Sinners: E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, and all of the reporters who have failed to point out that Gee earned nearly $2 million serving as a member of the board of Massey Energy and chairman of its Safety, Environmental and Public Policy Committee.  (See the relevant SEC filing here.) Gee has publicly portrayed himself as a fierce advocate of green energy while feeding at the trough of one of the worst coal companies in America.  FCP sent him this query:

1. How long did you serve as the chairman of the safety and environmental and public policy committee of Massey Energy?
2. What steps did you take to reduce the number of safety citations against Massey during your chairmanship?
3. Was your total compensation during your years on the Massey Board more than $1 million and less than $2 million?

Gee’s assistants, Kate Wolford (Wolford.4@osu.edu) and Viviana Ruiz (Ruiz.78@osu.edu) both acknowledged receipt of FCP’s inquiry, but no one in the president’s office responded to its contents.  After a massive campaign by Ohio Citizen Action, which included 6,800 letters and pictures drawn by children, as well as t-shirts sported by OSU students asking, “Why, Dr. Gee?”, the president finally left the board last year.  But he was careful to say that he was “retiring,” not “resigning,” to make it clear that he wasn’t succumbing to pressure from outsiders.

Update: In 2008 alone, Gee was paid $219,261 by Massey, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Second Update:  This is Dr. Gee’s second stint running Ohio State.  He has also been president or chancellor of Brown, Vanderbilt and the University of Colorado.  Four years ago The Wall Street Journal reported that those institutions had spent more than $10 million to build or renovate Dr. Gee’s various residences, including $6 million at Vanderbilt alone.  The annual tab for his personal chef and entertaining at Vanderbilt was $700,000.  Dr. Gee is described as a “Mormon teatotaler,” but his then wife, Constance, stirred controversy by using marijuana in the president’s mansion at Vanderbilt.  Her husband attracted additional headlines in 2002 by declaring his intention to boost the academic caliber of Vanderbilt students by soliciting more Jewish applicants.

Winner: The indispensable Clara Bingham, whose post today at The Daily Beast
makes it abundantly clear why “Hollywood couldn’t have invented a better villain” than Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy.  Bingham writes:

As the toxic streams and topless mountains multiply, the business community has embraced Don Blankenship and put him on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. You would think that Blankenship’s board, which consists of prominent business figures like the former head of the National Security Council and CIA Deputy Director Council Bobby Inman and former SEC commissioner and chief counsel of News Corp. International Barbara Thomas Judge, would have intervened by now.

Winner: FCP colleague Sydney Schanberg, whose collected war correspondence, Beyond The Killing Fields, has just been published by Potomac Books.  Schanberg was one of the greatest war correspondents in Indochina, and this collection includes FCP’s favorite magazine piece of all time, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, which was the basis of the iconic anti-war film, The Killing Fields.  Schanberg’s book should be required reading for every journalism student in America–and everyone else who is serious about the history of the wars in Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.  It includes details of John McCain’s shocking role in covering up credible reports that hundreds of his fellow American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam after the war was over.

Winner:  New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, whose new book, Why Architecture Matters, has become an instant classic, and is now going into its fifth printing from Yale University Press.  The Pulitzer Prize winner’s book was published simultaneously with a collection of Goldberger’s pieces, Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, from Monacelli Press.

Sinners: The editors of The New York Times Book Review, who have ignored both of Goldberger’s books, after giving a full page to a collection of pieces by Ada Louise Huxtable, Goldberger’s predecessor as architecture critic at The Times, and the same space to a posthumous collection by Goldberger’s immediate successor, Herbert Muschamp.  Before joining The New Yorker, Goldberger was the Times’ architecture critic from 1973 to 1990, its culture editor from 1990 to 1993 and its chief cultural correspondent from 1994-1997.  The failure of the Times to write about either of his new books is beyond baffling.

Winner: The sublime Jane Mayer, for her devastating review in The New Yorker of Marc Thiessen’s appallingly dishonest book about torture and terrorism, Courting Disaster (published, of course, by Regnery, where all prosperous neocons go to publish their paranoid fantacies).  One significant example of Thiessen’s serial lying: according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006, Thiessen’s account of the thwarted plot to hijack seven airplanes at Heathrow airport and blow them up over the Atlantic is  “completely and utterly wrong.”  Thiessen, who has never met a torture technique he isn’t in love with, pretends that some of the information that prevented the plot came from the torture  of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  However, according to Clarke of Scotland Yard, “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.”

Very fortunately for Thiessen, massive intellectual dishonesty is no longer any barrier to working for…

Sinner Fred Hiatt, who baffled everyone with a still-functioning brain at The Washington Post and elsewhere when he made Thiessen the Post’s newest op-ed columnist.  How could Fred miss what is so obvious to Frank Rich and to so many others: that Thiessen’s “giggly, repressed hysteria” (as seen on The Daily Show) is “uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.”

Winner: Jon Stewart, for once again performing his function as television’s leading press critic, by pointing out that Fox News is the only American television network where you can count on the guest and the host being equally dishonest, on virtually every program.  This time it was Newt Gingrich trading outright lies with the inimitable Sean Hannity about Barack Obama’s new nuclear policy.  Very fortunately for Gingrich, being completely dishonest has never been a barrier to being one of the most frequent guests of all of the network Sunday chat shows–where, naturally, Gingrich encounters just as much fact checking as he does on Fox.

Update: Jon Chait and the indispensable Steve Benen add this addtional important perspective on the former House Speaker:

With disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich having spent quite a bit of time this week in the national media – an oddly frequent occurrence – Jon Chait raises an objection that often goes overlooked.

On the subject of Gingrich, here’s one thing I don’t understand. John Edwards’ philandering has made him a public pariah, understandably so. But Gingrich’s marital behavior was probably even more disgusting. He cheated on his first wife and told her he wanted a divorce while she was recovering from surgery for cancer. He subsequently cheated on his second wife with a much younger aide. It’s fairly amazing how Gingrich has managed to avoid any stigma from this. He’s just a conservative “ideas guy.”

I’d go just a little further, still. Gingrich’s scandalous personal life and admitted adultery was concurrent with Gingrich launching an impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton for … his scandalous personal life and admitted adultery.

Gingrich then proceeded to characterize himself as an ally of the religious right, and started giving tours of Washington’s “Godly heritage.”

In other words, Gingrich’s political work was discredited, his moral standing was discredited, and his scholarship has been discredited. And yet, he remains a go-to guest for major media outlets, and has positioned himself as one of the right’s “big thinkers.”

When we talk about the bankruptcy of conservatism, Gingrich offers a helpful example.

Winners: The women writers of Newsweek, who convinced their editors to publish 2,500 words on how far the women’s liberation movement still has to go, forty years after 46 Newsweek women filed an anti-discrimination suit against their bosses.  The current Newsweek journalists acknowledged that until gender-discrimination scandals hit ESPN, David Letterman and The New York Post, the three of them knew virtually nothing about the struggle of their predecessors.  They needed to read Susan Brownmiller’s splendid memoir, In Our Time, to begin their education.  “We passed it around, mesmerized by descriptions that showed just how much has changed, and how much hasn’t.”  And don’t miss the accompanying feature displaying more than fifty years of women-themed Newsweek covers.

                                                                   -30-

Winners & Sinners / Health Care Reform Edition

Overnight is a long time in politics; a week is forever.
–FCP’s favorite American Political Proverb

    The Obama administration was spiritually and substantively reborn yesterday when Barack Obama use twenty-two pens to sign the most important piece of legislation into law in four decades.  (why did Stolberg and Pear say “20” in the Times??)

As always, the media did a wildly un-even job of understanding and explaining the significance of this extraordinary moment.

The Biggest Winner: David Leonhardt got right to the heart of matter, with a point I didn’t see made anywhere else: “The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago… Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan…The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.”  Of course, FCP believes it doesn’t do nearly enough to tax the rich–but at least it is a beginning.

The Biggest Sinner: Brian’s Williams’ NBC Nightly News last night devoted 53 seconds to a favorable account of the president’s bill signing–followed by 3 minutes and 7 seconds of Republican soundbites attacking the bill, 1 minute and 50 seconds about the Republican Attorneys General who have filed an almost-certainly doomed suit to overturn the law in Federal Court–and 1 minute and 55 seconds to an utterly clueless small business owner and his wife, who admitted they had no idea whatsoever how the bill would affect them–but still managed to repeat several of the most well-worn Republican sound bites.   And if you actually wanted to know anything about what was in the bill?  “Go to our website”–that was the anchor’s sole contribution to his viewers’ knowledge about that.  One of the shoddiest reports about an historic event FCP has ever seen on a network newscast.

Winner: ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer, which not only managed a much more balanced report, but also was the only network evening newscast to report the most relevant poll result of the day: Gallup found that 49 percent of Americans believed the bill was a good thing, and only 40 percent  did not.   On the other hand, the ABC broadcast reported just one Democratic congressional or party  office had been vandalized; on MSNBC,  the always much-more-thorough Rachel Maddow found five sites of vandalism across the country, as well as the ex-militia man in Alabama who claimed credit for inciting all of the violence.

Winner:  The CBS Evening News (Harry Smith was sitting in for Katie), which actually managed to describe some of the specifics in the bill–including tax savings of up to 4 percent for small businesses.

Sinner: The always-awful Kathleen Parker for repeating the bold-faced lie that the health care bill “expands public funding for abortion” and then attacking Bart Stupak for finally doing the right thing by voting for the bill.  Parker wrote that the Congressman “will forever be remembered as the guy who Stupaked health-care reform and the pro-life movement.”

Winner:  FCP’s  colleague, fellow Hillman Prize Judge Harold Meyerson, for writing the clearest column in The Washington Post about the president’s action:  “With the enactment of health-care reform, the often hapless, sometimes hopeless Democrats have transformed themselves into something America has not seen in decades: a governing party. By passing the most significant social legislation since the ’60s, they have ended the policy gridlock dating to the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. They have revalidated the almost quaint notion that – despite the ever greater role of money in politics – elections have consequences, too…Obama and Pelosi became a legislative force that Democrats have not seen since Lyndon Johnson. Pelosi’s contribution, no less than Obama’s, is one for the history books.” 

Then Meyerson laid out the rest of the necessary road to victory in the fall:

“To continue as a governing party beyond November, Democrats must apply the lessons of their health-reform victory to more popular causes. They need to establish a powerful consumer protection agency and rein in bank speculation – causes that some congressional Democrats decline to embrace. They must pressure those Democrats relentlessly, as they did those who wavered over health reform. They need more job legislation, beginning with California Rep. George Miller’s bill to save the teaching and public safety jobs on numerous states’ chopping blocks, and with Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s bill to establish an infrastructure bank to revive our construction sector.

Sinner: Ruth Marcus, also in The Washington Post, for boldly stating the obvious–we don’t know exactly how the one of the most complicated pieces of legislation ever enacted is going to work–and then casting doubt on its effectiveness with this factoid: “A study… by Richard Kronick, a former health-care adviser to President Bill Clinton, found ‘little evidence to suggest that extending insurance coverage to all adults would have a large effect on the number of deaths in the United States.’

Note to Marcus and Kronick:  Nothing will ever have any effect on the “total number of deaths in the United States”–except for the total number of births, and immigrants.

 Above the Fold

    David Boies and Theodore Olson came to The New York Times headquarters in Manhattan this week to discuss the constitutional challenge they have brought against California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed marriage equality in that state at the end of 2008, after 18,000 same-sex couples had been married there.

    The left-leaning litigator and the right-leaning appellate lawyer, who squared off against each other in Bush v. Gore back in 2000, now seem like old acquaintances who suddenly realized how much they liked each other when they reached late middle age.  

    When they first announced their federal suit nine months ago, with the clear intention of litigating it all the way to the Supreme Court, they caused a quiet uproar within the gay legal establishment, which had made a collective decision to keep the marriage issue out of the federal appellate courts, at least until there was a greater national consensus in favor of marriage equality, or another conservative justice was replaced by an Obama appointee–or both.

    Some people were so skeptical of what seemed like Olson’s very sudden conversion to a left-wing position, they accused him of purposely trying to undermine the fight for marriage equality by pressing the case in Federal Court prematurely.  But Olson’s moving public declarations in favor of same-sex marriage–as well as his brilliant performance at trial before Federal Judge Vaughn Walker–gradually obliterated the doubts about his sincerity.

    New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak was a superb moderator at the Times confab, and he went straight to the controversy over the timing of the lawsuit. 

   Why now? asked Liptak.

   “You never know exactly what the right time is,” David Boies replied.  “But there were three things that made us think this was the right time:”

* We have clients who want to get married

* I think it’s very hard to sustain Prop 8 on any legal basis

* This suit was going to be brought by someone, somewhere, and we thought it was best to bring it with the best possible resources (which included at least thirty lawyers and assorted support staff from the firms of Boies and Olson).

    After the initial shock of the gay legal establishment, it gradually decided to embrace the Boies-Olson effort–and it ended up supplying many of the expert witnesses who helped the lawyers build such a brilliant record at trial.

    The lead lawyer on the other side of the case was Charles Cooper, with whom Olson had actually served in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department.  Judge Walker had repeatedly asked Cooper exactly what damage would be done to the institution of marriage by allowing same-sex couples to marry, and Cooper persistently avoided answering.  Finally, Cooper conceded, “I don’t know”–and Olson clearly viewed that as an important turning point in the trial.  Judge Walker’s decision in the case is expected sometime later this year.  From there the case will go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then, almost certainly, to the highest court in the land.

   The most unlikely fact about this case so far: according to a report last month in the San Francisco Chronicle, Judge Walker, a Republican appointee of President Geoge H.W. Bush, is gay.

    The first action the Supreme Court took in this case was to deny the trial judge’s request to allow the proceedings to be televised–by a 5 to 4 vote.  But Boies and Olson insisted it was a mistake to see that vote as predictive of the final outcome of the case.  They believe the Justices were merely reaffirming their longstanding opposition to cameras in their courtroom under any circumstances, and they were not about to establish any precedent that might undermine their determination to keep things that way–forever.

    To skeptics who can’t see how this particular Supreme Court could ever endorse same-sex marriage, Olson emphasized that the Court had repeatedly held marriage to be “the most fundamental right of associational freedom”–a right which applies to everyone, including even prisoners who have no chance of ever living with their spouses.

    What was even more remarkable than the spectacle of a Reagan appointee making a full-throated defense of marriage equality was the atmosphere in which this confab took place.  Most of those present were gay and lesbian New Yorkers invited to the event.  But in the third row sat New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. , and six rows behind him was Andy Rosenthal, the editor of the Times editorial page.

    Thirty years ago, their fathers, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger and Abe Rosenthal, were running this newspaper, and they shared such antipathy for homosexuals that gay employees of the newspaper believed that their careers depended on keeping their sexual orientations a secret.

    But as the younger Sulzberger began his ascension through the paper’s corporate ranks, he did a  remarkable thing: he made it clear to every single person who worked for him that he would not tolerate an iota of prejudice based on sexual orientation. 

   Practically overnight, he transformed what had been a relentlessly homophobic place into one of the most gay-friendly institutions in the world.  

    And when Sulzberger went against his father’s wishes and started publishing same-sex wedding announcements in the newspaper in 2002, he did at least as much as any state legislature could to legitimize the idea of marriage equality.

    Not at all coincidentally, Andy Rosenthal’s editorial page has published more brilliant editorials in defense of equal rights for gay people than any other editorial page in the world.

    What a difference a new generation can make!

    The Times photographer for this week’s event was Sara Krulwich, a founding member of the New York Chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.  In the audience sat Krulwich’s partner, Lynn Paltrow, and their 17-year-old twins, Allen and Samantha.

    Adam Liptak called on Allen Paltrow-Krulwich to ask the final question, and the senior at The Bronx High School of Science, who is also vice president of the school’s Speech & Debate Team, highlighted another difference between the generations.

    “My name is Allen and my two moms are here,” he said.  “And we have a split in our family–they’re skeptical about bringing this case right now.  But I don’t agree with them.  I personally think that even the worst case scenario leaves all the [other] political strategies in place” to advance the cause of gay marriage.

    David Boies said it was a “great question,” and he agreed with Allen enthusiastically that even a defeat at the Supreme Court would do nothing to undermine the other strategies for equality.

    If indeed that worst-case scenario should come to pass, and this Supreme Court rules against marriage equality–and assuming that Allen Paltrow-Krulwich decides to go to law school–look for him to be the lead lawyer on the next marriage equality case which reaches the top Court, perhaps twenty years from now.

    That case will surely culminate in the next great judicial victory for gay Americans in the Twenty-First Century.

    That eventual outcome is certain, because every new generation of Americans is dramatically more tolerant of sexual diversity than the one that preceded it.

    In our time, that is especially true, because of the example of families like Sara and Lynn and Samantha and Allen.
 

                                                                             -30-

For the best guess about what will happen next in this case, see the typically brilliant analysis of ACLU LGBT Project Director Matt Coles.

The Boies-Olsen team introduced this anti-gay marriage ad made by the National Organization for Marriage, because they believed it made their opponents’ position look so ridiculous.

The ad’s most important effect was to inspire Stephen Colbert to do his own version: the single best piece of satire of 2009.

Boies and Olson previously debated the prospects for marriage equality with Bill Moyers. Read the transcript of that program here.

Winners & Sinners

The Conservative Political Action Conference is the marquee event of the conservative movement, which  this year was sponsored in part by the far-far-right John Birch Society.  The audience seemed to be dominated by the Tea Party Movement.

The way it was covered tells you a lot you might not want to know about the mainstream media in Washington.

Sinners Adam Nagourney and Kate Zernike of The New York Times led their first-day story with Mitt Romney’s “systematic indictment of what he described as the failed presidency of Barack Obama” and mentioned some “coy allusions” to Barack Obama’s youthful experimentation with cocaine, while Sinner Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post thought Romney “sounded every bit the party leader, denouncing the Obama administration as a ‘failure.’”

On the other hand, if you wanted to learn anything about the substance of Romney’s remarks–or anybody else’s at the conference–the person to listen to was Winner Rachel Maddow, who performed that oh-so-out-of-fashion journalistic function of fact-checking the remarks of the principals.  A few examples from the transcript of Maddow’s program the day the conference opened:

Romney: “Let’s ask the Obama folks why they say…no to malpractice reform” and “no to tax cuts that create jobs.” The former Massachusetts governor added, “On our watch, the conversation with a would-be suicide bomber will not begin with the words ‘You have the right to remain silent.’”

The Facts:  Obama is actually in favor of malpractice reform, and the year-old stimulus program included one of the biggest tax cuts ever enacted.  As for the suicide bomber, as Maddow pointed out, “Unless, of course, that would-be suicide bomber is would-be suicide bomber Richard Reid, who was told that he had the right to remain silent roughly five minutes after he was arrested back in 2001 when Republicans were running the show.”

Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCoutter: “When the American people asked for smaller deficits and a reduction of the debt, the Democrats said no.”

The Facts: As this chart reminds us, by far the biggest increases in the national debt took place under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush:

Former Congressman Dick Armey of Texas said Obama was “getting away with peddling” the notion that there is a crisis in health care, “despite the fact that America has the greatest health care in the world.” 

The Facts: As Maddow pointed out, in such a fake crisis, national spending on health care goes from 5 percent of GDP in 1960 to 7 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2000, and is expected to reach 20 percent in 2020. Maddow added, That‘s the crisis President Obama has apparently created out of thin air for his own political gain.  He apparently started working on this in 1970 when he was 9 years old.  He was very precocious.

But if the Times reporters had chosen to illuminate even one of these lies, that would have left them with less space for the jokes that were made about Obama’s cocaine use.

Meanwhile, network news reports like two from NBC’s Mike Viqueira on “Nightly” were virtually content-free, although Viqueira did manage to  include a tiny soundbite of Glenn Beck’s speech to CPAC, which at least hinted at the Fox News host’s absolute insanity.

Update: for a good piece in the MSM about the dark side of the Tea Party Movement, see Jonathan Capehart’s post.

Second Update: The only way to feel all of the love at the CPAC confab (including the Glenn Beck out-of-body experience) is to watch Jon Stewart–as usual.

Winner: Newsweek national security correspondent Michael Isikoff for revealing that a crucial CIA memo constantly cited by Dick Cheney as the source of his certainty that torture produced crucial intelligence actually contains “plainly inaccurate information” that undermined its conclusions.  Cheney has frequently demanded the publication of the still-classified document, but Justice Department investigators have now concluded “that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false,” according to Isikoff.   The reporter continued:

The memo also omitted any references to a notorious incident in which another high level CIA detainee, Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi,  provided ‘false information’ about Al Qaeda’s supposed connections to Iraq in order to stop his Egyptian interrogators from abusing him, the Justice report states.  (Al-Libi was transfered by the CIA to Egyptian custody under the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” program.)

Sinner: The normally-reliable Clyde Haberman, for a column in The New York Times about Harold Ford, the former Tennessee Congressman threatening to run for the Senate from New York.  Haberman left the clear impression that Ford’s early claims to having paid New York taxes were true. Haberman wrote:

One question raised about Mr. Ford is how diligent he has been in paying taxes in New York. Several weeks ago, he said in an interview with YNN, a cable news station in Buffalo: ‘I pay taxes there. And once you pay taxes there, you feel like a New Yorker.’  That’s an awfully limited definition. I worked for years in foreign countries, paying their taxes, yet somehow never felt like a Japanese, an Italian or an Israeli.

The trouble is, Haberman’s column appeared exactly seven days after Gawker’s John Cook had done a thorough investigation proving that Ford had actually assiduously avoided paying New York State Income Taxes.  Asked by FCP if he had missed the fact that Ford was a New York tax dodger, Haberman replied, “As you surely could tell, that wasn’t really my focus this time around”–an answer which neither answered my question, nor explained why Haberman had implied that Ford had paid these taxes when he really hadn’t.

Update: A spokesman for Ford telephoned FCP today (Tuesday) to dispute the notion that the former Congressman had ever tried to avoid paying New York State income taxes.
Earlier this year, Congressman Ford told reporters in Buffalo, and his spokeswoman told John Cook of Gawker, that Ford would file a New York State Income Tax Return for the first time in April,  2010, although he began working for Merrill Lynch in New York City in 2007.

    The spokeswoman then contacted Cook again to say that Ford would actually file his first New York State resident tax return in 2010.

    Ford spokesman David Goldin told FCP today that Ford had filed a non-resident New York State tax return for 2007 and 2008.   You can only file as a non-resident if you can prove that you spent at least 182 days outside New York State.  So although Ford was working for Merrill Lynch in New York, he apparently was careful to stay out of the state for more than half the year, to limit his New York tax liability.

Winner: Environmental reporter Margot Roosevelt of The Los Angeles Times for two beautiuflly written and thorougly nuanced stories (here and here) about the continuing destruction of the Amazon Forest–and the chances that developed nations will spend enough quickly enough to end that destruction. The ghastly bottom line:

Slash-and-burn deforestation accounts for about 15% of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions. Despite activists’ efforts, forests have been disappearing at the rate of about 34 million acres a year for the last two decades. Globally, Indonesia and Brazil are the third- and fourth-largest emitters respectively of greenhouse gases, after China and the U.S., because of their breakneck pace of forest destruction.

The stories demonstrate that even though it remains in bankruptcy, The LA Times will sometimes still invest a substantial sum to send a talented correspondent abroad to write about a crucial subject like this one.

Sinners: The editors of the op-ed page of The New York Times for printing, and their contributor, Lara M. Dadkhah, for writing, a fiercely incoherent argument in favor of sharply increasing civilian casualties in Afghanistan–by reversing the very wise directive Gen. Stanley McChrystal issued last July, which stipulated that air strikes (and long-range artillery fire) would only be authorized under “very limited and prescribed conditions.”

Besides the idiocy of the piece, there was the problem of who it was who had actually written it.  Times editors identified the previously unknown Dadkhah as “an intelligence analyst,” while the author herself slipped in the fact that she was “employed by a defense consulting company.”

Oddly, neither Dadkhah nor the Times recognized the obvious journalistic imperative to name that company.

Update: This afternoon, deputy editorial page editor David Shipley provided FCP with this explanation via e-mail:

We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal, work that was part of her Ph.D. dissertation at Georgetown.  Ms. Dadkhah only recently took a job at Booz Allen. We tend not to mention the names of companies – as it can run the risk of seeming self-promotional. I thought it was sufficient to have the author say, as she did high up in the piece, that “While I am employed by a defense consulting company, my research and opinions on air support are my own.” It’s worth underscoring that Ms. Dadkhah’s research regarding close air support came entirely from her doctoral research, and that these are issues she has written about over the the last couple years for Small Wars.

Second Update: The estimable Glenn Greenwald, who was one of the very first people to post about this monstrosity, adds these essential details in response to Shipley’s explanation:

Shipley’s answer strongly suggests that Dadkhah did not submit her Op-Ed unsolicited, but rather, the NYT purposely sought out an Op-Ed to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan (“We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal”).  Why would they do that?  Maybe tomorrow the NYT Editors can actively solicit an Op-Ed urging the use of biological agents and chemical weapons on civilian populations in Yemen.  After that, they can search out someone to advocate medical experiments on detainees in Bagram.  Perhaps the day after, they can host a symposium on the tactical advantages of air bombing hospitals and orphanages as a means of keeping local populations in line…Dadkhah’s employer – Booz Allen – has more overlapping ties with the Pentagon than virtually any other corporation on the planet.  The very idea that Dadkhah’s employment with a company that has its hooks in virtually every aspect of war policy need not have been disclosed, when she’s advocating greater use of air power, is absurd on its face.  And Shipley’s claim that the companies which employ Op-Ed writers are not typically mentioned by the NYT is insultingly false; just today, Newt Gingrich’s short Op-Ed contribution is accompanied by this tagline:  “founder of the Center for Health Transformation, a health-care policy consulting firm.”  Yesterday, the NYT published an Op-Ed from the “former general counsel of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses,”  and throughout the month, the NYT had Op-Ed writers identified as “chairman of Convers Group in Moscow,” “a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004,” and “the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”  Suffice to say, concealing the employer of the Op-Ed writer is not customary policy.

Read the rest of Glenn’s latest post here.

Third Update: My brother David Kaiser, author of the excellent History Unfolding blog, informs me:

The work Dadkhah did in Small Wars Journal consists of exactly one article, makig the same basic arguent at greater lenght.  That article actually takes a considerably more balanced view of the issue. At the end of the article she is described as follows.
   Lara M. Dadkhah is a graduate student in Security Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She has worked as an open source analyst covering biodefense issues in Iran and Afghanistan, and as a data analyst for current coalition information operations in Afghanistan.
 
Winner: CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper, for leading his network’s superb coverage of the Haiti catastrophe.  Whether he was pointing out the critical shortage of medicine, or the absence of any organized system to take care of the newly orphaned, Cooper and the rest of the CNN team set the standard for coverage which was both detailed and empathetic–and thereby earned Cooper the Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award for January.

Winners: Michelle and Barack Obama, for hosting one of the most spectacular musical events in the history of the White House–a Celebration of Music of the Civil Rights Movement.  The evening was pushed up 24 hours because of an impending snow storm, and broadcast nationally by PBS.  Morgan Freeman hosted, and the president offered this eloquent introduction:

The civil rights movement was a movement sustained by music.  It was lifted by spirituals inspired by the Bible.  It was sharpened by protest songs about wrongs that needed righting.  It was broadened by folk artists like a New York-born daughter of immigrants, and a young storyteller from Minnesota, who captured the hardships and hopes of people who were worlds different from them, in ways that only song can do. It was a movement with a soundtrack – diverse strains of music that coalesced when the moment was right.

A brilliant Bob Dylan stole the evening with a haunting The Times They Are A Changin’, accompanied only by piano, bass, and the bard’s own acoustic guitar.  (Dylan refused to tell the concert’s organizers which song he would sing until 20 minutes before his performance; Blowin’ in The Wind was naturally another finalist.)  Dylan was immediately followed by an equally powerful rendition by Smokey Robinson of Dion’s great lament of 1968, Abraham, Martin and John.  Obama thanked Dylan for being “a man who was good enough to take a night off from his never ending tour;” then the president shook the great man’s hand after he sang.

Astonishingly, it was the first time Dylan had ever performed at the White House.

Dylan first recorded The Times They Are A Changin’ in 1963,  four weeks to the day before JFK was assassinated.  On November 13, 1985,  Dylan told me,  it was “definitely a song with a purpose.  I knew exactly what I wanted to say and for whom I wanted to say it to.  I wanted to write a big song in a simple way.”

The evening ended when Obama joined all the other performers (except Dylan, who had exited earlier) in an unbelievably poignant rendition of Lift Every Voice and Sing. Chris Richards of The Washington Post called it the “most stirring concert” ever performed at the White House.

Score 1 for the mainstream media.
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To view the entire broadcast of the concert go here.

To read about and watch the original musical triumph of the Obama administration, provided by Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, go here.