Here's that Morning Meeting segment about lobbyists forging letters from civil rights groups in an attempt to kill cap-and-trade legislation. It's important to understand that the kind of work lobbyists do in the "astroturfing" business -- the business of faking grassroots, citizen-level support for public initiatives -- doesn't come under a lot of disclosure laws that apply to lobbyists who want speak or donate to members of congress, so it can be hard to ascertain who is behind these efforts, making them doubly pernicious for our democracy. Coincidentally, Matt Yglesias -- who warns me that my lack of eye contact with the camera makes me look shifty -- has two posts that explain why host Dylan Ratigan's idea of covering Congress by special interest coalitions would be difficult to do effectively. One point that I tried to make is that any individual member of Congress is going to have varying relationships with a variety of special interests, so it's hard to separate them categorically in that way. Matt observes that "unipolarity" of Congress -- the left versus right divide as the key analytical mechanism -- is in fact by design: Party leaders have an incentive to defer to the "majority of a majority" view of most issues, so they avoid staging votes on legislation that will split their coalition. That's useful as a pragmatic method of passing legislation, but it does mask some important divides in the public conversation. Also, regarding MSNBC and its ways, read this post from Glenn Greenwald about the dangers of corporate media. -- Tim Fernholz
