Month: October 2010

Matt Welch says the media is missing what’s interesting about The Los Angeles Times in the Sam Zell era:

1) Despite the persistent fever dreams of Nikki Finke and the newsroom, who yearned for a benevolent local billionaire hero to deliver them from evil, Sam Zell was literally the only person willing to make a bet on a beleaguered newspaper company. People love to mock how little skin he had in the game–infamously, just $315 million of an $8.2 billion purchase–but that in itself is a telling indicator of just how unattractive these properties are. Zell’s failure (and the immediate cultural hostility with which he was greeted) limits the ownership options for companies that don’t have very many left.

2) There isn’t a single management team that Spring Street hasn’t despised since the (over-)sainted Otis Chandler exited the scene three decades ago.

If I had a dollar for every word written in the Columbia Journalism Review about the malodorous new publisher of the L.A. Times, well, I probably wouldn’t be writing blog posts on Wednesday nights!

3) And the most undercovered L.A. Times media story of all? The paper, as Brian Doherty, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and even a reluctant Tim Cavanaugh have all recently noted here, has been bringing it of late, plunging into real and impactful tough-nosed coverage of local power structures, while taking the whole “website that publishes a newspaper” thing seriously enough that both traffic and quality have grown through the roof.

The stories on corruption in Bell, California are long overdue, but first rate.

Montreal, Canada, 8 pm

The viral sensation, if you missed it.

Ambinder defends the Palins:

[Todd Palin] erroneously interpreted something he had heard that Miller said on Fox about whether Palin was qualified to be president.

Now, Sarah and Todd Palin obviously believe she is qualified to be president. You may not, but they do. And that's important, because Palin has every right to assume that the candidates she endorses and spends any time campaigning for would, at the very least, answer that relatively innocuous question in the affirmative. Heck, Miller upped the ante yesterday, saying that of course Sarah Palin is constitutionally qualified to be president. Constitutionally!

The Palins are thinking about a run for president. Sarah has admitted as much. No surprise. We know that both Palins prize loyalty. Miller appeared to be acting disloyal. And Todd Palin, in a moment of anger, sent an e-mail blasting him for suggesting something he didn't suggest. More revealing than Palin's e-mail is Mller's apparent disdain for Team Palin, which suggests that Miller and Palin don't really like each other and that Palin's endorsement was predicated in part on her political strategy. That's how endorsements tend to work in American politics.

A Mississippi judge has sent a lawyer to jail for failing to say the Pledge of Allegiance in his courtroom. Here is the text of the order:

BE IT REMEMBERED, this date, the Court having ordered all present in the courtroom to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegience, and having found that Danny Lampley, Attorney at Law, failed and refused to do so, finds said Danny Lampley to be in criminal contempt of court.

Radley Balko has more.

A reader writes:

The next time I travel to San Francisco, I think I shall pass on visiting its supposedly gay-friendly I Castrate district.

If you're going to lead an army of revolutionaries, you can't ask for a more intimidating name than Castro.

A reader writes:

The initial point that you cited from Hitchens' piece was actually based on a falsehood.  For what it's worth, the Israel Lobby did not have the decisive effect on the Turkish genocide vote.  The vote also passed previously when the Israel Lobby was against it.  See here.

Another writes:

Look, here's the bottom line: Rick Sanchez was fired because he disparaged his bosses (or at least, he should have been).

If he was fired for insulting Jews, that would be wrong. But I seriously doubt the new CNN President Ken Jautz is so thin-skinned he would have fired Sanchez for hurting his feelings. CNN simply found a good excuse to fire someone who was an embarrassment to their network.

I admire and respect Chris Hitchens a lot, but to take this one putz and extrapolate his remarks to such global extremes is misguided at best and ridiculously silly at worst. None of this has to do with Jon Stewart or Jews or whatever else Rick Sanchez was babbling on about. If your bosses find out you've been speaking of them this way, you are going to get fired.

Another:

I did not even know who Rick Sanchez was until a few days ago, because I don't watch CNN.  But because this controversy temporarily took over half the internet, I felt compelled to listen to his Sirius rant.  And I think many people are misinterpreting Sanchez's thoughts.  Now, I do not really want to defend him, and it does seem like he is pretty much a fool, but I do not think any part of his rant was that "Jews control the media." 

What struck me, after reading all the commentary on this and then hearing his actual rant, was how uninterested in Jon Stewart's Jewishness he was.  His Sirius interviewer, Pete Dominick, even brought up Stewart's Jewishness, and it was ignored by Sanchez.  Sanchez does not talk about Jews; he talks about "white folks" and "elite northeast establishment liberals."  He lumps Jon Stewart in with Stephen Colbert, who is obviously not Jewish.  When he says Stewart is bigoted towards "everybody else who's not like him," he means, in his mind, that Stewart and all those other white people (some Jews, some not) look down on Latinos.  It seems like Jews are not even on his radar.  In a sense, by having a worldview that considers Jews totally assimilated with whites, Sanchez is among the least anti-semitic people on the planet. 

Why does this matter?  Because so many people are reacting to this rant as if it exposed his hidden anti-semitic side.  Jeffrey Goldberg dutifully blogs about how "what Rick Sanchez said was a lie" because none of the major TV news groups has a Jewish CEO.  But Sanchez never said anything about Jews.  It is bad luck for Sanchez that his "non-Latinos control the media" rant overlapped so much with the old "Jews control the media" rant favored by so many other cranks, but these are different rants.  The fact that he also hates Stewart (and Colbert) for poking fun at him on TV just helped to confuse the issue, because of course Stewart, despite having adopted a non-Jewish show-business name, is obviously Jewish.  If his rant had focused on Colbert, and only mentioned Stewart in passing, instead of the other way around, would he have gotten fired? 

Sanchez has some weird Latino persecution issues, but he is no anti-semite, at least based on that rant.

I think there was an unmistakable whiff of anti-Semitism in what Sanchez said, and wrote so, which is why I remain completely mystified by my colleague's reaction.

Douthat's fears that the GOP will continue its irresponsibility:

[A]s I said to Weigel, my biggest worry is that the G.O.P. is basically taking one of the insights from “Grand New Party” — that even the Republican base has grown to love big government — and running with it in a cynical, rather than a constructive direction, by offering rhetorical promises to cut government joined to specific pledges to protect the most expensive sections of the welfare state. If the Tea Party’s fervor succeeds in electing a group of politicians who are serious about entitlement reform, then it will have done both the country and conservatism a service. But if it just produces a lot of posturing about small government joined to yet more fiscal irresponsibility … well, then I hope the same people who regarded “Grand New Party” as a fatal compromise with statism will hold the Tea Party to same high standard.

You bet the Dish will – and has. I wish we had a sane, responsible, fiscally conservative GOP in this country – one that could make a deal with a pragmatic Democratic president to resolve long-term debt before it is too late (if it isn't already). But it appears we don't. When Rand Paul is criticizing even minor cuts in Medicare, we are not talking about Cameron-style realism.

Scott Morgan tackles an op-ed written by the nine former heads of the DEA:

They actually want Holder to tell voters that Prop 19 will be "void" even if it passes, as though no one in California has ever heard of a marijuana dispensary. This, in their view, is an argument so strong as to warrant an entire Wall Street Journal op-ed dedicated to it.

For another layer of absurdity, consider that one of the authors, Karen Tandy, presided over the DEA during a dramatic expansion of the medical marijuana industry that she now claims is legally impossible, even though it actually happened in real life while she was in charge of federal drug enforcement. She knows as well as anyone that California can make its own drug laws whether the DEA likes it or not. It's true that she could have prosecuted everyone in sight under federal law, but for a variety of practical and political reasons, that isn't what happened. It's not likely to happen if Prop 19 passes either, at least not unless Obama has a masochistic desire to further alienate his base as we heads towards 2012.