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Now Obama's gone and pissed off Slashdot. ... 2:15 A.M.
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Liberal Media Bias: Occasional Slate contributor Tom Geoghegan is running for Rahm Emanuel's congressional seat. He's a friend of mine, a terrific writer and a man of honor. I'm for him even though I'm sure he's for card check. ... P.S.: You can't call Geoghegan unthinkingly left. In 1972, he wrote a justly famous analysis of the McGovern rebellion in the Democratic Party and its relationship with the student left--still one of the best pieces on the nervous breakdown of post-WWII liberalsim I've ever read. It's online. ... 1:28 A.M.
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After giving in to a lazy inconclusive lede on whether Richardson's withdrawal might or might not hurt Obama's Southwest strategy (Answer: It might or might not!) NYT's Adam Nagourney finally gets around to asking the obvious key question:
[W]hether the Obama administration’s eagerness to get Mr. Richardson into the Obama cabinet might have contributed to what appeared to be an uncharacteristic laxness ...
And, Nagourney might have added, if there was eagerness why the eagerness. Specifically, was there a pre-endorsement deal?. ... Nagourney doesn't seem to even make an attempt to find out the answer to his question. WaPo at least has some reporting on the vetting process-- and it doesn't reflect well on the expert Obama "team" that "scoured" Richardson's background. If there wasn't eagerness/laxness, it certainly looks like there was incompetence. After all, even if Richardson didn't fully disclose the scope of the investigation that scuppered his nomination, what kind of savvy Washingtonian would take Bill Richardson at his word? A scout for the Kansas City Athletics, maybe?) ... P.S.: WaPo certainly didn't get to the bottom of the issue. We demand "tick-tock"--accounts of who said what to whom. And what they were eating. ... 1:17 A.M.
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We'll all be working for Andrew Breitbart one day (if we aren't working for Arianna). In the meantime, he's launched Big Hollywood. ... I'm not sure he can succeed in his mission of getting conservative entertainment industry types to come out of the ideological closet--they're too worried about losing paying work. But that's kind of his point, no? ... 12:25 A.M.
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Enjoyable anti-DiFi sniping by William Bradley. ... He notes that CIA nominee Leon Panetta is more than just a Clinton loyalist (for one thing, he hasn't been all that loyal). ... But Bradley describes the Iraq Study Group, on which Panetta served, as
"widely excoriated on the right two years ago but whose blueprint is basically being followed today."
Really? I must have missed the part of the blueprint where the Iraq Study Group called for the Petraeus "surge" strategy. ... Update: Fred Kaplan joins the "Keep Kappes" choire, and has a suggestion for breaching the CIA's own internal wall to coordinate intelligence in specific problem areas. ... P.S.: We need a czar! ... Oh, wait. We already have a czar. ... 12:09 A.M.
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Michael Hirschorn has seen the future, and it is ... Arianna.
In this scenario, nytimes.com would begin to resemble a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post, which, until someone smarter or more deep-pocketed comes along, is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting. This combination has allowed the HuffPo to digest the news that matters most to its readers at minimal cost, while it focuses resources in the highest-impact areas. [E.A.]
Hmm. OK! .... But I don't quite understand Hirschorn's argument that the proliferation of "lifestyle fluff" in the Times has "undermined the perceived value of serious newspaper journalism." That seems a bit like the argument that gay marriage undermines the perceived value of traditional marriage. How? I don't know anyone who doesn't read the news because of the presence of the fluff. And I know quite a few people who read the news and also love the fluff. ... My problem with the fluff is that the need to generate so much copy, coupled with the subliminal need not to piss off advertisers, leads to what my old collegaue H.R. called "hearty hack" writing. But it's not as if most of the serious Times national reporters are great writers who are tragically infected by the hearty-hack virus. They would be hearty hacks without "Thursday Styles." ... Anyway, HuffPo has started its own lifestyle-y sections--e.g., "Living," and "Style"--for obvious commercial reasons not dissimilar from the Times' reasons. ... 11:30 P.M.
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Sunday, January 4, 2009
Too early to gloat on card check: From a respected weekly email written by a top D.C. Hill observer--
In the 111th Congress' first week, House Democrats plan to pass organized labor's first priority, the Card Check bill that would make organizing workplaces easier. Republicans and business passionately oppose the legislation. Timing of Senate action is uncertain, as Senators are consumed with confirmation of President-elect Obama's nominees to the cabinet. [E.A.]
It's tempting for "card check" opponents to gloat about it's deteriorating prospects in the Senate. I've indulged in some near-gloating myself. But it's ill-advised, to say the least. (I'm certainly not going to rely on WSJ's Kimberly Strassel after her disturbingly similar sneering on immigration). ...Among the alarming-but-plausible possibilities, there remains the threat of a deal in which Big Business effectively sells out Small Business by cutting some sort of compromise with Big Labor that would make organizing drives much easier. ...Remember that big companies are probably better positioned to absorb the costs of fighting unions, and they are more comfortable, perhaps, dealing with union bureaucracies. Plus it's likely that big corporations have already been the targets of unionizing campaigns if they are vulnerable. Smaller companies, on the other hand, might not have been worth organizing under the status quo but might become targets if the rules are changed to make organizing less time-consuming. ... The case for a big business/small business sellout doesn't seem as clear-cut as with government regulations (where bigger businesses are almost inherently better able to deal with paperwork). But it's worth watching out for. ... 9:35 P.M.
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Bill Richardson doesn't even 'vet for Commerce'! Always trust content from kausfiles [see, e.g., last item]. ... P.S.: A HuffPo rundown of questionable Richardson behavior here. ... 9:15 P.M.
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Rod's Army: Never mind the issues of race or electability. Will labor unions and other powerful Dem constituencies be pressuring Senate Majority Leader Reid to seat Roland Burris, the appointee of tainted Gov. Rod Blagojevich, simply because they think they desperately need one more vote in order to quickly pass controversial bills (i.e. card check!) over a GOP filibuster? Is that why Reid waffled on Meet the Press? Does the pressure to seat Burris actually depend on whether Al Franken gets the contested Minnesota seat--because, at least according to Nate Silver, if only Burris or only Franken is seated, the Dems don't get any closer to their goal (they gain a seat but the cloture-breaking bar rises from 59 to 60 votes)? Did Blagojevich know all this before he made his pick? It's not like he's tight with the SEIU, the major proponent of "card check" within the labor movement. ... Oh, wait. ...
Update: Alert reader S suggests I've misconceived the sitution--that Reid wants Burris seated (for the extra vote) but can't show it for fear of seeming to approve of Blagojevich. Reid would prefer to have the courts to force him to do it--that would be the ideal Kabuki. But this doesn't change the possible role "pressure" might play in forcing Reid to accept something less than the ideal Kabuki--a negotiated deal, for example, or quickly abandoning an appeal after an unfavorable initial ruling. ... 2:26 P.M.
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Holder's Defense: 'I was played for a sucker by a lobbyist!' From the NYT today, the lawyer for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder defends him in the Marc Rich Pardon scandal:
“There’s no question that [Marc Rich lobbyist Jack] Quinn played him and it was astute by Quinn because he did catch Eric unawares.”
Creative defense. Unfortunately, the NYT story makes it pretty clear that Holder knew too much about the case to have been unwillingly played. Seems more like the buddy system at work. ...[Thx to reader J.] 12:10 P.M.
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Undernews Alert: Rezko sentencing set for January 6. The Tribune story suggests this means he is not cooperating with prosecutors (if he was cooperating it would be delayed). ... [via NewsAlert] 11:47 A.M.
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On Warren Olney's To the Point, LAT veteran Doyle McManus says Robert Gates
is in the unusual position of being a cabinet member who can't really be fired because if the President and the Secretary of Defense were to end up at loggerheads on an issue, that could be politically very damaging for the president. [E.A.]
This seems astonishingly wrong. Obama can fire Gates more easily because Gates is a Bush holdover, no? Obama won an election by opposing Bush's policies. ... Maybe Sam Zell had a point about McManus. ... 2:14 A.M.
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Monday, December 1, 2008
'You should never have made those loans groups like us pressured you to make!' The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a "community-based organization," is suing Wall Street ratings services for approving bonds backed by home loans to African American and Latino home purchasers with "insufficient borrower income levels."
The firms "knew or should have known" that subprime loans disproportionately were marketed to minority consumers -- a process known as "reverse redlining" -- and that those borrowers would ultimately default and go into foreclosure at high rates, according to the coalition's complaint.
Hmmm. Didn't community-based organizations push for exactly this sort of reverse-redlining? I think they did. It's one thing to argue that they maybe weren't the major cause of the subprime meltdown. It's another for them to pose as victims wronged by the very system they worked hard to set up (including the securitization that enabled banks to keep up "reverse redlining"). ... 2:21 A.M.
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Here's a Saturday Belfast Telegraph story about Sebastian D'Souza, the photographer who took a now-famous photograph of one of the Mumbai terrorists in the process of gunning people down in a train station:
But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back." [E.A.]
Here's a Sunday New York Times front pager about the "troubling questions" the attacks raised about India's "ability to respond":
[T]he most troubling question to emerge for the Indian authorities was how, if official estimates are accurate, just 10 gunmen could have caused so much carnage and repelled Indian security forces for more than three days in three different buildings.
Part of the answer may lie in continuing signs that despite the country’s long vulnerability to terrorist attacks, Indian law enforcement remains ill-prepared. The siege exposed problems caused by inexperienced security forces and inadequate equipment, including a lack of high-power rifle scopes and other optics to help discriminate between the attackers and civilians. [E.A.]
Read the Times story and you'll see a numbing litany of "systemic" problems with Indian security, including "Ill-paid city police [who] are often armed with little more than batons," and "little information-sharing among law enforcement agencies" and all that inadequate equipment, including "old, bulky bulletproof jackets" and lack of thosehigh-power scopes and "no technology at their disposal to determine where the firepower was coming from ..." [E.A.] It reads like the budget-increase proposal submitted by the Mumbai police bureaucracy--The Indian Omnibus Anti-Terror Funding Act of 2009. Nowhere in the NYT story will you learn what American blog readers learned a day earlier when Instapundit (among others) linked to the Belfast story: Police had lots of guns, and no problem seeing who and where the terrorists were, but they wouldn't shoot at them.
I'm used to a sort of Liebling-like hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The "fast" sources are telling you what happened. The "slow" MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves--in this case, it just so happens, liberal assumptions:1) the idea that there is no problem that can't be solved by greater funding for government bureaucracies and more interagency taskforces** 2) the predisposition to think widely-distributed small arms and a willingness to use them can never be a good idea and 3) an antipathy to any suggestion that an aspect of foreign culture is inferior to nasty American culture. (Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back--let alone armed civilians who did the same)? ...
**--Substitute "lousy test scores" for "vulnerability to terrorist attacks" and you have the stereotypical liberal MSM template for reporting on inner-city education failure: insufficient spending leads to ill-paid teachers who lack the latest technology! ... 1:27 A.M.
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Saturday, November 29, 2008
A friend of mine who occasionally visits the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai tells me that earlier in November the hotel bristled with security, including aggressively manned checkpoints--security that had been absent a few months earlier. Apparently the security was withdrawn before terrorists attacked the hotel this week. ...I don't know what to make of this, but it at least suggests that the attacks might not have been "a complete surprise," as the headline on Slate's home page (but not the article to which it links) claims. ... Maybe they were anticipated but on an earlier date? ... Maybe the extra security caused the terrorists to postpone them. ... If so, were they originally planned for before the U.S. election? ...
Update: Hotel's owner says "we did have such a warning, and we did have some measures," which were relaxed before the attacks. But he argues they wouldn't have made a difference because ... the gunman didn't go in the front door.
However, [Tata Group chairman Ratan] Tata said the attackers did not enter through the entrance that has a metal detector. Instead, they came in a back entrance, he said.
"They knew what they were doing, and they did not go through the front. All of our arrangements are in the front," he said.
Reminds me of the time I visited Hyannis Port when JFK was staying at the family compound there. The Secret Service was protecting it closely, except for a one-way street leaving the area, which was left unguarded--apparently on the theory that an assassin wouldn't go wrong way down a one-way street. ... More: kf's friend says that during the early-November high-security period the rear doors to the hotel were locked. Not that that would necessarily have stopped the terrorists. Still, they seem to have preferred low-security to high-security. ...1:21 A.M.
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Monday, November 24, 2008
Mark Krikorian is not impressed with likely Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano's border-control credentials but concedes
[S]he's about as close as any Democrat governor can get to appearing hawkish on illegal immigration.
He speculates:
"It could mean that the Obama administration picked an immigration person for this job because they want to burnish their pro-enforcement credentials to make a more plausible case for amnesty down the road ...."
That would be shrewd. But I wonder--suppose it all miraculously works according to plan. That is, suppose Napolitano succeeds, against all expectations, in controlling the border. The ACLU sues to cripple enforcement in the workplace. It loses! Illegal immigration in effect ceases. The public feels soon confident enough to allow Congressional Democrats to legalize those illegals already in the country. No more living in the shadows. Celebrations in the streets! But because the border is controlled, no new illegal immigrants get in. Guest workers, including agricultural workers, do get in--perhaps with a "path to citizenship." But only in the numbers authorized. The question is: Would the Congressional Dems and their allies be happy?
I'm not sure. ... They'd get 12 million new, mainly Latino voters. Likely Democrats. But that would be it. I suspect there are a lot of Dem pols who would not-so-secretly be rooting for things to not go according to plan--for an amnesty to be accompanied by a breakdown in border control, as it was the last time it was tried, meaning there would be millions more illegal immigrants, mainly Latino, to legalize and empower in future years.. ...
I suppose the answer would depend on whether the new rules allowed existing immigrants to keep bringing in members of their extended families, thereby rapidly expanding the newly-arrived, legal electorate. ...
I'm not saying this scenario is likely to happen--it's a thought experment. The very forces that might be happy to see the border-control part break down (low-wage employers, pols hoping to surf the Latino surge, anti-nationalist libertarians) would try to make it break down. Which is why it probably would. ... 12:17 P.M.
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A job for Anna: New York is still in a state of intense speculation on the central policy question regarding Obama's transition: What does it mean for Vogue? Editor Anna Wintour's "rep" has denied gossip reports that she'll be joining the administration, but that hasn't stopped them. ... She raised some money for the campaign. What might she want? Ambassador to France would be a good fit, no? "The French would deal with her a lot better than the Iceberg Lettuce King of Salinas that W. sent over," says cosmopolitan kf reader Madame S. ... 10:50 A.M.
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Sunday, November 23, 2008
"Franken to Win Recount by 27 Votes": Give Nate Silver points for not playing it safe. ... Update: A new Silver calculation:
The various versions of the model project a Franken win by between 48 and 136 votes once all ballots are re-counted and all challenges are resolved.[E.A.]
There are some disclaimers about high "margins of error." Nobody will notice them if Silver's right. ...11:22 P.M.
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Richardson Vets! [You said this wouldn't happen-ed. Vets for Commerce. That's like being "Hot for D.C."] 1:45 P.M.
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