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Can We All Stop Pretending To Love Ron Paul?

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The second part of the Vicente Fox interview from Bill Maher’s October 12th show and then:

The panel discussion begins as Tucker Carlson immediately calls Paul Krugman a “shill for a party” (actually twice in the whole discussion) while the third panelist Joy Behar squeezes in a word about the Republicans.

Bill praises Ron Paul for his bewilderment at Mitt Romney’s comment about “consulting lawyers” before he would choose to go to war at the most recent Republican debate.

Tucker Carlson talks about Hillary Clinton and her “authoritarian” health care program, “forcing” people to buy health insurance. SCHIP, the program for kids is debated as is poverty, smoking and the “working poor”. Graeme Frost, the young man who the right has terrorized is also discussed.

Blackwater U.S.A. and the fraud and graft going on over in Iraq are debated.
Mr. Carlson argues with straw men in his head as Mr. Krugman injects some common sense into the proceedings and Ms. Behar calls Michelle Malkin a “selfish bitch, probably”
James Dobson’s threat to not back any Republican candidate and go third-party is mentioned.

Bonus:: Tucker plays his “libertarian” card like it’s making his head get fatter if he doesn’t prattle on.

::Axis Of Evil included::

BONUS TWO:: Bill tries to get in his obligatory “Dems suck too” meme by bringing up the cigarette tax, lathering up Carlson into a “join the team of freedom” squawk.

Libertarian- Democrats with cooler music….

Make Tucker Carlson wear a bowtie again.
He has to.

 

THE WHOLE SHOW IS HERE

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Led Zeppelin Is Going Digital Next Month

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215xxx_led_zeppelin_rare_atlantic_promo_signed_8x10_wow___.jpg Zeppelin Is Going Digital

LONDON (AP) — Led Zeppelin, one of the last major acts to resist digital distribution, are releasing their back catalog online.

Led Zeppelin said their songs, including “Communication Breakdown,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven,” will be available from online music stores Nov. 13. The band is due to release a two-CD retrospective, “Mothership,” the same day.

“We are pleased that the complete Led Zeppelin catalog will now be available digitally,” guitarist Jimmy Page said in a statement Monday. “The addition of the digital option will better enable fans to obtain our music in whichever manner that they prefer.”

The band has signed a separate deal with Verizon Wireless to offer their songs as ringtones and downloads to mobile phones, Verizon said in a statement.

The Beatles are the highest-profile holdouts for digital distribution.

Led Zeppelin, which split up in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, announced last month they were reuniting for a Nov. 26 concert in London. The lineup includes Page, singer Robert Plant and bass player John Paul Jones, along with Bonham’s son Jason, on drums.

More than 1 million fans entered a draw for a chance to buy one of the 10,000 tickets to the show. The concert is a tribute to Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who died last year.

On the Net:

If a powerful op-ed falls in a forest…

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If a powerful op-ed falls in a forest…

By: Steve Benen August 21st CROOKS AND LIARS DOT COM

After the Michael O’Hanlon/Ken Pollack op-ed appeared in the NYT a few weeks ago, the political response was overwhelming. It was read, repeatedly, on the floor of Congress; it was cited frequently by administration officials and its ideological allies; and O’Hanlon and Pollack became fixtures on the talking-head shows. The piece, and the story behind, was practically ubiquitous.

 

Flash forward a few weeks. A couple of days ago, the NYT also published an op-ed from seven infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division, who will soon be returning home frustrated and jaded. The piece, “The War as We Saw It,” was a sweeping condemnation of everything we’ve heard of late from the Kristol-McCain-Lieberman-O’Hanlon-Pollack crowd.

Surely, given the vast coverage of the O’Hanlon/Pollack piece, the powerful perspective of these heroes would be immediately picked up everywhere, right? Wrong. Greg Sargent explained, that the op-ed “has been met with near-total silence.”

Efforts to crack down on lead paint thwarted by China, Bush Administration

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POSTED::Tue, Aug. 21, 2007::

Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and China have both undermined efforts to tighten rules designed to ensure that lead paint isn’t used in toys, bibs, jewelry and other children’s products.

Both have fought efforts to better police imported toys from China.

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UNRELATED DOUCHEBAG JOE SCARBOROUGH

Now both are under increased scrutiny following last week’s massive toy recall by Mattel Inc., the world’s largest toymaker. The recalls of Chinese-made toys follow several other lead-paint-related scares since June that have affected products featuring Sesame Street characters, Thomas the Train and Dora the Explorer.

Lead paint is toxic when ingested by children and can cause brain damage or death. It’s been mostly banned in the United States since the late 1970s, but is permitted in the coating of toys, providing it amounts to less than six hundred parts per million.

The Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts, consumer advocates say. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach.

“The overall philosophy is regulations are bad and they are too large a cost for industry, and the market will take care of it,” said Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy at OMBWatch, a government watchdog group formed in 1983. “That’s been the philosophy of the Bush administration.”

Today, more than 80 percent of all U.S. toys are now made in China and few of them get inspected.

“We’ve been complaining about this issue, warning it is going to happen, and it is disappointing that it has happened,” said Tom Neltner, a co-chairman of the Sierra Club’s national toxics committee.

The recent toy recalls — along with the presence of lead in vinyl baby bibs and children’s jewelry — are prompting the Bush administration to take a deeper look at the safety of toys and other imported products.

President Bush has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to report in September on ways to better ensure safe imports. He’s also asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to consider responses to lead paint threats to children.

But as recently as last December, the Sierra Club sued the Bush administration after the Environmental Protection Agency rebuffed a petition to require health and safety studies for companies that use lead in children’s products. The EPA and Sierra Club settled out of court in April, with the administration agreeing to write a letter to the CPSC that expressed concern about insufficient quality control on products containing lead.

The Sierra Club’s interest in lead paint in children’s products grew out of the largest-ever CPSC-conducted recall. That action on July 8, 2004, targeted 150 million pieces of Chinese-made children’s jewelry sold in vending machines across the United States. Since 2003, the commission has conducted about 40 recalls of children’s jewelry because of high levels of lead.

In March 2006, a 4-year-old Minnesota boy died of lead poisoning after swallowing a metal charm that came with Reebok shoes. The charm was found to contain more than 90 percent lead.

From 1994 until 2001, Ann Brown headed the CPSC under Presidents Clinton and Bush. She didn’t push for an outright ban on lead in all children’s products, partly because China’s rise to export prowess hadn’t yet unfolded.

“Today, I would say there should be an outright ban in any lead in any toy product,” she said in a telephone interview. “If I were at CPSC now, I’d say that trying to recall (tainted products) is like picking sand out of the beach — it’s just not possible.”

Before leaving her post, Brown unsuccessfully pushed for pre-market testing of children’s products. The idea largely died when the Bush administration took over, said Brown, who’s working with Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The CPSC has only 100 field inspectors to police problems with all products sold to more than 301 million Americans. None of the inspectors are stationed in China or anywhere else abroad.

China remains very much under the microscope. It’s fighting a CPSC proposal to bring the lead restrictions in children’s jewelry to the same levels as those imposed on toys and furniture — six hundred parts per million, which effectively amounts to a ban.

“We have done recall after recall since 2003. We would like to move towards a ban and make the marketplace safe,” said Scott Wolfson, a commission spokesman.

But in a March 12 filing, China was the only one of 48 interested parties to tell the panel that it opposed new restrictions on lead paint in children’s jewelry. Guo LiSheng, the deputy director of a Chinese global trade agency, warned against “unnecessary obstacles to trade” and advocated international rules that allow some lead content. He added that good product labeling was sufficient.

“We agree with the viewpoint of USA of protecting the children’s healthy and safety. And we consider that the method of stick warning mark on the children’s metal jewelry … may be more efficient than setting the limit of lead content,” LiSheng wrote from Beijing.

Of the 400 or so product recalls this year, about 60 percent involve products made in China, according to commission statistics.

In response to the toy recalls and tainted products, China announced last Friday the creation of a government panel on product safety. The government appointed Wu Yi, the vice premier and China’s top problem-solver, to head the panel.

Outside a Toys-R-Us store in Maryland’s capital city of Annapolis, Bruce Waskmunski suggested it was a no-brainer that lead should be completely banned from children’s products. He’s angry about the June recall of a Chinese-made Thomas the Train wooden toy that he bought his son.

“The only thing lead paint is in now (in the United States) is 40- or 50-year-old buildings,” he grumbled. “We’ve known about lead paint for years, but we’re giving away the penny to China.”

To read Sierra Club’s initial request for the Bush administration to monitor lead, click here: Sierra Club request.

To read the EPA’s settlement with Sierra Club, click here: EPA settlement.

2007 McClatchy Newspapers

A$*HOLES OF REPORTING: BASHING BLOGGERS BECOMING BIG

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Annals of Reporting

08.19.07 — 8:16PM

By Josh Marshall

For
a variety of reasons I try to stay out of the debates over blogs as
such, what they’re good or bad at and the rest. But this morning I was
alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube,
a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that
the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on
information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”

Now, fair enough. There’s certainly no end of blog pontificating
fueled by puffed-up self-assertion rather than facts. But Skube’s piece
reads with a vagueness that suggests he has less than a passing
familiarity with the topic at issue. And I will confess to you that
what really caught my attention was that in a column bewailing how
blogs don’t do any real reporting one of the four bloggers he mentioned
was me.

Now, whether we do any quality reporting at TPM is a matter of
opinion. And everyone is entitled to theirs. So against my better
judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to
believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as
examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the
blogosphere.

Now, I get criticized plenty. And that’s fair since I do plenty of
criticizing. And I wouldn’t raise any of this here if it weren’t for
what came up in Skube’s response.

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into
the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent
I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …”

This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly
does use me as an example — along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and
Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to
remember what he’d written in his own opinion column on the very day it
appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat
that he wrote about sites he admits he’d never read.

To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the
original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought
I needed to cite more examples … “

And this is from someone who teaches journalism?

Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor
of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name
claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.

Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times
oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article
decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual
backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few
blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off
on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.

I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.

Talking Points Memo | Annals of Reporting

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