Dear Keith Olbermann,

Please give us Ari Melber at 10PM the same way you gave us Rachel Maddow at 9PM.

I'm not just asking because Ari is one of us; or because he schlepped to YearlyKos 2006, YearlyKos 2007, and Netroots Nation 2008; or because he wrote today about Daily Kos's new outpost, Congress Matters.

Ari Melber at Yearly Kos 2006

Last week, I was on MSNBC discussing the 'lefty' blogosphere's angry reaction to the Lieberman debacle. To MSNBC's credit, I wasn't the only blogger they had on to review this issue, Jane Hamsher and Ari Melber also made appearances (you can see all three of us at the bottom of the post. Jane is the cute one.)

The basic media mantra and modus operandi is to treat the 'bloggers' as some subset of civilization, living on the fringes of society, trading secret virtual handshakes - no matter how much the facts disapprove this belief, it persists, strongly.

In fact, I regret part of my appearance because while it is hard to be perfect in live t.v. and I always have a moment after when I realize what I should have said, this time I should have said one of the following things, and been a little clearer about it.

Here's a perfect everyday example of just how much the pendulum of power is shifting in this country. Brad Blakeman, one of those GOP strategists you see on teevee, argues that an Obama victory would effectively result in a Democratic dictatorship.

Blakeman, whose counterpart was Ari Melber of The Nation, quickly realized he'd just stepped in it, and begged for mercy:

I'm kidding you Ari, take it easy. Don't blog it after we're done, get your people all in a bean about it.

To understand why Blakeman was begging for mercy, you need to know that the last time he and Melber squared off, Melber so thoroughly destroyed him that the YouTube clip of their encounter received over 150,000 views and subjected Blakeman to widespread mocking throughout the blogosphere.

So what we are seeing in this clip below is a Republican who realizes that conservatives no longer have exclusive dominance over the contours of our public discourse. There's a new seat at the table -- and we're the ones sitting in it.

You can view the full Blakeman vs. Melber segment here.

So I've been happily flying around on "O Force One," Obama's campaign plane, for The Washington Independent, and I'll stick around this thread to chat and take questions live from the trail, as discussed with SusanG. We're in a packed stadium in Roanoke right now (12:20 EST), where Obama will give his only speech of the day -- intro by Jim Webb -- and I just interviewed a senior Obama aide about the Colin Powell buzz...

I was wandering around on Jedreport and I came across this gem.  I must admit that our side has some become refreshingly aggressive. Gibbs, Burton, and now Melber are all turning out impressive performances. I am so proud of our surrogates!

The week ended with a strong performance by Barack Obama and his surrogates. In the wake of the financial crisis and its impact on the election, John McCain came out with lying ads about Obama's connections to former Fannie Mae CEO, Franklin Raines. These ads are patently false and rely on the type of truth twisting that gets countries into horrible wars. For the record:

I made a pledge on Crooks and Liars some days ago (actually it was the day I gave Senator Obama's campaign $50.00) that I would  donate to any 527s or any groups that puts up attack ads against McCain-Palin.  

It was the same day the Obama stopped holding back our 527s and true to my word I gave some money to The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund after reading oregon democrat's dairy "Defenders of Wildlife goes after Palin w/ shocking ad."  (thanks oregon democrat)  

Planned Parenthood Action Center has an ad out too and I encourage you to join me in donating to get this ad out there (video of ad below the fold)

Nation author and netroots activist Ari Melber will moderate a panel at Netroots Nation next Saturday morning at 10:30, entitled "War Pundits,":

Many people helped lead the U.S. into war in Iraq, but few were as wrong, uninformed and unaccountable as the television pundits. How do war pundits influence and distort our foreign policy debates? Why are they the most influential voice in the public discourse of foreign policy? This panel will convene journalists and actual foreign policy experts to dissect the broken punditocracy, Pentagon propaganda and the marginalization of voices critical of war or the government. From Iraq to Iran, panelists will discuss what activists can do to improve the accuracy and accountability of America's foreign policy punditry.

The panel will include Mark Danner, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, award-winning columnist at the E&P web site, author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq and Kossack, and me, less impressively credentialed than the remainder of the panel, but nonetheless holder of two degrees in international studies and one of the vast legion of bloggers who got it right on Iraq before we even invaded—though at the time I was still limited to yelling at the television set, not yet broadcasting my opposition on the Internet.

In approaching this discussion, Ari e-mailed these thoughts.

I hope we can use the war pundits panel for two aims: pinpoint media failures in refereeing foreign policy debates; and brainstorm organizing campaigns to improve democratic discourse. That should be easy, in theory. For Iraq coverage, the netroots' critique actually overlaps with the traditional media's stated goals of accuracy and balance. By relying too heavily on government sources from one party, most pre-war coverage misstated the threat and drastically underplayed opposition to the war among experts, political elites and the general public. According to a recent academic study, network TV stories in the eight months before the war quoted Bush administration officials for 29 percent of sources, while quoting Democratic officials for three percent of sources. The war pundits were shockingly unrepresentative of political reality. And grassroots antiwar groups, the study noted, "comprised just 1% of all quotes, making such dissent a drop in the bucket." So even when activists build large movements—some of the Iraq war protest broke world records—media malpractice can limit their impact. And the virtual media blackout of Democratic opposition to the war, even as most Democratic congresspersons voted against it, exacerbated tensions between the progressive base and incumbents with a misleading narrative. How can activists make the media live up to its own mission and report reality in foreign policy debates? How can the public influence who is anointed to shape our nation's war punditry? And will the general public's antipathy towards the media ever translate into greater media accountability?

While it’s a given now in blog discourse that the media failed miserably in the run-up to and the continuation of the Iraq War, it’s worth reflecting a bit on what Danner has called "the vaguely depressing spectacle of a great many very intelligent people struggling very hard to make themselves stupid." (And that quote is from three years ago, when we had been subjected to just a few years of the stupid.) I have my own theories as to what led to the mass inability to exercise critical thought demonstrated by the war pundits, a group which extends in my estimation to The Villagers—the reliable repeaters of conventional wisdom straight out of the White House briefing room.

First and foremost, I think the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the twin epicenters of their universe—New York and Washington—heightened their sense of their responsibility to the nation, including fully supporting their government in rising to its defense. The shared sense of tragedy, of responsibility, was probably a factor in the degree to which they just went along with, and eventually amplified, the Bush administration’s response.

That’s the charitable part of my assessment. Less admirable among The Villagers and the war pundits who so faithfully pushed the administration’s line is the factor that we’ve been discussing at length for the past several years in the blogosphere—the all important cocktail party circuit of insiders. For The Villagers, the Bush administration brought the return of "their people," the long-known faces who had dominated the establishment—and particularly foreign policy—since the Nixon administration, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

There was a familiarity to this team, and with the familiarity of the team, the familiarity of ways of thinking about and reporting about foreign policy and about war. As the cold warriors morphed into the neocons, they brought with them the bipolar, good and evil, east vs. west paradigms that had shaped (often disastrously) five decades of American foreign policy thinking. As "islamofascism" slipped into the place that "communism" had occupied in the thinking of these policy-shapers, it provided an easy narrative for the war pundits and Villagers to adapt without having to take too much into consideration the vast complexities of our newly and highly globalized world.

These were people they trusted, if for no other reason than they had known them for so long, and they were presenting a narrative that could be trusted, or at least easily understood. The other edge to that long relationship was the importance of staying on the inside of it—not endangering the all important access to the halls of power by asking too many questions or challenging too many assumptions. Staying on the inside seems to have gained even more importance for the crowd in this notoriously secretive and vindictive administration.

So when the few dissident voices that were heard on a national stage rose up, they were easily dismissed. After all, who in the punditocracy could believe that the Bush administration, their old friends, would lie to them about something as important as a war? And when it became increasingly clear that they, along with our Congress and the rest of the nation who lived inside the Beltway or voted Republican, was duped into going into war, it became increasingly important to not admit that.

Which, I believe, is one of the reasons that the bombshell New York Times expose on the military/media propaganda machine was greeted by the rest of the media (and The Villagers) with nothing more than a resounding yawn. What should have been a game-changing revelation:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

was little more than another blip of inconvenient information confirming the degree to which the media has been utterly played by this administration. It’s also inconvenient proof of the complicity of the media in perpetuating the administration’s lies, and in the continuation of this war, one Friedman Unit at a time.

The problems of the war punditry and the media are easy to lay out; the solutions, the other part of Ari’s challenge to us, much more difficult. We saw a bit of positive movement in the 2006 elections, when Ned Lamont and the netroots changed the narrative politically on Democrats and the war. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority in the 110th Congress has lost much of the edge it gained in that election by failing to substantially change anything on Iraq.

We have shown an ability to influence the narrative, but what can grassroots and netroots activists do to, in Ari’s words, "make the media live up to its own mission and report reality in foreign policy debates? How can the public influence who is anointed to shape our nation's war punditry? And will the general public's antipathy towards the media ever translate into greater media accountability?"

In this regard, the growth of organizations like VoteVets, which provides important and credible push back on the war, is key. But what else can we do to crash this gate?

Haha
We 'll have a blast this summer and fall. See McCan't-yeah Mr.Hot-water-Dehydrated-babies guy will be engaging us liberally in the coming months.

So people sharpen your daggers and claws. We have our work cut out for us. And yeah let's drive the bloody reasonless trolls nuts, shall we??

Ohhh the hilarity!!
ViShenk,kolobok,female

One of many questions that Chris Wallace failed to ask Barack Obama during his 45-minute interview on Foxaganda Sunday was what the Senator thought about David Barstow’s devastating exposé in The New York Times the previous weekend.

No surprise. What would be the percentage in replacing one of the plethora of Jeremiah Wright questions with an inquiry about the megamedia’s hiring of retired military officers who sexed up the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and then exaggerated, distorted and lied about what was happening when the war and subsequent occupation got underway? Would that help the bottom line? Nah. Hence, none of Wallace’s pals at Foxaganda are talking about this. Indeed, mum’s been the word on Barstow’s bombshell throughout the megamedia. The talking point – or perhaps the memo from on high – seems to be: Don’t talk.

Don’t tell viewers that retired generals and colonels and majors engaged in a war-drumming, flag-waving perversion of patriotism. Or that those in the Pentagon who ordered special briefings for these analysts as part of a domestic propaganda campaign ought to get their mail deliveries slipped between the bars at Leavenworth for the next few years. Avoid the subject and maybe it will go away like so many other stories which have been disappeared as if they were dissidents in some backwater military dictatorship.

No news coverage, no commentary, no questions for any candidates. No abject apologies to viewers from station CEOs who paid double-dippers and triple-dippers to give an official patina to fabrications that have caused the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans and other coalition soldiers. Plus millions of Iraqis. Business as usual. Even two days after the Pentagon suspended the briefings last Friday, Foxaganda was still employing retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney without disclosure.

You want to know more about the story, you go to Barstow’s follow-ups, to those of Glenn Greenwald at Salon, to the folks at Media Matters, and to excellent work of Ari Melber at The Nation. As a matter of fact, if you’d like to see Senator Obama’s answer to that question Wallace should have asked, you can find it (and Senator Clinton’s answer, too) at Melber’s blog here.

We’ve arrived at this situation because of three sets of cowards.

First among these are the military analysts themselves, supposedly men of courage who donned the uniform of the United States and swore an oath to uphold its Constitution. As Barstow wrote:

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

Tell the truth on the teevee and say poof! to that lucrative retainer, that seat on the board of some major player in the military-industrial complex, that ability to get the Pentagon to assign a favorable contract to the guys who are filling your bank account. What would retirement be like with a lowered cash flow? Yikes! Can't have that. So, instead of calling government policy into question, instead of acting like an officer and a gentleman, sell the country out and keep the moolah flowing. Spit on the men and women sent to fight. Spit on the Constitution. Spit on the truth. Once, they painted a yellow stripe down the back of cowardly soldiers.

Not merely cowards. As Daily Kos Contributing Editor BarbinMD wrote when this story was new:  "These men willingly deceived the American public to protect their access to power and more importantly, their profits. Perhaps traitor doesn't even begin to describe them." Indeed.

The second set of cowards are all those well-coifed news-readers and commentators and interviewers at CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN and Foxaganda who’ve not seen fit to discuss The New York Times story except to briefly note that the Pentagon has stopped giving the briefings.

We know why Bill O’Reilly hasn’t stepped up with a mea culpa. On April 14, less than a week before Barstow’s piece appeared, according to Media Matters:

During the April 14 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O'Reilly declared: "I can't base my opinion" about the Iraq war "on anything" other than "what my military analysts, people paid by Fox News, say to me." O'Reilly added that he could trust only Fox military analysts because "[t]he newspapers ... all have an agenda" and "only give you a snapshot of the war." Later in the broadcast, O'Reilly reiterated his position, saying, "I have to base my analysis on what our Fox News military analysts, who I think are the best and always [have] been the best, are saying." Further, O'Reilly described as "ridiculous" a caller's efforts to base his view of the war by "reading the Internet and the newspapers and forming a definitive opinion [based] upon what they say."

No retraction since. No mention at all. Silence from him and his colleagues throughout the industry – how appropriate that word. They didn’t vet the analysts or check out their possible agendas the way any good journalist would do. They ignored sources that might have called into question the claims of Lt. General Disinformation. Couldn’t find the wherewithal to let viewers know that Major Mendacious worked for a military contractor with a stake in the occupation of Iraq. Just broadcast his lies and cut his checks.

Of course, pointing out the cowardice of the megamedia’s on-camera crowd is thoroughly redundant. As Greenwald wrote Monday after a little praise for the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz – one of the few print journalists of note to say anything about Barstow’s revelations:

Kurtz's specific criticism of the media's behavior regarding this story highlights a broader and even more important point. In general, the establishment media almost completely excludes critiques of their own behavior, and discussions of the role the media plays in bolstering deceitful narratives is missing almost entirely from media-controlled discourse.

One of the most significant political stories of this decade, if not this generation -- the media's full-scale complicity with the Government in the run-up to the Iraq war -- has never been meaningfully discussed or examined on any establishment television network, including cable shows. While piecemeal quibbles of media coverage can be heard (of the type Kurtz typically spouts, or the Limbaugh-driven complaint about the "liberal media"), no fundamental critique of the role the media plays, the influence of its corporate ownership, its incestuous relationship with and dependence on government power -- among the most influential factors driving our political life -- are ever heard.

And we’re not likely to because of the third group of cowards. The guys who actually own and run the channels who paid the military shills to present the Cheney-Bush administration’s Iraq case for the past six years. Indeed, as Media Matters noted, they refused to appear on PBS last Thursday when the public channel took its look into the role of the military analysts.

In the old days in Japan, so the story goes, bosses who engaged in illegal, destructive or merely shameful behavior made a deep bow to those they had offended and headed off to a private room for a date with the blade of a tanto.

Even for those who’ve betrayed their fellow citizens and helped deliver thousands to their deaths for profit, seppuku’s admittedly a bit harsh. But if the craven news chiefs and channel owners were the least bit honest and upstanding, they’d be setting aside 15 or 20 minutes of broadcast time to apologize to the American people for acting as propagandists, for their malicious, intentional, long-running disinformation campaign. And they’d end with an on-the-air resignation and a vow never again to head up a media operation.

But then, if they were honest and upstanding, they wouldn’t be who they are. And we wouldn’t be where we are, mired in Iraq with no end in sight.

A hundred years of scrubbing will not remove the blood from their hands.

Just wanted to give a heads up to those in the NYC area who might be interested in this panel discussion on How the Netroots are Changing Progressive Politics  It's on Wednesday, March 5, 6:30 to 8:00
CUNY Graduate Center, Proshansky Auditorium, 365 Fifth Avenue, it's free with limited seating.

Don't see Markos on the list of participants....wha happened?

Details below:

Tonight, The Young Turks and Brave New Films will be covering the Iowa caucuses live. Starting at 7PM ET, we will simulcast a webstream on both sites. There will be wall to wall coverage of the Republican and Democratic caucuses in Iowa.

Here is a list of our guests for the night who will help us analyze the election before and after the results come in: