Dayhoff Soundtrack: TimesWatch: Times Raises Sestak Bribe Allegation, Presses Obama on Hypocrisy

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

TimesWatch: Times Raises Sestak Bribe Allegation, Presses Obama on Hypocrisy

Documenting and Exposing the Liberal Political Agenda of the New York Times
Tuesday May 25, 2010 @ 05:32 PM EDT

NYT Sees GOP's Special Election Loss as Harbinger for November
The Times continued to use its front-page real estate to trumpet last week's G.O.P.'s loss in a special House election in Pennsylvania as a warning sign for the 2010 elections, even though the seat had been occupied by veteran Democrat Rep. John Murtha and Democrats hold a registration edge in the district of 2-1.

The Times Follows the Aftermath of Climate-Gate in Britain
Reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal's front-page fret: "Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the Rplanet?"

Times Raises Sestak Bribe Allegation, Presses Obama on Hypocrisy
Peter Baker is the first Times reporter to directly address Sestak's allegations of the White House bribing him to drop out of the Democratic primary, and even raises the hypocrisy angle: "Even if the conversations were perfectly legal, as the White House claims, the situation challenges President Obama's efforts to present himself as a reformer who will fix a town of dirty politics. And the refusal to even discuss what was discussed does not advance the White House's well-worn claim to being 'the most transparent' in history."

NYT's Economic Guru Again Hits Reagan for 'Magnifying Income Inequality'
David Leonhardt brags on Obama, who is on a regulatory roll: "Today, he looks more like a liberal answer to Ronald Reagan." He then blames Reagan for fostering income inequality, and praises Obama for fighting it.

NYT Sees GOP's Special Election Loss as Harbinger for November

The Times continued to use its front-page real estate to trumpet last week's G.O.P.'s loss in a special House election in Pennsylvania as a warning sign for the 2010 elections, even though the seat had been occupied by veteran Democrat Rep. John Murtha and Democrats hold a registration edge in the district of 2-1.

On Thursday it was congressional reporter Carl Hulse's “House Victory Lifts Democrats' Hopes for Fall.” On Monday, Hulse (pictured at right) teamed with reporter Jeff Zeleny for another front-page story, flipping the coin from Democratic hopes to Republicans worrying they're going to blow their chance: “Republicans See Big Chance, But Worry About Wasting It.”

Republicans remain confident of making big gains in the fall elections, but as the midterm campaign begins in earnest, they face a series of challenges that could keep the party from fully capitalizing on an electorate clamoring for change in Washington.

There are growing concerns among Republicans about the party’s get-out-the-vote operation and whether it can translate their advantage over Democrats in grass-roots enthusiasm into turnout on Election Day. They are also still trying to get a fix on how to run against President Obama, who, polls suggest, remains relatively well-liked by voters, even as support for his agenda has waned.

....

A series of events last week prompted a re-examination among Republicans of where the party stands less than six months before the midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, a Republican House candidate, Tim Burns, lost a special election by 8 points in a swing district of the sort the party needs to capture to have a shot of regaining the majority. And in a Republican primary for a Senate seat from Kentucky, Rand Paul, a leading emblem of the Tea Party, won a commanding victory.

The story buried a piece of good news for Republicans – they actually picked up a seat in a special election in of all places, blue (state) Hawaii:

Republicans continue to have much in their favor, and over all appear to be in a stronger position than Democrats. They continue to benefit from a widespread sense among voters that government has gotten too expansive, with Mr. Obama’s health care bill as Exhibit A. The economic recovery remains tepid, with unemployment still high.

Republicans raised more money than Democrats last month, a reflection of the optimism about the potential for gains in November among the party’s contributors. And the party did pick up a House seat in Hawaii on Saturday in a special election in a district that is heavily Democratic -- two rival Democrats split their party’s vote -- but Democrats expressed confidence they would win the seat back in November.

While Democrats also face challenges motivating their base this year, the Democratic margin of victory in the House race in Pennsylvania suggests that the party may enjoy organizational capabilities that Republicans do not.

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The Times Follows the Aftermath of Climate-Gate in Britain

Thursday's A1 story from London by environmental reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal was headlined “Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britains.” Who is to blame? "Right-leaning newspapers," for one.

Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

....

Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.

Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history.)

Rosenthal detailed the push-back by believers in the theory of global warming as a man-made and harmful phenomenon, then pinned an ideological label on other news organs more open to debate on the issue than the New York Times:

It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world.

In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.

The Times has never identified itself in a news story as a "left-leaning newspaper."

And this scary speech suppression of German newspapers didn't overly concern Rosenthal:

Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, successfully demanded in February that some German newspapers remove misleading articles from their Web sites. But such reports have become so common that he “wouldn’t bother” to pursue most cases now, he added.

The Times would be in little danger of such censorship -- its coverage of the global warming (led until this year by Andrew Revkin) has been sufficiently alarmist for the climate change pushers.

In December 2009, Rosenthal saw utter catastrophe in the alleged “disappearance” of glaciers from the Andes mountain range over Bolivia:

A World Bank report concluded last year that climate change would eliminate many glaciers in the Andes within 20 years, threatening the existence of nearly 100 million people.

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Times Raises Sestak Bribe Allegation, Presses Obama on Hypocrisy

The Times at last devoted a story to the Sestak controversy in Tuesday's “White House Answer on Sestak Raises More Questions” by Peter Baker. Sestak, who beat sitting Senator Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, has long claimed the White House offered him a job to quit the race and let Specter run unopposed as a Democrat.

For three months, the White House has refused to say whether it offered a job to Representative Joe Sestak to get him to drop his challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Mr. Sestak has asserted.

But the White House wants everyone who suspects that something untoward, or even illegal, might have happened to rest easy: though it still will not reveal what happened, the White House is reassuring skeptics that it has examined its own actions and decided it did nothing wrong. Whatever it was that it did.

The surprisingly cynical text box: “No principles were harmed in making this election, the White House says.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “trust us” response from the White House has not exactly put the matter to rest. With Mr. Sestak’s victory over Mr. Specter in last week’s primary, the questions have returned with intensity, only to remain unanswered. Mr. Gibbs deflected questions 13 times at a White House briefing last week just two days after the primary. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral, has reaffirmed his assertion without providing any details, like who exactly offered what job.

Baker raised the hypocrisy point:

Even if the conversations were perfectly legal, as the White House claims, the situation challenges President Obama’s efforts to present himself as a reformer who will fix a town of dirty politics. And the refusal to even discuss what was discussed does not advance the White House’s well-worn claim to being “the most transparent” in history.

When Mr. Gibbs was pressed on the matter Thursday, he resolutely referred to his original statement exonerating the White House and refused to elaborate.

....

Ron Kaufman, who had the same job under the first President George Bush, said it would not be surprising for a White House to use political appointments to accomplish a political goal. “Tell me a White House that didn’t do this, back to George Washington,” Mr. Kaufman said. “But here’s the difference -- the times have changed and the ethics have changed and the scrutiny has changed. This is the kind of thing people across America are mad about.”

Moreover, he said, Mr. Obama’s own rhetoric raised the bar: “When you get out there and say, ‘We’re going to do things totally different, we’re above all this and we’re going to be totally transparent,’ they cause their own problem because they’re not being transparent.”

NYT's Economic Guru Again Hits Reagan for 'Magnifying Income Inequality'

In his “Economic Scene” column on Saturday, “A Progressive Agenda To Remake Washington,” David Leonhardt, the paper's resident economics thinker, pushed his single-minded focus on fighting the liberal white whale of “income inequality.”

Leonhardt again blamed President Ronald Reagan for “magnifying income inequality” and praised Obama for trying to ameliorate it (and has it both ways a bit by calling Obama “a liberal answer to Ronald Reagan”). Liberal nostrums to the contrary, income inequality in itself is not a universally negative trait, especially for growing economies, but Leonhardt doesn't factor those clashing ideas into his thinking.

Leonhardt bragged that after the passage of both health care and financial "reform," Obama is on a bit of a regulatory roll:

...the turnabout since Jan. 20 -- the first anniversary of Mr. Obama’s inauguration and the day after Scott Brown, a Republican, won a Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts -- has been remarkable. Then, commentators pronounced the Obama presidency nearly dead. Today, he looks more like a liberal answer to Ronald Reagan.

....

Mr. Obama has been trying to reverse the Reagan thrust in some important ways. Although the Reagan administration did not shrink the size of the federal government, it changed the ways that Washington collected and spent its money, by reducing taxes on the affluent, cutting some social programs and increasing military spending.

These policies ended up magnifying income inequality, which was already rising for other reasons. Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled. Every major piece of the Obama agenda is meant, in part, to push back against inequality. Government may grow, but the bigger change will be how the government is spending its money.

A good neo-liberal, Leonhardt at least noted that many victories of the Reagan Revolution still stand today:

For all these differences, though, there are also ways that Mr. Obama and today’s Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project. They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets, not expand Medicare.

Most striking, the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed their rules to allow more charter schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado signed a bill that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to some who did poorly.

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