Update: LA Times Bloggers told not to discuss

Criminal Complaint filed by reports against hotel security.

FOX News reports that a security guard working the night a National Enquirer reporter claims he confronted Senator John Edwards while he was visiting an alleged mistress has confirmed reports of the confrontation.

The guard said he escorted Edwards, who was not a registered guest at the hotel, out of the building after 2 a.m. Edwards did not say anything while he was escorted out, said the guard, adding that at times the reporters on the scene were “rough on him,” sticking a camera in his face and shouting questions.
The guard did not recognize Edwards at the time of the incident, but said he concluded it was the 2008 presidential hopeful after hearing reports about the incident and finding an Enquirer reporter’s notebook at the scene.

FOX also reports the following quote from an Edwards campaign worker speaking on condition of anonymity saying, “I’m definitely upset by it. I wish I was more surprised, though.”

“The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign,” Gibbs said.

Senator Obama skipped a meeting with wounded troops in Germany saying it would be “inappropriate” to do so during the campaign portion of the trip “out of respect” for the troops. In response:

John McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, “Barack Obama is wrong. It is never inappropriate to visit our men and women in the military.”

McCain’s Senate colleague Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., also took a shot at Obama.

“I noticed that Obama had plenty of time to shoot hoops … but he didn’t have the time to stop by (the Ramstein base),” he told FOX News.

How would it be any more inappropriate than meeting with government leaders while openly bashing the current administrations foreign policy and hinting that they would be better off working with him than the sitting President of the United States?

Not long ago Mike Barnacle declared on MSNBC that the Presidential race was over and that Barack Obama had all but shored things up. It was in that moment I realized just how lopsided the reporting on this presidential event had become. I won’t cite the numerous polls showing a closing race, as I said not long ago polls are not to be believed this far away, I will simply cite the history of previous elections and their main stream media coverage in saying that something may just be missing in our current understanding of this race.

Think back, if you will, to the last two elections. I think often about that night in November of 04 when the networks had all but called the race for John Kerry based on their exit polls. Though sworn to secrecy they broadcast the message loud and clear, Kerry had it, their numbers couldn’t lie. Pollster John Zogby had declared on The Daily Show just hours before that Kerry would be the winner and a somber mood was reported in the White House. Yet with three million more votes cast and 286 electoral votes the mood quickly changed on television and in the administration.

For weeks the media needed to explain their miscalculation any way they could. Their final answer was something that still strikes me a little odd. The official vision of that election was that Karl Rove had masterfully and quietly persuaded 3 million Evangelical voters to turn out by tearing up the country over social issues. “Yes,” the media declared “that must be it! Everyone else hated Bush, was ready for a change, saw the light of John Kerry, except homophobic evangelicals hell bent on banning gay marriage.” The Democrats and their very liberal media counterparts felt thwarted again, still saw voter fraud in Ohio, still had Florida 2000 in their heads and couldn’t accept that a great deal of this nation might just be living and breathing a more conservative air.

Just as Pat Buchanan had famously calculated on a silent majority in the Vietnam era, an election that saw the rise of Richard Nixon, so too may the media be missing another silent majority, those who seek change from the status quo but aren’t ready to change themselves.

We all know where we are right now. The nation is ready to move on from President Bush, the individual, the commander in chief who doesn’t always seem to be the chief. But is the nation ready for the kind of change that Huffington Post and DailyKos can provide? Maybe I am biased, as I live in a world that is one half college professors and one half rural right wing. Upstate New York is happily not New York city, much of this space looks more like Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri than it does Manhattan or San Francisco. When I hear “blue state” I think about all the counties that are not at the very Eastern tip of New York State and I have to laugh.

Yes we have our pockets full of lefties but the majority of those you will meet around these parts are anything but. Even those who call themselves Democrats are often blue collar working class people who cherish the second amendment, the church and the flag, who lament the loss of their jobs but hate government intervention and don’t worship at the alter of Noam Chomsky or George Cloony.

While the MSM sees slight appeal to the center as a movement by Obama away from the far left, much of what he said this week in Europe, especially his final speech in Germany, is as far away from Middle America as the ground is in Berlin. You can almost feel a sea change in the air, as right talk radio puts aside their grudge with McCain in favor of a policy directed at winning the war in Iraq, lowering taxes and seeking some small reduction in the size of government. There was plenty said this week by Obama on foreign soil that can be used for months in attack ads, expect that they are on the way.

Conservative apathy and outrage over Bush does not come from the President’s embrace of policies that are too far to the right, but instead too far to the left. While John McCain may not be a beacon of their hopes and dreams for government, Barack Obama is still a distant star in a far away galaxy for them. The more they learn, the less they like and you can start to feel something that doesn’t come across on MSNBC. America is coming to grips with itself, looking to find what it wants to be and I am having a hard time seeing how Pennsylvania, Missouri, Virginia, Florida, Ohio and a long list of other states are going to decide their future is in the 1960’s liberal philosophy of the past.

The media is presenting this race as a landslide and yet it isn’t even August. We haven’t had a single debate between the two candidates, we haven’t had a convention and the television advertising has just begun. The 527 groups are still writing their attacks and for the last week the Democratic candidate hasn’t even been in the country. So how can it really be decided?

Yes, the Obama team may have a winning strategy of hanging the failures of Bush around the neck of McCain. They MAY but we are a long way from finding out. I have a hunch that actually does come from a line of logic and historic precident and is starting to be proved by the polls and some of the backlash I am hearing. The more the media turns this into a one person race, the more working America is turning away.

I could be wrong, but I believe strongly this election is actually split. While the media is focusing on a 70-20 race, the country is still locked in the 50-50 divide of the last two cycles. My big evidence to prove my point is this. The media has come together around a pack mentality, a singular vision of the world they are presenting each and every night. Time and again, whenever this happens, we find out the opposite to be true. When everyone is writing the same story it is almost never evidence of truth but evidence that we don’t know what the real story is. The media has failed this nation so many times in just the last few years, I have a hard time believing that now will be any different, just because an Obama campaign slogan says so.

There are two people running in this race, the media and the Democrats and to a degree the Republicans just don’t know it yet. If I had to guess, we will all see it sometime in late October and on election night. While some see a Nixon or Reagan landslide ahead, I see a map very close to 2000 and 2004. Time will tell if I am right

So apparently all the speculation this week started by Robert Novak that McCain would counter-program Obama’s Europe trip with a VP announcement was just that, speculation. Obviously McCain could at any moment come out with something but considering it is 11:00am on a Friday and nothing has been said, I have to believe it isn’t going to happen.

THURS JULY 24 2008 12:58:02

Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen — a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father — my grandfather — was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning — his dream — required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life.

That is why I’m here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life.

Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this summer, on the day when the first American plane touched down at Templehof.

On that day, much of this continent still lay in ruin.Ê The rubble of this city had yet to be built into a wall. The Soviet shadow had swept across Eastern Europe, while in the West, America, Britain, and France took stock of their losses, and pondered how the world might be remade.

This is where the two sides met.Ê And on the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.

The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin.

Ê And that’s when the airlift began — when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.Ê

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won” The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty and People of the world, look at Berlin!”

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My favorite media trick pulled out during sessions spent blatantly covering a story in a way that a large portion of the population doesn’t like, is to cover it by covering the coverage, here is what I mean. If you’ve tuned into any of the news networks this week you’ve seen Senator Obama on his “groundbreaking” and “historic” trip. Despite little real news the media is going berserk in Obamamania. They decided weeks before the visit would be historic before anything happened, now with massive resources devoted to the event, they have to deliver and are getting endlessly attacked from the right for their coverage. The solution?

After the coverage they continue the focus on Obama by covering the coverage, asking the question “is there too much coverage? Are we biased?” The beauty of this is that they use these quick segments to justify the previous unnecessary coverage and to give the impression that they might not be overplaying their hand but are actually concerned about viewers.

Asking the question almost always leads nowhere. Most of these segments pit someone who says it is too much coverage against someone who says it isn’t. They fight for a minute or two, no one agrees on anything, the moderator or anchor asks a few questions, the segment ends and the coverage goes on.

It isn’t just about Obama either. The media often picks up on stories, beats them to death despite a lack of new information or the continuation of events, then looks dumb for clinging for too long before moving onto the next thing. They fills the space between or around these bouts with the aforementioned coverage of the coverage to get even more millage out of something that has no momentum. This election has been filled with these moments, Jeremiah Wright, Clinton crying in New Hampshire, Obama’s win in Iowa being seen as the end of the primary, the endorsement of Teddy Kennedy, Obama Girl and so on and so on.

All followed by endless coverage of the coverage asking “did we go too far, was there too much emphasis, will you still like us tomorrow?”

I can make it all easy, yes it is too much coverage and the coverage of the coverage is too much. If Obama brokers a Middle East peace deal while he is on the media tour, great that’s news, if he is just taking a bunch of photo ops and spitting out the same policies he had before the trip, it probably shouldn’t be your lead. History really hasn’t been made on this trip so far and it doesn’t look like it is going to be. Time to calm down!

Novak says McCain VP pick coming this week. Real or just normal Novak noise?

I first began thinking about largely ignoring the Obama trip overseas when the Senator decided to announce his plan for Iraq and Afghanistan before leaving. Heading to the Middle East under the guise of a “fact finding mission” it was clear the Senator wasn’t really out to find anything in those nations other than anything to reinforce his world view. As I watched Obama state his objectives I wondered, “how can you announce your strategy JUST BEFORE you see the battleground? Without listening to the generals and the troops on the ground? Isn’t this the same charge given by Democrats against Bush for so many years?”

As Obama landed in Afghanistan only to announce, after his short stay, that the nation needed more troops, the media began its onslaught of hype and I began tuning out. With no clear reflection on how he would secure those NATO forces to maintain the operation in Afghanistan, he simply echoed statements made by Bush and McCain many moons before and gave little in the way of insight or innovation. Still the press swooned.

There is little that is actually newsworthy about Obama’s visit to the Middle East or Europe. All we have is a media moment, finely crafted by a campaign that holds the media so effortlessly in its tight grasp. So far there is little in the news of policy, little insight, little more than tightly controlled press events that are nice theater but have little substance. There is nothing that addresses the reality on the ground in either battlefield and nothing that addresses our problems here at home.

Instead we are treated to the media swooning over a candidate who has purposely done everything he can do to foster the images of Kennedy and Reagan, to tee up the imagery for the press so they can write hyperbole while filling in the miles of blanks that separate history from hype.

I don’t mean to disparage Obama personally. It is the job of a campaign to manipulate the press, to control the image and do everything it can to push its point of view. It is not, however, the job of the media to give in and simply sit back to broadcast the show. It is the job of the fourth estate to ask questions, to demand more of politicians than a few staged shows. It was clear weeks ago that wasn’t going to happen on this trip. Instead we would just get the pretty pictures, the cute stories and the campaign credo.

If and when news breaks on this trip, I will note it here. Increasingly though I have come to the conclusion that it is not the job of this site or any of the media to simply tow the line of either party or campaign or to just sit back and report on the bickering, the soundbytes and the fake outrage. It didn’t work for this nation in getting us into Iraq and it won’t work for us in winning the War. We need to do better, to think harder and to tear down the nice imagery in order to get to the gritty truth.

So, maybe we should get started on that…

Is it just me or is firefox REALLY buggy in Leopard?

When will The Times realize decisions like this only help cons w/the public?