Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times today (11/18/11) that the failure of the Congressional supercommittee might be a good thing, and that public understanding of what's really happening is hampered by a familiar media problem.

He also makes a pretty safe bet about what coverage is going to look like if they fail to reach a deal:

So the supercommittee brought together legislators who disagree completely both about how the world works and about the proper role of government. Why did anyone think this would work?

Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.

Indeed.

And he adds for good measure:

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to "centrist" pundits who won't admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: "Why won't the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?" Mr. Obama: "I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes." Pundit: "Why won't the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?"

Psst--he's talking about this guy:

One more thing about free speech hero Michael Bloomberg's shutdown of Occupy Wall Street.

During the early morning raid on the Occupy Wall Street camp journalists were blocked from covering much of what was happening. Josh Stearns from Free Press has a rundown--as he points out, "By dawn, 10 journalists, including reporters from NPR, the Associated Press and the New York Daily News, had been arrested."

There was a good local TV news segment about the media clampdown, courtesy of the New York NBC affiliate. It's rare to see an image like this on your TV screen (click the image to watch the report):

The general line in corporate media coverage of the so-called "Supercommittee" tasked with coming up with a long-term budget plan is that both sides aren't willing to budge: Republicans won't agree to raise taxes, and Democrats want to protect "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare.

While some might find the idea of Democrats standing up for Social Security and Medicare, it's not really true--Democrats have offered to make such cuts if there are some tax increases to go along with them. This insistence that a compromise involve a compromise has been depicted, oddly enough, as a refusal to compromise.

But things got slightly more confusing when it was reported that the Republicans had broken their anti-tax stance, and were putting a $300 billion revenue increase on the table. In the Washington Post, Lori Montgomery's piece led with this:

Congressional Republicans have for the first time retreated from their hardline stance against new taxes, offering to raise federal tax collections by nearly $300 billion over the next decade as part of a plan to tame the national debt.

That is big news. In the New York Times (11/9/11):

Republicans, long opposed to tax increases, said Tuesday that they might allow $250 billion to $300 billion of additional tax revenue as part of a deal to shave $1.2 trillion from federal deficits over the next 10 years.

One slight problem: The GOP tax increase is, it turns out, a massive tax cut for wealthy Americans. As Steve Benen noticed (Political Animal, 11/9/11):

Way down in the same article, in the 16th paragraph, the piece gets around to mentioning that Republican want to trade nearly $300 billion in new revenue for "permanently extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts past their 2012 expiration date, a move that would increase deficits by about $4 trillion over the next decade."

That's the kind of detail that more or less debunks the article’s headline and lede. Think about it: as part of a debt-reduction deal, Republicans want to increase tax revenue by less than $300 billion and cut tax revenue by roughly $4 trillion.

This bit of trickery is still being misreported--in today's Post, for instance:

Some conservatives in the Republican House majority said they could not support the latest GOP offer to raise taxes by as much as $300 billion over the next decade as part of a broader deal to cut spending. The offer marked the first time Republicans other than Boehner have proposed raising taxes above current levels.

Readers had to keep reading several paragraphs to learn that this tax increase is actually part of a massive tax cut--bringing the top rate down to 28 percent.

Perhaps the most bizarre exchange on this topic came on Sunday's Meet the Press, where NBC host David Gregory insisted that his own reporting should be trusted over the word of Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida:

GREGORY: They did agree for tax increases that Democrats have not accepted this week. But I want to ask you about, specifically, about the debt.

SCHULTZ: Well, no, no, no.... Come on, David, that was not a serious proposal. What they proposed was, you know, reducing the number of itemized deductions in exchange for a passage, an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, which actually would've resulted in less revenue and brought the overall top tax rate down to 28 percent. So that was not a serious proposal. We need a serious proposal that balances the revenue the super committee generates and the cuts.

GREGORY: All right. Well, there was new revenue that was proposed, but I realize that's still a subject of debate. But let me, let me focus...

SCHULTZ: That would result in less revenue overall.

GREGORY: Let me--well, again, that's in dispute, according to my reporting on that.

It would be of great value to the country--and to the GOP--if Gregory could explain what his investigation turned up.

All right, which newspaper posed this question about the Occupy protests today:

Is this an occupation or an infestation?

Has to be the New York Post, right? Nope--they wouldn't include a question mark.

That's the Washington Post, which went on to report that "recent news updates from Occupy protests read like a crime blotter."

And that Post's Eli Saslow and Colum Lynch explain that they're not the only ones who feel this way:

In the wake of so much controversy, the Occupy movement--which began as a populist uprising to represent all but the wealthiest 1 percent--has begun to lose some of its mainstream support. A Washington Post poll early this month showed that only 18 percent of responders "strongly supported" the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If you want to show a decline in support for the movement--or anything else--then you'd have to show that this number was down from a previous poll. But the Post doesn't appear to have ever asked a question before about whether people "strongly support" Occupy Wall Street. The Post's poll actually finds that 44 percent of Americans support Occupy Wall Street (when you combine those who  "strongly support" with "somewhat support" the movement).  One poll (not conducted by the Post) showed 36 percent support a few weeks ago--which was an increase from an earlier survey. And an AP poll conducted about a month ago registered 37 support.

Of course, news coverage that talks about the movement as a criminal "infestation" might change some minds.

The New York Times, writing about Bloomberg's crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, said this:

For the mayor, a champion of the First Amendment....

I am not sure what is required to deserve the title of "champion," but was it a different Michael Bloomberg who was mayor during the 2004 Republican convention, which saw mass arrests, preventive detention and surveillance/infiltration of protest groups?

What's next--Bloomberg the Fourth Amendment champion?

Joby Warrick's Washington Post article (11/14/11) on the new International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran goes wrong from the first sentence:

When the Cold War abruptly ended in 1991, Vyacheslav Danilenko was a Soviet weapons scientist in need of a new line of work.

Well, no. Danilenko is allegedly a nuclear weapons scientist--but neither the IAEA or Warrick present any actual evidence that he was any such thing.

Rather, the documents disclosed so far suggest that Danilenko is what he says he is: an expert on the use of explosions to make tiny, industrial-grade diamonds known as nanodiamonds. His area of specialization goes back half a century, to the early 1960s, when the scientist was in his mid-20s (Inter Press Service, 11/9/11).

Warrick's story is a step forward from his earlier article (11/7/11) on the IAEA report, which refers to Danilenko as a "former Soviet nuclear scientist" without mentioning the field he's actually been publishing in for decades at all. Still, Warrick works hard to give the impression that the scientist's career-long interest in nanodiamonds is some kind of fly-by-night cover story:

Danilenko struggled to become a businessman, traveling through Europe and even to the United States to promote an idea for using explosives to create synthetic diamonds.... The scientist's synthetic-diamonds business provided a plausible explanation for his extensive contacts with senior Iranian scientists over half a decade.... Danilenko's work in Iran initially centered on his diamond-making scheme. But over the course of a six-year relationship, UN investigators later concluded, he provided expertise that would help Iran achieve something of far greater value.

OK--so what's the evidence that Danilenko was helping the Iranians make bombs, not diamonds?

The IAEA's report cites "strong indications" that the unnamed "foreign expert" [apparently Danilenko] assisted Iran in developing a high-precision detonator as well as a sophisticated instrument for analyzing the shape of the explosive pulse.

Right--because creating industrial diamonds requires high-precision detonation, which you would presumably want to monitor and analyze. The evidence that this is actually a cover for nuclear weapons research boils down to a lack of proof that it is not a cover for nuclear weapons research. Or as weapons analyst David Albright puts it--who is a major source for the Post story, both directly and through his Institute for Science and International Security think tank--"It remains for Danilenko to explain his assistance to Iran."

There's such a degree of spin in the Post's case for Iranian nuclear research that it really makes you want to check to be sure your wallet is still in your pocket. After relaying Danilenko's assertions that he had nothing to do with a nuclear program, Warrick adds, "In private conversations, however, the scientist allowed that he 'could not exclude that his information was used for other purposes,' the ISIS report said." Of course, no scientist can guarantee that their information was not repurposed, so the admission has zero evidentiary value--but it does function as an effective tension-raiser, like mood music in a horror movie.

The Post story concludes: "'Synthetic diamond production is unlikely to have been a priority' for Iran, ISIS said. 'Although it has obvious value as a cover story.'" Actually, Iran has a serious, long-standing nanotechnology program (Moon of Alabama, 11/7/11)--and one of the chief uses for nanodiamonds is in oil drilling, an activity that provides the bulk of Iran's exports earnings, so it's not actually all that remarkable that the country would be interested in producing them.

Of course, the Post should be skeptical of Iranian claims--but where is the same skepticism of assertions that an official enemy state is secretly researching weapons of mass destruction--particularly given the very recent history of such claims being manufactured and distorted for political ends? It's worth recalling that Albright, the Post's main witness for the idea that Danilenko is not what he says he is, was taken in by the last major WMD propaganda campaign, telling CNN (10/5/02; Extra!, 7-8/03): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean, these are the big questions."

We need the news media to be asking bigger questions this time around about the Iranian nuclear allegations.

The New York Times (11/13/11) had a Sunday Style section profile of ABC Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz that started off on a bad note--only to get much worse.

First the bad:

If there has been a glamour beat in television news in recent years, it may well be war correspondent. Starting with the original "Scud Stud," Arthur Kent of NBC in the 1991 gulf war, conflict reporters, including the current slate of Richard Engel (NBC), Lara Logan (CBS) and Ms. Raddatz's ABC colleague Alexander Marquardt, have become news media celebrities not just for acting fearless but for looking fabulous.

You might think the fact that Lara Logan was sexually assaulted while reporting from Egypt--which the Times piece mentions toward the end--would make Times reporter Jennifer Conlin think twice about referring to war coverage as a "glamour beat." But then you probably wouldn't have introduced the subject of your profile this way:

Glamour is probably not an adjective at the forefront of Ms. Raddatz's viewers' minds. At 58, she is older than most of her on-air competitors, and though she looks great--petite, blond and remarkably put together

I suppose a Style profile is the place one should expect a reporter to point out that a female TV reporter is "put together" and yet still not totally glamorous.

Then the piece gets much worse. Conlin writes:

Her approach to the beat is to cover war in its entirety, not just not on the battlefield.

What does that mean? The piece says Raddatz goes to warzones, which is part of the job. What they seem to be saying is that she knows to keep American troops first: "Her network of sources also includes numerous families at bases back home." Again, it's hard to see how that would all that remarkable for a network correspondent.

The truth is that Raddatz is a faithful Pentagon correspondent who rarely strays from the preferred storyline. Drone strikes in Afghanistan? Sure, they kill innocents, but there's no other way, according to Raddatz:

They simply have to carry out air strikes over there. It's a very rapid response. It's real-time intelligence. It's certainly flawed at some points.

But I've been on these missions. I've been on a combat mission in a fighter jet. I've seen all the very, very careful steps they take. They go through what's called the nine line. In fact, the mission I went on, some French soldiers were calling for them to bomb and the pilot and the weapons officer said, "We can't bomb, we think there's a school, we think there might be people in there."

Praising American military leaders? Raddatz knows how to do that too:

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

The point the Times drives home is that Raddatz is close to her U.S. sources-- she is "a reporter who shows the human side of war," a point illustrated by the fact that one general like her work. Raddatz "calls us and invites us over for dinner....  She knows both the soldier's side and the military family’s side."

The "human side," meaning the humans from her own country. As Raddatz says:

"I know how they notify families of the dead," she said. "No matter how you feel about this war or how we got into it, you have to care about our servicemen. I can’t pretend to be objective when it comes to service or sacrifice."

You read all of that, and yet the Times comes up with this idea in the very next sentence:

Despite her worldview, Ms. Raddatz is very much a denizen of the Beltway culture, having been married to three well-known Washington figures. Tom Gjelten, her husband of the past 15 years, is a correspondent for National Public Radio; Julius Genachowski, her second husband, was a law school classmate of President Obama and is now chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Her first marriage was to Ben Bradlee Jr., son of the legendary Washington Post editor--a relationship that propelled her into a gossip column dust-up earlier this year.

What exactly in her "worldview" would make her a Beltway outsider? All evidence would seem to point the other way.

The New York Times reports that Chelsea Clinton will be a full time special correspondent for NBC News, starting more or less immediately. Salon's Glenn Greenwald connected this news to the media careers of Meghan McCain (MSNBC), Luke Russert (NBC) and Jenna Bush Hager (NBC), and reached this conclusion about the state of our meritocracy:

We all owe our gratitude to NBC News for single-handedly correcting the shameful, long-standing exclusion from our media discourse of the views of young, journalistically accomplished heirs and heiresses to political power and great fortune; it is long overdue that former NYT executive editor Bill Keller, son of the CEO and chairman of Chevron, be joined by the next generation.

The only other thing to add is that the Times' account included this anonymous source, who offered the kind of remarkable insight one expects from someone who is granted anonymity to speak the truth:

One person close to Ms. Clinton said she had been quietly raising her profile for some time, though the public had not been completely aware of it. That person, who asked not to be identified because of a reluctance to speak for her, said Ms. Clinton had been more active in causes backed by her family’s William J. Clinton Foundation.

The Michele Bachmann presidential campaign--formerly treated as atop-tier juggernaut by Beltway media--has been floundering for weeks. Which makes right now as good a time as any for them to grab some headlines by shouting about liberal media bias.

The Bachmann campaign was furious about email correspondence concerning a possible Bachmann appearance on a CBS Web show after the Saturday night debate.  The network's political director, John Dickerson, was lukewarm on the idea, mentioning that Bachmann's poll numbers are quite low and that she wasn't likely to be much of a factor in the debate.  Even though Dickerson is correct, these are generally not good reasons to exclude candidates, as FAIR has argued over the years.

The value to the Bachmann campaign was pretty clear, as the New York Times reported today:

"Last night, as Michele prepared her plans to debate on CBS, we received concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows--the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message," Keith Nahigian, Mrs. Bachmann's campaign manager, wrote in an e-mail to supporters.

Back in reality, Bachmann's message was still being suppressed on Sunday morning--as she appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to talk about her candidacy.

The truth is that the corporate media have been remarkably generous, granting Bachmann an extraordinary amount of coverage. And the CBS Sunday morning show Face the Nation, as FAIR noted here, has produced factcheck articles on its website after Bachmann has made appearances on the show--without ever telling its much larger viewing audience about her wildly inaccurate claims.

In case you missed it, Bachmann's Meet the Press appearance included, among other things, a call to make Iraq compensate the families of American servicemembers killed in the invasion of that country. A few million dollars would suffice.

Just because he wears cowboy boots and drops his G's doesn't mean he's a dummy. Perry may be a small-town boy who went to an ag school (Texas A&M University), but he's an extremely cagey and strategic politician who has been among the state's most successful governors at getting what he wants. Put another way: Even if he's not book smart by University of Chicago standards, he's plenty street smart - and street smart is still smart. The better lens through which to regard Perry is inside vs. outside, establishment vs. anti-establishment, elitist vs. jus' folks. Don't make the mistake of thinking that jus' folks is jus' dumb.

--Evan Smith ("5 Myths About Rick Perry," Washington Post, 8/21/11)

Whatever his brain power is, he was elected three times governor of Texas. He is now a first-tier presidential contender. He's smart enough to be President of the United States. He's smart enough to be elected, I think. At this point, I think we can stipulate that. So whatever his book smarts are, I think that's irrelevant for this discussion. He has clearly met the bar in Texas several times. The voters in Texas have said three times he's smart enough to be governor, and he's had a record that he's now running on.

--ABC World News senior Washington editor Rick Klein (Fox News' On the Record, 8/29/11)

Liberals often say Republicans are stupid, but they really believe it with regard to Gov. Perry. For liberals, credentials and holding fashionable opinions are more important markers of intelligence than knowledge or accomplishment.... Gov. Perry scorns their opinions, and he went to Texas A&M, not Harvard or Yale. So when a new book said his is "the brainiest political operation in America," liberals were shocked.
--Jack Kelly ("Kicking Rick: Mainstream Media and Democrats Fear the Texas Governor, So They Smear Him," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/4/11)

What those dummies Bush and Perry have in common, other than having been Texas governors, pilots and cheerleaders (what is it with Texas?), is that they're not stupid at all.... They're smart enough to know that most people in this country didn't go to Ivy League colleges -- or any college for that matter.... Until someone emerges to remind Americans of who they are in a way that neither insults their intelligence nor condescends to their less-fortunate circumstances, smart money goes to the "stupid" politicians, who are dumb as foxes and happy as clams when their opponents misunderestimate them.
--Kathleen Parker ("Not So Dumb After All," Washington Post, 9/18/11)

I will tell you: It's three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: Commerce, Education and the--what's the third one there? Let's see.... OK. So Commerce, Education and the-- ... The third agency of government I would--I would do away with the Education, the ... Commerce and--let's see--I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops.

--Rick Perry (Republican presidential debate, 11/9/11)

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street.

Still, he sees a common thread:

The world's two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both countries are witnessing grassroots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal--a system requiring bribes at every level of governance to get anything done. And Americans are protesting what is legal--a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress, and both political parties, and thereby resist curbs on risk-taking.

Hear, hear! Wall Street has bought the political process. But what can save us? A magical centrist internet-based third-party presidential candidate, that's who!

What has brought millions of Indians into the streets to support the India Against Corruption movement and what seems to have triggered not only the Occupy Wall Street movement but also initiatives like AmericansElect.org--a centrist group planning to use the Internet to nominate an independent presidential candidate--is a sense that both countries have democratically elected governments that are so beholden to special interests that they can no longer deliver reform. Therefore, they both need shock therapy from outside.

Huh?

Americans Elect is the brainchild of a group of hedge-fund investors--or, as a columnist named Tom Friedman once reported, it is "financed with some serious hedge-fund money."

These are the people who are going to deliver a outsider shock to the system that will curb the influence of the financial services industry. Wall Street will save us from Wall Street?

Bonus irony: Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is the chief strategist for Americans Elect--the same Doug Schoen who was very recently proclaiming that Democrats should distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As Jedd Legum pointed out, Schoen misrepresented that polling in a column for (where else?) the Wall Street Journal.

When the International Atomic Energy Agency is about to release a report on an official enemy like Iran, you can be fairly confident that contents of the report--or what people believe should be in it--will be leaked to elite newspapers by anonymous sources in or near the IAEA, who will tend to make more alarming charges than the agency will eventually make in public.

That started happening this weekend. At the Washington Post, Joby Warrick had a piece on Monday headlined, "Iran Close to Nuclear Capability, IAEA Says." The most telling indication of what was going on was right in the lead:

Intelligence provided to UN nuclear officials shows that Iran's government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles, according to Western diplomats and nuclear experts briefed on the findings.

Read that closely and you can see that the key allegation is not that the IAEA will necessarily report any such thing, but that "intelligence" has been directed their way that makes such allegations. The United States and other countries have been lobbying the IAEA for years to take a harder line on Iran's nuclear program--a fact that renders the New York Times' headline, "U.S. Hangs Back as Inspectors Prepare Report on Iran’s Nuclear Program," rather odd. The Times, a bit like the Post, reports--via the usual leaks--that the IAEA will come down fairly hard:

An imminent report by United Nations weapons inspectors includes the strongest evidence yet that Iran has worked in recent years on a kind of sophisticated explosives technology that is primarily used to trigger a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials who have been briefed on the intelligence.

That's what the big papers are saying--but there are some good, critical pieces worth reading in order to get a good handle on this story.  Bob Dreyfuss at the Nation writes that the Iraq lesson should be foremost in people's minds:

In this case, the Post reports, the IAEA has "acquired satellite photos of a bus-size steel container" used to field test "the kinds of high-precision conventional explosives used to trigger a nuclear chain-reaction." The IAEA may be right, but those photographs ought to raise hackles among experts who were burned once, and badly, over Iraq's nonexistent WMD program.

Dreyfuss adds that much of the case seems built around a "former Soviet nuclear scientist" allegedly advising Iran--but that the advice seems to have been happening in the mid-1990s. And this Moon of Alabama blog makes the case that the scientist in question is an expert on nanodiamonds and detonation--which would require the kinds of facilities that are allegedly being flagged as nuclear weapons-related.

And on a more journalistic level, see how Antiwar.com writes about anonymous sources:

According to Western diplomats who refused to reveal their identity, the evidence will include satellite images of what of is supposedly a large steel container used for high-explosives tests related to nuclear arms as well as intelligence that Iran made computer models of a nuclear warhead.

FAIR raised the point two years ago that Iran nuclear claims can look a lot like Iraq WMD claims-- and the media should exercise the skepticism that was missing in 2002 and 2003. It's hard to say they've learned the lesson.

Opponents of the Keystone tar sands pipeline project--10,000 of them, by some reports--surrounded the White House on Sunday to call on Barack Obama to reject the deal. That generated a short Metro section story in the Washington Post on Monday.

More revealing than that was the Post's preview story in Sunday's paper, which presented the issue as one where protesters are "noise" and proponents talk about facts. Here's how Juliet Eilperin's story begins:

Canadian ambassador Gary Doer has a straightforward analysis of whether TransCanada will win the Obama administration’s approval to build and operate an enormous pipeline to transport oil from Alberta to the Texas coast.

"If it's made on merit, we're confident," Doer said in an interview. "If it's made on noise, it's unpredictable."

Foes of the project--which has become a test of how President Obama balances environmental considerations against economic and energy supply concerns--will try to turn up the noise Sunday with a rally around the White House. Unemployed workers who support the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline are planning to counter with a blitz of media interviews over the weekend.

The article quotes six different sources from the company trying to build the pipeline, consultants working for the company and U.S. and Canadian government officials. Climate activist Bill McKibben is the lone environmentalist voice quoted, and in the final paragraph.

If the protests are creating "noise," the Post doesn't exactly seem eager to hear it.

UPDATE: Eilperin is back on the Keystone case today, with similar results:

Pipeline route may get another look from U.S.

Opposition mounts to plan for shipping Canada oil sands crude

Eilperin reports that opposition is coming from "environmentalists and an eclectic group of ranchers, farmers and other opponents." So who's quoted in the article? A State Department official, the president of the American Petroleum Institute and the spokesman for TransCanada (the company wanting to build the pipeline  come first. And the final paragraph is reserved for someone from the National Wildlife Federation. That's in a piece that is, judging by the subhead, about the mounting opposition to the pipeline.

ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/6/11) kicked the show off with a pretty funny joke:

Clash of the titans in Texas last night, as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich met for the first of a series of one-on-one Lincoln/Douglas-style debates.

Less funny was the show's very imbalanced roundtable discussion:

So let's bring in our roundtable: George Will, the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, former George W. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, and historian and Newsweek columnist Niall Ferguson, author of the new book Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Three conservatives and the left-liberal Huffington.

But if anything, ABC's panel was teetering leftward.  On NBC's Meet the Press:

Finally, our roundtable will discuss if the state of the Republican race in flux now that the front-runner is engulfed in controversy. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kim Strassel, author of the new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero and host of MSNBC's Hardball Chris Matthews, and Politico senior political writer Maggie Haberman give their views.

Two conservatives, a Beltway reporter and Matthews, who described himself recently as a George W. Bush-voting pragmatist.

And on CBS's Face the Nation:

The guests are Ed Gillespie, former Republican National Committee Chair; Ed Rollins, former Bachmann campaign manager; Ken Blackwell, Perry supporter, Liz Cheney, Republican consultant and John Dickerson, CBS news political analyst.

So four conservatives and a reporter.

The November 1 broadcast of ABC World News couldn't have been any clearer about what's happening in Greece: Their pampered, early-retiring workforce is stealing from Americans.

Anchor Diane Sawyer explained:

If you were watching your stocks today, you saw a nosedive. The Dow down nearly 300 points, so, what changed?  Well, blame it on the country of Greece, long criticized for being undisciplined, and now threatening American retirements.

OK, since we probably were all "watching our stocks" on Tuesday--like any other day--why is Greece doing this to us?

ABC correspondent Dan Harris explains how this all works by introducing us to 2 workers. The Greek--Yannis--is a 52-year-old bank teller, already retired for two years (naturally). The other is a 60-year-old Florida resident--Emma--who is  "still having to work around the clock and doesn't have enough savings to retire."

How representative are those workers? While Yannis resembles the Greek worker most familiar in the U.S. media, it's not clear that he's at all typical. This chart, for instance, shows the Greek retirement age isn't all that different from the rest of Europe.

Harris explains that Greeks live it up:

And check this out. While our maximum Social Security payment is around $28,000 a year, over in Greece, where Yannis lives, it's 20 grand more, $48,000 a year.

It's hard to figure out exactly what is being compared here, or where the figures come from. But you get the idea. Harris goes on to say that Greece "is a country of generous benefits, of pools and Porsches," with American workers footing the bill:

And so here is how Emma is now paying for Yannis.

In order to pay for all the retirement packages for people like Yannis, the Greek government borrowed big time from banks all over Europe. Now, Greece says it can't pay. So, those banks are facing huge losses and that could push Europe into a depression. Since America does so much business with Europe, we would be pulled down, too, and that, of course, would hurt Emma's savings.

I'm confused. Emma doesn't have much in the way of savings; even still, it's hard to fathom how that money is at risk. America might get "pulled down" and that would...affect her Social Security checks? There's no explanation for how that could possibly be true. But there is a graphic:

Oh. Now it makes sense, right? You can see the dollars floating out of the U.S. bank right into Europe.

You seem to hear more about Greek retirees than Greek workers, which makes stories like this fuel a sense of outrage at what Harris calls Greek's "fat pensions."

But occasionally another message breaks through, like in this USA Today piece (5/10/10):

ATHENS -- A hard life is about to get harder for Manolis Fylaktidis.

Greece's cash-strapped government is cutting the schoolteacher's $27,300 salary by about $5,300 as part of a dramatic austerity move the prime minister says is needed to pay the country's ballooning debt. "It is difficult now.... We have to change our life because life is too expensive," Fylaktidis says.

Even as the 44-year-old teacher's salary falls, the government is raising the value-added tax on most purchases for the second time in as many months, to 23 percent, and increasing electricity and water charges.

We might live in a very different world if workers in one country saw what they have in common with workers in another country, instead of being made to feel angry about supposedly cushy retirements.