Eat The Press

Attendees of yesterday's Jewish Federations of North America's General Assembly meeting in Washington, DC were treated to an angry shouting match between Time Magazine's Joe Klein and The New Republic's Jamie Kirchick, after their disagreements on a panel discussion entitled "The Pro-Israel Lobby and the Media" spilled out into the hallway and devolved into some sort of profanity-laced session of yelling. The Reliable Sourcers have the pyrotechnics:

A heated debate between Time magazine's Joe Klein and the New Republic's Jamie Kirchick spilled off the dais Tuesday into a hallway confrontation where Klein called the younger pundit a "dishonest [expletive]" and a "[expletiving] propagandist."

Klein told us today he's not sure he uttered the "propagandist" bit -- heard by a few witnesses -- but stands by the "dishonest [expletive]" part.

"Absolutely. He's a [expletive]," Klein, 62, told us. "He's 25 years old, and he's one of those people who has opinions but no facts or experience."

Apparently, the two were only slightly more restrained whilst paneling:

People in the room say things heated up on the panel when Klein said he was dismayed that John McCain was swayed, he said, by Jewish neocons to support the war in Iraq, and cited his own experience with soldiers on the front line. Kirchick noted McCain's Vietnam experience -- and Klein said it wasn't the same, since McCain fought from the air. Kirchick lit into Klein, saying Klein was denigrating McCain's service and hard years in a POW camp. Klein argued back, saying he honors McCain's time as a prisoner -- but that the senator's experience doesn't relate to current troop experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Klein apparently attributes the spat to some broader set of circumstances involving the "desperation of a dying [media] industry." The Sourcers wonder if it's an "an old-pundit vs. new pundit thing." I tend to think that this is the sort of thing that happens any time you schedule a panel discussion on "The Pro-Israel Lobby." But maybe there's another explanation! The discussion in question took place at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC, where in previous adventures, our own Sam Stein witnessed Hillary Clinton flack Lanny Davis losing his mind completely, and where Stein encountered an angry mini-mob, bent on preventing his enjoyment of a Reuben sandwich. Maybe that hotel is located atop an ancient and angry burial ground, or something?

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Elyse Siegel contributed to this story

Just over twenty years ago, the cable industry launched the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network -- better known as C-SPAN. Among the network's achievements was its live broadcasts of legislative proceedings, allowing viewers to take a look at the governing process, to see how legislative sausage gets made, check up on their legislators' performances and stay abreast of key debates and votes.

It was a remarkable achievement in terms of transparency. However, there was a dark side to it all. Now, every single Congresscritter had a camera in the room and an unseen audience, beyond the governing chamber, to play to. And naturally, over time, they all basically became a gaggle of preening, self-obsessed jackasses.

This all reached its apotheosis this past weekend when Arizona Representative John Shadegg dragged a live baby into the chamber in order to make a melodramatic point about health care reform. Shadegg's presentation had no substantive impact on the debate, but then, that was never his attention -- he did what he did in order to grab a little attention from the media, who love themselves a good, substance-free, provocative stunt.

But while having a baby at the podium was certainly extreme, the truth is that Congress has been moving in the direction of being a quasi-governmental performance art space for a long time now, where it's becoming more and more normal -- perhaps even obligatory -- for your elected representatives to build props, wear costumes and come armed with idiotic charts to make their point. Which is that they often don't have a point, at all. But the camera eye loves the antics.

With the invaluable assistance of Elyse Siegel, we bring you our favorite examples of Congressional theatrics. Vote for your favorites! And if you've got a favorite of your own, send along an email!

John Shadegg Wields A Baby

In this past weekend's health care debate, Arizona Republican John Shadegg bravely opened a new frontier by using a live baby as a visual aid to complain about health care reform. The infant, Maddie, was introduced as Shadegg's grand-daughter, which Shadegg quickly corrected, saying, "I wish this was my granddaughter." I wish most Congresspersons demonstrated Maddie's level of cognitive development, but no!

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UPDATE: Justin Elliot has more on the madness going on over at the Washington Times, where one of the Reverend Moon's sons has "gone rogue," and is just playing havoc:

Hyun-jin Preston Moon, the son of Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon who controls the Washington Times, acted without his father's blessing in firing the top leadership of the newspaper over the weekend, a Unificationist and former Times staffer who is in contact with high church officials tells TPM.

Preston's reasons for carrying out the shakeup are not clear to the source, but "one thing that is clear is that he acted alone. This is not something the Reverend Moon wanted, ever."

What the Reverend Moon wants apparently includes this:

"The Washington Times has to take responsibility for people going to hell in America," he declared, referring to, among other sins, "homosexuality and lesbianism."

That's from a sermon the Reverend Moon gave that was titled, ""Western People Are Different From Eastern People," and was -- not surprisingly! -- "not entirely coherent." Anyway, read Elliot's piece on how everything's going totally bonkers over there.

----

Things are getting downright weird over at the Washington Times, where an ongoing executive shake-up has seen publisher Tom McDevitt, chief finance officer Keith Cooperrider and chairman Doug Joo leave their jobs, and mounting speculation that executive editor John Solomon -- who was brought on in 2008 to lend a new sheen of credibility to the frantic, scare-quotey newspaper -- is poised to quit as well.

Now, Ben Frumin at Talking Points Memo says armed guards are popping up all over the newsroom, as the paper prepares for the Rapture, or something:

TPM hears from current staffers in the newsroom there has been an increased security presence at the newspaper in recent days. On Sunday, when three executives were fired, armed guards were brought up to the third floor where management works, according to three newsroom sources.

Newsroom sources tell TPM that employees have been told the third floor is "closed."

Employees at first couldn't use the elevators for the three-story building. An additional guard has been spotted in the lobby, standing next to the regular security guard who is there during business hours. Sources aren't sure whether the guard remaining on site today is armed.

Over at Politico, Michael Calderone adds that "Solomon hasn't been in the office for several days, and it's unclear whether he'll return." So, maybe some sort of Manuel Zelaya thing is going on?

All of this weirdness has gone down hard on the heels of a decision made by the paper's owner, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, to hand over control of his Unification Church to his three sons. TPM's Justin Elliot provides the essential speculation:

The Sunday firings of executives at the Washington Times and the possible exit of its top editor are apparently being driven more than previously known by last month's transfer of power of the Unification Church and associated business empire from Rev. Sun Myung Moon to his children.

A newsroom source familiar with church politics tells TPM that the root of the shakeup at the Washington Times is a feud between Hyung-jin Moon, 30, and Hyun-jin Moon, 40, also known as Preston, both U.S.-educated sons of church Father Rev. Sun Myung Moon. The church announced in early October -- in an exclusive given, notably, to the Associated Press not the Washington Times -- that day-to-day operations were being handed over to Preston, Hyung-jin, and a third son.

Wonkette very fittingly compared this transfer of power to William Shakespeare's King Lear, and if you're a fan of the Bard, you'll know that ended very badly for him, what with betrayal and madness and ranty tirades on storm-blasted heaths and whatnot. At any rate, I guess for the time being, Washington Times staffers should keep their heads down and refrain from making any sudden movements!

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Earlier this week, Michigan Representative John Conyers told reporters that he'd like President Obama to start fashioning himself after a different model of politician if he wants to get health care reform passed:

"The president could take a few pages from Lyndon Johnson's book... and start knocking heads together," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Conyers, who spoke to reporters in Detroit, first came to Congress in 1965, the year Medicare and the Voting Rights Act both passed under the strong hand of Johnson, by then the president. Obama was not yet 4 years old.

Huh. You know, I thought that the whole knocking a heads was supposed to be a feature of tough Chicago-style politicians, and that Rahm Emanuel was going to be sending intransigent legislators fish-corpses through the mail! But Conyers is right. When it comes to swinging pipes, the White House basically manages to mewl their displeasure through well-placed, off-the-record quotes. And so you get laughable spectacles like this one, in the wake of Michael Bloomberg's narrow win in the New York City mayoral race:

"Maybe one of those Corzine trips could have been better spent in New York. Who knows?" remarked New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who weighed his own run for mayor, referring to the White House's devout attention to the New Jersey contest.

"Maybe Anthony Weiner should have manned-up and run against Michael Bloomberg," shot back a White House official, who attributed the night's results across the board to anti-incumbent fervor.

GROW SOME BALLS, says the guy, hiding behind the cloak of anonymity! Viva Chicago!

That said, it bears mentioning that LBJ was, in many ways, a little unhinged:

Johnson lived to dominate, and he used crass behavior to bend people to his will. At 6-ft., 3-in. tall and 210 lbs., he liked to lean over people, spitting, swearing, belching, or laughing in their faces. Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, "That's all right, son. It's my prerogative." His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him -- forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet.

You sort of get the feeling that Johnson would have waged his "War On Fox" in a much more entertaining and scatalogical manner! Still, I think that if you're looking for a Texas politician to model yourself on, a better example would be LBJ's mentor, Sam Rayburn.

RELATED:
Advice for Obama: 'Start knocking heads' on health [Real Clear Politics]

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On last night's edition of the Rachel Maddow Show, the host dug into the curious case of Representative Pete Hoekstra, who's been courting cameras lately in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, telling tales out of school. Chief among them are his account of the email habits of alleged Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hasan to a Yemen-based "radical cleric." Maddow asks the obvious question:

MADDOW: Why is it Pete Hoekstra who's taking it upon himself to tell the press that this radical cleric is having his email read by U.S. intelligence agencies? The FBI had not said publicly that this cleric had been emailing Hasan. The CIA, the NSA, the White House... nobody else had reported this cleric was e-mailing Hasan. This is just Pete Hoekstra letting us know -- and letting the radical cleric that is under surveillance know -- that he's under surveillance.

The Rachel Maddow Show attempted to find out why this was happening, and got the run-around from Hoekstra's office, and bad guesswork from the Republican side of the House Intelligence Committee. What they did find out is that Hoekstra "complained all weekend" that he was not being briefed on Fort Hood to his liking, then missed the briefing that was held because he left town of his own accord.

So, what's up with Hoekstra? The Nation's Christopher Hayes bottom-lined it thusly: "His reputation is of an epic grand-stander."

HAYES: There's been a lot of reporting on this over the years. Various intelligence issues that have come before the committee. This is a guy who, in 2006, called a press conference to great fanfare to announce the weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. This is the same person who has accused the CIA of lying to him many times and turned around when Nancy Pelosi said the CIA hadn't told the truth about torture and interrogation techniques, said it was obviously absurd the CIA lied would ever lie to Congress. And now, he's turning around and saying the executive was withholding information. So, this is what he does, from his perch on the Intelligence Committee.

If you recall, Hoekstra is also the the guy who breached the security of a Congressional delegation's trip to Iraq by broadcasting its whereabouts and itinerary on Twitter. At the time, Congressional Quarterly remarked, "Nobody expected, though, that a lawmaker with such an extensive national security background would be the first to break the silence. And in such a big way." People should recalibrate their expectations!

WATCH:

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It's not for nothing that General George Casey warned against an anti-Muslim backlash in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre. But a whole slew of childlike nimrods, spurred to action by Casey vowing that it would be "a shame if our diversity became a casualty," have taken the stage to decry such concerns as "political correctness." Michelle Malkin complained that this was worshiping "the false god of diversity." Pat Robertson demanded that Muslims be treated as "members of some fascist group." So much good sense, being made! And so, naturally, the backlash Casey warned of has now expanded to include Greek Orthodox priests.

Via Think Progress:

Alexios Marakis, a Greek Orthodox priest visiting the U.S., got lost in Tampa and tried to stop and ask directions from Marine reservist Jasen D. Bruce. But instead of offering help, "Bruce struck the priest on the head with a tire iron." The reservist believed Marakis, who spoke limited English, was an Arab terrorist. Bruce chased the priest for three blocks, "and even called 911 to say that an Arabic man tried to rob him."

And that's the wages of hysteria, right there.

MORE:
Marine reservist chases, assaults Greek Orthodox priest who he mistook for an Arab terrorist. [Think Progress]

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[Editor's note: Playgirl's Daniel Nardicio responds to Jessanne Collins' article. His statement is appended, below.]

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If you read one article today from someone who is "tired of having Levi Johnston's penis thrust into my consciousness every time I read the news" -- and even more sick of the revisionist history of Playgirl magazine that Johnston's upcoming spread is causing to widely bloom across the media landscape -- you should read... well, the only one that's on offer: the disputation of former Playgirl managing editor Jessanne Collins, in today's The Awl.

"It's not that I'm bitter," Collins avers, "More power to Playgirl if it can ride the brawn of a small town teen father back into the limelight, and more power to small town teen fathers who can make their mark on the world with their undeniably virile genitalia."

But, here's the rub:

Really, I'd be happy for both of them if I weren't so alarmed at the way history is being rewritten in the midst of the media shitstorm surrounding this moment -- and the fact that no news outlet has accurately reported who's really behind Playgirl's big comeback.

Collins is referring to the strenuous flackery being put forth by recently-installed Playgirl "PR gun" Daniel Nardicio, who's promoting 'an enduring myth that the earliest incarnation of Playgirl was intended to deconstruct -- that women are out of touch with their sexuality and can't even figure out what's hot and what's not." Here's Nardicio in the Daily Beast:

"We're trying to change the face of Playgirl... The reason I wanted to work with them is that I think of it as a classic American brand that got a little lost. The women working on it weren't keeping up with the times. They didn't admit that there were a lot of gay men reading the magazine and gay men don't want to see guys with flowing long locks looking like they came from the cover of a Danielle Steel novel."

And here he is, telling the same story to The Advocate:

"Playgirl was kind of stuck because the women who were working for it were old and they thought that Fabio-looking characters with long-flowing hair and uber-tans, like those red tans, were really hot. So once the magazine folded I got the opportunity to jump in because all those women were fired and I said, "Let me take the website in a whole new direction, and that's Levi."

Lucky thing that Levi Johnston came along, to help restore the Playgirl brand from all those dumb old ladies, right? Wrong, says Collins!

OK, so he has a point about the abundance of Fabio-looking characters. I wasn't big on the long flowing locks myself. (For the record, I also wasn't "old"--at 28, I was the eldest member of the editorial staff.) And we never had a problem admitting that there were gay men reading the magazine--we published letters from them all the time. (We got plenty of colorful correspondence from women too, which is one of the main reasons the magazine never "came out"--our gay readers seemed content with, even titillated by, a magazine with hetero overtones; our female readers were not so easily placated with gayer fare.)

So it's not that we were clueless, but here's a little secret: we were almost totally powerless over the aesthetic content of the magazine.

[...]

This is why Playgirl failed in the first place. The men in the boardroom had no idea how to market or appeal to either women or gay men -- never mind to both at the same time, an unattainable magic act, in my opinion, but one the company insisted on attempting for years. The tragicomedy of Playgirl's particular aesthetic failure starts to make a lot of sense if you consider that it wasn't constructed by anyone who professed actual physical interest in the male physique. If would-be Fabios were standard, that's because "musclebound with a ridiculous mane" is a comfortable caricature of what women find sexually attractive as doodled in the minds of out-of-touch old dudes.

Right about now, I can't help but wonder how Playgirl is supposed to ride a teenager from two election cycles ago who's fifteen minutes of fame are steadily ticking down to zero into renewed longevity, but hey, I'm sure this new crop of Playgirl dudes have their finger on the zeitgeist's G-spot.

UPDATE: Daniel Nardicio writes in with a generous and substantive response:

I'm aware of Jessanne's piece in The Awl and to be frank, I owe her and the women who worked at Playgirl a huge apology. I shot off at the mouth about them and it was childish and they deserved better.

The reason I was angry was that before I asked to be Director of Marketing, I worked at Playgirl as a party planner for over a year throwing parties for them in cities such as Denver, San Fran, Key West...etc. and in all that time, the female staff of the magazine never once asked to meet me to discuss their "vision" of Playgirl, or even asked to know how I was representing them in the outside world at these events. So I got the impression that they were just punching in for a corporate paycheck. And, evidently from Ms. Collins' piece, they did try to update the faded glory of Playgirl and Playgirl.com, although I never got from her article how she tried this.

When they got laid off, I saw this as an opportunity to create a vision for Playgirl and slowly (it is, after all, a corporate structure) make changes. And Levi was the shock to the public system that we needed to let people know that Playgirl was still not only a contender, but the only adult magazine which celebs may consider posing for.

I think I've done a fine job of enforcing that vision, and I may not have gotten Terry Richardson to shoot it, or John Waters (I asked him -- he declined, but my bet is will offer Levi a role in the next four months) to interview Levi for the magazine, but I believe in baby steps. And this whole media circus is one crazy, fun, mind altering baby step in the right direction for Playgirl and frankly, for me.

So I offer my sincerest apology to the women of Playgirl -- and for the record, I think Ms. Collins is a fantastic writer.

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Yesterday afternoon, Newsbusters plugged this story about ABC News's report via Brian Ross "that suspected Fort Hood shooter Nidal Halik Hasan tried to contact people connected to the terrorist group al Qaeda" with some intriguing language: "ABC reports story that many in media wish wasn't true." That raised a rather obvious question: Who out there, in the media or otherwise, was wishing that it was true? Doesn't it seem reasonable to wish that the Hasan shootings had nothing to do with al Qaeda at all?

Well, of course, there were people who were hoping against hope that Hasan was an al Qaeda-endorsed terrorist agent, and in a well-put essay on Gawker, John Cook identifies them: "terrorists and wingnuts."

Fanaticism makes strange bedfellows, and the push to link up Hasan to a wider terrorist plot has united Sen. Joe Lieberman and radical Yemeni cleric Sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki in common cause. Wingnuts and neocons want Hasan to be a Muslim terrorist because it confirms their worldview that Muslim terrorists lurk in every shadow and helps them scare the shit out people. Muslim terrorists want Hasan to be a Muslim terrorist because it satisfies their desire to claim credit for the murders of Americans and helps them scare the shit out of people. Everybody wins.

Well, not everybody! The major losers in all of this are any adults who want to conduct a serious inquiry into the actions of an isolated, disturbed murderer and the signs that may have been overlooked in advance of his horrific killing spree. Many of these adults, like Secretary of the Army General George Casey, would like to keep these more important concerns from being washed away in a toxic backlash that would unnecessarily sully the names and reputations of the many soldiers of Islamic faith who have and who continue to serve their country with distinction. Nevertheless, the race is on to capitalize on this tragedy for the sake of juvenile political points, and the news hole is already getting clogged with precisely these sorts of kindergarten combatants.

The whole thing deserves to be read in full. Pay particular attention to the fact that the reporter behind the original report, Brian Ross, is a serial offender of narrative unreliability who's put on offer a report that "is a grab-bag of red flags." Cook blows that out further in a related post today, that thoroughly discusses the Problem That Is Brian Ross:

Ross' stock response to these complaints is that he only reports what his sources tell him. "We reported what we knew, when we knew it," he says. "I'm comfortable with the story." His problem, as we've said before, is that he has shitty sources. And he just repeats what they tell him. Which is how you get from "Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who now preaches in support of Al Qaeda. We don't know what the e-mails were about, but they didn't raise alarms at the FBI" to "Hasan tried to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda" to the headline's blunt, and thoroughly unsupported, reference to "Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda." It would have been a good story if Ross had stuck to the first, accurate, formulation.

RELATED:
How the Ft. Hood Shooter Brings Radical Clerics and Right-Wing Nuts Together [Gawker]
How ABC News' Brian Ross Cooked His 'Hasan Contacted Al Qaeda' Scoop [Gawker]

It's been a while since we've checked in on how that whole White House "War on Fox News" was playing out in the trenches, between Fox News's news-gatherers and the administration's news-dispensers. Apparently, things are a bit chippy! At least that's the state of play between two guys you've never heard of: Fox's Pentagon producer Justin Fishel and Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

Over at The Line Of Departure, Jamie McIntyre has documented the blow-by-blow, which goes a little something like this:

Fishel ran afoul of Pentagon flacks after he ran this story about the decision to give Gitmo inmates the H1N1 vaccine, which "seemed to put the Pentagon at odds with the White House" on the matter. Bryan Whitman, a spokesman who was quoted for the story, wasn't happy about the way it played, and made a special point to put Fishel on blast within earshot of the other Pentagon correspondents.

The following day, this mini-skirmish of the thin-skinned was re-enjoined, as Fishel found himself in a spat with Morrell:

The next day, November 4th, Fishel was clearly feeling the chill from Morrell, who when Fishel attempted to ask a question, curtly rebuked him for interrupting, "Excuse -- Justin, I'm addressing this question. You raised your hand. I'm happy to call on you in some point in this engagement," Morrell remonstrated Fishel.

As Fishel patiently held up his hand up, Morrell ignored him, only acknowledged Fishel at the very end of the briefing, after another producer from a competing network, Luis Martinez of ABC, was called on and "deferred" his question to Fishel.

Fishel said, "Thank you. I've had my hand up the whole time," to which Morrell replied, "I didn't see you. I'm sorry. "

"I don't believe that for a second," Fishel retorted before asking and getting an answer to his question.

Here's a video of these ostensible grown-ups litigating their dumb personal grievances with one another in front of the assembled press, a sight that is sure to make you long for the days when people just settled these matters by dueling, with guns.

WATCH:

RELATED:
Is it cold in here? Or is it Fox? [The Line Of Departure]

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The Public Option! Like the sliced bread and soft ice cream of yore, it's something that's been crazy popular with the public. But for months and months, the naturally poll-obsessed media found many contorted ways to simply ignore the consistent and widespread favor that citizens of our fair Republic have showered on this idea. Until recently, anyway! That's when the House and the Senate, in separate bills, successfully preserved in each some manner of "public option-like material," and in that new dawn, suddenly the public option had "momentum."

Of course, that read of the situation is utterly false, and speaks solely to the fact that the media simply could no longer ignore its popularity. Still, now that the "public option momentum" meme has taken hold, we're treated to such spectacles as Fox News' Brit Hume -- who never misses a chance to despair at how awful health care reform will be on Fox News Sunday -- begrudgingly "correcting" Bill O'Reilly's contention that "the folks" -- THE FOLKS! -- "don't want [the public option.]"

[WATCH]

O'REILLY: They call it, you know, the public sector. What is the -

HUME: Public option, you mean?

O'REILLY: Public option, whatever. The folks don't want it. ... But it looks to me like they have maybe 55 votes to pass it. And that means they could be filibustered and never come up for a vote.

HUME: That's what it looks like right now. The public option, actually some polls show that the public option standing by itself is not at all unpopular, but it is kind of popular. But that depends on how the poll question is raised. ... We don't need to go into all that right now.

O'Reilly could use all the clarity he can get on the matter! Not too long ago, O'Reilly seemed to come out in support of the public option, saying, "I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don't like their health insurance, if it's too expensive, they can't afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks." THE FOLKS! Who now don't want it, I guess? SO FOLKING CONFUSED.

MORE:
Hume Corrects O'Reilly's False Claim That 'Folks Don't Want' The Public Option: It's Actually 'Kind Of Popular' [ThinkProgress]

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The Washington Post is searching for America's Next Top Cheaply-Bought Purveyor Of Online Opinion, and yesterday, the paper made its first round of cruel cuts, eliminating five of the ten contestants.

The eliminated include:

Burton Richter: Richter is a Nobel Prize winning scientist, which is awesome. Unfortunately, he's writing for an editorial page run by Fred Hiatt, who's way into misleading his readers and making up his own statistics. Richter, saints preserve him, went right at one of Hiatt's bugaboos, climate change science -- a topic Hiatt is fond of lying about. In the judges' estimation, Richter didn't stretch enough. Judge Marissa Katz said, "I'm not going to argue with an opportunity to learn from our Nobel-laureate contestant. But it's worth noting that he wasn't trying to impress us with his range." Voters didn't cotton to Richter's post either. Pearls before swine, I'm afraid.

Darryl Jackson: Jackson served in the Bush administration, and I liked his chances, because with the Democrats in power, WHO WILL GIVE THE GOP A VOICE IF NOT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST! These poor fellows are barely making it anymore... in the media. Jackson was only able to deliver the most standard-issue conservative cant, however, bitching about the Obama administration's complaints that he "inherited" a complete cock-up, and the 90,465th column about Sarah Palin's exciting "second act." Voters gave Jackson a resounding DO NOT WANT, and Hiatt called the effort a "rehash." And again, let's remember that Hiatt already has a stable full of writers who are willing to deliver this sort of crap on a regular basis.

Lydia Khalil: Khalil is "a specialist on the Middle East and international security at the Council on Foreign Relations," but she hung her November 3rd column on Afghanistan on one of the most hoary of all journalist cliches: "Stuff The Cab Drivers Told Me." WORST! This should be taught, in J-School: unless your cab driver is handing you the Pentagon Papers or the corpse of the Lindbergh baby, NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT IT. Hiatt, naturally, seemed to like the whole cab driver frame (which really tells you something), calling the fact that cab drivers do not express monolithic political thought "a surprising twist" (?!?) but complaining, "because the cabbies ultimately don't give us a good policy answer, their part of the column should have been shorter." You know what? Cab drivers really are coming up short these days, in their delivery of public policy prescriptions! Anyway, voters were appropriately "Meh," and Katz knows the score, saying, "Article submissions about the politics of D.C. cab drivers land in the in-boxes of Washington publications almost as often as submissions about 'what jury duty taught me.'"

Mara Gay: Gay introduces herself as a lover of "storytelling" and an Atlantic Media fellow, and then proceeded to cook up an epic bowl of thought salad about Michelle Obama and every other powerful woman in politics, organic gardening, the Democratic primaries, her love of nearly everything and everyone, her dislike of "partisan attacks" and sentences with no real meaning whatsoever. "Women continue to prove that they aren't leaving American politics anytime soon," Gay says, emphasizing a point that no one anywhere was disputing. Marissa Katz (clearly by now you see that she was the most astute of the first-round judges), basically took a look and said: Yeah, all of this was great when Rebecca Traister wrote this, months ago, only more coherently.

Mark Esper: Esper, the editor of a hyper-local in Colorado, swung for the fences by directing his concerns far afield and deep into the past, writing a column about how a premature victory over the Taliban was declared and enshrined as truth, except that in reality, no such victory has occurred. The media has demonstrated utter amnesia over the parade of statesmen who bragged about how America defeated the Taliban, and it's great that Esper used this forum to cut against this. Unfortunately, Fred Hiatt is just the sort of person to hand out reality roofies on this issue, and it probably didn't help Esper that he pointedly criticized WaPo favorite Charles Krauthammer. Voters, however, didn't exactly flock to support the piece.

The remaining five contestants will be moving on to the next challenge and bloggin' away this week. Their assignment: "write something about 1) politics, 2) life/culture and 3) one of the knotty issues of the moment: the economy or health care." And they also have a daily assignment as well:

For Tuesday: come up with something that could become a regular feature -- like Chris Cillizza's "Most Important Number" or Ezra Klein's "Lunch Break."

In other words: Please come up with some ideas... that we can steal!

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
This Day In Newspapers And Their Pointless Journalistic Endeavors
Comedians Mock WaPo Pundit Contest

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Sunday's 60 Minutes featured a pretty terrifying report on the potential threat the United States faces from cyberterrorism. It's territory that the show has mined before.

As Steve Kroft pointed out at the outset of the report, the show had "less than a decade ago" gone to the Pentagon to learn more about how computers could be used by hackers "as a weapon." "Much of it was still theory," Kroft related, "But we were told that before too long, it might be possible for a hacker with a computer to disable critical infrastructure in a major city, and disrupt essential services, to steal millions of dollars from banks all over the world, infiltrate defense systems, extort millions from public companies, even sabotage our weapons systems."

Eep! Sounds like someone better get on that, before something terrible happens! Except guess what, something terrible already did. "Plus a lot that we don't even know about," Kroft said. Great.

Enter Jim Lewis, who directs the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who says that the United States experienced its "electronic Pearl Harbor" in 2007:

LEWIS: Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information.

Lewis goes on to point out that the entire Library Of Congress is the equivalent of 12 terabytes, so that sort of puts things in perspective, doesn't it? And it's not like hackers were making off with William Faulkner novels!

And last November, according to Lewis, "someone was able to get past the firewall and encryption devices of one of the most sensitive U.S. military computer systems and stay inside for several days." That system? The CENTCOM network, which you might know as "the people who are fighting all of our wars." The hackers were able to sit inside the network, tracking information and documents "like they were part of military command."

This, Lewis said, is the "most significant" breach of security ever "acknowledged by the Pentagon." Not acknowledging this, however, is the Bush administration, on whose watch all of this happened. Asked why the public was never told about the extent to which the United States had already suffered significant cyber-casualties, Lewis said: "You know, I've been trying to figure out why that is. And some of it is the previous administration didn't want to admit that they had been rolled in 2007." Worse yet, in Lewis' estimation, the seriousness of the threat, even now, "doesn't seem to be sinking in."

Hopefully, Liz Cheney will find some way to waterboard the Internet!

WATCH:

RELATED:
Foreign Hackers Pulled Off 'Electronic Pearl Harbor' Under Bush/Cheney in 2007[Animal NY]

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The GOP has been making great hay out of the length and size and weight and page count of the House Health Care Reform bill. Apparently intimidated by its length, this has put them in this weird oppositional position where they have been insisting that the bill be read while simultaneously attesting to the impossibility of the task. To be sure, the bill looks difficult to tote around -- though Betsy McCaughey's been managing just fine!

Well, as it turns out, the physical bulk of the printed bill conceals an inconvenient truth: it's really not that long a read. The good people at Computational Legal Studies have analyzed the bill, and their findings tend to demonstrate that the GOP is vastly overselling the daunting nature of the task:

Those versed in the typesetting practices of the United States Congress know that the printed version of a bill contains a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font. For example, consider page 12 of the printed version of H.R. 3962. This page contains fewer than 150 substantive words.

We believe a simple page count vastly overstates the actual length of bill. Rather than use page counts, we counted the number of words contained in the bill and compared these counts to the number of words in the existing United States Code. In addition, we consider the number of text blocks in the bill- where a text block is a unit of text under a section, subsection, clause, or sub-clause.

According to their basic findings, the total number of words in the House Health Reform Bill are 363,086. That includes the words found in titles, tables of contents and the like. The number of "words affecting in H.R. 3962 impacting substantive law" total out to be 234,812.

To be sure, that's a long bill! The 2007 Energy Bill had only 157,835 words, and the 2010 Defense Authorization Act is a trim 119,960 words. But as Computational Legal Studies points out, the total word count of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix is 257,000 words. Granted, it's a more exciting read, but the task of reading that book is something that even small children have proven themselves capable of mastering.

Maybe if we just renamed the bill Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Pre-Existing Conditions, everyone could just get on with it, and stop bitching about how hard legislating is.

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Your "This Day In Government Contractor Abuses" comes via Spencer Ackerman, who flags this release from the U.S. Department of Justice:

The United States has filed a lawsuit against Kaman Dayron Inc., alleging that the Orlando, Fla., defense contractor violated the False Claims Act by knowingly substituting non-conforming parts in fuzes (sophisticated ignition devices incorporating mechanical and/or electronic components) supplied to the military for use in "bunker buster" bombs, the Justice Department announced today. The suit was filed today in U.S. District Court in Orlando.

The allegations relate to FMU-143 fuzes for use in hard target penetration warheads, colloquially referred to as "bunker buster" bombs. The government alleges that Kaman Dayron knowingly substituted non-conforming bellows motors for the specified parts in three lots of fuzes supplied to the military, and that the non-conforming parts could cause the fuzes to fire prematurely, creating a hazard for military personnel and causing misfires of the warheads. The military discovered the parts substitution and has quarantined the defective fuzes.

It's a good thing that the Department of Justice is taking this matter seriously, given the extreme limitations of a Congress that only tends to give themselves broad oversight power over contractors by accident. Of course, the real bad news is that because these defective fuses weren't developed by the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, the media is likely to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the matter.

RELATED:
What Kind Of Psychopath Sells Faulty Fuses To The Military? [Attackerman]

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On yesterday's Meet The Press, Rachel Maddow made an interesting point about the way the Democrats ought to govern that I think is worth another mention.

At issue was the high unemployment rate, and whether the current stimulus plan will solve the unemployment problem as it unfolds, or whether additional moves -- sure to be met with conventional political opposition -- are required. David Gregory, sizing up the current state of play, asked Maddow, "What went wrong?" To which she replied:

MADDOW: Obviously, job numbers are the holy grail for the next election, as the governors who were just on previously [Haley Barbour and Tim Kaine] were articulating. I think...whatever Democrats do, they are going to be accused of overspending. No matter what they do. If they don't spend another dime. Between now and 2010 they are going to be accused of it. And so, if they're getting shy about the second stimulus, it's not going to make conservatives back off and say, "Oh, the Democrats are the party of fiscal moderation." They're going to get slammed as overspenders anyway, and their choice is whether they are going to do it with intractable double-digit unemployment, and the appearance that they are not doing enough to stop it, or whether they are going to be aggressive, and they need to not be shy about a second stimulus.

I think that's a "real talk" take, frankly. During yesterday's liveblog, I bottom-lined this by saying, "If you are going to get damned no matter what you do, don't get damned having done nothing. Go big!" Obviously, the political risk, here, is that if further attempts to stimulate the economy fail, there's a political price to pay for it. But if Democrats have deeply-held convictions on how to act to bolster the economy and stem the downward trend in unemployment, they ought to act on them and put some real leadership behind the effort.

If you fail and are swept from office, so be it. But if their best plan at this point is to act in the hope that maybe if you're cautious and well-behaved the GOP will stop saying mean things about you, then you're going to get booted from office anyway. Because, as far as I can tell, the health of an economy isn't tied to playing an inter-party food fight to a stalemate. Fortune -- and independent voters -- favor the bold.

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