That's what Gawker founder Nick Denton suggests for media:
Get out of categories such as politics to which advertisers are averse. That's easier for us to say since we spun off Wonkette earlier this year. And outfits such as the Huffington Post and most big-city newspapers—defined by their political coverage—will have difficulty redefining themselves. But media groups cannot afford in the current environment to fund their most noble missions; they should leave that to public-spirited non-profits such as Pro Publica.
"What is missing is the step of coming to judgement . . ."
That's the key phrase for me and it's why I continue to find Gingrich a fascinating character. He has begun to make noises about Conservatives addressing how the Republican Party has contributed to the past eight years of failure. My very conservative family taught me that at the conclusion of any endeavor a reckoning would be imposed. It is the fear of nasty and brutal consequences that has made me a fiscal conservative and a successful business woman.
You are totally correct on teachers' unions. I am a teacher at a
high performing charter middle school in an extremely low performing
district. We randomly take students from surrounding schools by a blind
lottery. I cannot stress enough that the success of our school is in
large rooted in the fact that there is no teachers' union presence here.
Love him or hate him - and I do both all the time - he's usually worth reading:
I certainly agree about "compassionate conservatism." I came in for
some obloquy on this very blog a few years ago for calling it "turkey
poop," but in retrospect I think I was too kind. At least one of its
aspects — the determination to show kindness to poor people by making
it easier for them to buy houses, by chucking sane credit standards out
the window — contributed mightily to our current economic mess. And
there are certainly people in the GOP who think our error has been that
we weren't "compassionate" enough. In fact that is probably
George W. Bush's thinking, and John McCain's too. I'd like to see the
GOP get its green-eyeshade image back; but alas, green eyeshades in the
kind of deep recession we are entering are snowflakes in hell,
politically. We must hunker down and look to the future.
Pretty honest assessment. He only likes Sarah Palin for Lowry-esque reasons. She gives his tweed trousers starbursts. I wonder how much of Palin's male support never got past her ass.
Don't believe reports that Max Baucus intends to take the lead role on
health care legislation, anticipating a leadership vacuum because of
Sen. Ted Kennedy's illness and a possible Hillary Clinton
departure. What Baucus wants to do is make sure that his finance
committee plays a key role, so he's found a way to invest in the
debate.
I defer to Marc's reporting. But this idea just resonates with me as classic Obama. I don't think Clinton as secretary of state would be mere symbolism. And I think it's a brilliant way to coopt her without in any way demeaning her. More to the point: Dick Morris is furious and Drudge is trying to wish the story away. That tells you what smart politics this would be. The more I think about it, the more I support it. She did her duty this fall. And she is the kind of toughie who could be a real Iron Lady type with the Russians and Iranians. That global presence would be a better prep for a future presidential run (yes, I'll jump off that bridge when we get to it) and help separate her from her hubby. And if she turns Obama down, her leverage against him is weakened anyway. He did his best. Due diligence, and all that.
But I don't think it's a head-fake. And I think she may say yes.
President-elect Barack Obama offered Sen. Hillary Clinton the position
of Secretary of State during their meeting Thursday in Chicago,
according to two senior Democratic officials. She requested time to
consider the offer, the officials said.
Gellman's book may well be the fullest account we will ever get of its subject. Cheney's papers have been sealed and will remain inaccessible for many years to come, provided that he does not have them shredded or burned, which is altogether possible. It seems equally unlikely that Cheney will write an apologia or a finger-pointing memoir--testament to his discipline, and also to his oddly touching quality of genuine self-negation.
The real revelation of the Internet is not what it has done to newspaper readership – it has in fact expanded it – but how it has sapped newspapers' economic lifeblood. The most serious erosion has occurred in classified advertising, which once made up more than 40 percent of a newspaper's revenues and more than half its profits.
Thoreau wants the detainee interrogations videotaped:
Terrorism suspects should be treated like any other persons accused of murder or conspiracy to commit murder, and any sort of interrogation in those cases should be videotaped. Several years ago, an Illinois State Senator pushed for videotaping of police interrogations. I hope that that fine State Senator is still the man that he was several years ago, and I hope he holds fast to those principles when deciding what to do about terrorism suspects.
The Economist has an article on what to expect at the November 15th world finance meeting. Drezner is pessimistic:
...the basic conundrum is that governments would like to regulate financial institutions in such a way that private capital does not come up with a way to evade those regulations and engage in the exact same activities with a lower regulatory cost. In the history of financial regulation, however, private capital has excelled at regulatory avoidance. Given the complexities of financial markets, I have every confidence that even if the G-20 were to agree on common standards, they would not be airtight. The loopholes that would be found would let the air out of any governance balloon that was inflated.
Is this country going to slide into progressive corporatism, a merger
of corporate and federal power that will inevitably stifle competition,
empower corporate and federal bureaucrats and protect entrenched
interests? Or is the U.S. going to stick with its historic model:
Helping workers weather the storms of a dynamic economy, but preserving
the dynamism that is the core of the country’s success.
Al Giordano doesn't believe that Clinton is seriously under consideration for Secretary of State:
The whole thing is a media freak show being served up by members of the Clinton factions in the Democratic party and obliged by a national media (some of them also Clinton noisemakers) in search of a story. The speculation is not because Senator Clinton wants the job, but because her people so desperately want to muddy the waters and throw up a roadblock to either New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson or Massachusetts Senator John Kerry - two of the leading contenders - serving in the post, whom they consider turncoats for having endorsed Obama vs. Clinton earlier this year.
The best reason for Obama to be looking for a place in his cabinet for Clinton is simple: to get her out of the Senate. Just ask George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter what it was like to have a once or future presidential rival in the Senate serving as a one-person Roman tribunal.
Conor writes that prosecuting Cheney would "be a dark day for the United States." Larison disagrees:
In the event that the officials responsible for these decisions were arrested or found guilty of crimes, that would not be a dark day, but rather the day when the sun has finally started to peak through the clouds of arbitrary and illegal government actions. If high officials have broken the law, the day when they are brought to justice should be considered a very good day indeed. Is it regrettable that these officials created this situation? Of course. What we should never regret or lament is the successul revival of the rule of law that holding such officials accountable would represent. However, it remains to be seen whether such a revival will even be attempted.
Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, John Brennan, was an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity.
Much speculation centers on John Brennan, a highly respected retired CIA official who stood up the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and is advising the President-Elect. Among many things Democrats like about the softspoken Brennan are his anti-torture views.
"There are bound to be casualties when any nation
veers from its domestic and international obligations
to uphold human rights and international
humanitarian law. Those casualties are etched on
the minds and bodies of many of the 62 former detainees
interviewed for this report, many of whom
suffered infinite variations on physical and mental
abuse, including intimidation, stress positions, enforced
nudity, sexual humiliation, and interference
with religious practices.
Indeed, I was struck by
the similarity between the abuse they suffered and
the abuse we found inflicted upon Bosnian Muslim
prisoners in Serbian camps when I sat as a judge
on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia in The Hague, a U.N. court fully
supported by the United States. The officials and
guards in charge of those prison camps and the civilian
leaders who sanctioned their establishment
were prosecuted—often by former U.S. government
and military lawyers serving with the tribunal—
for war crimes, crimes against humanity and, in
extreme cases, genocide," - Patricia M. Wald, foreword, Human Rights Center's report on former Gitmo detainees.
Wald served on
the United States Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit (1979–99) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(1999–2001). Judge Wald was also a member of the
President’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004–05).
I've been a little taken aback by the news that gun sales have rocketed in red states since Obama was elected. Watching O'Reilly and reading Drudge lately has also been a bit of a revelation. A reader sums it up:
I can't tell whether the lack of serious attention given to the continued hysteria about our President-Elect still emerging from various corners of the Right is a good thing or bad thing. By hysteria I mean things like Congressman Jim Broun from Georgia equating Obama with Hitler and then his lame excuse of an apology. I also mean Sarah Palin using her 15 minutes to slime our President-Elect with Bill Ayers one more time, wink wink, and the 24/7 vitriol from demagogues like Hannity and priests who refuse to give Obama voters communion.
It's why as a 27-year-old voter, the Republican party has been off the table for me since I could vote in the 2000 election. No matter how much I like or identify with any of "conservative" ideas, I refuse to stand in any tent, now matter how big, with people like Sarah Palin, Jim Broun, and Sean Hannity.
Tomorrow, a virally-generated national day of protest across America is taking shape to protest the attack on the core civil rights of a small minority in California. It's a protest to demand equal treatment under the law for gay couples. It's a radical demand for a traditional institution and also a protest against those who seek to impose religious restrictions on civil law. It is a defense of both religious freedom and the freedom of those whom many (but not all) religions condemn.
The Dish will devote Saturday to covering the protests. Please send me stories, anecdotes, photographs, music, Youtubes, and graphics that reflect what's going on around the country. As on election day, we'll try and let you speak via this blog to the wider world, and convey a sense from the ground up of how people are feeling and arguing and acting.
There are demos all across the country, and a new one seems to spring up every minute. You can find the details for yours here. Show up. And then email me about your experience. The protests converge at 1.30 pm EST. They now seem to be spreading globally.
That's the buzz. Marc reports that Clinton and Obama met yesterday in Chicago. For my part, I think making her secretary of state is an inspired idea.
Obama has to offer something to Clinton. She's his main threat now and rightly regards part of his victory her doing. The primaries helped him. Left to fester in the Senate, Clinton will plot against the president if he doesn't actively seek her support and engagement and "spread the political wealth" of his mandate.
The split over Palin, of course, poisoned everything at the end. One of the dividing lines was between her communications team and the policy advisers. The communications team seemed to consider her a dolt, while the policy people—like Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann—were impressed with her and her potential. As one McCain aide told me, "It's the difference between considering her someone who lacks knowledge and someone who is incompetent, and they [the communications aides] treated her as the latter."
But this is to my mind the most revealing quote from a Palin defender:
"Look, she wasn't ready for this, obviously."
If she wasn't ready for this, how was she supposed to be ready to be president? And if she wasn't ready to be president, why did you pick her?
The focus in all this - apart from getting closure on some factual questions - should be on discovering who vetted, or didn't vet Palin. This was massive political malpractice - and it's McCain's, Davis's and Schmidt's responsibility. Thank God these incompetents and risk-takers will not run the country.
Yes! You nailed Kristol’s “world-weariness to
outrage." I’ve been trying to find a succinct way of expressing it.
“Oh, come on now, none of this matters!” It’s his constant
refrain whenever he’s asked to defend something awful (socialist! secret Muslim!
terrorist pal!) one of his protégés or heroes says.
He believes in nothing and
therefore thinks no one else believes in anything either.
That's a pretty accurate description of one kind of Straussian. Except they simultaneously claim to be the last defenders of objective truth.
If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into
a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from
McDonald's, Burger King or Wendy's is made from cows that eat primarily
corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than
480 fast-food burgers from across the nation.
A reader tracked down one of the first mentions in the press of Sarah Palin. From the Anchorage Daily News, April 3, 1996:
Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana.
And there, at J.C. Penney's cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.
''We want to see Ivana,'' said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, ''because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.''
Austin Bramwell responds to Ross. He captures something about the mindset that has captured the Republican "movement":
Ross correctly observes that it’s possible both to build a movement and to influence those outside of it. Again, he cites environmentalism as an example. Again, there are crucial differences between the conservative movement
and a movement like environmentalism. Environmentalists have never
sought to create a counter-establishment. Rather, they try to supply establishment institutions with environmentalist ideas. Conservatives, by contrast, have sought to create a whole alternative institutional world.
Felix Salmon is worried about $2 trillion behemoth Citigroup:
Citi might well turn out to be Hank Paulson's largest and biggest headache. There's no one he can sell it to -- it's far too big already. Which means that Paulson's only real option, if things deteriorate much further from here, is nationalization. Bits of it could be sold, at a price -- the retail bank to Santander, perhaps; other bits to JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs -- but the losses to the taxpayer would be enormous, and the disruption associated with breaking Citi up and then trying to integrate the pieces in the middle of a major financial crisis would likely be devastating to the economy.
I loved hearing from him about oddball "practical" matters. For
instance, height: he appeared to be nearly 7 feet tall, and explained
to me (6'2") that up until 6'6" height was an advantage, but after that
it was a big inconvenience -- door frames, beds, airplane seats. Or,
getting ready for book writing bursts: He said he removed complications
from his life while writing by having exactly the same food at every
meal, so he never had to waste time deciding what to eat. He was a tech
enthusiast, and the most passionate Mac advocate I have encountered.
Knocking teacher tenure is easy but simplistic. There would be some specific gains from eliminating tenure -- getting rid of (or re-motivating) some deadwood. But you're ignoring the real systematic costs. Tenure is a form of compensation: it gives teachers job security and some degree of classroom autonomy. If you already think that teaching is not attracting enough quality candidates, why would you propose cutting compensation? If you really believe in market economics, you have to grapple with the likely effects of making the job even less attractive than it already is.
Charles Bremner reports on an exchange between Sarkozy and Putin:
With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia, Mr Levitte said.
"I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," Mr Putin replied.
Mr Sarkozy responded: "Hang him?"
"Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein," said Mr Putin.
Mr Sarkozy replied, using the familiar "tu": "Yes but do you want to end up like (President) Bush?"
Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: "Ah, you have scored a point there."
Watch the contempt from Fox News for Peter Schiff over the past two years:
I feel his pain. His economic sense and foresight escaped me. But politically, some of us diagnosed the conservative implosion years ago - and earned the same kind of contempt from the same kind of baying hounds for getting it right.
I just wanted to let you know that after Obama won, I took a look at
how I consumed (and consumed, and consumed) my editorial over the last
year or so, and realized that I read four Atlantic writers: yourself,
Ta-Nehisi, Ambinder and Fallows every single day, and Goldberg and
Douthat regularly.
I'd been a subscriber to The Atlantic for a long
time, but fell off a couple of years ago for a variety of reasons.
Today, after realizing just how much Atlantic Online I read, I felt it
was my responsibility to subscribe and help keep it going. Of course,
I'm looking forward to receiving the print product again, but it was
the bloggers who convinced me to re-up.
Fantastic. The print magazine is on a roll right now. Subscribe here!
Mark Benjamin reports that Bush may issue a blanket pardon to protect his administration from war crimes. Benjamin also describes how Obama may approach Bush's use of torture:
The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution.
Eric Posner lists facts that make closing Gitmo difficult while Paul Cassell points to a paper by Professor Amos Guiora on how to try the detainees:
I suggest a hybrid "domestic terror court" that would allow for an in camera review of confidential intelligence information presented by the prosecutor and a representative of the intelligence services. A properly constituted domestic terror court - comprised of judges schooled in understanding intelligence reports and intelligence gathering procedures, and aware of the necessity of preserving constitutional rights-is the proper starting point in moving forward with post 9/11 terrorist prosecutions. The proposed hybrid paradigm will ensure both the state's obligations to keep intelligence and matters of national security confidential as well as the defendant's right to a fair trial.
"The bottom line," McCaffrey writes, "is a dramatic and growing
momentum for economic and security stability which is unlikely to be
reversible. I would not characterize the situation as fragile."
He was there; I've never been. But I wonder if he's right. I sure hope he is.
The GOP governors spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity. One called it awkward: “I’m sure you could see it on some of our faces.” Another Republican governor eyeing a presidential run in 2012 told CNN the event was “odd” and “weird,” and said it “unfortunately sent a message that she was the de facto leader of the party." There has been palpable tension among some GOP governors gathered in Miami that Palin has been sucking up all the media oxygen.
A museum assistant looks at a skeleton at the 'Darwin' exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, November 13, 2008. The exhibition is the highlight of 'Darwin200,' a national program of events celebrating Charles Darwin's ideas, impact and influence around the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. By Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.
Ilya Somin doesn't think that Obama will roll back executive power. We'll see. But you know what? At least we'll be able to tell who was attacking Bush for partisan and who for principled reasons. I consider myself part of the loyal and constructive opposition, as of January 21. Promise. Of no party or clique.
Greenwald argues that it isn't a good idea for Obama supporters to stay silent until policy has been enacted:
It simply is noteworthy of comment and cause for concern -- though far from conclusive about what Obama will do -- that Obama's transition chief for intelligence policy, John Brennan, was an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity. It would be foolish in the extreme to ignore that and to just adopt the attitude that we should all wait quietly with our hands politely folded for the new President to unveil his decisions before deciding that we should speak up or do anything.
Politicians respond to constituencies and pressure. Constituencies which announce their intention to maintain respectful silence all but ensure that their political principles will be ignored.
No silence here. If Obama hesitates in any way to end torture everywhere in the CIA and military, the Dish will be relentless in holding him to the same standards applied to Bush. Because there is only one standard for America.
Your post on Sarah Palin moved the ball. The
issue is whether the media and the political class in the country can
break through the persistent delusion of normalcy that has gripped our
politics for too long. The delusion is
that whatever happens is normal, simply because it happened. No
historical perspective, no sense of proportion. Everything is just
part of the normal give and take of politics.
November 9, 2008 - November 15, 2008
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