Category: Hack Journalism
The Recent Pissing Contest Between Fox and the White House
Well, for once, the White House was actually telling the truth when Anita Dunn said, “”Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party…Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”
That being said, it’s kind of like declaring that milk is white, and the sky is blue, so I find it uninteresting, and it really means little in the scheme of things.
I Disagree (A Little)
Alex Pareene has a righteous take-down of the Washington Post OP/Ed section, calling it, “The Worst Opinion Section in America.”
I disagree, UI think that the Wall Street Journal is worse, but I understand how this is a close call. It’s like comparing the the St. Louis Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Detroit Lions, Tennessee Titans, and Cleveland Browns, a lot of badness in the eye of the beholder.
I’m not an Economist, but ….
I have to agree with Dean Baker when he excoriates New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin for this bit of crap:
That Treasury bills were trading for less than 1 percent interest, as if they were no better than cash, as if the full faith of the government had suddenly become meaningless.
When you have people who lend you money, and they ask for less interest from you, which is the position of the government when they sell Treasuries, it means that they have more faith in you, not less.
The issue was not that people stopped trusting the government as Sorkin implies, it is that people are desperate for Government debt, because the lost faith in everything else.
I’ve done a quick google, and it appears that he’s also one of the idiots who took the thoroughly debunked $70/hour pay rate propaganda GM workers, which included the costs of those workers who were already retired, and ran with it.
I Googled Mr. Sorkin, so see if this was perhaps yet another innumerate journalist covering finance, and while I know when he earned his degree (BS, in 1999), and where he earned his degree (Cornell University), I cannot determine what he earned his degree in, and hence the degree to which is actually able to count.
My guess is that he got it in pastry baking.
Ummmmm…Not So Fast
It appears that the Telegraph in the UK has reported that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s family converted from Judaism to Islam and changed their name when he was 4 years old, largely on the basis of the change in family name from Sabourjian.
The problem is that this is simply untrue, according to the Guardian.
First, the Telegraph says:
- That “Sabour” is the word for Talit used by Iranian Jews.
- Not true: it means “thread painter”, and refers to those who work coloring fibers for Persian carpets.
- Note that thread painting is not a traditionally Jewish profession in Iran.
- The word used by Iranian Jews for the Tallit is “Tallit” (my experience with Iranian coreligionists) or Titzit (19th Century Iranian Judaism Scholar David Yeroshalm), both Hebrew words from scripture.
- According to scholars, there is no word Sabour at all among Jewish dialects in Iran.
- That “Jian” is a suffix that almost exclusively refers to practicing Jews.
- Simply untrue. It’s a fairly common suffix.
What is true, however, is that surnames have come fairly recently to Iran, and that the “hicks in the sticks”, typically had surnames associated with the family profession, like “thread painter”:
The reason that Ahmadinejad’s father changed his surname has more to do with the class struggle in Iran. When it became mandatory to adopt surnames, many people from rural areas chose names that represented their professions or that of their ancestors. This made them easily identifiable as townfolk. In many cases they changed their surnames upon moving to Tehran, in order to avoid snobbery and discrimination from residents of the capital.
The Sabourjians were one of many such families. Their surname was related to carpet-making, an industry that conjures up images of sweatshops. They changed it to Ahmadinejad in order to help them fit in. The new name was also chosen because it means from the race of Ahmad, one of the names given to Muhammad.
But wait, there’s more:
Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Male members are given the title of Seyyed, and include prominent figures such as Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Judaism, this is equivalent to the Cohens, who are direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. One has to be born into a Seyyed family: the title is never given to Muslims by birth, let alone converts. This makes it impossible for Ahmadinejad’s mother to have been a Jew. In fact, she was so proud of her lineage that everyone in her native village of Aradan referred to her by her Islamic title, Seyyede.
So, even if his father, or his father’s family were Jewish, he would not be, because Judaism is matrilineal, and if your mother is not Jewish, you are not Jewish, except by formal conversion.
Of course, I am competing with two links from two papers, the Telegraph, and the The Grauniad*, so why am I taking the side of the latter?
It’s pretty simple really: First, I have had Iranian Jewish friends, and the phrase “Sabour” never came up, and we did talk about Tallit in shul, and second, because the source was a newspaper formerly owned by Conrad Black, before he was sent off to a very well deserved stint in jail, and every story from a news outlet formerly owned by Conrad Black should be viewed with a jaundiced eye.
Additionally, you will note that that the Telegraph provides no on the record sources for its analysis, while the Grauniad* does, and goes into some detail as to the background of these sources.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
It Appears that I Was Premature in My Praise for Eugene Robinson
While his position on Roman Polanski’s fugitive status, and his apprehension in Switzerland, in his condemnation of people who support the incarcerated film director is laudable, just look at who he is condemning, “some of Hollywood’s most prominent luminaries,” who suggest that, “whatever sins Polanski may have committed are outweighed by the brilliance of his art.”
Let’s make it clear, I think that the arguments of his supporters in Hollywood are repulsive, but there are people out there who are suggesting that the, “bitch was asking for it,” like Anne Applebaum and Richard Cohen, who suggest that this was consensual or perhaps even encouraged by the girl.
This is a whole world worse than anything that has come out of Hollywood, or, for that matter, out of France.
Let’s be clear that there are in fact ethical arguments against the imprisonment or trial of Roman Polanski. Jeralyn of TalkLeft, for example, has been making highly cogent arguments about the legal process that deserve serious consideration, and this a valid, and I would argue essential part of the dialogue, but Robinson’s covering up for his colleagues is beneath contempt, particularly when one, Applebaum, explicitly called him out on her page.
Eugene Robinson, you sir, are a coward.
H/t Atrios.
Cash for Clunkers Have had a Long Term Effect
The folks at the Wall Street Journal miss the point, by stressing capacity cuts, but it takes 2-3 years for new cars to become used cars.
I’m not sure whey they do this, except for the fact that the jobs being lost are UAW jobs.
More significant is the fact that anyone who got cash for a clunker under the government program did not have their car work its way down the used car ecology.
Cars traded in under that program had to be rendered undrivable, generally by putting abrasive in the crankcase.
What that means is that there has been a significant reduction in used cars in the pipeline, which is likely going to be boosting used car prices, and possibly new car prices, for the next few years.
Speaking of Sociopaths at the Washington Post…..
In addition to Richard Cohen saying that there should be no consequences for people of consequence in the case of Roman Polanski, we have Anne Applebaum suggesting that the 8th grader was really asking for it (link to Paul Campos at LGM, I will not generate hits to Applebaum):
Of course, there were some very legitimate disagreements, including two excellent ones from my colleagues Gene Robinson and Richard Cohen, and I take some of their points. But to them, and to all who imagine that the original incident at the heart of this story was a straightforward and simple criminal case, I recommend reading the transcript of the victim’s testimony (here in two parts) — including her descriptions of the telephone conversation she had with her mother from Polanski’s house, asking permission to be photographed in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi — and not just the salacious bits.
So, how is this repulsive?
Because she is implying that the girl asked permission from her mom to have sex with Roman Polanski, and because the grand jury transcript does not show her asking about the Jacuzzi, it shows her asking to stay late for the photo shoot, and neither her nor Polanski ever talking about the Jacuzzi.
But Apple Applebaum, as Mr. Campos so ably notes, thinks that the slut was asking for it, which is a hell of a thing to say about a 13 year old rape victim, and it’s even worse, because Applebaum is also lying to smear said 13 year old rape victim:
Here’s the relevant part of the transcript:
Q. What happened out there after he indicated he wished to take pictures of you in the jacuzzi?
A. We went inside and called my mother.
Q. When you say “we called,” did you call or did Mr. Polanski call?
A. He told me to and I talked and then he talked and then I talked again.
Q. What did you tell your mother?
A. She goes, “Are you all right?
I went, “Uh-huh.”
And she says, “Do you want me to come pick you up?”
And I went, “No.”
And he said that we’d be home kind of late because it had already gotten dark out.
Q. When you said “he said,” did he tell you or did you hear him tell your mother on the phone?
A. He told my mother.
Q, Did he tell your mother any other things?
A. Not that I was listening to.
Q. After talking to your mother on the telephone, what happened?
A. We went out and I got in the jacuzzi.
Applebaum can’t even read 20 lines of a trial transcript accurately (the victim never asked her mother for permission to be photographed in the jacuzzi). But that idiocy pales to insignificance in comparison to the moral blindness involved in suggesting, as Applebaum clearly does, that if the 13-year-old victim had in fact asked her mother’s permission to be photographed in a jacuzzi by a 44-year-old man that would somehow transform the man’s subsequent drugging and raping of the girl into something other than a “simple and straightforward criminal case.”
We can add to this that her husband is Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, and as such, he is aggressively working toward Polanski’s release,* because they consider him a national treasure (even if he does not live there), and she thinks that she had no need to disclose this, because she, “Mentioned my husband’s job in a column as recently as last week”
No, it does not work that way. You are married to a high government official for a foreign government. When you are writing about issues that are part of the direct and explicit policy of that government, you disclose that you share a bed with the foreign minister, each and every time.
I will say that not all Postie pundits are Sociopaths, though Applebaum and Cohen clearly are, as is, of course, Krauthammer, though he may simply be insane .
For example, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson nails it when he says, “That is grotesque. In general, I agree with the European view that Americans tend to be prudish and hypocritical about sex. But a grown man drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl? That’s not remotely a close call. It’s wrong in any moral universe — and deserves harsher punishment than three decades of gilded exile.”
(emphasis mine)
Your mouth to God’s ear. I cannot speak to the finer points of the trial, and there are likely issues there, but the enthusiasm with which the people who seek to excuse this away on the feeling that somehow Polanski is “people like them”, is truly revolting.
*I do not blame Sikorski for doing his job here. It is his job to execute the policy, however immoral and venal (it’s about playing to the Polish electorate† by embracing a rapist). Pity your wife is a sociopath though.
†As to what this says about the Polish electorate, it either means that their leaders underestimate them, or that they are not underestimating them. One hopes for the former.
Well, Now We Know How Lame the New York Times Is
It appears that the New York Times has decided that they do not spend enough time paying attention to deranged dishonest right wing stories, and their response is to assign an (unnamed, lest he get stern emails) editor to the giving blow jobs to right wingers beat, to ensure that all of their bullsh&% gets mainstream press coverage:
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”
(emphasis mine)
Two points:
- This story was, and always will be, bulls$%#, and so the coverage should be on the politics, because a close examination of the real story, shows no story.
- Having “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio,” is a mark of journalistic success, not journalist failure.
- Anyone who claims to be a journalist, much less an editor, but is afraid to do their job because they will get nasty emails, should not be working in journalism. I said this about Monica Hesse, and I will say this about this unnamed editor.
Seriously though, separating the wheat from the chaff is a part of a journalist’s job, and what is going on here is the aggrandizement of the chaff.
H/t tbogg.
Before I Put Polanski on My List of
They Who Must Not Be Named, like he cares about whether or not I write about him, let me repeat what Atrios Said:
I really was going to try to avoid Polanski blogging, but then Richard Cohen referred to drugging and raping a 13 year old over clear objections as her being ‘seduced.’
What is wrong with these people?”
This was never seduction.
You can argue that he is a talented artist, and he is, Chinatown is brilliant.
You can argue that his trial was ineluctably tainted, by virtue of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, and the trial was ineluctably tainted by those actions..
You can argue that the time has passed for this, as the victim has.
But the coercion, drugging, and penetration of a 13-year old girl is not a “seduction,” it’s a rape, and the only reason that moral pygmies like Richard Cohen call it seduction is because they profoundly believe that there should be no consequences for people that they deem consequential.
I do now know whether Roman Polanski is a monster, or a sick victim, but I do know that Richard Cohen is a monster.
Economics Update
Click for Full Size
Blah, blah, blah!
Well, let’s lead with housing sales, since it gives me an opportunity to start with one of my pet peeves: Journalists pumping up news as better than it is.
CNN leads with New home sales rise for 5th straight month in August,which sounds good, sales went from a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 429K, up from July’s 426K, so what’s the problem?
Well the problem is that the forecast was for 440K, and a 3K gain is about ¾%, nothing to phone home about, and as Calculated Risk so ably notes when he looks at the numbers and declares that sales were flat, “This is a slight increase from the revised rate of 426 thousand in July (revised from 433 thousand).” (emphasis mine)
So there was an increase relative to the revised figure, but a drop when compare initial figure to initial figure, and in any case, an honest description for this would be “flat”, or “down slightly”, not a hed screaming a 5th straight month of increase.
In either case, we are still seeing week demand for manufactured goods, as evidenced by the 2.4% drop in durable goods orders, though the Truck Tonnage Index rose in in August, which compares to the drop in rail traffic I reported 2 days ago.
In the world of finance, banks losses in big mofo loans, the so-called syndicated loans, tripled in 2009.
In energy, revelations regarding Iran’s nuclear program and potential sanctions pushed oil up, though it is still well below $70/bbl, and in currency, the dollar fell broadly, hitting a 7½ month low vs the Yen, and remaining near the 1-year low vs the Euro that it hit a few days ago.
Washington Post Reporters Don’t Actually Read the Washington Post
Paul Kane, writing for the Washington Post, notes that Democratic political committees are seeing a major drop in fund raising, but he assigns blame to, “Complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party’s harsh rhetoric about big business.”
It ain’t complacency, it’s anger and demoralization, because the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular, have folded any time the small by historical standards Republican minority has gotten their nose out of joint.
I saw that in the paper today on the front page, and by paper, I mean paper, I have the ink and newsprint sitting by my keyboard.
You know what else I saw in the paper, just today?
- That Barack Obama and His Stupid* Minions™, are once again looking for a way to backtrack his promise on shutting down the Guantanamo gulag, and the reason is that they are finding it, difficult to, “win the cooperation of Congress.”
- Hoocoodanode that the Republicans would demagogue the issue after having been on the same side, Huh?
- Barack Obama throwing Yosi Sergant under the bus because Glenn Beck does not like him.
- So we see yet another case of cowardice in the face of the balls to the wall insanity that is Glenn Beck, but he keeps Wall Street butt boy Timothy Geithner.
- That Barack Obama and His Stupid* Minions™ unveiling a new educational policy that is correctly called by Bush III, because their policies consist of pushing charter schools high stakes testing.
- Aggressive lobbying to keep overpaying for prescription drugs, the so-called “Pharma deal”, which sells the rest of us out.
Let me make this clear, this is just what is in today’s Washington Post.
When you add in:
- Obama’s support of the status quo on gays in the military, the Defense of Marriage Act.
- Support of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and His Evil Minions™ on the idea that there should be no meaningful accountability for banks or their executives.
- His phony reforms on the state secrets privilege.
Is it any wonder that people are disinclined to donate money to a Democratic Party fund raising apparatus that he is firmly in control of?
You know, if Barack Obama showed a little bit of guts, members of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party might be inclined to have his back.
But when you are in Baucus and Conrad’s corner, you ain’t in ours.
Affirmative Action for White Folks
Of course, for white people, you don’t call it affirmative action, you call it nepotism, and the poster child for nepotism, at least this week is Luke Russert, who upon having the opportunity to question Congressional heckler Joe Wilson in his first press statements following his heckling Barack Obama’s speech, chose to asks him about the Clemson/Georgia Tech game.
You know, it’s genetics. Tim Russert did this kind of sh&% all the time…If you were a republican on his show.
How Utterly Appropriate
John Stossel is moving to Fox News.
I imagine the this is best for everyone. ABC gets rid of a guy who wouldn’t know accuracy or journalism if it bit him in the butt, but whose well deserved termination would generate needless outrage from the first-cousins married for twelve generations brigade, and any network that employs Glenn Beck cannot have its reputation sullied by hiring him.
People Who Should Not Be Reporters
Monica Hesse of the Washington Post, who went whining to their ombudsman.
You see, she wrote a puff piece about homophobic bigot Brian Brown, a major lobbyist against gay civil rights, and “The day before returning [from her vacation], she logged on to check e-mails — and wept.“
She wrote a puff piece, in the best tradition of Post writers being played by right wing blow-hards, and she crossed a line, and real people, as opposed to the right wing rent-a-crowd, took offense.
She was assigned the piece, and wrote it in order to ensure that she would not get irate email, and was crushed when she got irate email.
Notwithstanding her professed bisexuality, at least as related to the ombudsman, her problem is not her position on gay marriage, nor is it that she wrote a puff piece.
Her problem is that she clearly wrote this article to avoid confrontation, and when she got confrontation anyway, “she wept.”
She is in the wrong line of work. A journalist has to believe that irate letters are a mark of honor.
H/t Atrios.
The Phoney McCoy (McCaughey)
Less than a week after Jon Stewart showed Betsy McCaughey to be a complete liar who knows nothing about the healthcare bill, and next to nothing about healthcare, she gets a Wall Street Journal editorial.
You don’t have to be a stupid pathological liar to get an OP/Ed in the WSJ, but it helps, a lot.
Economics Update
Image Courtesy Calculated RiskWe have the new unemployment claims numbers, and according to USA Today and Reuters, the numbers are down, though as Bloomberg notes, the numbers are still 570K, more than the 564K expected.
Only, in a bit of flagrant journamalism, they ignore the fact that, the initial numbers for last week were 570K, and this week’s numbers are 570K, but since last week’s numbers have been revised up to 574K, they claim a small drop in initial Filings. (H/t Dean Baker, as well as CNN, normally the Cheer-leaders News Network, out there, for the catch)
Note that if the number is much above 400K, we are still losing jobs, that the 4 week moving average rose to 571,250, and that continuing claims rose by 92K to 6.23m.
The Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) NMI (Non-Manufacturing Index) is at 48.4%, indicating further contraction, but this is an improvement.
As Atrios puts it, “Hurray, the 2nd derivative is positive.”
In retail, same store sales fell 2.9% year over year in August, the back to school season, so the consumer is not yet ready to put the economy back on their shoulders.
In central bank news from across the pond, the European Central Bankleft its benchmark interest rate at 1%, and issued a statement that it sees no prospect of either rate hikes or its unwinding its support for their banks in the near future.
In the world of credit rating, Moody’s raised Ford’s debt rating to Caa1 from Caa3, but according to S&P, the default rate for junk bonds rose to 10.2% in August, up from July’s 9.4%, which does not bode well for the ability of companies to raise capital.
BTW, remember last week when I said that insider selling was beating insider buying by 30.6:1? Well, it’s up to 61.8:1.
The sucker’s rally is coming to an end.
Finally, something I generally pay very little attention to, but gold is getting awfully close to $1000.00/oz. (Troy)
The gold bugs will tell you that now is the time to buy gold, but I’ll say that gold approaching the 4 digit line means that it is time to dump gold and get the f%$# out of dodge.
In currency, the dollar was a bit stronger, largely on concern for Japan’s new government, and the statement by the ECB.
In energy, oil fell slightly, largely on the unemployment numbers.
High Broderism
Outsourced to Brad Delong, who notes that not only is David Broder a deeply immoral man, he suggests in that prosecution of crimes by his cocktail party friends is simply unAmerican, but that he is also lying through his teeth.
You see Broder says (not linking, friends don’t link friends to Broder) in the first substantive paragraph of his OP/ED (the first 2 ‘graphs are calling out Eugene Robinson for supporting the investigation):
First, let me stipulate that I agree on the importance of accountability for illegal acts and for serious breaches of trust by government officials — even at the highest levels. I had no problem with the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, and I called for Bill Clinton to resign when he lied to his Cabinet colleagues and to the country during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Actually, this is a flat out lie. While he did call for Clinton to resign over a blowjob, he strongly argued against impeaching Nixon at the time, when he wrote, “that he hoped it would fail–and that Richard M. Nixon would have his revenge.”
In the world of sociopaths like David Broder, Bill Clinton gets a blow job, so he must therefore resign.
Richard Nixon, on the other hand, uses the IRS, and the FBI, to pursue his political opponents, authorizes crimes against them, including attempted blackmail and robbery, and then is actively involved in covering up those crimes, and it’s “no harm, no foul.”
I think that David Broder is angry with Democrats, because somehow or other, he missed all the “free love” in the 1960s, and he blames the Democrats, for reasons that are unclear to me.
Stupidest Motherf$#%er on the Washington Post Payroll
Which may make Richard Cohen the stupidest motherf$#%er on the face of the earth, beating out Douglas Feith.
You see, he wants to wring his hands, and say that there should be no prosecutions for torture, because it might work, once.
This ignores the fact that it does not work most of the time, in fact it makes things much worse, because not only does it make potential allies into opponents, but it does not extract reliable information.
Notwithstanding Mr. Cohen’s self-professed, “abhorrence of torture,” this is really about the fact that inside the Washington, DC Beltway, the idea for accountability for crimes is an anathema to the “very serious people.”
He coaches this moral capitulation as his desire for the impossible, “absolute security,” which does not exist sitting in one’s home, or driving on a street, but this is thrown in because it sounds reasonable, and justifies the most heinous of acts.
The reality is that they are completely bereft of morality, and so attached to Sally Quinn’s damn cocktail parties and their access to the politically powerful in the nation, that they endorse criminality and moral indecency on a scale that boggles the mind.
That being said, cheer-leading crimes against humanity and endorsing the idea that there should never be any accountability does not make Richard Cohen a stupid man, it just makes him a war criminal, guilty of crimes against humanity like Julius Streicher or Hassan Ngeze, what makes him the stupidest man in the world is this:
Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to see whether any of the CIA’s interrogators broke the law. Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don’t know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there. No CIA interrogator can feel safe. The interrogators are about to be interrogated.
(emphasis mine)
While Judith “EC” Miller’s incarceration on contempt of court charges is undoubtedly coercive, and openly so, the intent of the contempt citation and jailing was to extract information about her sources, it was by no means torture.
Anyone conflating incarceration with torture is really, really, mind bogglingly stupid.
Te stoopid….It burns us!!1
What a Whiny Bitch
Joe Klein acts like a turd at a party to I.F. Stone’s grand daughter, where among other things, he claims that Wikipedia is “leftist”, and has clueless his ass handed to him, and then he basically describes her as a member of Glenn Greenwald’s “cult”, and then he gets his nose out of shape about this:
Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve. In one of those emails, I say that Greenwald “cares not a whit for America’s national security.”
You know, the intersection of private emails and listserve (no hyphen, dude) is a null set. If you post to a listserv, and expect it to be private, you are a complete tool.
He further goes on, republishing another of his emails from the listserv, that while, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” he has never heard him talk about who well, for example, well things went in Anbar province.
Ignoring the obvious, that if you are, “not a religious reader of Greenwald,” then you don’t know whether he wrote this or not, there is also the fact that Glenn Greenwald writes about civil liberties, not military tactics, but he continues to insist that because he, Joe Klein, has not read something on the subject, that Greenwald is somehow evil and anti-American.
It should be noted that the real cause of this is when Glenn Greenwald showed that Klein was holding authoritatively on the FISA legislation in Congress, and being completely wrong, because he had been, “he’d been lied to, by a Democratic Staffer,” ignoring the fact, that if he had read the legislation, or even if he had just had an intern read the legislation, he would have been known that what he was spouting was a crock of sh$#.
So much like Dick Cheney, Mr. Klein is a whiny bitch.
[update]Greenwald’s response, though it is rather more generally directed at the Washington DC Kule Kidz, than at Klein.