It’s a sign of where the story is going. You know that Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Chairman of the House Appropriations committee, is now under criminal investigation as part of the expanded Duke Cunningham probe. Tomorrow’s Times has a lengthy piece on one of Lewis’ key staffers-turned-lobbyists, Letitia White.
She’s the next big thing.
White too has become a focus of investigators. She left Lewis’ employ to go work for Congressman-turned-lobbyist Bill Lowery, who’s deep into the Brent Wilkes-Duke Cunningham-nogoodnik network.
And as long as we’re on the subject I want to make sure everyone saw and sees this crackerjack reporting TPMmuckraker’s Justin Rood did on White ten days ago.
Did Brian Bilbray get his race-baiting card to run on to replace Duke Cunningham?
A few days ago Matt Yglesias noted how a refusal to believe that Global Warming exists has become something like an article of faith within what passes today as conservatism, even though there’s no logical reason why that should be the case other than the Republican party’s current reliance on oil companies for campaign money and how much conservatives have invested in demonizing Al Gore. And I’m reminded how right Matt was by this ‘review‘ of the Gore movie by Kyle Smith in the New York Post. Much of it is predictable snark and trash talk. But some of the argumentation deserves to be preserved in the annals of nonsense.
Consider this passage encouraging a thoughtful reconsideration of whether ‘pollution’ causes Global Warming …
Global warming hasn’t noticed that we got the lead out of our gasoline or that Stage One smog days in Los Angeles fell from 121 in 1977 to zero in 2004. All regulations and taxes to date have done nothing. Does this hint that pollution isn’t the cause?
Priceless.
The investigation into House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) heats up. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
After we devoted a decent amount of column space last week to dissecting AP reporter John Solomon’s series of pieces on Sen. Harry Reid, a number of readers wrote in to ask what I thought was up. There were all sorts of theories — some reasonable, others more outlandish. So I thought I’d weigh in on my sense of this.
First off, I don’t think the issue is bias per se. I strongly suspect the issue is oppo research. And let me explain what I mean by that.
There’s nothing wrong with a reporter picking up a story from an opposition research shop, at least not in itself. (To think otherwise is to have a wholly unrealistic sense of what motivates tipsters. Almost all of them have some agenda or axe to grind. It’s just not always a clear partisan one.)
Republicans dig up stuff about Democrats and vice versa. Not infrequently they find out stuff that really should get published. The key is that you don’t just take something some oppo researcher hands you and run it under your byline. How it should work is that you take what they’ve found and you report it out yourself. If it really is a story and it all checks out, then the underlying facts aren’t tainted just because they were unearthed by an interested party.
Unfortunately though, and as you might suspect, that’s often not how it works. And without naming names, there are some high-profile reporters out there — whose bylines appear with the imprimatur of very distinguished news organizations — who’ve developed a reputation in the business (and particularly among oppo researchers) for being easy marks for oppo research drive-by hits.
Actually, ‘easy marks’ probably isn’t the best word for it. Since it’s not that they’re naive or easily taken in. It’s more like the Mikey kid in the old Life cereal commercials: They’ll eat anything. More to the point, they’ll launder the oppo research into print with the spin, deceptive ordering or suppression of key facts intact.
Now, I have no specific knowledge of how the Reid reporting came into existence. But based on some relatively detailed background knowledge of the players involved I strongly suspect this is how it all came into being.
If you want to know more about this, I strongly recommend reading this 2004 piece by Josh Green in the Atlantic Monthly with a specific attention to the bylines of the hit articles Green discusses. It’s very revealing.
As long as we’re on the subject of the AP’s reportage on Harry Reid, I thought it made sense to point out that the AP put out a statement last week about TPMmuckraker’s reporting on the John Solomon/Harry Reid imbroglio. And the author of that statement made two demonstrably false claims about our reporting. Not charges we disagree with — but purported statements of fact that were in fact demonstrably false.
The best we can tell, they have not corrected the record and have no intention of doing so.
Interesting. Justin Rood says DHS may not deserve a lot of the clobbering they’re taking over the distribution of Homeland Security grants.
We have what promises to be a enlightening and probably combustible TPMCafe Book Club this week with Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Joining Peter for the discussion will be Armando from Daily Kos, Ivo Daalder, Todd Gitlin, Danny Goldberg, Michael Hirsh, Karen Kornbluh, Max Sawicky, and Mark Schmitt. I’ll probably chime in at some point too. Peter just got the ball rolling with his first post.
Sebastian Mallaby has a column in today’s paper properly lambasting Congress for abolishing the estate tax, which it appears set to do. It’s a good column. And it runs through many of the almost innumerable good reasons for opposing abolition.
But I’m writing with a specific request. I’m interested in some play-by-play on how this shakes out in the Senate this week. And I’m curious whether anyone out there might be interested in blogging about this over at TPMCafe. You don’t need any fancy initials after your name. Just a solid understanding of the policy issues at stake and a grasp of who’s who in Congress — enough to give us a clear sense of what’s happening, who’s wavering, etc.
If you’re interested, drop me a note to the comments email.