New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a piece on Sunday (5/15/11) that tried to advance the argument that $250,000 actually isn't that much money to make in a year. The complaint is that politicians who advocate raising tax rates on income above $250,000 have chosen an arbitrary dividing line--above it you're rich, and you'll be taxed accordingly.

Articles like this are annoying for obvious reasons--we're being asked to listen to wealthy people complain that they're not that wealthy, once you factor in the private school tuition and a hefty mortgage. But they often mislead in other areas--especially when it comes to how much wealthy people pay in taxes. Ross Sorkin mentions a Manhattan father of two with a household income of $262,000 who sees his tax bill potentially going up, and he says, "I don't understand why people like us are lumped in with millionaires and billionaires."

As Dean Baker points out, anyone who understands marginal tax rates should know that someone making slightly more than $250,000 would pay a higher rate only on that income above that amount--which, in this case, would amount to a few hundreds dollars at most in extra taxes.

The article goes on to discuss tax policy and budget deficits, and Ross Sorkin makes this point:

much of the income of the country's wealthiest people comes from investments, which is taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of just 15 percent.

So far, neither Democrats nor Republicans dare talk about raising the long-term capital gains tax out of fear that it would reduce crucial investments that could produce jobs.

No one talks about raising capital gains tax rates? The Congressional Progressive Caucus's blueprint, the People's Budget, offers an array of options for raising revenues, including this:

Tax capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income: This policy would eliminate the preferentially low rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends (currently 15 percent) and again tax all capital income as ordinary income under the marginal tax rate structure. The tax rate on long-term capital gains is scheduled to rise to 20 percent in 2013 and dividends are scheduled to be taxed again as ordinary income.

So someone's talking about it after all.

Part of Ross Sorkin's point is that more tax brackets would help clarify the difference between earning a mere $250,000 or, say, many millions of dollars. A fine idea--and also part of the People's Budget. If reporters gave it more attention, they might discover that the answers are staring them in the face.

Writing about Newt Gingrich's presidential bid on the New York Times' Caucus blog (5/10/11), Matt Bai seems to confuse GOP rhetoric for fact as he suggest that, when it comes to marriage vows, Republicans are generally known for walking the line:

Mr. Gingrich, a bit of a rogue in his personal life, has never been a favorite of his party's powerful social conservatives, who tend to think of scandalous affairs as the purview of Democrats, and maybe Rudy Giuliani.

In order to maintain a tired and inaccurate cliché, Bai has to have forgotten John McCain, Henry Hyde, David Vitter, Larry Craig, John Ensign, Mark Sanford and Tom Delay, just to name some of the most prominent married Republicans who have had scandalous affairs. (See Extra!, 1/09.)

This is the sort of off kilter, numbingly conventional analysis we have come to expect from the Times political writer who routinely replaces reality with cockeyed conventional wisdom on deficits, Social Security, and the need for the Democratic Party to move to the right, to name just a few.

Washington Post reporter Dan Balz has a front-page piece about Newt Gingrich's announcement that he's running for president. Balz calls Gingrich's Twitter declaration a "milestone in presidential politics," adding that Gingrich "is an idea-spewing machine," a "one-man think tank" and "someone who has remained in the forefront of the public policy debate over a span of decades" with his "devotion to the intersection of ideas and politics": Gingrich has "kept himself in the middle of public policy debates on healthcare, education, energy and foreign affairs."

One possible downside, Balz warns: "A keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority." Goodness, will the rest of us even be able to understand his abstruse campaign platform?

Not all media coverage is so bad. The New York Times editorial page reminds readers of some Gingrich's actual positions:

The Democrats who won in 2008, including President Obama, are "left-wing radicals" who lead a "secular socialist machine," he wrote in his 2010 book, To Save America. He accused them of producing "the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America." And then the inevitable historical coup de grâce: "The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

The slurs don't stop there. He compared the Muslims who wanted to open an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan to the German Reich, saying it "would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum." He is promoting the fringe idea that "jihadis" are intent on imposing Islamic law on every American village and farm.

Last year, he called for a federal law to stop the (nonexistent) onslaught of Sharia on American jurisprudence and accused the left of refusing to acknowledge its "mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it." This nuanced grasp of world affairs was reinforced when he said that Mr. Obama displayed "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."

In his world, advocates for gay rights are imposing a "gay and secular fascism" using violence and harassment, blacks have little entrepreneurial tradition, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court is a "Latina woman racist." (He kind of took back that last slur.)

"Intellectual superiority" would not appear to be something  Gingrich has to worry about.

Today's broadcast of Democracy Now! featured an excerpt of Noam Chomsky's address at FAIR's 25th anniversary celebration. Watch it:

Want to see the whole event--with more of Chomsky, Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman? Buy the DVD from FAIR today.

I saw a press release yesterday announcing that Rep. Jim McDermott (D.-Wash) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) were introducing a single-payer healthcare bill in both houses of Congress. Unless there was a drastic change in the corporate media, this news wasn't going to be, well, news.

And it hasn't been so far. There were mentions in independent outlets like Democracy Now!, GritTV and the Nation. But in the corporate media, next to nothing-- except for one brief mention on CNN, thanks to Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel:

VANDEN HEUVEL: The progressive caucus, which put out a people's budget which is fair, did not get attention because the media slighted it and marginalized it. That is a mainstream budget.

SPITZER: One second, you'll get your turn.

VANDEN HEUVEL: No, but I do think, when Bernie Sanders and McDermott put forth a Medicare-for-all, that is a majority position.

The single-payer bill and the People's Budget will likely suffer the same media fate--marginalized by the Beltway elites, despite the fact that they represent policies that are broadly popular.

Maybe media would behave differently if someone as serious, wonky and handsome as Paul Ryan was holding the press conference.

USA Today weighs in today (5/10/11) on the argument that U.S. torture of detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was instrumental to tracking down Osama bin Laden. Like other outlets, the newspaper does a pretty lousy job of summarizing the evidence.

Under the headline "Raid Renews Debate on Interrogations," reporter Oren Dorell suggests this starting point:

But the revelation that tips prodded from captured Al-Qaeda members subjected to "enhanced interrogations" led to the capture of Osama bin Laden has ignited a debate over whether Obama should revisit the policies he cast aside.

There is no strong evidence that torture "led" to any such thing. But that's the starting point for the paper's discussion, with the first quote coming from Bush torture lawyer John Yoo. The piece then quotes National Security Council spokesperson Michael Vietor saying, "There's no way that information obtained by EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden." That would seem to undercut the premise of the discussion USA Today has set up. Not to worry--they line up four former Bush officials to endorse the argument that torture worked (Michael Mukasey, Richard Perle, Michael Hayden and former CIA official Jose Rodriguez).

Readers then hear from two former interrogators--Glenn Carle and Matthew Alexander--who do not think torture works. That is quickly countered by former Bush official Marc Theissen. And then readers get a quote from Ken Gude of the liberal Center for American Progress, who is a proponent of both sleep-deprivation and U.S.  drones in Pakistan.

That's not much of a "debate":  a slew of torture proponents, a few critics, and a flawed understanding of the facts that are known.

On the paper's editorial page, John Yoo gets more space to push for torture. That is supposed to "balance" the paper's editorial, which isn't exactly anti-torture:

Opponents of torture responded by trying to downplay the importance of those techniques to the bin Laden raid. They continued to argue that torture doesn't work and is never justified.

If only the answers were so simple or morally unambiguous. They aren't.

They add:

It's clear that torture played some role in piecing together the chain of information that led to bin Laden's lair in Pakistan. CIA Director Leon Panetta acknowledged as much. But he went on to muddy the waters, leaving unclear whether the information obtained by torture was indispensable or just a small factor in a sea of data investigators were dissecting.

Waiting for the head of the CIA to issue a clear explanation of CIA activities seems rather absurd.

The best case that torture proponents can muster is that some people who were tortured issued misleading denials that, many years later, led in some fashion to obtaining the actually useful information used to track down Osama bin Laden. As one L.A. Times article put it, "none of the three most critical pieces of information--the courier's name, the area of Pakistan in which he operated and the location of the compound in which Bin Laden was living--came from detainees." But that doesn't stop outlets like USA Today from presenting the supposed fact that torture "led" to bin Laden's killing as a "revelation."

The Washington Post today (5/10/11) has a perplexing article by Aaron Davis about U.S. troops leaving Iraq. Here's the lead:

BAGHDAD -- The United States' pleas for Iraq's government to decide "within weeks" whether American troops should stay beyond a year-end deadline to leave will not be met, Iraqi politicians say, complicating plans for the U.S. military withdrawal.

If the deadline to extend U.S. troop presence is not extended, then (if I'm to understand what the words mean) U.S. troops have to leave, as they're planning on doing. How does that "complicate" anything? There's a political problem in Iraq, in that most people don't want U.S. troops to stay, and politicians there are struggling with how to satisfy that public demand for ending the occupation. Some political leaders seem to want U.S. troops to stay in some form.

So the lead didn't make much sense to me, but the fifth paragraph makes things a bit clearer:

A growing chorus of military strategists in Washington would like a deal allowing at least some continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. Amid the broad unrest across the Middle East, they say, a U.S. foothold in Iraq is critical to help ensure stability in that country and to keep Iran and other potential aggressors in check.

So the "complications" are that U.S. elites want to stay in Iraq, and Iraqis don't want U.S. troops there.

I was intrigued to see this headline at the Guardian's website yesterday:

I was struck by the contrast between two passages I came across recently:

Misurata's population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people--including combatants--have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22--less than 3 percent--are women. If Gadhafi were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties.

--Alan J. Kuperman (Boston Globe, 4/14/11)

In a report to be published in tomorrow's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers have concluded that air strikes [in Iraq] by U.S.-led coalition forces have killed mostly women and children. Thirty-nine percent were children, while 46 percent were women.

--Jason Ditz (Antiwar.com, 4/15/09)

After nearly two months of NATO bombardment, the Libyan government's warfare in Misurata may have become more indiscriminate--a reminder of the often inhumane consequences of "humanitarian intervention." But it's striking to see what degree of violence against civilians is treated by U.S. corporate media as a compelling reason to take military action against an official enemy--compared to the much greater level of civilian killing that passes without much notice when it is committed by the United States itself.

The argument that the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden shows that George W. Bush's torture policies were justified got another rehearsal in Newsweek from Yale professor Stephen Carter (5/5/11):

In the end, we were able to track bin Laden because he communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers. And what was the source of this vital clue? The intelligence apparently came from detainees imprisoned in secret facilities overseas and subjected to what has been euphemistically called "enhanced" interrogation....

So the information from the detainees was crucial, and we face an uncomfortable irony, both political and ethical. The finest moment of Barack Obama's presidency to this point came about precisely because of the detention system against which he railed during his campaign. Indeed, the only slip in what was otherwise an exemplary performance on May 1 was the president's failure to credit his predecessor, who established the controversial mechanism that likely led us to bin Laden's door. If we are cheering bin Laden's death, then we are also cheering, whether we like it or not, the methods that brought it about.

Three cheers for torture--because the "vital clue" that "led us to bin Laden's door" was that he "communicated only through two couriers believed to be brothers"? So without this "crucial" information, the U.S. government wouldn't have been looking for bin Laden's couriers? Or if it had found them, it wouldn't have realized they were important? Maybe it would have wasted time looking for couriers who were only children. "Bin Laden's door" it isn't.

Newsweek's rationale for cheering terrorism is no more convincing than the one advanced by Time (FAIR Blog, 5/6/11), which argued that the fact that detainees didn't give up any information about the courier under torture was key evidence that the courier was important.

One gets the sense that people who participated in torture, or helped to justify it--as Carter did in his book The Violence of Peace--recognize on some level that this was a horrible thing to do, and are desperate to assert that their moral collapse was not in vain.

Certain features of the White House story about the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound were irresistible to the media: A fierce firefight. The feared terrorist leader crouching behind his wife as the Navy SEALs approached, before resisting or possibly even reaching for a weapon. And on and on.

Of course, those details have been substantially altered by the White House, if not scrapped altogether. And thus we started to see headlines like this one in the New York Times: "Raid Account, Hastily Told, Proves Fluid." As that story put it:

a classic collision of a White House desire to promote a stunning national security triumph--and feed a ravenous media--while collecting facts from a chaotic military operation on the other side of the world.

If by "classic," the Times means to say that the government often misleads or lies about its accomplishments--well, no argument here. And demonstrating their sense of humor, the Times account included this:

"There has never been any intent to deceive or dramatize," a military official said Thursday, asking that he not be named because of ground rules imposed by the Department of Defense. "Everything we put out we really believed to be true at the time."

We never meant to mislead anyone--but don't quote me on that!

Judging by what some reporters are saying,  early accounts are often simply wrong.  On CNN's Reliable Sources (3/8/11), host Howard Kurtz and former CNN Pentagon reporter Jamie McIntyre had this exchange:

KURTZ: And there was a conference call with White House officials, and you're trying to assemble as much as you can. You assume these people know what they're talking about.

MCINTYRE: But you know, Howard, this was an avoidable misstep, because anyone who has covered the military for any period of time, or anyone who is briefed on military operations, knows that initial details on an operation are almost always wrong. And if they had simply been cautious about caveating the fact that they didn't have all the details, or that they might change, and by the same token, if the reporters are careful to say in the past, we know that often these initial details are not right, it wouldn't have looked nearly as bad.

So reporters either "assume these people know what they're talking about," or just know that "initial details on an operation are almost always wrong." If it's the latter, it would seem to me that most reporters carry that knowledge around without sharing it with readers or viewers. In fact, a network correspondent once told me almost exactly the same thing that McIntyre is saying here. I remember being shocked, because the reporter's work betrayed no such skepticism towards official claims.

This was a well-planned assault, closely watched by elite planners at Washington. For reasons that are entirely  unclear, they delivered a highly misleading account to reporters and the public. They've made their corrections--or at least adjustments--but think about how often this might be happening, in Afghanistan or elsewhere. An airstrike reportedly kills civilians; the Pentagon issues a denial.  How often do reporters treat those denials with sufficient skepticism?

On the anniversary of former FCC commissioner Newton Minow's speech decrying television as a "vast wasteland," Chicago News Cooperative columnist James Warren makes an important point: Minow's speech was really about how broadcasters should be forced to do more public affairs programming in return for their free use of the public airwaves:

Sitting high above the Loop with Newton Minow, I realized that history buried his lede--to his everlasting good fortune.

"Burying the lede" is newspaperese for sticking a story's main point too far down. It partly explains why Monday brings the 50th anniversary of a speech that is now part of the cultural lexicon: "A vast wasteland."

That’s how he referred to television on May 9, 1961, in his first address as chairman of President John F. Kennedy's Federal Communications Commission. One can't imagine regulatory chiefs or cabinet officers today speaking so harshly, and forthrightly, to an industry they oversee.

The real message that Mr. Minow, then a 35-year-old Chicago lawyer, wanted to impart was that in exchange for free and exclusive licenses to use the airwaves, bona fide "public service" programming should be provided by broadcasters, whom he addressed and angered at their national gathering in Washington. "Vast wasteland" was a parenthetical term.

It's bad enough that corporate media are having such an ill-informed debate about whether torturing some prisoners helped find Osama bin Laden. But considering whom the media invite to this debate, it's probably not a surprise. Take yesterday's Sunday shows (please!).

On NBC's Meet the Press, Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon basically refused to take a definitive position on torture, waterboarding and intelligence.  "No single piece of intelligence led to this," was his line. They followed up with a segment with former CIA head Michael Hayden and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom basically endorsed the idea that torture worked.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Donald Rumsfeld declared that these tactics worked.

Fox News Sunday had an "exclusive" with Dick Cheney, which followed a pretty contentious interview with Donilon. Cheney did not surprise.

On ABC's This Week, torture advocate Liz Cheney was on the roundtable to say exactly what you'd expect.  ("That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.")  This came after host Christiane Amanpour seemed to overstate the White House's view, saying that that Obama officials have admitted that waterboarding "did, in fact, yield fruitful information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden."

But give ABC credit for having a  critic of torture on their show.  Former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks said this:

I never thought I'd live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.

Also, what we know is that the use of torture became the prime recruiting tool for Al Qaida and for insurgents in Iraq, and so directly resulted in the death of American troops.

Elite media’s selective disdain for public activism is well known. Still, you’d think some things would garner a word or two. Like 300 disability rights activists, a couple hundred in wheelchairs, occupying the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. The May 2 demonstration was organized by the rights group ADAPT to protest Republican budget plans for Medicaid. Ninety-one people were arrested and carted off by Capitol police.

Yet days after the rotunda protest, and another action the next day in which 300 demonstrators gathered outside the Longworth House Office Building, many getting inside to Rep. Paul Ryan's second floor office where 10 were arrested, the country's big media have taken no notice. Accounts in Politico (5/2/11) and the Hill (5/3/11) were all a search turned up.

ADAPT organizer Mike Ervin explained that it’s not just the roughly 35 percent funding cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s budget proposal that concern the disability community, but the plan to convert states' federal shares into block grants. Many people with disabilities rely on Medicaid “for the assistance we get every day to live in our communities," rather than institutions.

As for the claim, from Ryan's Roadmap Plan, that block granting "allows states maximum flexibility to tailor their Medicaid programs to the specific needs of their populations," Ervin says, "That's like saying Jim Crow laws give states more flexibility to decide who gets to drink at their water fountains. Flexibility is basically a code word for abandonment."

People with disabilities (one community that anyone can join at any moment) and their advocates are right to worry their concerns won't be heard by lawmakers, to the extent that that involves dealing with a press corps that, evidently, can't even see them.

Time magazine's new issue (no link to the text is available) includes this weird explanation of how torture helped track down Osama bin Laden:

Interrogators grilled 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed for details about the courier. When he pleaded ignorance, they knew they were on to something promising. Al-Libbi, the senior Al-Qaeda figure captured in 2005, also played dumb. Both men were subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, including, in Mohammed's case, the waterboard.

As best I can tell, the argument here is that they got no information about the Al-Qaeda courier from torturing these two detainees--which was just the crucial lead needed to crack the case. So the fact that torturing these two detainees did not produce information proves that torturing is a useful way to produce information.

The piece goes on to say, "The report that Mohammed and al-Libbi were more forthcoming after the harsh treatment guarantees that the argument will go on." Does that make any sense at all? Or is this just more evidence that anything and everything can be used by torture proponents to claim vindication?

Marcy Wheeler's coverage of this discussion at FireDogLake has been excellent, and seems more to the point:

But there are two points that seem key in assessing the torture question. First, both KSM and al-Libi had critical intelligence they withheld under torture. KSM knew of Abu Ahmed's trusted role and real name; al-Libi knew Abu Ahmed was OBL's trusted courier and may have known of what became OBL's compound.

And neither of them revealed that information to the CIA.

They waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month, and he either never got asked about couriers guarding OBL, or he avoided answering the question honestly. Had KSM revealed that detail, Bush might have gotten OBL eight years ago.

One other consideration--raised by Matthew Alexander on CounterSpin--is that the courier's nickname allegedly offered by Khalid Sheik Mohammed was probably not all that helpful. Indeed, a Los Angeles Times article (5/5/11), based on interviews with various government officials, makes this point:

They stressed that none of the three most critical pieces of information--the courier's name, the area of Pakistan in which he operated and the location of the compound in which Bin Laden was living--came from detainees.