Liberal media convergence?

"Allahpundit" over at Hot Air adds some delicious new ingredients to the stew created by apparent influence of lefty blogs on mainstream news (though in the specific example here, the story was opinion journalism).

AP says it looks like Maureen Dowd borrowed a statement from Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. Be sure to see the update consisting of Dowd's supposed explanation near the end of the post.

This makes twice in the span of four days that a major newspaper’s been caught cribbing material from nutroots blogs, which stands to reason. According to a survey of more than 200 journalists recently conducted at BYU, “despite equal awareness [of lefty and righty blogs], journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.” Contain your surprise.

Talking Points Memo bollixes the Jindal "during Katrina" thing

The leftward hemiblogosphere is suffering something of a domino effect of disinformation regarding a factoid in Bobby Jindal's rebuttal to President Obama's ~SOTU speech.

Talking Points Memo was instrumental in signaling the downfall of the sky. I'll show how they went awry.

The relevant portion of Jindal's speech:

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office, I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: "Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!" I asked him: "Sheriff, what's got you so mad?" He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go, when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn't go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, "Sheriff, that's ridiculous." And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: "Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!" Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and go start rescuing people.
(CNN.com)

The folks at TPM think that Jindal may well have been dishonest with the above.

(T)here are several pieces of evidence that suggest this just didn't happen. Nothing, to be sure, that definitively proves the story was made up. But more than enough to declare it highly suspicious.

On with the evidence.

First, Jindal's story has Lee railing against the red-tape in the midst of the crisis. But Lee, the sheriff of Jefferson Parish in suburban New Orleans, told CNN he didn't find out about the license and registration issue until about seven days after the incident.

Good point, but we don't know whether the problem is the timing or the inclusion of the detail about license and registration. Not based on this evidence, anyway.

The rest of the case is farmed out to "Daily Kos diarist xgz" and paraphrased by Zachary Roth of TMP Muckraker.

According to numerous reports, Harry Lee did not leave the affected area of New Orleans during the crisis. But there is no reported evidence of Jindal having set foot in the area during the period when people were still stranded on roofs -- which, based on a review of news stories from the time, was only until September 3 at the very latest. Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests he did not...

The supposed evidence consists of the fact that Jindal was out of the country when Katrina hit, plus the author's inability to find evidence that Jindal was on the ground in or near New Orleans during Katrina's immediate aftermath. The appeal to silence does not make for a strong suggestion unless the evidence is exhaustive. This author doesn't give us that. He lists only a search of Lexis Nexis as the basis for his findings. As though newspapers and magazines compile a satisfactory historical record.

One might end up overlooking something like this:

Jindal surveyed the room for a few minutes. Then he saw Blanco and the others pause to look at a television in the corner—it was footage from another press conference they’d had the previous day, broadcasting on CNN. The politicians all stood around, watching themselves on the screen.

Jindal turned to his chief of staff, and said, “Let’s go.”

They climbed into a Ford Excursion and took off looking for what they could do to help. They started with Harry Lee, the infamous Sheriff of Jefferson Parish.
(Ben Domenech, posted at Red State in 2007)

So far I've only found reports of a press conference involving the major players for Tuesday, Aug. 30. TPM mentions that as one of two Katrina press conferences on its Katrina time line page. If it is the same press conference, then that places Jindal with Sheriff Lee near New Orleans on Wednesday, Aug 31, two days following the storm. And that time line seems to agree closely with what Sheriff Lee reported in person:

The day after, Bobby was in my office saying "What do you need?" And it wasn't, it wasn't phone calls, he was in my office ...

Lee's account doesn't match perfectly, of course. His account seems to imply that Jindal was in his office on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. I think it's most likely he misspoke, perhaps because of a faulty history in his own mind.

Back to TPM:

Schedule issues aside, it's also noticeable that Jindal has talked or written several times before about the problems of excessive red tape during Katrina, but has never told this story.

Apparently he has:


By the measure many left wing bloggers (along with Keith Olbermann) have used to judge Jindal, that makes TPM liars.

TPM goes on to add another dust mote to the weight of evidence by citing another opportunity that Jindal missed in recounting the boat anecdote.

Then comes the summary:

As we said, none of this settles the question definitively. But it certainly raises a whole lot of questions about Jindal's tale. Those questions were enough for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, in a short segment last night on the controversy, to conclude that the story is "apparently not true."

And here's a realistic summary: It is normal for accounts of the same events to differ in detail, even to the point of discrepancy. Jindal may have supplied the detail about the reason FEMA discouraged the boat flotilla based on subsequent knowledge. Lee may have been wrong about the specific day that Jindal reached his office, depending on what he counted as "the day after." The gist of the story, that federal government beaurocracy (among other things) hindered getting aid to New Orleans, remains intact. The supposition that Jindal aggrandized himself by making it appear that Lee had not already sent the boats in prior to their meeting seems like nitpicking, given Jindal's aforementioned message.

TPM thinks this should cause more outrage on the right? Puh-lease. TPM's coverage of this non-story is the greater outrage, hands down.

Lefty lies about lying

I signed major ethics reforms, and I appointed both Democrats and independents to serve in my administration. And I've championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress thanks, but no thanks, on that "bridge to nowhere." If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we'd build it ourselves.(Transcript of Sarah Palin's speech to Republican National Convention, via NPR, bold emphasis added)

Some in the news media and many on the left have rushed to assert that Sarah Palin's account above is a lie. A blogger at "Comments From Left Field" even asserts that conservatives have no answer to the charge.

What is the truth of the matter? Let's start with a news report given the headline "'Bridge to nowhere' abandoned":

Gov. Sarah Palin said Friday the project was $329 million short of full funding.
"We will continue to look for options for Ketchikan to allow better access to the island," the Republican governor said. "The concentration is not going to be on a $400 million bridge."
Palin directed state transportation officials to find the most "fiscally responsible" alternative for access to the airport. She said the best option would be to upgrade the ferry system.
(CNN)

And how do progressives perceive this as a lie? "Comments From Left Field" deferred to Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, so there we go:

Sometimes when you've got a liar as big as Sarah Palin on the line only a timeline will really do justice to her fibbing ways.

That takes care of the initial assertion phase.

Actually, Congress put the kibosh on the Bridge to Nowhere back in November 2005. Since Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) was then head of the Senate Appropriations Committee he was able to force a compromise in which the earmark for the bridge was killed but Alaska got to hold on to the money -- some $442 million of federal tax dollars.

This far into the justification of his accusation, Marshall is already talking out of both sides of his mouth. In the space of one paragraph he claims that "Congress put the kibosh on the Bridge to nowhere" and also that Alaska got to hold on to the money. Marshall conveniently neglects to mention that Alaska could have used that money for the bridge. In other words, the specific project did not disappear. Just the congressional strings on the funding. Follow the link Marshall provides at "put the kibosh" and you get the following:

The change will not save the federal government any money. Instead, the $442 million will be turned over to the state with no strings attached, allowing lawmakers and the governor there to parcel it out for transportation projects as they see fit, including the bridges should they so choose.

Perhaps Marshall will one day explain how that means that Congress put the kibosh on the bridge, rather than just kibosh on the congressionally attached strings.

Back to Marshall's timeline:

Fast forward to November 2006. That's when Sarah Palin was running as a staunch supporter of the Bridge to Nowhere -- that is, after the feds had themselves already said 'No Thanks.'

Marshall's "staunch supporter of the Bridge to Nowhere" claim finds little support via the link he provides. As a gubernatorial candidate, Palin expressed general support for infrastructure projects including the Gravina Island bridge. However, that really has nothing to do with whether or not Palin ultimately said "No thanks" regarding the bridge earmark. As previously noted, Marshall engages in excess when he claims that "the feds had themselves already said 'No Thanks.'" The federal action left use of the federal money for construction of the Gravina bridge project up to Alaska's government.

More timeline:

In 2006, the Democrats took over both houses of Congress. So by the time Palin got into office it was clear that not only was the first Bridge earmark killed but that Congress was not going to be ponying up any more money.

Marshall hit with a bit of a knee-slapper, there. Apparently Democratic control of both houses of Congress is the death-knell for earmarks even though Marshall could have checked the record to see that the Democrat-controlled Congress has essentially done nothing to curb the use of earmarks. Thus we get a repeat of his false (implied) claim that the bridge project was terminated by Congress.

That meant that Alaska was going to have to pick up the tab all on its own.

Uh, no, Josh. That meant that any funds in addition to the federal funds already received, such as the $442 million originally earmarked for the bridge, would have to come from the state or other sources.

So since she couldn't pay for it with the federal pork barrel, in September 2007, Palin officially halted the project which was then a state project since Congress had said 'Thanks. But no thanks' two years earlier.

I doubt that the "state project" distinction hold up, here. Even a project stemming from a specific federal earmark would remain a state project. The state effects the project whether via federal funds or otherwise, and from Marshall's own reporting Alaska still had the funds that were originally specifically earmarked for the bridge, to appropriate as they pleased including to pay for the Gravina Island bridge.

She couldn't say 'No Thanks' because Congress had already said 'Forget It'.
Still with me?

No, sorry. The Marshall timeline steers into the weeds of illogic unless it's no more than its own lie. Marshall sums up by suggesting that Palin lied because the state kept the earmark money. Rather amazing considering despite that federal money the state would have had to pay for the bridge "all by itself" in Marshall's words.

What we have here is a progressive who has spun himself to the point of dizziness while the denizens of the Fever Swamp clap in appreciation of the feat.

Then, today Josh Marshall posts a brief and excellent timeline destroying any possible defense of Palin’s Lie
(Comments From Left Field)

Right. Sure. No possible defense.

Bless their little hearts.

Bottom line, Palin did support Alaska's use of federal funds for infrastructure and had a more welcoming attitude toward earmarks in the past than the one she exhibits today. Call that a flip-flop if you want. But Palin killed the bridge to nowhere, so her statement to that effect is not reasonably called a lie. I've run across at least one progressive who tries to remedy that problem by saying that Palin claims that she always opposed the "Bridge To Nowhere." Good luck with that.



Clarification 5/3/2012:  Tried to clarify last sentence of fifth-to-last paragraph.