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I've been writing a lot about the role Fox News and the right wing noise machine played in getting Scott Brown elected in Massachusetts. Margery Eagan, a Boston Herald reporter (who supported Coakley) told Howard Kurtz that right-wing talk radio and sports talk radio demonized Martha Coakley endlessly. This was a big part of her fall after she held a 31-point lead in MA.

CNN's Reliable Sources:

On Boston newspapers’ coverage of the Massachusetts Senate race

EAGAN: Well, she got very good press from "The Boston Globe," not from my paper, "The Boston Herald." But you know something? People don't like -- TV journalists and newspaper journalists do not like to talk about the influence of talk radio. Let me tell you something. There was a nonstop hammering of Martha Coakley on the AM stations here, on the huge sports stations here. She was the evil incarnate and Scott Brown was the next coming. And, you know, the New England Patriots in the playoffs lost early on. It was as if there was this transference from Tom "Terrific" Brady, the quarterback of the Patriots, to Scott "Terrific" Brown. You look at the rallies for Scott Brown, they were very white, they were very suburban, they were Gillette Stadium fans, and there was almost this...

KURTZ: But just briefly, did you mean to say earlier that "The Boston Globe" tilted towards Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, and your paper, "The Boston Herald," tilted towards Scott Brown in the news coverage?

EAGAN: Well, I would say my paper was pretty much cheerleading for Scott Brown. We're the conservative paper in town, and The Globe, I think, was -- they were evenhanded somewhat, but I think that they were definitely cheerleading for Martha Coakley, absolutely. They're the liberal paper in town. That's the way it always is.

I cover the sports media on C&L all the time because I think it's important to show how they act like the Beltway media elite -- they have their own Village. And their political reach is greater than people think, because the sports talkers are uniformly right-wing and they love to bash liberals, just like their "opinion show" counterparts. Locally, AM right wing hate talk radio does play a major role in the GOP propaganda battles and it worked very well for them in Massachusetts.

Eagan names what the media elites will dare not: the actual influence right-wing talkers have in America. Good for her.

Still same as the old boss. A fan of the site sends me this Boston Globe article, which discusses how prominent Democratic politicians pushed to get the second F-35 engine into the final DOD Appropriations bill prior to President Obama's signature. You might remember that F-35 second engine as one of those costly gold-plated things that DOD really didn't ask for and that President Obama said he wouldn't stand for. First it was gone.

The Obama administration has signaled for months that funding for a second F-35 engine in the fiscal 2010 defense bill could become veto bait. Gates spent months, most recently at the beginning of September, making the case that the Pentagon does not need the alternative engine, built by a General Electric-Rolls-Royce team.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said
Wednesday that he decided against funding the engine because he was concerned about the floor vote on the entire defense spending bill.

Now it's back.

Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that GE officials had told his office that 1,000 jobs in Massachusetts will be saved or maintained once full production begins on the backup engine.

"There will also be some jobs gained, but maintaining jobs right now is very important,’’ he said yesterday, defending his efforts to persuade fellow lawmakers, including the highly influential Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, to overturn Obama’s proposal in a final vote on Saturday.

Inouye chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, while Murtha oversees a House panel with jurisdiction over defense spending.

Kerry also used his influence with the White House to get it to back off a threatened presidential veto. He told the Globe that he ultimately got assurances from Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, that the president would not veto the fiscal year 2010 defense appropriations bill if the money for the engine was included. Obama signed the bill which totals $626 billion, on Monday.

What utter bullshit. This is just unjustified crap, and it doesn't smell any better coming from a Democratic politician than a Republican. In talking about defense acquisition with a colleague, he said that he might believe in Santa Claus, but he didn't believe in acquisition reform. With clowns like this in the Senate and White House, it's no wonder that the Defense Department can't get clear of its huge funding bills and massively overpriced, behind schedule programs.

The VH-71 presidential helicopter program also got $85 million to "wind down" its efforts. Must be a big office. The USMC's Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is getting $293.5 million, despite its many troubles. I'm severely disappointed.

The writer of this Boston Globe op-ed, who works for a liberal think tank, pulls apart the Baucus bill and doesn't like what she finds. Hey, Kent Conrad likes it - that should have been her first clue:

It’s no surprise that his bill includes no public sector insurance plan. Instead, the only competition that giant insurers face will come from tiny co-operatives - and even then, to qualify for federal funding, they must be fledglings. Established co-ops will not qualify for help. Thus, private insurers can count on controlling the marketplace as millions of new customers who don’t have job-based coverage are required by law to come their way, tax subsidies in hand.

But what is shocking is that under the Baucus plan, a 50-year-old single parent could wind up paying far more for health insurance than a 28-year-old single adult who earns twice her salary. The Baucus bill won’t let insurers hike premiums because a customer suffers from a pre-existing condition. But it lets insurers charge older Americas five times as much as younger customers.

"Shocking"? Only if you haven't been paying attention.

In a July letter to House leaders, the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans called for the 5 to 1 ratio, saying anything less than that would force many young people to pay more to “heavily subsidize the naturally higher health care costs of older individuals.’’ House Democrats refused. The House bill, like Massachusetts, says that insurers can charge older adults no more than twice what they bill younger ones.

If the point of insurance is to pool risk and reduce costs, having young people subsidize the higher costs of older people makes sense. But never let it be said that the insurance industry will pass up a chance to rationalize jacking up somebody's rates!

The Baucus legislation also imposes a penalty on single-parenthood. If you live alone with one child, you will be asked to shell out 80 percent more than a childless adult.

Of course it makes sense that coverage for a mother and child would cost more than the premium for a single person. But since children typically use much less health care than adults, 80 percent is a steep surcharge for single-parenthood - especially since a couple with children would pay only 50 percent more than a childless couple.

The Baucus bill also punishes smokers, adding 50 percent to their premiums. No doubt many would argue that this is only fair. But the vast majority of adults who smoke are poor. Many will qualify for full subsidies; others will be eligible for partial subsidies to help them pay for their premiums.

So who will pay 50 percent more for their health care? You, the taxpayer. If the smoker receives a subsidy, the 50 percent surcharge isn’t likely to induce him to stop. This rule seems designed primarily to funnel more taxpayer dollars to private sector insurers.

Single parents also tend to cling to the lower rungs of the income ladder. Many will qualify for at least a partial, if not a full subsidy. Who lays out the extra 80 percent? That’s right - you and I.

Finally, if under the Baucus bill, insurers can charge middle-income 50-somethings five times as much as even the most affluent 20-somethings, a great many of those older customers are going to need fat subsidies, sending more tax dollars to Aetna.

Do we see a pattern, class? Of course we do! The purpose of the Baucus bill is to make insurance companies happy. That's why it has to be fixed, and that's why you should be calling your congressperson this week.

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I'll start by saying that I really do like David Shuster, I don't like the way the network chases after celebrity stories like Michael Jackson's death when there are more serious topics being ignored, but I've got no quibbles with the bulk of his reporting on MSNBC.

I can't say that about his interview with Charles Pierce while filling in on Countdown for Keith Olbermann. I think David pulled the equivalent of why we never see the likes of Pat Buchanan or Joe Scarborough on Keith's Worst Person list for the night, as they would be regularly if they worked for Fox News and were saying the exact same things they did on MSNBC. He circled the wagons around his network and took offense to someone who was rightfully criticizing them, and didn't do his job.

Shuster attempts to focus the segment on Liz Cheney promoting the birthers craziness, and ends up finding his network being criticized by Pierce for how they treated Bill Clinton instead. Pierce went after our "main stream media" hard for their journalistic malpractice.

Pierce: Well, it's funny because I was listening to Chuck Todd on Hardball earlier tonight and when Chris asked him about how, you know this thing gets airborned he immediately jumped in and said the Internet. Well, it wasn't the Internet in 1992 that invented White Water that brought us all the way down the rabbit hole. It was the New York Times. It wasn't the Internet in 1999 that put Kathleen Willey on TV to slander somebody and put Jennifer Flowers on TV to talk about the Clinton body count. It was Chris Matthews and CNBC. It wasn't the Internet that were involved with the prolonged act of journalistic malpractice that was the coverage of the Al Gore in 2000. It was the main stream media.

Why wouldn't these people think this would work again?

Pierce is exactly right that there has been little or no political price to pay for the GOP to float the nudge, nudge, wink, wink lines of attack on anyone they think they can get away with it on. He's also right that Shuster should not be allowed to defend bringing on the likes of Liz Cheney on Morning Joe to spew her bile for a better part of that three hour show, and just because Countdown or Shuster's couple of hours on MSNBC criticizes her, that gives the network a pass for his cohorts' behavior and giving her a big, unrebutted megaphone during the morning. It doesn't.