|
|
The least known, but one of the most eagerly courted, screening committees for the next G.O.P. presidential nominee met recently in Colorado Springs, Colo., amid the panoramic opulence of the Broadmoor Hotel and Resort. The four-day meeting of affluent Evangelicals...
|
|
Ever since the mugshot taken when he was booked on money laundering charges, former Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas has been grinning through his court appearances and resignation speeches. He even mischievously suggested recently on TV that Democratic efforts to...
|
|
From Washington State to Missouri to Pennsylvania, Democratic candidates found themselves on the defensive Wednesday as the Republican Party worked ferociously at every level to try to use the primary defeat of Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut to portray the...
|
|
When Mark Halperin isn't joking about celebrity look-alikes and cult-classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer on ABC News Now, the network's ubiquitous political director is getting ready to launch his fall book on Presidential politics -- "The Way to Win: Taking...
|
|
In Washington, he's known for knowing everything and everyone. Political operatives and journalists strain to divine his tastes and instincts. Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News since 1997, both molds and reflects elite opinion with his pithy appearances...
|
|
White House officials had been tracking the British terror plot for weeks, supplying advice and intelligence to both Prime Minister Tony Blair's government and to Pakistan, where suspects have also been arrested. But it was not until Aug. 1...
|
|
Former Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick is planning to join the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain next year, overseeing development of domestic and foreign policy, Republican officials tell TIME. Zoellick, who will be working in New York...
|
|
George W. Bush has always been suspicious, even contemptuous, of introspection. "I don't spend a lot of time looking in the mirror," he once bragged, "except when I comb my hair." Last week, though, he suddenly yielded to reporters' endless,...
|
|
NEW ORLEANS -- You've heard of jazz funerals, but jazz Communion? With President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush down front, New Orleans marked the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a commemorative Mass that included a syncopated, clarinet-infused rendition...
|
|
The fast-growing suburban congregations have long been seen as hard-core G.O.P. supporters. But Applebee's America, a new book aimed at helping political, business and religious leaders market themselves, disagrees. The authors - ex-Bill Clinton aide Douglas Sosnik, Bush strategist Matthew...
|
|
At the Salt Palace convention hall in Salt Lake City, President Bush faces an audience of military veterans, standing before a backdrop depicting iconic scenes from wars past: "Spreading freedom is the work of generations, and no one knows it...
|
|
At a firehouse on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the White House had set up a catered buffet of cheese omelets, French toast and bacon in front of a Ford Excursion that belongs to the fire company and has emblazoned on...
|
|
The President is standing face to face with nbc's Matt Lauer by the immaculate oak desk in the Oval Office, jabbing emphatically toward the Today anchorman's chest and insisting, "My job is to protect this country, Matt. And it gets...
|
|
Former President Bill Clinton was holding court in a hallway at the soul-deadening United Nations complex in Manhattan on Tuesday when his Secret Service agents started to stir. Another Secret Service detail was coming down the elevator, accompanying his successor....
|
|
By holding their breath, for starters. With party strategists increasingly afraid the Senate is slipping away, Republican officials are moving money around in high-stakes triage. BY MIKE ALLEN/WASHINGTON Republican officials are trying to project confidence about keeping the Senate by...
|
(CBS)Call me cynical but it seems to me there must be an aide or advisor to New Jersey Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. who has earned themselves some big-time kudos because the Republican is having quite the good press day. Pick up a copy of the New York Times and there"s quite a nice front-page profile on Kean, headlined, "Out to Show He"s Not Just an Old New Jersey Name." It comes with a very nice picture of the candidate but it"s nothing compared the huge photo accompanying the profile of Kean on the front page of the Washington Post"s Style section. That one carries this subhead: "New Jersey Political Scion Aims to Make A Name for Himself in Washington." Not bad play for a Republican candidate operating in a decidedly Democratic environment. It helps that he carries the name of a politically powerful New Jersey family. It helps even more that Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez is battling charges and an overall image of corruption. And it certainly doesn"t hurt to get this type of attention just two weeks before the election. From the New York Times article: To admirers, Mr. Kean, 38, has matured into a thoughtful and attentive lawmaker, distinguishing himself in ethics, environmental protection and health care. Hardly doctrinaire, he has espoused positions that are moderate, though clearly more conservative than those of his father, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean. And he has demonstrated political grit in a surprisingly ferocious campaign to unseat the incumbent, Robert Menendez, in what national Republican leaders believe is probably their best chance to capture a Democratic Senate seat.From the Washington Post profile: Kean's political lineage includes a grandfather who served in Congress for 20 years, as well as a great-grandfather and a great-great-uncle who both served in the Senate. Theodore Roosevelt is a relative, too. And Tom Kean Sr. occupies a hallowed place in the state's history, widely viewed as a man of rectitude who, at least for a few years in the 1980s, restored pride to the state.It"s hard to know just how these two high-profile stories managed to hit on the same day. Kean does have a chance to score what would seem to be one of very few election victories for the GOP so it"s not as if they"re coming out of thin air. Still, there"s probably some back-slapping going on in the Kean camp today.
|
(AP)Journalists look out for each other. When colleagues or compatriots get fired, they lament the implications - for the outlet doing the firing, for the profession of journalism, and, finally, for America. The latest example of this impulse comes from Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. He points out that the decline of newspaper circulation and news viewership has led to staff cuts and threatened serious investigative reporting. "If this erosion continues," he concludes, "it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians." Not so fast, say a pair of prominent media commentators. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade writes that staff cuts at American newspapers are not necessarily a threat to healthy democracy. "Without wishing to be unduly rude about US journalists, seen from the British perspective, it appears that there are far too many of them being far too unproductive," he writes. "The LA Times has 980 journalists at present, a huge staff compared to any serious British national paper. Yet we manage to hold our government to account." Greenslade even suggests that "there's been a lot of feather-bedding on big monopoly metro papers in the States and the current crisis is providing an opportunity to hack away the hacks who do not contribute." When coming from a journalist, a statement like that is akin to heresy. But Greenslade has a compatriot in Slate's Jack Shafer, who questions the journalistic impulse to "somehow correlate the full employment of journalists with the common good." He argues that with technological innovation changing the rules of the game - "A middle-school student sitting at a Web terminal has more raw reportorial power at his fingertips than the best reporter working at the New York Times had in, say, 1975" - and declining circulation, "[s]omething's got to give."
|
(CBS/AP)For all the obsession over the YouTube phenomenon (nowhere more than right here at PE), it seems not to be a player in politics - at least not during this midterm cycle. Sure, we"ve run across lots of Ned Lamont ads embedded on blogs via YouTube but this trend appears limited to a few candidates at this point. So says ReelPop blogger Steve Bryant (hat tip: Lost Remote), who takes a look at how often Senate races have turned up on YouTube: I started researching the midterm Senate races on YouTube. I copied this Wikipedia list of Senate races and searched on YouTube for each candidate's name, taking note of the number of videos that search returned. I also noted the most popular or interesting videos, and the number of views and comments they received. The results for the first ten states of the Union (in alphabetical order) are here. The results aren't encouraging. If viewing political videos is any measure, YouTubers aren't very engaged with our government. Of course, YouTube may not be an ideal test bed for measuring engagement. But in an Internet era supposedly dominated by social media, it doesn't hurt to test our assumptions on what should be the most democratic medium of them all.Bryant also discovered that campaign ads being posted on YouTube are not very popular and material is not generally posted by the campaigns themselves. We"ve seen politicians reach out to bloggers, we"ve seen them dabbling in social networks like MySpace and a few of them have gained a measure of celebrity on YouTube itself. But Bryant shows many of our leaders aren"t what you would consider early adapters to the new media landscape.
|
(AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)So "stay the course" will no longer be, um, staying the course within the Bush administration"s rhetorical arsenal, a piece of news that"s generating quite a bit of attention. And confusion, and confusion, since it apparently changes nothing with regard to actual policy. It came up during the White House press briefing yesterday (yes, news is occasionally committed during these gatherings.) A reporter asked if there was a change in the administration"s "stay the course" policy. Spokesman Tony Snow responded thusly: "No, the policy -- because the idea of 'stay the course' is you've done one thing, you kick back and wait for it. And this has always been a dynamic policy that is aimed at moving forward at all times on a number of fronts. .So what you have is not 'stay the course,' but, in fact, a study in constant motion by the administration and by the Iraqi government, and, frankly, also by the enemy, because there are constant shifts, and you constantly have to adjust to what the other side is doing." And that begged for a follow up. Which came later.Q Tony, it seems what you have is not "stay the course." Has anybody told the President he should stop calling it "stay the course" then? MR. SNOW: I don't think he's used that term in a while. Q Oh, yes, he has, repeatedly. MR. SNOW: When? Q Well, in August, because I wrote a story saying he didn't use it and I was quite sternly corrected. MR. SNOW: No, he stopped using it. Q Why would he stop using it? MR. SNOW: Because it left the wrong impression about what was going on. And it allowed critics to say, well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is, when, in fact, it's just the opposite. The President is determined not to leave Iraq short of victory, but he also understands that it's important to capture the dynamism of the efforts that have been ongoing to try to make Iraq more secure, and therefore, enhance the clarification -- or the greater precision. Q Is the President responsible for the fact people think it's stay the course since he's, in fact, described it that way himself? MR. SNOW: No.Glad that got straightened out. As it happens, the president stopped using the phrase on Aug. 31, to be precise...
|
(CBS/AP)On Oct. 11, a small graphic started appearing on the top right corner of all CBSNews.com stories. "Answers.com enabled," it flashes, and then "Alt-Click on any word." If you click on the "What's This?" button next to the graphic, you get an explanation: CBS News is now providing its visitors with AnswerTips, a new feature that gives you instant definitions, explanations and facts about any word on the site: biographies, tech terms, geography, companies, culture and much more. When you Alt-Click (press the alt key while clicking the mouse) on any word on the CBS News site, you get a small pop-up window - an AnswerTip - with a concise explanation of the word or phrase. And if the concise Answer isn't enough, the full collection of sources on that topic is available just by clicking on the "More" button. More here. We played with the feature this morning, and found that, while it was helpful, it didn't always have the right, well, answers. For example: Alt-Click on the word "association" in this first or fifth paragraph of this story, and you get a definition of the word. But click on "association" in the sixth paragraph, and you get the rock band "The Association," which was apparently "one of the more underrated groups to come out of the mid- to late '60s."
|
(CBS)Michael Solmsen has been a producer at CBS News for 11 years. He's covered several wars, including the war in Afghanistan, this summer's Israel-Lebanon conflict and he's been to Iraq four times. As for other recent major news events, he was in Indonesia to cover the tsunami, in Rome to cover the death of John Paul II and he also covered Hurricane Katrina here in the U.S. So think up a question for him and e-mail it to us. He'll answer it tomorrow.
|
(CBS/AP)A billion dollars here, a billion there and pretty soon it adds up to some pretty serious money. That old adage, supposedly uttered by Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen about government spending habits, has become a popular one when it comes to discussions of Washington. Apparently, it now applies just as much to campaign spending. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, campaign spending will soar to a record $2.6 billion in 2006. From Reuters: With such high stakes, it is unsurprising that candidates and outside groups are expected to raise and spend more money than ever, said Sheila Krumholz, the nonprofit group's acting executive director. "The money in this campaign has been flowing fast and furiously," Krumholz told reporters on a conference call. Despite a 2002 law that aims to limit the impact of money on the political process, the center found that candidates and outside political groups are raising more money than ever for television ads, travel, voter outreach efforts and other campaign activities.Being a non-presidential election year, the overall spending is actually down from 2004 when it hit an estimated $4.2 billion. The attention paid to this year"s spending spree seems to be fairly non-existent this year as well. Traditionally, we can depend on a decent amount of "follow-the-money" stories to inform the public of who"s shoveling all this cash into campaigns or even occasionally stories helping us understand where it"s spent. Maybe it"s because these stories have been done so often in the past, maybe it"s because it"s easier to talk about who"s going to have control of Congress for the next two years, but it seems the money angle has been under-covered this cycle. Should it be getting more?
|
Michael J. Fox might just do a hell of an impression of a guy with severe Parkinson's. Or so says Rush Limbaugh, who claimed Fox was "either off his medication or acting" in an ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill. "In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it's purely an act," said Limbaugh. In the ad, Fox backs McCaskill's support for embryonic stem cell research and criticizes her opponent's position. You can watch it by clicking on the box. Limbaugh subsequently stepped back from the comment. "All I'm saying is I've never seen him the way he appears in this commercial for Claire McCaskill," he said. "So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act, especially since people are telling me they have seen him this way on other interviews and in other television appearances." Here's what William J. Weiner M.D., professor and chairman of the department of neurology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, told the New Republic on the matter: What you are seeing on the video is side effects of the medication. He has to take that medication to sit there and talk to you like that. ... He's not over-dramatizing. ... [Limbaugh] is revealing his ignorance of Parkinson's disease, because people with Parkinson's don't look like that at all when they're not taking their medication. They look stiff, and frozen, and don't move at all. ... People with Parkinson's, when they've had the disease for awhile, are in this bind, where if they don't take any medication, they can be stiff and hardly able to talk. And if they do take their medication, so they can talk, they get all of this movement, like what you see in the ad. The Fox ad has created quite a stir even before Limbaugh's comments. A response to the spot, focused primarily on a proposed amendment to the state constitution regarding stem cell research, has shown up on Youtube. It features Jim "Jesus" Caviezel, who speaks in Aramaic as the ad opens, Kurt Warner, Patricia Heaton, and others, and you can watch it here.
|
(CBS)That"s right, starting November 1, you can keep up with all the behind-the-scenes happenings at CBS News and the issues impacting the media at large right in your in-box. Get insights on the hot topics of the day and catch up on some PE highlights you might have missed. Receive the daily update by signing up here and be the first on your block to register for the Public Eye newsletter!
|
(AP)In the age of the Internet, everybody, they say, is a press critic. Even Supreme Court Justices. On Saturday, the Associated Press reports, Justice Antonin Scalia said at a panel sponsored by National Italian American Foundation that "[t]he press is never going to report judicial opinions accurately." He added: "They're just going to report, who is the plaintiff? Was that a nice little old lady? And who is the defendant? Was this, you know, some scuzzy guy? And who won? Was it the good guy that won or the bad guy? And that's all you're going to get in a press report, and you can't blame them, you can't blame them. Because nobody would read it if you went into the details of the law that the court has to resolve. So you can't judge your judges on the basis of what you read in the press." As Slate's Dahlia Lithwick points out, Scalia isn't the only Supreme with something to say about the press. At the same event, Justice Samuel Alito complained about the Internet's role in legal reporting, and earlier Justice Anthony Kennedy complained that editorial writers regularly "misinterpret" the court's arguments because they often don't read them. CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen tells Public Eye the comments are "disappointing but not surprising." The Justices, he writes in an email, "are so insulated from the outside world, and so sheltered from the rough-and-tumble of journalism, that they can hardly be expected to understand how difficult it is for even the most seasoned reporter to understand and accurately report what it is that the Justices have decided. Some of that blame has to go on the Justices themselves, who, with rare exceptions, write in a legalese that even Codebreakers would have a hard time following."
|
|
|
|
