J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail

Ten Economics Paragraphs: December 12, 2009

Worth reading:

1. Calculated Risk: Refinancing with Negative Equity: Unfortunately David Streitfeld doesn't provide any further information on Belvedere's loan. If the loan was held by a bank, then it might make sense for the bank to refinance the loan (this lowers the bank's risk of default). However Belvedere's "lender" might be a servicing company and the loan may have been securitized. Then it is impossible to refinance because the current holders of the note would be paid off, and no new lender would make a loan greater than the value of the collateral...

2. Mark Whitehouse: American Dream 2: Default, Then Rent: Schoolteacher Shana Richey misses the playroom she decorated with Glamour Girl decals for her daughters. Fireman Jay Fernandez misses the custom putting green he installed in his backyard. But ever since they quit paying their mortgages and walked away from their homes, they've discovered that giving up on the American dream has its benefits. Both now live on the 3100 block of Club Rancho Drive in Palmdale, where a terrible housing market lets them rent luxurious homes -- one with a pool for the kids, the other with a golf-course view -- for a fraction of their former monthly payments. "It's just a better life. It really is," says Ms. Richey. Before defaulting on her mortgage, she owed about $230,000 more than the home was worth...

3. Fake Steve Jobs: A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T: And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country. I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment. Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline. “Okay,” I said. “Nice talking to you.” Then I hung up.

4. Paul Krugman: Jobless Recovery: There was ample warning, even before the severity of the crisis was clear, that the recession was likely to be followed by a prolonged jobless recovery. E.g., here (January 2008): "I still keep reading articles asserting that the last two recessions were brief and shallow. Formally, that’s true. But … in both cases the employment slump went on for a long time after the recession was supposedly over. There’s every reason to think that the same thing will happen this time. There’s a huge overhang of excess housing inventory; it will probably take several years before housing prices fall to realistic levels; and it’s not at all clear what will fill the gap left by weak housing and consumer spending..."

5. Stan Collender: Baucus To Conrad And Gregg On A Budget Commission: Yo Mama: Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) yesterday delivered this speech on the Senate floor against the budget commission proposed by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Budget Committee Ranking Republican Judd Gregg (R-NH).  Although it was couched in the polite language typically used on the Senate floor, this absolutely was the Washington equivalent of "Yo mama"...

6. Mark Kleiman: "Anyone Telling You Uncertainty About Climate Change Is a Reason for Inaction Is Either a Fool or a Scoundrel": [G]reater uncertainty argues for more caution--more willingness to accept certain current losses to avoid possible large future losses--not less. That’s because it’s easier to adjust to small changes than it is to large ones, so damage is likely to increase more-than-proportionally as the size of the change increases...

7. Brad DeLong: Is This a Congressional Joke?: I am--in normal times--a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole. But when I look at Senators Conrad and Gregg, I don't recognize fellow members of my species. They may be glueing the feathers of deficit hawks onto themeselves, but they are birds of a very different order--doves, turkeys, chickens, whatever, but I hope they are dodos...

8. Mark Thoma: Why it May Take Almost Seven Years for Unemployment to Reach Five Percent: The average rate of decline in the unemployment rate over the last three recessions is .061 percent Using this figure, and starting from an unemployment rate of 10 percent — the rate that exists today — how long would it take for the unemployment rate to get to 5 percent? Answer: (10-5)/.061 = 81.8 months, or almost 7 years. (Getting to 6% would take 65.5 months, or just short of 5 and a half years.)

9. Ed Hugh: The Velocity Of Modern Financial Crises: Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president, noted when speaking in Cambridge last Thurdsay that the speed at which financial disruption can spread had “accelerated tremendously over the past few decades”. While debt crises in the 1980s occurred over years, the effects of the Lehman collapse “spread around the world in the course of half-days”. As Ralph Atkins pointed out, the Greek government is but the latest to learn that in the modern world you can be catapulted from relative obscurity to global prominence in a matter of hours. Everyone can be famous for five minutes, as Andy Warhol said, but this kind of fame most of us could well live without...

10. Brad DeLong (October 10, 2008): The wrong financial crisis: All of us from Lawrence Summers to John Taylor were expecting a very different financial crisis. We were expecting the ‘Balance of Financial Terror’ between Asia and America to collapse and produce chaos. We are not having that financial crisis. Instead we are having a very different financial crisis. Catastrophic failures of risk management throughout the entire banking sector caused a relatively minor collapse in housing prices to freeze up global finance to a degree that has not been seen since the Great Depression. The first good thing about this situation is that it does not call for different central banks and Treasuries to do different things, but rather for them all to do the same thing in unison without fouling each other’s oars. That should be relatively easy to arrange. What we need right now are: (a) Coordinated fiscal expansions across the globe. (b) If the world economy is not now in something close enough to a liquidity trap to make no difference, it soon will be: coordinated monetary expansions across the globe. (c) A bank is any organisation that borrows or accepts investments short and lends long; the durations of its assets and liabilities are deliberately mismatched; when the entire banking sector is insolvent at current market prices, anything that reduces interest rates all along the yield curve helps reduce the magnitude of the insolvency: coordinated banking sector recapitalisations across the globe. (d) Since at least 1844 there has been broad consensus that the short-term price of safe liquidity is too important to be left to the market; now there is growing consensus that the price of risk is too important to be left to the market as well. For the government to operate on the price of risk through Operations-Twist on a Galactic scale is infeasible. That means that the aggregate degree of capitalisation of the banking system must become the object of policy choice. Call it socialism in one sector. What we need in the longer term are: (e) Global rules to make outsized compensation incentive-compatible. The Princes of Midtown Manhattan and Canary Wharf need to know that their fortunes will be lost if their institutions blow up within a decade of their handing over operational control – only in this way can you make them truly long in the fortunes of their firms and of the global economy rather than simply long in volatility. (f) More progressive global tax systems...

Have I Ever Said That I Am Very Envious of This Weblog's Name?

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

In Celebration of a DMCA Takedown Notice: I Link to Elizabeth Kolbert on “SuperFreakonomics”

Well, this is new. My first ever DMCA takedown notice--from HarperCollins, publisher of Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics. While other publishers these days are happy to have sample chapters of their authors' works read and distributed on the internet, not so with HarperCollins.

One thing I can do in response is--tit-for-tat--to remove my praise of and link to E.M. Halliday's Understanding Thomas Jefferson: there are other better (albeit longer) Jefferson biographies published by firms that have not sent me DMCA notices: read them instead.

I urge everybody--authors and readers alike--to just say no to HarperCollins in the future.

A second thing I can do is to link to Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Superfreaknomics in the New Yorker:

“SuperFreakonomics” and climate change: Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed.... By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis inundated by ordure had been misplaced.

This story—call it the Parable of Horseshit—has been told many times, with varying aims. The latest iteration is offered by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their new book, “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”.... Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change: “Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization, there is now a fear that human activity will do the same.” As usual, they say, the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.” Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.”

Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix.” Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels—these are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the pair write, “like wearing sackcloth.” Wouldn’t it be simpler just to reëngineer the planet?... “Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem,” Levitt and Dubner write....

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind. It’s their contention that they don’t need it. The whole conceit behind “SuperFreakonomics” and, before that, “Freakonomics,” which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed.... Levitt and Dubner claim to have solved the mystery of why crime, after soaring in the nineteen-eighties, dropped in the nineteen-nineties.... They also have proved—at least to their own satisfaction—that names like Ansley and Philippa will be popular for girls in the coming decade, that reading to your kids doesn’t matter, and that drunks should be encouraged to drive rather than walk.

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate....

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” is... [t]hough climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are.... Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought).... There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe. “By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”...

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Erasmus, Tolkien, Clark Kerr, and Californium

Lance Knobel emails:

Your style of leaping from Erasmus to Tolkien to Clark Kerr to Californium is hard to capture in words, but I've had a go.

Clearly I read The Glass Bead Game at a too-impressionable age. The chain of associations Erasmus-Tolkien-Clark Kerr-Californium makes perfect sense to me...

He attaches a link to:

DeLong view of the future – Berkeleyside: Oct 14th, 2009 by Lance.

Ask Berkeley economist and blogger Brad DeLong about the future of higher education as digital technology develops and you’ll get a disquisition about Erasmus of Rotterdam and the puzzle about how the idea of the university survived Gutenberg and 1435. DeLong enjoys pointing out that UC Berkeley is the only university to have named four elements (Chicago only counts two). His blogging occasionally plunges into detailed macroeconomic arguments,  but he seems happiest when drawing on a seemingly inexhaustible trove of economic, political and social history to make cogent points about the present day. I caught up with DeLong in the new Peet’s in the university’s gleaming CITRIS building for some blogger-to-blogger chat, but also to see what he thought of UC Berkeley’s future given its dire budgetary straits.  DeLong has written frequently about the importance of Berkeley as a public university, often contrasting it with his own alma mater, Harvard. It was a day after the particular highpoint for a Berkeley economist of seeing yet another colleague, Oliver Williamson, awarded the Nobel prize for economics (the fifth Berkeley economist to win that honor).

Berkeleyside: Does Berkeley have a future as a great public university?

DeLong: There’s one view that it’s going to be absolutely fine. You look at the University of Michigan and UVa and they have made successful transitions to this mixed public/private institution. Berkeley should do even better. We are close enough to Silicon Valley and the extraordinarily unequal California economy that they money will flow. Not at a Harvard scale, but it will flow.

Berkeleyside: Is it just the California advantage?

DeLong: We’re Oxford 1880. Everyone at the rising superpower across the ocean wants their children to come. We’re culturally more friendly to Asia in lots of ways than other institutions. Then you think that there are 80 million 18-year olds in Asia. There are 800,000 of them in the top 1 per cent of income. There are 16,000 of them in the top 2 per cent of intellect and achievement. If we fumble that market position, we don’t deserve to survive. But we are also an amazingly bureaucratic organization and it’s conceivable that we could fumble the whole thing.

Berkeleyside: But if Berkeley and other UC campuses end up serving the Asian elite, what does that mean for its public role in California?

DeLong: There will still be pressures to fulfill Clark Kerr’s vision of creating a broad UC system. Since 1950 the system went from admitting 4,000 undergraduates a year to 50,000 a year. That’s institutional success at an extraordinary level.

Berkeleyside: Do feel the budget cuts directly?

DeLong: No, not me personally__but all kinds of administrators around me are feeling it. And economics has had a greater than normal number of faculty losses recently. It’s hard to know whether that’s just part of the cycle, or whether it’s people leaving because of the prospects. There’s also the fact that life for Berkeley economics faculty always becomes more stressed when there’s a Democratic administration in Washington. You lose some colleagues to that, but you also go from being someone who is carping on the sidelines to someone who’s ideas are sought.

For all the pressures, being a tenured professor at a research university is still an amazing deal. It’s the closest thing in our age to being landed gentry.

Berkeleyside: You’ve talked about the rosy scenario for Berkeley, but what could take it in the wrong direction?

DeLong: You could have a situation where more and more money gets sucked up into keeping our old tenured faculty. Instead of hiring new tenure track people you hire lecturers who are less expensive. You get the grant-running done by non-tenured researchers. Then we have something like the old regime in France where the aristocracy--the tenured faculty--is corralled into Versailles...

Berkeleyside: You’ve written often on your blog about the virtual university that exists in the blogosphere. Is the information age going to create something that supplants the university?

DeLong: Why didn’t this happen after 1435 when the price of a book fell 30-fold? The book is a sophisticated multimedia device. Reading takes place between the ears in a brain that is capable of extraordinary things. There were plenty of people who were disappointed when The Lord of the Rings movies came out because the characters didn’t look anything like the characters they had created in their own minds. So what you suggest ought to have happened in the 15th century.

Berkeleyside: But now in addition to books you can go online and follow courses at MIT or Berkeley.

DeLong: I’m going to teach my 20th century economic history course online next summer. I feel that if anyone is going to be making money or having influence teaching 20th century economic history, I want it to be me...

Skitch: Most Wonderful Piece of Software I Have Found This Year

I find that on the internet ease-of-use is all: things that take one click happen; things that take one click, one click-and-drag happen, and then a second click happen; things that require that one download files, type in file names, upload files, and type in link ids... they simply do not happen.

Lots of times I find that I want to grab an image or an image with a little bit of associated text and keep it--either for myself, or to republish it on the web.

Skitch is by far the easiest way I have found to do this, and has become a very normal part of my day.

Lindsay Beyerstein Joins Obsidian Wings

Publius:

Obsidian Wings: Welcome!: I wanted to take a moment to welcome Lindsay, and to thank her for joining the team. I know I'm speaking for everyone else in saying we're very excited that she joined. I've enjoyed reading Majikthise (along with her other journalistic work) for many years now -- as have many of you. So again, welcome!

Curious how neither the Washington Post nor the New America Foundation is this smart...

Wonk Watch Resurrexit II

Still not bored...

Mark Thoma reports Arin Dube's finding that the absence of a public option turns health reform into a gold mine for insurance companies, laments the continued reach of the right-wing slime machine, tells us to read Paul Krugman on how national health insurance works in the socialist hell-hole that is Switzerland, says we will know when the recovery has started well before we will know why, points out that public and private firms compete in garbage collection, and sends us to Bruce Bartlett's meditations on how Keynes was really a conservative.

Justin Fox is driving across the country from San Francisco to New York. I saw him just before he left while I was drinking a Mexican chocolate mocha at Papillon in Lafayette's La Fiesta Square, and moaning about how spaces that in Yurp would be pleasant parks and gardens are in America parking lots filled with SUVs on the one hand, Priuses and Teslas on the other, and a few convertibles.

Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen despair at the possibility of informed democracy. Cheer up, Alex! James Madison assures us that:

The science of politics... has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles... either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients... distinct departments... legislative balances and checks... courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people... by deputies of their own election... are wholly new discoveries... means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided...

Nino "Equal Protection of the Laws Requires that George W. Bush Be President by 5-4" Scalia and Charles "Death Panels" Grassley will save us all, with the assistance of the filibuster! They also think we are doomed never to reform our health care system, and report on math suggesting that eternal vigilence and preemptive attacks are the only security against zombies.

Wonk Watch Resurrexit!

There was a thing called Wonk Watch:

Wonk Watch | The Big Money: We read the smarties so you don’t have to. The economic blogosphere has two distinct sects: the communicators and the brilliants. The communicators are the journo-bloggers who rehash the news with a dash of insight but a dearth of big-think vision. The brilliants are the wonky bloggers who break news with a visionary thesis that nobody can read all the way through.

The Sausage is a communicator. We'd like to help you understand. Thus, we bring you Wonk Watch, where we read the brilliants so you don't have to. We've chosen the wonks that most set the agenda for the rest of the econosphere, based on a totally subjective assessment. For now, our debut roster will include two economists, a blogger who may as well be one, and an analyst. Introducing:

Brad DeLong, UC-Berk[e]ley economist
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times
Felix Salmon, Reuters blogger, formerly of Portfolio
Barry Ritholtz, CEO of only research firm Fusion IQ

It now appears to be dead.

But it was useful.

Someone should put their foot down and continue it, and that foot is me (until I get bored, at least):

Brad DeLong surveys the birther movement of 1377 and is annoyed at the cancellation of Wonk Watch and at Dick Armey's belief that Medicare = slavery. His main outings are a correct-the-record piece on how Brookings's Barry Bosworth is solidly in the pro-stimulus camp (and not "skeptical" as David Bleeping Broder claims), and some musings on a theme by Paul Krugman about the end of the possibility of bipartisanship and how this meshes up with Harold Pollack's call-out of Orrin Hatch for lying on TV.

Paul Krugman says that he and Robin liked Julie and Julia and that German politicians talk classical but walk Keynesian economics. His main outing consists of thoughts on why recently when the government deficit is high interest rates are probably low--basically that movements in animal spirits either boost economic activity and so raise both interest rates and government revenues or cause economic slumps and thus lower both interest rates and government revenues.

Felix Salmon's views may or may not be his own, but are extremely unlikely to be the views of Reuters. They include that shares of the music company EMI may go to zero, that the P/E ratio is high (needless to say because earnings are low), wonders whether Rahm Emmanuel is actually the Treasury Secretary, and applauds Justice Emily Jane Goodman for keeping that Snidely Whiplash that is WaMu from forcing Little Nell to surrender her virtue to keep her farm--all because WaMu decided that the fees from foreclosures made them something it wanted to do as much of as possible.

Barry Ritholtz notes that he was seven at Woodstock, is pleased that restaurants in the Hamptons are now full, snarks at quotes from President Herbert Hoover, and says that Gene Epstein of Barrons is as bad at choosing books as he is at economic forecasting--and that the worst book recommended is Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust, which "mixes in just enough reality to keep you wondering. The problem I found is the reality-based work is filler, there only to legitimize the political talking points..."

Tomorrow--unless I get bored--Mark Thoma, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, and Justin Fox. Tuesday: James Hamilton, Menzie Chinn, Yves Smith, and Calculated Risk

Does Anybody Know where Amy Tennery and Gabriel Beltrone Are?

Seemed to me that they did a good job, and thus are people whom I should put a tracer on somewhere. But there is no interest on the part of Slate in telling me where they have moved on to.

Jay Rosen has something harsh and shrill to say about this mindset, I am sure.

Wonk Watch Takes a Hiatus | The Big Money: The TBM office is mourning the loss of our trusted interns for many reasons, not the least of which is their dogged devotion to this daily feature. Amy Tennery and Gabriel Beltrone have moved on to full-time jobs elsewhere in the media world, and for that we're happy. But it means Wonk Watch will lay dormant until we can figure out who will keep its flame burning. Until next time, WW diehards.

Tom Ricks Unleashed (Media Criticism Department)

James Fallows:

Notes on repatriation (recession, media depts): The NYT... is a recognizable version of the publication I'd previously known.... The poor Washington Post is not. Laying off -- that is, buying out -- so many reporters who knew so much about their topics has had a more profound effect than I would have guessed. (Locus classicus: Tom Ricks on defense.) And the resulting paper seem more obviously desperate to try anything that will draw attention in this new age.... [E]veryone in every field needs to make his or her work as entertaining and attractive as it can be. But trying to compete for attention on sheer yuks is a step toward the brink. "Real" entertainment will always be more entertaining.... Anyone hungry for more on this theme is invited to check out the whole chapter on the death-spiral of infotainment in Breaking the News...

Matthew Yglesias comments:

Matthew Yglesias: Fallows on Newspapers: It’s also worth noting that though Ricks’ departure from the Post certainly counts as a major loss to that organization, that it’s not as if Ricks or his insights has vanished from the planet.... Foreign Policy... includes a really good blog by Tom Ricks. He’s also a senior fellow at the influential Center for a New American Security think tank and still producing excellent, well-regarded, and commercially successful books. And thanks to the Internet, all kinds of people around the world who are interested in defense issues can read what Ricks has to say, which really wasn’t the case 15 years ago...

I think Matt is massively understating his case. Back when Tom Ricks wrote for the Washington Post, you see, he did not say what he thought. You had to wait three years for him to write a book before you could learn what he really thought was going on.

For example, courtesy of Billmon, Tom Ricks in September 2003:

Senior U.S. commanders here are so confident about their recent successes that they have begun debating whether victory is in sight. "I think we're at the hump" now, a senior Central Command official said. "I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly" -- possibly within a couple of months, he added...

But Tom Ricks in 2006:

[T]here is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of [Saddam] Hussein['s regime] helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been...

When called on this "inconsistency" between what he was reporting in 2003 and what he knew back then was really going on, Ricks said:

I sometimes think that the left would only be happy if we started labelling all their enemies liars. I noticed that one leftish blogger criticized me for quoting generals who said in 2003 that we were winning the war. I don't think he understands that part of my job is to quote people accurately--even if I don't agree with what they are saying. Next!...

When he was writing for the Washington Post, Tom Ricks claimed that it was unprofessional for him to do anything to inform his readers when the people he was interviewing were lying to him. Now things are different. Now Tom Ricks's Foreign Policy weblog is much more likely to include material like this:

Tom Ricks: CORRECTION: The other day this blog referred to right-wingers recklessly calling Obama weak for his careful handling of the Iranian crisis as "clowns." In fact, they should have been called "dangerous clowns." Best Defense regrets the error.

This is a big gain, no?

Not only are Tom Ricks's writings now accessible to the whole world, but now they come without editing by that truly dangerous clown Len Downie and his staff, no?

And now they come with Ricks not guarding his tongue and so misleading his readers. no?

This is win-win-win-win, no?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Spencer Ackerman writes:

It Wouldn’t Kill You To Give Noah Shachtman His Due: I noted that mainstream media outlets have a widespread and unfortunate tendency to refuse crediting any rival outlet -- print, online, TV, whatever -- with being first on a story if they can somehow get away with it. Here's a great example. My friend Noah Shachtman runs Wired's Danger Room groupblog.  For the past week, he's broken and advanced a story about the Marines banning social media like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace from its networks. This comes on top of years' worth of reporting on the military's adjustment to Web 2.0. If you've read anything about this issue, it's because of Noah....

Here's a Los Angeles Times story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah [Schachtman] at all. Here's a Wall Street Journal story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah at all. Here's an AFP story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah at all. Here's a Christian Science Monitor story about the social media ban that doesn't reference Noah at all. Here's a Voice of America story about the social media ban that, perversely, references the AP, AFP and Reuters and doesn't reference Noah at all.

This isn't the fault of any individual reporter. It's the fault of an outdated newspaper convention that equates proper referencing with an admission of professional failure...

I'm curious. In what sense is it not the fault of every individual reporter? Are we still allowed to deny the moral agency of delinquents? "He's a good boy; he just runs with a bad crowd" would seem to be the kind of limousine liberal egghead thinking that has no place in modern America, isn't it?

Brad Setser Goes to Work for the National Economic Council

He writes:

Brad Setser: Follow the Money: This will be my last blog post, at least for the foreseeable future. I have accepted a new job, one that will require a certain level of discretion. I am excited by its challenges: ‘Balanced and sustainable” growth is something that I believe in. But suspending this blog is still hard.... I started writing a blog almost by default. There wasn’t an obvious source of demand for the kind of work that I wanted to do. My interests were too grounded in current events to fit well with academia, especially as I neither am a true economist nor a true political scientist. And I was too interested in policy issues to match, consistently, the interests of the market — especially as I am a bit better at seeing risks than opportunities. No private bank keeps a specialist on the TIC data on their payroll. Plus writing a blog gave me the freedom to write what I wanted when I wanted – and on occasion to work from where I wanted to work.... The ability to try to hash out, in real time, crucial questions with true experts is the great advantage of the web....

Fundamentally this blog was about an issue – the United States’ trade deficit, the offsetting trade surpluses in other parts of the world and the capital flows that made this sustained “imbalance” possible. Most of my early blog posts argued, in one way or another, that taking on external debt to finance a housing and consumption boom wasn’t the best of ideas. Even if (or especially if) the deficit was financed by governments rather than private markets. I always intended to write extensively about the world’s emerging markets. I never anticipated that I would end up writing most frequently about an emerging economy that I hardly knew when I first started writing this blog: China. Back in 2004, I was an expert on sovereign debt, not sovereign wealth. But some stories seize you. And China’s rise as a global creditor was just that story. I never thought China’s government would ever add close to $800 billion to its foreign assets over four quarters — accumulate close to $2,500 billion in foreign assets. China has stretched all definitions of the possible. There is – understandably – an enormous amount of interest in the consequences of a world where China is the world’s key creditor country; that, more than anything, seemed to drive this blog’s traffic...

Typepad Attempts to Simplify Workflow...

It tries to enter the age of multimedia.

Quintuple Meta Post on Health Care...

Robert Waldmann goes quadruple meta on the triple meta Matthew Yglesias:

Robert's Stochastic thoughts: Quadruple meta: Matt Yglesias goes triple meta in his blog post "Stay First-Order on Health Care." writing

It’s difficult, of course, to critique the impulse to “go meta” without falling prey to accusations of going double meta...

You can be the first (OK in the first million) to go quintuple meta on the blogosphere by linking to this post...

Don't break the chain!

The Revolt of the Stenographers...

At the moment, at the top of nytimes.com are four stories:

• A pretty good story by Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston filling in details in stories reported at lest three years ago by Ron Suskind in his The One Percent Doctrine--and, of course, they do not cite or reference Suskind in any way: Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston: Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests: "The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States. The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests. Most former officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations about the case involved classified information...": + 1/2

• Tobin Harshaw well out of his depth on finance: he truly darkeneth counsel without wisdom--it really is too bad that he took Chris Suellentrop's "Opinionator" and trashed it: -1

• Peter Baker and Helene Cooper adding absolutely nothing to the state of play on Crowley-Gates-Obama: 0

• Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore "As Officers Face Heated Words, Their Tactics Vary" with a truly self-parodying headline adding nothing to the state of play on Crowley-Gates-Obama: 0

That's minus one-half for four--a batting average of -0.125.

At the moment, at the top of washingtonpost.com are four stories:

• Ernesto Londono doing real reporting from the urban battlefield in Iraq: "After the Shooting, Another Showdown: Deadly Clash Underscores Rift Over Interpretation of U.S.-Iraq Deal": "When insurgents attacked an American convoy with AK-47 rounds and a couple of grenades on a dusty highway in a Baghdad suburb this week, U.S. soldiers returned fire, chased the suspects through narrow alleyways and raided houses. When the shooting subsided, another confrontation began. A senior Iraqi army commander who arrived at the scene concluded that the Americans had fired indiscriminately at civilians and ordered his men to take the U.S. soldiers into custody. The U.S. military said the soldiers had acted in self-defense and had sought to avoid civilian casualties; U.S. commanders at the scene persuaded the Iraqis to back down. The incident, apparently the first time a senior Iraqi commander has sought to detain U.S. soldiers, signals a potential escalation of tensions between U.S. and Iraqi forces trying to find a new equilibrium as Iraq assumes more responsibility for its security...": +1

• Michael Rosenwald: "Digital Nomads Ditch Their Cubicles for Diners and Pool Decks"--a piece that doesn't even try to provide any information at all about how many "digital nomads" working at coffeeshops there are these days or how their lives have really been changed by the coming of wifi and lattes, and so is more an embarrassment than anything else: 0

• Jason Straziuso and Rahin Faiez doing competent stenography about the war in Afghanistan: "Suicide attackers strike southeastern Afghan city": + 1/2

• Dan Balz sucking hs thumb and adding absolutely nothing to the state of play: Obama's Ambition: Was His Strategy a Mistake?: 0

That's one and a half for four--a batting average of +0.375

Taking the eight lead stories of the New York Times and the Washington Post together, we have a batting average of +0.125.

Now let's take a look at the most recent stories for the eight top feeds in my RSS reader:

• Chris Whalen at The Big Picture on financial regulatory reform: "Is the Fed About to Lose On “Systemic Risk” Legislation?": "It is really fascinating to see how much people underestimate the political staying power of technocrats such as FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair and SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. I get the distinct feeling that some senior members of the media, analysts and the banking community, still don’t see the ladies as serious players. If you bother to look at the Players’ Roster of American politics, it is clear that the ladies are very much in the ascendancy in Washington, both in government and in the lobbyist community. Consider the movement in terms of legislation on regulatory reform. The ebb and flow of the debate is headed very much in the direction of collective, shared authority for determining when a TBTF bank or, more specifically, a non-bank company such as AIG needs restructuring. This goes directly contrary to the Geithner proposal to give this function to the Fed...": +1

• rdan of Angry Bear sends us to Mark Thoma of Economist's View who tells us to read a 1983 New York Times story about health care reform in Canada: Douglas Martin: "Health Care in Canada: Popular System Now ROcked by Criticism": +1`

• Steve Benen reports and analyzes Obama's attempt to sell health reform: "Not surprisingly, President Obama devoted his weekly multi-media address to health care reform today -- the sixth address to emphasize reform in the last eight weeks. But what I found noteworthy about today's was the target audience of the pitch. In his five-and-a-half minute message, the president didn't mention the word "uninsured." In fact, the address wasn't geared towards the tens of millions of Americans without coverage at all. Instead, Obama talked almost exclusively about the importance of reform on businesses and employers. In fact, the president referenced the words "small business" 11 times in his message this morning...": +1

• Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings advances the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: "These statistics cast an interesting light on Brandon del Pozo’s defense of police doctrine... police work is less dangerous than many other possible occupations, and that less than half that danger stems from violent resistance by suspects – the kind of 'loss of control' that defenders of Officer Crowley’s conduct during the Gates arrest point to as a major danger.... What statistics alone can’t untangle is the impact of police praxis on the danger level: is police work relatively safe because police are hardcases about maintaining control, or is it relatively more dangerous because the provoke confrontations. And the ultimate question begged previously is where police safety ought to rank in the hierarchy: is it better that police feel as safe as possible or that citizens be respected...": +1

• von of Obsidian Wings advances the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: "Pithlord makes clear a point that I consider essential, namely 'We all act like dicks sometimes, and I can sort of understand both Gates and Crowley's point-of-view in a subjective sense. I imagine I'd feel pissed off if I was either of them. The difference is Crowley acted illegally and unprofessionally.' (Emphasis mine.) That's a huge difference.  As I've written in comments, I don't know and don't really care if Professor Gates lost his cool and acted like a jerk.  I do know, however, that Gates didn't have a gun and the power to throw Crowley in jail...": +1

• Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo doesn't advance the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: "Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says he'd be happy to have a beer at the White House with Officer Crowley and President Obama...": 0

• Heebie-Geebie on the social isolation of the mother of the neonate in modern American culture: "Lately I've gotten really into making the bed each morning. It only takes a minute, and the room looks so much tidier. I think this means I've got too much time on my hands, or maybe my brain. At least I'm not fretting about imaginary baby symptoms.... Being around babies too much is a kind of sensory-deprivation zone where you start hallucinating symptoms out of sheer boredom...": +1/2

• Steven Teles at The Reality Based Community advances the ball on Crowley-Gates-Obama: [T]his little micro-dispute in Cambridge was fundamentally a conflict about "honor." This whole thing would have been a big nothing if either man were willing to swallow his pride. The cop could have defused it by letting Gates call him a racist and have it roll off his back. He couldn't because, I think, he has a self-conception as precisely not a racist cop.... To back down would have been to... be dishonored. Gates couldn't back down and say "yes, officer, whatever you ask, officer" because he believed he was being treated in a way that was inappropriate to his status as a Harvard professor and because he thought he was being hassled because he was black. To back down would have been untrue to his idea of himself.... So they both stood their ground, and the guy with the gun won. And so Gates retaliates in the media, and with the president.... Now the Cambridge cops think that they are being dishonored.... The question is, is there any way for everyone involved here to retain their honor? That is, can they back out of this thing with the way they understand themselves, and that they want others to understand them, intact?.... Today... Obama seems to have realized that taking sides in this zero-sum conflict was not the right move, at least given his office. Which is why this is so refreshing. Whatever his flaws, Obama knows when he messed up and he knows how to find the right way to clean up his mess. Whatever his flaws, I do believe this is a man who has a touch of greatness--not from being flawless, but from being able to recognize his flaws and counteract them...": +1

That is a score of six and a half out of eight--a batting average of 0.8125: I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time reading one of the top stories printed by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

To some degree this is the "Daily Me" phenomenon: my RSS reader is now tuned to bring me things written by people I learn from, while the editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times select stories on the basis of... bizarre and incomprehensible algorithms. To some degree this is because this is because the WP and the NYT are pitched at a level far below the one I want to read at, in part because they think their audience is less clued-in than I am (Peter Baker and Helene Cooper; Dan Balz) and in part because their reporters are out of their depth (i.e., Tobin Harshaw). In part this is because they are unprofessional (i.e., Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston not situating their article in its proper context in the journalistic enterprise begun by The One-Percent Doctrine). To some degree this is because their reporters know nothing about how representative their anecdotes are and so have absolutely nothing interesting to say (Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore; Michael Rosenwald).

And then there are Jason Straziuso and Rahin Faiez performing the very useful service of writing up the briefings in Kabul, and Ernesto Londono putting his life on the line to inform us about what is going on half the world away.

With this as background, let's consider David Simon's proposals for the future of journalism. Here's David Simon with the mike:

Build the Wall : CJR: To all of the bystanders reading this, pardon us. The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism--two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good... [and] still have a card to play... the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution.... Yet incredibly, they delay, even though every day of inertia means another two dozen reporters somewhere are shown the door by a newspaper chain, or another foreign bureau closes, or another once-precise and competent newsroom decides it will make do without a trained city editor, an ombudsman, or a fully staffed copy desk.

This then, is for Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth: Content matters. And you must find a way, in the brave new world of digitization, to make people pay for that content. If you do this, you still have a product and there is still an industry.... I know that content wants to be free on the Internet.... I know that commentary--the froth and foam of print journalism--sells itself cheaply and well on thousands of blogs.... I know that if one of you should try to go behind the paywall while the other’s content remains free, then, yes, you would be destroyed.... But also apparent is the fact that absent a radical revisiting of the dynamic between newspapering and the Internet, there will be little cohesive, professional, first-generation journalism at the state and local level, as your national newspapers continue to retrench and regional papers are destroyed outright.

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future--let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it--both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only.... No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling.... You must both also individually inform the wire-service consortiums that unless they limit membership to publications, online or off, that provide content only through paid subscriptions, you intend to withdraw immediately from those consortiums... make a voluntary donation--let’s say $10 million--to a newspaper trade group to establish a legal fund to pursue violations of copyright, either by online aggregators or large-scale blogs, much in the way other industries based on intellectual property have fought to preserve their products....

[T]he need to create a new revenue stream from the twenty-first century’s information-delivery model is, belatedly, apparent to many in the industry. But no one can act if the Times and The Post do not; the unique content of even a functional regional newspaper--state and municipal news, local sports and culture--is insufficient to demand that readers pay online. But add to that the national and international coverage from the national papers that would no longer be available on the Internet for free but could be provided through participation in the news services of the Times and The Post and, finally, there is a mix of journalism that justifies a subscription fee. Time is the enemy, however....

[F]or the Times and The Post--entities that are still providing the lion’s share of journalism’s national, international, and cultural relevance--their reach has never been greater. The proof is that while online aggregation and free newspaper Web sites have combined to batter paid print circulation figures, more people are reading the product of America’s newspapers than ever before....

No doubt some mavens of new media who have read this far have spittle in the corners of their mouths at the thought of the dying, tail-dragging dinosaurs of mainstream journalism resurrecting themselves....

[T]he fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished--some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day.... Detroit lost to a better, new product; newspapers, to the vague suggestion of one....

[T]hree factors are worth noting--if only because of their relevance to the online subscription model that is clearly required:

• First, there is the familiar industrial dynamic in which leaders raised in one world are taken aback to find they have underestimated the power of an emerging paradigm. When I left my newsroom in 1995, the Internet was a mere whisper, but even five years later, as its potential was becoming a consideration in every other aspect of American life, those in command of The Baltimore Sun were explaining the value of their free Web site in these terms: this is advertising for the newspaper.... Looking back, it sounds comical....

• Second, the industry leaders on both the business and editorial sides came of age in an environment in which circulation had long been a loss leader, when newspapers never charged readers what it actually cost to get the product to their doorstep. Advertising, not content, was all. This specific dynamic maximized everyone’s blindness to the real possibilities of a subscription model.... [I]f there is no profit to be had in delivering the paper product to homes at existing rates, then by all means, jack up those rates—raise hard-copy prices and drive as many readers as possible online, where you charge less, but at a distinct profit....

• Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets.... [L]tle was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street Journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated.... The cancer devouring journalism began somewhere below the knee, and by the time the disease reached the self-satisfied brain of the Washington and New York newsrooms, the prognosis was far worse....

[H]ere are a few possible outcomes, if the Times and The Post go ahead and build that wall.

• First scenario: The Times and The Post survive, their revenue streams balanced by still-considerable print advertising, the bump in the price of home delivery and newsstand sales, and, finally, a new influx of cheap yet profitable online subscriptions. And reassured that they can risk going behind the paywall without local readers getting free national, international, and cultural reporting from the national papers, and having seen that the paid-content formula can work, most metro dailies will follow suit....

• Second scenario: In those cities where regional papers collapse, the vacuum creates an opportunity for new, online subscription-based news organizations that cover state and local issues, sports, and finance, generating enough revenue to maintain a slim—but paid—metro desk.... In a metro region the size of Baltimore, where 300,000 once subscribed to a healthy newspaper, imagine an initial market penetration of a tenth of that--30,000 paid subscribers (in a metro region of more than 2.5 million), who are willing to pay $10 per month... for the only product in town that covers local politics, local culture, local sports, and financial news--using paid reporters and paid editors to produce a consistent, professional product. That’s $300,000 a month in revenue, or $3.6 million a year, with zero printing or circulation costs.... At $100,000 a position for editors and reporters, that’s a metro desk of some thirty-five paid souls....

• Third scenario: Except for one in which professional journalism doesn’t endure in any form, this is the worst of all worlds. The Times and The Post survive because their coverage is unique and essential. But the regional dailies, too eviscerated to offer a credible local product, cannot entice enough online subscriptions to make do. They wither and die....

But all of this is, of course, academic. Because at this moment, Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth have yet to turn that last card. Until they find the will and the courage to do so, no scenario other than the slow strangulation of paid, professional journalism applies. Meanwhile, we dare to dream of a viable, online future for American newsrooms.

A few comments:

• I think Simon has gotten the hierarchy wrong. In terms of willingness-to-pay, mine is, in order: (1) the FT; (2) the Economist; (3) the Contra Costa Times; (4) the WSJ (and double if my online subscription came with the editorial page excluded); (5) the New York Times; (6) the San Francisco Chronicle... (666) the Washington Post.

• So I don't see the Washington Post surviving in any scenario: what does it have to sell, after all? At the international and national level, there are lots of organizations for whom aggregating up the international and national news makes sense as a loss leader.

• I do see the Contra Costa Times surviving: at a local scale, the task of aggregating up all of the press releases and police blotters and local gossip blogs is not of sufficient interest for anyone to do it for free, so there is value there.

• I do see the FT and the WSJ and the Economist and--alas! given its employment of the odious Stuart Taylor, Jr., he who slammed Sonia Sotomayor for being insufficiently grateful to Princeton for its beneficence in admitting her--the National Journal surviving: beat-level knowledge and expertise at that level is valuable.

• I don't know what is going to happen to the Atlantic and the NYRB and the New Yorker: it could go either way.

• I don't know what is going to happen to the New York Times: it could go either way.

• And I think Simon has gotten the situation very wrong: if the WP and the NYT move together on September 1 to cut off access, they die immediately and everyone switches to reading the Manchester Guardian, which flourishes. If the WP and the NYT and the LATimes and the Grauniad and the Times of London and the Telegraph all move together on September 1, they die and the Chicago Tribune flourishes. If the CT also cuts off access--if everyone with a White House correspondent cuts off access--then the White House web page becomes America's daily national newspaper, and that State and Treasury webpages become our daily free international and financial newspapers, respectively--with lots of webloggers peering over their shoulders to try to keep them somewhat honest...

Very Bad News for America's Public Discursive Sphere...

Hilzoy writes:

Obsidian Wings: Bare-Faced Go-Away Bird: I'm taking this opportunity to retire from blogging.... The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die. I thought: we've gone mad. And I have to do something -- not because I thought that I personally could have any appreciable effect on this, but because it felt like what Katherine called an all hands on deck moment. I had heard about times like this in the past -- the McCarthy era, for instance -- though I had never expected to live through one. Nonetheless, I was. And I had to try to do something, however insignificant.... Then, in 2004, I was asked to join Obsidian Wings. It was an honor: at the time, ObWi was, for my money, the best blog that really tried to create a dialogue between liberals and conservatives. And that was what I really wanted to do: to listen to people I disagreed with, to engage with them, and to try to show that it was possible to care deeply about politics without hating your opponents. Being civil doesn't mean you're lukewarm, and being committed to your principles doesn't mean you have to be hateful. Being asked to write for the Washington Monthly was a further honor, and one that I never expected.

That said, it seems to me that the madness is over. There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more.... And so it seems to me that it's time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.

It has been wonderful, though.... I put something up, and suddenly all these wonderful, smart, and articulate people whom I've never met pop up and start saying interesting things about it. It's a gift for which I will always be grateful. Thanks to everyone...

Now she goes to sleep in her cave near Caermarthen, to awake and post again in Britain's hour of need when King Arthur once again grasps Excalibur and returns from the Faerie Isle of Avalon... No, wait... wrong legend...

I urge everyone to post and send me links to or simply email their appreciations of Hilzoy--and of their favorite things that she has written over the past five years.

Etiquette

Freddie of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen asks a question:

The TAS Advice Column: [A] link from one particular blogger has eluded me--Matt Yglesias. Yglesias is my favorite blogger, and his blog is the first one I ever read. Now, I’ve tried posting obvious Yglesias bait, and linking to his pieces myself, and even been linked to defending him from the attacks of a blogger who he has linked to. (Got that?) No dice. So what, pray tell, is a young blogger to do?...

It's simple: you mount your destrier, take up your lance, and ride to the offices of Center for American Progress. There you tap on his shield with your lance--the butt end for a link a plaisance, the sharp end for a link a outrance.

I recommend a plaisance...

Robin Sloan's Iran News Superfilter

#IranElection tracker for the easily overwhelmed (robinsloan.com): Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed...

Via Xeni Jardin.

Morning Daniel Froomkin News Roundup

Hamilton Nolan:

Gawker - Washington Post Fires Token Liberal - Dan Froomkin: The Washington Post, which pays money to opinion writers such as Bill Kristol (smarmy) and Richard Cohen (smarmier), has fired blogger Dan Froomkin, one of the only WaPo opinion writers who pointed out that the Bush White House was crooked. Froomkin wrote the "White House Watch" blog and he was extremely "Liberal" because he generally pointed out the Bush administration lied all the time. (While the rest of the paper's opinion page supported the Iraq War, etc, they really do suck). Here's the paper's s----- explanation:

I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com

Translation: the Washington Post has to be even more conservative now with Obama as president or else they won't be taken "Seriously"...

John Harris of The Politico:

John Harris: This is a quick note on your recent items on Dan Froomkin's ouster from the Post.

I blundered four years ago in allowing myself to have an overwrought public disagreement with Dan over what now seems (and if I was thinking clearly at the time would have seemed then) an insanely narow [sic] issue--i.e., whether his column was appropriately labeled. I don't want any current references to that now ancient episode to obscure my actual view of Dan and his work. I think he is a distinctive and valuable voice on the presidency and on journalism. I particularly admire the entpreneurialism [sic] he has shown in his career--using the power of the Web to build a community of followers and create his own franchise. This was actually my view at the time, though it got lost in the smoke when I got indignant over a couple points that seem distant now. But my view has strengthened in the years since, with more appreciation of how the Web is changing journalism and how enterprising writers thrive in this new environment.

It's been nearly three years since I have had anything to do with decision-making at the Post, and I have no insight into what prompted he and the Post to part ways. But he had some impressive achievements there, and I hope he'll find the right home for his voice soon.

Best,

John Harris

Actually, I don't think that last is true. I think John Harris has considerable insight into what prompted the Post to fire him--how could it possibly be otherwise? I would be interested to learn what his insights are.

Glenn Greenwald:

Glenn Greenwald: [T]his Froomkin firing is so revealing.  The fact that one of the very few people to practice real adversarial journalism in the Bush era was decreed not to be a real "journalist" -- and has now been fired by the Post -- is one of the most illustrative episodes of the past several years regarding what the real function of the establishment media is.  Along those lines, Harris might want to consider also acknowledging that Froomkin was absolutely right when insisting (and Harris wrong when doubting) that Froomkin was not acting as "liberal opinionist" when criticizing Bush, but rather, was as an "accountability journalist" because he was merely pointing out facts, and would subject the actions and claims of a Democratic president to the same journalistic scrutiny.  Froomkin's tenacious criticisms of Obama leave no doubt about that... 

Jane Hamsher:

Campaign Silo » Froomkin v. Washington Post — The Battle Continues: Glenn Greenwald says most of what needs to be said about the Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin.  But having been involved in the early rounds of this battle and watched it ferment over the years, I thought I'd add a few notes of context. When Debbie Howell wrote that Dan Froomkin was "highly opinionated and liberal," she didn't just think that up by her little old "yippie ki yeah motherf-----" self.   It was the consensus of the newsroom, where it was believed -- correctly -- that Froomkin's writing about the war and US foreign policy were an inherent criticism of the WaPo's own coverage and editorial position.  And so they wanted to make it clear that he was Not One Of Them, nor did he rise to their high standards.   Here was Len Downie at the time:

"We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion," Downie told E&P. "And that readers of the Web site understand that, too."

And here's John Harris (now chief of Politico):

They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

But aside from the desire to play access footsie with the White House, Downie and Harris were bristling at Froomkin's critique of -- well, them.  While they were fawning over Bush, his war and his codpiece, Froomkin was writing about Bob Woodward's "unique relationship" with the White House.   When Froomkin was transferred into Fred Hiatt's fiefdom a couple of months ago, it didn't bode well for his consistently popular column.

There was always a sympathetic ear in the halls of the Washington Post for anyone who wanted to complain about Dan Froomkin.  The arrogant presumption that they were carrying on some sort of noble journalistic tradition that Froomkin violated is just baked into the concrete over there.  In the end, the bitter petty people who discredited the entire profession with their coverage of the war and its fallout just did not like the mirror he held up to them. 

And an organization that has long felt it could change reality simply by refusing to acknowledge its existence runs true to form once again.

Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander:

Ombudsman Blog: Post Axes Froomkin's "White House Watch": After five and a half years as a regular feature on the Web site, Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch column is being axed. Froomkin was quietly passing the word today that he was told by The Post that his contract will be terminated in early July....

"I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t 'working' anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well," Froomkin said. "I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online. I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day," he continued. "I’m not sure at this point what I’m going to do next. I may take White House Watch elsewhere, or may try something different."

Froomkin bills his often-irreverent online column as a “pugnacious daily anthology of White House-related items from news Web sites, blogs and other sources.” He does not operate as a White House reporter. Rather, he compiles material about the White House and offers his own commentary, often with a liberal bent.

That slant seemed to attract a large and loyal audience during the Bush administration, but it may have suffered when Barack Obama became president.

Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, whose stable of contributors includes Froomkin, said late Thursday: "With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision."

When it began, the column was called “White house Briefing.” But the name was changed after concerns by some at The Post newspaper that readers might believe Froomkin was a White House reporter, working alongside those offering objective news reporters.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank's comment on this is that it would have been much more popular with readers for the Post to have kept Froomkin and fired Alexander.

Jay Rosen:

The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media: Froomkin came along, in the wreckage of that, and from a position way on the wing, as a columnist for washingtonpost.com, this new entity which to the guys downtown at The Washington Post didn't even matter at first, came along and he basically picked up the signals from that event, and started to write it up, and started to bring that story, that whole narrative of the radicalism of the Bush years, into The Washington Post. And the truth is, that the Washington press corps, and the people at the White House themselves, helped to normalize Bush; they normalized a radical move. They didn't know what to do in the case of an outlier. All the things they would have had to do to respond, they failed to do. And Froomkin was reminding them of that. And that is ultimately why he was let go...

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: I think one mistake people, including me, have been making in discussing Froomkin was to assert that he's a liberal and, as Glenn Greenwald said, is almost alone in the mainstream media in criticizing Obama from the Left. This is true, in some sense, but only because our political discourse has become so weird. I mean, a decade ago, whatever I thought of conservatism, I wouldn't have considered "following the law" and "constitutional limits on executive power" and "skepticism about government secrecy" and "acknowledgment of the 4th amendment" and "accountability for government misdeeds other than blowjobs" and "lying our way into war is maybe wrong" and, perhaps, most of all, "torture is bad" to be just "liberal" positions. But since we just came off the age of Bush, where only liberals actually got upset about these things, and conservatives haven't yet (for some reason) become all that concerned that Rahm Emanuel might be bugging their phones, these are now apparently "liberal" positions. So in our discourse Froomkin became an extreme leftist, even though I don't remember him actually expressing opinions on the vast range of issues which, in non-crazy times, we associate with liberalism.

James Fallows:

James Fallows: egative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.

A Reader of Glenn Greenwald:

From a reader, via email: As of this moment the post on the WaPo Ombudsman's blog about Froomkin has 395 comments (most in support of Froomkin). His previous post, on Howard Kurtz, has 9. The post before that has 25. The one before that 0, as in none [and the 3 posts prior to that have 3 each, and the one prior also has zero]. Genius of the WaPo to get rid of the writer who readers are most passionate about.

And Glenn comments:

Number of comments isn't a perfect barometer of interest, but when the disparities are that large, it is certainly probative. The bottom line is that I'd be willing to bet anyone that Froomkin generates more outside traffic to The Post than the overwhelming majority of Post blogs that remain.

Steve Clemons:

Dan Froomkin and White House Watch - The Washington Note: Politico's Patrick Gavin (who is editing Michael Calderone's column this week) reports and I have confirmed that Dan Froomkin's invaluable White House Watch blog has been discontinued at the Washington Post. Froomkin was the new media hybrid of Woodward and Bernstein during the George W. Bush administration and provided one of the best informed portals into America's palace politics. I want all TWN's readers to know that Froomkin was one of those who greatly furthered serious public discourse about torture, domestic spying, the Iraq War, and many other stressful and important subjects -- and his platform at the Post will be missed.

Steve Benen:

The Washington Monthly: if Froomkin is leaving the Post, it's a real loss. Froomkin has been a great writer with keen instincts, often picking up on a burgeoning story before it's gained traction elsewhere. The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions...

Megan McArdle:

Froomkin Fired - Megan McArdle: Dan Froomkin is out at the Post, for reasons that aren't clear to me.  Was there really room for only one liberal political blogger?

And Dan Froomkin:

Froomkin, Lord Carlile, and US Political Journalism: Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central.  The threat comes from inside.  It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do…

Calling bulls---, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

It also resonates with readers and viewers a lotm ore than passionless stenography I’m not sure why calling bulls--- has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access fo  insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bulls----calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bulls--- more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bulls----calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat.  We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship — or whatever it is — out of the way.

"Retro Me Sathanas!" Internet-Always-on-a-Problem Blogging

Mark Thoma emails:

Uh oh. The iPhone cut and paste works a little too well. Wonder how much time this will suck up. It will be good in boring seminars though. Or pretty much anytime the mind has a moment. Yep, uh oh.

Just Arrived in the Mail Blogging...

The Root Desk--the desk bought by my great-grandmother around World War I from the Root family. There is a tradition that this is the desk at which George F. Root wrote "Jesus Loves the Little Children" and "The Battle Cry of Freedom" (but when "there is a tradition" that X, that of course means that X is not true but it is nice to think that it is).

This is worth mentioning because I have been peeking over the intelligent and thoughtful Ta-Nehisi Coates's shoulder as he reads James McPherson's Civil War history The Battle Cry of Freedom, reflects on it, and blogs about it. It's all very very good. For example:

Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers. I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.

I don't propose that blacks are alone in our myth-making, or in our desire to ennoble ourselves. But given the power dynamics of this society, we're the ones who can afford the comforts of myth the least. This is doubly true for those of us who are curious about the broader world. By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites  from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.

A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost. This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.

As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally. I've actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enought that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground. The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.

Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior's beard. His story is American--the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time. Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest).  To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK.

At the end of his book, McPherson has a section where the Confederacy, now desperate, considers raising regiments of black slaves to fight for them. For years, now, they've seen black soldiers--many of them their own ex-slaves--actively contributing to the South's demise. But faced with the prospect of doing the same, Lee and Davis are ensnared by the very lies that they've, until now, heartily embraced. Conceding that blacks could be soldiers, would be a tacit admission of their equality. As Southerner Howell Cobb puts it, "If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong." The South eventually raises two black regiments, but the Confederacy is defeated before any of them see action. And yet, in this section, you can see them trying to square the circle, trying to find another lie that will allow the lie of white supremacy to stand.

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause. The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me.

And "One Last Thought on [Nathan Bedford] Forrest".

Snark of the Day

Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: Feckless Bloggers Evaluate Sonia Sotomayor By Reading Her Opinions: Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog reminds us why we need real journalists instead of amateur bloggers:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor is an obviously serious candidate to serve on the Supreme Court. We have been struck by how the amount of commentary about Judge Sotomayor has ignored the most accessible and valuable source of information: her opinions as an appellate judge. Last year, I directed a project in which a team of Akin Gump summer associates extensively reviewed Judge Sotomayor’s opinions. Amy Howe subsequently revised and expanded their work, with contributions by me. Here, we summarize what we regard as Judge Sotomayor’s principal opinions in civil cases. Our only goal is to identify and summarize the opinions, not evaluate them.

What follows is some kind of nutjob effort to summarize her opinions in the most important civil litigation she’s been involved with. The whole exercise is absurd. Why would you waste your time on some silly blog when you could read Jeffrey Rosen peddling anonymous gossip in a professional magazine like The New Republic? After all, by not wasting time doing research on people’s work, Rosen’s able to do stuff like presciently observe that John Roberts is a “principled . . . defender[] of judicial restraint” for whom liberals ought to express gratitude.

HTML Footnotes:

Michael Froomkin sens us to:

Joho the Blog » Footnoter: I frequently write in HTML, but find footnotes (endnotes, actually) a pain. I don’t like having to interrupt my flow to jump to the end of the document to plunk in a footnote, and I hate having to decide on a number not knowing if I might decide to insert a footnote ahead of the one I just inserted. So, primarily because I enjoy writing utilities for myself, I spent far more hours writing a tool that will make it easier for me than the tool itself will save.

Footnoter lets you embed footnotes in the middle of an HTM document. [[For example, this might be a footnote]] It looks for the designated delimiters, pulls the footnote out, puts it at the end, and leaves a hyperlinked number in its stead. It defaults to the quick-and-dirty HTML that uses <sup> to superscript the number, but the Advanced section lets you instead insert CSS classes for the marker in the text, the marker that precedes the footnote, and for the footnote itself. Some warnings if you decide to try it out. First, It’s fragile. I’ve barely tested it. I’m sure there will be lots of ways it can be broken. (Nested footnotes won’t work.) Second, you would be a damned fool to paste its results over your only copy of the document you’ve been working on. Third, I am a baboonish, flatfooted writer of programs. What I write is the oppoosite of elegant: I prefer the long way of doing it and of writing it, since I can barely follow what I’m doing. Besides, the programs I write are so small and confined that efficiency doesn’t really matter.

If you care to try Footnoter out, with fear in your limbs and forgiveness in your heart, it’s here.

Wall Street Journal Crashed-and-Burned Watch: Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Edition

They publish Mark Penn, who writes:

America's Newest Profession: Blogging: It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year...

Ummmm... I get about a million page views a month all in all--which I think translates into about 100,000 unique visitors--and I make $3,000 a year off the weblog. It's a play in the intellectual influence game, a sounding board, a clippings file, and a loss leader.

The fact that Mark Penn is out without a keeper amazes me.

The fact that the Wall Street Journal is out without a keeper amazes me.

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UPDATE: Mark Penn responds to critics:

As far as the $75,000, the Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000. True, it's not the median, but it is the average. We can quibble about how easy it is to make this kind of money -- but the point is, the huge potential is there.

Words fail me. The innumerate stupidity--IT BURNS!!!! For the first time I understand the intonation with which senior economic advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton in late 1991 said the words "Mark Penn."

Against Misrepresentation the Bloggers Themselves Contend in Vain...

Henry Farrell sends us to Julian Sanchez, who says highly intelligent things:

Making a hash of it — Crooked Timber: Julian Sanchez on climate change debates.

Sometimes, of course, the arguments are such that the specialists can develop and summarize them to the point that an intelligent layman can evaluate them. But often—and I feel pretty sure here—that’s just not the case. Give me a topic I know fairly intimately, and I can often make a convincing case for absolute horseshit. Convincing, at any rate, to an ordinary educated person with only passing acquaintance with the topic. A specialist would surely see through it, but in an argument between us, the lay observer wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which of us really had the better case on the basis of the arguments alone—at least not without putting in the time to become something of a specialist himself.

Actually, I have a plausible advantage here as a peddler of horseshit: I need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

This is both true and smart (as is Julian’s work more generally; in my opinion, he is by far the most consistently interesting and intelligent of the young sort-of-libertarian opinion journalist set).

My Fifteen Minutes of Fame Are Ebbing...

And let it be said that as Brad DeLong I assert the moral right to ownership of the tag "brad delong," and I expressly forbid its use by anybody who uses either of the tags "ludwig von mises" or "lew rockwell"; expressly forbid repeat forbid.

Late to Bed, Early to Rise...

Felix Salmon:

The New Econoblogger A-List: It's the invite everybody wants to have gotten: were you invited to join Treasury's econoblogger conference call? Clusterstock, Dealbreaker, and Paul Kedrosky found the golden ticket in their inboxes, and Brad DeLong asked a question -- although one would hope that Treasury would be talking to him informally anyway.

As for the list of people who didn't get an invite, they include John Hempton, Yves Smith, and me; rumor has it that obvious names like Mark Thoma,[1] Nouriel Roubini, Tyler Cowen, and Calculated Risk weren't invited either, but I haven't checked. Certainly the call seems to have been very short; if many econobloggers did get the invites, they quite possibly -- like Kedrosky -- didn't get them in time.

Still, a golden star goes to Brad DeLong: going by Dealbreaker's timing, he received the email at 5:19am his time, and was on the call at 7am his time. There's the kind of conscientious econoblogging which gets you the coveted invitations!

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[1]Update: Mark emails to say he got an invite. Abnormal Returns got one too. As did Steve Waldman.

Felix Salmon Joining Reuters Opinion Start-Up

Jeff Bercovici:

Jeff Bercovici: Felix Salmon has opinions. Lots of them. More than any one person should be allowed to have, probably. On finance, sure, but also on food, architecture, climate change, men's grooming, and, of course, media, to name just a few topics. So if you're a global financial news service and you're looking to seriously beef up your opinion offerings, Felix is a pretty good place to start. Thomson Reuters recognized this and hired him away to work on a new, yet-to-be-christened online opinion hub set to launch at some point this summer. He starts April 1.

"I am sort of their -- I guess you could call it 'headline blogger,'" he says. Beyond doing what he's done here every day for the past two years -- in more than 4,000 individual posts -- he'll also have a role as what he terms an "in-house evangelist," helping to tutor the other 25 journalists on his team in the art of blogging. "I'm going to be the person going, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, blog, it's great,' and I'm going to be the person saying, 'Of course you can do that, and, no, you don't need me to edit it, and the faster you can put it up the better, and don't worry about being wrong'"...

Could Somebody Please Tell Me What Happened Around January 10? I Was Hopelessly Jet-Lagged...

Technorati Search: Brad DeLong:

Matt Cooper Is at TPMDC

The future of journalism. Matt Cooper:

TPMDC | Talking Points Memo | A New Day: I'm delighted to be helping out with TPMDC and TPM's coverage of the new administration. I've been a fan of Josh Marshall and the site for a long time and it's nice to be a part of it. I continue to write for Conde Nast Portfolio, where I'm a contributing editor, as well as its website, and other publications. But I'll be doing a lot here, trying to make sense of this new era and what it means. I covered the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies for mainstream media outlets like Time and Newsweek, but I have deep roots in publications like this, having started my journalism career at The Washington Monthly and later having written the "White House Watch" column for The New Republic. Like so many people I'm deeply interested in two questions: How will Barack Obama solidify his political power and pass his agenda and will it work to address both the financial crisis and the country's longer-term problems. I don't know what the answers are but hopefully in a dialogue with you, the readers of TPM and its off shoots, and through reporting and thinking hard we'll begin to get them. It's good to be with you.

To Make Heebee-Geebie Happy...

Is this internet stuff getting too self-referential?

Jennifer Palmieri Blows It...

This was a mistake on many levels:

A Special Note Re: Third Way: This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progess Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future...

And Angry Sam hits the right note in response:

I believe the post was a typo. It should have read:

Third Way are important power brokers and fund raisers, so we’re really sorry Matt called them out for having no policy proposals of weight or merit.

They don’t even have a softball team. WTF.

I, being a liker of hyper-incrementalist bullshit, like Third Way. But Matt doesn't have to. And Jennifer Palmieri should think very hard about how credibility is attained in retained in the twenty-first century.

Some of What I Have Been Reading and Noting...

Is here:

• Recent Headlines: Economics
• Recent Headlines: History
• Recent Headlines: Political Economy
• Recent Headlines: Politics

The Past Month's Worth of Egregious Moderation

Political Economy:

Dean Baker: Yet More Incompetent and Biased Journamalism from the Washington Post About the Auto Industry
James Surowiecki: Government Meddling Is Bad, Except When We Do It: The Balance Sheet
Dani Rodrik: Naomi Klein is very hard to understand
Josh Micah Marshall: Neo-Hooverite Republicans
Thoreau: Different poxes on different houses
Matthew Yglesias: Private Jets
Matthew Yglesias: Long and Deep

History:

Katha Pollitt: Bill Ayers Whitewashes History, Again
John Maynard Keynes: An Open Letter to President Roosevelt, December 31, 1933
John Maynard Keynes’s Private Letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt of February 1, 1938
NathanNewman: Amnesia on the Death of Reconstruction

Economics:

Paul Krugman: The Madoff Economy
Dean Baker: Yet More Incompetent and Biased Journamalism from the Washington Post About the Auto Industry
Julian Zelizer Answers Your Political-History Questions
James Surowiecki: Government Meddling Is Bad, Except When We Do It: The Balance Sheet
Matthew Yglesias: Great Moments in Jargon
Randall Smith in 1992: Wall Street Mystery Features a Big Board Rival
Barry Ritholtz: More CRA Idiocy
Tyler Cowen: Keynes's General Theory, chapter four, *The Choice of Units*
Matthew Yglesias: The Most Dangerous Man in Europe
Dani Rodrik: Naomi Klein is very hard to understand
Paul Krugman: The German problem
Menzie Chinn: The Employment Situation in Pictures
Barry Ritholtz: FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair on CRA: NOT Guilty
Robert Waldmann on Joe Stiglitz as Political Actor
Josh Micah Marshall: Neo-Hooverite Republicans
Felix Salmon: The Great Recession Bites
John Berry: Bloomberg: The Fed's Balance Sheet Swells to $3 Trillion
John Maynard Keynes: An Open Letter to President Roosevelt, December 31, 1933
Ezra Klein: The People on the Financial News Shows Are Idiots Who Are Trying to Make You Poor
Kenneth Rogoff: Fear of inflation is like worrying about getting the measles when one is in danger of getting the plague
Paul Krugman Even More on Nominal Wages in the Great Depression
John Maynard Keynes’s Private Letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt of February 1, 1938
Paul Krugman: What to Do
Calculated Risk: Hoocoodanode?
Garrett Jones: Monetary Policy and the Great Depression

Politics:

Zaz Hollander: Levi Johnston's mother hit with drug charges
Mark Kleiman: Optimism
Greg Anrig: The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008
The Economist on Michael Barone, and the Congress
James Surowiecki: Government Meddling Is Bad, Except When We Do It: The Balance Sheet
Amanda Terkel: Powell lashes out at Palin: I’m from the South Bronx, ‘and there’s nothing wrong with my value system.’
Dani Rodrik: Naomi Klein is very hard to understand
The Poor Man: When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on? It’s a tragedy
Karen Tumulty: Henry Kissinger Is a Liar
Josh Micah Marshall: Neo-Hooverite Republicans
Matthew Yglesias: Strange Swing: Joe the Plumber
Neal Gabler: The GOP's McCarthy gene
Jonathan Zasloff: The Great Krugman-Mankiw Debate
Matthew Yglesias: The Irrelevant House Republicans
Pro Growth Liberal: Healthcare Debate: So This is Why Conservatives Hate Social Security
Ezra Klein: The Best and the Brightest
Paul Krugman: About that advisory board
Steve Benen: The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Charlie Cook: Missing: Seller's Remorse
Stan Collender: Quick Question: Big 3 Auto Companies
Thoreau: Different poxes on different houses
The Economist: The Republican Party: Ship of Fools
Matthew Yglesias: Private Jets
Matthew Yglesias: Long and Deep
Michael Bérubé on the Weathermen

Four Hours into the Progress Bar...

I do not think that phrase "this will just take a moment" means what you think it means:

TypePad - Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong - Integrating:

The Cucumber Factor

Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: The Cucumber Factor: Ta-Nehisi Coates is getting ready to foreswear the smear against white people that we eat cucumber. And yet just yesterday here in Finland where the white people are twice as white as back home (Nordic ancestry + subarctic winter = pale), I was in fact served a sandwich of cucumbers and cheese on a croissant.

And here in Vienna while seated next to Dani Rodrik I was just served not a cucumber sandwich but an egg salad sandwich on white bread with the crusts removed.

It did have Hungarian peppers on it. And the Hungarians do claim to be Huns, after all--name their children Attila, et cetera...

Is TypePad Saying that It Has Broken My China and Is Now Painstakingly Glueing It Back Together?

I find this hard to understand:

Everything TypePad: A quick update on migration: We’ve had great feedback from the community about enhancements we’ve made to TypePad. We also know some of you are still patiently waiting to see the new features. The TypePad migration is kind of like moving out of a house and into a new one. If you've been in a house for a long time, it's going to take you longer to pack everything up and move it. Much the same with some of our favorite, longer-term bloggers. We're being really careful with "packing up" your data and metadata - posts and photos, links, comments, trackbacks and all the other elements that make your blog great. We know how important your blog is to you, so we want to be certain we're moving everyone quickly and carefully. One of the best benefits of TypePad is that we handle all the moving and upgrades for you. We're so happy you've chosen to blog with us. If there's a way we can show our appreciation to you, please let us know in the comments.

Policies

This is a current copy of the "policies" file at: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/comment-policy-a-seminar-.html

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This is the place to comment on the comment policy, the email confidentiality policy, and the websufing anonymity policy.

(1) I will not spy on you. I personally will not collect or distribute or republish information about who visits this website--feel free to come here direct from http://japanesetentacleporn.com/ without washing your browser.

(2) People with whom I have relationships I value can rely on me to keep confidential emails to me that they wish kept confidential. Otherwise, not. I am under no obligation to keep anything you send to me confidential unless I have promised previously to do so, and if I have not then I will or will not honor your requests that emails be kept confidential at my sole discretion.

(3) I want this website to be a seminar, not a foodfight. I don't have time to moderate this properly. I do try, occasionally. Thus I will delete comments that I believe to be, and I will delete comments by commenters who write comments that I believe to be:

1. factually false.
2. in a tone that is destructive of the conversation here.
3. drive-bys by those who have no interest in the conversation here.
4. mere expressions of approval or disapproval without evidence or supporting argument.
5. off topic.
6. the talking points of some political tendency.

---

The smartest thing I have seen on comment policies is Teresa Nielsen Hayden http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html. Here are selections (with my annotations):

Making Light: Virtual panel participation:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden. (Which I, unfortunately, don't have time to do: whatever it is, it's not a garden.)

2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

3. You own the space. You host the conversation. You don’t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you’re going away for a while, don’t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they’ll still be there when you get back.

4. Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

7. Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes. All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise. And if you get a particularly good comment, consider adding it to the original post.

8. Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they’re valuable the rest of the time.

9. If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it’s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There’s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can’t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes. (I think that this is the most important directive of all: trolls must be squashed quickly, or the space turns into... Kevin Drum's comment section.)

10. Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they’ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.

11. You can’t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot’s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.

12. Disemvowelling works. Consider it.

13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice.

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A Rather Draconian Moderation Policy...

Jim Macdonald writes thus:

Making Light: Time Notices Comments: Here’s what moderators need to know:

1. Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
2. Yog is an ancient ghod of chaos and evil. And he doesn’t like people very much.
3. Moderation is a subjective art, and the moderator is always right.
4. The moderator may have minions. They need to have a private area where they keep the buckets of Thorazine and the cold-frosty bottles of cow snot.
5. The minions speak with the voice of Yog. Yog backs his minions up.
6. There is always someone awake, and in charge, when Yog isn’t around in person. The minions know who the Duty Yog is.
7. If someone starts off as a spammer, troll, or flamer, he is a spammer, troll, or flamer forever and is liable to instant deletion/banning with no recourse and no appeal.
8. If the moderator ever needs inspiration, he can re-read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and recall that the posters are sinners and he is Ghod.
9. Rules? In a knife fight? Yog and his minions have standards, but they don’t need to tell the posters, lest some of them attempt to game the system. Attempting to game the system is, all on its own, a deletable offense.
10. ALL CAPS posts are deleted on sight, unread. Mostly ALL CAPS POSTS are ALL CAPS.
11. Anyone who doesn’t space after punctuation marks is insane, and can be deleted/banned on sight.
12. Personal attacks against Yog and his minions are ignored. Personal attacks against anyone else are deletable on sight.

More and more of the moderated weblogosphere appears to be devolving to Yog Rules--or to be shutting down comments entirely. It seems to me that there has to be a better way. But it is not clear to me what better way is (a) sustainable, (b) easy for the moderator, and (c) produces high quality discussions.

This Is Yet Another Test...

Testing...

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

"There are," says the fifteen-year-old, "good ways for professors at public universities to spend there time, and not so good ways. And there are," she continues, "good uses of Youtube, and not so good uses of Youtube."

Apropos of this:

Counting — but only to four:

and this:

“Trust me”:

Let Us Welcome Our Web 2.0 Publisher Overlords

Charlie Stross on Tor Books's arrival on the internet at http://www.tor/com/:

Charlie's Diary: Dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat: It's something of a truism that the larger a publisher gets, the more trouble they seem to have in understanding this interwebnet thingy. While smaller outfits like Baen Books and Subterranean Press seem to have more than half a clue, it's been almost embarrassing to watch the larger book publishers flailing around... so it's nice and refreshing to see one of them get their act together.

Case in point: Tor.com — Tor's revamped and relaunched web presence. It's very Web 2.0, with original fiction, blogs, and social networking bells and whistles; hopefully it'll be linked up to their long-awaited ebook store fairly soon so you can all buy my books. (Ahem ...)

Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

Welcome to the Frontpage: The conversation: Effective blogging is a combination of good personal writing and smart party hosting. A good blog post can be a sentence long, or three pages long; what matters is that it encourages further conversation.

Back in the heyday of the Whole Earth Catalog, visionary Catalog editor Stewart Brand told would-be reviewers to (I quote from memory, and probably imperfectly) “write as if you are writing a letter to an engaged and interested friend who knows almost nothing about the subject.” That’s a good starting point for blogging. Tor.com is for fans of science fiction, fantasy, the universe, and the many “related subjects” that such persons are also liable to be interested in.... We’re not trying to convert everyone to our particular geeky obsession, but we do assume that our natural audience is composed of people who understand the pleasures of geeky obsession, and we hope to share the cool.

Much of what has driven Tor.com is our desire to more fully contribute to the great conversation that is the subculture of SF.... That conversation has done nothing but expand. It is a major tributary to the modern Internet. Tor.com aspires to be part of that conversation. We recognize it as something older and bigger than we are.

We’ve recruited a number of front-page bloggers based on their knowledge of certain specialized subjects and their demonstrated ability to blog interestingly....

As this site’s editorial straw-boss, I guess what I’d say to everyone playing here, front-page bloggers and commenters alike, is: Converse. Be yourself; be a person, not a megaphone--a personal point of view, not an encyclopedia or an “objective journalistic voice.” Even the original fiction is part of the conversation; the authors writing for us are aware that there'll be a public comment thread following every story, just as if it were a blog post. Talk to the rest of us like we’re human beings at an interesting social event. If you feel like you’re up at a lectern on a big stage, reconsider. Tor.com aspires to be a room party, not Carnegie Hall. Circulate and talk.

In Which I Offer Unsolicited and Unwelcome Nosy Advice to the Extremely Intelligent and Articulate Ta-Nehisi Coates

Megan McArdle writes:

Megan McArdle: Department of kind of awful statistics: I should probably just shutter the blog and redirect it to Ta-Nehisi Coates, but he keeps coming up with neat stuff. This on black illegitimacy. The stunning statistic that 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock is driven, to be sure, by the fact that many poor black women have a lot of children. But it turns out it is also driven by the fact that married black women have fewer children than married white women.

Ta-Nehisi suggests a reason for this that makes sense to me:

I'm effectively--if not legally--married. Been with the mother of my eight year old son for ten years now. More on this later. (I promise!) But basically when he was born I felt that he was the bond between us. In other words, he literally was the marriage ring. We'd both love to have more kids, but we simply can't afford it. Furthermore, we don't have particularly wealthy parents to fall back on. I think that's the situation a lot of married black folks find themselves in. They simply feel that they can't have more kids.

It's well known that the black middle class has a lot less in the way of assets than whites of similar income levels--hardly surprising, given the legacy of generations of discrimination and poverty. But that also means that things that a lot of white middle class people take for granted--like help with a down-payment on a house when you have your first kid--are less available. Middle class black parents have less in the way of a parental safety net than their white equivalents, so they're less likely to have a second kid.

So even though the statistic is basically correct--as Ta-Nehisi says, "Even if married black parents had kids at the rate that white married parents did (or better yet, Hispanic parents), black babies would still make up a disproportionate share of kids borne out of wedlock"--it's still worth interrogating, because the picture is considerably more complex than is generally implied.

I read this, and I cannot help but be reminded of the low comedy of Genesis 2:18-24:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the male earth-creature should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto the earth-creature to see what he would call them: and whatsoever the earth-creature called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And the earth-creature gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the earth-creature there was not found an help meet for him.

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the earth-creature and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the earth-creature, made he a woman, and brought her unto the the earth-creature.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh...

And respond that:

[H]oly Matrimony... is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency... which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee; and is commended of Saint Paul to be honourable among all men: and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly... like brute beasts that have no understanding; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained:

1. It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name...
2. It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry...
3. It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity...

It's none of my business, I know. But I cannot help but think that people should be married and should have weddings, and say: "Propose, Mr. Coates, propose! At the very least it is a great excuse for a party--pot-luck receptions at home are at least as fun as the other kind!..."

Now That's What I Call a Comment Policy!

Troll Threat Condition Red:

Making Light: Got it in one: #1 ::: Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: July 01, 2008, 10:51 AM: I'm hereby declaring open season on anything unfamiliar that comes through the door. Newbies: behave or die.

Where People Are Coming From Today

Where people are coming from today:

• The Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/
• Marginal Revolution http://www.marginalrevolution.com
• Crooked Timber http://www.crookedtimber.org
• Matthew Yglesias http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/
• Paul Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
• Mark Thoma http://economistsview.typepad.com

Top Seven Current Posts

The top seven current posts on this weblog are:

• Alma Mater Blogging http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/alma-mater-blog.html: How effectively is Harvard University using its immense resources? Not well...
• John Scalzi Drums Up Business http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/a-new-kind-of-s.html: For writer Daniel Abraham and his story "The Cambist and Lord Iron," which shows a fine sensitivity to the concept of opportunity cost...
• Why Aren't More Americans Going to College? http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/why-arent-more.html: We do not know. They should be. The rewards are great...
• Keeping U.C. at the Top http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/economic-princi.html: It's a difficult task. A comment on a column by David Warsh...
• David Brin's The Transparent Society Book Ten Years Later http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/cfp-panel-on-th.html: A Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference panel organized and run by Michael Froomkin...
• Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo's Torture Memo and Academic Freedom http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/the-torture-mem.html: I write this as a consequence of reading what Boalt Dean Chris Edley calls the “Torture Memo” of Professor John Yoo--which horrified me. I write to ask you to appoint a special committee... members of the faculty with expertise in moral philosophy, the role of the university, international relations, human rights, and constitutional law. I ask you to instruct this committee to write of a public report to the Academic Senate no later than this Labor Day, advising the Senate of the pros and cons of actions that the Academic Senate might or might not take in the matter of Professor John Yoo...
• Let Them Hate Us as Long as They Fear Us http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/oderint-dum-met.html: [I]t is important that presidential candidates fear economists.... Republican politicians have not feared their economists since... the Eisenhower administration... and so Republican economic policy is overwhelmingly lousy. Democratic politicians... fear.... And so their campaign rhetoric is less out-to-lunch. And their post-election policies are better...

Nunc Dimittis

"Lord, now may thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation."

Something that I thought I would never see has come to pass: Republican thug Karl Rove has denounced former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan as the equivalent of "a left-wing weblogger."

Let me say that I have never been prouder to be a left-wing weblogger:

Loyal Bushies Smear McClellan: ‘Disgruntled,’ ‘Self-Serving,’ ‘Sounds Like A Left-Wing Blogger’: In an explosive new memoir, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes that the Bush administration engaged in a “political propaganda campaign” to sell the Iraq war and that it misled him on the Valerie Plame scandal. Today, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino slammed McClellan today as a “disgruntled” employee; former press secretary Ari Fleischer said he was “heartbroken.”

Other former White House officials started the smear campaign last night. Karl Rove, interviewed on Hannity and Colmes, asserted that McClellan sounded more like “a left-wing blogger” than himself. Former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend, interviewed on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, called McClellan “self-serving” and “disingenuous.”... McClellan is experiencing the same automatic smear response the White House deploys against former allies who dare to criticize the administration, including former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan or former head of faith-based initiatives John DiIulio. Some other lowlights:

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill: WROTE: Bush planned in invade Iraq before 9/11 and was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people” during Cabinet meetings. SMEAR: “We didn’t listen to [O’Neill’s] wacky ideas when he was in the White House, why should we start listening to him now?” — A senior official who informed Bush of O’Neill’s comments, 1/12/04

Former Campaign Chief Strategist Matthew Dowd: SAID: Bush has “become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in”; that “our leaders have to understand what they [the American public] want. They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’” SMEAR: “He’s going through a lot of personal turmoil but also he has a son who is soon to be deployed to Iraq. That could only impact a parents’ mind as they think through these issues.” — Dan Bartlett, 4/1/07

Former Counter-Terrorism Chief Richard Clarke: WROTE: Bush “ignored terrorism for months”; sought to tie 9/11 to Iraq immediately. SMEAR: “He wanted to be the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department after it was created.... He did not get that position, someone else was appointed to it.... His best friend is Rand Beers, who is the principal advisor to the Kerry campaign.” — Scott McClellan, while serving as press secretary, 3/22/04

According to the Politico, a “former colleague” said of McClellan: “It looks like a fairly pathetic attempt to restore his reputation by junking the only positive attribute people saw in him — loyalty”...

Unexpected Benefits of Manhattan...

Unexpectedly early to a lunch in Greenwich Village:

View Larger Map

I halt the cab at the Flatiron Building

to see if can possibly finally meet a Nielsen Hayden or two in the flesh. And whom do I also find there sitting in a semi-lotus position but New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing on tour for his brand-new (and excellent) book Little Brother, who proceeds to:

• give me his five-minute lecture on why he finds David Brin's The Transparent Society too optimistic,

• and then hands me a pre-sale copy of Jo Walton's Half a Crown for me to read on the plane back to San Francisco.

(I had expected to meet Doctorow at CFP on Thursday, but he was then in San Francisco signing books).

Now off to lunch with Nouriel Roubini at the Mercer Kitchen...

The Worm Ouroboros...

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors:

Feminist Law Professors: Why I Love Being A Law Prof, Blogging Edition: I’m listening to Jack Balkin (of Balkinization) give a talk, whilst sitting next to one of my very favorite law prof bloggers, Michael Froomkin (of Discourse.net), and next to him is Brad DeLong (of Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong). Nearby is James Grimmelmann (of The Laboratorium). Yesterday I was on a panel that also included Bill McGeveran (of Info/Law) and Frank Pasquale (of Madisonian.net and Concurring Opinions). I’ve heard presentations by very smart people like Wendy Seltzer (of Legal Tags), and Andrea Matwyshyn (Jurisdynamics Idol) and gotten to catch up a little with the wonderful Susan Crawford (of Susan Crawford blog) and Chris Hoofnagle (of Chris Hoofnagle.com).

There are lots of great non-bloggers too! The weather here stinks but the pizza is great. As some of you may have already guessed, I’m in New Haven. Next week I’ll get to hang out in Montreal with Bridget Crawford (of this blog of course!), Sudha Setty (of The Title IX Blog) and Christine Hurt (of The Conglomerate) at the LSA Annual Meeting, because we are all on a panel about Blogging As Feminist Legal Method, along with Alison Stein, author of the very cool article discussed here. Life is good, especially during the summer conference season!

Shades of David Lodge's Small World...