The Washington Post had a report on Sunday (6/19/11) from the left-liberal Netroots Nation conference. Actually, it's a report from two conferences: The Netroots event and a smaller right-wing affair which schedules its conference to coincide with the larger, liberal get-together--for a reason:

RightOnline’s conference is smaller (about 1,200 people to Netroots’ 2,500) and more focused on strategy than policy. RightOnline always makes sure to be in the same city, so the get-together is guaranteed more media attention.

Mission accomplished.

A New York Times piece (6/17/11) on Social Security actually quotes a defender of Social Security--but as that source notes, "the context looks designed to refute me."

In a story about the AARP suggesting that maybe Social Security benefits will have to be cut, the Times' Erich Lichtblau writes:

But other advocacy groups that are pushing to preserve Social Security benefits accused AARP of effectively abandoning its core constituency.

Doug Henwood, the Brooklyn editor of a liberal business blog and Internet radio program who has written on Social Security, said AARP's willingness to consider cuts in benefits "reads like a sign that this former lobby for the interest of older Americans has now transformed itself completely into an insurance company." He continued, "Surely they can’t be persuaded by the merits of the arguments, since the alleged Social Security crisis is a phantom that can’t survive a serious round of factchecking."

The most recent estimates from the Social Security Administration, issued last month, indicate that under current law the program's trust funds will be exhausted by 2036, and that $6.5 trillion in additional money will be needed over a 75-year period to pay all scheduled benefits.

In other words, it can too survive a serious round of factchecking!

Or maybe not so serious. Is it nicer to assume that New York Times reporters can't use calculators, or that they count on their readers not being able to? That enormous $6.5 trillion number, divided by 75 years, gives you the not-so-enormous sum of $87 billion--a figure no one would blink an eye at if you suggested it was necessary to subdue some possibly terrorist-harboring rebels in Central Asia. This amount should be even less daunting in 2036, when it will begin to be required, and will likely be rather trivial in 2111--assuming things keep going on in the future roughly the way they have in the past, which is a necessary assumption to make if you're going to pretend that making economic projections for a century in the future is in any way a meaningful endeavor.

The story of Michele Bachmann's surging campaign momentum continues, this time courtesy of Beltway reporter Mark Halperin of Time magazine:

Why has Michele Bachmann suddenly become the It candidate?

With her impressive New Hampshire debate performance, Bachmann has gone from a conservative Sarah Palin-lite curiosity to a potential game changer. For two hours onstage with her GOP rivals, Bachmann appeared polished, serene and in command. Her smooth performance was partly the work of a top-shelf team of veteran advisers (manager Ed Rollins, pollster Ed Goeas, forensic coach Brett O’Donnell). They sanded down some of her rough edges but let Bachmann be Bachmann, complete with zinging anti-Obama applause lines and sunny-side-up conservatism.

Halperin gave some advice on what Bachmann needed to do to keep things going:

Most of all: avoid the kinds of gaffes, misstatements, self-promotional moments and wacky behavior that would cause the media and many traditional Republicans to--once again--write her off.

Huh. Remember that this was a debate where her economic plan boiled down to calling for certain government agencies to be abolished-- especially the Environmental Protection Agency, which she called the "Job Killing Organization of America." That didn't cause the media to write her off--or most voters, either, since they mostly didn't hear about it.

Or when she said:

The Congressional Budget Office has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?

This is, as you might expect, not true. But maybe it qualifies as "sunny-side-up conservatism."

It's not just Halperin, though. Time columnist Joe Klein writes:

Bachmann is often linked with Palin as a Tea Party pinup, but she is a different breed of cat: She knows her stuff. She actually gives factual, informed answers. She lacks Palin's bitter, solipsistic edge. She skillfully framed even her most extreme responses in an amenable way, smothering her opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest within a paean to the sanctity of life.

If you scan the debate transcript, Bachmann didn't give many factual answers to any of the questions. (This is probably not all that unusual in a debate.)  When she tried to--see above about the 800,000 lost jobs--her "fact" was totally inaccurate. As has been the pattern in the past with her--like when she claimed on CBS there was a study showing 30 percent of doctors were leaving the field due to the healthcare law. There is no such study. CBS viewers didn't know the truth, and it seems like journalists are unwilling to tell people that Michele Bachmann's not telling the truth.

Yesterday New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse (6/16/11) reported on efforts in several states to get public-sector workers to increase contributions to state pension funds--or, to put it more bluntly, to take a pay cut.

Political leaders are claiming this is simply the only thing they can do--and Greenhouse helps them make their case. Right from the start, Greenhouse frames the political shift as "the most definitive sign yet that the era of generous compensation for public-sector employees is ending." Many studies have shown that public sector compensation isn't actually all that generous, and such workers might lag slightly behind their private-sector counterparts.

Greenhouse presents the case:

The Pew Center on the States estimates there is a more than $1 trillion funding gap for government workers' retirement benefits in the 50 states. At the same time, many voters resent that public employee pensions are generally better than their own.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. But over what period of time? And is that figure correct in the first place? Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote a great paper (2/11) explaining the origins of the crisis--which is rooted mostly the housing bubble--and that the estimates of one or two trillion dollars were misleading in at least two ways: Such figures might not fully account for a recovery in stock prices (which would improve the outlook for pension funds, and thus reduce the funding gap), and expressing funding gaps as a dollar figure absent any context is rather useless.

Express the gap as a share of the economy, and things aren't so alarming. As Baker wrote:

The size of the projected state and local government shortfalls measured as a share of future gross state products appear manageable. The total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product over the next 30 years for most states. Even in the cases of the states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product.

But it's Greenhouse's language near the end of the piece that might be the most galling part:

But with tales of six-figure pensions and public employees comfortably retiring in their early 50s, many lawmakers say it is outrageous that some of these workers pay nothing out of pocket toward their pensions.

Six-figure pensions are, as you'd imagine, quite rare. And workers who "pay nothing" for their pensions actually do pay something--they get some of their compensation in the form of a retirement package instead of wages. But these very exceptional cases get a lot of attention, as Dean Baker noted in his critique of Greenhouse's piece:

The media have been repeating tales circulated by right-wing and business organizations who are attacking public-sector workers and public-sector unions. In fact, the vast majority of public-sector workers do not retiree in their early 50s and do not enjoy especially generous benefits....

If the media had been doing a competent job reporting on this issue, legislators would be hearing tales of 70-year old retirees trying to get by on less than $20,000 a year. (Roughly 30 percent of public sector employees do not get Social Security.)

Journalists are supposed to challenge conventional wisdom and political rhetoric--not reinforce it. McClatchy's Kevin Hall wrote an exceptional piece on state pensions on March 6. We'd be having a very different political debate if more reporters were following his lead.

The emerging storyline after the Republican presidential debate this week was that far-right Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann is for real, mostly because she managed to sound, well, a little less crazy than she's sounded before. (No, they didn't quite put it like that.)

There are stories about Bachmann's new Bach-mentum in the New York Times (6/15/11), the Washington Post (6/14/11) and  USA Today (6/15/11).

Let's take the Times' lead:

The key question for Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota before the Republican debate on Monday night was whether she could appeal to voters beyond the Tea Party wing that she helped to create, while avoiding the gaffes that have sometimes emerged from her strident, passionate persona.

By most accounts, she did just that. Ms. Bachmann toned her rhetoric down a bit and offered herself as a competent, knowledgeable insider who would nonetheless carry on the fight against big government with the zeal of a Tea Party activist.

She's hired veteran GOP strategists, the Times' Michael Shear notes:

Those moves suggest that Ms. Bachmann, who is often mocked by late-night comedians and liberal cable hosts as a nutty right-winger, wants to dispel that caricature as she pursues the nomination.

Well OK. Then turn to the Times editorial about the debates, where you read this:

Michele Bachmann had the strangest, most simplistic economic solution of all: simply close down the Environmental Protection Agency, which she said "should really be renamed the Job-Killing Organization of America."

I guess if I was writing a piece about how Bachmann toned down the crazy in this debate, I'd leave out that quote too. It kind of makes it sound like she didn't.

Some in the press still seem to have trouble defining whatever it is that motivates the Tea Party movement. I noticed this in an L.A. Times piece last week (6/5/11):

Americans possess a long-standing wariness of power and its potential as a corrupting influence, especially in the hands of large institutions. That instinct bred our government system of checks and balances and, more recently, led members of the "tea party" to embrace the nation's founders (repackaged as a band of small-government crusaders) as the guiding lights of their movement.

So "wariness of power" and the "corrupting influence" of "large institutions" is what this is about. Huh. Then came New York Times columnist David Brooks (6/14/11), who wrote:

The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country.

So that is what the Koch brothers are fighting for?

Seriously, another one of these?

Like last year, maybe some of the reporters involved find it valuable for the people they cover to get to know them on a more personal level, away from all the tough questions and dogged investigations.

If you feel like there hasn't been enough attention paid to the fact that the democratic movements in the Arab world are undermining the power of U.S. elites to have troublemakers tortured and/or killed, rest assured that Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has you covered this week (6/12/11):

Among American spies there’s more than a little nostalgia for the bad old days. You know, back before dictators started toppling in the Middle East; back when suspected bad guys could be snatched off a street somewhere and delivered to the not-so-tender mercies of interrogators in their home countries; back when thuggish tyrants, however ugly, were at least predictable.

It’s not a philosophical thing, just a practical one. Confronted by the cold realities of this year's Arab Spring, many intelligence and counterterrorism professionals now see major dangers looming near at hand, while the good news--a freer, fairer, more equitable and stable Arab world--remains somewhere over the horizon. "All this celebration of democracy is just bullshit," says one senior intelligence officer who's spent decades fighting terrorism and finds his job getting harder, not easier, because of recent developments. "You take the lid off and you don’t know what's going to happen. I think disaster is lurking."

Dickey uses Egypt as one example, explaining that at one point dictator Hosni Mubarak was making plans to hand over power to feared intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The U.S. supported that idea, but Egyptians weren't especially keen on handing over power to Mubarak's torture chief. Losing this vital link is apparently bad news for U.S. policymakers--though Dickey undercuts the point when he recalls this history:

I noticed a few stories in today's USA Today (6/13/11) about supposed Republican front-runner Mitt Romney. There will be plenty more of this to come--horserace commentary based on polling that's being done in order to give journalists a reason to talk about one candidate more than another, which candidate has "momentum" and so on.

It's worth remembering that the polling at this stage of the race is useless. Actually, it's probably worse than that, since the political press corps obsesses over this trivia at the expense of doing any actually useful reporting about the candidates.

I wanted to find a story from around the same time frame in 2007 to illustrate how misguided this polling can be. It didn't take long. Here's the lead of a June 7, 2007 Washington Post article:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York holds a solid lead over her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, while the contest for the Republican nomination appears even more unsettled than it did when it began five months ago, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Clinton's lead remains steady over her two principal challengers, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and the poll contains troubling news for both. Obama's support has softened noticeably, highlighting the challenge he faces in turning high interest in his candidacy into votes. Edwards, meanwhile, has lost ground nationally over the past few months.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani remains the leader in the GOP race, but the poll suggests that the surge in support he received after declaring his candidacy has stalled and that his backing of abortion rights and gay rights has caused more Republicans to turn away from him.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona runs second in the GOP race, but the poll results raise questions about his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has spent millions on television ads already this year, has in some ways become an attractive alternative over the past few months, and former Sen. Fred D. Thompson of Tennessee shows the potential to quickly make the GOP contest a four-way battle.

The poll provides a revealing snapshot of the 2008 presidential race as the candidates gather this week for a pair of debates in New Hampshire, which will hold the first primary next year.

From the L.A. Times (6/9/11):

A tattered tent, shreds of carpet and other scorched debris were all that were left of a favored retreat of Moammar Gadhafi just outside the Libyan capital, the aftermath of what appeared to be a NATO bombing run.

Was the usually idyllic nature preserve a "command and control" center used by the Libyan military? Or was this an example of NATO attempting to assassinate the longtime Libyan dictator?

A NATO official reached in Naples, Italy, late Wednesday emphasized that the Western alliance does not target people for killings, and the official would not confirm that North Atlantic Treaty Organization warplanes had even struck the site Tuesday. "It doesn't sound like that would be the subject of our attention, so I'm not sure what you were shown there," said the official, who under NATO rules could not be identified by name.

Remember, it's Libya's pathetic PR that gets ridiculed in the U.S. press. NATO officials are granted anonymity to make their spectacularly implausible claims.

The Washington Post had a piece yesterday (6/9/11) on Mitt Romney's views on global warming. It serves as a reminder that Republican political candidates are under enormous pressure from the right-wing base of the party on this issue--any politician who's ever suggested that climate change is a problem, or backed efforts to address it, is in trouble.

This is an important thing to point out.  But that doesn't mean the Post thinks climate change is important. See the article's lead sentence:

It seemed like a straightforward question on a second-tier issue: Would Mitt Romney disavow the science behind global warming?

Is the fate of the planet a "second-tier issue"?

Romney's views--"he believes the world is getting warmer and that humans are contributing to that pattern," explains the Post--aren't pleasing the far right,  whom the Post gives ample space to vent:

"Bye-bye, nomination," Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday on his radio talk show after playing a clip of Romney's climate remark. "Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of man-made global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates that want to buy into it."

Then came the Club for Growth, which issued a white paper criticizing Romney. "Governor Romney's regulatory record as governor contains some flaws," the report said, "including a significant one--his support of 'global warming' policies."

And Conservatives4Palin.com, a blog run by some of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s more active supporters, posted an item charging that Romney is "simpatico" with President Obama after he "totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax."

Prominent climate change "skeptic" Christopher Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is also quoted. There's never any indication that what these people are saying is nonsense--perhaps because this is a story about politics, and facts shouldn't get in the way.

The closest thing to that kind of balancing perspective is when the Post pointed out that public opinion is divided:

Public opinion is politicized on the issue. A March Gallup poll found that 32 percent of Republicans think the effects of global warming are already being felt and 36 percent believe the rise in the Earth’s temperatures is caused by humans, while 67 percent say the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news.

The same survey found the opposite trend on the other side of the political fence. Sixty-two percent of Democrats polled said the effects of global warming have begun, and 71 percent said humans are causing the rising temperatures, while 22 percent think the situation is exaggerated. Among independents, there was a fairly even split on those questions.

I'm not sure "politicized" is the most useful term to use here. If many more Republicans believe that Iraq had WMDs, or that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, or that the Earth is flat, are such views "politicized"--or simply inaccurate?

One of the most common criticisms of the PBS NewsHour is that it too often mimics the elite bias of the commercial media.

A recent broadcast of the NewsHour (6/8/11) had two segments about the debate over the Afghan War--the first a news report covering the Senate nomination hearings for Ryan Crocker, Obama's nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan. Quoted in the piece were senators Jim Webb (D.-Va.) and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.), Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Barack Obama.

The discussion segment that accompanied it featured two more senators: Republican Saxby Chambliss  of Georgia and New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez. Chambliss is a supporter of the war, with some reservations, while Menendez wants to continue the war with a different strategy: 

I think you could do more of a counterterrorism effort, where you are striking at Al-Qaeda and along the Afghan/Pakistan border, even striking at the Taliban to just to continue destabilize them.

As FAIR pointed out in our most recent study of the NewsHour, actual opponents of the war are hard to find.

On June 7, the NewsHour had a discussion about the state of the economy, and what the White House might be able to do to turn things around. Again, the guestlist was disappointing. Here's Gwen Ifill's introduction:

We explore that now with Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, Mark Vitner, senior economist for Wells Fargo in Charlotte, N.C., and Tom Binnings, senior partner at Summit Economics in Colorado.

A Beltway political reporter for a mainstream daily, an economist for a bank and a partner at an economic forecasting firm. The banker expressed a view common in corporate America--that there's too much government regulation. ("It seems that regulation has increased.... Companies are really kind of put off by the amount of regulations that are hitting them all at once.")

There was little challenge to that sentiment--a predictable outcome, given the guests that the show booked to talk about the issue. The NewsHour should do better.

Guess who's booked to appear on the CBS Sunday morning chat show Face the Nation this weekend? None other than Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan.

It has, after all, been an eternity since Sunday TV viewers had a chance to listen to Ryan talk about his Medicare-slashing budget plan.

May 22 on Meet the Press, to be exact.

FAIR's new petition to the television networks asks why Ryan's far-right plan has been getting so much more coverage than the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Add your voice today!

One theme of the coverage of the NATO bombing of Libya is that the Libyan government is lousy at propaganda.

It was somewhat jarring, though, to see all of these headlines in the space of two days this week.  It's worth pointing out-- as some of these stories (and others) do-- that the NATO bombing has intensified over the past few days, making these 'no dead civilians here' pieces seem curiously timed.

I guess this could be seen as a message to the Libyan government: This is how the professionals do it.

--New York Times (6/7/11):

"Libya Stokes Its Machine Generating Propaganda"

Sightings of civilian casualties have been rare, though not for want of official endeavor. But 11 weeks into the airstrikes, the government minders’ credibility, at least among foreign reporters, has worn perilously thin.

Visits to bombing sites, hospitals and funerals have produced a succession of blunders, including patients identified as bombing victims who turned out not to be, empty coffins at funerals and burials where some of those interred turned out not to be airstrike victims at all.

--Wall Street Journal (6/7/11)

"Libya's PR Efforts Are Falling Short"

Libya's government says more than 700 civilians have been killed and more than 4,000 wounded in NATO airstrikes. But officials haven't shown foreign reporters in Tripoli evidence of large numbers of civilian casualties.

Los Angeles Times (6/7/11)

"Libya Officials Put a Spin on Conflict"

Moammar Gadafi's government alleges a mounting civilian toll and massive damage amid a punishing NATO-led bombing campaign. Foreign journalists learn that what officials say happened may not necessarily be the case.

Washington Post (6/6/11):

"Libya Government Fails to Prove Claims of NATO Casualties"

Nearly three months into NATO’s bombing campaign, Moammar Gadhafi's government churns out daily propaganda about the alliance supposedly inflicting civilian casualties. Last week, it said that 718 people had died from mid-March to late May and that 4,067 had suffered significant injuries.

But it has failed to show foreign journalists more than a handful of dead or wounded people. Indeed, when reporters are taken on official trips, what they see suggests that NATO is being accurate and careful.

"Connecticut is closing out its most activist, liberal legislative session in memory," Peter Applebome reports in the New York Times (6/8/11), with "the largest tax increase in Connecticut history" as the centerpiece of his case.

"They decided to tear up the antitax, budget-slashing, confront-the-unions script that has characterized state legislative sessions elsewhere," Applebome writes, noting that "Republicans say the last five months of lawmaking have been a liberal joy ride and a capitulation to the state's powerful unions....  'Their solution is to tax the wealthy in Fairfield County, redistribute income and hope people in Greenwich and Darien don’t move to Florida,' said Christopher Healy, the state Republican Party chairman." The reporter quotes a conservative newspaper's assertion that "the state of Connecticut has left the gravitational pull of planet Earth."

Applebome quotes some Democrats defending themselves as well, but he paints a vivid picture of a very controversial budget approach. Then he gets around to describing it: "The Legislature adopted a $40.1 billion budget that relies on $1.4 billion in tax increases, about $800 million in cuts and a projected $1.6 billion in union concessions on pay and benefits over two years." Union concessions are cuts, right? So he's really saying that the budget includes $1.4 billion in new taxes and roughly $1.6 billion this year in cuts. That's not exactly tearing up the budget-slashing, anti-union script--that's about a 4 percent cut in the state budget, largely at the expense of unions.

This is the plan that the New York Times thinks merits the (print) subhead "Connecticut Shifts to the Left."

What would help readers put this piece in context would be a sense of who was paying taxes before the tax increase. According to the invaluable "Who Pays?" report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (11/09), in Connecticut the highest tax rate was paid by the poorest 20 percent, with these taxpayers handing over 12 percent of their income to state and local government. The richest 1 percent, meanwhile, paid 6.5 percent of their income in state and local taxes.

I very much doubt that the Connecticut legislature doubled taxes on the wealthy, but if they had, then the state would be the kind of far-out left-wing socialist utopia where the rich are expected to pay about as much of their incomes as the poor to support schools, police and fire departments.