It looks like Drudge traded the Post’s ombudsman to Glenn Beck for a couple of packs of cigarettes:
Jones had issued two public apologies before The Post finally wrote about him. One was for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech before joining the administration. The other was for signing a 2004 petition that said members of the Bush administration may have “allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext to war.” Conservatives had attacked Jones for more than a week before the first Post story appeared Sept. 5. He resigned the next day.
With ACORN, The Post wrote about it two days after the first of several explosive hidden-camera videos were aired showing the group’s employees giving tax advice to young conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her pimp. Three days passed before The Post ran a short Associated Press story about the Senate halting Housing and Urban Development grants to ACORN, which operates in 110 cities. But by that time, the Census Bureau had severed ties with ACORN. State and city investigations had been launched. It wasn’t until late in the week that The Post weighed in with two solid pieces.
Why the tardiness?
Meanwhile, this story is barely being covered:
The Justice Department is investigating whether former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton illegally used her position to benefit Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the company that later hired her, according to officials in federal law enforcement and the Interior Department.
[….]On average, each of those 5,000-acre lease tracts holds an estimated $700-billion worth of recoverable oil (at today’s $70-per-barrel price), said James T. Bartis, a shale expert at Rand. Shell has estimated the costs of recovering the oil at $30 per barrel, leaving a potential profit of about $1 trillion after royalties if all the oil is extracted.
A trillion dollars.
I’d be the first to admit the Norton story would be getting more coverage if more black people had worked in the department or if the Shell employees had dressed up like pimps and hos.
It’s sad and it’s pathetic: Alexander and his ilk are so afraid of being labeled as liberal that they’re willing to push whatever story Glenn Beck feeds them. I guess that’s what 40 years of attacks from the right-wing does to people who weren’t very tough to begin with. You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much til you spend half your life just covering up.
Media Matters has more on this, via Atrios.
jibeaux
Born in the USA! USA! USA!
EdTheRed
Gale Norton went to the refinery
Said, “You can have these leases if you’ll hire me.”
I wrote a letter to my Ombudsman
He said, “Son, don’t you understand, now?”
jurassicpork
Assclowns of the Week #77 is up and waiting for comments. On the spit this week:
Fox and the Wa Po.
Joe Wilson and Democrats.
Orly Taitz.
Obama, Reid and Specter.
Max Baucus.
Teabaggers.
The aforementioned Gale Norton and much much more.
Ash Can
And then these guys get all butthurt when mean bloggers and commenters throw road apples and rotten tomatoes at them. Cripes. There aren’t enough road apples and rotten tomatoes in the world to do these guys justice, let alone to get Clue One through their thick heads.
Funkhauser
Not only a trillion dollars; a trillion dollars in profit.
It must be good to be Gale Norton. Except for the whole raping the Earth and having no conscience thing.
r€nato
yeah but some of that trillion dollars in profit trickled down to you and me, so it’s all good.
Kind of like how on the slave plantation, the slaves had the good fortune to eat the scraps from massuh’s table which the dogs didn’t get first.
Xenos
Rescission. It is not just for insurance companies anymore.
DZ
@Renato:
Amost but not quite. Too revisionist. The dogs got fed before the slaves; the slaves got the scraps that the dogs wouldn’t eat.
SpotWeld
I’ve begun to wonder if the Time cover story on Glenn Beck was done to “balance” the apparently liberaly slant the magazine was accused of having after all that Ted Kennedy coverage.
eric
@r€nato: your reference to slavery shows just how racist you are. I mean come on, if it wasnt for allowing africans to travel to the united states would it have been possible for obama’s parents to later travel to kenya so his mother could give birth to their indonesian love child?
the other day, my four year old was explaining to me that leaving the lights on was bad for the earth. so, there you have it: four year old = 1, bush administation member = -1 trillion.
(BTW: my daughter’s education on the environment is exactly what the culture warriors most fear. get them to the correct side of the issue before they can be overrun by cynical mammonism.)
David Hunt
Well, to be “fair,” that trillion dollars assumes that all of the oil is extracted. The figure is very probably hyperbolic. I’d be willing to bet that the actual profit to Shell will likely ending up being only hundreds of billions of dollars!
So to sum up, even though Norton is still going to Hell, she’s not going to replace any of the three dudes in all of history who get the honor a being personally chewed up in Satan’s 3 mouths. Dick Cheney gets the honor of coming in as relief for Brutus.
catclub
Exxon’s profits in 2008 were $45B.
So this purported ‘profit’ from 3, 5000 acre parcels,
is twenty times ALL of Exxon’s profits for its best year ever.
I think someone is making up numbers.
They may also forgotten to mention that Shell will need to buy all the available
WATER in the west to extract said shale oil.
I have would be totally unsurprised to find that Gale Norton was another corrupt, Bush admin thief.
Lying about the numbers is not needed.
b-psycho
Gov’t officials using their position for the benefit of themselves & their friends? Imagine my shock!
Zifnab
That’s their job. Glenn Beck slathers whatever gook he wants on national TV and then – a la “Cokie’s Law” – it’s “out there” and open season for more mainstream publications to follow up on. The WaPo and the NYT sold out years ago. Watching them continue to parrot right wing talking points while ignoring actual news and scandal isn’t surprising in the least.
FOX News makes a story sexy. The other media folks are only interested in following “sexy” stories.
@catclub:
That’s not $1 trillion all at once. Think of it drawn out over 30-50 years. You don’t just stick a hose in the ground and draw all the oil out overnight.
jibeaux
@Zifnab:
You’re saying that Shell was trying to drink our milkshake, and that Gale Norton arranged for the straw.
Bill E Pilgrim
That’s that learned hopelessness thing again. You’re hopeless, and you never learn.
Oh “helplessness”. That’s right.
Yeah, I guess having a bunch of liberals like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Gerson, George Will, and all the rest writing for your paper was bound to get you in trouble with the right sooner or later.
Of course, those are all balanced out by equally far left radicals like…. Michael Kinsley. Snicker.
ericblair
@eric: (BTW: my daughter’s education on the environment is exactly what the culture warriors most fear. get them to the correct side of the issue before they can be overrun by cynical mammonism.)
Mine are the same way, and from their point of view, why would you want to waste resources and mess up the Earth where we live? It’s only when the older crowd get environmentalism stuck up against a bunch of tribal nonsense and a good dose of American exceptionalism that you get any sort of argument the other way.
They’re not being “programmed” with environmentalism; they just haven’t grown up with the bullshit social baggage that makes environmentalism look like a bad thing instead of the obvious thing to do. Science advances one funeral at a time, ya know.
Zifnab
@jibeaux: Does that mean we get to beat her up with a bowling pin?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Future generations are going to look at our news media they way we look at the lead pipes and containers the Romans used for transporting and storing their drinking and cooking supplies and wonder “WTF were they thinking?”
JK
Congratulations to Rachel Maddow for mentioning Gale Norton on her program.
The Republican Party should change the symbol of their party from an elephant to a clown because the party has become a bunch of bozos.
General Winfield Stuck
It would take a small army of lawyers to ferret out all the Bush admin. crimes. Not the national security related ones. The ones involving the greatest heist in American or any other history. Start with the DOI and end with the grand finale involving the Corp of Engineers and contracting out the Iraq war. But Obama was once a young lawyer and did some work for Acorn decades ago, eegads!, and is a commie for rescuing capitalism bled out by GOP bloodsucking out all our pesos.
And our press worships at the alter of the persecuted wingnut. And even then Newt Gingrich opines weekly on liberal bias and Berny Goldberg bellies up to the Regenry pig trough with a list of evil dems out to destroy America/
If you need me, I’ll be in the bar.
eric
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: the joke is on you because the “we” that is constituted by 99.999% of the American population does not know (1) that the Romans had plumbing, (2) used lead, (3) or that the Romans did anything other than kill Jesus upon the direction of the Sanhedrin or watched gladiators fight totally cool battles.
eric
r€nato
@DZ:
I kind of thought that was what I wrote…
in any case, yes that trillion dollars of profit is surely an instance of blue-skies exaggeration. Still it doesn’t make much less corrupt what Norton did.
joes527
@General Winfield Stuck: +10 points for the reference to the best song evah
r€nato
@JK: evil, corrupt, incompetent (except at corruption, sort of… who prints up a bribe menu?) bozos.
Zifnab
@eric: A lot of people like to compare modern America to Old Rome. But I always preferred the idea that THIS IS SPARTA!
/face kick
eric
@Zifnab: nice touch.
BTW, nothing, and i mean nothing, bothers my historical radar more than the misappropriation of Sparta by the right wing freedom zealots.
And that is saying a lot given that (IIRC) the way Achilles dies was changed in the movie Troy.
eric
Comrade Dread
As near as I can tell, the significance of the ACORN scandal is as follows:
1. ACORN employs some black people.
2. Barack Obama did some work for ACORN years ago and is also Black.
3. ACORN also registers minorities to vote, and they usually vote for Democrats.
4. A handful of ACORN employees got caught on tape allegedly attempting to circumvent tax laws for a ‘prostitute’ and her ‘pimp’, and one allegedly suggested ways to import underage girls into the country.
5. Therefore, all ACORN employees must support prostitution and pederasty.
6. Therefore Barack Obama regularly gets blowjobs from 12 year old Thai whores secretly imported by ACORN every week.
Attention Fox News, you know where you can reach me. Give me a 7 figure deal and I’ll bring these flawless news skills to your agency.
r€nato
@eric: well, cut them some slack, they get all hot and bothered after seeing those totally cut male bodies in 300.
ronin122
Off topic, but I think this needs to be said: if a Republican is offering amendments to make the Baucus bill more liberal, that tells you how shitty it was and how much of a clown Baucus is.
Joel
@catclub: Agreed. The articles numbers sound phony. An unneeded distraction. The crime is still awful.
terry chay
The first link in the article is wrong (methinks).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091802639.html
BDeevDad
Well, this weekend Kathleen Parker had the audacity to say the Repubs were holding back on ACORN so they wouldn’t accused of racism.
Also, just because Joe Wilson admires the Confederacy and wants to fly the Confederate flag, he is not necessarily racist.
Asshat.
trollhattan
Gale Norton: freshening up the Reagan administration for the new millennium.
http://www.bookrags.com/research/james-g-watt-1938–american-former–enve-02/
One of the many legacies of 43’s administration is they had SO MANY massive misdeeds the general raping of our environment went ahead largely unhindered.
trollhattan
Gale Norton: freshening up the Reagan administration for the new millennium.
One of the many legacies of 43’s administration is they had SO MANY massive misdeeds the general raping of our environment went ahead largely unhindered.
steve s
“Science advances one funeral at a time, ya know.”
That’s a clever line from Max Planck, but it’s not actually true. Scientific consensus can change dramatically in a small number of years, much faster than if you had to wait for whole generations to die off.
Bruce Webb
Well not to give cover to the reichnuts who don’t know a thing about Sparta except that its guys have great pecs and fight Persian dragons, that is they don’t know anything at all about the actual historic Sparta. But in my view Sparta gets too much credit, in large part because they come off well in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War.
What we know about the actual Sparta is that it was a fairly sick culture that was one at the same time anti-Democratic, anti-intellectual, and anti-family. It is somewhat an accident of history that Classical History got its academic start in a time and a place where Democracy was literally a dirty word making the historians naturally tend to be pro-Sparta and anti-Athenian, something exacerbated because their own major source, that is Thucydides though an Athenian General, shared their aristocratic preferences.
You see the same thing in Roman historiography where the Gracchi Brothers tend to be presented as villains, while their opponents are the hero conservatives. Where near as I can see the only sin of the Gracchi’s was that they were seen as class traitors, much as FDR was. For a more familiar reference you could take Caesar and Pompey where the historians have traditionally placed the latter as the hero while praising those who struck Caesar down.
That is just because the historical time period is remote doesn’t at all mean that its portrayal is not distorted by the then current political and economic lens of the historian.
What about Sparta would you say is worth admiring?
kay
I know the media aren’t covering it, but I think the Gale Norton thing is actually serious, and they’ll eventually have to.
It’s not mean-spirited, congenitally nasty young conservatives playing investigative reporter.
It’s a criminal referral, she’s the former AG of Colorado, and she was a member of Bush’s Cabinet.
These are not speculative connections or a thrice-removed connection to former President Bush. They’re facts.
Maybe the DOJ should create and then creatively edit a video “sting” to get mainstream media attention, huh?
ericblair
@steve s: That’s a clever line from Max Planck, but it’s not actually true. Scientific consensus can change dramatically in a small number of years, much faster than if you had to wait for whole generations to die off.
Yeah, I know, I’m an ex-academic. You have all the human stuff with power factions and funding battles and personality conflicts, but eventually the ball does get moved down the field if the research backs it up. One thing that a lot of the anti-science people don’t understand is that, in a technical field, sitting on your butt and defending the status quo doesn’t get a lot of papers published or funding dollars awarded.
Bruce Webb
@ericblair:
Which is a blistering indictment of the pretensions of the neo-classical economists that what they are doing is science.
I was at Berkeley at the height of the furor around the Alvarez Hypothesis that posits that mass extinctions could be the result of such things as an asteroid strike. A couple of decades latter fairly widely accepted in principle but as I understand subject to some challenges around the edges. But at the time it was not accepted at all by the paleontologists at Berkeley, who at the time and probably still were among world leaders. And the reasons it was rejected was I believe two-fold.
First modern paleontology developed within a field that had categorically rejected Catastrophism. To the professionals Alvarez pere et fils might as well been pushing Velikovskyism. The immediate result was a determined push back defending the status quo which certainly didn’t prevent Tim White et al from getting funding or having papers published. It was Walter Alvarez that couldn’t get a hearing. Indeed if his Nobel winning physicist father had not signed on to the paper it is doubtful it would have gone anywhere at all.
The second reason was more petty and has been the reason a lot of theories don’t get the attention they ultimately deserve. Neither Walter (a geologist) or Luis (a physicist) were professional paleontologists. Just as Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift was in large part dismissed because he was a ‘weatherman’ (actually he had a PhD in astronomy and was a pioneer in the fields of meteorology and climatology).
In any event the reaction of what Kuhn calls ‘Normal Science’ to innovation can be more foot dragging in character than what was suggested by ericblair. It is not always whether a new theory is testable, it is too often whether it is tested by the powers that be.
eric
@Bruce Webb: nothing. i did not mean to suggest that they misappropriated Sparta the way they do with Jeffererson or Madison or Paine, where they distort the beliefs away fromt what it is right to what is wrong.
No, here they distort waht is wrong to what is wrong, all the while ignoring the things about Sparta that are grotesque.
The misappropriation of the Greeks makes more sense because there was a commitment to progress (contra Sparta) and a commitment to democratic and republican concepts — even if temporary.
But to ignore the misogyny and the homsexuality (as conservatives do) is to misunderstand how greek males viewed themselves as the archetypes for all humanity. Man are the best of creation and should be “loved” as the best, hence greek homsexuality.
alamacTHC
“It’s sad and it’s pathetic: Alexander and his ilk are so afraid of being labeled as liberal that they’re willing to push whatever story Glenn Beck feeds them.”
I’m really getting tired of the “afraid” meme. It just reinforces the idea that those on the left are cowards who just shake in their boots when some big bad rightist looks askew at them.
Has anyone stopped to think that maybe the real problem isn’t cowardice, but corruption? This corporatist worm is just doing what his paymasters want: push right-wing ideology any way he can. It’s not cowardice. Like all corporatist media and their paid whores, they are just doing what they are hired to do.
kay
@alamacTHC:
I don’t know what it is. Maybe you’re right. It’s sad to watch, though. They’re impugning their own credibility with this desperate attempt to appease, and appease, and appease.
It’s never going to end, either.
The more they capitulate, the more the Right will demand, and the less credibility media will have, and fewer sets of eyes. There’s already a FOX News. They have that market cornered. No one is going to watch or read Fox News Lite.
It seems self-defeating, even as a commercial strategy.
Tax Analyst
joes527 said:
@General Winfield Stuck: +10 points for the reference to the best song evah –
— and then linked to a YouTube of Joni Mitchell doing “A Case of You”, which was what I thought the reference was about. It is a great song, and from a great album, too (“Blue”). I can’t watch it now (work prohibition against streaming during work hours), but will check it out after we close today.
Thanks.
Jason Brzoska
Um, isn’t the Gale Norton story almost exactly the same as the Teapot Dome scandal?