Month: June 2010

Alex Pareene outs an LA Times political blogger as a former member of the Bush communications team – a fact not disclosed by the paper:

nearly everything Malcolm and Orr write is critical of the Obama administration, disdainful of Democrats, and supportive of Republicans. They print poll results that are good for Republicans, but not ones that look like good news for Democrats.

There's nothing wrong with the Times hiring conservatives to blog for them. If the Times wants a conservative blog, they can go ahead and launch a conservative blog. The point is to actually identify it as such. Right now the Times seems to be catering their online product specifically for Drudge and the right-wing blogosphere while pretending it's still objective in the traditional old newspaper sense of the word. … (Of course, if it was ever revealed that either Malcolm or Orr had ever said anything mean about Matt Drudge in private, I'm sure they'd both be looking for work by the end of the week.)

Free Exchange compares gay and straight parenting:

Currently, most gay or lesbian parents had their child in a prior heterosexual relationship. As society becomes more tolerant and gay marriage more popular, children born to or adopted by gay couples will become more common. This suggests the typical gay and lesbian couple might be better parents then the average hetero couple. The typical hetero couple may or may not have planned for a child, while a gay couple probably did.

What makes a good parent is tough to quantify. but the evidence does suggest that being financially and emotionally stable probably matters more than gender.

A reader writes:

You asked, "Are any emails safe?"

No. Is this even still a question? Seriously?

My mama taught me when I was very young not to put anything in writing that I wouldn't want the whole world to see, and I think it holds me in good stead, *especially* with email.  Even if you're sending something to someone you trust, email is insecure.  It's too easy to accidentally send something to someone that you don't intend, to type a shortcut into the "to" field and not notice that it didn't resolve the way you expected it to, to hit return and have something go out before you were ready for it.

My best friend in the whole world would never out me about something on purpose, but bless her heart, she's computer-clueless and has a long history of screwing up email, and I just simply won't say anything I wouldn't want to have accidentally forwarded to everyone in her address book.  I save it for a phone call, instead.

Anyone who thinks that a listserv of 400 journalists and bloggers is a safe place to vent in private just hasn't been paying attention.

'Americans are not addicted to oil, Americans are addicted to freedom – the freedom to move freely and independently where and when we want," – former Virginia governor, George Allen.

At some point, we'll get a more honest GOP: they'll declare that national default is a good thing and that carbon-based energy needs to be even more central to the US economy.  After all, anything else is "librul" isn't it?

Friedersdorf wants the issue left alone:

I assume Trig Palin is Sarah Palin’s son, and that I don’t think we should go down the road of demanding hard evidence on these sorts of questions (even if it meant never finding out the truth in an individual case) — it sets a precedent that would mire future elections in ever more absurd accusations and counter-accusations, all of them focusing attention on the personal history of candidates rather than their professional qualifications and policy positions, a road we’ve gone too far down already, and that benefits the least qualified seekers of office (and that is unnecessary in the case of a candidate like Sarah Palin, who wouldn’t even make it past summary judgment in a trial to gauge her qualifications for the presidency).

I think this assumes that this is indeed a case of legitimate privacy; whereas I regard it as something much more sinister. His response to my call for pushback:

One explanation for the disparity in evidence: the persistence of questions about Trig helps Sarah Palin.

All along, she has savvily used the notion that the media is treating her unfairly to enhance her popularity. An amoral political strategist would advise her to keep hard evidence of Trig’s maternity hidden at all costs in the hope that critics would continue questioning it — if Professor Bernstein and I, both of us huge Sarah Palin critics, doubt the merits of this line of inquiry, imagine how the average American reacts to it, and how the Sarah Palin base reacts. For better or worse, we live in a country where the politics of umbrage are very effective, and Ms. Palin is expert at them. Indeed I fear that speculation about Trig’s maternity increases the chance that she’ll win the 2012 GOP nomination. If a savvy political analyst can be found who disagrees with that assessment, I’d be surprised.

Later in his post, Andrew writes, “if Palin has lied about this, it’s the most staggering, appalling deception in the history of American politics.” I think that on reflection he’d reconsider. How staggering a lie is must relate to consequences. Consider Dick Cheney and the Iraq War, or the treatment of detainees at black sites around the world, just to name two political lies that resulted in loss of life and incalculable damage to our country. Compared to these issues, which The Daily Dish has covered so well, the saga of Sarah Palin and her son are of little consequence. I appreciate wariness about Sarah Palin as 2012 approaches, and since he conducts even inquiries to which I object with a commitment to regularly airing dissent, I can respect Andrew even when his obsessions and mine part — the Dish is a success in large part due to his obsessions and passions, and as his many longtime readers know, no one agrees with him on everything. As the Obama Administration continues to ignore Bush-era lawbreaking, assemble an assassinations list, and normalize other excesses of the War on Terrorism, however, I’d love to convince Andrew that whatever energy he spends on the Trig story is more profitably invested elsewhere.

Well, I certainly hope I won’t abandon vigilance on other issues for this farce. But two responses: first, it is not my concern whether this helps or hinders Palin. I want to know what’s true, that’s all. And while I’m perfectly aware of the rope-a-dope potential, and have been from the beginning, everything I know about Palin suggests that this is a secondary strategy. And when someone with that much power brazenly dares the media, the media needs to dare back. Otherwise, they win. And they have won, hence all the copy-cats.

Secondly, this lie, while certainly not as offensive or grave as “we do not torture”, could amount to a woman stuffing her dress to fake pregnancy. There’s a clarity about that kind of lie that strikes me as truly gob-smacking. Before I knew much about Palin, it struck me as extremely unlikely. But would you put anything past her, now you’ve watched her for a couple of years?

By the way, the only reputation I care about is between me and my conscience and my readers. Apart from that, I couldn’t give a toss what others say. But if they have an argument or some evidence, I’d love to clear this up and move on.

CJR's Greg Marx actually adds something to the post-Weigel debate. What he notes is that Ezra Klein, Dave Weigel and Dan Froomkin were and are all bloggers, whose work inevitably involves more of their raw humanity, warts and all, than that of traditional reporters. They develop an intimacy with readers and an increasing degree of candor and personal transparency in their writing. And once a writer has set those parameters, his private life will soon follow – and he or she will become part of the story.

In ten years of doing this, I have certainly learned the amazing professional advantages and personal costs of this model. For the readers, though, I think it's almost all positive. The truth is: reporters are human beings, and I think that being more candid about who we are and where we come from allows readers more lee-way to judge our work. They can see for themselves if they think we're off-base. They can note that Dave's personality and biases obviously affect his writing – and make allowances. In a blog, this helps give the blogger ore credibility and durability and interest. But squeezed into a corporate journalist model without the kind of cool, hands-off stewardship of, say, James Bennet, this can clash with previous models. Wapo's failure was in not sticking with this and in not being prepared to allow the new model to work alongside the old – through the inevitable bumps and skids on the journey. Marx:

Institutions like the Post have both an opportunity and an obligation to take advantage of what this new model offers—to find a way to, as Tkacik writes, “combine the best of both.” Instead, at the first sign of trouble, they cut Weigel loose. And rather than thinking about how it might have made this experiment work—for example, by making clear to readers this was an experiment in a new form, or by providing support from an editor who could help Weigel navigate the shifting terrain—the Post seems determined to draw the wrong conclusions.

Amen. CJR's cover-story by former Jezebel blogger, Moe Tkacik, whom Marx cites, is a brilliant overview of the new forms of journalism we are experimenting with. Her description of being a professional phone-sex worker – and its strange parallels with being a journalist – is pay-off enough (and great grist for the illustration above).

"So the dirty little secret is yeah, we sort of informally agree not to report a lot of things that we see and hear, some of it for legitimate security reasons, and some of it because it could just be embarrassing. And the tradeoff is we get a continued relationship with these people and we can get information," – Jamie McIntyre, explaining the process by which he reports on the war for CNN.

"The security situation in Afghanistan remains tenuous, with instability fueled by a resilient and still confident insurgency, tribal tensions, political challenges, and competition for influence in the future,"- David Petraeus, laying the groundwork for permanent occupation. Henry Kissinger says two things:

Mr Kissinger added that fighting the Taliban until it was reduced to impotence “would take more time than the American political system would permit”.

But:

“On the other hand, if we are willing to pursue the stated [war] objective the public must be prepared for a long struggle. This is a choice that needs to be made explicitly.”

I agree with that. Obama needs to pony up and make the case for permanent occupation of Afghanistan as a ward of the US if he is to continue his current "surge".

Bernstein says my reader is wrong about Bonds, steroids and press coziness.

I'm not sure I could name a single policy question on which David Frum has seriously changed his mind in the last few years. He's still in favor of the Bush concept of the war on terror, he's still a neocon in foreign policy, he wants the right to prosper, he likes small government and individual liberty and balanced budgets. He voted for McCain. He has not had the Iraq epiphany I have had, along with a re-think of America's global reach. He has not been as radical a critic of the Christianist forces within "conservatism" as I have; and he's no real libertarian. But he is not allowed to be a part of the conservative hive of blogads, cutting him off from some of the financial support that could actually stimulate a debate on the right (if the right-wing blogosphere were in any way interested in a debate about anything).

Yes, David has questioned the rigidly closed minds and abstract extremism of the Tea Party tendency. He is appalled that any serious political movement could actually regard Sarah Palin as a potential president. And he has criticized the GOP tactics of total obstructionism – because he thinks it will enable liberalism. That's it, so far as I can see. A career of thinking and writing on the right, a time in the Bush White House, the man who wrote one of the more embarrassing hagiographies of Bush, is no longer a conservative. Because he will not obey the dictates of the fringe crackpots, he is to be punished. Go read John Hawkins' post defending the purge mentality, exposing the core truth of what I wrote the other day:

For the current right, "liberal" simply means "the other side." Since their side is defined in almost suffocatingly orthodox terms, any critic of any aspect of today's Palinite conservatism is a "liberal."

And they punish the dissenters not just by criticism, but by organized financial pressure. I told you it would get worse before it gets better.