Another Congressional Perk: College scholarships for pals

From the Dallas Morning News:

Longtime Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson has awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships to four relatives and a top aide’s two children since 2005, using foundation funds set aside for black lawmakers’ causes.

The recipients were ineligible under anti-nepotism rules of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which provided the money. And all of the awards violated a foundation requirement that scholarship winners live or study in a caucus member’s district.

Johnson, a Democrat, denied any favoritism when asked about the scholarships last week. Two days later, she acknowledged in a statement released by her office that she had violated the rules but said she had done so “unknowingly” and would work with the foundation to “rectify the financial situation.”

Doh! Bachmann spells name wrong in registering her PAC

As Wonkette reported earlier today, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has formed her very own Leadership Political Action Committee, the slush fund of choice for the modern politician.

Like many members of congress, she incorporated her own name into the name of the PAC. Unfortunately, her first name is spelled incorrectly in the Statement of Organization filed with the Federal Election Commission. The PAC is registered with the FEC as MichellePAC.

More on Obama’s Chances to Win Reelection

Nelson Hernandez (among others) took issue with my “clever analysis of President Obama’s excellent chances of re-election.” Hernandez made a number of good points, though he made several comments (for example, Obama has “an insatiable desire to promote socialism”) that make it hard to take him seriously. But here’s an edited version of his email, to which I’ll reply below:

The economy is obviously in dire straits and may well be heading into a full-scale, big-D Depression which will hit us full force before the 2012 election. Even the most mainstream economic commentators are now pretty much throwing in the towel after the crushing GDP and housing numbers we’ve been hearing lately. In short: do a little extrapolation on this disastrous economy and tell me that the Democrats can win re-election in 2012. It’s not a question of where we are today, but where we will be in two years. It doesn’t look good.

Silverstein’s breezy dismissal of all the likely GOP candidates totally fails to take into account the already well-advanced revulsion toward the incumbent that animates broad swathes of the middle class and independent voters. It is also very unlikely that youth and non-black minority groups will mobilize for Obama in the same way they did in 2008. Americans are in distress and are not going to fall for Obama’s soaring yet lightweight rhetoric a second time.

Silverstein’s recollection of history is faulty. Mondale was not the most boring candidate ever; Dukakis was. Mondale was actually one of the better candidates (in terms of competence) the Democrats have put up in the last 40 years.

Finally, Mr. Silverstein completely disregards four personages in the GOP, of which at least one and possibly two will likely be on the 2012 ticket: Gov. Christie (NJ), Gov. Daniels (IN), Rep. Ryan (WI) and Gov. Jindal (LA). All four of them could and would demolish Obama in a debate on any topic in different ways: basic principles, factual analysis, policy analysis. There is absolutely no hope of Obama besting them in an impromptu discussion.

My reply.

Point One: I generally agree, the economy is very scary and if it drops off the cliff Obama will lose. But in my view, that’s the only way he’ll lose. It’s very hard to knock off a sitting president. Gerald Ford lost in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, but this was the first election after Watergate; Ford was Richard Nixon’s vice president; Ford angered the country by pardoning Nixon; and the American economy was in a terrible recession in the run-up to the election. And even so, Ford came back from behind (at one point by 34 percent) and lost by only two percentage points. A shift of very few votes in Wisconsin and Ohio would have given Ford victory in the Electoral College.

George Bush Sr. lost in 1992 but he had Ross Perot on the ballot; Bill Clinton won with just 43 percent of the vote. And in recent times, that’s it. Sure, Obama could lose but Hernandez’s breezy dismissal of his chances reveals his loathing of the president and sympathy for the GOP.

Point Two: I also agree in part, but see above. I’d also note that Americans fell for his rhetoric the first time, there’s nothing to prevent them from doing so again. Americans have a long track record of swallowing empty, overblown rhetoric (for example, that the GOP is the party with a track record of deficit reduction, even though under Presidents Reagan and Bush it ran up enormous deficits, and Clinton more or less eliminated it.) And underestimating Obama as a campaigner is a mistake Hillary Clinton, among others, has already made. He’s good on the campaign trail.

Point Three: OK, Dukakis was a dog of a candidate but it’s a photo finish with Mondale in terms of dullness. And competent? Mondale was best known as Carter’s vice president, hardly an auspicious record to campaign on.

Point Four: Good luck to those four candidates. If I were Obama I wouldn’t be losing a lot of sleep about any of them. The political scenario for Republicans for 2012 looks to be highly favorable (though obviously a lot could change between now and then), but the party has no charismatic candidate with new ideas, and whoever wins the GOP nomination is still going to have to knock off a sitting president with the powers and perks of incumbency. Possible, but unlikely unless Hernandez is right about the “big D.”

About That “Year of the Insurgent” Narrative: And what new bogus storyline will the media find to replace it?

A few short months ago the media was filled with narratives about 2010 being the “Year of the Insurgent,” a storyline that was always overblown. That’s not because the public is happy with congress, but because a well-funded incumbent is awfully hard to knock off. Even in 2006, when Democrats made huge gains in the House, 94 percent of incumbents won reelection. That’s not to say incumbents aren’t going to lose a few races (and it looks like the Democrats will drop quite a few seats this fall), just that it generally takes extraordinary circumstances, given the corrupted rules of American politics, for challengers to win a significant number of races in any given year.

Furthermore, America is a big place. Winning or losing state and local races depends on different issues in different places; there may not be a One-Size-Fits-All explanation for results around the country.

So it’s been amusing to see the media backing away from the “Year of the Incumbent” narrative, without ever acknowledging that it created this bogus thread to begin with. A classic example came in a Washington Post story today by Dan Balz. Writing about John McCain’s crushing victory over J.D. Hayworth in Arizona, he wrote, “On a day of coast-to-coast primaries that tested the power of the establishment against the appeal of political outsiders, McCain demonstrated anew that some incumbents who receive advance warning may be able to fend off challenges.”

Point One: For the purposes of hewing to its original storyline, the media has been portraying Hayworth as an outsider who was challenging establishment candidate McCain. But Hayworth was no outsider; he is a former member of Congress who lost his seat in 2006 largely due to his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (He’s also dumb as a rock, which didn’t help his cause.)

Point Two: Don’t all incumbents receive “advance warning” that they will have a challenger on the ballot? Of course this caveat from Balz was inserted in order to explain why incumbents keep winning races despite the fact that he and others in the media were so recently predicting a wave of victories by “insurgents.”

Balz’s story in the dead tree version of the Post was written before results started trickling in from Alaska, where Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin-backed candidate Joe Miller are running neck and neck. Murkowski had been expected to win, as noted by Balz in his story. Had she triumphed, Balz would no doubt have seen it as evidence to support his bold theory that incumbents with “advance warning” can fend off challengers. Imagine, though, if the results from Alaska had come in before the results in Arizona. Balz no doubt would have written a story saying that Miller’s unexpected showing demonstrated that “The Year of the Insurgent is alive and well.”

But now what will be the new storyline, since the “establishment” won in Arizona and the “insurgent” won (or did far better than predicted anyway) in Alaska?

Coming soon, from Dan Balz: “The results tonight demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that insurgents may, possibly, run strong this fall, especially if they have the endorsement of Sarah Palin, and even more so if the race happens to be in Alaska. However, there is no question that establishment candidates may, under some circumstances, triumph this fall, especially if their challengers tell them they plan to run against them. This trend may be heightened if the establishment candidate was his party’s presidential nominee two years ago and if his opponent is a cretinous buffoon.”

Race and the Courts

From Stephen Bright, in the Fulton County Daily Report:

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ third ruling that a white supervisor calling black men “boy”—as in “Boy, you better get going” and “Hey, boy”—is not evidence of racial animus was issued last week by Judges Edward E. Carnes and William H. Pryor Jr. in an unsigned, unpublished opinion. Carnes and Pryor are white men and alumni of the Alabama attorney general’s office.

The third judge on the panel, a visiting senior district judge from Ohio appointed by President Ronald Reagan, dissented. He would have upheld a jury verdict finding that Tyson Foods discriminated against a black man, John Hithon, in not promoting him to position as a shift manager at Tyson’s chicken processing plant in Gadsden, Ala., and awarding damages of more than $1 million to Hithon.

David Broder Rushed to Hospital for Emergency Craniorectal Procedure

David Broder of the Washington Post has long had his head so far up Washington’s ass that he is incapable of understanding that there are opinions in America beyond the ten Beltway insiders he gets his talking points from. (An affliction from which much of the D.C. press corps suffers, though generally not in as advanced a state as Broder’s.) In his latest column, he attacks writer John Judis for having opinions that Broder deems out of the mainstream — meaning anything to the left of, say, Senator Blanche Lincoln. Specifically, he endorses Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs’s recent criticism of “the professional left,” or those who are “prematurely finding fault with President Obama” for his failure to pursue reforms favored by liberal groups.

The column itself is a typical Broder snoozer, but what made it interesting was the addendum he tacked on lamenting the passage of Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, and Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman from Chicago. Both, he said, “cultivated reputations for being tough, combative so-and-sos, but…were boon companions for a lot of us. “

Of course they were. Broder has no time to consider opinions more than a shade different than his own, but he’s “boon companions” with a corrupt former chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means who did prison time and with Stevens, who was just as crooked but was spared prison due to the bungling of prosecutors.

Why Obama Will Win Reelection: Walter Mondale

With the Democrats looking to receive a solid (and well-deserved) drubbing in the mid-term elections, there’s much talk in the press about whether Barack Obama will be a one-term president. In a Sunday column, Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote: “Throughout this long year, President Obama’s advisers have sometimes looked to Ronald Reagan for comparison and inspiration. If the Gipper could survive a deep recession, low approval ratings and an adverse midterm election in his first two years and win reelection handily two years later, then Obama could easily do the same, they reason.”

But, Balz went on to say, the situation appears far more perilous for Obama than it was, at a corresponding time, for Reagan:

Whatever the outcome in November [midterms], and whatever interpretation is placed on the results, the real question for Obama is what happens to the economy afterward. On that measure, comparisons with Reagan are discouraging for the current president. The economy rebounded significantly during Reagan’s third and fourth years in office. The unemployment rate declined, although not spectacularly…More important, however, was the rise in gross domestic product, which experts say is a far more reliable political indicator. The U.S. economy experienced a growth surge in 1983 and 1984 that helped set the stage for Reagan’s gauzy “Morning in America” ads and prepared the ground for his huge reelection victory…

If Democrats lose substantial numbers of seats in November, Obama’s advisers will probably take heart from Reagan’s example, according to Bartels. But the recession this president inherited is nothing like the economy of Reagan’s time, and the divisions in the country are, if anything, deeper and more virulent. Obama will need the economy to snap out of its slump far more robustly than current forecasts predict before he can feel confident about the road ahead.

If the economy is truly in the tank, Obama might well not win his reelection bid, but at this point I’d bet on him. Balz makes all sorts of analogies between Obama’s situation and Reagan’s but omits one critical fact, namely that Reagan won a second term in 1984 running against one of the worst candidates of modern times, Walter Mondale. Mondale had been Jimmy Carter’s vice president, and the duo had presided over a catastrophic recession that paved the way for Reagan’s reelection. Furthermore, Mondale was a totally boring candidate; by comparison, Al Gore looks as charismatic and feisty as a youthful Muhammad Ali.

And that’s the problem for Republicans — whoever wins the nomination is going to be as weak a candidate as Mondale (though not necessarily as bland). Sarah Palin may motivate the G.O.P. base, but she is not going to win a general election. Mitt Romney? Please. He’s almost as dull as Mondale, and a phony to boot. Obama would destroy him. Newt Gingrich? I’ll give you 20 to 1 odds.

OK, so maybe an exciting, lesser known Republican candidate will emerge between now and primary season. After all, at this point in 2006 Obama would have been given no chance of winning the presidential election of two years later. So who’s it going to be? That whirling dervish Tim Pawlenty?

Barring an economic meltdown of the scale that finished off John McCain’s campaign, Obama will be president until January of 2017. For better or for worse.

Goldberg’s Case for War

James Fallows argues that Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic about the prospect of Israel attacking Iran is not actually an endorsement for such an attack, but that “the article hews to a strictly reportorial perspective: this is what the Israeli officials seem to think, this is how American officials might react, this is how Israeli officials might anticipate how the Americans might react, these are the Israeli voices of caution, here are the potential readings and mis-readings on each side.”

Fallows adds that those who believe Goldberg is advocating for war are mainly responding to his byline rather than his argument. “If this new article had appeared under the byline of someone known to have opposed the previous war [against Iraq] and to be skeptical about the next one, I think the same material could be read in the opposite way — as a cautionary revelation of what the Netanyahu government might be preparing to do.”

To which I’d reply, if the article had been written by anyone else I might agree. But Goldberg’s past work as a dishonest advocate for the Iraq War and his long service in support of the Israeli military (literally for a time, when he served in the Israeli Defense Force) makes Fallows’s argument harder to accept. Goldberg has never seen an Israeli military action that he didn’t approve of. Can anyone honestly believe that Goldberg wouldn’t support an Israeli attack on Iran in the event that it came to pass?

Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic is more balanced than his Iraq war “reporting,” which ranked with British propaganda from World War I about German soldiers bayoneting babies, but it’s awfully sympathetic to the Israeli point of view. If Israel does attack Iran, its supporters will surely point to Goldberg’s piece as evidence for why such a strike was necessary, just as President Bush cited Goldberg’s work in making the case for war in Iraq.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s Convenient Facts

Jonathan Schwarz and Glenn Greenwald demolish Jeffrey Goldberg’s new piece in The Atlantic. The former writes, “Jeffrey Goldberg has just written a long article about the chances of Israel attacking Iran. (Apparently it’s 50-50.) The piece demonstrates that Goldberg remains at the top of his profession—he’s still America’s greatest foreign policy propagandist.”

Greenwald, elaborating on Schwarz’s post, starts his piece by citing this section of Goldberg’s new article:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Then he notes this section from a 2002 story by Goldberg in The New Yorker:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.

So let’s see, in 2010 Israel had halted “forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.” Eight years earlier, though, the Israeli attack had failed. What could possibly explain these two completely contrary accounts by the same writer?

Greenwald explains: “Back then, Goldberg wouldn’t possibly claim what he claims now — that the 1981 strike permanently halted Saddam’s ‘nuclear ambitions’ — because, back then, his goal was to scare Americans about The Threat of Saddam. So in 2002, Goldberg warned Americans that Saddam had ‘redoubled’ his efforts to turn Iraq into a nuclear power after the Israeli attack.” And of course now Goldberg is trying to build the case for an Israeli attack on Iran.

Trouble for the Democrats’ Favorite Defense Lobbyist

From the Washington Post:

Paul J. Magliocchetti was one of the most powerful and influential lobbyists in Washington not too long ago, known for steering campaign contributions to favored lawmakers while securing millions of dollars in projects for his clients. On Thursday, the former defense lobbyist stood accused by federal prosecutors of orchestrating one of the largest campaign-finance frauds in U.S. history…

Magliocchetti, 64, the founder and owner of the now-closed PMA Group, was charged in U.S. District Court in Alexandria with eight counts of illegal campaign contributions and three counts of making false statements. He is accused of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawmakers to enhance his firm’s stature and business prospects.

The developments mark the latest chapter in the saga of PMA, whose success in securing funding for often-obscure defense contractors spawned the criminal probe and a recently completed House ethics inquiry. PMA’s clients gained more than $200 million in federal earmarks from a roster of lawmakers, who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from the lobbyist, his family and associates.

Hope and Change in the Middle East

From Laura Rozen:

The 2010 Arab Public Opinion poll will be released Thursday at the Brookings Institution by Shibley Telhami, of the University of Maryland and Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy. The annual survey, conducted in conjunction with Zogby International, polled 3,976 people in six countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates — in June and July.

The most striking finding is that while early in the Obama administration, in April and May 2009, some 51 percent of those polled expressed optimism about American policy in the Middle East; in the 2010 poll, only 16 percent were hopeful, while a majority, 64 percent, were discouraged….

“The data leaves little doubt that the deciding factor in the shift of opinion toward the Obama administration is disappointment on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Telhami said by e-mail.

Jon Stewart Gives Up

And with good reason. Which side is worse? The Republicans who voted against a bill providing health care for 9/11 first responders? Or the Democrats who used a legislative trick so they wouldn’t have to approve it?

You decide.

There Go The Midterms

Afghanistan + The Economy + Health Care Reform = this:

Only 41% of those surveyed Tuesday through Sunday approved of the way Obama is handling his job, his lowest rating in the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll since he took office in January 2009. In Gallup’s separate daily tracking poll, his approval was at 45% Monday.

Yes, polling trends can, and almost surely will, change between now and the fall elections, but the general outlook for Democrats in the midterms is pretty grim. Afghanistan is a disaster and unlikely to turn around significantly. Obama and the Democrats can whine all they want about how they inherited a bad economy—it’s true, they did—but the unemployment rate is a scandal and the president can’t blame George W. Bush forever.

It remains to be seen whether the health-care reform package will actually make life better for most Americans—I have my doubts—but it surely won’t have done so by the fall.

The only hope for Democrats is that generic polling data about party preferences suggest no matter how unhappy voters are with congress they tend to vote for incumbents in larger numbers than anyone expects. (Partly because of name recognition, partly because incumbents raise far more money than challengers and can buy more TV ads.)

“The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy,” Edwin Edwards, the former governor of Louisiana, once said about his electoral prospects. Edwards won in a landslide, despite his notorious reputation for corruption.

If the candidates can stay out of those beds, Democrats might not lose as many seats as expected this fall. But it’s likely to be ugly either way.

AIG Teaches Rangel an Ethics Lesson

From Ruth Marcus:

My favorite part of the ethics report on Charlie Rangel involves his efforts to “close” a $10 million gift “to create AIG Hall” as part of the Rangel Center at the City College of New York. Yes, that AIG.

At a meeting in April 2008, the New York Democrat, then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, “asked AIG, at least twice, what was necessary to get this done,” according to the report. The insurance giant wasn’t so sure about writing the check, citing the “potential headline risk.” When AIG — the company that paid out hundreds of millions in bonuses after being rescued by a government bailout — recognizes an appearance issue, you know you’ve got a problem.

The Tom DeLay Shakedown: Disciple learned from the master

From the Washington Post:

Days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank in the Gulf of Mexico, a conservative nonprofit group called the Institute for Energy Research asked BP to contribute $100,000 for a media campaign it was launching in defense of the oil industry. Although BP took a pass, the group’s advocacy arm went ahead with a campaign — only instead of defending BP, it vilified the company as a “safety outlier” in an otherwise safe industry. The campaign’s Web site features dozens of images of the burning rig, oil-smeared birds and other environmental devastation from the spill.

“BP is a victim of its own carelessness,” the group’s president, Thomas Pyle, wrote as part of the campaign’s kickoff in early July. “The rest of us should not be.” To backers of BP who were familiar with the discussions and spoke on the condition of anonymity, it seemed an awful lot like a shakedown. The initial proposal contained no criticism of the British oil giant or its handling of the spill. A BP spokesman declined to comment.

But Pyle, previously an oil-industry lobbyist and an aide to former congressman and Texas Republican Tom DeLay, said the anti-BP message was part of a separate campaign and was not intended as retaliation. “A lot of people were trying to lump the industry together as one cohesive unit,” Pyle said in an interview. “Our point was to not judge the whole industry by one incident and one actor.”

Cheery Economic News to Get Your Week Started

I missed this when it was published a few days ago. Worth a read.

From James Kuntsler:

I visited the Slate Political Gabfest podcast yesterday. These otherwise excellent, entertaining, highly educated folk (David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Daniel Gross, in for vacationing John Dickerson) were discussing the ramifications of the economic situation on the upcoming elections. They were quite clear about not being able to articulate the nature of this economic situation, “…this recession, or whatever you want to call it…” in Ms. Bazelon’s words. What’s the point of sending these people to Ivy League colleges if they can’t make sense of their world.

Let’s call this whatever-you-want-to-call-it a compressive deflationary contraction, because that’s exactly what it is, an accelerating systemic collapse of activity due to over-investments in hyper-complexity (thank you John Tainter). A number of things are going on in our society that can be described with precision. We’ve generated too many future claims on wealth that does not exist and has poor prospects of ever being generated. That’s what unpayable debt is. We have such a mighty mountain of it that the Federal Reserve can “create” new digital dollars until the cows come home (and learn how to play chamber music), but they will never create enough new money to outpace the disappearance of existing notional money in the form of welshed-on loans. Hence, money will continue to disappear out of the economic system indefinitely, citizens will grow poorer steadily, companies will go out of business, and governments at all levels will not have money to do what they have been organized to do.

Your Stimulus Dollars at Work

Hmmm. I wonder how many times this sort of thing happened with stimulus money? And how many millions (billions?) were wasted?

From the Post-Dispatch:

When he applied for federal stimulus money to build a new fire station, the city’s chief described the existing building as one that posed health problems and was at risk of “collapse.” Steve Olshwanger wrote in his 35-page application that the station was dangerously unstable, with damage to support columns, and rife with black, toxic mold.

He also said the station’s roof was deteriorating and the supports underlying it were damaged.

Olshwanger submitted the application last summer to replace Station No. 1, at 6801 Delmar Boulevard. FEMA accepted Olshwanger’s pitch and in October gave the city $2.6 million in stimulus money for the new station. But a tour last week of the 107-year-old station by the Post-Dispatch showed that while it may be a dreary place for firefighters to bunk, no structural problems were visible. And an examination of city documents showed that some of the problems cited by Olshwanger have already been fixed.

Class: The unspoken word of the Shirley Sherrod affair

Michelle Singletary couldn’t quite bring herself to say the word — she used the term “” — but her column otherwise nailed the real story.

Instead of focusing on the politics behind the firing and subsequent redemption of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod, we should consider what she was trying to tell us when she addressed the NAACP…There is a disturbing and widening gulf between the rich and the poor in America. And it would be even wider except for the fact that so many middle-income families have borrowed their way to a comfortable lifestyle. They are just a paycheck, a divorce or a heath crisis away from financial ruin.

Sherrod said that while working with the white farmer, she realized that the social war we’ve been having isn’t about race but economic inequity.

“Y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have,” Sherrod said in her speech. “It’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.”

Journolist Uproar: Pot, meet kettle

I don’t think all these Daily Caller stories demonstrate that Journolist was a grand liberal media conspiracy, and almost everyone writes intemperate, sarcastic emails from time to time that would be embarrassing if leaked. Who cares?

Still, if this were a conservative listserv that had been leaked I don’t think liberal writers would be too outraged about privacy issues. And in fact, if you are writing anything in an electronic form that can be forwarded, you have essentially relinquished your right to privacy. Politicians don’t have it, why should journalists?

And there are some embarrassing remarks that have come out in the past few days. Some of the more steamed up liberal writers having orgasms on Obama’s election night are every bit as embarrassing as Rich Lowry ejaculating on his keyboard when writing about Sarah Palin.

“It’s all I can do not to start bawling.”

“I had to close my office door yesterday because I was watching YouTube videos of elderly African Americans saying what this meant to them and tearing up.” (Which reminds me of this Onion item).

The story published today reveals Journolisters talking about how to reply to Palin’s nomination. One comment: “That’s excellent! If enough people—people on this list?—write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket.”

Andrew Sullivan is dead on here: “There was a cozy, self-satisfied network of writers, bloggers, and journalists who shared a broad progressive position and supported the Democratic party (but often disagreed as well). The valid criticism is not that this is a conspiracy, but a clique, a clique that at times (but not always) fostered the notion of coordination, media management, and even petitions.”

Incidentally, Eric Alterman talking about “Fucking Nascar retards” is also pretty embarrassing, but it’s ironic that Jeffrey Goldberg pointed it out. In another item about Journolist, Goldberg wrote: “I tend to believe that group-think can lead people in dangerous directions, and so I try to avoid groups like this in any case.”

Jeffery Goldberg is a critic of “group-think”? This is the same Jeffrey Goldberg who wrote all those articles during the Iraq war — an example of media group-think at its worst — about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capabilities and his links to Osama bin Laden? That, as they say, is rich.

Note: Unlike Tucker Carlson, I never applied to be a member of Jornolist.

Spotty Record on Oil Rig Safety

From the New York Times:

A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oil rig exploded showed that many of them were concerned about safety practices and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.

In the survey, commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and that they “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.” Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, “which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance,” according to the survey, one of two Transocean reports obtained by The New York Times.

“At nine years old, Deepwater Horizon has never been in dry dock,” one worker told investigators. “We can only work around so much.”

Our Federal Government: Job training program for energy lobbyists

From the Washington Post:

Three out of every four lobbyists who represent oil and gas companies previously worked in the federal government, a proportion that far exceeds the usual revolving-door standards on Capitol Hill, a Washington Post analysis shows.

Key lobbying hires include 18 former members of Congress and dozens of former presidential appointees. For other senior management positions, the industry employs two former directors of the Minerals Management Service, the since-renamed agency that regulates the industry, and several top officials from the Bush White House. Federal inspectors once assigned to monitor oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico have landed jobs with the companies they regulated.

With more than 600 registered lobbyists, the industry has among the biggest and most powerful contingents in Washington. Its influence has been on full display in the wake of the BP oil disaster: Proposals to enact new restrictions or curb oil use have stalled amid concerted Republican opposition and strong objections from Democrats in oil-producing states.