On the one hand, NBC's Meet the Press gives us Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (2/5/12):

DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it's very difficult to prove something like that, just like it's difficult for the president to prove the economy would've been weaker if not for his particular policies. How could it have been stronger had a Republican been in president, in your judgment? Been in the White House, I should say.

DANIELS: Well, for one thing, for one thing, national policy wouldn't have been so relentlessly anti-enterprise as it's been. If you'd assembled a team of Nobel economists and said design us a policy to stifle and strangle investments and small business growth and innovation in this economy, you couldn't have done better than what's happened the last three years. The mindless piling on of new regulations, every one of them very expensive, and in the aggregate extraordinarily so, that's all drained away dollars that could've been used to hire someone. New taxes and the threat of more, all the uncertainty that's come with that. What we know is this, David, I don't have--no one can prove what might have happened, but this is the weakest recovery, by far, from a deep recession that we have in--since the records have been kept, and I don't think that's an accident.

Wow--anti-enterprise tax-hiking regulatory excess!

Instead of the reporter in the room quizzing his guest on what he's talking about, let's get another guest to weigh in.

Like, say, a billionaire mayor:

GREGORY: Mayor Bloomberg, as an independent voice in all of this, is that your judgment as well, that that's a fair criticism?

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I think I agree with most of what Mitch said. I think if you want to have growth, number one, you have to have the financial industry be strong and willing to take risks. And this relentless criticism and investigation of them, whether--regardless of the facts in the past, if we want to have a future, we have to have people have confidence.

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 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?

At the top of Meet the Press yesterday (9/25/11), NBC anchor David Gregory announced one of the topics to come:

Is the president's plan basic fairness or class warfare?

As with too many other media debates, an absurd proposition--that returning tax rates for certain wealthy people to levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s is a declaration of war--is treated as one of the two possible answers to a question. Gregory manages to make things worse by getting the only answer on the show from billionaire New York mayor (and media tycoon) Michael Bloomberg:

GREGORY: Does that trouble you?

BLOOMBERG: It does trouble me. You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor. Every time you have a jump, people play games to get on one side or another. And I think it's not fair to say that wealthy people don't pay their fair share. They pay a much higher percentage of their income. They have a higher rate than people who make less. The Buffett thing is just theatrics. If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. And, in fact, a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk on their taxes.

Bloomberg's response is incoherent. Of course definitions of what makes someone  "wealthy" or "poor" differ, but there's no reason people can't make such distinctions.

And Buffett's tax burden has nothing to do with "theatrics." Bloomberg says, "If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher."

Well, yeah. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT of Buffett's argument.

If Meet the Press is going to actually engage this discussion, it might make sense to invite some guests who know something about the issue--perhaps even a non-billionaire.

You just never know what will set Bill O'Reilly off. Last night, it was a perfectly reasonable remark by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who, following the arrest of a Pakistani suspect in the Times Square car bomb plot, cautioned against turning  Pakistanis or followers of Islam into scapegoats:

I want to make clear that we will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers. All of us live in this city. And among any group, there's always a few bad apples.

O'Reilly angrily lashed out at Bloomberg:

Well, maybe somebody should remind the mayor that Muslim fanatics have been threatening New York City and the entire country for almost 20 years. That's a lot of apples out there, sir.

If there is a way to read O'Reilly's response to Bloomberg as anything but a call for "bias and backlash," it eludes us.

The author of an upcoming "people's history of the Bolivarian Revolution entitled We Created Him," George Ciccariello-Maher tells (CounterPunch, 2/15/09) an eerily "familiar" tale of one unnamed political leader who, after being "in power for nearly eight years,"

no longer feels the need to comfort his opponents, and his discourse radicalizes as his view of term limits shifts. Dismissing his opposition as rigid "dogmatists," the leader now insists on the need to change course flexibly to meet circumstances. True and sustained change, he argues, requires the continuity of his successful leadership....

Not without controversy, then, was the decision of the region's largest newspaper--aligned politically with the leader--to wade into these conflictive waters with the following declaration: ..."The bedrock of… democracy is the voters' right to choose. Though well intentioned… the term limits law severely limits that right, which is why this page has opposed term limits from the outset… Term limits are...profoundly undemocratic, arbitrarily denying voters the ability to choose between good politicians and bad."

While the paper had previously insisted that any change to term limits come through popular referendum, it now reverses this view, taking the position that for reasons of political expediency, a simple vote in the small executive council will do.

While consumers of corporate U.S. media may recognize this as the common narrative against current official U.S. enemy Hugo Chávez, Ciccariello-Maher lets us know that this land where "weak-kneed apologists parade about under the banner of free press" really "is none other than New York City, the leader none other than Michael Bloomberg, and the newspaper none other than the New York Times." Cautioning "patience: we haven't even gotten to the hypocrisy part yet," Ciccariello-Maher then goes on to note how

the New York Times has never been bashful about the crush it has on this tale of hypocrisy’s third character: the narco-terrorist president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. Uribe is currently engaged in an effort to change the Colombian constitution for a second time to allow his own re-election, doing so not through popular plebiscite, but rather indirect legislative vote. But not that you would know this from reading the press.

Read the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs: FAIR Finds Editors Downplaying Colombia's Abuses, Amplifying Venezuela's" (2/09) by Steve Rendall, Daniel Ward & Tess Hall