The week begins with a Romney campaign finance brag:
Today, Romney for President, Romney Victory, and the Republican National Committee announced fundraising totals of over $101.3 million in July. The campaign, RNC and state party participants have approximately $185.9 million cash on hand.
Shira Toeplitz reports on how the meltdown of Rep. Thaddeus McCotter might leave his district with a fight between a gadfly and a Larouchie.
At first, Dindoffer would only allow Bentivolio to be interviewed if he could approve his quotes. Roll Call declined, but Bentivolio answered a few short questions anyway. He responded to GOP attacks on his role in a low-budget satire film that suggested President George W. Bush planned the 9/11 attacks.
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“It shows they have a desperate campaign,” Bentivolio said. “They lie, tell half-truths. There’s a difference between reality and fantasy.”
Within minutes, Bentivolio’s aides cut off questioning.
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten find one of those scandals that sounds less explosive as the paragraphs add up.
There were no legal or ethical restrictions on Plouffe being paid to speak to the MTN subsidiary as a private citizen. But for a close Obama aide to have accepted payment from a company involved in Iran could prove troublesome for the president as the White House toughens its stance toward the Islamic republic.
Jay Rosen really really didn’t like a Washington Post item that judged the savviness of a false attack, instead of the falseness.
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These are small clues that a split is beginning to develop within the journalism profession. The savvy is still in charge. It is the worldview of choice in pro journalism; in the political reporting wing it wins maybe 95 to 5. But it has a potentially fatal weakness built in: it brackets questions of truth, suggesting that they have become either quaint (meaning: of interest only to the unsavvy) or irrelevant in making distinctions (because both sides do it.) The more open this attitude becomes among political reporters–and this is what distinguished Blake’s post, its baldness–the more repulsive it feels to their colleagues.
And in news that will send Israelphobes a-titter, the GOP’s wealthiest Jewish donor is apparently using his clout to try and get Mitt Romney behind a Jonathan Pollard pardon.
