Political leanings of network anchors

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

My main point is that getting briefed immediately would not have necessarily entailed panicing the kids or himself.

wouldn't it make more sense for the people who brief the president to get briefed. it isn't like there was a telex that just starts spitting out info explaining the details of an event for someone to read to the president.
someone has to pull together the known facts, assemble them in a logical way and then report it to the individuals who brief the president. at that point in time the president and his advisors would probably sit down for an effective briefing.

the alternative is that the moment the plane hit the 2nd tower his aides could have pulled him out and sat him down while he watched them talk on the phone to those with the info. he could then have watched them hang up the phones, discuss the issue among themselves, only hearing snippets of the conversation - and possibly forming an inaccurate or tainted view of the situation based on small tidbits of info.

this briefing prep shouldn't take hours, but 7 minutes seems pretty reasonable.

[warch]

Command during crisis starts immediately. Cheney, not Bush, was put in the immediate command role to make the call whether or not planes should be shot down. Cheney was the commander in chief. Cheney was in charge. That's not how its billed though.

[tw]

Originally Posted by warch

Command during crisis starts immediately. Cheney, not Bush, was put in the immediate command role to make the call whether or not planes should be shot down. Cheney was the commander in chief. Cheney was in charge. That's not how its billed though.

Reality is that fighter planes were never authorized to shoot down attacking airliners - at least not by Cheney. But then it gets worse. George Jr even complains how difficult it was for him to contact Cheney. Richard Clarke tells the story. It turns out that the open speaker phone used during this crisis was too loud for Mrs Cheney (what is she even doing there?) So she repeatedly goes over to that speaker phone and hangs it up - so that she can hear the sound from CNN.

[tw]

Originally Posted by lookout123

the alternative is that the moment the plane hit the 2nd tower his aides could have pulled him out and sat him down while he watched them talk on the phone to those with the info. he could then have watched them hang up the phones, discuss the issue among themselves, only hearing snippets of the conversation - and possibly forming an inaccurate or tainted view of the situation based on small tidbits of info.

Its called a game of telephone. How many people completely distort the message. Five? A responsible president, while the nation was watching the WTC attacks unfold on live TV, would have gotten up, taken the phone himself, and immediately called the White House situation room. Instead this president waits for the game of telephone to provide him with a distorted summary? As if that president is waiting for his political advisors to tell him what to do. Waiting for Cheney, Rove, and Rice to make decisions.

After reading so many insider stories, I now suspect this president does not make the decisions. He sits there waiting for someone to tell him what to do. The fact that he asks no questions only demonstrates what so many others have said about meetings with this president. He just sits there. He asks nothing as if he already knows all the answers. This was disturbing even to his Secretary of the Treasurey Paul O'Neill. This president has found a way to mask his ignorance. He asks no questions.

[warch]

Interesting timeline link Mr. Monkey. Thanks.

[Troubleshooter]

Regardless of which way these guys lean they say only what they are told to say. The ones who make the big time are the ones who do it with the least prompting.

Even the ones that seem to lean conservatively spend most of their time accosting the liberals, not telling tales on the people who own them.

Don't forget that all, all of the channels are owned by conservative corporations whose job is to make the most money, not necessarily to tell the truth.

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

Don't forget that all, all of the channels are owned by conservative corporations whose job is to make the most money, not necessarily to tell the truth.

i don't know about that... didn't the big dog over at Fox throw his support behind Kerry?

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by lookout123

i don't know about that... didn't the big dog over at Fox throw his support behind Kerry?

Show me a serious difference between Bush and Kerry and we'll see if that point is moot or not.

To borrow a whole article from Reason Magazine

Ten Reasons to Fire George W. Bush
And nine reasons why Kerry won't be much better
Jesse Walker



If you're looking for reasons to be disgusted with George W. Bush, here are the top 10:

1. The war in Iraq. Over a thousand soldiers and counting have died to subdue a country that was never a threat to the United States. Now we're trapped in an open-ended conflict against a hydra-headed enemy, while terrorism around the world actually increases.

One of the silliest arguments for the invasion held that our presence in Iraq was a "flypaper" attracting the world's terrorists to one distant spot. At this point, it's pretty clear that if there's a flypaper in Baghdad, the biggest bug that's stuck to it is the U.S.A.

2. Abu Ghraib. And by "Abu Ghraib" I mean all the places where Americans have tortured detainees, not just the prison that gave the scandal its name. While there are still people who claim that this was merely a matter of seven poorly supervised soldiers "abusing" (not torturing!) some terrorists, it's clear now that the abuse was much more widespread; that it included rape, beatings, and killings; that the prison population consisted overwhelmingly of innocents and petty crooks, not terrorists; and that the torture very likely emerged not from the unsupervised behavior of some low-level soldiers, but from policies set at the top levels of the Bush administration. Along the way, we discovered that the administration's lawyers believe the president has the power to unilaterally suspend the nation's laws—a policy that, if taken seriously, would roll back the central principle of the Glorious Revolution.

Two years ago, when Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was running for governor of Maryland, I noted her poor oversight of a boot camp program for drug offenders where the juvenile charges had been beaten and abused. "It's bad enough," I wrote, "to let something like institutionalized torture slip by on your watch. It's worse still to put your political career ahead of your job, and to brag about the program that's employing the torturers instead of giving it the oversight that might have uncovered their crimes earlier. There are mistakes that should simply disqualify a politician from future positions of authority." Every word of that applies at least as strongly to Donald Rumsfeld and to the man who has not seen fit to rebuke him publicly for the torture scandal, George Bush.

3. Indefinite detentions. Since 9/11, the U.S. government has imprisoned over a thousand people for minor violations of immigration law and held them indefinitely, sometimes without allowing them to consult a lawyer, even after concluding that they have no connections to terrorist activities. (Sirak Gebremichael of Ethiopia, to give a recently infamous example, was arrested for overstaying his visa—and then jailed for three years while awaiting deportation.) It has also claimed the right to detain anyone designated an "enemy combatant" in a legal no-man's land for as long as it pleases. Last month the Supreme Court finally put some restrictions on the latter practice, but that shouldn't stop us from remembering that the administration argued strenuously for keeping it.

4. The culture of secrecy. The Bush administration has nearly doubled the number of classified documents. It has urged agencies, in effect, to refuse as many Freedom of Information Act requests as possible, has invoked executive privilege whenever it can, and has been very free with the redactor's black marker when it does release some information. Obviously, it's impossible to tell how often the data being concealed is genuinely relevant to national security and how often it has more to do with covering a bureaucrat's behind. But there's obviously a lot of ass-covering going on.

And even when security is a real issue, all this secrecy doesn't make sense. Earlier this year, the Transportation Security Administration tried to retroactively restrict two pages of public congressional testimony that had revealed how its undercover agents managed to smuggle some guns past screeners. Presumably they were afraid a terrorist would read about it and try the method himself—but it would have made a lot more sense to seek some outsiders' input on how to resolve the putative problem than to try to hide it from our prying eyes. Especially when the information had already been sitting in the public record.

The administration has been quick to enforce its code of silence, regularly retaliating against those within its ranks who try to offer an independent perspective on its policies. While the most infamous examples of this involve international affairs, the purest episode may be the case of chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster, who apparently was threatened with dismissal if he told Congress the real projected cost of Bush's Medicare bill. Even if the White House didn't know about the threat—and I strongly suspect that it did—it created the organizational culture that allows such bullying to thrive.

5. Patriot and its progeny. The Patriot Act sometimes serves as a stand-in for everything wrong with the administration's record on civil liberties, and at times is blamed for policies it didn't create—those detentions, for example. Nonetheless, there's plenty of reasons to despise a law that allows warrantless searches of phone and Internet records; that gives police the right to see what books you've bought or checked out of the library while prohibiting the library or bookstore from telling you about the inquiry; that requires retailers to report "suspicious" transactions and, again, prevents them from telling you that they've done so. And there are plenty of reasons to despise an administration that rammed this bill through at the eleventh hour—and still wants to extend its reach.

(cont.)

[lookout123]

Originally Posted by Troubleshooter

Show me a serious difference between Bush and Kerry and we'll see if that point is moot or not.

huh-uh - you're asking the wrong person for that. that has been one of my points all along. i don't think they are really all that different. the only real difference i see is that:
1) Bush picks a philosophy or belief that makes sense to him and holds onto it like a pit bull. nothing can make him let go of it, even when he should.

2) Kerry changes his beliefs based on his audience, what the polls say, or what the popular movement in the democrat party is at the time.

i've said all along that neither of these individuals are the best choice for president. i firmly believe that the best thing that could happen for the future of our country would be if 98% of those currently in high level government service disappeared without a trace.

barring that we should change the laws so that an individual can only be elected to national office(house,senate,president) once - for a 6 year term. there should be an election every year for a portion of the positions. the beauty is that the people would have only 1 term to create their legacy and wouldn't have time to worry about pandering to the lobbiests for money to get elected again.

Whoa! i must have dozed off there for a minute because a government that is working for the good of the people instead of for themselves is just a dream.

[Troubleshooter]

Originally Posted by lookout123

i don't know about that... didn't the big dog over at Fox throw his support behind Kerry?

6. The war on speech. Not all of the White House's assaults on our freedoms are linked to the war on terror. In March 2002, Bush signed the McCain-Feingold "campaign finance reform" bill, whose restrictions on political speech in the months approaching an election—i.e., at the time when political speech is most important—are so broad that they've forced a filmmaker, David T. Hardy, to delay the release of his documentary The Rights of the People until after November because it mentions several candidates. Bush approved this bill fully aware that it was a First Amendment nightmare; it's generally believed that he did so assuming that the Supreme Court would strike down its unconstitutional elements. Surprise: The Court weeded out a few measures but left most of them in place.

That's not to say the government hasn't done anything to increase the amount of political speech. Its ham-handed crackdown on "indecent" broadcasts—an effort that is to the cultural realm what McCain-Feingold is to the political sector—has turned Howard Stern into Amy Goodman.

7. The drunken sailor factor. Fine, you say: We all expect a Republican president to molest our civil liberties. But this one has poached the Democrats' turf as well, increasing federal spending by over $400 billion—its fastest rate of growth in three decades. Even if you set aside the Pentagon budget, Washington is doling out dollars like crazy: Under Bush, domestic discretionary spending has already gone up 25 percent. (Clinton only increased it 10 percent, and it took him eight years to do that.) "In 2003," the conservative Heritage Foundation notes, "inflation-adjusted federal spending topped $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II."

Of all those spending projects, Bush's Medicare bill deserves special attention. It will cost at least $534 billion over the next decade, and probably more. And it doesn't even deliver on its liberal promises: It does much more to distribute new subsidies and tax breaks to doctors, HMOs, and the pharmaceutical industry than it does to help seniors. The Medicare bill is to Bush's domestic policy what the Iraq war is to its foreign policy: an enormous expense of dubious merit that's come under fire from both the left and the right.

8. Cozying up to the theocrats. There are those who believe the White House is being run by religious fanatics, and there are those who believe it's mostly paying lip service to Bush's Christian base. I lean toward the second view. But whether he's cynical or sincere, there's nothing good to be said for the president's willingness to demagogue the gay marriage issue (and throw federalism out the window in the process), or—worse yet—to restrict potentially life-saving research on therapeutic cloning because it offends that constituency's religious views.

9. Protectionism in all its flavors. Bush has repeatedly sacrificed the interests of consumers to help politically significant industries, giving us tariffs on products from steel to shrimp. This doesn't just make a mockery of his free-trade rhetoric—it's also bad policy.

10. He's making me root for John Kerry. I haven't voted for a major party's presidential candidate since 1988, and I have no plans to revert to the habit this year. The Democrats have nominated a senator who—just sticking to the points listed above—voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold, and the TSA; who endorses the assault on "indecency"; who thinks the government should be spending even more than it is now. I didn't have room in my top ten for the terrible No Child Left Behind Act, which further centralized control of the country's public schools—but for the record, Kerry voted for that one too. It's far from clear that he'd be any less protectionist than Bush is, and he's also got problems that Bush doesn't have, like his support for stricter gun controls. True, Kerry doesn't owe anything to the religious right, and you can't blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he's not much of an improvement.

Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I'm sure he'll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry isn't the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it's the offense that I take most personally.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).