ABC local affiliates owned by Hearst …

Boston, MA WCVB
Manchester, NH WMUR
Pittsburgh, PA WTAE
W. Palm Beach, FL WPBF
Portland-Auburn, ME WMTW
Kansas City, MO KMBC
Milwaukee, WI WISN
Oklahoma City, OK KOCO
Omaha, NE KETV
Jackson, MS WAPT
Fort Smith/Fayettville, AR KHBS/KHOG
Albuquerque, NM KOAT
Honolulu, HI KITV

Sinclair Broadcasting owns …

St. Louis, MO KDNL
Columbus, OH WSYX
Asheville, NC WLOS
Dayton, OH WKEF
Mobile, AL/Pensacola, FL WEAR
Springfield, IL WICD
Springfield, MA WGGB

If memory serves, Sinclair refused to air the edition of Nightline when Ted Koppel read the names of soldiers who had died in Iraq.

Also, we’re hearing that at least some program managers at local ABC affiliates around the country are planning to run rebuttal segments and/or panel with a mix of terrorism experts to add ‘balance’ or least deflect some criticism.

So here’s where we are. It now seems clear to just about everyone that the other shoe has now dropped. We know the president’s final strategy to keep the subpoenas at bay in 2007 and 2008. Put the worst al Qaida bad guys at Gitmo and force a rushed debate over legislation over how they will be tried. An up or down vote, either the president’s kangaroo courts or nothing.

Dare Democrats to vote for nothing. If they do, mutilate them with 30 seconds. If they don’t, sow dissension among the opposition.

It’s hardly a surprise. This whole White House is the fruit of the poison tree. Their national security policy has always been essentially political. Nothing has changed. It’s what all of us have always predicted.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Three Republican senators say they won’t play ball: Warner, McCain and Graham.

If the president can’t get a clean partisan vote in the senate, that takes a lot of the wind out of his sails, though they may be happy just to do the bogus vote in the House.

Warner, I don’t see where he gets rolled. He’s almost 80. Been a senator for twenty-five years. Been married to Liz Taylor. Opposed a Republican senate candidate from his own state. I think he sticks.

Graham, he seems like a fairly straight arrow on this stuff. Figure the same for him.

So it comes down to McCain. Not your ordinary Republican, I grant you. But really, really wants to be the next Republican President. My gut tells me he flakes and goes along with Bush. He’s basically already sold himself to the party’s establishment for the GOP nod in 2008.

But there’s another possibility.

McCain’s no fool. He can see that Bush is now about as popular as a week old mackerel. And he also knows that the GOP nomination will only get him the presidency if he still has some colorable claim to political independence when the election comes around. McCain may figure that he’s pandered and kowtowed enough to the Republican base that standing up to Bush can actually be in his political interest.

Jack Shafer has a very good and fairly Shaferly piece in Slate about the Lee Siegel brouhaha. Or, to be more specific because there are several, the one in which he got his TNR blog deep-sixed for toasting, adoring and defending himself in the guise of the commenter “sprezzatura”.

Shafer’s point or his question is simply: what exactly did Siegel do wrong? Everyone’s anonymous in a comment thread. Why can’t he be too?

I must say that I kind of agree with this. At least, in the narrow sense. Earlier this year the LA Times bounced the blog of business columnist Michael Hiltzik — who, by the way, wrote a really good book about the Social Security wars — for commenting at his and other blogs under a pseudonym. And it really wasn’t clear to me at the time why this should really be such a federal offense.

For the record, the only place I can think where I’ve commented in recent history is at TPMCafe. And there I’m “joshtpm.” So I figure people know who I am. But again, it’s not really clear to me why doing otherwise would be a journalistic breach. I’m not saying it’s okay. But it’s one of those questions that, I think, when you break it down is not completely clear. The reason I don’t do it, I guess, is that at some level it doesn’t seem honest to me, especially when it’s my blog or one like TPMCafe which I run even if I don’t write there that often.

Shafer, at the end of his piece, I think comes back to the real issue with Siegel — not that what he did is so shocking in itself but that his postings (once exposed as his) were so pompous, self-glorifying and morally frivolous that I think Frannk Foer must have just thought he embarrassed the magazine.

If other forms of employment have ‘morals’ clauses, punditry, I think, has a tacit lame-assery clause, which Frank must have thought Siegel violated. Like ‘moral turpitude’, ‘lame assery’ is one of those words which is both vague and endlessly extensible and yet so clear-cut and obvious when you see it right there in front of you.

(ed.note: I consider myself a friend of Foer’s. I’ve never met Siegel.)

With control of Congress nearing their grasp, Dems pressure lobbyists to fund their takeover. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

Rep. Pombo (R-CA) pulled into emerging Alaska oil and bribery scandal.

Lugar pulls Bolton nomination. Why, not clear.

TPM Reader DT on the ABC bamboozle and Scholastic …

I think Scholastic may be the weak link here. Scholastic is in the business of teaching children — and that requires that it present factual material. ABC will not readily pull The Path To 9/11 because it has advertised it so heavily and because it can pretend that its semi-fictional account is based on facts, etc. Also, I doubt ABC can reshoot made-up scenes between now and Sunday or find a replacement on its schedule. The best we may see from ABC is a more prominent display of the falsity of its docudrama.

Scholastic, on the other hand, does not have the same investment as ABC does in the program. It would not surprise me if Scholastic executives were unaware of the liberties that the docudrama takes with the facts. Scholastic will suffer much more reputational harm from teaching lies to children than ABC will from airing a “docudrama.” We can already see that while abc.com still prominently advertises The Path To 9/11, Scholastic has, at least temporarily, scrubbed its site of 9/11 materials. The corporate offices of Scholastic are at 212-343-6400. (I note that a customer service representative offered me this number without prompting when I mentioned the 9/11 controversy, so I’m not handing out a number that Scholastic is hiding.)

If Scholastic pulls out of the project because the docudrama is inaccurate, that would increase pressure on ABC to admit that its program contains gross falsehoods.

This may be true. I would also say, though, that you get the names of the key advertisers with your local ABC affiliates and contact them, and you’ll hear people squeal very quickly.

Let me return for a moment to my comments last night about the Lee Siegel/Sprezzatura controversy. As I said last night, what Siegel did seemed to me at some level just not honest with readers. But it wasn’t clear to me precisely why. Emails from a number of readers, however, have allowed me to parse the technological and ethical contours of the question and clarify the problem. All or most commenters may be anonymous. But to be an ‘anonymous’ commenter on your own site is not to be anonymous but rather to impersonate, since you are claiming to be a third party, someone other than yourself. I think that clarifies it for me.

Of course, Siegel was scotched on lame-assery clause regardless. But this only adds to his infamy.

Bill Clinton’s attorney, Bruce Lindsey, has written to ABC chief Bob Iger protesting the network’s decision to air the 9/11 docudrama, “The Path to 9/11.” Full text of the letter here.

Boston’s ABC affiliate WCVB is apparently telling viewers they have no choice but to run the ABC 9/11 movie. But I’m not sure that’s true since they’re an independent affiliate. The station is owned by Hearst, not ABC.