Month: September 2011

From Jerusalem Post editor Caroline Glick. This is what happens when neocon fanatics think they have a sense of humor (hathos warning):

Gaga honored a gay fan of hers who killed himself after being bullied. She probably shouldn't have.

Geoffrey Dunn calls her out on a review that deeply distorted both the contents and the methods of The Rogue.

Bruce Bartlett reframes the Buffett tax: 

There is no evidence whatsoever that lower rates on the wealthy stimulated growth in the 2000s. Indeed when the Congressional Research Service examined the economic consequences of allowing all the Bush era tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010, it concluded that the impact was likely to be slight because their effect on growth was virtually non-existent.

Reducing the budget deficit by cutting spending alone, as Republicans insist, means that the burden of adjustment will fall almost entirely on those with low and middle incomes, since those with high incomes do not benefit much from federal programmes. Raising taxes is the only way of ensuring that the cost of deficit reduction is shared among all income groups.

More on Obama's proposal here and here. 

Shurely Shome Mishtake. Jim Antle points to this bit from Chris Christie's speech last night at the Reagan Library: 

The United States must also become more discriminating in what we try to accomplish abroad. We certainly cannot force others to adopt our principles through coercion. Local realities count; we cannot have forced makeovers of other societies in our image. We need to limit ourselves overseas to what is in our national interest so that we can rebuild the foundations of American power here at home – foundations that need to be rebuilt in part so that we can sustain a leadership role in the world for decades to come. 

Along the same lines, Steve Benen is perplexed by the neocon embrace of Christie's modest notion of American exceptionalism: 

To hear Christie tell it, American exceptionalism is hollow — indeed, it may not even exist — unless the nation, to his satisfaction, has “demonstrated” and “earned” it. I’m fairly certain this isn’t close to what the right has it mind. Put it this way: what do you suppose the reaction would be if President Obama declared that the United States still has to “earn” American exceptionalism. I suspect the right would be apoplectic; his Republican rivals would speak of nothing else, and the White House would never hear the end of it.

Friedersdorf has more on Christie's "heresies."

A reader writes:

Ignore the critics.  Haters will be haters.  I love the new feature.

Another writes:

Personally I am happy to be able to put a face to the name of the one blog I read daily. This is right in line with growing up with David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite sharing the dinner hour with my entire family at the table, Mom serving everyone and the family watching the news together. That was part of our daily ritual. I bring my lunch to work every day and clear some space on my desk to enjoy my meal, and have been sharing this time with The Dish for about four years now. Seeing your face, hearing your voice, getting a feel for your personality, all adds to the experience. I don't expect to see you behind a network news desk, but a shot where you actually blog from would be most interesting. And it would great fun if Patrick, Chris, Zoe, Maisie, and Zack all made guest appearances.

Another:

I like the new video feature! For us in the UK, it's good to see and hear more of you, as I'd guess you appear more on American TV than British.

Another:

Re: Transcripts "defeating the purpose." Ah, but transcripts are essential for search engines; you want those Google hits, no? And I didn't check – are the videos captioned? My hearing is still good, thankfully, but I'm sure there are others who would depend on a reliable transcription.

Traffic is nice, but the Dish has never been a traffic chaser. Another reader:

The videos should have a text caption that lets readers know what the topic is at a glance. I'm loading the videos now because they're new, but I've only been interested in 1/3 of them so far. If that interest rate continues, and I don't have a caption to indicate whether the question is interesting to me, I'm likely to just skip over all the videos to save time.

We would prefer people clicking on the video to see the question, which appears within the first 5 seconds. But we will take it under consideration. Another:

Perfect timing for this new video feature. My question is simple and maybe not quite what you had in mind for this feature, but I just read your post about accents, where you mention that an Englishman saying "Aristotle" sounds like "one guttural syllable." For the life of me, I can't dream up what that must sound like. Any chance you might say it for us on video?

An episode on accents could be fun, stay tuned. By the way, regarding the problem with viewing the videos on the iPhone, our tech team just resolved it.  A big thanks to them and everyone at the Beast who helped put this new feature together, especially David Wharton and Susie Banikarim. And thanks for all the great feedback. The feature, along with everything at the Dish, is a work in progress.

Sam Harris recently published Lying, his first Kindle single. How Sam sees the publishing industry's problem:

If your book is 600-pages-long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60- page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem.

Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing.

In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.

As often, Sam is onto something. I have a book in the back of my head that I am slowly turning over. But I know that even if it did extremely well, it would only muster a fraction of the readership that the Dish offers each day. A really successful, highishbrow book will sell, say, 30,000 copies. I just had that many eye-balls in the last hour or two. In a week, I have more eyeballs than all my books put together – and they have all been in the 300 page range. If I think of making a sustained argument, as in Virtually Normal, I now wonder if self-publishing a pamphlet like Sam's wouldn't be more worthwhile. And, of course, The Cannabis Closet, our second print-on-demand book, is only 118 pages and available for just $5.95. Explanation of the project here. A reader keeps the fires burning:

One of the highlights of Tuesday is reading the VFYW guesses. Every week there seems to be at least one interesting "another" that has a fun story about the location of the VFYW. So … why don't you assign your crew to gather the most interesting e-mail from each week and compile volume II of the View From Your Window book with the best VFYW's from the contest? As you turn the pages, the VFYW is on one page and on the opposite page is the e-mail you received from one of your readers that gives their story on how they new it.

Now that we have the help of interns Maisie and Zack, who joined the Dish this summer, we hope to be able to crank out a few more slim volumes in the near future. 

Alexis assesses the Amazon challenge.

The miracle of the yogasm.