Because dailykos was started as the Bush administration was preparing to send this country to war, I've decided my first diary entry will start with my own story from that time.

In August 2002, I began my third year of college. One of my courses was Politics of West Asia, and for this class I was required to keep up with all stories relevant to this region in the New York Times. At the beginning of the semester, I opened my Times every day and inevitably found an update of the US operations in Afghanistan.

At some point in September, I started noticing a change in the Times' stories. The coverage of Afghanistan was now on page 2, 3, 4...and on the front page appeared strange articles about Iraq. I say "strange" because they often did not follow the normal Times protocol of having front page stories cover distinct and recent events. Iraq was not complying with the UN Security Council Resolutions—just as it hadn't for years. Sometimes based on vague White House statements, these articles otherwise did not seem to describe any new developments, but had the effect of replacing "Afghanistan" with "Iraq" in the top news items in newspapers around the country.

  Tom Friedman, who gets paid far too much money for what he writes, and takes up far too much valuable editorial space in the NY Times has done it again. 9/11 and 4/11 is his complaint that Bush has wasted too much time while doing nothing that might actually  work with regards to the energy situation. Friedman is 'outraged'

I am reliably told by a Bush administration official that there is an old saying in Texas that goes like this: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”

Could anyone possibly come up with a better description of President Bush’s energy policy? America is in the midst of its worst energy crisis in years and what is the big decision our Decider has decided? Drum roll, please: Our Decider decided to lift the executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country’s shoreline — even though he knew this was a meaningless gesture because a Congressional moratorium on drilling passed in 1981 remains in force.

Well DUH!

Wow, Frank Rich's Sunday NYT Op Ed column, It’s the Economic Stupidity, Stupid, just slams McCain! Despite a somewhat odd discussion towards the end about VP candidates, it's a thing of beauty, with this as the central point:

were voters forced to actually focus on Mr. McCain’s response to our spiraling economic crisis at home, the prospect of his ascension to the Oval Office could set off a panic that would make the IndyMac Bank bust in Pasadena look as merry as the Rose Bowl.

Is the MSM starting to get it?

David Brooks tries in his column today to do something I've warned about before. He tries to claim Theodore Roosevelt as a conservative, which he most definitely is not. TR was a liberal, period. I've written about the need to claim liberal Republicans as our own. This is crucial for us as we frame American history as a march, however uneven, toward the triumph of the progressive values we share, and progressivism as being rooted in American history going back two centuries (rather than simply being seen a deviation from 'traditional values' that cropped up in the oft-[unfairly] derided 1960s). Why is this important? Because progressivism has been a winner in the big picture since 1776, and we need to portray it as being a winner. Doing so makes it more likely that progressivism will continue winning. Winners win. Losers lose. It's that simple.

See more after the jump.

The headline in Wednesday's New York Times barked:

Poll Finds Obama Isn’t Closing Divide on Race

Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society.

What the poll actually showed are the current inclinations of black and white voters in regard to Obama’s candidacy.

Today, the New York Times published a front page article about the generally positive feelings toward Barack Obama that Iraqi citizens have expressed to their correspondents. But the headline "Mixed Feelings About Obama And His Troop Proposal," refers to the article's other major contention: That Iraqis have also expressed broad opposition to Obama's plan for a 16 month timetable to withdraw US troops from the country. That surprised me. The last major Iraqi public opinion poll I know of, which was conducted by the BBC and ABC News last fall, found that nearly 50% of Iraqis favored an immediate withdrawal of US troops. That's a much more rapid timetable than Obama is proposing.

This diary is inspired by Maureen Dowd's abysmal article today, truthseeking missle's fully justified diary on how much it sucked, and a link from BarbinMD's ever-awesome Abbreviated Pundit Roundup.

The Obama campaign is taking issue with The New York Times this morning over the paper's front-page piece today on the Times poll released last night, critiquing the story for omitting a great deal of the paper's own poll polling data that suggests a different conclusion than the story reached.

NYT says Obama should have fixed the US already

How else can you explain this headline?

Poll Finds Obama Candidacy Isn’t Closing Divide on Race

Oh, really?

You mean Barack Obama just running for President hasn't been enough to heal the wounds of slavery, of segregation, of Jim Crow?  Barack Obama is running for office not already running the country.  And speak of running the country...

Indeed, the poll showed markedly little change in the racial components of people’s daily lives since 2000, when The Times examined race relations in an extensive series of articles called "How Race Is Lived in America."

As it was eight years ago, few Americans have regular contact with people of other races, and few say their own workplaces or their own neighborhoods are integrated. In this latest poll, over 40 percent of blacks said they believed they had been stopped by the police because of their race, the same figure as eight years ago; 7 percent of whites said the same thing.

Eight years ago.  Hmm.  Remind me again what happened in 2000?

That's the best the late night comedians have been able to come up with as a joke about Obama so far.

In the wake of The New Yorker cover (has that been diaried enough times yet?) comes an article in today's New York Times about the trouble late night comedians are having finding a good joke about Senator Obama.

Latest example of how far the Old Gray Lady has fallen:
Zev Chafets' generous, long, front-page Magazine article on Rush Limbaugh.(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06Limba...

Yes, all the world knows that Limbaugh has received a $400 million 8-year re-up of his contract, more than all the other news anchors combined. Yes, he has an audience of 14 million.

Why is the Times seeking to increase that audience? {The aricle conveniently notes the time of Limbaugh's broadcast at the beginning of the article.}

.

The New York Times finds that Lieberman is losing his friends.

Mr. Lieberman was leaning back in a chair in his Senate office, wearing a loose-fitting pinstriped suit, grinning a lot and appearing quite comfortable while describing "my uncomfortable position." He compared his predicament to the old Groucho Marx conceit, "I don’t care to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."

So there, Democrats!

(cross posted at MyLeftnutmeg.com)

If this has already been written about I apologize.  I did a quick search before I wrote this and didn't see any others.

With the recent news that the Iraqi government has demanded a timetable for withdrawal (which, by the way, got way less media attention than it should have--but I guess Jesse Jackson's off-color remarks and Christie Brinkley's divorce are much bigger news), it's becoming more and more clear that a long-term presence in Iraq would be unpopular with just about everyone:  Iraqi citizens, the Iraqi government, the vast majority of Americans, and the vast majority of the rest of the world.

In Monday's New York Times, Barack Obama will lay out his plan for withdrawal, taking into account the current situation on the ground and the recent requests for withdrawal from the Iraqi government.

Barack Obama has got an op-ed in Monday's New York Times in which he lays out his plans for Iraq.   He reiterates what he has been saying all along - he wants to withdraw from Iraq in 16 months (while taking the views of his commanders seriously) and deploy more troops to Afghanistan.

At the end of the op-ed, Obama hits those who have been trying to portray him as a flip-flopper on Iraq:

But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.

Nice.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

CHICAGO - The New York Times writes today on Barack Obama's recent policy shifts. The headline (not surprisingly) distorts the frame of debate, calling the Illinois senator's critics the "far left." I'll be writing on why that is such a distortion in my upcoming newspaper column this week. But beyond that distortion, let's consider the substance of what's going on.

From the AP

McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the Islamic Republic by saying it may be "a way of killing 'em."

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said: "McCain's crude remark on the indiscriminate killing of the Iranian nation not only testifies to his disturbed state of mind, but also to his warmongering approach to foreign policy."

In a statement quoted by the website of Iran's state Press TV satellite station, Hosseini added:

"We condemn such jokes and believe them to be inappropriate for a U.S. presidential candidate. It is most evident that jokes about genocide will not be tolerated by Iranians or Americans."

Well, not precisely Daily Kos, but liberals/progressives who are unhappy with the Obama flip-flop on FISA, which are probably a majority of Kossacks.

The headline tosses the slur out there, though the story has a mere one person who is arguably "far left" and who is really calling foul.

Did copy editors even read the story?

Or did they just allow their anti-liberal bias to affect the absurd headline?

More below.

The New York Times on John McCain's fact-free promise to balance the budget by 2013:

Mr. McCain’s main campaign promises, if fulfilled, would lead to huge budget deficits. Extending the Bush tax cuts, enacting more tax cuts of his own and staying the course in Iraq would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more, every year, than the small bore spending cuts he has specified. Mr. McCain cannot balance the budget on a crusade against pork and a one-year freeze in a sliver of federal spending. Either he has a secret plan to balance the budget or he’s blowing smoke.

It is safe to assume there is no secret plan.  [...]

Mr. McCain and his advisers must know that his numbers do not add up. But adding up is not their point. Their point is to perpetuate the fantasy that Americans can have ever bigger tax cuts and a balanced federal budget. They cannot. [...]

But feeding the fantasy is easier than presenting tough choices, and it worked for Mr. McCain’s Republican predecessors.