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The 2,645th CyberAlert. Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996
11:15am EDT, Tuesday May 13, 2008 (Vol. Thirteen; No. 90)
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2. Newsweek Impugns GOP: 'Merchants of Slime and Sellers of Hate'
3. Klein Hails McCain for Being 'Pariah to Blowhards Like Limbaugh'
4. CBS: Baldwin 'Easy Target' of 'Conservative Junkyard Dog' Hannity
5. Late Show's 'Top Ten Surprises in Saddam Hussein's Prison Diary'
Karins gently corrected him: "Well, there are correlations that can be made. Global warming not quite one of them. La Nina, more likely." [This item, by the MRC's Brent Baker, was posted Monday night on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ]
The not so in depth "In Depth" segment on the Monday, May 12 NBC Nightly News:
BRIAN WILLIAMS: We're back with NBC News In Depth tonight. Tornado season, especially vicious this year. As we reported earlier in the broadcast, this has been one of the most active, deadly tornado seasons in a long time. So we asked Bill Karins, meteorologist with NBC Weather Plus, to join us tonight to explain why this might be happening now. 
The eight-page spread, decorated with several behind-the-scenes photographs of the candidate and his top aides, paints Republicans and independent conservative groups as the source of all campaign nastiness. The authors even question whether John McCain, who has earned innumerable media accolades as a champion of more government regulations on free speech ("campaign finance reform") is not perhaps a co-conspirator with those awful conservatives: The May 19 cover story: www.newsweek.com [This item, by the MRC's Rich Noyes, was posted Monday on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ] As for Obama, the magazine quoted a mid-level staffer to argue that the wise Obama would be far less a gamble than was electing George W. Bush eight years ago: There is no ready training for commander in chief, and no real way to predict how a man or woman will perform once in the Oval Office. Campaigns can deceive voters, or at least mask shortcomings. After watching his father's triumph in 1988 and failure in 1992, George W. Bush had a good feel for the mechanics of campaigning: the importance of money, message and geography. His 2000 campaign was well managed by a tight group of loyal aides, with little infighting. It was only after he became president that voters began to grasp Bush's failings as an executive -- his disdain for expert opinion, his stubborn approach to policy or rivals, his fatal lack of follow-through. Obama, at least, seems to be more curious than the current president. Ruchi Bhowmik, a legislative counsel in Obama's Senate office, is one of the staffers whom Obama has called upon because she was too quiet in a gathering. "When he's at a meeting, he's very inclusive and a very good listener," she tells Newsweek. "He's not looking to dictate what everyone is discussing, and he wants to hear what everyone is thinking. He doesn't discount things." On Capitol Hill, Senator Obama has been a foe of "knee jerk" thinking, says Bhowmik. "Obama's response is, 'Well, we've always done it that wayâ€"why?' " Presidential campaigns may be in some ways little more than glorified stress tests, not true measures of the potential for presidential greatness. Still, they do offer significant peeks into personal character. Obama "does not get rattled," says Bhowmik. "I've never seen it." He has "grace under fire." In the coming campaign, he will need it.
Excerpts: While Clinton veered between playing Queen Elizabeth I and Norma Rae, Obama and his team chugged along with a superior 50-state campaign strategy, racking up the delegates. If the candidate seemed weary and peevish or a little slow to respond at times, he never lost his cool. But the real test is yet to come. The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower- and middle-class whites in industrial and border statesâ€"the Democrats' base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but "Reagan Democrats" in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as "the other" -- as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters. Obama says he's ready for the onslaught. "Yes, we know what's coming," he told a cheering crowd as he won the North Carolina primary last week. "We've seen it already...the attempts to play on our fears and exploit our differences to turn us against each other for pure political gain -- to slice and dice this country into Red States and Blue States; blue-collar and white-collar; white, black, brown." Hillary Clinton was not above playing on those fears. Refusing to concede defeat last week, she cited an Associated Press poll "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again." As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote: "Here's what she's really saying to party leaders: There's no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you'll be sorry." A top Clinton adviser, speaking anonymously so he could be more frank, says the Clinton campaign has actually been holding back, for fear of alienating other Democrats. The Republicans "won't suffer from such scruples," this adviser says. Sen. John McCain himself has explicitly disavowed playing the race card or taking the low road generally. But he may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism. And the real question is whether he can -- or really wants to -- rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the "independent expenditure" groups who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech. ... McCain's top aides include some veterans of past Republican attack campaigns, like campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, who was in charge of rapid response for Bush-Cheney '04, and Black, whose experience goes all the way back to the campaigns of right-wing Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist who resigned from the campaign last summer but keeps ties to McCain, suggests that McCain could try to block low-road smears. "He could say, 'If any major donors or political operators do that, then you will be persona non grata in my administration'," says Weaver. But McCain himself has said that he will not "referee" between various independent groups who always want to have their say in presidential campaigns. (The model is the notorious Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who unfairly but effectively questioned John Kerry's war record in 2004.) [McCain strategist Charlie] Black tells Newsweek McCain was powerless to stop the "527s," named after the provision of the tax code that covers political expenditures by nonprofits, from running attack ads on their own. "Look, there's nothing we can do about the 527s," says Black. Another McCain adviser, who asked for anonymity discussing internal campaign strategy, bluntly warned: "It's going to be Swift Boat times five on both sides...The candidates will both do their best publicly to mute it. But in a close race, I don't see how to shut that down." Indeed, two of the most experienced attack artists are already gearing up. Floyd Brown, who produced the infamous "Willie Horton" commercial that used race and fear of crime to drive voters away from Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988, produced an ad before the North Carolina primary accusing Obama of being soft on crime. He tells Newsweek that Obama is "extremely vulnerable" to questioning about his ties to Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, who has been indicted for political corruption. (Obama is not linked to any wrongdoing.) Another target is former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, whose association with Obama will remind voters of bomb-throwing student radicals of the 1960s. "There's plenty of stuff out there," says Brown. "I'm kinda like in a candy store in this election." END of Excerpt The totally one-sided nature of the Newsweek piece provoked McCain aide Mark Salter to write a letter of complaint to editor Jon Meacham, which Newsweek has published on its Web site linked to the original article. Salter pointed out the obvious, that Democrats engage in their share of slimy campaigning, and that the Newsweek team had "framed this race exactly as Senator Obama wants it to be framed." An excerpt: Suggesting that that we can expect a whispering campaign from the McCain campaign or the Republican Party about Senator Obama's race and the false charge that he is a Muslim is scurrilous. Has John McCain ever campaigned that way? On the contrary, he has on numerous occasions denounced tactics offensive tactics from campaigns, 527s and others, both Democratic and Republican. By the way, which party had more 527 and other independent expenditure ads made on its behalf in 2004? It wasn't us. By accepting the Obama campaign construct as if it were objective, Evan [Thomas] and Richard [Wolffe] framed this race exactly as Senator Obama wants it to be framed -- every issue that raises doubts about his policy views and judgment is part of a smear campaign intended to distract voters from the real issues at stake in the election, and, thus, illegitimate. And even if Senator McCain might not be inclined to support such advertising, if he can't stop them from occurring then he will have succumbed to the temptation to put ambition before principle. How this notion could appear credible after MoveOn, the AFL-CIO and the DNC launched negative ad campaigns weeks ago, and after leaks from the Obama campaign that they would soon start running negative ads against McCain, is mystifying. END of Excerpt Salter's rebuke: www.newsweek.com
[This item, by Geoffrey Dickens, was posted Monday morning on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ] An excerpt from the piece in the May 19 edition of Time magazine: ....In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Obama went directly after both McCain and the media. "[McCain's] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election," Obama said. "Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive. We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along." That may have been unfair to McCain, since the Senator from Arizona won the Republican nomination in much the same way Obama has triumphed -- as an outsider, an occasional reformer, a pariah to blowhards like Limbaugh. But it's also true that McCain has a choice to make: in the past month, he has wobbled between the high and low roads, at one point calling Obama the Hamas candidate for President after a member of that group "endorsed" the Senator from Illinois. If McCain wants to maintain his reputation as a politician more honorable than most, he's going to have to stop the sleaze. END of Excerpt To read the full Joe Klein piece see: www.time.com
An admiring Safer described Baldwin's activism this way: "Liberal politics has always been his passion...He has an impressive grasp of the issues and spends a huge amount of his time and money supporting causes he believes in: animal rights, the environment, the arts." Safer then went on to continue to portray Baldwin as a victim of the right-wing conspiracy: "But his bare-knuckled approach to political discourse- [clip of Baldwin: "Not all Republicans are as insane as these extremist conservatives"] -has made him an easy target for conservative junkyard dogs like Sean Hannity." Safer then played a clip of Hannity speaking about Baldwin: "He's unhinged. Let's be honest, he's not really bright." [This item, by Kyle Drennen, was posted Monday afternoon on the MRC's blog, NewsBusters.org: newsbusters.org ] Safer went on to describe further right-wing attacks on Baldwin: "And the right went wild when it was reported he said he'd move out of the country if George Bush were elected." Safer then described Balwin's outrageous and offensive comments about conservatives as simply being "excessively eloquent": "Your eloquence, if that's the word, can get you into deep trouble... Well, or you make them perhaps excessively eloquent, as in your description of Dick Cheney, who you said was a sociopath and a terrorist, and you later apologized by just calling him a 'lying, thieving, oil whore and a murderer of the U.S. Constitution.'" Despite this controversial material in Sunday's interview, Friday's CBS Early Show had previewed the interview by only highlighting Safer's questioning Baldwin about the controversial voicemail that the actor left his daughter last year. Also mentioned in Friday's preview was Baldwin's suggestion he may run for office: "There's no age limit on running for office to a degree. It's something I might do, one day." For a full transcript of the May 11 60 Minutes story, see the NewsBusters post linked above.
From the Late Show with David Letterman's e-mailed newsletter, an "un-aired Top Ten List" edited from the May 6 show, the "Top Ten Surprises in Saddam Hussein's Prison Diary." Late Show home page: www.cbs.com 10. Favorite aspect of prison life? The delousing. 9. Often called into The Howard Stern Show as "Stuttering Abdul" 8. Even when things were bleakest, still dotted his I's with little hearts 7. Thanks to ideas from "Better Homes and Gardens," cell went from drab to fab 6. He and Cheney used to exchange torture tips 5. Only regret: not living to see Late Show Magician Week 4. Claimed real weapon of mass destruction was the prison meatloaf -- booyah! 3. Only contact he had with Osama bin Laden was brief exchange of erotic text messages 2. Planned to leave all of his earthly possessions to his camel, Gary 1. Had a torrid affair with Barbara Walters -- Brent Baker
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NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams on Monday evening gave credibility to the extremist environmental theory that the Earth is reacting to mankind's mistreatment by spawning a rash of tornadoes. Williams reported how "this has been one of the most active, deadly tornado seasons in a long time" with more tornadoes so far this year than through August last year. He then forwarded to NBC Weather Plus meteorologist Bill Karins the kind of reasoning he hears during his daily routine: "I talked to three people, casual conversation today, all of them smart, saying 'I don't know, we must be doing something to our Earth.'" 
BILL KARINS: Well, there are correlations that can be made. Global warming not quite one of them. La Nina, more likely. I'll get to that in a second. Let's first talk about the numbers out there so far: 850 tornadoes. Let's just compare that to the last three years at this point in May. Well above 250 last year. If you look at 2005, we're about 600 above that. And. Of course, these are just the number of touchdowns. The important number the deaths, the deaths are also way up this year. We already had 96. In 2005 everyone was happy saying our Doppler radars and warning services were doing the job. Now the question is what are we doing wrong? 
In this week's cover story, Newsweek's Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas juxtaposed Democratic talking points about the sliminess of Republicans ("successfully scaring voters since 1968") and testimonials to the managerial wizardry of Barack Obama ("he has 'grace under fire'") and presented the entire package as an insightful look inside "The O Team." 
The lion's share of the article seemed dedicated to painting any Republican effort to criticize Obama as outrageous attack. 
In this week's cover piece for Time magazine, "Obama: The Game Changer," Joe Klein praised John McCain for having won the nomination by being "a pariah to blowhards like Limbaugh." However the Time magazine columnist advised the Arizona Senator to keep it clean, as he warned: "If McCain wants to maintain his reputation as a politician more honorable than most, he's going to have to stop the sleaze." 
For Sunday's 60 Minutes, Morley Safer interviewed left-wing actor Alec Baldwin and spent some time focusing on Baldwin's liberal activism: "And yet it's his off-screen performances that can get in the way of a truly gifted man. And often it's his liberal politics that make him red meat for his critics." Baldwin explained to Safer: "They hate liberals who can throw a punch." And when Safer asked: "'They'? Who's 'they'?," Baldwin responded: "They, the vast right-wing conspiracy that's after me." 