It was nice to see The Washington Post’s ombudsman agree with us that the paper’s coverage of the alleged anti-Semitic remarks by Cong. Jim Moran (D-Va.) was unfair.

But the paper’s editors were un repentant.

Metro’s top editor, Jo-Ann Armao, says she is “frankly baffled by the suggestion that The Post should not have reported this story — a longtime aide and political ally to one of the Washington area’s most influential congressmen quits the campaign at a critical point in time and cites as reason his on-the-record allegation that the congressman, already under fire for previous comments deemed inappropriate, made an anti-Semitic remark. The story was thoroughly and diligently reported. We tried many times to get Secrest to say specifically what Moran said to him, telling him that it hurt the credibility of his charge. His refusal was a factor in how we played the story,” Armao said.

“Many readers and voters have said they don’t believe Secrest’s charge. And every reason they cite — that there was a financial dispute between the two, that Secrest is sometimes a hothead who has had breakups with other clients, that there was a dispute about campaign strategy, that Secrest wasn’t specific, that others denied the charge — they know because they read them in our stories. In other words, we reported everything we could and left readers to make the decision about whether to believe Secrest’s allegation.

“Critics seem to be saying,” Armao said, “that we should have decided whether the charge was true before deciding whether to write a story. I do think that we have to judge the credibility of the accuser, and in this case again, it was someone who has been a staunch backer of Moran for two decades, someone who has not been accused of lying, someone who has a national reputation he seemed to be risking.”

“If Secrest had told us the alleged specific comment, and Moran denied saying it, would it have made a difference to those who feel we shouldn’t have written the story?”

Michael Getler, the ombudsman, said Armao’s last point is a good one, but

My own view is that what The Post violated was a fundamental sense of fairness and common sense by airing and repeating this explosive, uncorroborated, unexplained — and denied — charge four days before an election. Because Moran is such an easy target is all the more reason to be careful.

Thanks to Paul Goldman of the Augusta Free Press who wrote a column a few days after our first post, concerned about the coverage. His column, which we forwarded on to The Post, was quoted in the ombudsman’s critique.

No postings today. I’m off to see my daughter’s soccer team win the state semi-finals, and then to see if Barry Bonds can hit one out of the Yards.

I try to have faith in people. I think they’ll vote for the candidate who best serves their ends, and I respect that some think Bush is doing that for them.

But a couple of comments in a Washington Post story about how good economic numbers aren’t helping Bush, there are two quotes that stand out.

Maria Sandoval, an elderly Democrat in Colorado Springs, has had a rough time of it in the past few years, living solely on Social Security and relying on the county clinic for her health care. On the economy, Bush “hasn’t done very good,” she allowed. He could have offered more help, she said, and his prescription drug law does not promise her much, either.

But Bush has her vote, she said firmly. “I guess he hasn’t put too much into [the economy], but he’s busy with a lot of other things. He’s on top of everything. That’s what I like about him.”

He’s on top of everything? Like the guy or not, it’s clear that he’s been scrambling for months trying to get on top of the Iraq thing.And then there is this:

During the Clinton years, Jeremy Tuck said he had been selling mobile homes in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and, at $45,000 a year, making good money. Last year, he was assembling mobile homes, earning $15,000 and living hand-to-mouth. But Bush has his vote this November. Had Gore been elected in 2000, Tuck said, “we would’ve been taken over by Saddam Hussein or [Osama] bin Laden.”

“You make more money in plain terms when Democrats are in office,” Tuck said with a shrug, “but Republicans are stronger on the military, and that’s why I’m voting for President Bush.”

We would have been taken over by Osama bin Laden? He’s making a third of what he did while Clinton was president and he’s happy. I wish everyone were so easy to please.

More revealing was this.

“Americans are a show-me people,” said Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “They need to be shown that things have actually been changed, and I think in an economic recovery, this means seeing the guy down the street getting his job back rather than good jobs numbers.”

… John R. Zaller, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggested that voters … may have considerably sharper antennae than economists.

In the fall of 2000, when most economic indicators continued to surge, anxiety among voters began to take a toll on Democrat Al Gore’s White House bid, Zaller said. That anxiety proved to be prescient: By the spring of 2001, the economy had slipped into recession.

This go-round, jobs are coming back, but Americans may sense that those jobs are not of the same quality as the work that was lost, Newport said. Any good economic news is being tempered by high gasoline prices, and a generally sour mood has made voters skeptical.

Katie, bar the door! That’s what some are saying to the bold move by Katharine Webb, the powerful lobbyist for the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association. Asked by six Republican delegates for donations recently, Webb said a polite no to those who voted against the budget.

Polite yes, but also direct. Usually, requests are either ignored or some innocuous excuse is used to reject them. But breaking with tradition, Webb sent a letter that, according to The Washington Post’s Mike Shear, read in part:

“HOSPAC’s financial support must be contingent on a recognition that it is reasonable for health care providers to be paid for the costs they incur to deliver services to Medicaid patients,” the letter stated. “Your failure to vote for a budget that only provided a modest increase places us in the difficult position of denying your contribution request.”

That’s not the way, it’s usually done.

“It’s a real big look under the tent. It is rare that you see things spelled out with such clarity,” said Bill Allison, a spokesman for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. “A lot of these things are usually inferred. For somebody to put it down in writing is incredibly rare.”

Webb may not be alone. At lunch with education lobbyists last month, I heard the same may be coming from education groups who plan to make an example of the delegates who voted against the budget or tax increases. Others may join the effort.

Brett A. Vassey, president and chief executive of the Virginia Manufacturers Association, said many groups will be making similar decisions about campaign contributions by tallying up the voting records for the session.

“I don’t think Katie’s alone,” he said. “We are adding a greater level of analysis to the voting history of legislators before we give anything. And we are advising our members to do the same. Katie is always pushing the envelope.”

A couple of delegates are pushing back. One is Tim Hugo (R-Fairfax) who complained, “I think this is over the top and beyond belief,” Hugo said. “We are not finished with the budget. I would be worried, Democrat or Republican, about accepting any contributions from the hospital association.” Hugo, you may recall, spent thousands of dollars on auto calls to residents around the state urging them to oppose the tax increases.

Webb said … that Hugo and the other lawmakers were the ones who asked for contributions weeks ago, prompting her letters. She questioned their concern about the ethical implications of receiving her letter before the amendments were voted on. “If that was so important to them, why did they ask for money well before the budget was done?” she asked.

I’ve said this before: The greatest pressure on Republicans in ’05 will not be from the right against those who voted for the tax increases, but from the moderates against those who didn’t. The Club for Growth will try to impose its will, of course. But watch Hugo and others back peddling when they get challenged.

Del. Dave Albo is one who may be vulnerable, not from within his own party but from Democrats. He tried to explain his not vote in a column recently, but may have shot himself in the foot:

The only good news is that McLean’s Delegate Callahan, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, managed to get us a little bit better than our normal 7.4%….we will receive $37.3 million. It was going to be only $10 million.

A little bit? That’s almost four times what Fairfax would have gotten, and he’s complaining. He did the same a couple of years ago when the sales tax referendum for schools was in play. He opposed Del. Jim Dillard’s formula that would have returned 80% of Fairfax’s sales tax dollars to the county instead of the usual 20%. He wasn’t happy because the county didn’t get all of it.

I wonder how many of his residents would rather be living in the areas of Virginia that get all of their sales tax dollars back. Check home listings and schools in say, Wise County. Nothing against Wise, but you get what you pay for, and I’m sure many Wise residents wish they could afford what Fairfax has.

[Ed. Note: Post edited for typos after original posting.]

Cong. Jim Moran (D) won his primary race for the 8th Va. district, no thanks to The Washington Post. Despite its best efforts (which ironically included an editorial that endorsed neither Moran or his opponent), Moran received 59% of the vote.

The Post’s four-day series of stories about alleged but unstated and uncorroborated anti-Semitic remarks was shameful journalism. The articles are here, here, here, here, here and here. They report an unidentified remark characterized as anti-Semitic by a disgruntled vendor, pollster Alan Secrest. Yet, with no evidence (two others in attendance at the meeting where the remark was allegedly made did not hear it), The Post went with the story.

(The Post didn’t mention that Alan Secrest was part of another controversy last year when two of his candidates, both Democrats who lost races for the Virginia General Assembly, conducted a poll he developed. “Muslim-American advocates say [a] question [in the poll] portrays the entire community as sympathizing with terrorists.” )

I have no idea whether Moran is anti-Semitic. But I don’t think you can draw that conclusion from his past remarks that have drawn fire. Unlike Moran, most politicians will steer far away from the Israeli-Palestinian issue unless it’s to say they wholeheartedly support Israel’s right to exist. Add criticism of terrorism and you have as far as many politicians will go.

Even journalists must pause. Rory O’Connor writes a weekly column for AM New York, a free New York tabloid. But a recent column didn’t make it into AM New York. O’Connor had his AMNY column whacked by the publisher who didn’t like O’Connor’s take on recent events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The column explaining what happened asked people to comment, and comment they did. One recurring theme was an issue we must face if we’re to have an open and honest debate about how our world will be shaped. It’s the same discussion The Post’s coverage of Moran’s primary race demands.

Americans support Israeli’s right to exist, although they do so without knowing anything about the roots of the conflict. Those roots go way back, of course, a millennium before the existence of the modern Israeli state. And with any conflict that long, there is no right or wrong party here.

But most public officials are loathed to say that. As the comments on O’Connor’s piece point out, criticism of Israel – and by that I mean the policies of the current Israeli government –is soon translated as anti-Semitism.

As one anonymous commenter put it:

It’s crucial for the debate to focus on the difference between political criticism and anti-semitism. Until that debate begins, any effort to report on Israeli government actions gets conflated with the Jewish religion. The conflation has not occurred accidentally; it is done with a purpose to stop any criticism of Israeli government actions. But, it’s a terrible conflation because while it is used by pro-Israeli critics to deflect any criticism of the Israeli government, it in fact is contributing to increased anti-semitism around the world. Once you buy into the concept that Israel the government is the same thing as the Jewish religion, however, it cuts both ways. That is the dilemma of political zionism. Journalists and law-makers in Congress and the Senate have bought into, or have been forced to acquiese (sic) to, this false dichotomy.

There’s a lot for people to dislike about Jim Moran, chiefly perceived ethical lapses. And his temper gives one pause. But the charges of anti-Semitism are largely trumped up because of his balanced view of the Middle East conflict. That he has been sometimes inarticulate in espousing his views hasn’t helped.

The more important issue is that open and honest debate. We should abhor suicide bombings and the wanton killing of civilians, especially children who know not why they died. But that doesn’t mean we must support the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the wall that Balkanizes the Palestinians or “targeted killings.”

In a political world where the Democrats favored candidate is “Anybody but Bush” and the Republicans demonize anyone who disagrees with them, we tend to look at everything as either/or. It’s not either/or in the Middle East. It’s not terrorism or Israel’s existence. It’s finding a common ground between two entities that have terrorized each other, but where both have legitimate goals and grievances.

That won’t happen until we can get passed the knee-jerk charge of anti-Semitism. For that to happen, I suspect it will start, as most good movements do, with the grassroots. It will start when more American Jews press for a just peace and defend those non-Jews who also do.

And for all this to begin, the press, especially megaphones such as The Washington Post , must stop trading in the type of journalism we’ve seen in the past few days.

Del. Bob Marshall is unabashed in his quest to cut off debate on the question of same sex marriage. Courtesy of the SW Va. Law blog, we learn that Marshall had a bill in the last Assembly that would have called for the impeachment of any judge who ruled that the prohibition against same sex marriages was unconstitutional. Kind of makes the idea of checks and balances more like checkmate.

Eric Alterman’s post this morning counterbalances the effusive praise in the press of former President Regan. More important, it links to several stories on aspects of Reagan’s administrations and policies.

For me, though I don’t want to speak ill of the recently departed, two thoughts come to mind. One, I was utterly baffled when he was elected. I couldn’t believe that someone who I considered so intellectually ill-prepared stomped Carter. The presidents I was old enough to observe first hand – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter – seemed to have either the experience or general intellectual weight to be president. Maybe it’s a poor assumption that a president must have some gravitas, but I do and was therefore aghast that he won.

Two, while his legacy was more than economic, it is for that I remember him. I sum up his presidency thus: He made greed acceptable. He allowed us to lose our conscious about accumulating as much as we could without concern for the less fortunate. Whether he was a “good guy” or not (and evidence suggests he was), his economic policies were a disaster for this county.

Good column yesterday in the Los Angeles Times about which reporters got it wrong – and right — in predicting the Iraq fiasco.

The Washington Post has now clearly inserted itself in the political process with a weekend of more stories on the alleged anti-Semitic comment by Cong. Jim Moran (D-Va.). Still The Post says it doesn’t know what the comments were. But that doesn’t stop the paper from repeating the charge, originally reported Friday, today, in two stories Saturday (here and here) and one Sunday.

A letter to the editor from a Jewish reader expressed the same concerns I did Friday about the fairness of these stories.

And now, in a column published today, Paul Goldman, a former Virginia Democratic Party chairman and a Jew, criticizes The Post. Goldman makes a point I neglected to in my post Friday: The alleged remark was made in March, but the accuser, Alan Secrest, did not leak the comment (as we must assume he did) until the Friday before the primary election.

How can we have a fair political process if, in the last week of the campaign, someone can purposely leak a resignation letter to the virtual 800-pound media presence in order to get that media giant to print a damning charge (remember, Secrest knows Moran’s internal campaign polling data, so he knows what can hurt Moran the most) without even knowing what the alleged anti-Semitic words were exactly?

It is fundamentally unfair to ask someone to defend themselves against words the accuser refuses to reveal.

…I don’t believe a newspaper of such power as the Post should, in the final weekend of a campaign, make huge stories with such potentially damning content based on a claim of anti-Semitism unless the accuser at least will tell them precisely what was said so people can make up their own minds.

Stephen Farnsworth, a former journalist and now political science professor at Mary Washington University and author of the book The Nightly News Nightmare: Network Television’s Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2000, wrote in an email to me this morning, “If this incident is supposed to be an important part of how voters assess Moran in the primary, both the consultant and the Post should be clearer about exactly what is being alleged. It also gives Moran a clearer opportunity to respond to a specific charge.”

The story was picked up by CNN and is bouncing around the blogosphere. Even Rosenberg supporters have trouble with The Post’s story.

Thanks to GOTV and Digby, we learn that Cong. Tom Davis (R-Va.) might want to re-write the Constitution. Maybe he wants us to go back to the 2/5’s rule that once was in place for counting African-Americans. But this time, he’ll short-change the Indians: “If you take out the Indian reservation, we would have won,” said Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), former chairman of the NRCC, of the recent special election for South Dakota’s House seat.