An early entry – from Los Angeles, at dawn this morning. Send in digital pics from your own window – to give your fellow readers an idea of where you all live and what you see each day. Details of the idea can be read here. I’ll be posting glimpses of the places where all of you live and/or work all week. You know enough about me. It’s time to find out more about you. Remember to provide the place and time of day.
David Carr sees the Philadelphia Inquirer on the chopping block. Then this:
A yearlong journalism fellowship at Stanford University is supposed to provide a break from the news business, a relaxing time to think big thoughts, recharge your batteries and enjoy diversions like horseback riding on the sunny Palo Alto, Calif., campus.
But this year, not even the blissed-out Stanford fellows could escape the exigencies of the newspaper business. Of the seven fellows who came from American dailies, five worked at papers where buyouts were offered, and one took the offer. The papers of two were sold out from under them.
Just keep the deckchairs in order, will ya?
"Those who hire large numbers of illegal aliens are the 21st-century slave masters. And in my opinion, that’s just as immoral as the 19th-century slave masters we had to fight a civil war to get rid of," – James Sensenbrenner, back in March. (Hat tip: Yglesias.)
A reader writes:
Your desperate desire to slam Dean is disappointing, since I enjoy your writing. But I guess its understandable – the guy’s basically a living rebuke to you and your conservative beliefs. He shows that it is liberals, not conservatives, who will advance equal rights for gays in this country. He shows that it is liberals, not conservatives, who can balance budgets – while at the same time providing a statewide health care availability to everyone, rather than your "available if you can pay for it" method. He proves that liberals don’t want to take your guns – and worst of all, he proves that it was the liberals (the non-sellout ones) who were clear thinking on what the Iraq war would be like, as opposed to the sugarplum fairytale fantasies of conservatives.
Actually, the reason I have come to dislike Dean is because he is an arrogant, devious, self-righteous, and politically maladroit bully. But you were saying …?
It’s a media frenzy now. Money quote:
"Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences," observes a senior party player. "One: ‘She is the presumptive front-runner.’ Two: ‘I don’t much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God‚Äôs sake!’ And three: ‘If she‚Äôs our nominee, we‚Äôre going to get killed.’ It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it."
I was saying much the same thing in January.
(Photo: Frederick M Brown/Getty.)
One of the strange things about having a blog, especially a one-man outfit like this one, is that, over time, you get to find out more about me, but not much about each other. Yes, you get to read some of the smartest emails on the web, but you don’t get to know who your fellow-readers are, where they live, what they do, what they see as they look out their window each morning. I get a little sense of it from the roughly 500 emails I get a day. But it’s still opaque.
Hence this idea, which may be nuts or inspired. We’ll find out. This week, get out your digital cameras, and take a picture of the view from your window. It can be your living room window, bathroom window, car-window or office view. If you’re serving in the military, or traveling, it can be just the view from where you’re standing or sitting. Email it to me, put "View From My Window" in the contents line, and I’ll post as diverse and as interesting an array of reader photos as I can all week. Just send it via the email option on the right, include the place and the time of day. By place, I mean town, state or county, and country. If you live outside America, I’d love to capture some of the exotic places I often get email from. Special treatment for those of you in the military, wherever you are. No names will be given: this blog’s rule of reader anonymity will remain. And by sending it, you give me the right to publish it. So show me – and every other reader – your world. Don’t pretty it up; just show it as it is – a glimpse through the looking glass of a blog, at the world its readers live in.
A reader asks a good question:
I was just wondering what your thoughts were about the now-failing Rove strategy. The
guy’s supposed to be a genius, but if he were so smart wouldn’t he have foreseen that embracing divisivess and extremism would come back to bite him and his party in the ass?
For that matter, what about the intelligence (or lack thereof) involved in the prosecution of the war and its aftermath? If I had wanted to assure a "permanent Republican majority" I would have done everything possible to assure that the war was a complete and unquestionable success. But clearly they planned it on the cheap and with lack of forethought.
Is this just stupidity? Hubris? Once again, if Rove was such a genius, wouldn’t he have done his part to make sure that the President and his policies were as certain as possible of success? Imagine, if you will, what a lock on power the GOP would now have if the war had been done right.
My money is on stupid. The right has long sought to portray Karl Rove as a genius; and the paranoid left has been only too happy to go along. My own view is that he’s always been a dreadful political strategist. We don’t have to wait for a GOP bloodbath this fall to see it. We had a president after 9/11 who could have asked anything of the American public and been supported. He chose a policy of brutal partisan division in war-time, and as commander-in-chief with a strong economy, he turned a 50 percent victory into … 51 percent. If he’d risen above petty partisanship, asked for real sacrifice, listened to the military leadership on the war, and included Democrats in a war-cabinet, he could have won in a landslide.
The domestic policy record is also terrible. By allowing the staggering splurge of spending, especially on the Medicare entitlement, Rove has destroyed the Republicans’ advantage on fiscal issues for a generation. By harnessing the GOP to religious fundamentalism, he has all but lost the center and independents; and by relying exclusively on that base, he is also alienating Hispanics on the immigration issue. His decision to ignore Iraq and go for an incoherent social security reform last year was another massive miscalculation. Yes, he can whip up hysteria against already-disliked minorities for short-term gain. But anyone with no scruples or conscience can do that. As for communicating the Bush message: Rove’s tenure has been marked by some of the worst p.r. I’ve yet seen from a White House. So, yeah. Rove is a terrible political guru. To sell your soul – and your party’s soul – for a permanent majority is one thing. To sell it for 51 percent is just pathetic.
He apparently is the source for the National Post story about Jews being forced to wear yellow badges in public in Iran. The Post has now retracted the story, but I haven’t found any explanation from Taheri. The FT reports:
The Post story was drawn from a column in the paper by Amir Taheri, editor of the state-owned Kayhan newspaper under the Shah of Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Mr Taheri claimed the law was ‘drafted two years ago’ and had been revived ‘under pressure’ from President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
‘The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognise non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean),’ Mr Taheri wrote.
A contributor to various newspapers including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, a leading Arabic-language newspaper, Mr Taheri is an opponent of talks between the US and Iran.
He wrote in the New York Post last month the US should ‘go for regime change in Tehran’ as the only way to stop Iran’s drive to ‘dominate the region and use it as the nucleus of an Islamic superpower which would then seek global domination’.
I’ve long read Taheri and appreciated his columns and reporting. All I can say is: he owes everyone an explanation. How did he come up with this? Was it a garbled misunderstanding? Was it propaganda? After the Iraq WMD debacle, we need to treat all intelligence from interested parties in the Middle East with a great deal of skepticism. The tragedy is: the underlying fact of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic extremism is true. Which is why sloppy MSM journalism can only help Iran’s leadership, rather than harm it.
The Human Rights Campaign is the premier gay lobby group in the country. I try to temper my criticisms because there are good people there who do important work. But having been in the fight for marriage equality for almost twenty years now, I can honestly say they’ve barely been detectable in the battle. They don’t seem to be getting much better. Their main message against the Federal Marriage Amendment, or whatever the far right is now calling it, is that it’s a "distraction" from more important issues. Chris Crain nails it here:
Rather than actually defend gay families and make the case for gay marriage, HRC is stuck in a three-year strategy of arguing that the American people don’t ‚Äî and shouldn’t! ‚Äî care about marriage equality for gay couples.
"Voters want candidates focused on soaring gas prices, a health care crisis and national security," [HRC executive director Joe] Solmonese says in the release, "not putting discrimination in the United States Constitution."
What sort of gay rights strategy is it, when the attention of Americans is focused on our issues, to argue that our rights aren’t important, and refuse to engage our opponents in the debate over our equality?
Amen, brother. Even now, HRC is still carrying water for the Democrats – some of whom, like Russ Feingold, seem to have more conviction on the matter than HRC does. Why do they exist? And why should any gay person care?
How much more damage can Howard Dean do to the Democrats before someone finally pulls the plug?
The Dish 