Jay Rosen Pieces Together Rove/Plame

Jay Rosen:

Lying to the press—though a serious thing—is what all administrations do. In Washington leaking to damage people’s credibility or wreck their arguments is routine, a bi-partisan game with thousands of knowing participants. I rarely see it mentioned that Joseph Wilson (who is no truthtelling hero) began his crusade by trying to leak his criticisms of the Bush White House. When that didn’t work he went public in an op-ed piece for the New York Times.

But business as usual is not going to explain what happened in the Valerie Plame case, or tell us why its revelations matter. For that we need to enlarge the frame.

My bigger picture starts with George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Andrew Card, Dan Bartlett, John Ashcroft plus a handful of other strategists and team players in the Bush White House, who have set a new course in press relations. (And Scott McClellan knows his job is to stay on that course, no matter what.) The Bush team’s methods are unlike the handling of the news media under prior presidents because their premises are so different.

Butman & Petersen Question SBC’s AT&T Acquisition

TDS Metro’s Jim Butman and Drew Petersen raise many useful questions regarding the proposed SBC/AT&T merger:

The proposed purchase of AT&T by SBC has the potential to demonstrably alter the way a majority of our state’s commercial and residential telecommunications customers conduct their daily affairs. For most urban U.S. consumers today, especially residential and small business patrons, the communications market is rapidly deteriorating into a duopoly dominated by the Bells and cable operators. Wisconsin, however, due to a fledging economy and classic entrepreneurial spirit, is fortunate to have some very credible competitive alternative providers operating in the state’s more urban markets like Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Waukesha, Janesville, Kenosha and Racine.
Competition in the telecommunications industry has done wonders for consumers and businesses across Wisconsin, resulting in small business savings of roughly 30 percent annually. Competitors have led the way in accelerating the deployment of world-class technology such as high-speed Internet and the provisioning of outstanding services at value-based pricing. Competition benefits anyone that has selected an alternative provider and even those who have not.

(more…)

Ethanol: More Trouble Than It’s Worth?

Mark Johnson:

Farmers, businesses and state officials are investing millions of dollars in ethanol and biofuel plants as renewable energy sources, but a new study says the alternative fuels burn more energy than they produce.
Supporters of ethanol and other biofuels contend they burn cleaner than fossil fuels, reduce U.S. dependence on oil and give farmers another market to sell their produce.
But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern North America United States, it takes 45 percent more energy and for wood, 57 percent.

Slashdot discussion