The ever-progessing debate within the Democratic Party on how to recover the South has continued in the last few weeks, taking on some interesting features. There is there the more constructive angle, exemplified in the recent New Strategies for Southern Progress conference (discussed in the Nation). Then there is the backbiting, such that [...]

I’ll have a piece up on Democratic Underground tomorrow. Let me know what you think.
And to the guy who stole my piece on Chris Cox and posted it on Slate without credit, cut it out. I don’t mind if you use it, but have the decency to tell ‘em where you got it.
UPDATE: The [...]

Although the Fishbowl started a day or two after BTC News began its own quixotic quest for a White House correspondent and seemed to be having even less luck than we were for the first two days, they exercised some well-earned juice and got in.

What most bloggers don’t have is something the lack of which is far more valuable than anything we do have, and that’s a stake in massaging the sources that fuel the national political press. It matters not the slightest bit if a blogger offends Scott McClellan or any senior administration official with awkward questions because we’re not reliant upon access to them. We have nothing to lose.

In a press release dated Friday, Oak Ridge announced it had helped the Richard Childress Racing Team, headlined by driver Jeff Burton and the Number 31 Chevy, significantly improve the performance of Childress driver Kevin Harvick’s Number 29 Chevy by providing valuable data to the manufacturer of the car’s valve springs.

Our White House correspondent is your White House correspondent. We welcome news tips and suggestions for questions, and we will notify readers a day or two in advance of the briefings we’ll be attending.

Here’s my understanding of the WhiteHouse/BTC News relationship: Our site has been accepted as a news and commentary organization, and we’re able to issue credentials for whomever we choose to attend White House daily briefings and other White House press events.
Because our most experienced journalist, Paul Berger—Paul has written for a wide range of publications [...]

The administration has a habit of paying lip service to the poor and then cutting or gutting programs aimed directly at helping them. Before last November’s election, there was a joke making the rounds to the effect that if the President asked to speak alongside and praised someone involved in providing services to the poor, that person’s program was doomed. And as the mounting deficit and the increase in military spending stresses the budget, discretionary spending programs designed to help low income citizens make ever more tempting targets.

The war in Iraq has been stage-managed pretty slickly by our political and media elite–the Jessica Lynch rescue, the toppled statue, the caskets that no one is supposed to see, the bunker busters that were dropped with great fanfare on nonexistent bunkers, and, perhaps, even Saddam’s capture. So it is gratifying, to us who have [...]

The small conversations in which Bush participates when he’s selling a particular agenda are mirrors of the national conversations— the administration want to talk with people who are already on their side—and the ones ongoing in the US House and Senate.

I don’t know why this strikes me as funny, but every member of the Presidential Delegation going to the dedication of the new Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem appears to be Jewish. Apparently the significance has narrowed?
Other countries are being a bit more catholic in their choice of delegates.

In other words, I set out to informally interview the guy and he interviewed me without my actually being aware of it until some time later, when the realization hit that this is one extremely proficient reporter. And this wasn’t even in the flesh or on the phone.

Tom Fenton, long the premier European foreign correspondent for CBS News, has a book out that may as well be required reading for anyone who detests the current state of the press*. Bad News is a completely damning indictment of the broadcast and cable news industries.
Dan Rather doesn’t come off particularly well in the book [...]

Stein and Barstow say that “The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them.” If accurate, this means the networks are being paid to distribute government propaganda disguised as news.

BTC News will have a representative at one or two of the White House press gaggles and briefings this week. We’re looking for succinct, documentable questions to ask the press secretary, assuming we get the opportunity. If you have anything you’d like us to ask, leave it in the comments.
Sample:
On February 27 of 2003, Paul [...]

I’m writing this in the basement of the White House, at an empty desk in the warren of cubbyholes used by members of the press in between events upstairs in the briefing room. I arrived shortly after 9 am, expecting to attend the scheduled 9:30 “gaggle” and then the televised 12:30 briefing with Scott McClellan, [...]

This is a country in which we can’t figure out a way to get everyone covered by some form of health care but we can figure out a way to make sure that the people who get crushed by medical bills incurred because they didn’t have health insurance, can’t wiggle out from under the rock. The ratio of suicide to bankruptcy is about to take a jump. Next step, debtors prisons. Hey, free health care! For now, anyway.

I have to confess that I didn’t think there could really be more than one interpretation of the ascension to World Bank president by Paul Wolfowitz, but there are. Several, in fact, if you look at the comments upon the post linked above.
Daniel Drenzer, whom I believe to be the token moderate among the advertised [...]

If you’ve ever watched a White House briefing or presidential news conference and thought, “Damn, I wish they’d ask him about …,” now’s your chance.

The right has a network of think tanks providing expert commentary for the press (in which I include television ‘”news”) and a farm system producing an endless stream of progressively more reactionary political candidates and operatives. They worked hard to get where they are. But most people still don’t embrace the far right conceptually: polls inevitably show respondents more supportive of progressive and socially supportive goals rather than the reactionary, punitive ones of the right. We, liberals, can take advantage of that sense of progressive propriety if we put ourselves in the presence of the press and legitimate it by becoming their colleagues, in some fashion, rather than their removed opponents.

James Wolcott tears off a multi-contextual rant that begins with the increasingly bizarre hysteria surrounding the Schiavo case—Congress has announced an agreement on a supposedly one-time exception allowing Schiavo’s parents to appeal directly to the federal courts to have Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted—and ends with the assassination of the American Dream, stopping along the way to trash the dance of the press with religious hypocrites.

Modern conservatives can’t seem to decide whether they most admire Mao or Osama. On the one hand, Billmon (via Atrios) has demonstrated an eerily similarity between the Cultural Revolution and today’s right in their attack on intellectuals in the Academy.
On the other hand, Volokh (via Digby) apparently wants to justify the use of torture, [...]

Rumsfeld also came up with the funniest sick line of the day when he observed that had the US put sufficient troops in the country to secure it and avoid the chaos following the invasion, Iraqis would have viewed the troops as occupiers rather than liberators.

Either Halliburton misplaced a decimal point or getting around in Iraq is a bit more difficult than the administration would have one believe.

Condoleezza Rice is getting off to a strong start in the 2008 campaign season.
A number of the blogs linked above cite California Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s introduction of Rice to the Senate foreign relations committee, particularly this excerpt:
The problems we face abroad are complex and sizable. If Dr. Rice’s past performance is any indication, though, [...]

Friedman’s friends and family members are said to be overjoyed. A spokesman for the family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the last reported sighting of Friedman had been late in 2002 when he was seen fleeing barefoot from Karl Rove’s office pursued by a pack of flying monkeys.

The Republicans may think that the Schiavo case, and ones like it, are smart politics. But if they do, they’re fooling themselves. Kohut’s NYT piece (via EDM) suggests that the religious right is now approaching the same status as the NRA, i.e. it can win political fights even though they defy political opinion. The basic [...]

Stepping into chilly water is a shock but you get used to it; when it’s freezing, you just go numb.

The April issue of Scientific American offers a must-read editorial (link is to an abstract with purchase option). It should be tattooed on the forearms of every working journalist.
In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin [...]

So the guy has a copy editor and three others to protect him from himself. Most self-respecting bloggers get by with a spell-checker, Google and common sense, but Shaw needs a fifth editor to guard against unintentional self-parody.