NightBlogger

From: Think Progress.org
Last night, Fox News’s Carl Cameron reported that “there was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgability [sic] necessary to be a running mate, vice president, and a heartbeat away from the Presidency.” For example, aides said Palin did not know that Africa was a continent, rather than a country. According to ABC News, Palin dismissed the internal criticism and refused to comment on the specific allegations:

PALIN: That’s kind of a small, evidently bitter type of person who would anonymously charge something foolish like that, that I perhaps didn’t know an answer to a question. So until I know who is talking about it, I won’t have a comment on false allegations.

Watch it:

The explosive claims — including that Palin could not name the signatories to NAFTA and that she refused to prepare before her Katie Couric interviews — are the latest signs of infighting and finger-pointing among McCain campaign staffers, not to mention evidence that Palin was difficult to control. For example, Newsweek and the New York Times are reporting that Palin spent far more than the originally-reported $150,000 on clothing, including spending on shoes, jewelry, and even luggage.

While Palin’s astounding misunderstanding of the basic nature of Africa has not yet been confirmed, it certainly would not deviate from her demonstrated lack of fundamental knowledge about the world:

– Palin suggested the U.S. shares a border with Afghanistan, calling it “our neighboring country.”
– Palin touted her foreign policy experience by explaining, “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
– Palin suggested the U.S. was in a war with Iran.
– Palin claimed that “Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America,” though there have been no Russian incursions of American airspace during Palin’s tenure.

The fact that Palin thought, for example, that South Africa was just a region of the larger country of Africa makes McCain’s claim to have “turned to her for advice” on foreign policy “many times” that much more implausible — or frightening.

Go to Think Progress.org for supportive links.

Dave Lindorff
The sorry performance of the US corporate media, which blacked out stories questioning the official line on the so-called “Iraq Threat” until the nation was deeply mired in to pointless, bloody war in that country, and which has almost completely ignored a three-year, nation-wide movement calling for the impeachment of the president and vice president, has continued.

Search far and wide, and you will find no reporting on the fact that Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has filed a total 36 proposed articles of impeachment against President Bush, is finally going to get to formally present his case to the House Judiciary Committee, beginning on July 25. Although this is not an impeachment hearing, it is putting impeachment “on the table,” from which it has been banned for two years by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Although the House last week voted 251-166 to send Kucinich’s articles to the Judiciary Committee for hearings, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the nation’s television news organizations ignored this breakthrough (which included 24 Republicans voting for the measure). Only USA Today, at least in its online edition, even mentioned it, with a headline saying “Pelosi cracks door open on impeachment resolution”–and that was just a five-sentence story. More

Michael Arrington
TechCrunch.com
Thursday, June 19, 2008; 1:09 AM

I’m not normally one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but something is just plain rotten in this whole New York Times/Associated Press/Media Bloggers Association love fest.

As I wrote earlier today, the New York Times just won’t stop defending the Associated Press and their position that quoting from their articles is a copyright infringement (it isn’t). The NYTimes’ Saul Hansell has now written three blog posts and one feature article on the mess, all defending the A.P. None of those articles disclose the NYTimes’ partial ownership or board seat with the A.P.

In the first article, Hansell wrote that the A.P. was negotiating with the Media Bloggers Association to negotiate guidelines around use of A.P. content, even though copyright law already sets forth very clear guidelines on fair use. Any more restrictive measures wouldn’t be enforceable, but the A.P. has shown that it’s willing to use it’s army of lawyers to make life hell for anyone that tries. The easy way out is to simply pay the A.P. for quotations of more than four words.

Throughout Hansell’s posts there is a noticeable lack of criticism towards the A.P., or even recognition that this is a two sided issue. In his third post, this source left a comment basically retracting all the original material. More

In a front-page article headlined “Is McCain Like Bush? It Depends on the Issue,” the New York Times (6/17/08) managed to locate “striking differences” between Sen. John McCain and George W. Bush on several issues—in spite of contradictory evidence reported in the very same article about the two politicians’ overwhelming similarities on these very issues.

In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes that “on the environment, American diplomacy and nuclear proliferation, Mr. McCain has strikingly different views from Mr. Bush.” Yet Bumiller offers little evidence for these supposedly striking differences. In fact, on the environment, she points out that while McCain has called for limits on greenhouse gas emissions, he “has a mixed record on the environment in the Senate — he has missed votes on toughening fuel economy standards and has opposed tax breaks meant to encourage alternative energy.”

Meanwhile, despite Bumiller’s claim about McCain and Bush’s “strikingly different views” on diplomacy, an accompanying chart includes “Diplomacy with Iran and Syria” as an area where Bush and McCain “mostly agree. ” As the chart observed, “Like the president, Mr. McCain has ruled out direct talks with Iran and Syria for now. Mr. McCain supported Mr. Bush when he likened those who would negotiate with ‘terrorists and radicals’ to appeasers of the Nazis, a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama.” More

Pic courtesy of Zac-Attack

This from Salon.com:

[The]…New York Times article by David Barstow, documenting the Pentagon and U.S. media’s joint use of pre-programmed “military analysts” who posed as objective experts while touting the Government line and having extensive business interests in promoting those views, is very well-documented and well-reported. And credit to the NYT for having sued to compel disclosure of the documents on which the article is based. There are significant elements of the story that exemplify excellent investigative journalism.

At the same time, though, in light of questions on this very topic raised even by the NYT back in 2003, it is difficult to take the article’s underlying points seriously as though they are some kind of new revelation. And ultimately, to the extent there are new revelations here, they are a far greater indictment of our leading news organizations than the government officials on whom it focuses.

Read more