The mighty wingnut Wurlitzer plays on

~ susie

Whitewater Hillary

In light of this week’s story about “Clinton Cash,” Digby had a good one in yesterday’s Salon where she points out this is far from the first time the “respectable” media merely regurgitated what they were fed by the right-wing propaganda mills. Let’s take a little stroll down Memory Lane, shall we?

As early as 1994, responsible journalists were questioning the major media’s use of the material provided by the group and its leader, a young man named David Bossie and his partner, a longtime conservative operative named Floyd Brown, known at the time for his role in making the notorious “Willie Horton” ad in the 1988 campaign.

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Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote one of the earliest pieces about this Citizens United campaign called “Churning Whitewater”:

ClintonWatch, a newsletter dedicated to “Proving Character Does Count in a President,” is sent to all media and contains tales and tidbits that have found their way into the nation’s news. The organization’s official newsletter, Citizens Agenda, sent to its 11,000 subscribers periodically, offers a morsel or two and boasts about the group’s success in siccing the media on to the Whitewater story. Citizens United’s newest information effort is a Whitewater Fax Bulletin, also called ClintonWatch, which is fed to the media almost daily. “Nobody seems to have all the answers, but by sharing our information with members of the media, we can start putting pieces together … We are making new discoveries every day,” Brown said in launching his new fax service in early March. One of the first Fax Bulletins was aimed at stirring up interest in Lot 7, which Bossie had told me was the next big story.

The March 1994 issue of ClintonWatch characterized the organization’s impact on Whitewater press coverage this way: “We here at ClintonWatch have been working day and night with the major news media to help them get the word out about the Clintons and their questionable dealings in Whitewater and Madison Guaranty.” Of course, Citizens United is not the only source of information on Whitewater. And reputable reporters do their own digging and doublechecking. Still, an examination of some 200 news stories from the major news outlets aired or published since November shows an eerie similarity between the Citizens United agenda and what has been appearing in the press, not only in terms of specific details but in terms of omissions, spin, and implication.

She went on to document some of the spin, omission and implications and showed how these stories made their way through the media ecosystem until it was taken as a article of faith that there must have been “something” there. This was 1994, still at the very early days of the administration. It was obvious what was happening but it didn’t stop the press from eagerly chasing every shiny object that David Bossie and other right-wingers threw in their path. That dynamic would characterize media coverage throughout the Clinton administration.

And there is one major aspect of all this that people should keep in mind before they rely on the mainstream press to “do their own reporting,” as they insist they will. For all the breathless front-page coverage in mainstream papers and on evening newscasts, and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the Department of Justice, Congress and the Office of Independent Counsel, the only charge they were ever able to bring against Bill or Hillary Clinton was that Bill lied one time about having unauthorized fellatio in a deposition. That’s what they impeached him over and he was acquitted in the Senate. If any of the scandals pushed by the right had held up to the slightest scrutiny, there is little doubt that Ken Starr and his crew of zealous prosecutors would have charged them when they had the chance. There was, in the end, nothing.

There are two good books to read on this subject if you want to get up to speed. The first is “Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater” by Gene Lyons, which exposed how the New York Times was duped by some small town Arkansas political operators. The second, “The Hunting of the President” by Lyons and Joe Conason, brought the whole story together at the end of Clinton’s term. The press’s track record during this period and into the 2000 campaign can only be described as malpractice. It’s beyond belief that after all their failures and journalistic malfeasance they would formalize an agreement with a right wing operative to “share” his information.
Continue reading “The mighty wingnut Wurlitzer plays on” →

Blood test

~ susie

BLOOD DRAW LAB

I have to get a blood test today for my thyroid meds or they won’t refill my prescription (I don’t know why, I’m doing fine), so I went over to the local ambulatory center (which was a hospital until right after I moved here). I sit and wait my turn for about a half-hour. One of the patients is watching a movie trailer on his phone; it’s really loud, and he’s chortling loudly as he watches. “DAY-UMN!!!” he says to the woman he’s with. “He shot him right in the stomach, yo!”

I finally get in to get my blood drawn and I’m bitching to the technician how much easier it was when doctors took blood right in the office. “I know, I remember it, too,” she says. “I don’t know why they stopped.” I tell her it’s because doctors were making so much money, ordering extra tests.

“Don’t kid yourself,” she says. “They’re still doing it.”

Baby, you’re a rich man

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

chris christie

When I read this piece yesterday, I thought, wow, here’s a guy who’s flying around in kazillionaires’ private jets, sitting in private boxes at high-profile sporting events and making ten times the median income in New Jersey (one of the wealthiest states) — and he’s poor mouthing? Seriously, dude? This is not going to endear him to the voters! Maybe if he listens to the video, it will start to sink in. Via the Daily Beast:

“I don’t consider myself a wealthy man,” Chris Christie said Friday in New Hampshire. That would be the same Chris Christie who, according to his tax returns, made $698,838 in 2013—$160,054 of which he earned as governor of New Jersey, and $475,854 of which came from his wife, Mary Pat Christie, who works at a New York investment bank.Christie isn’t rich if you’re comparing him to his friends and donors, and he certainly may not feel rich in New Jersey, where his own policies have made living more expensive. But it turns out that feeling just makes Christie exactly like many other technically rich people: not very self-aware.

Mind you, this is just reported income. Nudge nudge, wink wink!

Christie’s income is nearly 10 times New Jersey’s median, which in 2013 was $71,692; and well over $539,000, the amount necessary to qualify as one of the top 1% of earners there.So why does Christie feel so poor?

He offered his own explanation on Friday: “Listen, wealth is defined in a whole bunch of different ways, and in the end, Mary Pat and I have worked really hard, we’ve done well over the course of our lives—um, but, you know, we have four children to raise and a lot of things to do, so, no, I don’t, I don’t consider myself and I don’t think most people think of me that way.”

Perhaps Christie doesn’t feel rich because compared to his friends and the lifestyle he enjoys in their company, he’s not.The economic class with the greatest income inequality is the upper class, because it encompasses everyone earning $250,000 or more. Were Christie to look around, he might feel very poor indeed. He has flown on private planes provided by Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and Republican donor, and Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys. And he has been the guest of King Abdullah of Jordan—“a friend,” an aide told The New York Times—who put him and his family up for a weekend in a hotel with rooms costing $30,000 a night.

Chris Christie is someone who only really enjoys OPM (Other People’s Money). When he was in office, he was, in fact, the spendingest U.S. Attorney around. When he traveled, he ordered a lot of room service, and he was frequently accompanied by the colleague everyone assumed was his girlfriend (who has since shuffled through a series of well-paid, government-related jobs). And he only stayed in five-star hotels! No government per-diem rates for him, no sir. (The way he accomplished this was to put off making reservations until the very last minute and claim the top-ranked hotels were the only ones available. Oh yeah, this is the guy we want in the White House.)

And when he was a lobbyist for Bernie Madoff’s Wall Street trade association, why, you just betcha he had an American Express gold card. Imagine the fine dining OPM paid for!

Not to mention, he (someone without a lick of prosecutorial experience) managed to bundle together a large enough contribution to the Bush campaign that Karl Rove slid him into the U.S. attorney’s slot.

Everyone is a “friend,” because that’s his way around the strict (but obviously not strict enough) New Jersey ethics laws. All those nice hotel rooms, all that room service, all that living high on someone else’s hog. What a life.

The day we’ll know Chris Christie truly is a rich man is the day he finally starts paying his own way.

Watching Scotty blow

~ susie

Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker at #FITN in Nashua, NH 2015

Charlie Pierce goes to see Scott Walker in New Hampshire:

I was especially interested in the evening show provided by Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. I had to wait for John Sununu, Sr. to go through an introduction that lasted longer than the Good Friday ritual. (Sununu may still be talking. CSPAN cut away to listen to Walker.) But Walker was worth the wait. We heard about how he’s going to ride his Harley to Bike Week in Laconia this year. We heard the bit about buying the shirt at Kohl’s. We heard “go big and go bold.” We heard about the death threats. And we heard a lot of stunning misdirection about how rosy things are with the Wisconsin economy. (I was especially taken with how he boasted that he had turned his state into a right-to-work paradise, Walker having denied up and down throughout the last campaign that he had any such plans.) And there is no question. Scott Walker is the best Governor of Wisconsin that New Hampshire ever has had.

What we didn’t hear, of course, was that, back in America’s Dairyland, they may never get out of the death spiral into which Walker has shown the actual state he allegedly actually governs. His new budget is so draconian that even some of the Republicans in his pet legislature are starting to get nervous. And the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, a newspaper of wild ambivalence regarding Walker and his prospective candidacy, dropped a dungbomb on him that demonstrated that, while Scott Walker may have bought a shirt at Kohl’s, he isn’t qualified to run a cash register there.

Last August, a Wisconsin state agency told two family-planning organizations that they owed a total of $3.5 million because they had overbilled Medicaid programs for prescription drugs and certain services. Last week, the agency — the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health Services — lowered the amount by more than $3.2 million. The two family-planning organizations — NEWCAP Community Health Services and Family Planning Health Services — were told of the change in letters from Alan White, the inspector general. Yet the letters raise more questions than they answer, not the least being how the state could have been off by 93% — and maybe more, given that at least one of the organizations plans to challenge the remaining claims. The Department of Health Services would not make White or anyone else in the department available for interviews this week, and White did not return phone calls. The department would only answer questions via email.

My suspicions that family-planning clinics were deliberately targeted in order to placate those parts of The Base that Walker needs to appease are completely unfounded, I’m sure. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

(He will get around to uttering some barefaced non-facts about this situation sooner or later. He’s had practice at that.)

This coincided with Walker’s Rubio-esque attempt to thread the marriage equality needle; apparently, he won’t go to the clerk’s office, but he’ll go to the reception. (Is he only in it for the open bar and the bratwurst? Stay tuned.) And it also coincided with some new polling numbers from alma mammy that fit Walker for the bell also worn by “Bobby” Jindal and Chris Christie back in their home states. The folks in Wisconsin seem to be tumbling to the fact that their state, in addition to being a lab rat for corporate conservatism, has been rendered quite deliberately little more than a vehicle in which Scott Walker can run for president. Good luck with that.