Alarmist corporate media coverage of the "threat" from Iran is everywhere, thanks to a Senate appearance yesterday by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Clapper said very little in his remarks that would justify the propagandistic coverage we're seeing.  His main point was that Iran could launch attacks if it felt threatened. It is hard to see how this is particularly surprising. Clapper pointed to the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. as evidence that Iran seems more eager to assert itself, perhaps even inside the United States. But there were many people who raised serious questions about that rather implausible scenario (which involved hiring a Mexican drug gang to carry out the assassination).

As the Wall Street Journal reported (one of the few corporate outlets I saw pushing back against the official alarmism):

There is still widespread doubt that an alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador was authorized at the highest levels in Tehran, said Karim Sadjadpour, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"If that's the only data point, I think it's a stretch to conclude that the regime is now looking to commit acts of terror on U.S. soil," he said.

That kind of caution was in short supply on the network newscasts. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (1/31/12) announced:

Iran's threat. Not just the nuclear program. Tonight, U.S. intelligence warns Iran may be prepared to strike on American soil.

Williams called Clapper's testimony  a "chilling new assessment about the scope of the threat from Iran." As correspondent Andrea Mitchell explained,  "Experts warn that the U.S. is even more vulnerable than Israel if Iran retaliates or launches a pre-emptive bomb plot.... Soft U.S. targets like embassies throughout the Persian Gulf, and 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan, next door to Iran."

It wasn't until the end of Mitchell's report that any notes of caution were sounded:

Still, intelligence officials told the Senate today they don't think Iran has taken the final step, deciding to build a bomb. But Israel does think Iran has crossed that red line, and U.S. officials say if attacked, Iran would not hesitate to retaliate against both Israel and the U.S.

So Iran is a substantial threat, though then again it might not even be developing the weapons the U.S. and Israel claim are in the works. And really, the "threat" seems mostly that Iran might be ready to respond to an attack on its country--something virtually any country in the world would do.

But for sheer propaganda value, ABC World News' January 31 broadcast would be tough to top.

First, start with alarming graphic:

Then Pentagon correspondent Martha Raddatz announced, "The saber rattling from Iran has been constant."

Match that with threatening B-roll footage from the enemy country. Weapons  on display at a military parade, for instance:

Iran "may be more ready than ever to launch terror attacks in the United States," Raddatz explained. Cue footage of apparently menacing soldiers:

Don't forget to show the enemy county's leader (or, rather, a close approximation) meeting with other Official Enemies. Like this:

And why not one more, while reminding viewers that such figures "have little love for the U.S.":

It's important to remember, amidst all this hoopla, that it is U.S. military officials and the president who have regularly threatened that "no options" are "off the table" in dealing with Iran. That is code for using nuclear weapons--and Barack Obama's latest repetition of that apocalyptic threat got a standing ovation from Congress.

It is hard to argue honestly that the real escalation  is coming from the Iranian side. But that's what propaganda is for.

Barack Obama did something yesterday that government leaders tend not to do: He talked about the CIA drone war in Pakistan.

This admission--which, it should be pointed out, happened in a Google-sponsored Q & A with the public, not a session with reporters--made it into the papers. The New York Times (1/31/12) flagged civilian deaths as the most newsworthy aspect, headlining a report by Mark Lander "Civilian Deaths Due to Drones Are Not Many, Obama Says." Lander writes:

Mr. Obama, in an unusually candid public discussion of the Central Intelligence Agency's covert program, said the drone strikes had not inflicted huge civilian casualties. "We are very careful in terms of how it's been applied," he said. "It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash."

It would have been helpful for the Times to point out that there are other sources who might comment on civilian casualties from drone strikes. The Times addressed this topic last year, challenging the CIA's absurd claims that there were no civilian deaths at all.  The British Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted  (8/10/11) that between 391 and almost 800 civilians have reportedly been killed since the drone program began in 2004, including 168 children.

The Times offers a curious explanation for the government's refusal to speak openly about their program:

The CIA's drone program, unlike the use of armed unmanned aircraft by the military in Afghanistan and previously in Iraq, is a covert program, traditionally one of the government's most carefully-guarded secrets. But because of intense public interest--the explosions cannot be hidden entirely--American officials have been willing to discuss the program on condition of anonymity.

Granting anonymity to official sources  because of "intense public interest" in a story is a little puzzling.

The Wall Street Journal also weighed in (1/31/12), pointing out that the "U.S. says roughly 60 civilians have been killed there. Pakistani officials and some human-rights group say the number of civilian dead is far higher."

The Journal adds that some think secrecy is bad PR:

Proponents of more disclosure inside the administration and the military argue U.S. secrecy has fueled charges in Pakistan that the drone strikes frequently kill civilians. They say releasing at least some details about the operations will help deflect criticism.

Or maybe the drones do actually kill innocents, and it's better not to acknowledge this fact.

The country is on the brink of bankruptcy, Fox host Bill O'Reilly warned last night--all because Barack Obama is spending too much money. Drastic cuts are required, but "the far-left loons want to spend more."

And he's got the number to prove it:

In 2007, during the Bush administration, federal deficit spending was $161 billion, despite the Iraq and Afghan wars. Four years later under President Obama, the deficit spending is $1.3 trillion, eight times as much.

To be fair, the economy collapsed on Bush's watch, and both Republicans and Democrats committed almost a trillion dollars to prop up the economy. As we all know, the stimulus spending did not work very well.

But the Obama administration has not cut back. Today the feds are spending $9.8 billion every day. That breaks down to $410 million per hour. Tax revenue has actually gone up. It's 21 percent higher this year than last, but there's no way Americans can bring down the federal debt with their tax dollars. The spending is just too massive.

It would be surprising to find out that government tax receipts increased 21 percent. They didn't. O'Reilly is misreading the Wall Street Journal editorial where he got these number, which says that "federal receipts grew by 6.5 percent in fiscal 2011, including a 21.6 percent gain in individual income tax revenues."

Actually, the whole piece is unhelpful to his argument, since it argues that the rise in spending has actually been pretty modest over Obama's term;  it actually fell slightly from fiscal year 2009 to 2010. And the current deficit as a share of GDP--which is a better way to measure the deficit anyway--has dropped over the past two years.

And it's not clear why O'Reilly would choose the 2007 fiscal year to compare Bush's record to Obama's--unless the point is to make Obama look worse. The 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

O'Reilly says that he "is playing Paul Revere" here.  More like Chicken Little.

The speculation about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry will jump into the Republican presidential race boils down to one word: Jobs. Perry's state has been generating jobs at an impressive rate--which Perry likes to think is due to low taxes and lax regulations. Some of the coverage points to important caveats--the booming oil economy, for instance, and rapid population growth both make Texas fairly unrepresentative.

Today the Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece by Ana Campoy and Sara Murray  about the Texas miracle. The papers shows that many of these jobs are in the public sector; a million total new jobs over the past decade, but roughly "300,000 of the new Texas jobs were in government."

What's more, this graph accompanying the piece shows the rate of private sector job creation declining since 2008, while the rate of growth in  public employment* continues to rise:

The Journal includes this typical line from Perry:

"Government doesn't create any jobs," he said last month on Glenn Beck's show on Fox News. "They can actually run jobs away."

He's partly right. As the Journal points out, Perry's budget cuts will lead to job losses in the public sector, particularly in the public schools. While he might not deserve credit for the Texas job boom, he can claim credit for some likely job losses.

*Note: Corrected to more accurately reflect the chart (thanks to commenter Kyle O.)

In the wake of the News Corp scandal and the resignation of their own paper's publisher/CEO, the editors of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal came out swinging today (7/18/11) against critics who would question the Journal's own standards and even "perhaps injure press freedom in general."

Today's editorial first goes for deflection: Scotland Yard's failure to stop the hacking is "more troubling than the hacking itself," and "it is also worth noting the irony of so much moral outrage devoted to a single media company, when British tabloids have been known for decades for buying scoops and digging up dirt on the famous." (As if bribing police officers and illegally hacking into phones are "buying scoops and digging up dirt.")

The paper also warns against U.S. investigations into News Corp wrongdoing, reminding readers of the Valerie Plame Wilson case, in which the New York Times' Judy Miller did jail time for refusing to reveal which Bush administration official leaked the identity of the undercover CIA officer to right-wing columnist Bob Novak--an episode the Journal recalled as a Times-led "posse to hang Novak and his sources." Asked the editors, "Do our media brethren really want to invite Congress and prosecutors to regulate how journalists gather the news?"

In the Plame Wilson case, remarkably few in the media actually supported the government investigation, instead claiming source confidentiality ought to be absolute--no matter that the "whistleblowing" being protected was actually political retribution against a whistleblower. (See Extra!, 9-10/05.) Journalism that serves the public interest is crucial for a democracy and should be protected from state interference. But journalism that gives government officials cover to punish whistleblowers, or that hacks into people's phones in order to sell more copies of a newspaper, hardly serves the public interest. And the Journal made clear which master its version of journalism serves:

Our readers can decide if we are a better publication than we were four years ago, but there is no denying that News Corp. has invested in the product. The news hole is larger. Our foreign coverage in particular is more robust, our weekend edition more substantial, and our expansion into digital delivery ahead of the pack. The measure that really matters is the market's, and on that score Mr. Hinton was at the helm when we again became America's largest daily.

The end of a Wall Street Journal article (7/14/11) on a new report on Afghan deaths highlights the peculiarity of their culture:

Of civilian casualties, 2 percent were caused by night raids, slightly down from last year, with 30 fatalities, the report says. Night raids have been a contentious issue between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. military officers and civilian leaders. The raids are sensitive in Afghanistan, because foreign soldiers burst into civilian homes, where strangers are unwelcome in the country's conservative Islamic traditions.

What a strange place. I guess in a civilized society, when a foreign soldier bursts into your home in the middle of night brandishing a weapon, you offer them dinner.

Two elections, different outcomes, different headlines at the Wall Street Journal (6/6/11).

When the left loses:

Portugal Decisively Ends Leftist Rule

Portugal on Sunday voted decisively to end six years of leftist rule, electing the country's main conservative party and boosting prospects for austerity measures tied to a $114 billion aid package from the EU and IMF.

But when the left wins:

Peru Votes in Divisive Runoff for President

Voters in one of the world's most dynamic economies went to the polls Sunday to choose between two divisive presidential candidates.

The latter piece included this:  "Financial markets, which have been riding a roller coaster during the long campaign, would be almost certain to take a win by Mr. Humala badly, analysts say."

That analysis wasn't confined to Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. In today's Washington Post (6/7/11):

Peru's Path Is Question Mark as Nationalist Wins Presidential Race
Investors worry whether he will pursue leftist economic policies

And the Los Angeles Times (6/7/11):

Leftist's Victory Rattles Peruvian Stock Market
After his narrow win, Ollanta Humala seeks to reassure the business class, but his previous pledge to work for better distribution of the nation's silver and gold wealth sends the market down more than 12 percent.

Viewing elections through the eyes of the investor class might be helpful for some, but it's doubtful that it's a great way to understand what the people in any country are thinking.

On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, conservative pundit Shelby Steele lays out the argument that Barack Obama's blackness is a unique asset that makes him difficult to beat in 2012. The argument--which, on some level, is worth taking seriously--is that "his presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to compete with. He literally validates the American democratic experiment, if not the broader Enlightenment that gave birth to it."

You can see how this might be true for a segment of the American population--I wrote in 2007 about pundits who made such arguments--but it's unclear how this phenomenon might fare against widespread paranoia on the right about Obama's birthplace, religion, rejection of  "American exceptionalism" and so on.

There is a way a Republican can win in 2012, Shelby argues--so long as the candidate can "break through the barrier of political correctness." The fact that he cites Donald Trump as serious example of how to do this is puzzling.

The bio at the bottom of the piece reads:

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is White Guilt (Harper/Collins, 2007).

White Guilt actually came out in May 2006. Steele did have a book that came out in 2007, but I can see why the Journal wouldn't want to draw attention to A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.

Perhaps he meant that Obama wouldn't get re-elected.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial (3/11/11) defended the Peter King hearings on Islamist terrorism against "our friends on the left [who] are busy portraying them as the McCarthy hearings and Palmer Raids rolled into one."

The editors argued that in fact, the focus on Muslims is justified based on the facts:

Since 9/11, there have been more than 50 known cases, involving about 130 individuals, in which terrorist plots were hatched on American soil. These include plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, an office tower in Dallas, a federal court house in Illinois, the Washington, D.C. metro, and the trans-Alaska pipeline. Most of these schemes were foiled at an early stage, though the Times Square bomber failed only at the moment of ignition. The worst attack was Major Nidal Hasan's November 2009 murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.

In a useful report published by the Rand Corporation last year, terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins notes that the plotters were a "diverse group" that included Caucasians, African-Americans and Hispanics as well as immigrants (or their children) from about 20 countries. Yet all but two of the plotters were Muslim, and those two sought to offer their services to al Qaeda.

So much, then, for the notion that it is bigoted for Mr. King to focus on Muslim radicalization. This is where the current threat lies.

This is a complete misrepresentation of the Rand report. The report is exclusively about Muslim radicalization and jihadism, not about domestic terrorism in general, as the WSJ would lead you to believe--if anything, it's surprising that there are any non-Muslim jihadist plotters. (The exceptions were two men who agreed for their own secular purposes to collaborate with undercover FBI informants purporting to work for al Qaeda.)

The vast majority of "homegrown" terrorist attackers--those of all ideologies who successfully carry out an attack--are not Muslim, the report finds: Of the "83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three...were clearly connected with the jihadist cause." The other jihadist plots referred to by both the report and the WSJ were disrupted by authorities--quite often because those authorities themselves helped generate them.

One key point of the report, in fact, is to say that homegrown jihadism is not nearly as big a threat as it's made out to be--exactly the opposite of the argument that the WSJ is trying to make.

"Americans are entitled to an assessment of how serious a threat this is," wrote the WSJ editors. I agree: It's about time they and the rest of the King hearing supporters (that includes you, Bill O'Reilly) stop unjustly demonizing American Muslims and present the facts.

The documentary Gasland was up for an Academy Award last night. Director Josh Fox has been writing about the gas industry's campaign against the film, which is a critical look at hydraulic fracturing, or  "fracking." That controversy found its way to the Wall Street Journal on Friday, where a story by Ben Casselman was posted that included an interesting admission.

As Press Action noted:

In the original version of the article, Casselman, who has covered the energy industry at the Journal for several years, quoted Range Resources-Appalachia director of public affairs Matt Pitzarella as saying: "We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror."

Obviously, "we need to look in the mirror" is not the message the industry means to send about the film. And that might explain why the quote disappeared--to be replaced, ironically enough, by an industry spokesperson declaring that they "don't want to get drowned out... We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately." Yes, let's hope the energy industry gets a chance to be heard!

So what happened? Press Action got a response, though not one that helps explain what happened:

Press Action contacted Casselman on February 26 to find out if he knew why the Range Resources spokesman's quote was removed from his article. In an e-mail response, Casselman wrote: "As a matter of policy, the Journal doesn't discuss its editorial decisions, so I can't get into details. But stories are edited all the time between editions, for all sorts of reasons (space, clarity, etc.). So it's not unusual for the early versions of a story to look different from the final version."

Perhaps a Wall Street Journal editor could provide an answer?

Obama's selection of conservative Democrat William Daley as his new chief of staff didn't surprise anyone. So reporters were left to explain the political shift behind the move. Some saw little movement at all, since Daley's political views would seem more or less in line with his predecessor Rahm Emanuel. The Washington Post (1/7/11) offered this somewhat confused explanation:

His moderate views and Wall Street credentials make him an unexpected choice for a president who has railed against corporate irresponsibility and tried, with limited success, to appease restive liberals who think he has not been tough enough on bankers.

Actually, the opposite would seem more accurate; the choice of a right-leaning banker with deep ties to corporate America would suggest that Obama doesn't really "rail" against corporations, and certainly has done little to "appease restive liberals." Daley's selection is more evidence of this general trend. Tell that to USA Today, which headlines its piece "Daley Choice Puts a Moderate in Play"--as if there weren't many "moderates" around to begin with. The piece leads with this:

President Obama's choice of Chicago business executive William Daley to run his White House operation is the clearest sign yet that he intends to move toward the political center as he approaches a likely 2012 re-election campaign, members of both parties say.

And over at the L.A. Times, "Obama Chooses Former Clinton Staffers in a Move to the Center" is the headline; readers are told that these moves are "a signal to business leaders and independent voters that he is resolved to steer a more centrist course after two years of intense partisan clashes."

The obvious point here is that Obama "intends to move" towards the center--meaning that he's not there already. The media preference for a Democrat is one who continuously moves to the right. In order to convince readers that Obama isn't already there, reporters magnify certain political disputes in order to prove this point. Today's Wall Street Journal headline, "President Revs Up Campaign to Make Peace With Business," is a perfect example: Obama's been too tough on corporate America, and now he's moving the other direction by hiring a businessman to run the White House.

The emerging hero of the Chilean miners' story--in Latin America and elsewhere, if not in the U.S.--is Luis Urzúa, a topographer who took a job at the San José mines as a shift foreman while awaiting the start of new a job in his field.  NASA officials working on the rescue called Urzúa "a natural leader," but his most important accomplishment was getting the 33 miners through the first 17 days of their crisis, when all they had was enough food for two days, dirty water and no idea if a rescue effort was even underway.

Besides implementing food rationing and a 24-hour watch to listen for rescuers, Urzúa is credited with unifying the men and mediating conflicts in the desperate situation. As a topographer, Urzúa also had technical expertise useful to the rescue team. He was the last miner to be brought up because of his value to the effort.

Urzúa, whose father was a Communist leader murdered by the Pinochet regime, and whose stepfather, a Socialist mining union leader, was in turn killed by anti-left government violence, explained his leadership approach to London's Guardian:

Speaking from a hospital bed at the San José mine, shift foreman Luis Urzúa--the man who kept the Chilean miners alive for two months--said his secret for keeping the men bonded and focused on survival was majority decision-making.

"You just have to speak the truth and believe in democracy," said Urzúa, his eyes hidden behind black glasses.... "Everything was voted on.... We were 33 men, so 16 plus one was a majority."

So the hero of our story, a mine foreman, says he discarded corporate, top-down decision-making in favor of workplace democracy.

As we pointed out earlier, Daniel Henninger's Wall Street Journal column, "Capitalism Saved Miners," forgot to mention that a reckless capitalist company put the miners in their predicament in the first place, and that government played a far larger role in their rescue than did capitalism.

Urzúa's story further detracts from Henninger's thesis, for unless capitalism and its anti-democratic decision-making processes have radically changed in the last two months, Henninger's hallowed system played no role in getting the miners through the toughest  part of their ordeal.

After the miners' rescue Wednesday, talk in Chile turned to mine safety and the  conduct of Compañía Minera San Esteban, the corporation that owns the San Jose mines where the miners were trapped. On Thursday, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera publicly addressed safety issues,  vowing "fundamental changes in how businesses treat their workers."

Stories about San Esteban's horrible record are legion (e.g., here and here). The company has been host to a number of deaths at its mines in recent years, and accusations of safety violations including the charge that it ignored orders to install safety equipment--a condition of its reopening after a previous accident--which might have made an earlier escape possible for some miners.

Moreover, during the debacle, San Esteban, which played no part in the miners' rescue, pled poverty and claimed it could not pay the trapped miners wages. As London's Independent reported, San Esteban "says it has no money to continue paying their wages, let alone cope with the lawsuits that will inevitably arise from the ordeal."

All in all, one might say it wasn't an episode in which capitalism cloaked itself in glory. That is, unless one is Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page director and "Wonder Land" columnist Daniel Henninger. In his October 14 column, "Capitalism Saved the Miners: The Profit = Innovation Dynamic Was Everywhere at the Mine Rescue Site," Henninger argued that the miners owed their rescue to a special drill bit developed by a private U.S. company. That was his entire argument.

Henninger's real motive seemed to be to use the miners' rescue to rebut a bit of Obama campaign rhetoric in which the president had sarcastically dismissed notion of unqualified faith in markets:

The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.

Henninger’s response to Obama's remark:

Uh, yeah. That's a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that's right. Ask the miners.

I'm sure the miners are thankful for the heroic drill bit, but their opinion of the role of capitalism in their debacle might be less breathless than Henninger's. Indeed, most of the miners have weighed in on the central capitalist actor in the story: At least 29 of the 33 miners' families have filed lawsuits against San Esteban.

Also inconvenient for Henninger's argument: The rescue was run by the Chilean government and its relevant ministries, not by the capitalist company. Oh, and the U.S. government's space agency, NASA, also played a crucial role, designing the rescue capsule and consulting on safety issues.

Moreover, it's worth noting that, while Chile's larger, government-owned mines have relatively good safety records, the same cannot be said for its smaller, capitalist-run mines, such as San Esteban's.

No one argues that capitalism does not produce new innovations (while sometimes stifling innovations too), but in Henninger's capitalist Wonder Land, the bad actions of capitalists, as well as the the good and vital acts of governments, are banished to the real world.

Jeffrey Trachtenberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal (9/28/10), reports in "Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books" that electronic publishing is ruining authors:

It has always been tough for literary fiction writers to get their work published by the top publishing houses. But the digital revolution that is disrupting the economic model of the book industry is having an outsize impact on the careers of literary writers.

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America's top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.

Trachtenberg gives us what he presents as the economic realities--as usual in such articles, reality as viewed by the big publishing houses:

The new economics of the e-book make the author's quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15 percent, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70 percent, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25 percent of that, or $2.27, to the author.

The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

Left out of this, of course, is the publisher's investment in each book--which is obviously much lower with an electronic copy that doesn't require printing, storage or shipping. According to the New York Times' calculations (FAIR Blog, 3/2/10)--which are based on a $26 hardcover rather than $28--the net profit on each hardcover copy is $4.05; the net profit on a $12.99 e-book, if you use the Journal's royalty figure, is $5.54--or $1.49 more profit than with hardcover publishing.

Suppose royalty rates were increased so that publishers made the same profit on an e-book as on a hardcover book. That would give the  author $3.77 per e-book sold, as opposed to (by the Times' reckoning) $3.90 for a hardcover sale.  As the law of supply and demand will tell you that it's possible to sell a lot more copies at $12.99 than at $26 or $28, it's clear that authors could maintain or increase their standard of living in a digital world--if publishers weren't intent on grabbing a bigger slice of the pie.

Update: See also James Ledbetter's take on this in Slate (9/28/10), "The Journal Asks Us to Weep for Literary Novelists."

Follow Jim Naureckas on Twitter @JNaureckas.

An illuminating account of how conservatives won the Massachusetts Senate race (Washington Independent, 1/20/10) singled out an op-ed by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal (1/14/10) as having energized citizens to vote against Martha Coakley. And, honestly, the piece does provide plenty of legitimate ammunition for the anti-Coakley side.

The op-ed centered on a case  in which three members of the Amirault family, which ran a pre-school in Massachusetts, were sent to prison based on children's accounts of seemingly impossible sexual abuse. (Read the column if you want to see the grisly yet preposterous examples.)  Rabinowitz, who has  long written about the child sex-abuse witch-hunting that has put numerous people in jail based on  bizarre and unverifiable accusations, pointed to Coakley's strenuous defense of the convictions as attorney general as evidence of her unsuitability for higher office.

It's refreshing to see a piece of conservative opinion journalism that is grounded in actual investigation and addresses a real issue (and doesn't mention ACORN even once).  If it had an impact on the outcome of the Senate race, that's what political writing is supposed to do.

There's one false note that I want to point out in the op-ed, though, when Rabinowitz contrasted Coakley's enthusiasm for the dubious process that convicted the Amiraults with her concern over the treatment of prisoners rounded up in the "War on Terror": "It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo--her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence."

I think it's fair to say that the point of Rabinowitz's sarcasm is that Coakley's concern for due process is misplaced--that it should be reserved for the innocent Amiraults, and not extended to the terror suspects.  This impression is confirmed by an earlier column from Rabinowitz (2/2/09) that attacked Obama for "issuing executive orders effectively undermining efforts to extract (from captured Al-Qaeda operatives) intelligence essential to the prevention of terror attacks"--i.e., preventing the government from torturing suspects.

Sexually abusing children and killing random people to make political points are both horrible things--which is why people are inclined not to worry too much about the rights of people who are accused of such crimes, and sometimes neglect the rules that are designed to separate the guilty from the innocent. Rabinowitz made a strong case that Coakley fell into this trap when it came to the Massachusetts pre-school charges--but she seems to have a similar blind spot for the possibility that some inmates at Guantanamo may have been equally railroaded.

Rabinowitz writes movingly about the heartbreak of being unjustly imprisoned and separated from one's family; she could write exactly the same story about many of the Guantanamo inmates--but provoking outrage against the politicians responsible for the tragedies might not be to her ideological taste.