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NEWS FLASH

Arkansas GOP Nominates House Candidate Who Called For Jailing NY Times Journalists | On Tuesday, the Arkansas Republican Party nominated Tom Cotton as their candidate to replace retiring Blue Dog Mike Ross. Cotton became a minor celebrity in the right-wing blogosphere after he penned a letter in 2006 calling for two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters and the New York Times‘ executive editor to be thrown “behind bars” for publishing a story about a Treasury Department program to disrupt terrorist organization’s finances. Since President Obama took office, Republicans have taken to campaigning on outlandish claims that they are the sole protectors of our Constitution. Before Cotton takes up this strategy, however, he might want to familiarize himself with the following words: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” [HT: Adam Serwer]

Security

GOP Aide: New York Times Claim That Obama Ignored Generals On Afghanistan ‘Must Be Inaccurate’

By Ben Armbruster on May 21, 2012 at 10:54 am

The New York Times published a piece on Sunday charting President Obama’s “journey to a shift on Afghanistan,” as the article’s headline reads, and claimed that the president did not consult the generals when deciding on pulling out the “surge” troops and the overall withdrawal plan. “The generals were cut out entirely,” the Times’ David Sanger writes, later adding that Obama ordered the withdrawal after “no debates with the generals.” The article also has a quote from an unnamed adviser:

“I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his advisers said of the surge. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.”

Of course the neocons are now pouncing on the president. “This is breathtaking,” Mitt Romney adviser Max Boot writes, “The commander-in-chief at least has an obligation to solicit [the commanders'] views and take them into careful consideration.” Right-wing Washington Post blogger Jen Rubin piled on today too. Obama “actually doesn’t all that much care if we ‘win’ or not,” said Rubin, who also quoted AEI’s foreign policy leader Danielle Pletka saying Obama “just as hates the word ‘victory.’”

But did President Obama really choose to ignore his top commanders’ advice when making his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan? A spokesperson for House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), a strong critic of the president on national security issues, told Politico’s Austin Wright that the Times story was most likely “inaccurate”:

“McKeon is reserving judgment,” Claude Chafin, a spokesman for the HASC chairman, tells Morning Defense in an email. “The report is so dramatically at odds with recent communications between the committee, commanders on the ground and senior administration officials that it must be inaccurate.”

A “senior defense official” also told Wright that “[t]he suggestion that the White House and the Department of Defense haven’t consulted closely on the major decisions on Afghanistan over the past three years is simply incorrect.”

Moreover, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time Obama announced his withdrawal plans in June 2011, Gen. David Petraeus, said then that, while he did not recommend the plan that Obama ultimately decided on, he was indeed consulted:

“I provided assessments of risk. I provided recommendations. We discussed all of this again at considerable length. The president then made a decision. … And so that’s how I would layout the process that took place, the very good discussion, this was indeed vigorous. All voices were heard in the situation room. And ultimately the decision has been made. And with a decision made, obviously I support that.”

So no, Obama did not decide to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan without consulting his top military commanders.

LGBT

Fox News Joins The Marriage Poll Distortion Band Wagon

By Zack Ford on May 17, 2012 at 9:53 am

A slew of polls have surveyed voters’ beliefs about marriage equality since President Obama’s endorsement last week, but the data collection is quickly becoming lazy and the interpretation sloppy. Monday’s CBS/New York Times poll has been roundly criticized for its incredibly small sample size (615) and the odd framing of its questions. Fox News unsurprisingly conducted a poll of its own in the same fashion and eagerly spun the results to accommodate its anti-equality agenda:

A majority of voters don’t support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, yet at the same time a majority also opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

According to a Fox News poll released Wednesday, 37 percent of voters believe gays and lesbians should be allowed to get married legally. While that’s unchanged from 2010, when the question was most recently asked, it’s nearly double the 20 percent who felt that way in March 2004, the first time it was asked.

There is actually nothing in the data that supports this conclusion. What the Fox News article doesn’t mention until its fourth paragraph is that it asked its question the same way the CBS/NYT poll did: forcing a choice between same-sex marriage, legal unions not called marriage, or no legal recognition. The true result of this poll is that 70 percent believe there should be legal recognition for same-sex couples, which was actually 8 points higher than what Monday’s CBS/NYT poll found.

But the problem with both polls is that they never force respondents to choose between same-sex marriage and nothing, creating an incomplete picture of where voters stand. Consider the recent polling from Colorado, which found that 62 percent support civil unions, but that 53 support full marriage equality as well. Forcing respondents to make an either/or choice about marriage and civil unions instead of allowing consideration for both separately creates a distorted view of where voters actually stand.

The Times’ Ross Douthat attempts to spin the interpretation the other way, suggesting that because so many “prefer” civil unions, their support for  marriage equality when not provided with an alternative is “reluctant.” And it’s because of that reluctance, he believes, that the results of ballot measures don’t match the polling. This, of course, is a conclusion that can only be drawn from the strange construction of the question in these polls, and it also ignores the reality that many complex factors impact these plebiscites. In North Carolina, the most current example, polling showed that voters were largely uninformed (or misinformed) about the actual impact of Amendment One, and thus did not realize they were voting to ban civil unions and domestic partnerships in addition to marriage — against their wishes. Plus, as Nathaniel Frank points out, polls on social issues are simply “notoriously bad at predicting [voter] behavior.”

Fox News wants to be able to claim it has data opposing the conclusion that a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, despite consistent national polling over the past two years that shows otherwise. Any poll can be structured and framed to deliver a certain bias to the results, but the true momentum for marriage equality cannot be disregarded so easily.

LGBT

EXPOSED: Romney Campaign Silenced Gay Spokesman To Avoid Confronting Hate Groups, Misled Reporters

By Ali Gharib on May 3, 2012 at 11:45 am

Eric Fehrnstrom (L) and Ric Grenell

When presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s openly gay foreign policy spokesman resigned under pressure from right-wing anti-gay groups, the campaign sought to minimize the perceived damage by noting that Richard Grenell had not actually started yet on the job.

When a CNN anchor asked campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom about Grenell, the top aide prefaced his remarks by saying: “First let me correct you. He wasn’t two weeks on the job. He was scheduled to start on May 1.” Other Romney-friendly media, vaguely sourcing the campaign, addressed Grenell’s departure the same way, implying that he left the job before he’d started it. When the Washington Post reported that Grenell was “kept under wraps,” Washington Examiner’s Byron York pushed back:

But Romney campaign officials say strongly that they did not keep Grenell under wraps or in any other way discourage him from taking the job. First, they point out that at the time (last week) in which Grenell was supposedly being held back, he was not yet an employee of the Romney campaign. Like a number of other new hires, officials say, Grenell was getting ready to move to Boston to begin work May 1. Romney officials fully anticipated he would begin his public role as spokesman then.

The only problem? Grenell could well have been set to officially become an employee of the Romney campaign on May 1, but he’d already started working for the team.

As Andrew Sullivan reported last night and the New York Times later confirmed, Grenell helped organize a Romney campaign conference call to pre-empt Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy speech last week. Sullivan reported that after Grenell’s voice was not heard on the April 26 call, which he’d helped set up, people started to ask questions:

Some even called and questioned him afterwards as to why he was absent. He wasn’t absent. He was simply muzzled. For a job where you are supposed to maintain good relations with reporters, being silenced on a key conference call on your area of expertise is pretty damaging. Especially when you helped set it up.

Sources close to Grenell say that he was specifically told by those high up in the Romney campaign to stay silent on the call, even while he was on it. And this was not the only time he had been instructed to shut up.

The Times added information to Sullivan’s story, also noting that the call was the “biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team”:

It turned out [Grenell] was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

It’s no wonder Grenell felt the need to resign from the campaign. The newly revealed information only bolsters his reasons: the campaign was clearly seeking to mislead the media to downplay Grenell’s departure. “It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” an anonymous Republican told the Times. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.” If Romney campaign can’t stand up to a bigoted special interest on personnel issues — for what they clearly thought was the best man for the job — how could a Romney administration be expected to make the politically tough decisions needed to successfully govern the country?

Alyssa

Tom Hiddleston, Marvel’s Loki, Defends Superhero Movies

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 24, 2012 at 10:06 am

Tom Hiddleston, who plays Asgardian god Loki in Thor and will be the main antagonist of The Avengers, pens a nice little reflection on the impact of superheroes on his own actorly ambitions, and the role superhero stories can play in exploring big questions:

Superhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths can be explored. In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of every man’s life, and we love it. It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good. The possibility of redemption is right around the corner, but we have to earn it.

The Hulk is the perfect metaphor for our fear of anger; its destructive consequences, its consuming fire. There’s not a soul on this earth who hasn’t wanted to “Hulk smash” something in their lives. And when the heat of rage cools, all that we are left with is shame and regret. Bruce Banner, the Hulk’s humble alter ego, is as appalled by his anger as we are. That other superhero Bruce – Wayne – is the superhero-Hamlet: a brooding soul, misunderstood, alone, for ever condemned to avenge the unjust murder of his parents. Captain America is a poster boy for martial heroism in military combat: the natural leader, the war hero. Spider-Man is the eternal adolescent – Peter Parker’s arachnid counterpart is an embodiment of his best-kept secret – his independent thought and power.

I don’t know if arguments like this will convince doubters like the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane to take superhero movies seriously. But it makes the point that these holdouts are a minority. All critics have biases, and perhaps it’s better that those biases be put on display by someone like Lane, who thinks that Battlestar Galactica is a waste of his infinitely precious time, or the New York Times reviewers who make their contempt for fantasy every time they write about Game of Thrones. I’m not saying that genre material should be turned over to reviewers who privilege science fiction or fantasy over other frameworks. But if you want to give culture that a lot of people take seriously a fair shake, it’s probably worth assigning it to a reviewer who is open-minded about it. Bad things can make a lot of money, or garner high ratings. But quality doesn’t automatically decline as profits and ratings increase. It’s a shame that some folks deny themselves great fun out of close-mindedness, and unfortunate when they try to dissuade others from that enjoyment as well.

Climate Progress

New York Times Reporter Criticizes His Paper For ‘Scandal’ Of ‘Dodging’ How Global Warming Is Poisoning Our Weather

By Brad Johnson on Apr 3, 2012 at 3:00 pm

Mrbps via Flickr

In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times reporter Justin Gillis criticizes the media, including his own paper, for failing to connect the dots on how the hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution humanity has spewed into the atmosphere is making weather more extreme and “crazy”:

One thing I’m seeing—and I see it in our own paper as well as many other news outlets—is that people are covering the crazy weather we’re having and, more often than not, dodging the subject of whether there’s any relationship to climate change. TV weathermen are dodging that subject. Print reporters are dodging the subject. And it’s not so easy to cover because science does not have particularly good answers for us. The concept that I wrote about last week—that we’re in the middle of a sort of weather “weirding”—isn’t really a scientific concept for which you can build a weird index and figure out where we are on that index, but there are some things that scientists can say about weather extremes. Some of the extremes are very consistent with what is expected and what has long been predicted, and we’re seeing very clear trends in certain extremes like heat waves and heavy precipitation events. Reporters are not going to be able to be definitive, in real time, about whether this particular event was or wasn’t connected to climate change, but it’s a bit of a scandal that there’s not enough connecting the dots for people.

As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said in 2011, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”

Alyssa

New York Times Magazine Editor Hugo Lindgren, Feminist Thinker

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 19, 2012 at 11:38 am

The big technical news out of New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren recent appearance at Columbia may be that an iPad app for the magazine is still a couple of years away. But it was his explanation for why he replaced Ethicist columnist Randy Cohen with Ariel Kaminer that caught my eye:

“There’s no science to it. We thought the Ethicist franchise … still had some vitality to it and it’d be interesting try a different voice there. And I think there’d been a real male dominated voice. Randy’s an incredibly gifted, funny, smart guy, but he’s definitely a dude and I think a lot of his…” he trailed off. “Is this on the record?”

“Yeah,” Navasky said as Lindgren began to pick back up.

“But he definitely brought a male perspective. And not in a cheesy—he’s a fair-minded, decent guy—but we thought it’d be interesting to try a woman and see what the difference was. And it was just like we thought that’s interesting, so let’s try it.”

That curiosity is heartening. The assumption by powerful men that they can speak for all of humanity, that their opinions and views on the world are just naturally the appropriate default, isn’t just condescending—it’s boring. It’s the mark of a good editor to be looking not just for good new stories, but for good new perspectives, and to be suspicious of whatever has become the default. The Times Magazine as a whole can be kind of dudely. But if Lindgren’s operating under the assumption that dudely isn’t always better, maybe that won’t be the case forever.

NEWS FLASH

The New York Times Rejects Anti-Muslim Advertisement | The New York Times rejected a full-page anti-Islam advertisement submitted by anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. The Times rejected the ad, which urges Muslims “to quit Islam,” because “the fallout from running this ad now could put U.S. troops and/or civilians in the [Afghan] region in danger,” Geller told The Daily Caller. The ad, a product of Geller and Spencer’s new group “Stop Islamization Of Nations” (SION), can be viewed after the jump.

Update

Geller says her ad was in response to an anti-Catholic ad that ran last week in the NYT.

Read more

Economy

Fox News Analyst Calls Goldman Whistleblower Column A ‘Political Hit Job’ By The New York Times

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 15, 2012 at 10:44 am

A Goldman Sachs employee yesterday publicly resigned via an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he called the firm “toxic and destructive,” saying that Goldman traders consistently talk about how much profit they are making by ripping off their clients. Goldman quickly mobilized a smear campaign against the former employee, Greg Smith, with “people familiar with the matter” saying that Smith was just miffed at not getting promotions and receiving a comparatively small bonus.

Financial prognosticators on cable news, of course, were quick to take Goldman’s claims and run with them, mocking Smith and saying that he should go start a media firm with the characters from Sesame Street. And today, Fox News’ Charlie Gasparino took on a new target, The New York Times itself, saying that the column was a “political hit job” by the paper of record, and an attempt by the Times to garner credit with the Occupy Wall Street movement:

GASPARINO: I don’t think we can underplay the political significance here. This is different than the New York Times business staff going out and doing an investigate report on what this guy said, you know, using it to develop anecdotes…This is The New York Times, as an institution, this is an op-ed, raising its gun and pointing it at Goldman Sachs. And there’s a political issue here, I believe, many people believe on Wall Street, that it’s playing up to the Occupy Wall Street people, the President’s class warfare rhetoric. This is a political hit job, in many ways…You have to ask what The New York Times’ motives are. This is a political hit job…And remember, what has the New York Times been on a roll about? Occupy Wall Street. Class warfare.

Watch it:

Gasparino also claimed that Smith was merely angry that he wasn’t promoted. “He’s never made managing director, that’s a big thing,” Gasparino said. “There’s a little bit of sour grapes here.” Yesterday, Gasparino tweeted that some Goldman employees were disparaging Smith’s views because “he never made more than $750,000 a year.”

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