Bradley Manning Protest: White House Bans Journalist for Doing Journalism

By: emptywheel Friday April 29, 2011 4:53 am

To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered independently to be able to cover Gitmo.)

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times – pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

She was part of a “print pool” – a limited number of journalists at an event who represent their bigger hoard colleagues – which White House press officials still refer to quaintly as “pen and pad” reporting.

As with coverage of Omar Khadr’s trial, the Obama Administration seems to be demanding that journalists abdicate their jobs and their instincts to play by the rules.

But the event reminds me of something else: how the White House asked (and persuaded) all the big US outlets to suppress the widely discussed news that Raymond Davis was a spy, even while publications overseas and dirty fucking hippie bloggers were reporting on it.

As the account of Marinucci’s treatment makes clear, the rules they want to enforce on pool reporting basically put her at a disadvantage to everyone else in the room who had and used a cell phone video.

Carla cannot do her job to the best of her ability if she can’t use all the tools available to her as a journalist. The public still sees the videos posted by protesters and other St. Regis attendees, because the technology is ubiquitous. But the Obama Administration apparently wants to give the distinct advantage to citizen witnesses at the expense of professionals.

While there’s a bit of professional snobbery here, it is entirely justified. The White House bizarrely imagines it can manage Obama’s image by imposing rules on journalists it can’t impose on others. Not only does that not do a damn thing to prevent videos like this from getting out. It profoundly corrupts the role of journalists, imposing requirements that ensure they offer only a highly scripted and obviously false view of an event.

It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/04/29/bradley-manning-protest-white-house-bans-journalist-for-doing-journalism/

GOP eyes budget bill for anti-collective bargaining law

JESSICA VANEGEREN| jvanegeren@madison.com
The Capital Times
Posted: Thursday, April 28, 2011 1:45 pm



Get ready, protesters. The collective bargaining bill could soon be back before the Legislature.

Andrew Welhouse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Thursday that while the "preferred avenue" for implementing the collective bargaining bill is still the state courts, there is a "possibility" the bill will be inserted into the 2011-2013 state budget.

"There is a possibility, and it has been informally discussed among Republican leadership, including the Joint Finance Committee co-chairs, that if the matter can't be fully decided on by the Supreme Court, then it will be inserted into the full budget," Welhouse told The Capital Times.

The legality of the bill, which would strip most collective bargaining rights from state employees, was challenged by Dane County District Attorney Ozanne Ismael on the grounds that a special conference committee violated the state's open meetings law when it approved the collective bargaining bill on March 9.

The lawmakers gave less than two hours notice before commencing the 6 p.m. hearing. State law requires 24.

Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi blocked the law from being implemented while the legal challenge is being hashed out. Putting the collective bargaining provisions in the budget would sidestep the open meetings issue, allowing the bill to become law when the budget passes.

The move also could get a highly controversial topic resolved and out of the public arena at a time when six Senate Republicans are facing likley recall elections over their previous vote in favor of the bill.

They are Alberta Darling of River Hills; Robert Cowles of Green Bay; Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac; Dan Kapanke of La Crosse; Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls and Luther Olsen of Ripon.

"I think there will be a real rush to get the Walker agenda through before the recall elections are held," said Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, D-Monona. "And I won't be surprised if it happened soon. Republicans want to destroy the unions because it is politically advantageous for them. Unions are the only group strong enough to stand up against the WMC."

In recent years, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, has raised and spent millions on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative Supreme Court candidates, while unions have been big givers to Democrats.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca of Kenosha said he would be surprised if collective bargaining was added to the budget bill.

He cited the fact that Gov. Scott Walker admitted under oath before a Congressional hearing that restricting collective bargaining rights would not save the state money as well as the mounting number of Republicans facing recall elections as his reasons.

"It would be a political miscalculation if they were to take away collective bargaining rights," Barca said.

Despite the recall effort against her, Darling, a Joint Finance Committee co-chair, told WisPolitics in an interview earlier this week she would vote again for the collective bargaining bill. She also said the bill has enough votes to pass the Senate.

In addition to the Republican senators facing likely recall elections, three Democratic senators are as well.

Wednesday, officials with the Government Accountability Board filed a motion in Dane County Circuit Court requesting one statewide recall election date of July 12. The GAB is currently verifying signatures on the recall petitions that have been turned in.

If Democrats come out of the recall election with a net total of three Senate seats, they will have control of the Senate. Currently, Republicans are in control of both houses.

"I think there's a good chance we'll pick up three seats," Miller said.

Democratic control of the Senate would also spell changes on the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee by giving Democrats more seats, including a co-chair position. Right now, the split is 12 Republicans to four Democrats.

Given that Democrats adamantly oppose the restrictions to collective bargaining rights, if the bill remains mired in the courts and Democrats gain control of the Senate, it would no longer stand a chance of passing the Legislature.

Since the open meetings issue has the collective bargaining issue tied up in court, the budget could be the quickest avenue for getting the measure into law, putting the matter to rest before a possible July 12 recall election date.

A repeat of the prolonged protests at the State Capitol that followed Walker's announcement of his effort to curtail collective bargaining in February could pose an electoral pitfall for the GOP.

In the spring Supreme Court election, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg came close to unseating conservative incumbent David Prosser, an unexpectedly strong showing that was driven by a mobilized Democratic base.

A return of the collective bargaining bill likely would lead to another round of rallies at the Capitol, Miller said.

Welhouse dismissed the potential for renewed protests as a factor in inserting the measure into the budget.

"This budget was not developed with politics in mind," Welhouse said. "It was designed because we think this is the right way forward for a state that has gotten off track."

Welhouse said there are two ways the collective bargaining bill could be inserted into the budget.

He said the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee could pass the 2011-2013 budget and the collective bargaining bill could be added as an amendment once it hits the Assembly floor for debate, or a finance committee member could insert it into the bill through a motion before sending it out of committee.

Or, lawmakers could give the proper 24-hour notice and again vote on the bill in conference committee.

"The mechanism for this happening has not been fleshed out yet," Welhouse said.

http://host.madison.com/ct/article_57a01758-71b3-11e0-a4b9-001cc4c002e0.html

Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans

by Johann Hari
Friday, 29 April 2011

He is the Republican id - finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and reality

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."

That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."

The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.

This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "

It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.

Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'

The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-donald-trumps-lunacy-reveals-core-truth-about-the-republicans-2276222.html