Newsweek's newest political contributor, Markos of Daily Kos, has his first column up about the war funding bills and how Democrats so far have failed to keep their promise.

It's the second most widely read article on Newsweek's site. Go on over and read it. Besides being really good, it'd be great to push him to Number One. A snippet:

If Reid and Pelosi stand firm they will finally fulfill one of their key 2006 campaign promises, proving they have the courage to stand tough for what they believe, while giving the vast majority of the American people what they want.

If they yield they will reinforce perceptions of Democratic weakness. Worse, they will be siding with an unpopular president and an unpopular Republican Party over an unpopular war, and their own popularity will suffer as a result.

The options to those of us outside of the Beltway are so obvious it's truly unfathomable that we are still left wondering which path the Democrats will take.

Congress is now on a two week break. The Senate returns December 3 and the House on December 4.

Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice believes the first of the two unnamed senior Fox officials named in Judith Regan's lawsuit is Roger Ailes. He's said so on Countdown, Democracy Now and the Abrams Report. Salon has more.

"The funny thing about Judith Regan's complaint is that she doesn't refer to Roger Ailes by name for the first 16 pages, right?" Barrett told Keith Olbermann of MSNBC on Wednesday. "But Roger Ailes is ... clearly the person she is referring to as this senior executive who made all these suggestions to her." The next day, on "Democracy Now," host Amy Goodman opened her segment with Barrett by stating as fact that "Regan ... was talking about Roger Ailes." Barrett responded, "I'm sure you're correct."

Another Salon article adds more dates to the timeline:[More]

Working for Fox and its deleterious effects. It makes you blind. Case in point, Juan Williams:

The fact is that (Moulitsas is) not a journalist in terms of someone who knows how to do reporting, someone who reflects balance in what he portrays. To the contrary, he engages in the kind of hyperbole and extreme statements that are represented by that crass and I think offensive statement that he made about those dead people. But you know what? I think that’s just what’s going on in journalism. I think that there’s more and more opinion, less and less people who know how to do the job. All you gotta do is shout, say something on the blog that offends and attacks the other side and suddenly you have the credentials and you’re said to be a journalist. I think it’s a great lie.”

Setting aside that Juan Williams has no idea what Daily Kos is about, does Juan know what Fox News is? Bill O'Reilly Juan? What a ridiculous fool he is.

Now a part of the cowardly Media.

Congrats to him. Now he is part of the problem . . .

Update (TL): Congratulations, Markos. Newsweek couldn't have picked a better choice. I disagree with Big Tent that he's now part of "the problem." If anything, now more people will get to read him and hopefully be swayed by what he has to write.

Many bloggers write for big media from time to time, myself included, and there's nothing wrong with being paid for our work. To think Markos would change his stripes because he's writing for big media is just silly. He won't.

Update [2007-11-13 19:21:41 by Big Tent Democrat]: I was joking. I totally agree with Jeralyn. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

This is hard to understand:

Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Of course, Greg Sargent is right (Michael Crowley stupidly argues that Clinton is getting great coverage, but Michael Crowley is pretty dim generally) that Clinton has every reason to be suspicious of reporters, but my question is why would reporters be fearful of reprisals? What will a campaign withhold? Positive spin? What else does access get them? How stupid can the Media be?

I know, as stupid as all get out. See coverage of the Bush Administration if we have any doubt.

Bob Herbert provides must reading today, especially for Brad DeLong, Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Brendan Nyhan, and of course, David Brooks.

Herbert writes:

Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

More...

Someone else, Ezra, notices how bad Bell Curve Sully has Clinton Derangement Syndrome:

. . . Sullivan is demonstrating . . . that, if Clinton is elected, he will . . . use his platform, his dozens of posts a day, his megaphone into the elite, to bring back the constant psychosexual speculation, the bizarre paranoia about the "true" nature of their marriage, the constant questioning of Hillary's feminist credentials, etc, etc. Phrased another way, Sullivan is saying, "nice press corps you have here. Shame if something should happen to it." That's the deal he, and some others in the media, are offering: Don't vote for Clinton, and we won't descend into hysterical Clinton-hatred again. As he writes at the end of his post, "I just want this on the record, ok?" And so it is.

The man is insane.

Like Booman (who responds to me here without actually addressing my points), many in the Left blogosphere seem oblivious to the Media bias against Democratic candidates. Bob Somerby demonstrates:

. . . According to Matt and Kevin, Russert performs a stale, stupid version of gotcha journalism. But land o’ goshen, people! He does it to everyone! Matt implies that Russert goes after both parties. Following up, Kevin seems to comes right out and say it—though we’ll admit that his language is framed in such a way that he hasn’t actually said this.

. . . At this point, it’s astounding when liberals go out of their way to say that Russert treats Republicans the same way he treats Democrats. If you want to know how Dems lose elections, just gaze on the way these two fine fellows refuse to fight; refuse to observe; refuse to stand up for your side.

Does Russert treat Republicans the way he treats Dems? By now, that case would be exceptionally hard to make. [More]

Speaking for me only

Brad DeLong is a great progressive commentator on matters economic. But, for a second time that I know of, DeLong has demonstrated a thoughtlessness about race issues. The first, in which he was joined by Matt Yglesias, involved a defense of Bill Bennett's offensive remarks regarding fighting crime through termination of African American pregnancies. (See also Nathan Newman's great piece on the subject.) Today, in pointing out factual errors in a Bob Herbert column (Herbert erroenously confused the Consumer Price Index with the core inflation rate and confusingly used the technical term recession when making an argument about our skewed economy), DeLong, in my view, innocently but insensitively, asked:

How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery.

Now, everyone is entitled to their opinion about Bob Herbert. Mine is that he is a national treasure. Certainly NOT liking Herbert is a respectable, though wrongheaded opinion. But surely DeLong SHOULD have known what his comment would invite.

For example, "respectable" champion race baiter, Andrew "Bell Curve" Sullivan wrote:

A question only a left-liberal could ask:

"How has the New York Times managed to pick Bob Herbert out of the 75 million liberal adults in America? It is a mystery." Is he kidding me?

Get it? It's because Herbert is black. Ha! What a funny racist idiot Sullivan is. And make no mistake. Andrew Sullivan is a racist. More.

Via andgarden, Paul Krugman notices that David Brooks is a "heinous" dissembler:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake. Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

. . . Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake. . . .

Hopefully people like Kevin Drum will know better than to defend this Brooks tripe.

Author Norman Mailer has died of renal failure at age 84.

Via Atrios, the Heartland speaks:

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

That this was said by the person who was wrongly alleged to have not received a tip speaks volumes.

But this is a warning for us all. Too many blogs ignore the issues and go for the so-called "poltics." Too many citizens do the same thing. Of course it starts with the Media, but we do not have to echo it.

If you care about issues, then talk about issues. Despite what the Media thinks:

In the first five months of this year, almost two-thirds of the mainstream media campaign coverage was devoted to the horse race (and subsidiaries thereof, like polls, tactics and fund-raising). Why do we do it? Lots of reasons. I’ll start with the obvious: We can’t help ourselves! . . . Another reason: It’s easier. It takes time and patience to dig through records, to get answers from candidates that go beyond spin.

Only the lazy and stupid think discussing issues is hard or uninteresting. Yes that means the Media. But it does not have to mean us.