#Benghazi, #IRS, #Obamacare, #AP snooping: What Obama needs to do

Eric Hitler, er Holder has crossed a bridge too far.
Time for Dear Leader to push him out.

First of all, that political consultant is me.

And, he's going to give Obama some tough advice, starting with the guy in the picture.

Setting aside that, as a left-liberal in American terms, I've found his stimulus response to the Great Recession, the whole semi-bollocks of Obamacare, and other actions less than ideal, the constitutional law scholar president appears out of his element, even after four-plus years, at the hardball of elective politics.

So, he needs help.

That would start with bitch-slapping him a couple of times, or more than a couple, before he finally realizes, and admits, that "Kumbaya" ain't in the GOP hymnal, that his self-loved mellifluous voice sounds discordant to many on Capitol Hill, and that his White House staff could use somebody with more legislative experience to work the Hill.

Now, on to some specifics.

First, the AP snooping. I don't care if you're having gay sex with him on the down low, at a point not immediate, but after a reasonable amount of stonewalling, if Eric Holder was directly connected, plugged-in, etc., to the AP snooping, can his ass. Period. It's triage and you need to manage it. (As long as you weren't in the loop yourself, and nobody leaks that you were after he gets fired.)

Then, to shore yourself up with Democrats, especially more liberal ones, appoint a new AG with better civil liberties cred. Of course, Holder needs to go, anyway. And, you need to stop the snooping and leak-plugging, not that the non-political consultant me expects that.

IRS? Steven Miller is an acting commissioner. Schmooze GOP Senators about a permanent replacement while cutting the House GOP out of the loop. Hell, tell Mitch the Turtle you'll name his venal wife, Elaine Chao, to the position. (Well, that might be a bit much, but you get the idea. Schmooze.) And, it looks like Obama's made a start here by accepting Miller's resignation. That said, Holder's finger-wagging, again, about IRS criminality and investigations makes me want to fucking barf.

It makes me barf more now that we see this is less of a scandal than Benghazi, because liberal groups got the same treatment. The bigger scandal is that the IRS is overburdened, likely because the GOP wants to starve it. 

Beyond this, any other scandal is Dear Leader's reaction to what is even more a non-scandal than Benghazi is starting to look like the Shirley Sherrod fiasco when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, with some knowledge by Obama, threw her under the bus.

Obamacare? Namely, the concerns that Kathleen Sibelius shouldn't be soliciting money from health care organizations to help pay for educating the American public about this.

Ain't this what Organizing for Action is for? To shake down rich donors but outside of of electoral politics, as it reportedly says its about? Surely there's room to launder some money in a theoretically legal way.

Benghazi? Even if you don't want to be totally honest (as Republicans don't either) about what the fuck the CIA was doing there, roll out a sacrificial lamb. Or better yet, tell the GOP that you WILL spill the full beans unless it shuts up.

And, if not me, I'll bet Bill Clinton would give you advice halfway like this. Because, if nothing else, and speculation is true, he doesn't want your fortunes to be a lead anchor around Hillary 2016.

(Of course, the left-liberalish part of me, thinking of that, says "please don't take a word of advice, but instead, drag her down with you.")

Beyond that, Ambassador Stevens himself twice rejected additional military protection. 

I am beginning to think that no "scandal" story deserves attention until McClatchy writes something and gets at least in the reasonable ballpark of reality.

Dear Leader spies on the AP

Eric Hitler, er, sorry, Holder! Attorney General
and Lord High Protectors of eroding of our
American civil liberties/SocraticGadfly Photoshop

Yes, you read that right.

Apparently as part of doubling down, or tripling down, on its witch hunt against leakers, The.Most.Transparent.Administration.In,HistoryTM sucked up phone conversations of multiple Associated Press editors and reporters.

Here's the details:

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

Wow. Just wow. More than 100 people may have been spied on. That's pretty "unfettered," eh, Jay Carney, but "unfettered" for snoops and not the press.

And, the AP gets the non-Kumbaya back of the hand from Team Obama. (Per first link, again.)

The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

Thinking about all this made me wonder if wingnuts aren't Photoshoppping Attorney General Eric Holder to have a much narrower moustache, and renaming him Eric Hitler. Oh, I guess somebody did that!

And now, Dear Leader is saying the White House knows nothing about Holder's snooping. Yeah, right. And, in a later presser, the White House is saying "no comment" because, you know, there's an investigation. And Holder continues to defend this.

Also, in an NPR interview I just heard, the plot thickens. (Also covered in second link, about Carney and his and Holder's pressers.)

Holder said he was interviewed last year by the FBI over leaks issues, so he had his assistant, Jim Cole, handle the AP snooping. But, he says he saw himself one letter Cole sent to AP. Either you recuse yourself or you don't.

The latest? Dear Leader revives calls for a media shield law, which he has never pushed for in the past himself, and which still probably wouldn't put actions like the Justice Department's totally in the out of bounds anyway, the way this administration works.

Here's why:

It is not clear whether such a law would have changed the outcome of the subpoena involving The A.P. But it might have reduced the chances that the Justice Department would have demanded the records in secret, without any advance notice to the news organization, and it may have allowed a judge to review whether the scope of the request was justified by the facts.  

Under the 2009 bill, which was negotiated between the newspaper industry, the White House and the Judiciary Committee, the scope of protection for reporters seeking to shield the identities of their confidential sources or the calling records showing with whom they had communicated would vary according to whether it was a civil case, an ordinary criminal case or a national security case. 

The most protection would be given to civil cases, in which litigants seeking to force reporters to testify or seeking their information would first have to exhaust other means of obtaining the information before making the request. The burden would be on the information seekers to show why their need for the information outweighed the public’s interest in unfettered news gathering. 

Ordinary criminal cases would work in a similar fashion, except the burden would be on the reporter seeking to quash the subpoena to show by a “clear and convincing” standard that the public interest in the free flow of information should prevail over the needs of law enforcement. 

Cases involving the disclosure of classified information — as in the investigation into The A.P.'s disclosure of a failed bomb plot in Yemen last spring — would be even more heavily tilted toward the government. Judges could not quash a subpoena through a balancing test if prosecutors could show that the information sought might help prevent a future terrorist attack or other acts likely to harm national security. 

However, the prospect that a confidential source might leak something else in the future would not be enough to invoke that exception under the 2009 compromise legislation. 

It remains unclear what kind of legal device the Justice Department used to obtain The A.P.'s calling records from phone companies. It is not clear how the standards established by the media shield legislation would apply to administrative subpoenas called “national security letters” that the F.B.I. may issue to obtain customer records from a business without a judge’s permission. 

Hence, the AP would be in limbo, and in the journalism equivalent of a FISA court, the burden would fall in it, not Team Obama.

And, for people who think this is a tempest in a teapot, National Journal says this has implications for the general public.

Also, to guard against the snoops, the New Yorker has launched a new electronic system for leakers.

Meanwhile, the whole Benghazi brouhaha?

Both Tweedledee Congressional Republicans and Tweedledum White House Democrats refuse to address what should be the real brouhaha, and that's that Benghazi site wasn't an embassy or consulate, but was a CIA operation through and through. What was the CIA doing there? Did the terrorists who attacked it have some inkling it was a CIA operation?

These are serious questions not being asked, let alone answered, by either "mainstream" party.

And, on the IRS rifling through Tea Partier type returns? Uhh, in the 1960s, it happened to the Sierra Club, before it ultimately had its nonprofit status jerked. Liberals should always take such things seriously, no matter who the target was. I'm not saying that the Obama Administration was involved on that one, because I know it wasn't. But, Democrats should welcome any reasonable investigation. That said, such investigation is not likely to come from House Republicans.

Robert Wright jumps the shark again

Wright can be very insightful at times. And, at other times, as in his book "The Evolution of God," he can be stubbornly obtuse.

He's not being quite that bad now, but, his column welcoming the greater invasion of online privacy that HTML5 supposedly will offer is close. Why does he want this? He says greater knowledge of consumers will help newspapers.

Boy, if you think that's all that's needed, you're fucking clueless.

That greater knowledge, except in certain high-rent areas of a small number of newspapers, won't drive up the value of online ads.

Wright halfway admits that himself:

Besides, the idea of a coherent demographic has broken down. Most people who read Slate’s content aren’t regular readers in the sense of going to its home page every day and perusing its table of contents. Lots of them are just link followers; they’re referred to specific Slate articles from, well, God knows where.

Links, RSS, etc.

The only possible way around all this would be if the AP formed its own search engine or something. And, no, the AP ain't that smart.

Mark Cuban calls Google a 'vampire' – and he's right

He's also right that newspapers — and, even more, press organizations like AP — largely continue to be run by people who are too inept, timid, and "old thinking" as well as old media in dealing with this.

Cuban has cojones, if nothing else. He made his comments at an online media conference, and as the keynoter, no less.

Not just that, he called newspapers cowards for being afraid to let go of Google traffic even as they remain clueless, in his words, about how to monetize said traffic.

Salon, as part of its own take on his comments, highlights the pull quote:

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

The problem lies not so much with individual papers (though those with their own news services, like NYT, McClatchy, etc., fall under the following finger-pointing) as it does with AP (and Reuters and AFP, to the degree my solution could dodge collusion issues).

AP is not charging Google, MSNBC et al enough.

Pure and simple. If AP would increase its contract charges about six-fold — YES, as in 600 percent — and could do a work-around on the collusion stuff, not only with Reuters, but NYT News Service, MCT, etc., it might be enough to force Google to paywall.

And, yes, I think AP could write its contracts in a way as to do a work-around on the collusion issue while leaving the door open for Reuters et al to cut similar deals.

That said, AP's chairman of the board, Dean Singleton, is so effing clueless about this that he ran his own newspaper company, MediaNews, into the ground of Chapter 11, so what should we really expect?

If nothing else, maybe more newspaper chains will reverse cutting back on DC bureaus, and rebuild them — with money they save from canceling AP contracts.

Calling Jay Rosen and Google's chief ass-kisser Jeff Jarvis. Have you already started attacking Cuban?

Google, AP and paywalls

Here’s some very interesting thoughts from Josh Cohen of Google News.

Very interesting, indeed. I wish he’d been asked more, by the interviewer, Danny Sullivan, about the *rates* AP and other wires charge Google, et al, whether they're high enough, whether they should be set high enough to force Google and other portals to paywall, along with newspapers, etc.

Fairey confesses to deceiving AP

While he’s a creative artist, it’s clear Shepard Fairey is a not-so-creative breaker of copyright law, and has now fessed up. And fessed up to a whole history of deception:

"After the original complaint was filed, Mr. Fairey realized his mistake. Instead of acknowledging that mistake, Mr. Fairey attempted to delete the electronic files he had used in creating the illustration at issue. He also created, and delivered to his counsel for production, new documents to make it appear as though he had used the Clooney photograph as his reference."

No wonder his lawyers quit on him.

I hope the AP throws the book at him, and this is the start of a toughening enforcement of print and photo fair use standards.

And, that said, the artwork you see above is a parody of Fairey; where will it now stand?

Tribune Co. bailing on AP

The Tribune Company, parent of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times,, is looking at not renewing its AP contract in 2010.

The Associated Press’ proposed new package of services in 2010 is unpopular with many papers, including controversial new rate structure next year.

Member papers now pay AP for a general news package tailored to their size and location. The new plan will have papers getting all available breaking news dispatches from around the world and other states with premium non-breaking content available at an added cost.

The gist of the complaint is that, even as many newspapers want more local news, the AP is forcing more international news on them.

Editor and Publisher has more:

Under current AP policy, each newspaper buys a package of general news created by AP based on that paper's location and circulation. The package usually includes breaking news, sports, business, and other national, international, and regional news relevant to the client's market, including its state AP wire.

Under the new structure, AP member newspapers will receive all breaking news worldwide (including items from other state wires), as well as breaking sports, business, and entertainment stories. In addition, a package of premium content — made up of five types of non-breaking stories including sports, entertainment, business, lifestyle and analysis — will be available at an additional cost.

The base rate is lower, but the material isn’t targeted by location.

So far, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is the largest paper to officially opt out. Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., is trying to get out at the end of this year, claiming AP’s two-year advance notice doesn’t apply as the new service package is that much different than the old one.

So far, the AP has been indifferent to member newspapers’ complaints, but I don’t see how it can ignore the Trib Co.

But, per E&P, the Trib’s empire also includes: The Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; The Orlando Sentinel; Red Eye of Chicago; the Hartford Courant; The Baltimore Sun; The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa.; and The Daily Press of Newport News, Va.

I just don’t see how the AP can ignore than many newspapers of BIG circulation.

And, the Trib has options. Boost its own internal news service. Partner with Agence France-Presse or Reuters. Partner with someone like Yahoo, which has its own reporters.

The AP just can’t ignore this one.

Kos gets facts wrong itself in Dem-fluffing AP attack

Yet another reason I don’t automatically vote Dem AND why I’m glad I got booted from the Kossack herd of sycophants.

BarbinMD claims the AP is fact-challenged in hanging large responsibility for Gramm-Leach-Bliley on Slick Willie Clinton’s neck.

Tis true that the name of the act, including Phil Gramm, wasn’t mentioned.

But, here’s the bigger things that AP also didn’t mention:
• Two-thirds of House Dems voted in favor of GLB
• Co-author Jim Leach is the biggest Republican to endorse Obama, and he’s never apologized for GLB;
• Before becoming Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin worked for Goldman Sachs, the single largest donor, by company, to Obama’s campaign.

It’s the duopoly at work!

Barb, if the AP is an “embarrassment to journalism,” you’re an embarrassment to mock indignation. Put a fork in yourself; you’re well done, Barb.