Frontrunner-of-the-moment Rick Perry is getting a lot of press for his performance at the recent Republican debate--especially because he's standing by his belief that Social Security is a "monstrous lie" and a Ponzi scheme, and that climate change is an untested theory advanced by corrupt, discredited scientists.

You can call such ideas a lot of things. "False" or "untrue," for example, would work. But a lot of reporters characterized Perry's performance in positive terms. In today's New York Times (9/9/11), Michael Shear writes that Perry

made clear in his first national appearance that he would campaign as an unabashed Southern conservative who is unafraid to speak bluntly, would double-down on controversial statements and planned to shrug off the concerns of the Republican establishment.

Shear later added that "Perry did not back down Wednesday night from his assertion that Social Security was a failure, even in the face of direct criticism by Mr. Romney."

"Unabashed," "unafraid," not backing down--these are all more or less positive descriptions.

Likewise, on NBC Nightly News (9/8/11), Andrea Mitchell said: "Perry proved he could throw a punch and take one. And he was unapologetic about attacking Social Security as a monstrous lie."

So he's not only a fearlessly blunt speaker, he's also an unapologetic punch-thrower. This is the kind of coverage the Perry campaign would probably pay for. Yes, there are pieces here and there that point out that, you know, Social Security isn't actually a massive scam. On the other hand, Washington Post liberal Ruth Marcus writes today (9/9/11): "On the substance, Perry’s point about Social Security-as-Ponzi scheme has some grounding in reality." She gets around to criticizing him, but that's a lot of ground to cede to a falsehood.

As Greg Marx notes at CJR,  the media designation of certain pieces as "factchecks" is strange because one might logically conclude that run-of-the-mill articles don't dwell on checking the facts of politicians (a conclusion that would largely be a correct one). He points to a CBS News piece on Perry and Social Security that quotes other Republicans disagreeing with his stance. Readers are apparently being asked to believe either Karl Rove or Rick Perry on the issue. That's a lot to ask of anyone.

The Washington Post today:

Diplomatic Efforts Unable to Derail Palestinians' UN Gambit

"Gambit" is the kind of word that seems intended to send a certain message--as if there some kind of sneaky maneuver at work here.  That's especially true when it is contrasted with "diplomatic efforts."

In this case, the paper is referring to efforts by superpowers (like the United States) to tell people with very little power (Palestinians) to pipe down.  Whatever you think of Palestinian efforts to elevate their  status at the United Nations, an alternate headline--"U.S. Gambits Unlikely to Derail Palestinians' Diplomatic Efforts"--is hard to imagine.

It seems like just yesterday that Michele Bachmann was in the "top tier," thanks to her narrow victory in the mostly meaningless Iowa straw poll. She had "momentum." Then came this week's debate and, well, things are looking different. As the Washington Post described the scene at the debate:

Meanwhile, any momentum that Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), who won the Iowa straw poll in August, may have had from that victory has been extinguished by Perry.

The debates have been a forum in which Bachmann has shone, but she was sidelined on Wednesday night.

She was not asked a question until 14 minutes into the debate, and during an exchange on healthcare, she shouted for a chance to speak--only to be told that it was Huntsman's turn.

This should serve as a reminder that "momentum" in electoral politics is basically just how much attention media decide to grant a given candidate. Then when the press decide to pay less attention to your candidacy, they can observe that they had no choice--you lost your "momentum."

As progressive criticism of the Obama administration has intensified,  the critics of the critics have stepped forward to defend the White House. Much of the case comes down to saying that Obama's lefty critics don't know how the game is played in Washington.

Jonathan Chait from the New Republic had a New York Times Magazine piece this weekend (9/4/11) taking issue with Obama critics like Glenn Greenwald, accusing them of "magical thinking" about the power of the presidency. As the argument goes, Congress can stop what the White House wants to do, so you can't blame Obama for not winning more progressive victories.

I am fairly certain that people like Greenwald or Paul Krugman know how Congress works. Their criticism of Obama is more substantive--that the policies he advocates aren't very good even before one factors in what Eric Cantor or John Boehner are going to say about them.

The next part of his critique was even less convincing. Chait wrote that Obama's liberal critics think he should have been bolder on the economy, but there's a problem:

It's worth recalling that several weeks before Obama proposed an $800 billion stimulus, House Democrats had floated a $500 billion stimulus. (Oddly, this never resulted in liberals portraying Nancy Pelosi as a congenitally timid right-wing enabler.) At the time, Obama’s $800 billion stimulus was seen by Congress, pundits and business leaders--that is to say, just about everybody who mattered--as mind-bogglingly large. News reports invariably described it as "huge," "massive" or other terms suggesting it was unrealistically large, even kind of pornographic. The favored cliché used to describe the reaction in Congress was "sticker shock."

If I'm understanding this correctly, Chait is saying that media coverage of the debate over the stimulus was terribly misleading. That seems true. But how does that have any bearing on what his critics are saying? As this Firedoglake post pointed out, plenty of nonentities like Dean Baker, James Galbraith and Mark Zandi argued at the time that the stimulus wasn't large enough. If Chait's point is that these economists "don't matter" in elite circles, he might have a point. But that's a very different critique than the one he's making--and one that actually makes a lot more sense than his other argument.

The New York Times has a story today (9/7/11) by Jeff Zeleny about how both sides are branding Obama:

The White House is in the midst of rebranding the president as a pragmatic problem solver prepared to set aside ideology to address a compelling need (see last week's concession on ozone regulations), a reasonable man in an era dominated by extreme views.

I'm not sure that qualifies as "rebranding"--I think that's been the Obama "brand" all along.

More worrisome is the notion of "pragmatism" here. It's not clear whether the White House offered the ozone rule as evidence of Obama's pragmatism, or if this is the Times' view. Either way, it doesn't really make sense--unless you believe that there's a "compelling need" for dirtier air, or that wanting fewer deaths from air pollution is an "extreme view." Or, come to think of it, you define cleaner air as a "problem" that is "solved" by loosening pollution rules.

The Obama White House made (yet another) move bound to disappoint progressive activists.  But good luck trying to get corporate media to explain the impact.

Here's how the September 3 New York Times piece by John Broder started off:

WASHINGTON — President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Business groups and Republicans in Congress had complained that meeting the new standard, which governs emissions of so-called ground-level ozone, would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So this new standard would lead to HUNDREDS of thousands of lost jobs? Wow. That's a powerful argument against it. Where does that figure come from? Is  it correct? The Times is of no help--"balance" requires that both sides get a hearing, no matter the details.

But a little history would be helpful. Similar claims were made during 1997 debates about provisions of the Clean Air Act; as this Center for American Progress report demonstrated, the massive job losses that industry warned about are difficult to spot.

Broder was back on the job-killing beat on September 5, writing (along with Motoko Rich) a piece with this lead:

When Dick Cheney appeared on the Today show, at the conclusion of the interview a camera that shows the crowd outside the studio picked up this image:

That sign probably represented the harshest take on Cheney's record that TV viewers saw during the PR campaign for his book.

Unsurprisingly, it caught someone's attention over at Fox News, and on Sunday host Chris Wallace decided to use it in a question about liberal media bias. That's not surprising. Cheney's response, though, is worth a look:

WALLACE: What do you make of that? I mean, I somehow doubt that if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were speaking, they would have taken the shot and then suddenly have person with a sign would have been putting their pictures in.  Simply, do you think there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media?

CHENEY: I think there probably is. But I don't spend time worrying it. I think those of us right-thinking conservatives find that there are a lot of outlets out there now in the media, on the Internet, that give us ample opportunity for our points of view to get across and to be heard.

You hear this every so often from powerful conservatives like William Kristol and Pat Buchanan. I guess it's hard for people who spend their lives pontificating on national television to faithfully recite their team's talking points about a media system that is apparently allergic to their point of view.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (9/5/11) takes the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11 to say that he's sorry:

I went home on September 11 with my shoes dusted with the detritus of the World Trade Center. I felt a hate that was entirely new to me. Soon after, the anthrax attacks began, and I was ready for war--against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for sure, but against Saddam Hussein as well. I was wrong, and for that I blame myself, but I blame us all for going along with it and then rewarding incompetence with another term.

Wait--we all did what now?

Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this--he was writing columns attacking those who weren't "going along with it." As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, "How did this fool get on Meet the Press?"

Documents discovered in Libya suggest a close relationship between the Libyan government and the CIA. The New York Times described it this way on September 3:

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya's former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service -- most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture.

And then today (9/6/11) the Times put it this way:

The cooperation appeared to be far greater with the American intelligence agency, which sent terrorism suspects to Libya for questioning at least eight times, despite the country's reputation for torture. Britain sent at least one suspect, according to the documents.

As  Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter (in fewer characters), the whole point of rendition was to send prisoners to countries the United States knew would treat them a certain way. It wasn't a series of accidents. In other words, the CIA used Libya not despite its reputation for torture, but because of it.

(UPDATE: Today's Times includes a story about the WikiLeaks Iraq cable, under the somewhat strange headline "Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians." Still very little in the rest of the press-- nothing on television, according to a search of the Nexis database).

One of the main media tropes regarding WikiLeaks' release of State Department cables last year was that there was either nothing new to be learned, or that private conversations they revealed were remarkably consistent with what U.S. officials were saying publicly. That was totally misleading, but for many pundits the story seemed to end there.

Now comes the release of thousands more documents. If you've been reading the New York Times, you know these cables exist. But you don't know much more than that. On August 29, the Times focused on a dispute over whether some names in the cable weren't properly redacted to protect these individuals--"a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials." WikiLeaks disagrees.

In today's edition of the Times (9/1/11), reporter Scott Shane gives a few examples of what's actually in the cables: criticism of former Philippines President Corazon Aquino, something about the Australian air safety system, human trafficking in Botswana.  The rest of the article discusses the controversies over redactions, and whether or not someone has gained access to the entire trove of cables.

Shane adds: "News organizations in dozens of countries are panning for nuggets in the latest and largest dump of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks."

One "nugget" the Times seems to have trouble finding: A cable that details how U.S. forces executed 11 civilians in a night raid in Iraq in 2006. The victims appear to have been handcuffed. U.S. forces apparently destroyed the evidence--the house--in an airstrike.

McClatchy has a piece by Matthew Schofield (8/31/11) summarizing the matter ( "WikiLeaks: Iraqi Children in U.S. Raid Shot in Head, UN Says"). He reports:

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a five-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Schofield adds:

At the time, American military officials in Iraq said the accounts of townspeople who witnessed the events were highly unlikely to be true, and they later said the incident didn't warrant further investigation. Military officials also refused to reveal which units might have been involved in the incident.

The Daily Mirror (9/1/11) also has a piece today on this incident ("WikiLeaks Reveals Atrocities by U.S. forces"). John Glaser at Antiwar.com wrote a piece on August 29 detailing the contents of the cable--the first account that I can find, so he deserves credit for that.

But at this point, major U.S. papers like the New York Times are still searching for this nugget.

Recently on Fox Business (8/30/11; cite by Think Progress, 8/31/11), host Eric Bolling tried to discredit the Center for American Progress's excellent new report on Islamophobia with this colossal falsehood:

I need to point this out--I'm reading directly from this report: "The Obama-allied Center for American Progress has released a report that blames Islamophobia in America on a small group of Jews and Israel supporters in America, whose views are being backed by millions of dollars."

You would have to be an idiot to read those words and not realize that they weren't CAP's. In fact, Bolling was quoting from a column on the far-right American Thinker website, attacking CAP and its report.

But the damage was done: The rest of the segment--Bolling's questions and his guests' answers--all swirled around the subject of CAP's anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing. "For the Center of American Progress to say there is a grand conspiracy undermines their credibility and is laughable," said lobbyist David Rehr, comparing CAP to "the left John Birch Society" (not to be confused with the original JBS, which was prominently featured on Glenn Beck's now defunct Fox News show).