Once again, the rumors are getting louder about the New York Times going (back) behind a paywall. It probably says a lot about my personal biases that I found Foster Kamer’s Gawker article the most interesting—not least because of the comments engendered by it. You don’t get nearly such a range of… creativity… in the “Letters to Ye Editors”.
I would actually be willing to pay some kind of subscription to keep a high-quality “paper of record” online, because I’ve reduced a 30-year daily newspaper addiction down to a Sunday-only over-the-counter purchase for the ad inserts and leisurely browsing when screenreading isn’t convenient. And as a comparatively old person with an established pressed-pulpwood addiction, I should be a prime target. But I bitterly resent the idea of giving so much as a thin dime to the godsdamned New York Times, because they’re the Gordon-Gekko-besotted bandits who eviscerated my dependable Boston Globe and sabotaged its various delivery services in a (vain) attempt to “convince” Bostonians of a better-than-fourth-grade reading ability to switch to the NYTimes. As it turns out, Sulzberger’s People could wean me off buying the Globe, but they couldn’t force me to buy the Times, and I can only assume I’ve got plenty of company out here in the wilds beyond the Hudson. Suggestions as to alternative options gratefully accepted.
But it gladdened my shriveled heart to read that The Moustache of Understanding is no longer sanguine about the free exchange of ideas in the global marketplace…
Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.
“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”
Friedman is now “pro some kind of pay model,” he says. “My own feeling is, we have to do anything we can to raise money,” he told me. “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”
I asked Friedman whether any of the technologists he meets during his globe-trotting had presented any groundbreaking ideas for how to save the Times and journalism. While he’s optimistic about the coming crop of tablets and e-readers, the answer is no. “We’re in a megatransition. It hasn’t ever felt like anyone has the answer,” he said. “My macro feeling is that I’m glad I had this job at this time. It was great working at the paper when it was on dead trees and could pay for itself.”
Such are the harsh judgements that must be made when a Very Serious Person’s family fortunes are cruelly reduced from a decently prosperous $3-billion-plus to a mere handful of millions. Perhaps the NYT’s last paywall-free front page can headline a five-page article chronicling the sad plight of its most illustrious pundits, reduced to scrabbling for speaking fees and book contracts with the unwashed hoi polloi from Fox News and the wingnuttier outposts of Heartland America™.
If you really like stuff like following stuff like Tuesday’s MA special election, I really recommend checking Ben Smith’s blog over the next couple days. I know it’s Politico and I know he consults Bill Cosby whenever race comes up, but for this stuff, his blog can’t be beat. I can’t take all the showy, overwrought stuff that Josh Marshall prints from readers before elections or Sully’s “who would Burke vote for in a special election” stuff, and I don’t even want to know what OBG Bob Somerby is writing about this race (I’d like it if someone would tell me briefly, though, provided it’s not too horrifying).
Any other recommendations for good places to read about Tuesday’s race? Boston being Boston, I’m sure there’s no shortage of bloviation. Anything that won’t make me want to punch myself in the neck?
Update: Speak of the devil, here’s footage of Brown smiling at the “shove a curling iron up her butt” comment:
I’d rather not go into the details, but this seems to be the origin of the bizarre “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” comments made by a Scott Brown supporter at a rally this weekend.
Unsavory sex abuse cases play a big role in Massachusetts politics. In 1998, the Democratic nominee for governor, Scott Harshbarger, lost in part because of his infamous prosecution of the Amirault family (which I agree was a terrible miscarriage of justice). Coakley has been criticized for her role in this case, but to me it seems fairly tangential. Weirdly and personally, I have heard about this case for my entire adult life: for reasons I can’t explain, when my uncle is drunk around the holidays, he starts joking about Tookie Amirault and the “magic room”. I can also remember my grandmother telling me she wouldn’t vote Harshbarger because he wouldn’t let priests wear their collars in their courtroom when they were being tried for sex crimes.
Massachusetts politics is strange. It’s very liberal by any measure and it’s completely dominated by Democrats (I would argue that the recent success of Republican gubernatorial candidates was caused by the fact that the Democrats ran a lunatic in 1990 while the Republicans ran a moderate candidate who went on to be a moderate and well-liked governor). But, Cambridge and a few other places notwithstanding, the liberalism is not always of the high-brow, nuanced variety. It’s more the liberalism of places like Italy or Spain, where there’s genuine concern for the poor and respect for the working class, but also a lot of superstitious, essentially conservative Catholicism and a lot of retelling of decades (if not centuries) old stories. If Coakley loses on Tuesday—and I think she’ll win by 6-10 points—it will be more because of the state’s idiosyncrasies than because voters reject health care reform.
Are other people confused by the blue and yellow strip on the 20 yard line in San Diego? How can it be both the first-down marker AND the line of scrimmage? If the league is going to require that players pull their socks up and not take off their helmets, shouldn’t it also require that San Diego use different colors for their 20 yard line?
Update. The play-by-play guy just said “Hay-sha” for Haiti. Never heard that one before.
The crowd responded enthusiastically as Brown made his case against AG Martha Coakley (D)—even interrupting frequently to make Brown’s case for him.
“I’ll tell you what,” Brown said, using a megaphone to address the crowd. “There’s negative campaigning, and then there’s malicious campaigning.”
“She’s malicious!” a man in the crowd cried out. “She’s a phony!” shouted another. “Shove a curling iron up her butt!” a third man interjected a few moments later.
Why is it always about putting things up people’s butts with Republicans these days? Seriously.
I’ve always been a defender of Tim Tebow—he has every right to express his religiosity in the stupidest way possible, IMHO. But this makes me hate him:
Focus on the Family will air a 30-second “life- and family-affirming” television spot, featuring University of Florida star quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, during the coverage.
The Colorado Springs-based media ministry shot the ad with the Tebows on Tuesday in Orlando, Focus spokesman Gary Schneeberger said Friday. It is set to air before and again during the CBS broadcast of the football championship from Dolphin Stadium near Miami.
Focus on the Family is a scam led by an adult with a sick fixation with beating children. I can’t respect anyone who would do ads for them.
I’ve been watching Bush the past two days working with Clinton on the Haiti disaster, and I think that even though his administration was such a disaster it made me switch parties, his conduct since he left office has been pretty admirable. Compare his behavior to Darth Cheney and Cheney’s idiot daughter. Bush deserves credit for that.
The Washington Monthly has a good, disturbing article about the Texas Board of Education:
“I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”
[....]
Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.
Perhaps I’m wrong wrong to make this comparison, but the right’s obsession with altering textbooks seems of a piece with its obsession with critiquing ostensibly non-political movies like “Avatar”. While today’s left thinks in terms of public options and stimulus details—however heatedly and irrationally—the right thinks in terms of changing the nation’s culture.
I used to think of this as just another pony plan: it’s much easier to say you’ll deal with a problem by changing the culture than by commissioning studies, enacting new legislation, etc., but now I think it’s something quite different, that they really believe that if kids watch “Avatar”, they’ll grow up to be pagans and we’ll all end up in Hell.
I think this piece about Gruber might be the sloppiest post by Glenzilla I’ve ever read from him, and I’ve gone through all the updates and I’m not quite sure what exactly he is advocating (admittedly, this may be the fault of the Percocets and the throbbing shoulder). You’ll have to read it for yourself, because it is far too long to quote, but for the life of me I can not figure out his point.
If all he is saying is that Gruber should have repeatedly disclosed his grant, I have no problem with that, but it sure seems like he is going a lot farther. The Armstrong Williams/Maggie Gallagher comparisons make no sense whatsoever, because unlike Gruber, they were paid to covertly push the company line, while Gruber was not- he was paid because he is the go to guy in the field. In fact, he goes to great length to point out all the ways he agrees that Gruber is not the same as Williams/Armstrong. If you are going to make all those caveats, maybe the comparison should never have been used in the first place. The military scandal makes even less sense as a comparison. Likewise, this passage was confusing:
What will make it impossible to effectively call out wrongdoing by future corrupt administrations (by which Krugman seems to mean: Republican administrations) is the willingness of some people to tolerate and defend corruption when done by “their side.” The next time we have what Krugman calls a “genuinely corruption administration” which, say, secretly pays people they’re holding out as “independent” experts, the administration’s defenders will say: “how can you possibly object to our doing this when Obama did it, and not only did you fail to object then, but you defended it?”
Nowhere has Glenn stated that Gruber is corrupt, but now those defending Gruber are defending corruption? What is Greenwald actually saying- that no one can receive grants from the government and be independent? Is he asserting that Gruber has somehow bent the truth or tweaked his work to satisfy the government and retain his grant. Is he arguing that Gruber’s academic reputation is suspect? Does Glenn have any evidence that Gruber has been doing biased work simply to please his masters? Is Glenn stating that it is completely impossible to be “objective” and “independent” if a scientist receives grant money- because that is absurd. Does that mean that every single medical study somewhat funded by federal money is now somehow suspect as having the outcomes guided to a government preferred solution? That is absurd. All of the people advocating regarding global warming are somehow tainted if they work for an organization that received money from the government? That is crazy.
Again, I agree he should have disclosed his relationship more clearly, but I reject the idea that he is somehow incapable of being independent or objective, and calling him on that seems to be jumping the gun when you have provided no evidence that he is somehow incapable of being independent or objective. If Glenn’s new standard is what describes “corruption,” we might as well simply shut down the relationship between the government and academia, because anyone who has ever taken a dollar from the government to pursue and advance lines of research is now no different from Armstrong Williams.
Frank Rich’s Sunday column “The Great Tea Party Rip-Off” told me things I did not know about RNC Chair Michael Steele:
Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox… though Steele is black, and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money.
A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he found it “way too male” for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just before “Game Change” emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig. The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele’s arrival at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November, with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. “He needs to raise money for the party, not his wallet,” one Republican leader griped to Politico.
Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his own, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” He hadn’t told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me,” he taunted them. “But until then, shut up. Get with the program, or get out of the way.”
Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said that white Republicans are “scared” of him. They are. He loves to play head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he’s publicly professing “slum love” for the Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled “What Up?,” or announcing that he would use “fried chicken and potato salad” to recruit minority voters. As long as the G.O.P. remains largely a whites-only country club, Steele has job security. But he had real reason to fear some new restraints on the cash box; last year the party was driven to write a rule requiring him to get approval for expenditures over $100,000.
On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.
His behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain.
It would be nice to believe that the scam artists and kleptomaniacs-by-principle of the Republicans, having been temporarily deterred from their full-scale looting of the national Treasury and the global economy, are starting to turn their rapacious appetites upon each other…
