Analyzing the AIG bailout

Powerline looks at Hank Greenberg's recent testimony.

Key question: why did the Treasury opt for a "solution" that placed the interest of large banks (especially European banks) ahead of the US taxpayer?

This doesn't seem right

American taxpayers shell out trillions to save big banks.

Banks then layoff American taxpayers in order to hire cheaper workers brought over from India.

I thought the H-1B visas were supposed to be used to fix local labor shortages in critical skill positions.

There is no way that banking, with all the layoffs, has a labor shortage.

And people wonder why voters support limits on executive compensation.

What if the mule is too stubborn to pay attention

even after you whack it with a 2x4?

The Duke Lacrosse Hoax was a mighty big whack to the faculty and administration at Duke. Yet, they appear to have learned nothing.

The Group Tightens Its Vise

Yes. "Where do we go to get our election back?"

When the Left said that Bush was politicizing the Justice department and wanted to steal elections, i did not believe them.

At a minimum, i expected that if they were right, that Bush, Rove, and Gonzales intended to steal elections from Democrats.

What, then, to make of this?

DoJ Seeks to Reverse Ted Stevens Convictions

All kidding aside

The Other McCain does have a great post up on teams and leaders.

I'd call them cranky old men

But not all of them are old and some aren't even men.

How about clueless weenies?

Let's all get our shriek-freak on and bash Jimi Hendrix.

San Francisco education reform: Be like Jimi Hendrix

Well not here. This site brooks no bashing of Jimi Hendrix.

Heck, i'll even defend the SF schools on this one. If you want a pop icon to represent "transformation", Hendrix is a pretty good choice.

Now 'scuse me while i fire up the CD player with a little "Manic Depression."

You know who i want to hear from? R. S. McCain. As the right-o-sphere's reigning semi-reformed bad boy, McCain has to have a lot of fond memories with a Hendrix sound track. As a guitarist. he knows that Hendrix is more than a "drug-addled rock star". Yet we also know that McCain has broken bread with Malkin.

So what will it be? Will he stand up for truth, beauty, and essential American music? Or will he compromise out of political calculation and ideological alliance?

Watch this space as we look for clues for the state of Robert Stacy McCain's soul.

UPDATE: Worse than we dared think. McCain, who i thought was a patriot, actually wasted his time on derivative and pretentious Brits instead of a real American genius.

A world turned upside down

Strange times, maybe desperate times, when a conservative like me has to admit that left-wingers like Krugman and Joan Walsh make more sense than the typical right-wing pundit.

Paul Krugman:

Indeed, these days America is looking like the Bernie Madoff of economies: for many years it was held in respect, even awe, but it turns out to have been a fraud all along.

It’s painful now to read a lecture that Mr. Summers gave in early 2000, as the economic crisis of the 1990s was winding down. Discussing the causes of that crisis, Mr. Summers pointed to things that the crisis countries lacked — and that, by implication, the United States had. These things included “well-capitalized and supervised banks” and reliable, transparent corporate accounting. Oh well.

One of the analysts Mr. Summers cited in that lecture, by the way, was the economist Simon Johnson. In an article in the current issue of The Atlantic, Mr. Johnson, who served as the chief economist at the I.M.F. and is now a professor at M.I.T., declares that America’s current difficulties are “shockingly reminiscent” of crises in places like Russia and Argentina — including the key role played by crony capitalists.

In America as in the third world, he writes, “elite business interests — financiers, in the case of the U.S. — played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive.”

Joan Walsh in Salon:

The article confirmed a feeling I've had for a while, that the Democrats can't get us out from under this mess until they are forced to reckon with their role in creating it. Every time I see Chuck Schumer on television pretending to be a populist scourge of Wall Street, I remember his role in blocking higher taxes for hedge fund managers and repealing Glass-Steagall. I can't help thinking that Tim Geithner is too close to the industry that took over -- and took down -- the economy to tame it. A large part of the Democrats' resurgence in the last four years, ironically, has been its success raising money from Wall Street, which undermines its populist street cred at a time like this. Fortunately for the party, Republicans are just as compromised, so it's not too late to for Democrats to take leadership in bucking the financial oligarchy and develop real solutions to the financial crisis.

On the right there is a curious silence about the crony capitalism that created this mess. Instead we get Randian wet dreams about "Going Galt", and endless quotes from "The Road to Serfdom."

I can't say i disagree with Armed Liberal:

But - what I'm seeing in this rising tide of conservative confidence is relatively stupid chestbeating.

How evil is Google?

Well, Dante put hypocrites in the second lowest circle of Hell. By that standard, Big G is very evil.

For some reason, the site feeds from (Google-owned) Blogger are not talking to (Google-owned) Feedburner. I've wasted hours trying to get past that failure to communicate. The various "Help" screens seem designed to give the illusion of helpfulness without actually helping the customer.

Slowly the truth comes out

Karl at Patterico has more information about Dodd, his BFF at AIG, and charges of fraud.

Dodd and AIG: Perfect together

EXCLUSIVE: AIG chiefs pressed to donate to Dodd

$160,000 streamed in as senator gained power on banking committee

After all the political posturing over the retention bonuses, maybe we should ask the poliicians to return the campaign contributions they collected from Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Maddoff, etc.

The essence of leadership

An interesting article on Dennis Walaker, the mayor of Fargo.

With jokes and tears, Fargo mayor fights flood

Field Marshall Montgomery defined the essence of leadership:

The final test of a leader is the feeling you have when you leave his presence after a conference. Have you a feeling of uplift and confidence?

It appears that Fargo's mayor passes that test in spades.

I thought this only happened in movies

'Dumbest criminal' robs cop

Jerome Blanchett took a loaded handgun into the Holiday Inn-Harrisburg East on Friday, passing dozens of unmarked police cars in the parking lot and a sign at the hotel's entrance welcoming 300 officers to the Pennsylvania Narcotic Officers' Association conference, police said.

Nevertheless, the 19-year-old Harrisburg man went into the men's room and waited to rob the next person who walked through the door, police said.

Unfortunately for Blanchett, that person was John Comparetto, a retired New York City Police Department lieutenant.

Jack Shafer shoots down another media illusion

Democracy's Cheat Sheet?

It's time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential for democracy.

The doyens of the MSM have no solution to offer so they now sound like neurotic matriarchs of dysfunctional families. They cannot staunch the bleeding so they now threaten the nonreaders of their fishwrap:

"Your going to miss us when we're dead. Oh yes, you will. But it will be too late then."

A linkfest like no other

'The Full Monty Joint Review' Avalanche

More fun than reading footnotes and less dangerous than smoking in bed.

A peek into the roots of the crisis

Rahm Emanuel's profitable stint at mortgage giant

In the 1990s, when it happened in Asia, we blamed "crony capitalism." In Washington it is still business as usual.

Beldar looks at what it means here.

Soulcraft and statecraft

This post at The American Thinker spiked my blood pressure:

The Dead-End Politics of Envy

The posturing over the AIG bonues disgusts me, but Todd Dittmann’s post is so over the top it is shameful. Come on. Comparing the AIG executives to the victims of Stalin? Invoking Deadly Sins?

It also reeks of hypocrisy.

There are other deadly sins, some of which led directly to this economic cataclysm Did Mr. Dittmann denounce those as well? Where is his heartfelt post worrying about the sould killing danger of greed, gluttony, and pride on Wall Street?

Or is Todd Dittmann one of those worshippers of the “Bitch Goddess Success” who sees sin only in the agents of the State? We have many idolaters of the Market who believe that the cash nexus washes away all iniquity.

Once again, Chesterton was prophetic:

"In practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all."

"We are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor."

Heretics

The real meaning of gonzo

R. S. McCain explains it all to you:

In Search of Right-Wing Gonzo

More evidence that Congress is filled economic illiterates

Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) wants to save newspapers by letting them convert their ownership into non-profit corporations.

That way they won't have to pay taxes on their vast profits.

Oh. Wait a minute. Newspapers are dying because they have no profits in the first place. Their owners dream of having profits to tax.

Making sense of the mess

Some worthwhile reading on AIG and the wider political and economic issues at stake.

Is Physiognomy Destiny?

Last fall I thought Jamie Gorelick was emblematic of the disaster. Lawrence Summers is another poster boy for the flawed system that created the crisis and now prolongs it. David Warsh hits the gruesome highlights in a fair but tough-minded article.

Despite all his baggage, The New Republic thinks it is time to “unleash” Larry Summers. That is how our mediated democracy works. Those inside the charmed circle take care of one another. Once inside, no number of blunders, policy mistakes, or acts of dishonesty can undermine one’s standing.

In an honest, reality-based community, The New Republic would be interred next to the Weekly World News and Larry Summers would be fenced off from the levers of power.

The American Spectator zeroes in on another member of the Beltway elect.

Plenty of Rahm at the AIG Table

Why is the press so uncurious about Rahm Emanuel’s role in protecting the AIG bonuses?

Another hidden tidbit. The maneuvering around AIG was an all Democrat production. Pelosi and Reid excluded Republicans from the conference committee negotiations.

Maybe someone will ask President Obama how that fits into his efforts to transcend partisan bickering.

Edward Jay Epstein explains why AIG had to offer those retention bonues.

Sympathy For The Devil: Why AIG Had No Choice But To Pay

Joe Nocera provides a welcome level-headed assessment of the state of play and outlines the danger of mindless AIG bashing. (Hint: it costs the taxpayers money.)

The Problem With Flogging A.I.G

Nocera also makes a the point that much of the taxpayer money propping up AIG is immediately passed on to other financial institutions. One of the leading recipients is Goldman Sachs which is sitting on a cool $100 BILLION in cash as it collects your tax dollars through AIG.

Seems outrageous. Actually it stinks to high heaven when you remember that Goldman is the former employer of Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Rubin and Bush’s last Treasury Secretary Paulson. (Not to mention Chris Dodd’s colleague John Corzine.)

Finally, my own snarky little contribution. Several of these stories note that people who created the mess at AIG are no longer on the payroll. Joseph J. Cassano, for instance, no longer heads the financial products division that wrote and traded all those toxic credit default swaps. BTW, anybody want to guess whose campaigns Mr. Cassano contributed to?

If you said Chris Dodd and Barak Obama, you are a winner.

Goring the correct ox

True confession time. I have no idea what McCarthyism is.

Not the Man and the Era. That i understand. I've read the biographies and the histories. The "Ism", though, that is a problem. It is ill-defined: a buzzword for political attacks instead of a term with concrete meaning. Often it is just short hand for "stuff i don't like."

One reason for my confusion is the hypocritical ambivalence that anti-McCarthyites display toward McCarthy's tactics. When Joe does it, it is evidence of his wanton depravity. When others do it, however, the tactics often pass without condemnation. Almost never are they described as harbingers of a new dark age.

Take, for instance, the scandal of the AIG bonuses. Here we see Congress critters using their subpoena power to berate politically unpopular targets. Isn't that what McCarthy did?

Does no one hear echoes of the Tailgunner when Andrew Cuomo announces that he holds in his hands the list of those who received bonuses from AIG?

To raise these questions is not to be in favor of the bonuses. As in the McCarthy period, the key issue is one of ends and means. No matter how righteous the cause, there are limits to the means that can be used in its pursuit.

If McCarthyism truly represents a dark time in American History, then the behavior of Cuomo, Grassley, and Maxine Waters deserve condemnation as well.

Even Homer Nods

The Other McCain has a post up that defends David Frum. Admittedly, he does so in the course of bashing David Brooks, but that is no excuse. That is the equivalent of praising gonorrhea while condemning syphilis.

Come to think of it, Brooks is the less dangerous of the two. He has already settled into his spot on the liberal reservation. In the not too distant future no one except deep-died liberals will think of David Brooks as a conservative.

Frum, on the other hand, is still trying to get on board the conservative-bashing gravy train. We can expect plenty of mischief from DF as he tries to catch the attention of the MSM.

Good question

Will Krugman Call Obama Narcissist-in-Chief?

Frightening thoughts on what lives inside the Teleprompter Presidency

What’s behind Obama’s Teleprompter addiction?

Obama is addicted to his Teleprompter not only because he knows he sounds better—smoother and smarter—with it than without. The deeper reason for his reliance on it may just be that he differs so profoundly from the persona he wishes to convey that he quite literally cannot trust himself to speak without it. Shorn of the Teleprompter, he not only runs the risk of revealing a disfluency that could rival (or even exceed?) that of his reviled predecessor George Bush—he may reveal who he truly is, an angry man with a profoundly radical agenda for America.

The Anchoress must be lying

She claims that President Obama made a cruel jole on The Tonight Show.

I know that is not possible.

How?

David Brooks assured me that "Obama has the great intellect" and "he has tremendous powers of social perception." And we all know that David Brooks is never wrong. If you don't believe me, just ask David Brooks.

Clueless in the bubble

Turns out I’m not the only one concerned about the group polarization that Cass Sunstein sees as inherent in online life. Nicholas Kristof cites Sunstein in his Thursday column.

The only difference is that he is still worried about us barbarians who do not subscribe to newspapers:

The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.

Wonder what he thinks of journalists from the “traditional news media” kibitzing with leftwing bloggers and policy wonks on a secret listserv? He does not say. Guess that concern never entered his mind.

Underneath all the hand wringing, Kristof strikes me as a disciple of “castor oil journalism”. He is happy to deliver the medicine and is delighted to work for the biggest nurse in the ward. He worries about group think but what really scares him is that the plebes no longer let Pinch and Punch and Keller do their thinking for them.

In the end, Kristof is just making excuses for the catastrophic collapse of the MSM. He sees people deserting newspapers so he blames the customers for fleeing the purveyors of “hard truths” in favor of the “narcotic” of “self-selected news.” He will not, on any account, look at his own profession and its performance.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Kristof will revisit this issue. He can discuss JournoList and this study. Maybe he can tell us what it means when 70% of surveyed voters believe that the MSM favored Obama in the 2008 election. That is a hard truth and is well worth discussing.

But that is a tough issue for the hallowed NYT. Delicate subject. Handle it wrong and you might encourage the barbarians. Wouldn’t want to give them another reason to stop buying the product. Hard truths don’t come cheap and op-ed columnists have a life style to support.

Blog comment of the day

The best thing about blogs is i get to hear the opinions of people who were too smart to waste 4 years on a journo degree

From The Other McCain

JournoList

Good reading on the kerfuffle of the day:

Kaus

Tom Maguire

Winds of Change

For the journalists involved, isn't there a danger of groupthink and group polarization that Cass Sunstein is worried about?

We can sharpen our understanding of this problem if we attend to the phenomenon of group polarization. The idea is that after deliberating with one another, people are likely to move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which they were previously inclined, as indicated by the median of their predeliberation judgments. With respect to the Internet, the implication is that groups of people, especially if they are like-minded, will end up thinking the same thing that they thought before-but in more extreme form.

Barney Frank tries to rewrite history

Lucky for us that there is a blogosphere and sites like Patterico's:

Barney Frank cannot hide his Fannie role

Shattering some illusions

A new book looks at teen mass killers:

Columbine shooters mentally ill, not bullied


The most prevalent misconception about school shootings, Langman contends, is that they are perpetrated by loners or outcasts striking out against classmates who bullied them. In reality, most shooters were teased no more or no less than their peers, most had friends, and most of the victims were targeted at random.

Anti-bullying efforts really took off after Columbine. I remember hearing Rush Limbaugh zero in on an unintended consequence of linking such programs to school shootings. To wit, outcasts and misfits are already persecuted by their peers. After Columbine, law enforcement and school administrators added to their misery by treating them as potential mass murderers.

Much good sense on newspapers

The imperative of localism and local news

Both might be equally blamed on the turn from community news to more professionally produced political and process coverage by newspaper staffs. I call this "Castor oil" coverage, as in "we think this is important and we don't care whether you, dear reader, agree -- take it and don't whine about it."

(And note, too, readership declines started before newspaper chains became massive entities and were often publicly traded, so readership losses are not necessarily an ownership problem, either.)

-------

Of course, to me, the business model and the journalism model are one and the same. Revenue declines are closely related to readership declines, so we must fix readership before we can fix revenue.

RTWT

Newspaper killers mourn the passing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

I caught part of ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning” Sirius and happened to hear their discussion prompted by the end of the Seattle P-I. Both Golic and Greenberg pronounced themselves fans of newsprint and struck a mournful tone even as they admitted that new technology was killing traditional newspapers.

They were probably sincere which means they are remarkably obtuse about their role in the death dance of the local media dinosaurs.

Simply put, the success of their employer (hence their own livelihood) is based, in part, on sucking the life out of local papers all across the nation.

Start with the most basic economic realities. Audience attention and advertising dollars are finite. When one outlet grows its share, others must lose out. Declining media are hurt no matter if the growing outlets are blogs, talk radio, or cable channels.

ESPN’s success, to some degree, comes at the expense of local media. That is how markets work. These realities do not change just because Mike Greenberg loves newspapers while Rush Limbaugh hates the MSM.

ESPN is killing newspapers in other ways. For instance, they, like many primetime cable news programs, “cover a story” by talking to the beat reporters who are actually covering the story. In essence, they let newspapers bear the cost while ESPN or Nancy Grace shares in the benefit.

(I’ve long found it puzzling that publishers and editors let their reporters give away their expensive product to the competition. Don’t they know about unsold cows and free milk?)

It is not enough that cable takes without paying. As noted here, ESPN has degraded the product of local newspapers. At a time when these outlets need the best from their reporters and columnists, ESPN has pushed them to become less distinctive and less valuable. For every Woody Paige or Tony Kornheiser who becomes unreadable after they become ESPN stars, there are dozens of local scribblers who use their local reporting gig as platform to grab Bristol’s attention. Only a few like Rob Parker will pull it off, but all those failed Kornheiser wannabees still hurt the newspapers that pay their salary.

ESPN, with its national reach, is a big promoter of “teamless fandom”. Those fans best fit their business model. Hence, the emphasis on mock drafts, fantasy sports, individual highlights, and soap opera stories (like the sequential trainwrecks that define Terrell Owens’s career). Conversely, being the fan of a specific team is one of the best reasons to read that city’s newspapers. (I read the Post-Gazette online because it is the paper of record for Steeler Nation.) Once again, ESPN’s gain as they shape the sports media is newsprint's loss.

Why (most) newspapers are doomed

The people running newspapers have the information to diagnose the problem. Why can’t they act? Too blind to see? Too scared to take action? Too unimaginative to formulate a solution?

Some revealing results in this Pew research survey:

Stop the Presses? Many Americans Wouldn't Care a Lot if Local Papers Folded

Only 55% of the people who read their local paper would “miss it a lot” if it shutdown. I. e. barely half of current customers care very much. Among non-customers only 12% see the paper as important.

Among those who think that the loss of the paper will not hurt civic life, fully 20% say it is because the “quality of the newspaper is poor.”

Ouch.

There is also an intriguing example of the disconnect between the Audience and the Deciders.

The survey asked respondents to note the story they were following most closely. Number 1 was Obama’s plans to reform health care (26%) followed by unemployment and the stock market with 18% each.

And how much attention did these topics get from the MSM?

The stock market got 6% of the total coverage. Unemployment received 5%. Health care reform (#1 in audience interest) only received 4% of the coverage.

Way to appeal to the customers.

One story dominated the coverage. It received more attention than all three economic stories. Yes, that’s right—Rush Limbaugh. The Deciders devoted 8% of their attention to El Rushbo.

Only 4% of the audience thought this was the most important story.

Two obvious points stand out about this disparity.

First, the Limbaugh story was born and bred within the White House. It was a political strategy by Obama, Emmanuel, Carville, et. al. The skeptical MSM, the people who pride themselves on cutting through the BS of official Washington, fell in line and carried water for the Administration. They devoted twice as much coverage to political talking points as they did to the story their audience was most interested in.

Tell me again why they are a vital watchdog for democracy?

Second, David Frum poses as a conservative leader who wants to rebuild the Right so it can win again.

Yet, DF did not take to the pages of Newsweek to analyze the weaknesses of Obama’s health care program. Nor did he offer a conservative plan to rebuild investor confidence and speed economic recovery.

No. Frum went with the White House playbook and attacked Rush Limbaugh.

How exactly do you build a majority movement around an issue that few people care about. At a minimum, this raises questions about eDF’s political acumen.

Makes you wonder which is more important to Mr. Frum: creating a new majority or grabbing a resercon franchise like his buddies Brooks and Carlson.

UPDATE: Kathleen Parker is determined to win recognition as the most airheaded of all the airheads in the media. In her special little world, Rush Limbaugh and his fans are the reason newspapers are failing and that is a bad thing.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Parker is that editors PAY FOR her kind of clueless punditry.

Maybe it is just a giant terrible trick on little Kathleen. Maybe the cool kids are letting her play "elite opinionmaker" for a little while just so they can pull the rug out from under her. (Sort of like Carrie being elected Prom Queen.) That would be cruel, but at least it would show some intellegence on the part of the movers and shakers in the MSM. Right now, they just look stupid when they run her insipid stuff.

It's things like putting Kathleen Parker on your op-ed page that make readers say “the quality of the newspaper is poor” when asked why they do not read it.

UPDATE 2: One sure fire way NOT to win back dissatisfied customers is to hold them in such contempt that you see them as "a public that has been conditioned, like rats in a Skinnerian dystopia, to hate us."

Patterico calls out John Stewart

It’s possible for a comedian to have serious opinions, and Stewart is a smart guy, no doubt. He’s very clever and most people don’t notice that Clever Remark B and C contradict Clever Remark A.

But he’s also a wimp. He tries to be a political commentator, but if you call him on his own failings as a political commentator, he whines that he’s just a comedian.

Fine. You’re just a comedian. So when I look at you, you always have the clown nose on.

RTWT

Read, laugh, learn

FULMETJACSAT

Wonder what Orwell would think of Brooks, Frum, et. al.?

To be a highbrow [writer] with a footing in the snootier magazines, means delivering yourself over to horrible campaigns of wire-pulling and backstairs-crawling. In the highbrow world you "get on", if you "get on" at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.


The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white collar job ... and above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.

Makes me think he might agree with the comments noted here.

Remember children, it is hypocrisy that makes a story big news

You know, like the Larry Craig scandal or Mark Foley.

That's why you can expect this story to lead the evening news for days on end.

Maxine Waters: Banking on Hypocrisy

A link-fest like no other

Dr. Freaking S. Goodblog's Happy Hour of Hot Sweet Pink Rule 2 Linky-Love

Tough, smart, and funny.

A herd of independent minds

If I had to offer a single data point to validate the nightmare scenario outlined here, it would be this article.

Left Wing Journalists Celebrate Themselves

When you go looking for evidence that the journalistic establishment is blinded by a clueless leftism, you cannot ask for anything better than the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.

At a time when a sizable minority of the public thinks the press is too liberal, the elite of the guild decide to honor a man who never hid his leftism and who remained an apologist for Stalin decades after the purge trials, Ukrainian famine, and the pact with Hitler. (Stone signed a public letter to The Nation lauding Stalin as a bulwark against Hitler and a force for Peace just weeks before Ribbentrop and Molotov signed on the dotted line.)

If Izzy is a role model, the press will keep drifting left while audiences shrink. If the keepers of journalistic standards cannot see the difference between left-wing agitprop and honest analysis, what hope is there for righting the ship?

The grand poobahs of the guild probably do not recognize the contradiction between their claims of objectivity and their esteem for an unrepentant left-wing ideologue.

Nor can they reconcile the contradiction between their ritualistic denunciation of rightwing bloggers (they cannot be trusted because their work is shaped by their politics) and their high regard for I. F. Stone whose work was shaped by his (left-wing) politics.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus was a one-time fan and subscriber to the I. F. Stone Weekly. His take on Stone is out of step with the usual hagiographies:

I remember thinking at the time that some of the stories were probably not true, and that he knew it, which did not diminish his delight in telling them. When you’re “speaking truth to power,” you need not be too scrupulous about the truths you’re speaking. Izzy Stone was a hard-of-hearing, thick-spectacled, quizzical little man who exuded delight in fighting the good fight, as he understood the fight. He had no difficulty in separating the children of light from the children of darkness, and there was no room for shadows or ambiguities.

And this is dead-on:

Sartre and Stone were lovers of freedom only in the sense that they adamantly insisted upon their own right to do what they wanted, while being indifferent to or even, as was often the case, celebrating the powers that enslaved and killed millions of others. This is not a “paradox.” This is a deep corruption of intellect and soul.

Come to think of it, an “I. F. Stone Medal for the Deep Corruption of the Journalistic Intellect and Soul” is not a bad idea. Certainly better than one for “Journalistic Independence.”

The many fans of I. F. Stone also face the difficult question of his relationship with Stalin’s secret police. The end of the Cold War triggered a flood of new information about Soviet intelligence activities. Contained in this voluminous (but incomplete) record are hints that Stone had a covert relationship with Stalin’s operatives.

The Stone-groupies did not react to these revelations with a hard-nosed determination to seek the truth no matter how unpleasant. Instead, they rose up in a righteous rage that anyone would dare question the integrity of their friend/mentor/icon Izzy the Great.

The nature of Stone’s relationship with the KGB is still shrouded in mystery. There is no proof that Stone took money from Stalin’s Gestapo. His defenders claim that this is PROOF that he was as pure as fresh-fallen snow. Apparently, they never heard that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (It goes without saying that they have no interest in actually looking for more evidence.)

In their rush to exonerate Stone, they gloss over one glaring, incontrovertible contradiction in I. F. Stone’s career. They praise Stone’s resolute refusal to be sucked into the insider games of Washington journalism. They happily quote his dictum: ““You've really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you're sunk.” Yet even his defenders admit that Stone had no problem lunching with Soviet intelligence operatives and sharing his opinion with them.

What kind of twisted worldview sees patriots like Dean Acheson or George Marshall as the vortex of corruption, but has no problem dining with Stalin’s secret policemen in order to exchange information?

That worldview, in and of itself, makes I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence a laughable award. That the journalistic guild sees it as a high honor tells us all we need to know about life inside the media bubble.

Well said

Dead Wrong

When liberals adopt you as their token conservative, kiss your credibility among conservatives goodbye and say hello to writing gigs at the Atlantic, appearances on Keith Olbermann's program, and lectures at the Kennedy School of Government. David Brooks, who serves as the house conservative to both PBS's News Hour and the New York Times op-ed page, could have told David Frum this. To be the liberals' favorite conservative is usually an indication of just how alienated from conservatism one really is.

You could toss Tucker Carlson in there to make it a trifecta.

There is only upside for Frum, though. The moment he denounced Rush Limbaugh, all his embarrassing moments went down the memory hole. No one cares anymore about the grandstanding over the "Axis of Evil" speech. Bygones. Forgotten. Only people the press dislikes are reminded of past mistakes.

The bigger question, the more honest question, is this: When was David Frum ever an important leader in the conservative movement? The "second thoughts" of a self-promoting scribbler hardly seems worthy of Newsweek's attention.

ADDED: Waste not, want not. I emailed this another blogger several days ago. It fits, so i might as well use it.

A couple of years ago i started calling Brooks old buddy Tucker Carlson a "reservation conservative." Brooks is an even better example of the breed. The Frum is bargaining for a slot.

Liberals love those kind of "conservatives". It lets them define both the liberal and conservative position on an issue. (If Brooks gets too out of line, a sharp look from MoDo will send him to his keyboard to make amends.) And if real conservatives don't get in line, resercons provide a nice club: "even David Brooks thinks that The Other McCain is crazy."

Speaking of The Other McCain, this post contains an incredible sociological analysis of Washington and the environment that produces resercons.

If National Review wanted to be interesting again, they'd make McCain their Red America correspondent in Washington.

Even better, The Atlantic should hire McCain to follow-up on this idea:

As an aside-- it would be interesting if a magazine like The Atlantic did a reverse Brooks. Send a "Red America writer" to do a red/blue comparison.

Offered without comment

Between the late 1950s and the early 1980s government in the United States became so big and so complex that it all but lost the ability to function. A medical term, 'iatrogenic disease,' illness resulting from treatment by a physician, fairly well describes what happened. Starting with the New Deal, government attempted to solve problems of a nature and magnitude beyond the capacities of a limited constitutional system and perhaps of any system. Some remedies worked, others did not. When they did not, the tendency was to create a new program on top of an old one, rather than to scrap the old. By the early 1960s this jerry-built machinery was beginning to produce, or aggravate, social problems of a scale previously unknown in America. Every governmental 'remedy' produced a new governmental-caused sickness; and yet Americans had become so addicted to the habit of believing that government could cure everything that the response of the late sixties was wave after wave of crash programs. These created new problems that, in the seventies, resulted in more programs. By the time considerable numbers of people began to suspect that they were overgoverned, the reality was that, though government interfered in their lives from cradle to grave, it scarcely governed at all, in the original constitutional sense of the term. Government had ceased to be able to protect people in their lives, their liberty, and their property; and it had lost the capacity to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.

Forrest McDonald, A Constituional History of the United States, (1984)

Perhaps a badge of honor, but maybe not the best business model

I found this at a site that has a lot of smart things to say about journalism.

But there are probably just as many--or more--people rooting heartily for papers and journalism to fail, for political reasons.

Twenty-five years ago, a smart professor and editor of mine named Charles "Puff" Puffenbarger told me something about news audiences that I'll always remember: "They hate us out there." It appears that's true more now than ever.

The mind boggles. How can a for-profit business be so flippant about alienating their customers.

David Gerlenter relates a more telling and more recent anecdote in Drawing Life:

"Today's elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the '96 Dole presidential campaign: 'The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say 'yeah, i'm the Media. Screw You.' The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd-- an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none."

The media arrogance might remain, but the audience’s powerlessness is a thing of the past. Some talk back; even more stop buying the product.*

For decades journalists delighted in bringing bad news to the doorstep of their readers. Now the bad news is in the newsroom and the game is not fun anymore. Now it sucks to be a Decider.

The economic problem for newspapers is easy to see but hard to correct. They have a mass-market cost-structure but are headed toward a niche-product revenue stream. The business side responds as bean counters usually doget costs in line with the new realities.

The newsroom is not on board with this. (Understandably, since they are a big part of the cost being cut.) But they have few good ideas about growing their audience.

How could they? Their guild ethos sees angering (some) customers as a badge of honor. They have spent decades ignoring criticism. It is too much to ask that they suddenly start listening.


* In the “good” old days, the only way to talk back was to write a letter to the editor. Angering customers meant free content and reinforced the idea that the newspaper was the only game in town for public discussion and debate. The internet changed that. Now the criticism appears outside the confines of the newspaper. That, in turn, reduces the centrality of the local paper and makes it one of many competing venues. Bad news when your business model depends on being a monopoly.

Collectively, the internet also helps counter-act what Michael Crichton called the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Readers no longer fact check the newspaper based on their personal knowledge. Now they benefit from the combined knowledge of dozens of critics. (Ahh, the awesome power of the hyperlink.) this can be devastating to a newspaper’s credibility which is its primary selling point.

Counterpoint: I think conservatives underestimate the New York Times and are going to be disappointed at the end of the Dinosaur Media Death Watch. The newspaper industry may crater, but the Times has taken that into account. (See this Nicholas Carr article) If the Times is right, then they will be even more dominant in “explanation space.” (See also here.)


Related:

The newspaper today and tomorrow

Good sense here

Shook up about Rush, &c.

And let me say a further word about John McCain — whom I admire, and whom I voted for enthusiastically. He was almost perfect for the GOP moderate types, you would have thought. He was anti-Christian Right. He was Mr. Campaign Finance Reform. He was Mr. Amnesty. He was Mr. Global Warming. He was Mr. Reach Across the Aisle.

Except for being against abortion and for free trade, he was made-to-order.

And if McCain isn’t good enough for the [Colin] Powell brigades — who ever would be?

A five star thumbs up

Finally watched Taking Chance on HBO. It's a wonderful movie: understated yet powerful.

If you don't have HBO, you are going to want to get the DVD when it comes out in May. Trust me. You don't want to miss this movie.

I guess the rules only apply to little people

In Madoff asset search, wife's worth adds intrigue

Her husband is the one accused of the biggest fraud in Wall Street history, but Ruth Madoff's name also keeps coming up in investigators' pursuit of assets linked to Bernard Madoff.

From mailing more than $1 million worth of jewelry and watches in violation of a court order, to withdrawing $15.5 million before his December 11 arrest and an attempt to separate $70 million in her assets from his purported fraud, Ruth Madoff has added intrigue to the case.

That's going to leave a mark

R.S. McCain on David Brooks

If there is one thing that the blogosphere has accomplished, or will eventually accomplish, it is to expose the likes of David Brooks as vestiges of the golden age of journalistic excess, a Darwinian remnant of an obsolute appendage, a luxury that newspapers could arguably afford when ad revenues were growing and newsrooms were crowded.

RTWT

Who should i believe? Academics or my own lying eyes?

KC Johnson has a new post that reviews several academic papers on the Duke lacrosse case.

A difficult task

I can't say that i am surprised that enterprising "scholars" are devote time and energy to rewriting history. Ideology plays a role, but the main allure is market positioning. It is easier to get attention when your findings seem to contradict conventional wisdom.

I followed the mess down in Durham from the beginning. I blogged about it frequently. Almost all my posts zeroed in on the lies, distortions,and evasions of the press. If Gross and Entman believe that their methodology shows that the media was fair to the falsely accused lacrosse players, then i would suggest that they get another methodology.

Et tu, Warren?

Looks like all our pop idols have feet of clay.

Buffet Versus The Hedge Funds

It turns out that even while Buffet was denouncing derivative contracts as "financial weapons of mass destruction" and " time bombs", he was amassing one of the world’s largest position in them. For example, he sold derivative contracts on four stock market indexes– the S&P 500 in America, the FTSE 100 in the U.K., the Dow Jones Euro Stats 50 index in Europe and the Nikkei 225 Stock Average in Japan– for $4.9 billion that expose his company to over $35 billion in losses. In 2008 alone these contracts had lost on paper nearly $10 billion and with the market in free fall in 2009, they lost another $3 billion. Indeed, each percent these indexes decrease adds another $350 million to the loss Berkshire Hathaway is liable for.

Highly recommended

I've had it for a year and it spends most of its time in the stereo.

Hipster iconography

What's So Bad About Socialism, Anyway?

In 2007, Cameron Diaz carried a Maoist messenger bag while sightseeing in Peru and was forced to apologize — 70,000 Peruvians were murdered by the Maoist Shining Path in the '80s and '90s. At least with Che chic, the idiocy is dreamy and romantic and you can pretend that wearing his face is all about being young, riding motorcycles, and having South American-level sex; Mao was responsible for the death of 60 million people — he makes Hitler look like an amateur.

Cameron Diaz is not, of course, a communist. She's a ditz — that's her ideology. Her Mao bag was tasteless, not evil. And she's far from alone in her tastelessness. The coolest literary bar in New York is KGB in the East Village — the 92nd Street Y for young writers — and it's full of Soviet propaganda.

RTWT (HT: Photon Courier)

The "ditz pass" only applies to left-wing icons. If Cameron Diaz wore a Confederate flag t-shirt, i doubt that she would be excused for "bad taste" because she was ignorant.

The "upside" of the recession

The Economy made us do it

It seems today's tough economic climate has become the ultimate scapegoat for pretty much everything.

RTWT

I touched on this point last fall:

Notes on the current crisis

"Leap in order to look" An interesting post by Diane Coutu on dealing with an uncertain business environment:

Leap While You Look: Moving forward in the Recession A cosmology episode is the opposite of a déjà vu experience. When you experience déjà vu, everything suddenly feels inexplicably familiar. By contrast, in a cosmology episode, everything seems completely strange and dangerous, unknown. In cosmology events, people feel that they don't know what to do because they've never been here before. Panic and fear bubble to the surface, and folks become so anxious that they find it almost impossible to take action. Weick's insight about how to move forward during a cosmology episode is as counter-intuitive as it is compelling. The people who really get in trouble, he says, are those who rationalize everything before taking any action. Instead, leaders need to act before they have defined and refined all their hypotheses. "Action, tempered by reflection, is the critical component in recovering from cosmology episodes," he told HBR readers. "Once you start to act, you can flesh out your interpretations and rework them. But it's the action itself that gets you moving again. That's why I advise leaders to leap in order to look, or leap while looking."

Countu's "cosmology episode" echoes some of the findings of Cohen and Gooch's Military Misfortunes. In particular, the French high command in 1940 exhibited exactly the sort of quiet, cerebral paralysis that Weick predicts. Setbacks were not met with frantic reaction. Rather, the generals fell into the grip of a calm acceptance of the "inevitable". UPDATE: Bob Sutton sounds the same theme:

Reward Success and Failure, Punish Inaction

A solution for the banking crisis

David Warsh outlines a surprisingly workable solution:

Late Starter

Would Oswald have joined the Brady campaign?

Before he shot President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald composed a political manifesto setting forth his "Athenian System". While he was disenchanted with both the US and Soviet Union, he apparently did like the Stalinist gun control laws that prevailed in the USSR when he lived there.

At the end of his political treatise we find this:

Sale of arms-- pistols should not be sold in any case, rifles only with police permission.

Newspapers

Two smart proposals and one bad example of the problem.

Newspapers' supply-and-demand problem (Why you should quit doing what everyone else is)

Consider a scenario: Newspaper A posts a local scoop to its website. The story is picked up by other news organizations. It's rewritten, repackaged, sent out on wires, and within hours that story or some version of it — sans additional reporting — is on a hundred different websites. Much of this duplication is automatic, but some of it is done by human editors. (See Google News any day for an example of this.) Best-case scenario, a few of those sites actually link back to Newspaper A.

Now let's say most of the duplication stops. Because there are fewer versions of the story, more eyeballs now find their way to the original scoop on Newspaper A's site. Good. But aren't many of these additional eyeballs just single-page, out-of-market visits that have little value to advertisers? Maybe, but if Newspaper A is sticking to its core mission of covering local news, it will be able to deliver an audience that's more cohesive on the whole — and therefore more sellable — than if its content is all over the map.


Journalism is the business of building communities - so newsrooms must hire from within those communities

That, I think is where so many news organizations have failed over the past generation. In a drive to professionalize the journalism industry (and, then, to cut costs), we've cut our publications off from the communities they are supposed to represent.

This post might have been written as an illustration of that point.

What's your dream? Season tickets.

It drips with condescension and veiled contempt for the people of Pittsburgh. It is something you expect to read in the Boston Globe or an alt-weekly in a latte-town The only reason it caught my eye was that it was written by a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Yeah, that's the way to build your brand and connect with your audience. Hire people who think your subscribers are a bunch of conformist cowards who prefer mediocrity to excellence.

A good cop looks at the Kathryn Johnston case

Infuriated.

We should have gotten more time out of them. 5-10 with concurrent sentencing is not enough for what these men --police officers sworn to uphold the law-- did.

That's not what I got into policing to do.

Friends with badges, hear me: we had better damned well police ourselves. If a person in your ranks is breaking the law, then he is not a police officer-- he is a criminal with a badge. And we put criminals in prison.

This won't make some nano-pundits happy

Obama Gets High Marks for 1st Month

Large majorities of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll support his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the recently unveiled $75 billion plan to stem mortgage foreclosures. Nearly seven in 10 poll respondents said Obama is delivering on his pledge to bring needed change to Washington, and about eight in 10 said he is meeting or exceeding their expectations.

I guess those rants on Fox News and talk radio did not mean much after all.

Reminds me of something i once said

The Chandra Levy case may be close to an arrest.

It disappeared from the headlines for years. Any chance this is the reason?

At times, media coverage of criminal matters seems like a reversion to our primitive history. Watching Nancy Grace or Greta van Sustren brings to mind images from the Roman Coliseum. The goal isn't truth or justice, it is closure. Closure demands that someone must pay for the crime. Someone can easily become anyone, guilty or not.

I suspect that this is why the tabloid media continues to bash Aruba, but has lost interest in Chandra Levy. Both crimes are unsolved, but the DC police get a pass. Levy's murder, though, did cost Gary Condit his seat in Congress. Someone paid. That he was innocent of her murder is of little concern.

I'm interested in what the DC police have as evidence. I hope they found the guy who did it. But there is always a good chance that they are just trying to close an embarrasing cold case. (Their record as investigators is not good at all.

UPDATE: Here's an article from 2002 by a reporter who pointed to Ingmar Guandique at the height of Condit-mania. Oddly enough, her beltway colleagues were not interested.

Note as well how those journalists just assumed that someone fed her the information. Why was it so hard to believe that a reporter could find a scoop through independent digging?

Playing nice is not a strategy (at least not a winning strategy)

R. S. McCain has a great post up analyzing the GOP's woes and knocks down the latest "solution" offered up by a brain-dead nano-pundit.

Rick Moran takes counsel of his fears

Two quick points about Moran's "please be nice" whining.

One: By decrying the use of "wedge issues", Moran implicitly endorses the disenfranchisement of American citizens. These issues became political issues because activists and the courts sought to overturn established laws on abortion, marriage, education, etc. Moran condemns the majority who refuses to accept this judicial tyranny.

Bottom line-- an anti-democratic ethos is no way to build a successful political party.

Two: Moran's bogus history lessons are part and parcel of the "permanent campaign" mode that now defines our politics. That mode goes beyond starting the next election cycle as soon as the last vote is cast. It also has a retrospective component as partisans try to re-write the history of past campaigns to gain useful talking points or to neuter issues that hurt their party.

Thus, Willie Horton becomes evidence of Republican racism instead of the liberalism of Michael Dukakis. The Swift Boat Veterans become partisan liars even when they present unchallenged facts about John Kerry. John McCain lost because of Sarah Palin.


"Rovian wedge issues" are just another example. As R. S. McCain points out, basing one's arguments on the dishonest talking points of the other side is no way to find the truth or to win political support.

That said, I'm not as confident as McCain whn it comes to beating Obama with a free market platform.

There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?

40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.

The usual mantra of "No socialism, Free Enterprise!" just seems inadequate in the face of the current economic realities.

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

Any sustained revivial of free market politics requires three things. First, we need solid, empirical analyses of what went wrong. Second, we have to admit that "our side" made mistakes. (Bush, after all, missed plenty of opportunities to rein in the madness.) Finally we need reform proposals that respect free market principles but also mitigate against a repeat of this crisis.

Unless the right can do these things, the conservative coalition faces a long stretch in the wilderness or even disintegration.

Harvey Milk and the People's Temple

A useful history lesson. Seems Hollywood left out some parts of the story.

"Milk": Another People's Temple Political Strongman Gets The Whitewash -- And Just Maybe Even An Oscar Or Two?

"And hold their manhood cheap..."

A righteous smackdown from the Mudville Gazette, the best i've seen in months:

Who gives a rat's ass about a magazine designed to sell hair gel to "men"? Part of that equation is making sniveling little cubicle dwellers feel like they're hot shot studmuffins who just need the right cologne to finally score a date with that hot chick from accounting, and a big part of that equation - along with advice on white water rafting gear they're never going to use - is making them feel superior to (and more "manly" than) guys like Lt Jones, he of the "lower-tier liberal arts college" who couldn't get a job and is therefore "stuck in Iraq Afghanistan". (Sound familiar?) So readers of "Men's Journal" get to the end of that story convinced of their ongoing superiority to anyone who doesn't get a "Hawaiian Shirt Friday", turn the page, start drooling over the chick in a Bulova watch ad and forget all about it.

RTWT

R. S. McCain thinks he might be unfair to Bill Moyers with this headline

J. Edgar Hoover, Bill Moyers and LBJ's homophobic witch-hunt

Based on Moyers's history, i think he is being too kind to the old fraud. (See here)

In from the Cold has much more on the background to this story. RTWT.

That little thing called supply and demand

Nicholas Carr looks at the future of journalism and sees things that most new media pundits ignore:

The writing is on the paywall

Now here's what a lot of people seem to forget: Excess production capacity goes away, particularly when that capacity consists not of capital but of people. Supply and demand, eventually and often painfully, come back into some sort of balance. Newspapers have, with good reason, been pulling their hair out over the demand side of the business, where a lot of their product has, for the time being, lost its monetary value. But the solution to their dilemma actually lies on the production side: particularly, the radical consolidation and radical reduction of capacity. The number of U.S. newspapers is going to collapse (although we may have differently branded papers produced by the same production operation) and the number of reporters, editors, and other production side employees is going to continue to plummet. And syndication practices, geared to a world of geographic constraints on distribution, will be rethought and, in many cases, abandoned.

As all that happens, market power begins - gasp, chuckle, and guffaw all you want - to move back to the producer. The user no longer gets to call all the shots. Substitutes dry up, the perception of fungibility dissipates, and quality becomes both visible and valuable. The value of news begins, once again, to have a dollar sign beside it.

.

It's sort of like the old joke about out running the bear. The New York Times does not have to be profitable right now. It just has to lose money slower than the other newspapers.

Armed citizens and al Qaeda swarms

This recent op-ed offers a sobering look at the evolution of terrorist tactics.

The Coming Swarm

WITH three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new “Mumbai model” of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.
The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.

The author believes that current US doctrine is too centralized to deal effectively with this type of multiple, small-scale attacks. He recommends dramatic changes or necessary to prevent Mumbai-scale carnage in this country.

At the federal level, we should stop thinking in terms of moving thousands of troops across the country and instead distribute small response units far more widely. Cities, states and Washington should work out clear rules in advance for using military forces in a counterterrorist role, to avoid any bickering or delay during a crisis. Reserve and National Guard units should train and field many more units able to take on small teams of terrorist gunmen and bombers. Think of them as latter-day Minutemen.

He overlooks a critical dimension that is directly relevant to his scenario. The original Minutemen were civilians ready to take up arms in defense of their community. A non-trivial minority of US citizens still live by that ideal. Armed citizens may be the most effective force in limiting the death toll should terrorists try to carry out swarm attacks here.

I argued that point here in response to Richard Clarke's "scenarios" several years ago. The new terror tactics make civilian response even more promising.

For one thing, small terrorist teams (two men each in the Mumbai example) decrease the odds against civilian responders. Private citizens fight back--successfully-- against armed assailants everyday. It may appear suicidal to take on eight or ten terrorists with a handgun. That is not the case when armed citizens fight back against one or two criminals.

Second, the slow expected response by the professionals actually undercuts one of the most popular arguments against civilian resistance to terror attacks. Skeptics often claim that arriving first responders will shoot anyone with a gun. Thus, fighting back makes you a target of both the terrorists and counter-terrorist units.

But if the counter-terrorist response is expected to be slow and deliberate, then the risks are all on one side. The danger of being mistaken for a bad guy by the SWAT team is low. Against terrorists any resistance is better than passive capitulation.

See also:

Richard Clarke in The Atlantic

"But Richard Clarke was a wimp"

Mall Shooting and future terrorism

Lessons and preparations

Why legal technicalities matter

Here's a terrible story out of Texas.

Seeking justice for convict who died in prison

Rape victim, late inmate's family have DNA tests, other man's confession to back their claim.

The family of Tim Cole cleared his name and had his rape conviction overturned. That is a small victory in a bleak, tragic story. Cole was falsely convicted and died in prison.

At the heart of the nightmare is a faulty, unduly suggestive police line-up that led the victim to identify Cole as the man who raped her.

When defense attorneys challenge investigative procedures, their arguments are frequently dismissed as trivial. Yet this case demonstrates why sound procedures matter. For Tim Cole, they were a matter of life and death.

Jason Whitlock-- Genius

No other sportswriter can pack so much good sense into a few words:

A-Rod comes clean — now baseball needs to do same

[A-Rod] even expressed respect for the most clueless and potentially most dishonest commissioner in the history of professional sports, Bud “Iceberg” Selig, who had a front-row seat for McGwire and Sosa and was repulsed by Bonds. Selig pimped the ’roiders for relevancy when the game was in the toilet and now claims he was a victim of the steroids era.
Please let this end. The discussion of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is clearly the most deceitful, unintelligent, unsophisticated and hypocritical debate ever held in sports journalism.
We’ve done virtually nothing to rid football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, tennis, soccer — or any other sport performed for large sums of money — of performance-enhancing drugs. We’ve crucified and jailed a few high-profile athletes. We’ve made a few sportswriters wealthy and famous, or in the case of A-Rod’s hunter, Selena Roberts, we’ve hyped her tell-all book about the third baseman and given new life to her floundering back-page column in Sports Illustrated.

As a journalistic outsider, i think Selena Roberts's role in this deserves greater scrutiny. How was it, exactly, that she obtained the results of "confidential" drug tests. Who broke their word to give her the hot info about A-Rod?

Over 100 players failed those tests, yet Roberts published one name. Oddly enough, that one player she outed is the subject of her forthcoming book.

Sweet!

Number Six baby

This pretty much removes all doubt. The Steelers are the greatest NFL franchise of the Super Bowl era.

The flag of Steeler nation

A great story in the New York Times no less

For Terrible Towels, a Wonderful Legacy

Is there any hope for the academy?

Some days i doubt it. This is one of those days. I just finished KC Johnson's review of the latest Duke lacrosse book. His incisive analysis shows once again that too many modern academics spend most of their brainpower avoiding inconvenient facts that are right in front of their eyes.

Review: Race to Injustice

Having fun with a serious subject

R.S. McCain has a little sport with the latest sex "research".

Sex and science

Unfortunately, this kind of bad research can have terrible consequences when it gets into the hands of educators.

Give us science, but not too much


"What Lies Beneath the Titillation"

The future of newsweeklies

Howard Kurtz looks at Time and Newsweek as they struggle to adapt to a changed media marketplace.

Do Newsmags Still Matter?

Two elements of their strategy seem problematic.

First, both magazines have reconciled themselves to shrinking readership. Each of them are moving away from a mass audience model and are concentrating on a niche marketing approach.

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal.

It is striking that both editors are fighting for the same liberal readers as an answer to a shrinking market. Both magazines would rather compete for the same readership instead of repositioning to appeal the under-served center-right readership.

Selling opinion does have one advantage-- it is cheaper than reporting.

The shift toward analysis carries an ancillary benefit: It is cheaper than shoe-leather reporting. Each magazine's editorial staff -- 215 for Time, fewer than 200 for Newsweek -- is about half the size it was a decade or so ago.

The short-term cost savings may be an illusion. Opinion is free and plentiful on the web. As Time and Newsweek become less news-based, they end up competing with all that internet punditry.

Lower costs are only part of a solution for any struggling company. They also need to put out a product that people will pay for. I think it is debatable that the week-old commentary of Jonathan Alter or Joe Klein constitute a compelling proposition to potential subscribers.

This has long been one of my favorite quotes

Eric Hoffer

Nice write-up about one of my favorite Steelers

James Farrior: The Quiet Riot

Steelers linebacker James Farrior doesn't have Baltimore star Ray Lewis' flamboyance, but he's every bit the competitor

He has topped the acclaimed [Ray] Lewis three of the past four years in tackles and sacks and surpassed him three of the past five years in forced fumbles and fumbles recovered. But Farrior's number of Pro Bowls? Counting this year's, two, compared to Lewis' 10 in 13 seasons. Farrior's number of Defensive Player of the Year Awards? He finished No. 2 to Lewis' Ravens teammate Ed Reed in 2004, compared to Lewis' two first places.

See more here.

How the game is played in Washington

Peter Pettigrew Politics From the Land of Powell

Wilkerson seems oblivious to the idea that his comments paint not only himself but Secretary Powell into a newer version of what was said of Richard Nixon during Watergate. Either, said the liberals (and others), Nixon was corrupt (if he knew about Watergate and was a participant of some sort) or he was utterly stupid (if he had no idea what was going on around him in his name). It was a lose-lose proposition that meant Nixon had to go. In the Wilkerson version, either he and his boss Powell knew all about these high crimes being committed by Bush, Cheney and company (in which case they should have done something about it post haste) -- or in not knowing what was going on around them every day proved Powell and company as little short of spectacularly incompetent in their respective posts at the State Department.

Yet Powell himself received a great deal of favorable press during his tenure. And still does, as the mainstream media lapped up his endorsement of Obama. How can this be if Powell and his staff did such a lousy job? It is one of the hardiest if hoary rules of thumb in Washington that there is a direct relationship between positive press clips and leaks. The revelation that Powell Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was in fact the leaker of Valerie Plame's CIA identity to columnist Robert Novak provided a quite accidental look-see for Washington outsiders into how the Powell people played the game, even if Novak wasn't into the burnish-the-Powell-portrait game. It was decidedly not an accident -- nor the action of a "dumb strongman" -- that Bush refused to give the Powell-Wilkerson clique a second tour of duty at State. The President had to suspect or know outright what the game was. That whatever the real object with Powell and his entourage, to give this clique another four years in which they could quietly, on a not-for-attribution basis, continue to trash their own president in precisely the kind of terms Wilkerson suddenly began spouting in public after his and Powell's departure from Foggy Bottom would be a big mistake.

An extraordinary memoir

One of my Christmas presents was Robert Novak's The Prince of Darkness. It is an amazing memoir-- honest, opinionated, and unflinching. Novak shows us the inside of Washington journalism and how it changed over the past half-century.

The book is worth reading simply for the inside story of the Plame/Wilson "leak" and the phony scandal it produced.

Sympathy for the devil

The New York Times has an interesting obituary for CIA traitor Philip Agee. Of course, since it is the New York Times, they manage to 1) minimize the harm he did, 2) overlook the KGB's role in his activities, 3) blame the CIA for "exploiting" Agee's public treachery.

The New Criterion offers a necessary corrective here.