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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (59937)	4/18/2008 6:55:02 PM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542535

Josh Marshall makes an interesting observation re the ABC debates: REDUNDANT I was mulling over the ABC debate this morning and the moderators' claim that knocking Obama with a more or less uninterrupted stream of Swift Boat gotchas was justified by focusing the debate on 'electability'. And it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant. Think about it. Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we've gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they're floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates. It's an expansive rationale under which Gibson and Stephanopoulos may have failed their civic responsibility by not pressing the point of whether Obama is a hereditary Muslim or his mother had a predilection for dark-skinned socialists. As I've noted it's pretty nauseating and disillusioning that Sen. Clinton has now also convinced herself that she's providing a service by mounting her own Swift Boat campaign. But she is after all running a campaign. In any case, at this stage it's not even clear the GOP slimesters ever have to come on the field. Journalists recognize their obligation to seek out potential Swift Boat tactics and do the job for them. --Josh Marshall

To: Dale Baker who wrote (59937)	4/18/2008 8:42:14 PM
From: Katelew	Respond to of 542535

Actually I was amused all the way through listening to people clamor for their returns. Implied was that big things would be revealed. As you point out, the information on tax returns is quite limited. I'm assuming they released the entire return, i.e. all the attachments, or we'd still be hearing clamoring. The sources of income, though, were broken out. If memory serves, I think approx. 90% of it came from speeches and book sales. Basically the rest came from his investor relationship with Ron Burkle. Maybe a list of where he made his speeches would have turned up something or at least given rise to more speculation. I considered it a very clean return relatively speaking. Affective tax rate of 31% is high, quite high, for people in their income group. Without the 10% level of gifting off the gross it would have even been higher. It suggested their only major deduction was their charitable gifting. At any rate, I've been amused that their enemies didn't seem to realize that a return isn't that detailed. The total silence though has surprised me. I'd have thought at least a little grumbling and speculation would still be circulating.