My email to the Public Editor:

I'll be interested to read your defense of Jim Rutenberg and Adam Nagourney's story on 22 June titled "G.O.P. Decides to Embrace War as Issue."

In particular, your defense of their peculiar statement that "Some polls show a majority of Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake, and pollsters say independent voters are particularly open to the idea of setting some sort of timetable for withdrawal, the very policy Democrats have embraced and Republicans are now fighting."

As I'm sure you know, ALL polls, including those done by the NY Times, show that the American public today views the war as a mistake and wants the US to begin to withdraw. It may be, of course, that Rutenberg and Nagourney know of a poll that shows the public supports the war and wants the US to stay. Indeed, they MUST know of such a poll, otherwise they would never use the locution "some polls show…."

Could they name that poll? No? I didn't think so.

This story seems to me to be yet another example of the tilt of the NY Times to the Right. But of course, I'm sure you will mount a strong defense and attack those who question the story as "partisan," etc. 

They continue to write reports as if there is public support for the US staying in Iraq, when in fact all polls show that the public wants the US out of Iraq:

The new efforts by Republicans in Congress, and in the media, to use Iraq to their advantage by branding Democrats as favoring a "cut-and-run'" policy, has received wide coverage in the past week. Often pundits, and even reporters, have suggested that this is working, because Americans are not in favor of a "hasty" withdrawal. Democrats are in shambles, they report, as they fear that proposals for setting a timetable for withdrawal put forward by Sen. John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha will prove disastrous for the party in the November elections, due to the alleged unpopularity of this stance.

This conclusion, however, flies in the face of surveys by all major polling firms, as E&P has chronicled over the past two years.

Read the entire article. Mainstream reporters don't ask obvious questions, don't do fact checking, and get the facts wrong. Why does the public tolerate such incompetence?

Senator Pat Roberts is totally partisan and doesn't care a fig for the public good or good government. His one guiding light is to cover up anything that might put the GOP in a bad light. Via Kevin Drum, here's how he's killing investigations into the use of intelligence in taking the US to war in Iraq:

What Roberts is doing here is a story that's gotten scandalously little attention. In a nutshell, here's the deal: The potentially most damaging part of this probe is this one, because it risks revealing the extent to which White House officials manipulated available intelligence in the runup to war. So Roberts is trying to muddy the waters by getting the committee to focus not just on the public statements of Bush administration officials, but also on the statements of all public officials going back to the early 90s.

It's hard to describe just how ridiculous and transparently corrupt this is. It simply doesn't matter if one Dem or another said at some point that Saddam was "seeking" to develop WMD. What actually matters are the statements by Bush administration officials — that is, the ones who conceived and implemented the war, the ones who had exclusive (yes, exclusive) access to the best classified intel, and then cherry-picked some of it, while ignoring other parts of it, to build a case that Saddam was on the cusp of developing nukes.

York suggests that Roberts, incredibly, is on the verge of succeeding in deep-sixing the probe amid procedural disputes about how or whether to examine public statements by Democrats.

Read the whole thing. The GOP doesn't understand any of the responsibilities of government. More here.

And what do they do? Beyond, of course, reporting who said what. I mentioned earlier that they don't ask obvious questions. Nor do they do any obvious fact checking.

Here's a recent example: Tony Snow:

SNOW: "The president understands people's impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?

But you cannot conduct a war based on polls. And you can't conduct this kind of activity. What you have to do — and the president's been clear about this — is take a look at the conditions on the ground. Let's think for a moment of the alternative.

If the United States pulls out — and what's been interesting is that most people realize that simply pulling out would be an absolute, unmitigated disaster, not merely for the people of Iraq but the larger war on terror."

The obvious thing, of course, is to do a bit of research and look at the polls at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. The mainstream press can't seem to understand this notion, but thank heavens for blogs: Josh Marshall does a bit of fact-checking and discovers that 70% of the American public supported the war at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, and that support didn't waver during the battle—indeed, support continued to increase. (The chart itself is quite interesting.)

Juan Cole also has a good post on the Snow comment.

But the point remains: why are mainstream reporters so absolutely and totally incapable of checking elementary facts? Why can't they ask the obvious questions? Why are they so quick to betray the public trust?

UPDATE: Yet another example of reporter incompetence.

I was grumbling about how difficult it was to find a Webcam for the Mac (only the iSight seems to work with a Mac), when a PC user has a choice among many. But then my Mac-using friend pointed out that for the past year a Webcam has been built into the iMac. That's pretty cool. And even though Skype has not released a Mac version that uses video, they're apparently working on it.

Oh: that built in Webcam apparently is only for their laptops. I use a desktop, so it wouldn't help me even if I had a Mac. And the iSight costs twice as much as the Logitech QuickCam Fusion. I'm just sayin'…

UPDATE: Looks like I'm wrong: the Mac desktop monitors do have the Webcam built in these days. See comments.

I've finished some thrillers and science fiction novels and felt in the mood for something different, so I decided to start reading Anthony Trollope. I am starting with the Palliser novels. I thought about reading first the Chronicles of Barsetshire, but happened to pick up Can You Forgive Her? first.

The article at the link makes an interesting point about Trollope: "Anthony Trollope is one of the greatest nineteenth-century novelists with whom (oddly) the majority of readers come into contact on their own — that is, without first having been assigned to read a novel by him in school."

I blogged earlier about Denny Hastert's land-deal maneuver: buy land, pass legislation to put a highway 2.6 miles from the land, then sell the land at an enormous profit. And in my earlier blog, I blogged about this deal in California: Rep Ken Calvert buys a parcel of land, puts a freeway interchange near it, and then sells at an enormous profit. He's a Republican, of course.

Now the Washington Post is on the case with a story today:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) made a $2 million profit last year on the sale of land 5 1/2 miles from a highway project that he helped to finance with targeted federal funds.

A Republican House member from California, meanwhile, received nearly double what he paid for a four-acre parcel near an Air Force base after securing $8 million for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles away. And another California GOP congressman obtained funding in last year's highway bill for street improvements near a planned residential and commercial development that he co-owns.

Read whole sordid story at the link. The GOP is totally corrupt and self-serving.

This is enormous news, if true: today in Texas there is no racial bias. Sort of takes one’s breath away. The person holding that view is a US Representative from Texas, John Carter.

I can’t help thinking that he’s led a very sheltered life. Here’s the story, as it begins:

The House abruptly dropped plans Wednesday to vote on a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, a seminal law from the civil rights era, after criticism from Republican lawmakers from Texas.

A bill to extend the law for 25 years has support from the White House, top legislative leaders of both parties and a key, GOP-controlled committee that passed it 33 to 1.

But the bill was delayed after objections from the Texas lawmakers to the requirement that the state must get permission, or “preclearance,” from the Justice Department or a federal court before making changes to voting standards, practices or procedures. Read the rest of this entry »

I made slow-cooked beef things last night, the things in this case being short ribs. Man, did they have an incredible aroma when I took them out of the oven and removed the bones. The pot is now sitting uncovered in the fridge for the fat layer to congeal so I can easily remove it, then I'll add pearled barley and mushrooms and cook it until those are done. I did one minor variation: dredged the ribs in seasoned flour before browning them in the bacon fat. This is to make the resulting dish slightly thicker.

I was going to make this earlier, but I ran into a cold: I had one day of my throat feeling funny, then a week of a very painful sore throat—not strep, though—along with a cough. It was so long since I had a sore throat, I had forgotten about throat lozenges. Fortunately, I remembered on the third day. Then I had a week of a persistent cough, with sore muscles in my chest. Then I felt fine, but so tired: I was sleeping 12 hours a night and then falling asleep in my chair in the morning and afternoon. Weird. But then after almost a week of that, I woke up and found myself full of energy once more—a great relief. A cold is not a trivial illness, I've decided.

And so I again started cooking, making first a bean salad, then last night the slow-cooked beef things. Good to be back.

Swiss Sophie taking her ease on the grass.