CQ Transcriptswire

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Queen Rania of Jordan has for some time had her own channel on youtube and has done a number of broadcasts attempting to clarify the reality of Islam, to present a modernist vision of the place of women in Islam, and to combat extremist interpretations of her religion.

The queen, who (like me) is a graduate of the American University in Cairo, worked at Citibank and Apple Computers in the region before marrying Abdullah bin Hussein of Jordan in 1993 (he is now King Abdullah II). She has been lauded for her work for women’s rights in Jordan, and she is a new breed of queen, holding the rank of colonel in the Jordanian armed forces.

The queen was given award as a visionary at the youtube streaming video awards show recently, and accepted it with grace and humor, doing her take-off on David Letterman’s top ten list.

Also check out her more serious interventions. Here is part I of Queen Rania’s interview with Fareed Zakaria on women and Islam on CNN:

and here is Part II:

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http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/images/11/05/art.putnam1105.gi.jpg
Rep. Adam Putnam, flanked in this file photo by Rep. John Boehner on the left and Rep. Roy Blunt on the right, has said he is leaving his congressional leadership position.

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More stupid from Mark Halperin.

I think there’s so much bad polling and it drives so much of the coverage that it’s kind of a depressing topic for me. I think that the ABC News/Washington Post poll and the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll are the gold standard right now of what we have.

It’s not too shocking to see a media guy defend media-funded polls as the “gold standard”. But are they really?

There are two ways people gauge a poll’s accuracy. The first is to simply take the margin of the poll’s final results and compare them to the margin of the final results. So it a poll says 48-41, and the results are 53-46, the poll was supposedly “spot-on” because they both had margins of seven. I think that’s a stupid way to gauge accuracy. A poll could similarly guess the results as 12-5, and be equally “accurate”.

I think the best way to gauge a poll’s accuracy is to take the totals for each candidate, calculate how far off the poll was, and then add them all up together. So in the example above with the poll saying 48-41 and the final results being 53-46, the results would be 10 points off (53-48 and 46-41).

With that standard in mind, here are the current accuracy rankings, based on the current national popular vote spread of 52.7-45.9, and each polls final result:

So ABC/Wapo and NBC/WSJ weren’t among the most accurate. Although to be honest, polling was pretty darn good this cycle. None of these results are really that far off the mark. I’ll also assume Halperin isn’t talking about state-level polling, because NBC used Mason-Dixon this year, which uncharacteristically stunk up the joint, while the Wall Street Journal skipped state-level polling this year after having funded those horrible Zogby internet polls in 2006.

So what else is there? It’s true that ABC/WaPo and NBC/WSJ have the money to fund elaborate polls with extensive crosstabs. But so does Pew, and its final numbers were second-best. In fact, it’s hard to argue that given the breath of results, that Pew isn’t the gold standard. CBS News and Democracy Corps polls also had extensive crosstabs available, all of which helped paint a more complete picture of the electorate and its leanings.

So what the hell is Halperin talking about? Well, he worked at ABC News before his current gig at Time, and his conservative buddies all work at the Wall Street Journal. Throw in a dash of the media trying to keep itself relevant by hyping its own products above all others, and that probably covers it. Because on the merits, if we’re going to start talking “gold standard”, and if we’re going to try and define that by combining accuracy with breadth of results, then Pew would most certainly win. (And Rasmussen wouldn’t be far behind.)

As to “bad polls driving too much of the coverage”, there was one major culprit — Zogby. And who was pushing Zogby’s polling when it pretended to show a close race? Drudge. The guy that rules Halperin’s world.

Meanwhile, John Heilemann follows up Halperin with a more substantive comment (and one clearly rued by Halperin) — that Nate Silver kicked ass this year. Media companies may want to pretend that their products are the “gold standard”, but it took a web-creation like Nate Silver to make sense of all that data and provide readers (and traditional media reporters) with numbers-based analysis of what was important, as well as offering a master clinic in how to read and analyze polls.

Halperin has long depended on his BFF Drudge to help steer the national conversation toward his beloved Republican buddies. So while he likely applauded Drudge’s hyping of one-day Zogby samples (out of a three-day rolling average tracker) to create the impression that McCain was still competitive, a lot fewer people cared. All one had to do was head on over to FiveThirtyEight.com to see that, in fact, the numbers continued to paint a grim picture for McCain.

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[b][link:voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2008/11/nbc_fires_twc_environmental_un.html|NBC Fires Weather Channel Environmental Unit][/b], November 21, 2008

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Forecast Earth was hosted by former CNN anchor Natalie Allen, with contributions from climate exp…

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Leaks and rumors abound on possible nominations and speculation is reaching a fever pitch. Several media outlets are reporting Timothy Geithner to be named Treasury Secretary.

Geithner played a large role in the government’s efforts to wrangle the credit crisis, which has damaged markets and economies worldwide. While a number of those efforts have been controversial, Geithner remains a well-regarded figure from Wall Street to Washington.

MSNBC reports Bill Richardson is likely to be tapped for Secretary of Commerce and Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security. Although the aides leaking the news to both CNN and MSNBC cautioned neither position was a done deal.

And last but not least, according to CNN (and many other outlets) Hillary Clinton could be nominated for Secretary of State.

President-elect Obama is on track to nominate Sen. Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state after Thanksgiving, three aides on Obama’s transition team told CNN Thursday.

Clinton senior adviser Philippe Reines repeated a statement that “any and all speculation about Cabinet or other administration appointments is for President-Elect Obama’s transition team to address.”

Talking Points Memo has an interesting take on the Clinton nomination. Hillary still owes $7.5 million to various vendors for her campaign…..$5.4 million of that is owed to Mark Penn for services rendered. While she has nearly cut her debt in half since June, all fundraising would have to end if she accepts the position.

Obama is considering Clinton for secretary of state. As a Cabinet member Clinton would face fundraising restrictions to retire her vendor debt.

A 2001 advisory opinion by the federal Office of Special Counsel said a federal employee who still had a campaign debt would be prohibited from “personally soliciting, accepting or receiving political contributions.”

Clinton could name an agent from her campaign committee to continue to organize and hold fundraising events to retire the debt. Clinton would be limited to attending a fundraising event and simply stating her appreciation to donors.

In other words, if the SoS job is offered and accepted……it could be very difficult for Mark Penn to get paid. Ouch.

More community discussion on these possible nomiations can be found in Johnny Venom’s diary on the rec list.

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(From the diaries — kos)

It’s amazing - the entire world body of leaders REFUSES to shake George Bush’s hand.

The video, courtesy of Greatscat and Youtube:

11-19-08: CNN: George Bush snubbed at the G20 Summit. Everyone greeting each other and shaking hands, but Bush walks with his head down like the dejected most unpopular kid in high school.

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A November 16 Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle editorial
supporting the “Fair Tax”
plan, a proposal that “replaces all federal income and payroll based
taxes” with a national sales tax, falsely stated that under the
“Fair Tax” people will “get
their entire paycheck.” The editorial failed to point out that the
“Fair Tax” would not pre-empt state income taxes, so Georgia residents would still have to pay the Georgia income
tax, which is withheld from their paychecks. The editorial also cited radio
host Neal Boortz as a supporter of the “Fair Tax” plan but did not
note that Boortz himself has said that employees might not receive 100 percent
of their current paychecks under the “Fair Tax” plan.

As the editorial noted, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) — who
is in a run-off Senate election against former Georgia state Rep. Jim Martin (D)
– has endorsed the
“Fair Tax” proposal. On November 14, the Chronicle endorsed Chambliss
in his run-off against Martin, saying “the re-election of Chambliss is a
must. He may be all that stands between the American people and congressional
tyranny.”

According to the Georgia Department of Revenue,
“[e]mployers are required to withhold Georgia
income tax from the wages of residents for services performed inside or outside
of this state and from nonresidents for services performed in Georgia.”
Georgia
income tax is
“computed at a graduated rate and is assessed in a range from one to five
percent on the first $10,000 of net taxable income (total tax on first $10,000
of net taxable income is $340) plus six percent of the excess of net taxable
income over $10,000.”

As Media Matters for
America previously noted, on the November 29, 2007,
edition of CNN’s The Situation Room,
correspondent Ali Velshi rebutted the claim that, under the “Fair
Tax” plan, workers would get to keep their entire paychecks: “Now,
this would be a 23-percent tax on everything you buy. Promoters like [former
Arkansas Gov. Mike] Huckabee [R] talk about how you’d get 100 percent of your
salary paid to you. Now, that is a myth. … [Y]ou’d still have to pay all of
your state and local taxes and property taxes. And, by the way, everything will
be taxed — including things like rent and health care.”

Additionally, the editorial stated: “On Nov. 16, at
the Gwinnett Center
in Duluth,
there will be a Fair Tax ‘Truth’ rally to clear up some of the lies
and distortions about the Fair Tax featuring GOP presidential candidate Mike
Huckabee, nationally syndicated radio host Neil [sic] Boortz and U.S. Senator
Saxby Chambliss as guest speakers, among others.” But the editorial did
not note that Boortz, co-author
of The FairTax Book: Saying Goodbye to
the Income Tax and the IRS (William Morrow, August
2005), wrote in a September 25, 2005, post on his
website: “Now, let’s elaborate on the ‘keep 100% of your paycheck’ line
that appears in The FairTax Book. It is certainly true that after the FairTax
becomes law there will be no more withholding from your paycheck for any
federal taxes. What you earn is what you get. This is not to say that your
gross pay will equal what it was before the FairTax. This will depend on what
your employer does when the embedded costs represented by the tax burden you
have passed on to your employer disappear.” Boortz later stated:
“The ‘keep 100% of your paycheck’ concept can more easily be
applied to those who either change jobs or come into the labor force after the
implementation of the FairTax. A new worker will negotiate a wage with an
employer knowing that the amount negotiated will be the amount that worker
receives every two weeks … no deductions.”

In the post, Boortz also wrote: “When the FairTax is
implemented, and when business and personal income and payroll taxes disappear,
your employer is going to have to make a decision. He will either take some or
the entire amount he had been withholding for federal income and payroll taxes
and add it to your weekly check, or he will readjust your pay figures so that
your entire paycheck will be equal to what you used to call ‘take home pay’
before the FairTax. The employer may also decide to do a little of both.”

From Boortz’s post headlined, “The FairTax –
Straightening Out Some Confusion”:

When the FairTax is implemented, and
when business and personal income and payroll taxes disappear, your employer is
going to have to make a decision. He will either take some or the entire amount
he had been withholding for federal income and payroll taxes and add it to your
weekly check, or he will readjust your pay figures so that your entire paycheck
will be equal to what you used to call “take home pay” before the
FairTax. The employer may also decide to do a little of both. Either way, you
can see that the amount of money you actually receive as pay - the amount
you can put into your bank account - will not decrease, and may actually
increase.

[...]

Now, let’s elaborate on the
“keep 100% of your paycheck” line that appears in The FairTax Book.
It is certainly true that after the FairTax becomes law there will be no more
withholding from your paycheck for any federal taxes. What you earn is what you
get. This is not to say that your gross pay will equal what it was before the
FairTax. This will depend on what your employer does when the embedded costs
represented by the tax burden you have passed on to your employer disappear.
One thing is certain: You will suffer no decrease in real or net earnings —
the amount of each paycheck you deposit into your bank account every other
week. The “keep 100% of your paycheck” concept can more easily be
applied to those who either change jobs or come into the labor force after the
implementation of the FairTax. A new worker will negotiate a wage with an
employer knowing that the amount negotiated will be the amount that worker
receives every two weeks … no deductions. Likewise, when you change employers
you, too, will negotiate a wage that will not be subject to withholding, and
you will get 100% of your wages in each paycheck.

From the Augusta (GA) Chronicle editorial:

A proposed 23-cent national sales
tax, the Fair Tax would replace the current federal system of taxation –
meaning no income tax and no Social Security tax.

That means power to the people,
because, first of all, they get their entire paycheck. Secondly, they determine
the amount of tax they pay by the decisions they make on their purchases.

The Fair Tax also contains a feature
called a “prebate” — money that would wipe out federal taxes
completely for those at or below the poverty line.

[...]

It’s an awful shame that such a
partisan shroud has fallen down around the Fair Tax. On Nov. 16, at the Gwinnett Center
in Duluth,
there will be a Fair Tax “Truth” rally to clear up some of the lies
and distortions about the Fair Tax featuring GOP presidential candidate Mike
Huckabee, nationally syndicated radio host Neil Boortz and U.S. Senator Saxby
Chambliss as guest speakers, among others.

This isn’t a Republican or
Democratic idea. Fact is, it’s a grass-roots movement that has been catching
steam in recent years. What a tragedy it would be if Nov. 4 were to sap the
energy out of the movement.

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CQ Transcriptswire

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Source: [b]CNN[/b]

November 14, 2008
McCain aide cites ‘failure of management’
Posted: 04:30 PM ET

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney
Davis managed McCain’s campaign.

(CNN)

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Source: [b]CNN[/b]

RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) — U.S. Sen.-elect Kay Hagan withdrew her defamation and libel lawsuit Thursday against incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole for a campaign commercial that Hagan alleged questioned her Christianity.

Hagan spokeswoman Colleen Flanagan said the papers were…

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Why the mainstream media got ‘The Huxtable Effect’ wrong.

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Amid reports that President-elect Barack Obama’s
transition team is developing a plan for closing the U.S. military-run
detention facility at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, conservative media figures
have baselessly asserted that such a plan would result in the
release of terrorists and place the country at risk. For example, Fox News
contributor Dick Morris claimed on the October 10 edition of Hannity
& Colmes that “Obama’s going to close Gitmo, and all of
those people are gonna be
back in the field, fighting against us.” On the same day, nationally
syndicated radio host Lars Larson stated that the detainees are
“garden-variety terrorists who I don’t think are entitled to
treatment under … the
American system of justice.”

Contrary
to Morris’ claim that “all of those
people” will be released if Obama
closes Guantánamo Bay, CNN
justice correspondent Kelli Arena, for
example, reported
on November 10 that
“the incoming administration is pondering whether to try some of the
Guantanamo Bay inmates in existing federal courts; set up a special national
security court to deal with cases involving the most sensitive intelligence
information; or release others.” Arena quoted a statement Obama made in an October 31 CNN interview: “I am not going to give a time certain
because I think what we have to do is evaluate all those who are still being
held in Gitmo. … We
have to put in place appropriate plans to make sure they are tried, convicted
and punished to the full extent of the law, and that’s going to require, I
think, a review of the existing cases, which I have not had the opportunity to
do.”

Larson’s claim that all of the detainees in Guantánamo Bay
are “garden-variety
terrorists” is false. It is
false, for example, with respect to a group of detainees
belonging to the Uighur ethnic group from western China,
who the Bush administration told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia are “no
longer” enemy combatants. Nevertheless, the Bush
Justice Department has fought the Uighurs’ release — which the court ordered on the grounds that
“the government has already absolved the petitioners of this [enemy
combatant] status” — arguing that they should be held until a country
agrees to take them in.
(The Uighurs say their ethnic group is persecuted in China.) The
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reportedly stayed
the men’s release and scheduled a hearing for November 24.

From the November 10 broadcast of Westwood One’s The Lars Larson Show:

LARS LARSON: Yeah, but here’s what gets me — tell me if any of this
doesn’t match what you’ve been hearing, ’cause, I mean, you’re much
closer to the centers of power. Gitmo’s
gonna close.
We’re gonna take
all those jokers and give them basically a civilian trial and the full benefit
of American jurisprudence instead of some special treatment as just, you know,
garden-variety terrorists who I don’t think are entitled to treatment
under — under our, you
know, the American system of justice.
And now we’re gonna make the attorney general the woman who put up the walls between
our agencies and, to a certain extent,
created some of the conditions that the terrorists capitalized on? The terrorists are still
terrorists, but they
capitalized on flaws that were put there by people like this woman.

MARK TAPSCOTT (Washington Examiner editorial page editor): You know, Gitmo is
one of those symbolic issues for an awful lot of people who backed Obama, and I suspect that it
doesn’t really make a difference who he appoints as an attorney general. They’re going to close Gitmo at
the first opportunity,
and the consequences of that could be very, very dire indeed. On the other
hand, there have been some number of these characters that have — that have been released
from Gitmo, who subsequently were recaptured or were killed
on the battlefield, and
perhaps some of these folks that are gonna
be let go by an Obama administration will be killed on battlefields before they
can do any more damage to Americans.

LARSON: Well, I worry that — that we’re going to give them — we’re gonna let them be loose within our country and get
our level of justice, and if they’re not convicted the countries that
gave them up are not gonna
want them back. So, are we stuck with
them?

TAPSCOTT: Very valid concern,
absolutely.

LARSON: Oh, boy.

From the November 10 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes:

ALAN COLMES (co-host): Dick, when you
keep talking about Barack Obama is gonna
have this radical agenda, we’re gonna
scare people into thinking he’s gonna
take the country way to the left. Isn’t
buying people’s bad mortgages, buying up companies, investing in banks; isn’t the Patriot Act, in terms of going after,
you know, preemptive wars, the president able to declare anybody that he wants
an enemy combatant — aren’t
those things radical? Aren’t those radical ideas we had from the past
administration?

MORRIS: Well, let’s — let’s take them one
at a time. The Patriot Act. What Obama proposes to do is to say that — and we write this in Fleeced — if we have a group that we think is a
terrorist organization, right now we can investigate them for six months in
secret: infiltrate them, check their money sources, tap their phones. Obama
wants to collapse that to a seven-day notice requirement.

You say home mortgages. We got into
this problem because of our desire to let people borrow money with no money
down and subsidized interest rates.

COLMES: Partly.

MORRIS: Those are not Republican
voters that bought those homes. Those are low-income people that needed that
kind of financial incentive and then couldn’t pay the mortgage. And what Obama’s gonna do –

COLMES: That’s only one of the things, Dick. We also had the private
companies that were –

MORRIS: — is just continue this process.

COLMES: — because of deregulation allowed to do what
they did. And, you’re — you
know, the whole idea that what this president has done — enemy combatants, that he can declare
anybody an enemy combatant –
people not having
rights to an attorney –

MORRIS: Let’s –

COLMES: — locking people away
without an opportunity for redress.

MORRIS: Well, let me –

COLMES: That’s radical.

MORRIS: Alan, don’t give me — don’t give me a
smorgasbord. Let’s take them one at a time.

Enemy combatants. As we point out in
Fleeced, there have been 225
people released from Guantánamo,
and 50 of them — 50 of them — have taken the battlefield and fought against
American soldiers. And we know,
because we’ve killed them or wounded them, and we have their proof — the DNA — that we had them under lock and key.

And now Obama’s going to close Gitmo, and all of
those people are gonna
be back in the field, fighting against us.

COLMES: Well, we don’t know that.

MORRIS: We need to make sure that
this guy does not get near 60 votes, and that’s why it’s crucial to win this
race in Georgia.

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Paul Krugman, among my favorite political commentators, has spoken forthrightly of how during the past few years we have had “monsters” in office, naming Tom Delay, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. He complains that until recently, if an observer simply called them what they are, he or she was termed “shrill.” (h/t Daily Kos).

I could not agree more. But I’d like to take this discussion out of the realm of commentary and into that of action.

It is unacceptable that television news brings Tom Delay and Karl Rove on as bona fide political commentators, when both are criminals. The same thing goes for Oliver North. Delay has been indicted on corruption charges and had to step down from his seat in Congress. Rove led a campaign to have the press out a covert CIA operative who was attempting to stop Iranian nuclear proliferation, essentially blowing her cover and that of her contacts to Tehran (i.e. he is a traitor).

There was a time when individuals so tainted with crime made themselves unacceptable in polite society, including on television.

Instead, these monsters are being given air time. CNN brought Delay on to accuse Barack Obama of being a “Marxist.” To have that shameless embezzler given a platform to smear an honorable man just made my blood boil.

Folks, we need an organization that can blanket the corporate media with emails of complaint every time they bring on a criminal and parade him as a legitimate commentator. If they blow us off, it would be time to get up some advertiser boycotts.

This rehabilitation-by-media of criminals is one way the country keeps being shifted to the right every time the people find their voice. The Right gives a comfy perch on television to looney embezzlers and burglars and then wages campaigns with big money behind them to discredit even centrist leaders not in their back pockets.

I do not advocate criminalizing politics. I am not saying anything glib, such that all Bush administration figures are ipso facto criminals and should be denied a public voice. The United States government is a large bureaucracy and lots of civil servants and military have to serve whatever administration the public votes in. There are and were people on Bush’s National Security Council, e.g., who are honorable and trying to do their best by the United States.

All that I am saying is that where someone has to resign in disgrace and is actually indicted on serious corruption charges, like Delay, that should make that individual poison to television news! The Rove case is a little trickier, since he has not been indicted. But the Fitzgerald investigation showed that he tried to do something that was technically illegal. Presidential pardons also muddy these waters. Elliot Abrams lied to Congress over the Iran-Contra affair, but was pardoned by Bush senior and then actually let onto the National Security Council by W.! But a responsible citizen watchdog group could surely come up with a fair gauge of gross criminal or ethics violations that should put the individual out of the business of commenting on daily politics to millions of viewers.

Note that corporate media is much more careful about sexual scandal than it is about other kinds of crime. A politician or public figure so much as accused of sexual impropriety is often considered off limits (CNN’s Aaron Brown once sidelined Scott Ritter that way, over a date gone bad). Presumably this caution derives in part from fear of the emails they would get, and threats of advertiser boycotts, from the religious Right.

Liberals have let themselves be walked all over by the Right, which is mostly much better funded and organized than the American Left, for too long. In part, it is because we are tolerant of a wide range of speech in a way that the Right is not. But I am not arguing for restricting the range of speech. People with Delay’s or Rove’s views deserve a hearing in the public sphere. It is just that we have no obligation to give a soapbox to monsters and criminals.

So the next time you see CNN or ABC, e.g., interview Tom Delay with a straight face, send a protest email and scream bloody murder and notice which corporation paid for Delay to be on the public airwaves. But better yet, can’t we form a facebook page for this with alerts, and get organized about it?

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The Corridor stretches across the center of Florida from Tampa through Lakeland and on to the Orlando area on the east coast, following I-4.

I just saw CNN’s graphic with Orange and Polk County. Maybe will change later, but looking bluish early on.

More about the I-4 Corridor…the microcosm…

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