story would seem to render a verdict on the question: "There is little dispute among economists that the measure has kept the jobless rate from being even higher than it is."

That's clear enough. But then the piece--adhering to the notion of "balance" in which true and false claims must be given equal weight--manages to muddy it up:

At a time when both parties are talking about the virtues of working together, the anniversary touched off a bitter dispute between them, with each using the day to write its own political narrative around the bill. Democrats sought to portray Republicans as hypocrites for voting against the bill and then rushing to claim their share of stimulus money for projects in their home districts, while Republicans painted the measure as a failure.

The Republican National Committee posted a Web video aimed at Mr. Obama titled "Broken Promises," and the House Republican leader, Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, issued a report titled "Where are the Jobs? A Look Back at One Year of So-called 'Stimulus.'"

If the major parties are each writing their "own political narrative around the bill," a reporter should try to examine the claims.  But Stolberg's piece merely lists them:

In interviews and e-mail messages, Mr. Boehner and other leading Republicans, including Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana and the Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, argued that Mr. Obama could hardly claim credit for improvements in the economy with 3 million jobs lost over the past year, unemployment at nearly 10 percent and a deficit at $1.6 trillion.

Since we were already told that most economists agree that unemployment would be worse without the stimulus, these GOP talking  points are misleading, right? Apparently not:

Economists say that Mr. Obama and the Republicans are both, in a sense, correct. The economy has indeed lost jobs on Mr. Obama’s watch, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently calculated that the recovery package, formally called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, had saved or created between 900,000 and 2.3 million jobs.

"The economy has shed some 3 million jobs over the past year, but it would have lost closer to 5 million without stimulus," said Mark Zandi, who is currently advising congressional Democrats but also advised Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee. "The economy is still struggling, but it would have been much worse without stimulus."

Mr. Zandi said: "It's legitimate to debate the efficiency of the stimulus; one could say, 'You're spending $800 billion plus and look at what we're getting for it.' But to say that this has not helped the job market is not correct."

So while the Times tells us that "economists" say both sides are "in a sense, correct," the actual economist they quoted to illustrate that fact says that in another, more accurate sense, the Republicans are wrong.

FAIR put out an Action Alert today (2/19/10) critiquing recent nuclear power reporting on ABC and NBC network newscasts. Please feel free to share your letters to the networks in the comments section below.