When you watch Barack Obama give a speech or meet with voters, it’s easy to believe that the political process comes naturally to him. He is poised, conversational, on message – the kind of candidate a campaign strategist could only dream of.

Yet those who know the president more personally have often painted a more nuanced picture of Obama – sometimes distant, even sulky, and candid about his distaste for the frivolity of modern politics. It’s a side of Obama that former campaign manager David Plouffe sheds some more light on in The Audacity to Win, his insider account of the 2008 campaign. Read More

Biomass fuels – defined as fuels made from plant life – have long been a focal point of the green energy movement. In the United States, the spotlight has largely been on corn-based ethanol, which accounts for 140 billion gallons of the gasoline used domestically each year.

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Obama Close to a Decision on Afghanistan

“I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we’re doing, how we’re going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost.”

- President Obama said Wednesday he was “very close to a decision” on a troop increase for the war in Afghanistan and would make his case to the American people for his Afghan strategy in the next “several weeks.” (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich

Obama Admits Guantanamo Won’t Close by January

“We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year. I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress.”

- President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time today that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility will not close by the January deadline he set. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer

Visit to China Yields Few Concrete Results

“I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues. What is important is to respect and accommodate each other’s core interests and major concerns.”

- Chinese premier Hu Jintao, speaking at a press conference after a candid three-hour discussion with President Obama in Beijing. (Financial Times)

* Related Title: The Inheritance: The World Obama Inherits and the Challenges to American Power by David E. Sanger

Sarah Palin’s book hit the shelves just hours ago, yet unless you’ve been in the Alaskan wilderness hunting elk these past seven days, you can be forgiven if you’re already feeling some Palin fatigue. Going Rogue, Palin’s already bestselling political memoir, is dominating our media circus, even as the dollar sinks to new lows, health care reform faces a battle in the Senate, and President Obama literally has his “going to China” moment.

Some level of coverage is legitimate; Palin is a major political player, after all, and clearly a large chunk of the public is interested in what she has to say. But media organizations, if they’re doing their jobs, will point out that Going Rogue is riddled from cover to cover with falsehoods, errors, and willful distortions. Some have. Most have simply provided a platform that lends credibility to her claims and ideas–and those of the millions of Americans who will believe her lies no matter how often they are debunked.

For all that she complains about the media’s double standards, Palin is a direct beneficiary of the false “balance” that has deformed American political debate. And with the publication of Going Rogue she benefits for good measure from the notion, as widespread as it is wrong, that if a claim or an idea is contained between the two covers of a book, there must be something to it.

It’s to debunk that notion, and to pick up some of the slack from the mainstream media, that Progressive Book Club is taking part in a new partnership, launched today, with Media Matters for America: Right Wing Book Watch. Each month, Right Wing Book Watch will feature a thorough fact check of a prominent conservative book, and rebuttals by leading progressive thinkers, authors, and experts.

Right Wing Book Watch debuts with — you guessed it — Going Rogue by Sarah Palin. Visit the project’s home page here, where you’ll find the exhaustively documented list of the book’s distortions. Below, Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, supplies the definitive review below, drawing heavily on that research.

Palin Goes Rogue on the Facts

By Max Blumenthal

In August 2008, when then-senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the media had held her under a “sharper microscope” because she was a woman, Sarah Palin rose to condemn her, accusing Clinton of a “perceived whine” that would harm other female political candidates. “I mean, work harder, prove yourself to an even greater degree that you’re capable, that you’re going to be the best candidate,” Palin instructed Clinton.

Almost a year later, Palin quit her job as Governor of Alaska without any advance warning, blaming her snap decision on “Washington and the media,” along with a nebulous band of political operatives who had filed “all sorts of frivolous ethics violations.” She added, with no sense of irony, that media double standards had cast a dark cloud over her career.  “Though it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term,” Palin claimed in a July press conference, “of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.”

By the following month, Palin had revealed the nature of her “higher calling:” a multi-million dollar book deal and a bus tour of midsize cities throughout “Real America.” Palin’s book, “Going Rogue: An American Story,” is an autobiographical account of her political life that culminates with a revisionist history of the 2008 campaign. According to Palin, her most embarrassing moments on the campaign trail, from her disastrous interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric to her expensive shopping sprees, were really the fault of her running mate, Senator John McCain, his staffers, and her favorite whipping post, the national press corps. Having filled her book with complaints about all the people who lifted her from obscurity and brought her into the national spotlight, Palin nonetheless writes, “I don’t like to hear people complain.”

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Progressive Book Club is proud to announce the launch of a new partnership with Media Matters for America: Right Wing Book Watch.  Each month, Right Wing Book Watch will feature a thorough fact check of a prominent conservative book,  and rebuttals by leading progressive thinkers, authors, and experts.

The first book in our sites is Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.

Get the real facts about Palin’s revisionist history of her personal and political life at Right Wing Book Watch.  More details on the official launch below:

Right-Wing Book Watch: Palin Goes Rogue with the Facts

Progressive Book Club and Media Matters Launch New Project to Separate Fact from Fiction

Log onto RightWingBookWatch.com for more information.

Today Progressive Book Club and Media Matters for America announces the launch of Right-Wing Book Watch RightWingBookWatch.com – a new joint project that will monitor the release of conservative books and provide detailed fact checks, research and thematic rebuttals from progressive experts.

First in the project’s sights is former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s memoir Going Rogue: An American Life, which hits bookshelves across the country today.

Despite enormous advances in technology, books continue to serve as the primary means to legitimize political and policy ideas. Under the guise of “non-fiction,” conservatives use books to force misinformation into the media and the public discourse.

These books can be devastating to good policy and decent political discourse – as illustrated by such notorious examples as The Bell Curve, which misused data to resuscitate racialist ideas about intelligence, and Unfit for Command, the “Swift Boat” fraud that smeared Senator John Kerry.

All too often these kinds of works, riddled with fictitious claims supported by sloppy research, go unchecked. Or their falsehoods are broadcast without contradiction until it is too late. The same could have been true of Palin’s new memoir – until now.

Since obtaining a copy of Going Rogue days in advance of its public release, Right-Wing Book Watch has posted and disseminated more than a dozen Fact Checks, all of which can be found here, with still more to come including a review of the memoir by Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and author of the recently released book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party.

http://rightwingbookwatch.com/

Palin is just one of the many conservative authors Right-Wing Book Watch will be keeping an eye on in the weeks and months to come. Like so many other conservative authors, Palin has consistently shown a willful disregard for simple facts – even when it comes to her own life story.

Conservative books are the life’s blood of the right-wing media attack machine. For decades the right has used works of supposed ‘non-fiction’ to advance misinformation and outright lies on every issue imaginable” said David Brock, founder and CEO of Media Matters. “This new partnership will bring the progressive movement’s ability to hold conservative authors and the publishing world accountable to a whole new level.”

The right-wing has used books, talk radio, cable television and the internet to disseminate and legitimize their ideas with no regard for the truth or damage to our country,” said Governor Howard Dean, chairman of The Progressive Book Club. “For too long their misuse of information has gone unchecked and unchallenged.  Progressives now have a powerful tool to use in taking the right head on as we work to repair the damage of conservative rule and move America forward.

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The revered religious scholar Harvey Cox, in his new book The Future of Faith, argues that a transformation is taking place in the nature of religiousness–a shift away from an understanding that emphasizes belief and toward one defined by faith. Cox acknowledges that for many people “faith” and “belief” are the same thing. “But they are not the same thing,” he writes, “and in order to grasp the magnitude of the religious upheaval now under way, it is important to clarify the difference.

Accordingly, Cox writes:

Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. It is what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern,” a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the “heart.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty…. Beliefs can be held lightly or with emotional intensity. We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital to the way we live.

To illustrate this distinction, Cox cites a short story by the Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1864-1963). A young man returns to the city to his native village where his mother lays dying. The mother clutches his hand, in the presence of the local priest, and asks him to pray for her. The son does not answer. As he leaves the room he tells the priest that he’d like to pray for his mother but can’t because he doesn’t believe in God. The priest’s response: “That’s nonsense. You don’t have to believe in God to pray.”

Cox: “The priest…recognized the distinction between faith and belief. He knew that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief.” Later he writes that quarrels about beliefs “can never be finally settled. But faith [...] is more closely related to awe, love, and wonder.”

In 1999, just a year after Google was founded, twelve of the company’s earliest employees locked themselves in a break room and spent eight hours coming up with a three-word company motto: “Don’t be evil.”

For Google’s founders, this wasn’t just a cute slogan. It was to serve as a reminder for a quickly growing company with idealistic roots that no matter how high its ambitions or how great its success, it was to be a force for good.

A decade later, Google has exploded from a well-designed search engine into a media-technology hegemon, with leading products in advertising, e-mail, online video, cloud-computing, news dissemination and even publishing. The company’s triumphant rise is traced by Ken Auletta in Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

Not surprisingly, Google’s growth has invited a more skeptical look at its intentions, particularly regarding the incredible amount of data it collects from its users. Every time a person performs a Google search, sends something through Gmail or looks up directions on Google Maps, the activity is recorded and used to guide future search results and advertising directed toward that user. It is the technology behind Google’s AdSense, which now accounts for half of its revenue. Read More

Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker columnist and the author of ¡OBÁMANOS!, talks to PBC about Barack Obama’s memoirs, “Dreams From My Father”. Hertzberg argues that the qualities that Obama (the author) displayed then were the initial signs of “a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe.”

For many Americans of a certain sensibility, there was no more frightening prospect in 2008 than that of Sarah Palin coming within a heartbeat of the presidency.

As much as Barack Obama promised to change the status quo, Palin – who has thrust herself back in the spotlight with the release of her new book tomorrow, Going Rogue – represented a continuation of Bush-era fundamentalism.

Yet if Obama himself shared those apprehensions, the public was not going to hear about it. The Alaska governor had obvious vulnerabilities, but as former campaign manager David Plouffe writes in The Audacity to Win, Obama saw an advantage in avoiding direct engagement.

Even as Palin was lighting up the news cycle, Obama advised not attacking her inexperience or fringe viewpoints, even publicly contradicting an early statement released by his campaign. The governor’s personal and family life, he declared, were strictly off limits. Instead, the Obama team was to let the Palin drama evolve on its own and continue to push its message. Plouffe recalls:

“I think we just need to sit back and play our game,” said Obama. “It actually won’t be bad to be off Broadway for a few days. We should just leave her out of the equation. This is a race between John McCain and me. To the extent we talk about Palin, I think it should be about the differences in our selection processes – it illuminates differences in how we’d make decisions in the White House.”

One of the many issues President Obama sought to address on his trip to China this week was the country’s record of Internet censorship, telling an audience of university students in Shanghai:

“I’m a big supporter of non-censorship. I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” (NPR)

China’s censorship laws have posed dilemmas for American companies looking to do business in the region. One notable instance is recounted in Ken Aleutta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

As Google has grown into a global media titan, its idealistic mission (”Don’t be evil” is the company’s motto) has bumped up against colder business realities. A striking example came in the early part of this decade when Google complied with requests from the Chinese government to censor search results.

Google was launched in China in 2002 and quickly began to catch on. In a country notorious for its tight stranglehold on all kinds of media, government officials were unnerved by the breadth of information the search engine could provide. They began banning certain terms and diverting traffic to other more acquiescent search engines. Though Google initially resisted interfering with searches, it became clear the company had a choice to make: tailor their search engine to comply with Chinese censorship laws or have their Chinese operation scuttled entirely. Read More