It’s pretty sad when you can catch the bureau chief of a major news magazine in silly errors like this.
Guess which Washington Post reporter is taking questions from readers today at 11 A.M.? Our good friend John Solomon.
This might be a good occasion for readers to ask Solomon some of the many outstanding questions about the hit-piece he did last week on John Edwards. The chat will be held here.
We have a list of ideas for questions here.
Okay, so tonight’s the State of the Union address. And as we discussed yesterday, we want to see your response. Crank up the webcam or videocam or even your cell-phone, and deliver your response. Sen. Webb (D-VA) gets to deliver the official response from the Democrats. But we want to see yours too.
How long should it be? Style? We’re going to leave that to you, long or short, detailed and specific on particular points or general and thematic. Respond the way you want to respond. We don’t expect professionally quality video — just so we can see your face and hear your voice clearly.
And here’s how to send it into us.
To post a video, just:
1. sign in to YouTube (or make an account if you don’t have one, it’s very quick),
2. upload your video to your account here: http://youtube.com/my_videos_upload
3. go to the TPM SOTU Group here: http://youtube.com/group/tpmsotu
4. join the group by clicking “Join This Group” to the right of the group title
5. add your video by choosing “Add Videos” to the right of the title, choosing from your videos as clicking “Add to Group”
Your video may not immediately appear. We’ll do a quick check just to make sure it’s a State of the Union response and not a dog training video or a home marital activity update and then we’ll upload it to the group site.
Your video will then be available to view along with other members of the TPM community.
You can then watch each other’s videos and we’ll make a collection of some of our favorites later tonight.
Fresh from this morning’s Armed Services Committee hearings, see Sen. Lieberman (D-CT) beg fellow senators not to criticize the president’s escalation plan. See the video here.
Hmmm. The John Solomon online chat turned out to be a pretty sorry affair. Here at TPM we spent the last few minutes trying to figure out what Solomon’s now saying Edwards even did wrong. Solomon now seems to be running away from the idea that there was anything wrong or untoward about the transaction itself — the identity of the buyer, the sale price, issues related to the buyer, etc. — and focusing on whether Edwards miffed a disclosure requirement. Now MediaMatters says that on this point Solomon’s actually misstating federal law.
Let me focus on a few points here. In his response to controversies about this and previous articles, Solomon refers to the blogged-based discussion or controversies surrounding his work. Often he implies that online controversy is simply the natural response to hard-hitting investigative journalism. And that may be true. But Solomon’s far too generous with himself. This isn’t just chatter from the blogs. Solomon’s work is, to put it generously, quite ‘controversial’ among many of his colleagues as well. It was that way at the AP. And since two of Solomon’s new Post colleagues have now publicly questioned the merits of his debut front page piece (the paper’s ombudsman being one of the two) I think it’s fair to his work is controversial at the new shop too.
Update from G.S.: More on the obvious absurdities of Solomon’s pushback here.
Nope, John Solomon’s not out of the woods just yet. WaPo ombud Deborah Howell plans to address his John Edwards story in her column this week.
It’s nice to see the GOP surrogates are doing a little pre-SOTU warm up by spouting a new crop of ridiculous lies and comical rewritings of history.
Here for instance is serial bamboozler and former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie just moments ago on MSNBC waxing poetic about President Bush’s plan to balance the budget by 2012 and claiming that the last time the budget was balanced was in 1998.
Unlike the more established Republican tradition of chat show lying, I’m not even sure what it is this goof is trying to hang his hat on with this whopper. Back on planet earth we know that the budget became balanced during the Clinton presidency and remained in balance until he left office in 2001.
According to this October 24th, 2000 article at CNN.com, the 1999 budget surplus was $69.2 billion; 1999 was $124.4 billion; and 2000 was $237 billion.
President Bush oversaw the return to massive deficits.
So really what Gillespie should have said was that it was great that President Bush is considering balancing the budget since that hasn’t happened since he became president after there had been three consecutive years of budget surprluses and plunged the country right back into deficits. But when you hear how that sounds I guess I can understand why he just decided to lie instead.
Late Update: Here’s a pretty good example of one of those graphs, if a bit too large to squeeze into the TPM post column width.
In case you missed it, today’s the first day of Scooter Libby’s trial.
Okay, we’ve got little more than four hours before the president walks into the House chamber to give the State of the Union address. Are you ready to send us your official video response to the president’s speech?
No fancy gizmos required. If you’ve got a nice video camera, great. If not, the handy webcam will do. Just crank it up and record your response. Here are the instructions for how to upload it. It can be long or short, specific and particular or general and thematic. It’s up to you. Just so we can see you and hear your voice.
Don’t let Jim Webb have all the fun!
Join us.