Month: December 2008

Not Brennan. Not Hayden. Then Who?

By Patrick Appel
Marc reports:

Sources say that Obama’s team is having trouble finding a potential CIA director who lacks politically incriminating links to controversial Bush Administration policies and yet commands the respect of the agency’s rank and file.  Potential nominees include John Gannon, a Bush era Homeland Security official and Clinton-era intelligence officer and Jami Miscik, former chief of the CIA’s directorate of analysis.  The New York Times reported that New York crisis management consultant Jack Devine, a former CIA chief of operations, is also a potential candidate.

A Better Bailout

By Patrick Appel
Manzi:

Experts disagree about whether a literal application of a Chapter 11 process would work for the Big 3. So, if we could stipulate that we could get all of the effects of an orderly bankruptcy through some government-sponsored process that just had a different name, then of course we should do it.

If we had a process called conservatorship or something, in which a set of government employees called an oversight board, who are insulated from political pressure and have very similar motivations and authorities to the government employee named a bankruptcy judge, makes decisions that force renegotiation of contracts and a change of ownership, we would have a materially identical process to bankruptcy. This hypothetical alternative could – again, in theory – actually be superior if it could reduce some of the inevitable disruption in consumer demand that would very likely be created by bankruptcy.

Novel Ads

By Patrick Appel
Scott Douglas wonders how file-sharing will impact authors:

Musicians simply learned to tour if they wanted to make money, but what about authors? Maybe Stephanie Meyer can sellout the Nokia, but the average author can’t even get a handful of people to show up for a signing at Barnes & Noble. What happens when people start putting books up on bit torrent and publishers go from making $50,000 to $100,000 on a mid-list author to making less than $10,000—my guess is they cut back the number of authors they sign, which is already low.

My longstanding idea for putting advertisements in an eBook might start looking like a better idea to them.

Caopublicans

By Patrick Appel
Larison mulls over the Cao win:

Cao is by all accounts impressive, intelligent and appealing, but the GOP is not going to rebuild its majority by running extraordinary candidates in deep-blue districts that will vote them out in another two years. They need instead to start recruiting decent candidates in marginal districts. It is telling that essentially no one in the party hierarchy was backing Cao and they didn’t even know who he was, which means that the most outstanding Republican House candidate this cycle was the one not actively supported by his party.

Reihan and Ross are also worth reading.

Poseur Alert Nominee

By Patrick Appel
"I know how it feels to see the design for the dust jacket of a book that I’ve written, but that’s different: the cover is not the book. An opera, on the other hand, truly exists only in performance, and must be created anew each time it is produced: the score is not the show. As I saw how Hildegard had transformed my libretto into a three-dimensional object, a Biblical phrase popped into my mind: Thus the word was made as flesh."– Terry Teachout, Artjournal.com. Awards glossary here. Most nominations come from readers.