War on pervy creeps

James Taranto is feeling a bit put upon by all the great women who can tell after 30 seconds of listening to him that they will never sleep with him. The mere thought skeeves them out. They're thinking, "If I can just get away from this perv, I'll never have to breathe the same air again."

It's totally understandable that Taranto would mistake a war on pervy creeps for a war on all men. Totally.

Who are the takers?

A fundamental belief of today's wealthy corporate Republicans is that they are deserving and no one else is.

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

[Mitt] Romney, ignoring the fact that he has echoed this same sentiment on multiple occasions, organized 24 “We Did Build This” events in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada. At each event, local business owners are speaking about their self-sufficiency in running a business and how government is hindering their growth.

But, like the New Hampshire business owner showcased in Romney’s attack ad on the issue, many of these business owners have received significant support from the government, a ThinkProgress analysis finds.

But no one else deserves this sort of help. They're all slackers who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

These Republicans can't even grasp their own selfish double-standard. They invented the Internet, dammit, not the government, not that fat Al Gore guy who tried to steal credit.

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

Hard to imagine anyone more thoroughly missing the point without trying to, but then he was editorializing for the Wall Street Journal. Until it's monetized, it doesn't exist. What a strange epistemological idea!

Republicans believe that whoever exploits a resource, infrastructure, an externality, or the gullibility of the public should get all the rewards and the credit.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R-whatever you need Mitch) shows the problem in more plebeian terms. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his father, and his mother spend time on welfare, which Scott made her eligible for. Now, however, Brown has money, success, and the gift of forgetfulness. He wants to deny any such help to people like him. I guess they're just not handsome enough to deserve it.

Where I grew up, we called this gittin' above your raisin', and it was a mortal sin for a politician.

Nowadays, though, merely driving a gimmicky pick-up truck and wearing a barn coat every election season is enough to remain a regular guy, never mind that you spend you entire career ardently defending the self-proclaimed right of the wealthy to be taxed and regulated at very low historical rates.

Who feels entitled? Who takes without giving back? Who votes out of selfishness?

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

Update: The wealthy not only don't want to pay, they want to get refunds that make their tax rate negative.

What they fear is true

Wingnuts have an emotional commitment to falsehood. Their heroes have implanted it by daily repetition.

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.”

Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, ...

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Wingers are also certain their taxes went up.

Fear is its own perverse logic. If they fear it, it must be true. The bogeyman lives!

The Times deigns to permit the L-word

The American Enterprise Institute, which calls its employs scholars but pays them to create propaganda, created the bullshit lie that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial meltdown.

 Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, [has] almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point.

Allies? Start with Congressional Republicans, who have vowed to eliminate Fannie and Freddie — because, after all, they caused the crisis! Throw in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which, on Wednesday, published one of Wallison’s many articles repeating the Big Lie. It was followed on Thursday by an editorial in The Journal making essentially the same point. Repetition is all-important to spreading a Big Lie.

AEI and the Wall Street Journal know they're lying. They know that Fannie and Freddie were late to big profitable rape and pillage started entirely by private, market-based institutions.

But they lie repeatedly just the same. Oh, yeah, the Republicans too.

Fox, F-O-X

Just skimming along in another Media Matters takedown of first degree Murdoch, I found this nugget of bullshit:

The Wall Street Journal's current arrangement with CNBC -- wherein CNBC reportedly receives advanced [sic] access to certain original financial reporting from WSJ and all Dow Jones business outlets as well as other perks -- expires in 2012.

While many observers assumed that Fox Business would inevitably form a partnership with WSJ once the CNBC deal expired -- News Corp. owns both Fox and the WSJ -- Journal managing editor Robert Thomson told Media Matters that partnering with FBN would "not necessarily" happen.

Fox's first priority at all times and in all ways is the Fox brand. Whether or not the medium is the message, the brand is the message for Fox. At every level of the Fox media empire, pimping the brand comes first - witness the constant tie-ins and mentions on sports broadcasts. Pimping the brand comes even before fellation of conservatives.

You thought the company town was great

You had it wrong.  Those Appalachian mining towns?  Paradise on earth.  Only the occasional case of rickets.  Wait till you get the inestimable privilege of living in the company nation.


Hans Gruber had it wrong.  Steal $600,000,000,000 (wild guess) and not only will they not find you, you'll have open advocates in the Senate and of course the Wall Street Journal excusing your manifest and continuing racketeering.

[W]e’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.

Richard Nixon had it wrong.  It's not against the law if the Chamber of Commerce says it isn't.

Alvin Toffler had it wrong.  Corporations won't need their own armies once they've consolidated their hostile takeover of government.

Oh, yeah, I guess you're already privileged.  Though of course your four legs are merely good, not deserving of the rewards that come to your betters climbing over you on two legs.

Stacking the deck

Does it ever seem that there are no longer any consequences for financial misbehavior?

"On Judge Levine's first week on the job, nearly twenty years ago, he came into my office and stated that he had promised Wendy Gramm, then Chairwoman of the Commission, that we would never rule in a complainant's favor," Painter wrote. "A review of his rulings will confirm that he fulfilled his vow," Painter wrote.

Painter continued: "Judge Levine, in the cynical guise of enforcing the rules, forces pro se complainants to run a hostile procedural gauntlet until they lose hope, and either withdraw their complaint or settle for a pittance, regardless of the merits of the case."

Oh, sure, Painter must be some disgruntled liberal. But:

Levine was the subject of a story 10 years ago in the Wall Street Journal, which said that except in a handful of cases in which defunct firms failed to defend themselves, Levine had never ruled in favor of an investor.

The Republican Party is a criminal conspiracy.

Note to reporters on the penis-bomb

The penis-bomb fizzle in Detroit (there's a phrase I never imagined writing!) points up the utter failure of U.S. intelligence agencies. Abdulmutallab bought his ticket with cash and didn't check a bag! His own father had reported him directly to the Nigerian embassy. Our Nigerian embassy.

Systems fail, though. All systems.

What I'd like to see as follow-up to this good factual story from the New York Times is a way for me to assess whether this was a rare failure due to imperfection or a symptom of systemic failure. That requires numbers:

• How many reports are the intelligence agencies sharing?
• What proportion lead to actions (beyond entry into a database that "serves as holding area for cases that need more research")? And, no, 1700 visas revoked in eight years doesn't seem like a lot to me.
  
• What proportion of similar fact patterns to this attack elicit a no-fly order? A pat-down order? Some other protective act, where here there was none?

Who's going to report that story?

Update: An attempt at context, though I want details on the firehose intel is drinking from, and Ackerman ignores the behavioral markers - cash and no carry-on.

Update (1/9/10): Hey, my Google alert tells me the Wall Street Journal has linked to me. With such a pithy title, too, espethially if you lithp!

First draught of history

Media coverage of politics is no longer driven by the New York Times or the Washington Post, not even by CBS, but rather by Fox News, talk radio, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Drudge's rumor-mongering (still prospering on one semen stain after all these years!), and the rest of the concerted conservative corporate propaganda machine. The first draught of history is a heady blend of angry, paranoid, proudly ignorant Kool-Aid.

Any history of this period that's not a revisionist history will purvey the thoroughgoing bullshit of our age.

(h/t Philosoraptor)

Why don't liberals fall for glurge?

What the hell is glurge, anyway? Snopes says this. My experience is that glurge never comes from liberals. Instead, conservatives forward it on, breathlessly attesting to its truth. Sometimes I write them back (somewhere on the Internet someone is wrong!), and they often express their first skepticism at my debunking. Their friend who sent it to them checked it out. I guess they miss the handy link to real skepticism that I provide.

It's not just glurge; it's also warnings about the danger of gang wannabes following you home and putting your lights out if you flash your headlights to get them to turn theirs on. Or it's warnings of danger to women, who might be taken advantage of somewhere in an unnamed city. No matter how often you point them to Snopes.com, even after it becomes part of their vocabulary, their first impulse is to believe.

Liberals aren't taken in by these just-so stories, or so it seems to me. I'm sure we have our blind spots, too; they just aren't so glaring.

I think that an elemental conservatism is the default response of a social animal habituated to a tribal environment. The reflex to believe what one's prejudice shouts loud and clear is socially useful to keep the tribe united.

Liberals have a different more modern approach. We engage our brains to test our beliefs. This makes us amenable to learning, liberal arts, and the compromises of democratic government.

Conservatives once had some of these characteristics, too, but they've given them over. I think it happened about the time the Wall Street Journal started common cause between its core readers, the wealthies, and the fundies it thought it could co-opt to the great Bushist cause of obtaining more money for the already rich and powerful.

News stack

A news stack is a layering of subject areas that a consumer of current events needs to be well informed. (As far as I know, the term 'news stack' is my own coinage.) It's akin in concept to a tech stack of components for software.

Major daily newspapers try to cover at least this stack:

• World news
• National news
• Metro/local
• Sports
• Business
• Health/technology/science
  
• Opinion
  

Oh, sure, they often fill in from wire services, corporate partners, alliances, and syndication what they can't or won't produce for themselves. Really, the quality of a paper is usually proportional to its filling this stack - with additions - with their own content.

However, all newspapers have been acting as news aggregators for years. One of the newspapers I read as a child was the Knoxville News-Sentinel, where international coverage consisted of occasional pulls of lead paragraphs off the wire services in small type.

TV news has had a shorter and more distributed news stack. The national and cable networks have taken the national and world news. Local affiliate broadcasts handle local news and sports, and they add an orgy of weather coverage presented over and over again in a way that has a low information density but lots of graphics and pictures that even the village idiot can relate to. Local access cable (remember that?) handles the really local stuff and a little bloglike bloviating that seldom gets any attention (hey, like me!), but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Delivering the entire news stack to readers on paper requires a single organization. Not so on the Internet. Not even so on TV. Already, anything lucrative and integral has been unbundled. Weather is on the Weather Channel, even though its content is all basically dressed up from NOAA data (cheap!). Sports is on all sorts of specialty channels; ESPN can proxy for all of them.

On the Internet, we all get to pick our own news stacks. Mine is, more or less:

• World - New York Times
• National - Times, Washington Post
  
• Politics - Times, Post, Boston Globe, and my blogroll
  
• Lowest common denominator - CNN.com
• Boston and Massachusetts - Globe (oh, yeah, sports, too)
  
• MetroWest and Framingham - MetroWest Daily News
  
• Business - Wall Street Journal (but not my strongest interest)
  
• Local towns - amateur or semipro news blogs
  
• Opinion - the blogosphere plus Paul Krugman (Tom Friedman? puh-leeze)
  

Is there any way for an aggregator to cover this stack in a marketable way? So far, aggregators have sucked. They've tried to automate delivery of content from many sources. Uh, guys, it may be cheap, but you have it backwards. The sources you aggregate are already too mass market generic, and you're just mixing all the watercolors and getting brown. I don't know if there's a customizable alternative other than all of us finding our own way with search engines, but aggregation has to empower the single reader.

So, is Google the end-all of news aggregation? Maybe, but only for junkies like me. Google will remain the tool for drilling into a story beyond even what an aggregator provides - because there's always more to a story that obsesses readers - like Jon-Benet Ramsey or nuclear non-proliferation.

What I do know is that there is no longer any reason related to distribution medium that all the layers of the news stack need to be filled by the same organization. This means that news organizations need to identify which layer they can compete in (and for many it will be at most one).

There are still scale advantages in adjacent layers. Effective and resourceful organizations will still try to expand into them. Witness the dispute between the Globe and Gatehouse Media over local aggregation.

But trying to fill the whole stack without aggregating? No one who's left doing journalism is going to succeed at that.

Future of news, if any

"Networking, Ad Revenue and Reinvention", by my blog friend Newscoma on the new site NewsTechZilla, which she shares with a partner, has me thinking about the parlous future of the news business. It costs money to find out the facts, and yet hardly anyone is willing to pay for it.

Reader unwillingness to pay is not new. Advertisers pay the bills, not readers, and they always have (where 'always' means 'in my lifetime').

Goodbye paper

One future we all know: Paper's over. No point discussing it.

As soon as advertisers figure out that they can get into just as many eyeball-deploying wallets on line as they get from dead trees, the whole expensive process of distributing inky gray newsprint to every suburb will immediately become too uneconomical to continue. I've read a daily newspaper for more than 40 years, but I dropped my Boston Globe subscription last fall. I feel like a sponger sometimes, but I was tired of recycling unopened papers.

Newspaper advertisers have been overpaying for years, anyway, and that wasn't going to go on forever. When I do get a paper, the first thing I do is to recycle the circulars. Sooner or later, the sponsors are going to figure that out. A little time watching a conveyor at a newsprint recycling plant should be enough.

The demise of paper has one consequence that newspapers have long realized: Video and audio clips are now part of the newspaper, just as text is part of news sites descended from TV such as CNN.com. One of the New York Times's chief competitors is in fact CNN.

Slice and dice

Once you're on line, though, the viewport of a news site is different from a newspaper. Why would a local paper even try to compete with the New York Times in national and international coverage? Truth is, local papers haven't been competing with the NYT forever (same definition). Part of my childhood, I read the Knoxville News-Sentinel, whose idea of international coverage was four one-paragraph blurbs - lead paragraphs off the wires - twice a week. They outsourced their national coverage to the AP and UPI or, preferably, the other Scripps papers. Nonetheless, the Sentinel pretended to cover all the news.

On line, local papers are learning not even to pretend. The MetroWest Daily News only puts local content on line. National stories without a local tie? Maybe they make the dead tree edition, maybe not. On line, the Nov. 5th headline was "MetroWest voters help elect first black president".

Why should they pretend? Their readers are already on line, where they can easily get far better and more complete coverage. As Newscoma puts it, quoting Vibinc:

Readers can get the AP feed ANYWHERE.

What's happening is the end of the vertical integration of news-gathering. Very few organizations will have the profits to compete at all levels and in all general interest areas. Really, how many national newspapers do we need? There will be some larger regional newspapers, too. The LA Times and the Chicago Tribune may have to settle for regional, though at worst the LA Times's potential region is pretty damn huge.

Location, location, location

Everyone else is going to need a niche where they can be the big dog. Some of those niches are going to be verrry small. Current well-reputed semi-national papers such as the Globe had better have terrific, detailed, and much more easily navigated sports coverage. If they don't, sites will spring up to cream off those highly motivated readers. (Hmm, business idea?)

Local coverage is a vital competitive advantage for professional reporters. Instead, newspaper consortiums are hollowing out. Community Newspaper Co., now owned by Gatehouse Media, has done this in an attempt to capture economies of scale. The problem is that Gatehouse and their predecessors have interpreted that as calling for staff cuts. They can always pull in a story from the next town over, as they do in the weekly I still subscribe to (and used to write for). Problem is, their readers want to read about their own town, not what the school committee did about mold in their elementary school.

At the bottom end are the amateurs and semi-pros who report news. Maybe they report about quilting. Or maybe they actually cover the police and fire reports in their towns. Some of them with an extreme tolerance for boredom, occasionally punctuated with real drama, may even cover the meetings of local political boards. All of these topics are valuable to someone, which is why Gatehouse Media is suing the Globe over its knock-off of Gatehouse's local aggregation pages.

Unfortunately, it appears that the subversives at the Globe who are trying bring it into the blog age don't have enough executive buy-in to get convenient links from the front web page. I'm no newbie, but I still have trouble finding the new media and had to search to find Your Town. In fact, the Globe site overall needs much better organization. CNC, unbelievably, is ahead.

It could be that the Globe executives are still pushing paper and that they want their site to be hard to use. If so, they've succeeded, though that word is an oxymoron in this context. They're only cutting their own throats.

Paying

Like 'Coma, I don't know how to pay for it. Only the Wall Street Journal has succeeded at getting revenue from on-line subscribers, and that's because of its special and tax-deductible specialty as the indispensable business paper. Even the New York Times, America's number one national general interest newspaper, failed with TimesSelect.

I'd like to think that a micropayment system might work, but I just don't believe it. No one wants to read with the meter running. (Micropayments would be a far better solution to email spam, as Bob Metcalfe long ago argued in the departed dead tree edition of InfoWorld.)

Ad it all up

That means we're stuck with advertising. Web browsers make many wicked annoying ad types possible. The Globe now pops up ads when you click a link. I kill them as fast as I can. Pop-unders are hardly better. But the worst ad type is a hijacking ad; the Minneapolis Star Tribune pops up borderless ads with transparent backgrounds. Try to click a link under the ad pane and you get jerked over to a commerce site that you're probably not interested in since you were trying to click something else. In fact, the Star Tribune probably gets to charge its sponsors more money because they generated a click-through, even if that does border on fraud.

There are going to be product placements, too. When I used to still be willing to watch all the fluff on CNN TV, about half the stories felt like placements to me. The conscientious sites will label ads. Many others won't.

Futurepress

Crystal balls are notorious producers of bullshit. This one may be no exception.

Print media already serve a market segment rather than everyone who wants news. Most people don't read much if they can avoid it. They'd rather see pretty pictures. Print-oriented news sites that descend from newspapers need to recognize that not everyone wants to read, and they should serve those who do want to read. No doubt, they still need to be visually attractive and easy to use, both for their core customers and to attract new ones.

Print media companies will not be virtual corporations, though sometimes they will look like them. Instead, they will have their niches, and they will aggregate everything else. Each day will be a rap track that samples heavily from other sources. Assigning rights and payments will be a matter for lawsuits, evolving markets, and eventually statutes.

To this point, news aggregators mainly suck. Most aggregation sites are automated, ugly, and hard to navigate. I use the blog aggregator BlogNetNews, but the learning curve there is steep, and their rankings are easily manipulated. Technical problems will be solved, not by magic but first by proprietary software and then by open source. Or maybe open source will get there first, last, and only.

The sites that the aggregators aggregate will have all sorts of sizes and specialties. The advertisers will determine which ones survive as businesses and which are left to hobbyists. If I claimed I could tell in advance what type of organizations would be best suited for the new environment, well, I might be the Bernie Madoff of new media.

One thing that will be especially hard to judge is the relationship of one site to others. Do you share traffic, or are you competing for the same traffic? With this post, I want to share NewsTechZilla's traffic. Since I'm not working this subject every day, that's probably fine with my blog friends, but what if I did want to poach on their preserve? Is building a larger conversation more important than hosting the conversation? It will depend...

The answer will affect how much link-sharing sites want to do. The Globe links to me, primarily I'm sure because I asked early. They'll get stingier later. Most of the Globe site, in fact, is already verrry stingy with links, which is one of the reasons I suspect that their business people really don't understand how doomed their current business model is. (Or maybe their owners at the NYT are making them, as a hedge. Except that the NYT does not encourage its commenters to link, either.)

My suggestion for a rule: If you have even one order of magnitude more traffic, link away. You'll help the little site, and its owner will be grateful. (Against that, CNN used to give me links, and I constantly bit the hand that fed me.)

The new media winners will be good enough that they can link freely to interesting and vivid one-offs without losing their readers to the linked site. Their readers will continue to trust them to find - and sometimes, to re-report - nuggets that would otherwise wind up buried in the avalanche of mostly crappy content. Chances are, for example, if you won't help your commenters link to their blogs or whatever, you don't have enough confidence in the uniqueness and quality of your content to build a permanent audience.

I don't make the news

What's the upshot for reporters and columnists? The generalist days are probably gone, and this is a loss. Both reporters and columnists need areas of special expertise. Don't blame me; I'm just calling it as I see it.

Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol have been superficial or wrong so many times that it's a wonder they still have jobs that don't involve upselling French fries. Many political bloggers do a better job without expense accounts, though of course you have to find them. That will be the future role of op-ed editors.

Reporters need forensic accounting or business experience or foreign studies or public administration or something else that will permit them to do much more than rewrite press releases. They need math and science. (Sorry!) Because so many of us crazy semi-pros and amateurs are willing to spend Sunday afternoon writing analyses like this, reporters need knowledge that is rare, and English usage is not rare enough.

Reporters will need one integrated skill that columnists are supposed to have: the willingness to call bullshit and make it stick by deft display of facts. They don't need a visible point of view; there's plenty of that for free. But the jejune, faux balanced story structure pioneered by Time Magazine of thesis-antithesis-superior shrug is not going to cut it.

Reporters will need to be able to write short. Yeah, I still need to figure that one out. But at least I gave you cut-lines.

Update (1/5): One classic example of expertise that takes one slice of news stack and owns it is Nate Silver's 538.

Noblesse self-oblige

Paul Krugman is looking for a word to capture what self-involved narcissistic dipshits with a breathtaking lack of the slightest bit of perspective completely lack.

Atrios would call them wankers, but that wouldn't conform to the New York Times style guide.

Executive fiat

Many people have written about the Fourth Amendment and privacy implications of the NSA's communications surveillance and data-mining. And Congress actually showed some backbone on this in 2003 by passing recission of Total Information Awareness - or Terrorist Information Awareness, as the Bushists had deceptively rebranded it.

The law couldn't be more clear (my emphasis):

SEC. 8131. (a) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this or any other Act may be obligated for the Terrorism Information Awareness Program: Provided, That this limitation shall not apply to the program hereby authorized for Processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence, as described in the Classified Annex accompanying the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004, for which funds are expressly provided in the National Foreign Intelligence Program for counterterrorism foreign intelligence purposes.

(b) None of the funds provided for Processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence shall be available for deployment or implementation except for:

(1) lawful military operations of the United States conducted outside the United States; or

(2) lawful foreign intelligence activities conducted wholly overseas, or wholly against non-United States citizens.

(c) In this section, the term `Terrorism Information Awareness Program' means the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or any other Department or element of the Federal Government, including the individual components of such Program developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Yet, here we are in 2008, and the whole program is still going on. Sure, the NSA is doing it now, and it's probably funded out of the black budget. Never mind that Congress prohibited it; the Bushists don't care.

Alberto Gonzales and the rest of the Bushist lackeys have tried to leave themselves an out by playing a shell game about how many and specific programs there are. They'll be happy to show you inside the walnut, but there will never be a pea there. Of course, it's a dodge, a lie, a fraud.

What in sum the Bushists have done is to abrogate the clause in the former Constitution that the framers felt was so important that they put it first, Article I, section 1:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States

Duhbya and Darth and their minions have arrogated to break the fundamental expression of democracy and to spend money specifically prohibited by law.

A few links for your reading pleasure:

• EPIC
• Cato Institute
• ACLU
• CNet
• SecurityProNews
• AP reporting at FAS.org

More on the former Constitution at "Documenting the tatters".

Random thought

Sure, this is hopelessly retrospective - and egotistical - but if Bill Kristol can get a gig with the New York Times, despite all the nasty things he has said about the press in general and the NYT in particular, when can I expect the Wall Street Journal or Fox News to hire me? OK, or someone like me with a longer history of celebrity?

Fidelity to...

For those executives who thought they might supplant Abby Johnson at the helm of Fidelity when dad retires, they're leaving the door ajar a tiny bit. My advice: Don't bet on it.

The dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal told me lots I didn't know. Fidelity is a corporate governance scandal waiting to happen. The board is basically Johnson, Inc.

I guess I really ought to pay more attention to my tiny little proxy statements. But with Robert Gates gone to Washington, it takes more research to find out which fund directors to vote against.

Heart on your sleeve

This morning's Wall Street Journal shows the news angle of its new management with this teaser above the masthead on the front page:

In Interview, Greenspan Hits Democrats, Too

If you're too thick to understand that, the headline on A3 is:

Greenspan's Dismay Extends Both Ways

Reporter Greg Ip helpfully "corrects" the impression that Greenspan is only put out with the Republicans.

Trouble is, Greenspan's opinions about Democrats aren't news, while his criticisms of Republicans - since he is one - are.

I suppose I could make the same critique of this post. Bias in the WSJ is old hat; the difference is that the Journal's news pages used to be relatively immune from the stone age politics of the editorial page.

People like us

To call the Wall Street Journal editorial page Neanderthal would be a grave insult to Neanderthals. Geico, so easy Paul Gigot can do it.

Today, however, the lead editorial in the Journal says:

Serving as lender of last resort in these conditions is the proper function of central banks.

Sounds about right, but it's funny how rich investors deserve interventions in the market to save them from themselves, while the rest of us can go hang when we need something done outside one market or another. Oh, sure, the WSJ frames their opinion in free market terms when arguing against a rate cut - "bring the markets' risk appetites back in line."

Here's the basic contradiction:

• Lose your health insurance, get sick, and need protection from creditors - tough.
• Lose your head, go long in risky securitized mortgages, suffer a downturn that busts you - too much danger to the economy, we'll help.

Free market advocates are always willing to let the free market work as long as other people are the ones suffering.

Update: Quentin Hardy, you go, boy!