Just got this from the Public Campaign Action Fund. If you haven't supported them in the past, please consider doing so. Public Campaign and its action fund do a lot of great work.

Dear [desmoinesdem],

 

Thanks to your fast action, Insight Communications, the cable company that last week refused to air our new ad about Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has relented: they will air the ad this week.

We beat McConnell and his donors when we forced Insight Communications to back down. Now we need to take this opportunity to claim the right to run this ad on the air. We’re $14,500 short of our goal – if 145 people gave an average gift of $100 we’ll make it. If you can give more, great. Every dollar you contribute affirms the freedom of speech we fought for last week. Please make a donation to help us reach our goal today.

Help us keep this ad on the air. Consider making a donation today!

Insight, whose executives have donated thousands of dollars to McConnell and whose head lobbyist and CEO are both McConnell allies, tried to keep our ad, which talks about McConnell's ties to big money special interests, off the air.  We know censorship — and blatant political favor-trading  — when we see it and we immediately launched our petition effort to get Insight to air the ad.  On Friday evening we got the news: Insight backed down.

Now we need to make sure Kentuckians see this ad. Help us keep it on the air by making a donation today!

While we celebrate this victory for our ad, and for the light it will shed on McConnell's habit of acting on behalf of his campaign patrons instead of his constituents, we also celebrate a larger victory for our freedom of speech.

We have already seen our elections dominated by those with the most money who can buy the biggest megaphone, and as a result we have seen the priorities of our elected officials skew towards the narrow interests of the few and the wealthy.  But when you, and your fellow activists, signed the petition Friday and called for an end to Insight's censorious tactics to further control debate you took an important step in changing those priorities.

The ad will run in Kentucky through the week, as often as our funds will allow.  Thank you for all you've done.

David Donnelly
National Campaigns Director

P.P.S. The ad, and Insight's reaction got quite a bit of news coverage, read up here for more, and check out these YouTube clips of television coverage.

While this isn’t exactly Iowa-specific or Iowa-centered, I thought it was worth noting today’s MSNBC story on the left-leaning emphasis of journalistic contributions to federal campaigns and PACs.

Marc Ambinder decides to frame the issue as “all journalists are liberals” and says it doesn’t help fight the “liberal bias” title usually assigned to the MSM by the right-wing noise machine.

I’m more inclined to agree with Matt Yglesias:

“This effort at ginning up controversy by revealing political contributions made by employees of media organizations seems fundamentally misguided. For one thing, no effort is being made to see if the people named have any ability to impact coverage of national politics. They have, for example, a former copy editor here at The Atlantic on their list, but what nefarious influence is she supposed to have had on the magazine’s coverage?”

You can find the full list of journalists and their contributions here.  A large number of the folks listed are producers, copy editors, or other senior positions in journalistic enterprises.  Clearly, personal life issues and personal politics don’t inherently have to enter the work life and the job that one person is doing.  This goes for Republicans and Democrats.

Furthermore, this kind of ‘investigative’ reporting groups the kinds of journalists writing for Bloomberg in the same category as journalists writing for a magazine like The New Yorker.  Journalism isn’t just about writing down the facts of current events and reporting them to the people, there is real investigative work and commentary that can be done–with a clear intent.  Simply put, you can consider it analysis.  Writers for The New Yorker are pretty clear about stating their intent and opinions in their pieces, which make them fundamentally different then the reporting done in a Bloomberg news piece.

Clearly, there are conflicts of interest with some of the people mentioned the in report, but is it really something pervasive among the journalistic community in this country?  I guess that’s for the consumer and the reader to decide.

And if you’re curious for an Iowa-angle, the only journalist from Iowa making the list was Des Moines Register business reporter S.P. Dinnen, who gave $250 to John Kerry in 2004.  His explanation can be found here.

Last November, right before the midterm elections, CityView also did a big cover story on bias in the media, particularly in Iowa.  They covered all angles, including print, TV, and radio.  I recommend reading the full story here as it provides great insight into the efforts of the outlets to maintain their objectivity and it also provides a good list of just who in the Iowa media is registered with which party (if any).

Finally, there is a poll in the extended entry asking if you think there is bias in Iowa’s press.

I read the Des Moines Register's write-up on Tom Tancredo's visit to NW Iowa in the Sunday edition, and I think it's time for reporters covering Tancredo to go beyond reporting his outrageous claims and ask him to provide some evidence to back them up.

We've known for a long time that Tancredo is a one-trick pony, playing on the right wing's resentment against Spanish-speaking immigrants, fanned by the conservative hate radio machine. 

But I hadn't realized before reading this article that Tancredo actually blames immigrants for every problem plaguing America. Tancredo seems to think the main problem in our education system is the hordes of illegal immigrants whose children flood our schools. Nowhere in the article do I see a hint that a reporter asked him about what percentage of our school districts serve a significant population of illegal immigrants. 

Here's Tancredo talking about health care, channeling Moe Siszlyak of The Simpsons (“I knew it was the immigints! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was the immigints!”):

Tancredo touted his support for “market-place competition” in health care and personal health savings accounts, but added that “were we to deal with the illegal immigration problem, we could significantly reduce our costs for health care.”

Really? Illegal immigrants are a significant reason that the US is spending 14 percent of our GDP on health care? Again, I see no sign that a reporter has asked Tancredo or a Tancredo staffer to provide evidence backing up this claim.

Tancredo linked immigration to our environmental problems, since immigration is largely responsible for our population growth:

“If we continue on this path, there will be a billion people here by the end of the century,” Tancredo added. “And if there are, what do you think that does to our environment? Americans consume more and produce more waste than anybody else. If you're worried about the environment, why aren't you worried about the fact we are bringing in millions and millions of people?

Kind of interesting to see this conservative, anti-choice Republican so concerned about population growth and U.S. consumption. Did the Register's correspondent ask Tancredo whether he has ever sponsored legislation aimed at reducing the amount of waste produced by American consumers?

Also, his population numbers seem way off. What credible source has predicted that the U.S. population will hit 1 billion by the end of this century?

The last straw for me was this passage:

Tancredo touched briefly on what he said was the increased number of vaccine-resistant diseases being introduced into the United States from other countries, then forged ahead to what he said is illegal immigration's impact on national security.

This is loathsome propaganda designed to dehumanize immigrants among the Republican electorate. Maybe the reporter or the DM Register's editors think that “what he said was” is sufficient to suggest to the reader that Tancredo's claim might not be true. But this was crying out for a follow-up by the correspondent–what vaccine-resistant diseases is Tancredo talking about? Are there any?

Did the Register contact the Centers for Disease Control to verify this claim?

Come on, campaign trail reporters, be more than stenographers.

UPDATE: Don at Cyclone Conservatives attended Tancredo's Sioux City immigration forum on Saturday and loved what he heard from Tancredo and his Iowa campaign director, Bill Salier. 

It's Memorial Day weekend.  It is dreary and raining and I can't get out and work on the pond like I wanted to.  So, I'm catching up on my reading.

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall recently published a letter from a reader that, I think sums up very well the feelings and opinions of the small number of Americans who either still support the war outright or support it in concept.  TPM reader JDG writes:

Yes, our war in Iraq is very much like the one in Viet Nam, but not the way its opponents mean the comparison. What's similar is this: Both of these war efforts by the United States have been sabotaged, probably on purpose, and we will probably lose this one as we lost Viet Nam, by the media's practice of showing us the daily body count in color on the nightly news every single day, again and again and again and again!

It is simply impossible for a democratic country to pursue any war, no matter how justified, to a successful conclusion under those conditions.

No matter what you think of the merits of the present war, it's obvious that two choices lie before America: either we go back to our pre-1950 policy (which most countries in the world still follow) of wartime censorship — not just of information that would help enemy commanders, but also of information that would undermine our own public's morale — or we may as well pack it in and invite China to rule our country, since we can never possibly win another war.

As I said, I think it is important to confront this idea head on.  It is, among a class of mostly male mostly conservative individuals a very popular and persuasive notion and it goes like this:  The media prevents us from winning because the American people cannot stand to see their boys and girls bleeding and dying on a daily basis.  It undercuts morale over the long haul and makes victory impossible by undermining the support for the war at home.

More after the jump.

My initial reaction to hearing about this blog was, “Ah, the inevitable, exploitative follow-up to the tragedy-of-the moment.  Some soldier trying to buy himself an easy ticket out or a good job afterwards.”

But that changes as soon as one reads along a bit.  This is the real, compelling and heart-wrenching, self-help of a soldier caught in bureaucratic purgatory.

If you oppose the war, if you support the war, you must read Walter Reed.