NewsTrust - Media and Politics - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Iraq & Afghan Wars: Just Give Me Some Truth

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Media is a Plural - By Rory O'Connor - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - When it came to the war in Iraq, “I should have been the canary in the coal mine,” Alissa Rubin wrote this week in the New York Times. “But like so many others around me, I did not want to believe what I saw.”

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22 Things Dick Cheney Can't Recall About the Plame Case

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Nick Baumann - Oct. 31 (Opinion) - Notes from former Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with the FBI about the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity were finally released on Friday afternoon after a lengthy legal battle. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the Justice Department last year to obtain the interview notes; a judge finally ordered their release on October 1. In the interview, Cheney demonstrated a behavior common among Bush administration officials under investigation: he couldn't remember much of anything. Here's a non-comprehensive list of 22 things Dick Cheney claimed he couldn't recall about the Plame case, in the order they appear in the FBI's notes:

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Lieberman Twists the Knife

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Robert Scheer - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - Is there a more hypocritical figure in American politics than Joe Lieberman? The Connecticut senator declared Tuesday that he would support a filibuster of any health care reform bill that has a public option -- even the version with the "trigger" compromise accepted by Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe -- because it might cost money Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/lieberman-twists-the-knif_b_336457.html

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Derailing unprecedented health reform would be unprecedented

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

bestoftheleftpodcast.com - By Jay - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - Edition #309 Act 1: Kid is denied healthcare for being too skinny – The Young Turks Act 2: Max Baucus and Senate health reform – Bill Moyers Journal Act 3: Medicare Part E – Thom Hartmann Act 4: Healthcare, now what – This American Life Act 5: Dems stopping healthcare would be unprecedented – Rachel Maddow Act 6: The history of our healthcare system – This American Life Act 7: Insurance company calls sick people dogs – The Young Turks Act 8: Further reporting on anti-healthcare campaign – Rachel Maddow

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In recent polls, GOP limited to Southern comfort

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

OregonLive.com - By David Sarasohn - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - For months, Barack Obama’s national approval rating has been hovering in the low to mid-50s. The level is respectable — his predecessor hadn’t been there for his last three years — but not exactly intimidating, not exactly a number to make congressmen think they’d better get in line

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Cenk Uygur: Democrats Should Stay Off Fox Until They Confess

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Cenk Uygur - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - Is there really any doubt in anyone's mind that Fox has been attacking Obama from day one? Can anyone really be that misinformed or disingenous?...

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Why Journalists Shouldn't Be Defending Fox News

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - The Obama administration's recent characterization of Fox News is a long overdue acknowledgment of the obvious: Fox News is not a legitimate news organization

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The Washington Post Creates Its Own Facts to Support Afghan Nation-Building

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Melvin A. Goodman - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - The Washington Post is creating its own facts in order to support its argument for US nation-building in Afghanistan. In its lead editorial on Saturday, the Post asserted that the United States is capable of building a strong government in Afghanistan at the national and local levels. The Post claimed that Afghanistan had had a "working national government through most of the 1970s and 1980s." This is simply not so.read more

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Will Mainstream Media Journalists Fail on Afghanistan War the Way They Did on Iraq?

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Media is a Plural - By Rory O'Connor - Oct. 21 (Opinion) - The “’forgotten war’ in Afghanistan, as news outlets once called it, is suddenly very visible. NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel – who made his name covering the war in Iraq – put it well when he spoke to the New York Times from Kabul this week: “It’s like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009.

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The Great One

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Talkers Magazine - By Mark Levin - Oct. 21 (Interview) - I’d been a professional talk radio listener since I was a kid in Philadelphia. I used to listen to folks like Dominic Quinn and Bernie Herman and Joel A. Spivak. Maybe people haven’t heard of them but they were big time when I was a teenager. I used to listen to Bob Grant, Jean Shepherd and so forth. I loved it. I never really intended to pursue it, and so here I am 40 years later. I would say really it was Rush and Sean. First of all, I subbed once for Rush, not knowing anything I was doing and he said just go with it, do the very best you can. And Sean had me sub for him fairly frequently during the Christmas holidays. I remember telling him, you know, I get the substance part of this, but I’m not sure about the breaks –– how to get in and get out. He sat me down at his house one day and we did our little blue cards. Forty-eight of them. Just to remind me of who I am…“Hi, I’m Mark Levin.” That sort of thing. I think they called them formatics cards.

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Obama and the Left's Old Schism

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Oct. 18 (Opinion) - However, another branch of progressives – let’s call them the “pragmatists” – recognize the daunting challenges that a liberal politician faces in the United States because the Right has built such a powerful propaganda apparatus, dominating the message reaching the American people through newspapers, magazines, books, cable TV, talk radio and the Internet. When a liberal politician also has to deal with careerist mainstream journalists who bend to the right for self-protection – think CNN – “pragmatic” progressives agree that it is unrealistic to expect perfection from someone trying to advance a reformist agenda and maybe win the next election.

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How Fox News Outsmarted the White House

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By John Batchelor - Oct. 14 (Opinion) - What’s worse than stupid about the conspiracy theory that Fox News is a pachyderm is that it is wrong. Fox News has nothing to do with the Republican Party or its dreary state. “We go to Fox because that’s the only place that will put us on TV,” a desultory Republican source admits. “But they don’t help us by telling everyone that we suck.”

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Obama Vs. Rupert Murdoch: Fox News' Blatant Transition into GOP TV |

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Eric Boehlert - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House, which, of course, is unprecedented for a media company in modern-day America. That partisan embrace means the news media have to expand beyond typing up Fox News-ratings-are-up and the White-House-is-angry stories, and it needs to start treating the cable channel for what it is: a partisan animal.

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Whiner-in-Chief

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Griping about Republicans on Fox and off-message bloggers in pajamas hurts Obama much more than the targets of the administration's wrath.

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Memo to the media: Fox News is now the Opposition Party

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Media Matters - By Eric Boehlert - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - Fox News has changed the rules. Now the press needs to change the way it covers Fox News.

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Dems Health Care Bill Will Cost Families $1,700 More a Year

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Gateway Pundit - By Gateway Pundit - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Dems Health Care Bill Will Cost Families $1,700 More a Year

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If I Were A Senator I'd Vote For Opt-Out Public Option

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Sam Stein - Oct. 08 (Interview) - Former DNC Chair Howard Dean told the Huffington Post that the "opt-out" compromise that is being discussed by Senate Democrats was not his ideal conception of what a health care overhaul should be. But he granted that the proposal would produce "real reform" and said that, if there were no other vehicle for getting a bill through the Senate, he would support it. "If I were a member of the U.S Senate I wouldn't vote for the [Senate Finance Committee] bill but I would vote for this," Dean said, "not because it is necessarily the right thing to do but because it gets us to a better conversation about what we need to do. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/08/dean-if-i-were-a-senator_n_314118.html

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Glenn Beck Crying with a Little Help from His V...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

allvoices.com - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - Fox News host Glenn Beck is captured on video during a photo shoot having Vick's vapor rub smeared under his eyes as he jokes that his eyes are getting used to it.

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US Press Corps Fails Again on Iran

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Robert Parry - Sep. 30 (Opinion) - the most dangerous parallel between the misreporting on Iraq and the current hysteria about Iran may be that major U.S. news outlets, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, continue to paint the disputes in black and white and leave shades of gray out of the frame. In doing so, these news organizations again are casting aside their own rules about objectivity and balance.

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Susan Older: That's Not the News: Clinton's "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy"

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Susan Older - Sep. 30 (Opinion) - Although I did find it interesting to hear Clinton's take on whether Obama has been the object of a right-wing conspiracy, I can tell you one thing: That most certainly was not the news story in that interview.

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Where is the Defund Blackwater Act?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Jeremy Scahill - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working-class people. Their campaign has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009, which has now passed the House and Senate. Yet the bill was written so broadly that, as Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post has pointed out, it could "plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex."

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Obama Finally Facing Reality in Afghanistan

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dan Froomkin - Sep. 24 (Opinion) - Should Obama actually change his mind about Afghanistan, our elite journalists -- obsessed as they are with how the game is played -- will almost inevitably characterize this as vacillation and declare it a sign of political weakness. But that really misses the point.

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Glenn Beck and Left-Right confusion

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Ultimately, Beck himself is just a histrionic intellectual mess: willing to latch onto any hysterical accusations and conspiracy theories that provide some momentary benefit, no matter how contradictory they might be from one moment to the next. His fears, resentments and religious principles seem fixed, but not his political beliefs.

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Bill's Back in Business

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Joe Conason - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Enter the recipients' email addresses, separated by commas: Your email has been sent. Alex Wong / AP Photo Mocking the predictions that he’d be sidelined or prove an irritant to his wife, the former president has his mojo back and is kicking off

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Glenn Beck's facade starts cracking: How dare they compare me to McCarthy? I compare me to Murrow!

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Crooks and Liars - Sep. 16 (Opinion) - OK, looks like the pressure is finally getting to Glenn Beck. You can't watch this rant, from his show yesterday, without concluding that the big implosion is on its way

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