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2010 Elections -- The New Inquisitors

In this Nov. 10, 2010 photo, Carl Frattini, Director of Business Development for Northeast Utilities, left, and Bill Blanchard, Solar Project Manager of Western Massachusetts Electric Company, walk the 1.8 megawatt facility in Pittsfield, Mass., that is run by the Western Massachusetts Electric Company. It is the largest solar energy plant in New England. (AP Photo/Stewart Cairns)

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AP/The Huffington Post First Posted: 11-15-10 09:42 AM   |   Updated: 11-15-10 09:42 AM                    

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — On land poisoned by toxins from a long-gone manufacturing era, more than 6,500 solar panels face the south sky, capturing the sunlight of a late autumn day in the Berkshire Mountains.
They're ready to deliver power to New England.
The Western Massachusetts Electric Co. site in Pittsfield, New England's largest solar project, promises to produce enough electricity for about 300 homes starting later this month. That's a tiny fraction of what the region needs to run computers, lights, TVs and everything else utility customers take for granted.
But the $9.4 million solar plant and an even larger project planned for Springfield next year are expected to spur job growth in the solar industry and eventually make the cost of solar power competitive with the oil-burning furnaces that are common in New England.

"What we'd like to do is open a new sector," said Carl Frattini, director of business development at Western Massachusetts Electric.
The cost to install smaller scale rooftop solar panels is about $8,800 per kilowatt, he said. However, increasing the efficiency of production with large projects reduces the cost to about $5,200 per kilowatt, he said.
Ian Bowles, the state's secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said that although solar power represents less than 1 percent of electrical use in Massachusetts, it is not subject to price volatility common with rising and falling oil and natural gas prices. So the rates consumers pay are more stable.
Solar power still is far more expensive than fossil fuels, but its rates are down by almost a half in just a few years, he said. It's on a trajectory toward parity with traditional sources of energy in the region.
"Then it will really take off," he said.
But don't get rid of that oil-burning furnace yet.
Philip Jordan, head of Green LMI Consulting, a Mendon, Mass., work force and economic consulting firm, said technology still has far to go to push down prices. Renewable energy depends to a certain extent on government spending, which could fall as public officials close budget deficits, he said.
"It's hard to know how fast things will ramp up in terms of efficiency of scale," he said.
Nationally, the solar industry employed 93,502 workers as of August, about double from the previous year, according to a report by the Solar Foundation, a research and education group. In the next year, employment is expected to jump 26 percent, adding nearly 24,000 jobs, despite the weak recovery from the worst recession in decades, the group said.
Paul Gromer, executive director of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England, said the trend in solar construction nationally is toward larger plants. He said improvements in manufacturing have pushed down costs, and installers are becoming more efficient with each new project.
"It is small but growing very, very rapidly," he said.
Fouad Dagher, manager of energy products and services at National Grid, which is installing five megawatts of utility-owned solar power at five of its locations in Massachusetts, said equipment manufactured overseas also is pushing down prices.
"The more we do the more the prices are coming down," he said.
Though Gromer called Massachusetts a "hotbed for the solar energy business," New Jersey and Florida are home to larger solar projects. In Pilesgrove, N.J., Panda Power Funds of Dallas and Con Edison Development of Valhalla, N.Y., are developing a 71,000-solar panel project on a 100-acre farm. It is set to generate 20 megawatts by April or May, among the handful of largest solar farms in the nation.
A 25-megawatt facility opened last year in Arcadia, Fla.
Massachusetts legislation signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick in 2008 helped push development of solar plants locally, Frattini said. The Green Communities Act permits utilities to generate power from solar plants, an exception to the prohibition against generating power that was part of deregulation more than a decade ago.
And to resolve another problem – the need for large tracts of land to house row upon row of solar panels – Western Massachusetts Electric looks to abandoned industrial and commercial areas and former landfills, which are relatively inexpensive. The company plans to use a capped landfill in Springfield for its next solar plant. And its eight-acre Pittsfield property, once used by General Electric Co. to make transformers, was fouled by PCBs.
The site of the 1,800-kilowatt plant in Pittsfield, with its 33 rows of solar panels in an out-of-the way industrial park, is less obtrusive – and less contentious – than alternative energy such as wind turbines.
"I know aesthetics depend on where you stand," said Western Massachusetts Electric project manager Bill Blanchard. "But I love it."
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After DADT vigil, LGBT servicemembers are en route to the Capitol.

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Clinton and Gates: Why the Senate should ratify New START

By Hillary Rodham Clinton and Robert M. Gates
Monday, November 15, 2010;


For decades, American inspectors have monitored Russian nuclear forces, putting into practice President Ronald Reagan's favorite maxim, "Trust, but verify." But since the old START Treaty expired last December, we have relied on trust alone. Until a new treaty comes into force, our inspectors will not have access to Russian missile silos and the world's two largest nuclear arsenals will lack the stability that comes with a rigorous inspection regime.
Before this session of Congress ends, we urge senators to approve an arms control treaty that would again allow U.S. inspectors access to Russian strategic sites and reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by both nations to a level not seen since the 1950s.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), signed by President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April, builds on foundations laid by American leaders from both political parties over the past four decades. It has broad bipartisan backing. Six former secretaries of state, five former secretaries of defense and three former national security advisers have endorsed ratification, along with seven former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command and the entire current U.S. military leadership. They understand that nuclear dangers did not disappear with the Soviet Union and that we have a responsibility - to Americans and our allies - to keep our eyes on the world's other major strategic nuclear arsenal.
Time is running out for this Congress. Here is what's at stake:
New START will advance critical national security objectives: Reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons while retaining a safe and effective deterrent; providing direct insight into Russia's nuclear arsenal; and creating a more stable, predictable and cooperative relationship between the world's two leading nuclear powers.
It will put in place an effective verification regime to track each side's progress in reducing its arsenal to 1,550 strategic warheads. We will be able to count the number of deployed strategic weapons more accurately, because we will exchange more data on weapons and their movement than in the past. We will also conduct 18 short-notice inspections of Russian nuclear forces each year, including checking warheads on individual missiles.
New START will also set the stage for future arms reductions, including negotiations on tactical nuclear weapons. It will help solidify the "reset" of U.S. relations with Russia, which has allowed us to cooperate in pursuit of our strategic interests.
That's what the treaty will do. Here's what it will not do:
It will not limit our ability to develop and deploy the most effective missile defenses to protect America's forces and territory, and to enhance the security of our allies and partners. This administration is committed to sustaining and improving our missile defense capabilities and has proposed spending nearly $10 billion in fiscal 2011 to do so.
It will not restrict our ability to modernize our nuclear forces. On the contrary, the United States will continue to maintain a robust nuclear deterrent based on our "triad" of delivery systems: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers for nuclear armaments. To sustain and modernize these systems, the administration has proposed spending well over $100 billion during the next decade.
Furthermore, the treaty permits us to make investments as needed to maintain a secure and effective nuclear stockpile. The administration has proposed spending $7 billion for this purpose in the current fiscal year - a nearly 10 percent increase - and more than $80 billion to modernize our nuclear weapons complex over the next decade, including a major life-extension program for current warheads. In all, the administration proposes spending more than $180 billion on the infrastructure that sustains our nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them - a substantial investment in the credibility and efficacy of America's nuclear deterrent.
Finally, New START will not constrain our ability to develop and deploy the most effective conventional capabilities possible, including strike systems that could potentially hit a target anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.
Every president since the beginning of the Cold War has opted for verifiable arms control deals. Each time, the Senate has backed these treaties by overwhelming margins. The START Treaty, negotiated by Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was approved in 1992 by 93 votes to 6. The Moscow Treaty, negotiated by President George W. Bush, was approved 95 to 0 in 2003.
The New START Treaty also deserves prompt ratification. Our national security depends on it.
The writers are, respectively, the U.S. secretary of state and secretary of defense.

Voters Don't Want Congress To Cut Extended Unemployment Benefits: Poll

                   First Posted: 11-15-10 01:45 PM   |   Updated: 11-15-10 01:49 PM

Seventy-three percent of voters want Congress to keep the extended unemployment benefits put in place to fight the recession, according to a new poll commissioned by the National Employment Law Project, and they don't care about the deficit.
With unemployment expected to hover above nine percent for the foreseeable future, nearly three out of four voters say "it is too early to start cutting back benefits for workers who lost their jobs."
"There is deep public support for continuing the federal unemployment programs at a time when unemployment is at 9.6 percent and millions are still out of work," said NELP director Christine Owens in a statement. "Support for continuing these programs trumps concerns about the deficit -- which should be no surprise when nearly half of all unemployed workers have been looking for work for more than six months but have not been able to find jobs."
Congress has just two weeks from Monday to reauthorize extended unemployment benefits before they expire at the end of the month. It will be the third time the benefits have needed reauthorization in the past year. Each of the three previous reauthorizations met stiff resistance from congressional deficit hawks, and the most recent reauthorization was delayed for nearly two months as 2.5 million people had their benefits interrupted.
According to the poll, the public doesn't share the deficit concerns voiced by Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress. Only 24 percent of voters agreed that, "With the federal deficit over one trillion dollars, it is time for the government to start cutting back on unemployment benefits for the unemployed." Sixty-seven percent said the programs should continue until there is a significant drop in the jobless rate.
"The breadth of the support was pretty striking to us," said Guy Molyneux of polling firm Hart Research Associates. Molyneux noted that 55 percent of Republicans want the benefits kept in place, compared with 83 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Independents.
During recessions Congress routinely gives the unemployed extra weeks of federally funded benefits on top of the 26 weeks provided by states. The programs in place provide up to 73 additional weeks in some states, which surpasses the previous high of 55 weeks during the recession of the early 1980s. Federal benefits have never been dropped with a national unemployment rate above 7.2 percent.
Owens stressed that the primary concern is reauthorizing the existing programs, not giving extra help to people who have already run out of benefits. There has been some confusion over what's at stake in the next two weeks.

"What we are talking about now is maintaining the status quo through 2011 and not adding new weeks of benefits."
NELP has estimated that two million long-term unemployed will prematurely stop receiving benefits by the end of the year if Congress doesn't reauthorize the benefits. The checks will stop going out for some people immediately after Nov. 30, and more and more people will have their lifeline cut off each week as they exhaust the weeks left on their current "tier" of benefits and find themselves ineligible for the next tier.
The progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that reauthorizing the benefits for a full year would cost $65 billion and create more than 700,000 jobs.
"For the sake of the economy and millions of struggling families, Congress should continue these programs for a full year," said Owens.
Click HERE to download a PDF of the poll results.
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Ultra-Light Aircraft Emerge As Newest Threat On Southwest Border

December 2010 

By Stew Magnuson 

After several years of cat-and-mouse games with Mexican smugglers who tunnel under southwest land crossings, Customs and Border Protection has had to play defense in the air.

Ultra-light aircraft have emerged as the latest challenge to agents, said Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher.

“When you think that we’ve got it figured out, that threat — as the threat does — is going to change, and going to morph. We have to be as agile,” Fisher said at a recent National Defense Industrial Association homeland security symposium.

The five-mile stretch between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa crossings south of San Diego is one of the most heavily fortified sections that the agency patrols. Smugglers responded by digging numerous tunnels in the area. Now that ground-penetrating radar has been employed to ferret out the underground structures, the cartels have taken to the air in ultra-light aircraft, Fisher said.

“Right now, we don’t have an interdiction policy,” Fisher said. CBP tries to identify them, launch air assets and “provide an armed escort back south.”

The profits for a successful operation can be enormous, though.

Ultra-light aircraft kits cost anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, according to the all-about-ultralights.com website. A pilot weighing about 150 pounds could leave another 100 pounds in excess capacity. With current street values of cocaine at about $100 per gram, one quick flight over the border could net cartels $4.5 million.

The latest National Drug Threat Assessment carried out by the Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center, said there has been some speculation that this method could be used to bring terrorists or weapons of mass destruction across the border.

However, “Intelligence and law enforcement reporting indicates that [drug cartels] have not demonstrated any interest in or intent to smuggle on behalf of terrorists,” the report said.

Reps. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and Dean Heller, R-Nev., introduced the Ultra-light Smuggling Prevention Act this year, which seeks to increase penalties for those caught flying over the border. It passed the House in September, and has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee.

Ted Koppel And The Real Death Of "Real News"

DAILY KOS

 

by Keith Olbermann

Mon Nov 15, 2010 at 07:37:03 PM PST

During my suspension weekend before last I got an email from the delightfully and improbably named Autumn Brewington, inviting me to contribute an Op-Ed piece to The Washington Post on the topic of journalistic objectivity (and, I’m assuming, how political contributions or mere identification fit into that sphere). Discretion being the better part of valor, I had to turn down all requests for comment at that point. Vanity being the better part of me, I have to assume she then turned to the former ABC anchor Ted Koppel.

• Keith Olbermann's diary :: ::

The results were what you might expect. Sanctimony, condescension, nostalgia for a time when tv news was objective and neutral and giants walked the earth and they didn’t worry about profits and it was a point of pride that they lost money and everybody trusted them and it was never about ratings and hey you kids get off my lawn. Around dinner-time tonight, the fabulous Jack Shafer at Slate dismembered the we-lost-money meme with a splendid deconstruction of the cooked books of the news operations of the ‘50s and ‘60s that I have to admit was an education even for me. By accident, Mr. Shafer presented a wonderful preamble to the point I wanted to make in tonight’s Special Comment, a point I hope you’ll permit me to present here in the form of the script from tonight’s show:
When Walter Cronkite died sixteen months ago, he was rightly lionized for the quality of his work, and the impact he effected on television news. He was praised for his utter objectivity and impartiality, and implicitly – and in some cases explicitly – there was wailing that this objectivity had died with him.
Yet invariably the same few clips were shown with each obituary: There was the night Cronkite devoted fourteen minutes of the thirty-minute long CBS Evening News to a report on Watergate which devastated the Nixon Administration, one so strong that the Administration pressured CBS just to shorten the next night’s follow-up to eight minutes. There was the extraordinary broadcast on Vietnam from four-and-a-half years earlier in which he insisted that nothing better than stalemate was possible and that America should negotiate its way out, “not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” All that newscast did was convince the 36th President of the United States to not seek reelection. The deserved and heartfelt sadness at the loss of a great journalist and a great man had been turned into a metaphor for the loss of a style of utterly uninvolved, neutral  “objective” reporting. Yet most of the highlights of the man’s career had been of those moments when he correctly and fearlessly threw off those shackles and said what was true, and not merely what was factual.
It has been the same with every invocation of Edward R. Murrow: Murrow would never have stood for the editorializing of today in his newscasts! The Murrow radio reports from London rooftops during the Blitz of 1940 are replayed – and forever should be – and their creator is offered as a paragon of “straight” reporting. Yet it is never mentioned, that as they happened, CBS was pressured to stop those searing explosions of truth, because our political leaders believed they would unfairly influence Americans to side with the British when the nation was still officially neutral and the Republican Party was still completely convinced that there was a deal to make with the Nazis. President Roosevelt did not invite Murrow to the White House to congratulate him on his London reports because they were “fair and balanced.”
     
Similarly, the journalism students of now seven different decades have studied the Murrow broadcasts about Senator Joseph McCarthy from 1954. These are properly lauded as some of the greatest moments not merely in the history of American Journalism; they are considered such in the history of America. The story is told that a cowering, profit-hungry press stood idly by – or even rode McCarthy’s paranoia for circulation and ratings – while the blacklist and the fear grew. And then Murrow slayed the dragon.
     
Always left out, sadly, is the fact that within hours of speaking truth based on facts, Murrow was attacked as a partisan. The Republicans, and the Conservative newspapers, and the Conservative broadcasters described – in what they would have insisted was neutral, objective, unbiased, factual reporting – that in smearing the patriotic McCarthy, Murrow was a Democrat, a Liberal, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Communist, a traitor. Always left out, sadly, is the fact that these attacks worked. Within 12 months, Murrow’s “See It Now” program had lost its sponsor and been reduced from once a week to once a month. Within 18 months it had been shifted from every Tuesday night at 10:30 to once in awhile on Sunday afternoons at 5 -- becoming, as one CBS producer put it “See It Now And Then.”
       
Mr. Koppel does not mention – nobody ever does – that the year in which Edward R. Murrow helped save this democracy by including his own editorial judgment in “The News,” was the last year of his life throughout which Murrow appeared on a regular prime-time news broadcast. He would be eased out of CBS entirely in seven years and would be dead in eleven.
The great change about which Mr. Koppel wrings his hands is not partisanship nor tone nor analysis. The great change was the creation of the sanitized image of what men like Cronkite and Murrow – and H.V. Kaltenborn and Elmer Davis and John Charles Daly and H.R. Baukhage and Howard K. Smith and Eric Sevareid and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and George Polk and even Ted Koppel - did. These were not glorified stenographers. These were not neutral men. These were men who did in their day what the best of journalists still try to do in this one. Evaluate, analyze, unscramble, assess – put together a coherent picture, or a challenging question – using only the facts as they can best be discerned, and their own honesty and conscience. And if the result is that this story over here is a Presidential chief of staff taking some pretty low-octane bribes and the scandal starts and ends there, you judge all the facts, and you say so. And if the result is that that other story over there is not just a third-rate burglary at a political office, but the tip of an iceberg meant to sink the two-party system in this country, you judge all the facts, and you scream so.
Insist long enough that the driving principle behind the great journalism of the television era was neutrality and objectivity -- and not subjective choices and often dangerous evaluations and even commentary -- and you will eventually leave the door open to pointless worship at the temple of a false god. And once you’ve got a false god, you’re going to get false priests. And sooner rather than later, in a world where subjective analysis is labeled evil and dangerous, some political mountebank is going to see his opening and seize the very catechism of that false god, words like “objective” and “neutral” and “two-sided” and “fair” and “balanced,” and he will pervert them into a catch-phrase, a brand-name. And he can create something that is no more journalism than two men screaming at each other is a musical duet.
But as long as there are two men, as long as they are fair, and balanced, is not the news consumer entranced by the screaming – and the fact that his man eventually, and always, out-screams the other – is not he convinced that he has seen true journalism, true balance, true objectivity?
I have read and heard much, of late – including from Mr. Koppel in The Washington Post Sunday - about how those who succeeded his grand era of false objectivity are only in it for the money or the fame or the chance to push a political party. Mr. Koppel also implied – as others have -- that the men behind my network saw in the success of Fox News, a business opportunity to duplicate the style but change the content. Mr. Koppel implied that yesterday. In fact, nothing could be further than the truth, and the very kind of fact-driven journalism Mr. Koppel seems to be claiming he represents and I fail, would not stand for his sloppy assumptions and his false equivalence of “both sides do it.”
We do not make up facts at MSNBC and when we make mistakes we correct them. Friday night I found, as we rehearsed its presentation, that a segment implying former President Bush had lifted parts of his autobiography from other works of recent history was largely based on excerpts that mostly required heavy editing and still produced only weak evidence. We killed the segment. Would Fox have? Would CNN have? A week before “Anderson Cooper 360” presented a political story in the most cataclysmic of tones. There were three guests: an on-line magazine editor, a staunch Liberal, and a staunch Conservative. They were in agreement: the story wasn’t that big a deal. The segment ran anyway.
     
More over, while Fox may be such, we are not doctrinaire. I cannot prove it, so I’ll estimate it here and if I’m proved wrong I’ll happily correct it: but my intuition tells me I criticized President Obama more in the last week than Fox’s primetime hosts criticized President Bush in eight years. To equate this network with Fox, as Mr. Koppel did – to accuse us of having our own facts - is another manifestation of a dangerously simplified understanding of modern news. This guy says the moon is a planetary fragment orbiting the Earth; this other guy says it’s actually the body of the late Vince Foster – have them both on and let them debate. It’s fair and balanced.
And to the charge that a bunch of bean-counters seized upon a business opportunity: I have been here for every moment of my network’s evolution. It began in 2003 when slowly, one fact at a time, we began to challenge the government’s rationalization for the war in Iraq. A year later I was told by the former president of this network that he did not want me, or us, to be a liberal answer to Fox News. The man whose hour followed mine then, was a conservative ex-Congressman. The year after that, I offered evidence that there seemed to be a disturbing juxtaposition of government terrorism warnings or counter-terrorism detentions with political bumps in the road for the Republican party. The woman whose hour followed mine then, had been hired by us away from Fox. The year after that, I did the first of these Special Comments and I fully expected that I might be fired it. The year after that I had to spend urging my employers to give my guest host her own show. Now there are three shows in primetime in which the content usually lines up with the small “L” liberal point-of-view even as it needles and prods and sometimes pole-axes the Democrats. And that conservative ex-Congressman is still on the air here, every day, and he has as much time as the three of us at night do, put together.
     
If this was a business plan, it wasn’t as good as the one at the nearest kid’s lemonade stand. This network came to this place organically. And therein lies the final irony to what Mr. Koppel wrote. We got here organically in large part because of Mr. Koppel. His prominence, you will recall, came when ABC News and Sports president Roone Arledge - who never permitted business or show business to interfere in his judgments and journalistic pledge of allegiance or his decision to air “Battle Of The Network Stars” – made the subjective, and eminently correct, decision that the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran merited half an hour or more each night of the network’s time in 1979.  This was not the no-brainer retrospect may suggest. CBS and NBC and PBS certainly did not do it. Even when CNN signed on in the middle of the next year, it did not do it. Arledge made his decision just four days after the hostages were seized, and stuck with the story until it ended, defying the conventional television wisdom and constantly pressing the government and questioning the official line.
And even after those hostages were freed more than a year later, the half an hour of news, now called “Nightline,” continued. And each night, for 26 years, Mr. Koppel and his producers and his employers subjectively selected which, out of a million stories, would get the attention of his slice of American television for as much as half an hour. Which story would be elevated and amplified, and which piles upon piles of stories would be postponed, or tabled, or discarded, or ignored.
Just as the accounts of Mr. Murrow’s career emphasize McCarthy but not the fact that the aftermath of McCarthy buried Murrow’s career, the accounts of Mr. Koppel’s career will emphasize the light he so admirably shone on the Iran hostages. These stories will probably not emphasize that in 2002 and 2003 and 2004 and 2005 Mr. Koppel did not shine that same light on the decreasingly coherent excuses presented by the government of this nation for the war in Iraq.
Fourteen consecutive months of nightly half-hours on the travesty and tragedy of 52 hostages in Irahn, but the utter falsehood and dishonesty of the process by which this country was committed to the wrong war, by which this country was committed to dishonesty, by which this country was committed to torture – about that Mr. Koppel, and everybody else in the dead “objective” television news business he so laments, about that Mr. Koppel could not be bothered to speak out.
     
Where were they?
     
Worshiping before the false god of utter objectivity.
     
The bitter irony that must some day occur to Mr. Koppel and the others of his time was that their choice to not look too deeply into Iraq, before or after it began, was itself just as evaluative, just as analytically-based, just as subjective as anything I say or do on MSNBC each night. I may ultimately be judged to have been wrong in what I am doing. Mr. Koppel does not have to wait. The kind of television journalism he eulogizes, failed this country because when truth was needed, all we got were facts - most of which were lies anyway. The journalism failed, and those who practiced it failed, and Mr. Koppel failed. I don’t know that I’m doing it exactly right here. I’m trying. I have to. Because whatever that television news was before – now we have to fix it.

Quantitative Easing Explained

posted by: Dylan Ratigan on November 15, 2010

Ted Koppel, Bad Reporter

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ABC News veteran Ted Koppel ladles out self-serving news nostalgia in the Washington Post.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Nov. 15, 2010, at 6:29 PM ET

---

I know of no more sorry a spectacle than the wizened newsman weeping with nostalgia for the golden age of journalism—which just happens to coincide with his own glory days.
Ted Koppel sobbed this eternal lament in the Washington Post Outlook section on Sunday, Nov. 14, in a piece titled "The Case Against News We Can Choose." His news peg? The 2-second suspension served by MSNBC Countdown anchor Keith Olbermann after Politico reported that he had violated company policy with his campaign contributions.
This isn't the first time Koppel has complained about the ruination of TV news by the cable channels. In 2006, he penned a similar op-ed in the New York Times upon leaving ABC News after working there for 42 years. In both the Post and Times pieces, he accuses the cable networks of giving audiences what they want instead of what they need to know because it's the best way to secure advertising profits. Such profit-pandering was unlikely in the 1960s, he writes in the Post, because network TV news "operated at a loss or barely broke even," a fulfillment of the "FCC's mandate" that broadcasters "work in the 'public interest, convenience and necessity.' "
"On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable," Koppel writes in the Post.
Koppel continues that it wasn't until 60 Minutes proved TV news could make a profit—"something no television news program had previously achieved"—that news divisions started chasing revenues.
The assertion that TV network news lost money everywhere until Don Hewitt birthed 60 Minutes is frequently repeated. But it's wrong—dead wrong—as a paper in the December issue of Journalism by Michael J. Socolow of the University of Maine shows. Socolow has Koppel's number, writing:

[B]roadcast journalism, historically, has played a direct—and at times central—role in increasing the profitability of American network broadcasting. …
The idea of the philanthropic news division continues to be propagated because network journalists—and their employers—derive benefits from its public dissemination. It allows journalists to indulge in jeremiads about the decline of journalistic standards and the intensity of contemporary corporate pressure. Like all jeremiads, it calls upon a community to restore supposedly timeless values. The myth legitimizes a normative vision of professional broadcast journalism in the United States as protected, disinterested, and independent. [Emphasis added.]

The myth that network news didn't make money owes its origin to artful bookkeeping, Socolow informs us. The networks have never broken out profit-and-loss statements for their news divisions or allowed the press access to their budget documents because it has never been politically advantageous for them to do so.
As this Time magazine story from 1965 explains, the shows had no trouble attracting advertising in the 1960s. NBC News' nightly news program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, brought in an estimated $27 million a year in network advertising revenues, making it NBC's highest-grossing show. CBS News' evening broadcast, anchored by Walter Cronkite, collected an estimated $25.5 million. According to Socolow, CBS and NBC reaped additional revenues from their "owned-and-operated stations" in places like New York and Los Angeles, which sold local ads during the network broadcasts. "Having these stations is like having a license to print money," Socolow quotes CBS Chairman William Paley as saying, "and the news department justifies it."
Socolow reports that artful bookkeeping forced NBC News to pay a fixed sum to support the NBC Orchestra. Fred Friendly of CBS News complained that the news division couldn't lease or buy its own studio space, cameras, or transmission lines but had to pay the going corporate rate. He unearths a 1951 memo by Sylvester L. "Pat" Weaver, carping that NBC accounting practices made virtually every NBC program look like a money loser. Weaver wrote that a show would get billed $60 whenever the NBC staff repaired a broken ladder that originally cost just $4.
More accounting tricks: After NBC stated that it spent $800,000 on the coverage of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, hospitalization, and funeral, it admitted to reporter Edward Jay Epstein that at least $500,000 of that included salaries of existing news crews and technicians and "general overhead" that had to be paid regardless.
Socolow amply documents that making money from news was already a tradition at CBS and NBC in the radio era, writing that "by 1944 news programming provided the majority of NBC's revenues." He points to former NBC News President Reuven Frank's 1991 memoir, Out of Thin Air,* where Frank writes that Camel cigarettes "supported the entire national and worldwide structure of NBC Television News—salaries, equipment, bureau rents, and overseas allowances to educate reporters' children." And NBC News was free to sell ads beyond the Camel spots. According to Socolow, the Today show, a news-division product, became NBC's most profitable program by 1954. "By the early 1960s, both NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report and the CBS Evening News were earning enormous revenues," Socolow writes, paralleling the booming revenues of their parent networks.
How big was the take? "I don't think the news division of a network ever lost money," Frank says in a 1989 interview cited by Socolow.
Koppel is correct when he cites the success of 60 Minutes as a news-business turning point, one that proved a news-division program could make entertainment-division-size profits. But to say, as Koppel does, that because of 60 Minutes, "a light went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed" is beyond stupid. It's bad reporting.
If Koppel is so keen on criticizing the sensationalizers and popularizers of TV news who are bent on turning profits, won't he please look in the mirror? In 1979, when American hostages were taken in Tehran, ABC News capitalized on being the only one of the big-three networks with a presence in the country to start nightly special broadcasts titled The Crisis in Iran: America Held Hostage. That Koppel-anchored show morphed into the profitable Nightline franchise. I can't take a wrecking ball to everything Koppel has done in his life. He obviously did some good work with Nightline. But the ambulance-chasing and audience-pandering contained in that show set the template for the coverage of O.J. Simpson, Natalee Holloway, Anna Nicole Smith, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, the Balloon Boy, and others.
There's a lot wrong with broadcast and cable news, but hustling for profits isn't their main fault and never has been. In fact, profitability is a good thing for TV news because, as Socolow indicates, it gives news divisions the muscle they need to push back any person, institution, corporation, or government bureaucracy that would try to stifle independent reporting.
* The original version of this article misnamed Reuven Frank's memoir.
******
When I read a Koppel column, I can hear his too-practiced voice reading the copy in my head. Do you have this problem with voices in your head? Send your mental health problems to slate.pressbox@gmail.com and chase the ambulance that is my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Camel in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Follow him on Twitter.

Democrats should fight tax cuts for the rich

GOP's real goal: forcing Obama out of office

Rand Paul defends BP

Ed Show: Limbaugh walks racist line

Special Comment: Keith Olbermann

False promise of 'objectivity' proves 'truth' superior to 'fact'

Check out whitecollargreenspace blog

http://whitecollargreenspace.blogspot.com/
Here is a proposal that will save the Federal government close to $50 billion per year enough to pay for the public option with only an executive order. Most office space is very expensive yet white collar workers only use it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. This amounts to only 30% efficiency which is completely unacceptable in today's economic and ecological environmentWe can no longer afford to let all white-collar workers that still have jobs work banker's hours when we can work two shifts per day in government and private industry and cut our overhead costs in half. This simple paradigm shifts solves three problems: It jumpstarts economy and fights poverty, cuts pollution, reduces budget deficits.

Arizona Legalizes Medical Marijuana

— By Josh Harkinson

| Mon Nov. 15, 2010 12:51 PM PST

— Photo from Reality Catcher

On Sunday, Arizona officially became the 15th state to legalize medical marijuana. It was the narrowest of victories: By the time that all of Arizona's of 1.67 million votes were counted, Proposition 203 won by less than 5,000.  But while that was hardly a resounding win for the pot initiative, it's an important one in a state in which a plurality of voters and all victors for statewide office this year are Republicans.
As I've noted in the past, loosening restrictions on marijuana turns out to be a bipartisan issue. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, a whopping 61 percent of Republicans support legalizing the drug for medical patients. The tea party includes vocal advocates of legalizing pot for medical as well as recreational use such as US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and the former Republican governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson.
Of course, marijuana legalization in any form is still a tough sell in many states. On election day, voters rejected a similar medical marijuana measure in South Dakota, and other states haven't even been able to get the issue on the ballot.  The difference in Arizona's case is probably geographical: According to a poll released on April 20th by CBS news, 55 percent of voters in Western states support legalizing marijuana for recreational use—a higher percent than in any other part of the country (only 36 percent of Midwestern voters support legalization). Western Republicans tend to be more libertarian than their counterparts in the rest of the country.
Ironically, some Arizona voters may have been scared into into opposing medical marijuana by the spectacle of California, where a landmark initiative to legalize pot for recreational use was on the ballot. California potheads argued that the state's 1996 medical marijuana law is so loosely worded that pot is virtually legal already. Working the argument from the other side, Keep AZ Drug Free, the anti-Prop 203 group, claimed that allowing medical cannabis in the Grand Canyon State would just be the first step towards total marijuana legalization. In an effort to tamp down such fears, Prop 203 places tighter controls on who can use medical marijuana and where they can buy it. Yet if polling trends hold up, it's just a matter of time before the West completely succumbs to reefer madness.

What Should Climate Hawks Do Next?

 Fight for Free Birth Control

By Lisa Hymas | Mon Nov. 15, 2010 12:59 PM PST

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[1]
Climate hawks [2] are floundering after this year's election. A climate bill couldn't get through Congress even when it was controlled by the Democrats, thanks to Senate dysfunction [3] and general idiocy [4]. Now, with the GOP and Tea Party ascendant, the chances of passing curbs on greenhouse gases anytime soon are zip to zilch.
So what now, the hawks are wondering [5]?
For the moment, forget about carbon caps and start thinking about cervical caps—and the Pill, IUDs, and Depo-Provera.
Next week, a panel of experts will start meeting to determine whether health insurers should be required to cover the full cost of contraceptives. At issue is whether birth control is "preventive" medicine, which the new health-care law requires insurers to cover free of charge, without co-pays. The Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to make a final call on that question in August 2011.
Sounds like a no-brainer, but ultra-right-wing groups like the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council are rallying in opposition [6], and they may have more allies in the newly conservatized Congress.

It should be obvious why climate hawks need to care about making birth control widely accessible: fewer unwanted pregnancies will mean fewer unwanted births (not to mention fewer abortions), and, ultimately, fewer greenhouse gases [7].
You might think birth control is already so prevalent in the US that covering it fully under insurance wouldn't make a difference. But you'd be wrong. Consider, for starters, that about half [8] of all pregnancies in the US are unplanned; that leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Cost can be a real deterrent to contraceptive use, even among women with health insurance, as the co-pays tend to cost $10 to $50 a month. Thirty-four percent of women voters have struggled with the cost of prescription birth control, according to a recent poll [9] conducted for Planned Parenthood. And a survey [10] [PDF] conducted last year for the Guttmacher Institute found that 8 percent of American women sometimes didn't use birth control in order to save money; that includes 18 percent of women on the Pill who used it inconsistently in order to reduce costs.
Even beyond the prospect of reducing CO2 emissions, there are great reasons for climate hawks to get involved in this fight. Stepping out of the climate/energy silo would help them forge alliances and generate goodwill with other progressive groups. Unlike conservatives, who are great at sticking together and pushing an overarching narrative, the left tends to splinter into little interest groups that don't rally to support each other's causes. Here's one way to start changing that dynamic.
This stuff's pricey. Can't you lend a hand?And this issue is a clear political winner. Eighty-eight percent of American voters support women's access to contraception, according to a 2009 poll [11] conducted by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. That includes 80 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of self-identified "pro-lifers."
And on the specific question of insurance company coverage, the numbers are almost as high: 71 percent of American voters believe insurers should be required to fully cover prescription contraception, according to a Planned Parenthood poll [9], including 72 percent of Republican women and 77 percent of Catholic women (no matter what their bishops say).
Planned Parenthood is making a big push on this issue [12], along with other groups focused on women's issues and reproductive health. Climate hawks should step outside their comfort zone and get on board.
This post [13] was produced by Grist [14] as part of the Climate Desk [1] collaboration.

Aung San Suu Kyi's Release "Just the Beginning"

— By Mac McClelland

| Mon Nov. 15, 2010 10:00 AM PST

This weekend, Burmese Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest, where she spent the better part of the last two decades. So. Now what?

(If your first question is actually Why was it again that she was imprisoned?, here's your primer: In 1988, Burma erupted into mass protest against the dictatorship, and Aung San Suu Kyi became a symbol of a new order because her dad was Aung San, father of independence, national hero, assassinated in 1947. She started giving speeches and leading a political party, the National League for Democracy, so she was locked up by the military government. After the NLD won the 1990 elections and the dictatorship decided to just void the results, she was kept locked up, except for two brief releases. During one of which the government tried to kill her, staging an unsuccessful assassination attempt.)

Let's start with the reasons she was let go. The military government says it's because her sentencing time was up, but over the last 20 years, her time's been up lots of times, and they've always just renewed and extended it, so no, that's not a plausible explanation. And entertaining the possibility that the ruling generals who plunder the country and propagate ethnic cleansing campaigns had a fit of anything remotely resembling magnanimity or a change of heart is absurd. More likely, Aung San Suu Kyi's release is a sign that they're so secure in the status quo that they didn't feel they needed to incarcerate her anymore. Her release also lends further credibility to the charade of democracy the regime started enacting with its rigged elections last week. And Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment was one of the only lasting points of Burmese oppression anyone actually talked about. Newspapers, politicians paid some lip service to her incarceration periodically, bringing unwanted attention to the otherwise isolated regime. 

The generals are right that making progress won't be easy for Aung San Suu Kyi. Their party won the majority of legislative seats in the election. Her party was legally disbanded after it boycotted, at her advice, the polls, which caused divisions within the party as well. And while her release was score one for the generals' honoring the most basic standards of human rights, there are still more than two thousand other, less famous, political prisoners in the country. To say nothing of that aforementioned ethnic cleansing, or the rebel militia from one of those minorities currently wreaking havoc on the eastern border.

But she's got some momentum—and many thousands of crowding fans—behind her, too: She's been hustling around giving interviews and speeches and calling for a chat with the generals, not that anybody (UN envoys, American presidents, whatever) ever got anything out of talking to them. She's announced she's going to work on a new agreement of peace and cooperation between the majority and minority groups, like the one her father made decades ago but that was never honored because of his death.
She doesn't have any real political power to actually implement these idealistic policies. She does have one very important tool, though: the fans. "I'm glad that you are welcoming me and supporting me," she told a crowd this weekend. "I want to say that there will be a time to come out. Do not stay quiet when that time comes." If anybody could mobilize the much-needed revolution in Burma, it'd be her. Whether or not she'll do it, and whether the military will fracture and fall to an uprising or just violently squash it like it usually does, remains to be seen. Like one old lady outside Aung San Suu Kyi's house said on Saturday, "I’m happier than if I won the lottery. But this is just the beginning, not the end." 

Rep. Jeff Flake: Kill Earmarks

— By Siddhartha Mahanta

| Mon Nov. 15, 2010 11:32 AM PST

Kill earmarks! So said Arizona Republican Jeff Flake in an op-ed on Friday in the Washington Post. Flake, a fiscal conservative with a sterling no-earmark record, has been floated as a possible addition to the House Appropriations Committee. For a rising star like Flake—and with earmark reform the meme of the moment for congressional Republicans—it was only a matter of time 'til he weighed in on the debate.
Critics of earmark reform rally around the fact that they constitute a paltry 2 percent of government spending. But as earmarks have spiked in number and expense over the past two decades, Flake says, the commensurate quality of congressional oversight by the House Appropriations Committee has slipped precipitously. The result: Congress has given up its oversight of the remaining 98 percent.
Flake attacks Sen. Mitch McConnell's contention that an earmark ban cedes spending power to the president. (Despite initial resistance, McConnell endorsed Sen. Jim Demint's proposed earmark moratorium Monday afternoon.) Giving up earmarks doesn’t hand power to the White House, he argues. Instead, it's Congress' reliance on earmarks that has led lawmakers to turn a blind eye to the executive branch's spending excesses.
"It is as if Congress has called a truce with the executive branch: don’t hassle us about our 2 percent," he writes, "and we'll offer only token interference with your 98 percent. Such a poor trade has not been made since the days of Esau." Flake's suggestion is that, in Washington, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue excel at the practice of gluttonous spending. One end feeds and, in fact, enables the other.
Public revulsion to wasteful projects, he argues, is reason enough to invoke a ban. The "most compelling reason," he says, is that it will balance the relationship between Congress and the executive branch.
"Without the earmark distraction," he argues, "Congress can return to the deliberative process of authorization, appropriation, and oversight, thus reining in spending abuses of the administration rather than simply piling on with spending abuses of our own."
Ranking member Jerry Lewis certainly seems convinced of Flake's fiscal bonafides: the California Republican has endorsed Flake in his bid to be named to the committee. Lewis is term-limited from being named chairman, and is seeking a waiver. He's also a notorious porker. Some see his support for Flake as an attempt to win over Republicans skeptical of his record on earmarks.
There's no telling how realistic Flake's orthodox vision truly is. But thanks to the DeMint's proposed moratorium, the tea party freshmen, and longtime earmark critics like Flake, the push for earmark austerity is getting a major shot in the arm. 

Labor-Enviro Coalition Calls for RES in Lame Duck

— By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Nov. 15, 2010 11:50 AM PST

— Photo by Kate Sheppard.

With the lame duck session of Congress starting Monday, a coalition of labor and environmental groups is renewing the call to pass a federal renewable electricity standard (RES). Advocates have been trying to keep hope alive that an RES, which would require states to draw a percentage of their power from renewable sources, could pass this year, and were boosted in late September when a bipartisan group of senators called for it to pass as a stand-alone measure. The RES they're calling would require utilities to draw 3 percent of electricity from renewable sources starting in 2012, ramping up to 15 percent in 2021.
In a busy but likely not very eventful lame duck session, passing an RES is probably a longshot. But four Republicans are backing the effort, along with 21 Democrats. The Blue Green Alliance, an enviro-labor coalition that includes the Sierra Club, the United Steelworkers, and 11 other union and green partners is pushing to keep it on the RES on the agenda.
"We can put people back to work with policies like an RES and investments in manufacturing," said Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers. "We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines as China and Europe pull ahead in the race for clean energy. "
The alliance called for the RES as part of their "Seven Simple Steps" for moving the green jobs agenda forward in this session. That also includes passage of the Home Star and Building Star bills, two measures meant to encourage building efficiency improvements, and the extension of the advanced energy manufacturing tax credit. They are also calling for the passage of a bill to improve health and safety standards for miners.

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Will Secret Spending Divide Democrats?

They denounced shadowy outside groups and dark money during the midterms. Now, as they plan for a nasty 2012, all options are on the table.

By Andy Kroll | Mon Nov. 15, 2010 2:00 AM PST

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With the midterms wreckage still smoldering, 150 or so Democratic donors will meet [1] at Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel this week to ruminate on what led to the party's 2010 "shellacking" [2] and, more important, discuss how to beat back the ascendant Republicans in 2012. Atop their to-do list is figuring out how to counter the deluge of political spending by outside conservative groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Action Network, and Karl Rove's American Crossroads, which poured more than twice [3] as much cash into midterm races as their Democratic counterparts did. The critical questions: should they fight fire with fire, and can they?
This debate within Democratic circles promises to be a contentious one. Are new outside groups needed to keep control of the White House? Or should liberals work through existing organizations—like the Sierra Club and labor unions—to push out the progressive message? And if they take the former route after having denounced the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and demanded transparency in campaign spending, will they come across as hypocrites to voters?
There are no easy answers, say strategists, fundraisers, and progressive leaders helping to plot the Democrats' 2012 war plan. Complicating matters is the White House's mixed message on campaign spending. During the 2008 presidential race, the Obama campaign told the founders of the Fund for America [4]—a left-leaning 527 political action committee [5] that funded ads [6] attacking Republican candidate John McCain—to shut down their operation. The candidate's team wanted full control of the 2008 message, and they wanted to win with small individual donations from the grassroots—not with outside spending. "We said, 'OK, fine,'" recalls Robert McKay, a California-based philanthropist, chair of the Democracy Alliance [7], and one of the Fund's founders. "If this major national election campaign wants to do it this way, then we'll shut this thing down."

Similarly, after the Citizens United decision, President Obama came out strongly in opposition. "I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities," he said. Again, in October, he said [8] at a Democratic fundraiser, "I want you to understand right now all over this country special interests are planning and running millions of dollars of attack ads against Democratic candidates." The administration's statements clearly turned off deep-pocketed liberal donors [9] in the midterms, during which Democrats lost the most seats in a single election cycle since World War II.

"If you're in a fistfight, then you're in a fistfight, and you use all legal means available," says Harold Ickes.

Though top Obama aide David Axelrod recently opened the door [10] for liberal donors to fight the right's secretive attack machine, many Democratic players still see the administration as hostile to outside political spending. "By and large, the political people in the Obama firmament really have disdain for outside groups," says one Democratic strategist. "They think they whine and snivel and make all these demands and don't produce very much." But with conservative forces poised to spend over half a billion dollars in 2012, monied liberals are already plotting [11] their own outside spending groups to wage war against the right. Among them is David Brock, the founder of Media Matters for America, who is reportedly pursuing [11] his own 527 independent spending outfit for the upcoming presidential race.
The left can't wait for campaign finance reform to rein in outside spending, says Joan Fitz-Gerald, president of America Votes [12], an umbrella group that oversees some 300 progressive organizations nationwide. "If we look at where the Supreme Court has been trending, it is to give unfettered rights to wealthy individuals as well as wealthy corporations to express free speech through money," she notes. Fitz-Gerald, a former state senator in Colorado and ex-chairwoman of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, points out that this past year Democrats in Congress failed [13] to overcome GOP opposition to the DISCLOSE Act, which sought to beef up disclosure requirements on political spending. Fitz-Gerald says progressive groups must adapt to this cash-flush political playing field or risk another trouncing: "This is the way it's going to be unless we have radical changes on the Supreme Court."
The best option, Fitz-Gerald insists, is using existing progressive organizations. While a small cadre of wealthy donors and corporations bankroll American Crossroads and its ilk on the right, unions and environmental groups have grassroots bases (and, thus, power in numbers). With that, she contends, comes credibility, which could make a difference at the polls: "They are trusted messengers, whether they're a union that someone belongs to or a group that people have been a member of for many years. At some point the American people, as they see these ads pushing this right-wing agenda, they're going to ask, 'Who are these people? What's the goal of American Crossroads?'"
But progressive groups will have to engage immediately, Fitz-Gerald says. "If we're going to have this onslaught of commercials on the things we care about from a very conservative perspective," she notes, "we're going to have to continue, much as we did during the Bush administration, to be very vigilant."
Not that left-leaning groups snoozed through the midterms. Unions spent big; the Service Employees International Union poured in $15.7 million, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, $12.3 million. Commonsense Ten, a "super PAC" founded by a trio of Democratic strategists, spent [14] $3.3 million in the midterms. C10, as it's known, helped defeat GOP Senate candidates including Dino Rossi in Washington state, Ken Buck in Colorado, and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. The left-leaning America's Families First Action Fund spent [15] $5.9 million opposing House Republican candidates in a dozen states. Those figures pale in comparison to leading right-wing groups—the Chamber's $32.9 million [16], for instance, or American Action Network's $26.1 million [17], according to the Center for Responsive Politics. "For every $500,000 we spent, it felt like American Crossroads spent another $5 million," said Mike Palamuso, vice president of communications at the League of Conservation Voters.
Even with ramped-up fundraising and more attack ads, liberal groups will be unlikely to come close to the half a billion dollars right-leaning groups claim they'll drum up for 2012. The way Robert McKay (who's also a Mother Jones board member [18]) sees it, Democrats and the progressive community will likely need to take both routes—that is, use existing organizations and create new independent groups—to counter pro-Republican corporate America and the likes of the Koch brothers, the billionaire benefactors of the libertarian right. And this would include Democratic-friendly organizations that do not disclose donors. "We have a lot of existing groups who do disclose, and that is a meaningful distinction," McKay says. "But look: The Chamber and Crossroads and all them are going to be coming in full bore. So I think you will see donors engaged, and I'm not going to sit here and say we won't need to create some new groups." He adds, "It's not that I don't want to see a meaningful legislative response to Citizens United, but I'm also not going to unilaterally disarm."
McKay readily admits that Democratic groups, secretive or not, will not enjoy the massive corporate backing that Republican-backing groups do. He does, however, suggest liberals ought to make hay of corporate America's coziness with the GOP; casting big business as the bad guy could be one way to appeal to middle-class voters. "We have to think about what additional public campaigns may be appropriate now to let their shareholders and consumers know what [big corporations] are up to," he says.
A massive influx of Democratic money will no doubt draw criticism from factions of the liberal community. But Democrats will have to dive headfirst into the post-Citizens United spending wars if they want to compete in 2012, says Harold Ickes, former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and a prominent Democratic fundraiser. Ickes, who ran two independent spending groups during the 2004 presidential campaign and served as a top political strategist on Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, says big donors usually want to see their money have maximum effect, and they are more likely to get that through outside outfits. Plus, the Democrats will need all the tools they can muster, he adds. "Is small money better? You bet," Ickes says. "But we're in a fucking fight. And if you're in a fistfight, then you're in a fistfight, and you use all legal means available."