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Archive for November, 2006

Newt Gingrich is Not Running for President

Published by William Beutler on November 30, 2006 in Campaigns, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Newt Gingrich, Republicans, Rhetoric and White House '08. 5 Comments

No, that’s not exactly what he said, but whether he meant to effectively drop out of the presidential race or not, that’s just what he did this week in New Hampshire. Amidst the controversy surrounding his calling the Iraq war a failure this week, this tidbit has fallen through the cracks. So let’s get down, reach as far as we can, and maybe we can knock this back into reach:

A few minutes ago, the MSNBC chyron announced that Gingrich won’t decide on a presidential run until next September. The sound was off and they’ve moved on to other segments, but I believe they’re referring to this report by James Pindell:

Gingrich said he is more concerned with injecting ideas into the campaign than himself. Monday night at a First Amendment dinner in Manchester and again Tuesday morning he said he will not consider running for president until September 2007, a relatively late date.

The third quarter of 2007 is way too late to start playing the staffing game — by that point every other candidate will have already signed up the top rung of advisers. That’s not to say a candidate couldn’t get in late and still succeed; if Wes Clark had been a better candidate, he might have pulled that off. But it’s not clear Gingrich is this kind of candidate, either. If Gingrich is waiting that long, then he’s not seriously thinking of running for president. Worse, he doesn’t even realize he should be making people think that he actually is.

NY Daily News 1995 Newt Gingrich Cry Baby coverThis must come as a disappointment to the thousands of conservative blog readers who made him their top choice in the latest GOP Bloggers straw poll, but it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Like the liberal bloggers for whom Russ Feingold was a runaway straw poll favorite but would probably have ended up supporting Hillary (not likely) or Edwards (more likely) even if Feingold hadn’t dropped out, by September of next year conservative bloggers will likewise be deciding to reluctantly support McCain (see: Hillary), Romney (see: Edwards), or Rudy Giuliani (it depends), regardless of what Gingrich does.

Gingrich’s candidacy — in the works at least since Mr. Clinton’s Wild Plane Ride — has always been premised on the idea of promoting conservative ideas within the context of the election, not on actually winning electoral office. Issue candidates are a time-honored part of presidential politics, so this is not duplicitous in of itself.

But issue-based candidacies only work if you actually make moves like you’re going to run — see Dennis Kucinich in the last cycle, who ran a threadbare but earnest campaign through 2003, or Duncan Hunter (who has already announced that he will run) on the GOP side this time. But Gingrich won’t even think about putting a team together until nearly a year from now, which at that point will be less than six months from the Iowa caucuses.

Running a credible presidential campaign is about creating a presence — momentum, or the appearance thereof. Newt Gingrich, needless to say, will not be creating any of this. If Gingrich won’t even bluff, the media won’t play along.

Update: Via Political Wire, the suspicion that Hillary Clinton might not run for president gets a boost from a QC Times report saying Clinton isn’t staffing up in Iowa. If true, then this wide-open free-for-all nomination race only continues to thin out.

Home of the C+ Term Paper Makes the Honor Roll?

Published by William Beutler on November 28, 2006 in Academic Blogging, Second Life and Wikipedia. 2 Comments

This fall term, Pepperdine international law professor Roger Alford made sure his students gave something back (my take, not his), as he explains at Opinio Juris:

This semester I took Peter Spiro’s suggestion to heart and assigned my international law students to write a Wikipedia entry as a small part of their class requirements. The only limits I put on the students was to pick a topic that was relevant to international law and that was not currently included in Wikipedia (or at most was a stub). The results were quite impressive. I will not give you the details of each entry to avoid compromising the next phase of the experiment. But essentially they wrote on topics ranging from prominent international law professors and judges, several major decisions of international courts, two Supreme Court decisions, a key aspect of a major environmental law treaty, principles of international law jurisdiction, an undeveloped topic relating to the use of force, a major international investment arbitration issue, and an issue relating to corporate conduct and core labor standards. They wrote the entries in Wikipedia format to maximize the chances that the entries will be accepted by the Wikipedia editors.

First, this is a terrific idea for a course assignment — I wish there had been a Wikipedia when I was in school. Second, this is great news for Wikipedia itself. I’d like to see media outlets that picked up the John Seiganthaler controversy last year run a small feature on this development. Third, this makes a lot more sense than a whole class about Second Life.

Content hat tip: ExMo. Headline hat tip: zefrank.

In The Land Of The Blind, The One-Eyed Item Is King

Published by William Beutler on November 28, 2006 in Journalist Bloggers, MSM vs. Blogs and Rhetoric. 9 Comments

Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic, Slate and most recently the Los Angeles Times editorial page, pens a whopper of a blind item in his latest column, for the Washington Post and Slate:

The first person I knew who had a Web site of his own was a fellow Washington journalist. This was when many journalists were still just getting into e-mail, but the URL for this Web site quickly circulated around town and around the world. Why? Well, we were all impressed by the technological savvy. But we were absolutely astounded by the solipsism. What on earth had gotten into Joe (not his real name)? This was a modest, soft-spoken, and self-effacing fellow, yet his Web site portrayed him as an egotistical monster.

The list of possibles is vanishingly small. There’s Kinsley’s fellow former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan… maybe fellow neoliberal contrarian Mickey Kaus, and… there’s Andrew Sullivan. Kinsley offers a few more clues:

Or so it seemed at the time. All of the elements that struck us as obnoxious maybe eight years ago no longer seem that way. In fact, they are now virtually required for any writer’s Web site. The Web address, of course, was his name: JoeJournalist.com. It’s hard to recapture why that even seemed pretentious. But it did. Then there was his deadpan list of books he’d written and awards he’d won. And quotes from other journalists about how wonderful he is. It all seemed totally out of character, and terribly immodest. Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?

All right. Is there seriously anyone left who doesn’t think this is Andrew Sullivan?

Update: Mickey Kaus says it’s neither, citing Sullivan as an unlikely to have possessed the virtues Kinsley ascribed to this Washington journalist pre-AndrewSull… er, JoeJournalist.com. Now, I don’t know Sullivan personally, but at least on television — debating on “The Chris Matthews Show” or those old C-SPAN mornings with Brian Lamb and Christopher Hitchens — he is all of those things. Perhaps Kinsley was simply being generous, and besides had a column to write.

Updated again: This blog post is mentioned briefly in the latest episode of Bloggingheads. As the comments here indicate, Kaus strongly implies to Robert Wright that Kinsley’s subject was James Fallows. Meanwhile, Gawker thinks it’s Malcolm Gladwell.

I can’t add much more here. I don’t know the parties involved, and while I don’t think there’s enough content at the early Fallows site to convey anything like solipsism or egomania, I suppose I will defer to Kaus’ certainty.

What’s In The Technorati Top 100?

Published by William Beutler on November 21, 2006 in Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, Charts and Graphs, Daily Kos, Entertainment, Gawker Media, Instapundit, Tech Blogosphere and Technorati. 6 Comments

Earlier in the month Technorati founder/CEO David Sifry published the latest of his “State of the Blogosphere” reports. This one doesn’t break a lot of new ground — Farsi edges out Dutch as the 10th most-used language! — but it does look as if the Technorati team has taken previous criticisms into consideration. Numerous bloggers derided the August report as inaccurate (or worse) by counting dead blogs and spam blogs among the exponentially rising number of blogs in the known universe. In this installment

The State of the Blogosphere continues to be strong.

though the curve representing new blog creation finally begins to flatten:

Technorati blog creation growth curve flattens

Sifry says this “may be” the result of improved spam-fighting measures: “Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.”

He also buries the lede by skipping too quickly past this newsworthy finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

As usual the report is not lacking for beautiful charts (some of which I have appropriated for this post) but a chart showing the number of active blogs is not among them. Contrary to the bold-faced boast

Currently Tracking More than 57 Million Blogs and Counting.

there are not actually some 60 million active blogs out there. The number is closer to 33 million, which still sounds impressive even if it too is probably a little inflated, and most importantly, has the virtue of being a useful number.

In the (now mysteriously unavailable) comments on the post, one of the early respondents asked that a future report show what the top blogs are actually writing about, perhaps based on the search engine’s top 50 tags. Anyone can check out the most-used Technorati tags for themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to go down the list and figure out what genres or categories define the Top 100 and count them up.

As you can imagine, that’s quite a list. So here’s the color key for the chart and a sample:

At right you’ll find the Top 10 sites of the 100, current to November 2006. Below, a color-coded key that tells you what each pastel means.
  Technology & Business 30
  Politics & News 21
  Niche/Other 18
  Foreign Language 17
  Entertainment/Gossip 12
  Duplicate 2

 

  
  Technorati Top 10
  Engadget
  Boing Boing
  FC2 Blog
  Gizmodo
  Xujinglei
  The Huffington Post
  Techcrunch
  Daily Kos
  PostSecret
  Lifehacker

Ready for the full list of 100? After the jump:

Continue reading ‘What’s In The Technorati Top 100?’

Into Thin Air?

Published by William Beutler on November 21, 2006 in Blogging Officials, Candidate Bloggers, Daily Kos, Journalist Bloggers, Startups and Website Design. 1 Comment

Air Congress Logo, Danny Glover, Kris Meister

At the risk of turning every other other post at Blog P.I. into an update of what former colleagues are up to, I’ll attempt to turn your attention now to the launch of a new site by Danny Glover (just promoted to editor of Tech Daily, coincidentally) which happens to have been designed by a former colleague from my present job, Kris Meister. They say Washington is a small town, and it’s true, assuming you mean just the NW quadrant.

In any case, the site is called Air Congress, and it’s the logical progression of Danny’s work keeping track of congressional (and other professional) blogs at Beltway Blogroll. He writes in the Air Congress inaugural post:

Much of the content here will come directly from lawmakers themselves — the video clips they post from floor debate, the podcasts they create on various topics and more as today’s high-tech innovations take root in government.

The site also will highlight audio and video content about federal policy from other sources, including the executive branch, trade associations, advocacy groups, government watchdogs, journalists and bloggers. Plus there are plans for original AirCongress content.

The last bit is reassuring, because the biggest risk in Air Congress’ strategy is that the audio-visual content emanating from Capitol Hill is often excruciatingly dull. As someone who subscribes to to every political podcast I can find, from Judd Gregg to Xavier Becerra and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Dave Freudenthal — but rarely listen to any one of them — I think I speak with some authority.

That’s why I figure Air Congress’ best bet for success is not so much in being a collector of legislative podcasts (though if thorougly indexed, that could be useful) but rather in acting as a guide to the best, worst and most noteworthy among them. As Chris Anderson would say, we need a better filter.

To that end, I have a vague sense that such a project would benefit mightily from an open rating and tagging system, elements of which are already in use at YouTube and Daily Kos, respectively. Short of that, only the most dedicated political junkie could pull off such a feat — but then again, there’s every reason to think Danny is just that political junkie.

Why, You Little—!!!

Published by William Beutler on November 21, 2006 in Blogs vs. MSM, MSM, Newspapers and Seriously. 1 Comment

There’s a curious and twisted form of homerism on display right now at Power Line, where readers have been falling over themselves to first nominate and now vote for their hometown newspaper as the “worst newspaper in the United States.”

I don’t doubt that there are legitimate criticisms to be made about most or all of these papers, but I also don’t doubt that the examples provided are not nearly enough to make such a drastic judgment. Indeed, while a couple submissions refer to specific grievances, the post is characterized by allusive grumbling and generalized complaints. Which gives me an idea…

Can you match the newspaper with its corresponding critique? Answers in the nomination post at Power Line, as well as below the fold. No peeking!

a. Los Angeles Times   1. “Farther left than the Guardian, but without the snappy prose.”

b. The Oregonian   2. “All around worst paper, general purposes”
c. San Francisco Chronicle   3. “Not nominated by any readers, but a paper that few will dispute belongs on this list.”
d. Washington Post   4. “Relentless liberalism, then spiteful revenge pieces.”
e. Kansas City Star   5. “Slavish liberalism (probably all those gummint workers).”

Continue reading ‘Why, You Little—!!!’

Dear John

Published by Not Paul Begala on November 21, 2006 in Democrats, Elections, John Kerry and White House '08. 0 Comments

Kerry, that is. (Edwards, you can go about your book tour.)

I’m going to take a moment from my post-election binge drinking and ask you a favor: Don’t run for President. Please.

I know, it’s really not fair, and I feel really bad for you. You raised more money than any Democrat in history, got more votes than any Democrat in history — just 80K from victory Ohio — and parties have typically afforded their nominees a second chance.

But, I have to be more honest with you than I was with that girl I met at the bar last week.

I don’t like you.

Nobody did. We hated George W. Bush. Remember this guy? It wasn’t just funny, it was the truth. We could have nominated a bicycle and it would have gotten 45% against W. (”Vote Bike — Ride the Path to Change in 04!”) So don’t take last time as an example of how people feel about you or how much money you can raise.

You’re boring and vacillatory, which makes it remarkable how often you manage to say something that can get you into trouble. Like that little joke that got you routinely panned by the whole country in about 2 days. Honestly, I’ve heard how scared your staff used to get when you stopped reading from the prepared text.

You are a career Washington politician, and that has a way of sapping the real life out of candidates. You tend to forget what it was like to be inspired by greater things and greater people. You fall in love with your own voice and your ego gets way too big.

We’ve got some big problems we need fixed, and we need someone who will inspire the next generation of Americans. For example, your newfound voice is two years too late and feels contrived. We don’t need more insincerity — we already have Hillary, after all.

But worst of all, you blew it on the war.

Campaigns reflect their candidates, no matter how much we political consultant folks try and tell you guys what to do, you are the ultimate deciders. Your core being — the military service and heroism that defines you most — came under attack, and you resisted the urge to swing back.

Why? Because you were afraid to lay it on the line. You were afraid of losing the presidency. That’s why you voted for the war resolution in the first place. You thought it would help you win the presidency. Conviction is important, John.

And it’s not just these things. We have new people courting us. That Obama fellow is mighty dreamy. We always liked Edwards and we don’t much blame him for what happened in 2004. You, on the other hand… (Another reason we’re pissed? You’re partly responsible for Bush still being in the White House.) And let’s face it, there are quite a few of us who are scared to cross Hillary — those Clintons hold a hell of a grudge, you know.

And I want you to have an honorable legacy. You deserve not only for 20 years of distinguished service in the Senate and for fighting volunteering to fight in Vietnam. You raised a ton of money for Democrats. Emails to your list on behalf of candidates were worth $50K for some candidates. Despite what I said above, your new voice on Iraq is welcome and we need real, responsible people to help us fix the mess. I’d love to see you as a Secretary of State, or some other position that would piss off John McCain.

You have a long, James Baker-like career ahead of you in Washington. Old hands that the country desperately needs in positions where we don’t have to elect you. Hell, Al Gore has become so anti-Washington of late, there’s a vacuum waiting to be filled. Bill Clinton isn’t going to do anything like this, not while there’s political risk in offending people.

So please John, don’t run. We want to like you. Just not as a candidate.

Sincerely, Not Paul Begala

Take The Plunge

Published by William Beutler on November 20, 2006 in Journalism History, New York Times, Newspapers and Seriously. 1 Comment

If you missed Jack Shafer’s “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Bus Plunge’ Story” last week, I much recommend it. Not only will you learn about this gruesomely fascinating category of journalism, but by the end you may yearn for the long lost days of the K-hed (not K-Fed; nobody will be sorry to lose him).

As an example of the genre, I have appropriated from Slate the scan of one specimen from the Sept. 1, 1956 New York Times:

New York Times Bus Plunge Story

As Shafer documents, the phenomenon has all but disappeared from the Times. But on the Internet it lives on — not just on the aptly named Bus Plunge! website, but also, just this afternoon, on the front page of CNN.com:

CNN Bus Plunge Story

More on the accident here, but I must warn you — if you enjoy your gallows humor, I don’t recommend clicking through.

Paging Jackie Chiles…

Published by William Beutler on November 20, 2006 in Blogs vs. MSM, Entertainment, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere and YouTube. 2 Comments

Any day with two stories where the leftosphere and rightosphere agree is an unusual day, so let’s not let it pass unnoticed.

This afternoon News Corp. announced it would not be publishing the O.J. Simpson book, “If I Did It,” and it naturally follows, Fox would not be airing the accompanying Judith Regan interview. If there’s anyone in the blogosphere who’s upset with this turn of events, you won’t find them on Memeorandum. When Firedoglake and Michelle Malkin agree on something, pause to savor the moment (or let your stomach settle).

Before the announcement, Newsweek had a story prepped for the issue out today that you just know the authors had a great time writing:

Regan’s imprint at HarperCollins, which has put out books about convicted wife-killer Scott Peterson and a memoir by porn star Jenna Jameson, is set to publish a “fictional” account by O.J. that details how he would have killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman if he did kill them, which he still insists he did not. The book, titled “If I Did It,” will go along with a two-part “Fox television event” in which Regan—a former National Enquirer reporter—will interview O.J., who’ll apparently spell out in gory detail precisely how he didn’t commit the crime.

Time may have hired Ana Marie Cox, but Newsweek can do the snark, too.

Next, how could we ignore the bizarre, racist and unfunny Michael Richards meltdown this weekend — making the former hipster doofus another victim of the YouTube revolution, if not actually YouTube itself. Any sympathy for him in the blogosphere? Not a bit. There really is only one take on this, although as Roy Edroso points out, after the initial condemnation, the tangents followed by some are less than enlightening.

Bonus Fun Fact: Longtime readers of Gothamist’s franchise in the District might recall that this is not the first indication that there was something odd about Richards:

Michael Richards — you know, Cosmo Kramer — got interested in Freemasonry around the time that “Seinfeld” ended. In 2001 he told the Post’s Peter Carlson about reading [impenetrable thousand-page Masonic text written by an alleged Kluxer] “Morals and Dogma.” Said Richards: “I don’t fully understand it, but I have an intuitive understanding of what it means.” That Kramer — he’s always up to something!

I’m not sure exactly how to tie in that episode of “Seinfeld” where Kramer played the O.J. role in a re-enactment of the Bronco chase or Jackie Chiles’ Darden-esque courtroom gambit — “Of course a bra’s not going to fit on over a leotard. A bra’s gotta fit right up against a person’s skin… like a glove!” — but then again, I suppose I just did.

Botched Joke?

Published by William Beutler on November 20, 2006 in Democrats, Entertainment, John Kerry, Republicans and White House '08. 0 Comments

The Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary today takes up the case of political figures ambushed by Borat — finally, an “I Fell For Borat!” for the DC crowd? Alas, not. John Fund just wants to complain:

It won’t surprise anyone who’s noticed how much liberals love to laugh at the humiliation of average Americans that all the Washington-related victims of Mr. Cohen’s stunts appear to be conservative Republicans. For his first victim, Mr. Cohen taped a speech by GOP Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi at an annual Pentecostal revival to illustrate the links between religion and politics in America. In his encounter with former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, Mr. Cohen’s character Borat gushes over the fact that he has finally met “a genuine chocolate-face.” But the most over-the-top of Borat’s pranks on politicians is played on former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, who admittedly often does appear to be humor impaired. In the movie, Borat offers Mr. Barr some cheese, only to inform him that it’s actually made from the breast milk of one of his relatives. I suppose it’s funny in a gross-out way, but I wonder how uproariously the audiences who are enjoying the Borat film in Manhattan and Hollywood would laugh if the victim were Mr. Barr’s equal in the humor-deprived category, Senator John Kerry, the man most of them backed for president in 2004.

Okay, it’s a fair point that Borat (and Ali G, and Bruno) has, to my memory, targeted Republicans for ridicule exclusively, even when he’s just looking for a standard-issue stuffed shirt to make uncomfortable. The joke on Barr would have played just as well on any Washington figure — maybe even someone still holding elective office.

However, at the risk of pulling a reverse Pauline Kael, I don’t know a single Democrat who thinks John Kerry should run for president in 2008, and most of them supported Kerry in 2004 only because he was the party’s nominee. Laughing at John Kerry would be nothing short of cathartic.

So Cohen and Fund have at least this much in common: They could choose their targets a little more judiciously.

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