The great blog American Thinker offers us a nugget of fact-based truth:
Journolist, the “unofficial Obama campaign,” proves that irresponsible, false charges of racism are accepted on the left as a political tactic.
RepublicanDaily.info seems to be a fairly straight-up site that aggregates news within the Republican political sphere. Definitely worth a click if that interests you.
Then again, a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
Here is Sullivan’s rather bloodless post acknowledging that Journolist critics might have a point.
Here’s what Ezra Klein wrote today:
In another wrinkle they haven’t mentioned, Journolist included Gautham Nagesh, a Daily Caller reporter (he’s since moved to The Hill). He leaned conservative, and frequently disagreed with other members of the list. It also included almost 400-some other people. If I had thought there was some deep and dark conspiracy to protect, I can guarantee you I would’ve been a bit more selective.
In my opinion, Klein seems to be speculating (without “saying”) that Nagesh is the leaker. If you want to spread a rumor, Klein shows us how to do it here. His long career as a political op makes him an expert.
One other think Klein demonstrates is how to reframe a debate by misstating the issue. It’s not about conspiracy, it’s about message coordination. The JournoList echo chamber gave a bunch of leftish journalists, writers who were insecure in their own opinions, a mechanism for getting on the same page. Such discussions do not technically constitute a conspiracy, which implies actual planning. But it did give leftish policy pimps the opportunity to co-opt the journalistic community. And as The Daily Caller is showing, JournoList was a very effective tool for this.
The real question continues to be, why does Ezra Klein still work for the Washington Post? Does the newspaper no longer value its reputation as an honest broker of information? The full impact of the JournoList scandal will be that readers who are not part of the leftish echo chamber will no longer be able to trust the Post to publish the truth. For the Post, this can’t possibly be a good thing
Tucker Carlson’s online mag The Daily Caller has just put itself on the American journalistic map with its serialization of the JournoList scandal. This kind of news will put the popularity of the site on afterburners, just the way the Monical Lewinsky scandal made Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report a household name.
It’s also catalyzing a long-needed public discussion of journalistic ethics and the role of journalism in a democracy. Memo to the leftish: You had better think twice before trashing the institutions from which your views eminate. When they lose respect, you lose respect.
Good luck, Tucker!
Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller expands the the JournoList scandal with a new article by Jonathan Strong, showing how the formerly-secret internet listserv was used to coordinate a strategy to mute criticism of Rev. Jeramiah Wright during Obama’s campaign.
The current mainstream media can still function with a tarnished reputation. But they leave a vacuum that legitimate, non-partisan news sources need to fill.
UPDATE: Ann Althouse’s blog will probably have a good comment thread on this. What we are witnessing is the collapse of journalism as a profession. This is huge.
UPDATE: The Christian Science Monitor has a fairly balanced take on this scandal.
UPDATE: Rod Dreher:
If this were just a conservative vs. liberal thing, I wouldn’t blog on it here, because politics isn’t really my thing anymore. This, to me as a journalist, is a hugely important matter of morality and professional ethics, and a blow to the authority of journalism at a time when it is already reeling.
One of my friends, a very liberal white guy whose partner is black, removed all the Obama stickers from the back of his car. Only his Human Rights Campaign sticker remains.
If the Democrats lose people like him, who’s left to vote for them? They seem to be expecting to lose Congress, as Charles Krauthammer speculated. The question is then, how do the Republicans plan to stanch the flow of dollars from Treasury printing presses until a Republican president is elected?
And I wonder: Why do Democrats hate America?
Sometimes, to cook food well is to make sure the food is well cooked.
My partner Charlie died in 1994. Back in the 1980s, our romance was going full-bore; and the time eventually came when he had to take me to meet the family. They lived in a shotgun shack on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, off the road between Oglala, South Dakota and Chadron, Nebraska. Dried badlands that grew barely enough grass to graze cattle. They had a few horses and a dog, no electricity (it went out to the utility pole but the house had never been wired), and water from a hand pump outside the house. Charlie’s parents were old and didn’t speak much English, but they were very nice to me.
During the day, various sisters and brothers came by, along with their kids. It was eventually decided that in celebration of my arrival, they would make taniga. I had no idea what this was, so I didn’t know what to expect.
They pooled $20 in food stamps, and sent Charlie, myself, and Charlie’s friend Todd to a slaughterhouse in Gordon, Nebraska. After quite a long drive, we got there. I waited in the car while the other two went in to complete the transaction. About 15 minutes later, they came out with a black plastic garbage bag one-quarter full of — something. I didn’t know what, but its smell had barnyard qualities to it.
When we got back to the house, I had a look. It was tripe — cow stomach — that had only been rinsed a bit. It had not been processed with lime to turn it a dainty white; no, it was “green tripe”. It was greenish brown and smelled rank.
Charlie’s sisters did further cleaning and cutting of the tripe into smaller pieces. They then threw the pieces of tripe into a big enamelware stock pot, covered it with water, threw in some salt, and put it on an old Franklin stove outside the house, stoked with firewood.
The water started boiling mid-afternoon. We spent the day chatting, and watching the stove. I shared myself with the family, and they shared themselves with me. In the Lakota way, I became the new family member.
The sun set. The taniga was still boiling. The sisters ladled the scum off the broth, and added water from time to time. At almost midnight, the sky was inky black with pinprick stars, and the taniga had boiled enough. They gave me a serving in a styrofoam bowl and handed me a plastic spoon. I fought back some queasiness and fished out a small piece of the rubbery mass in my spoon. Mirable dictu! It was beefy and a little earthy, and delicious. I went back for seconds.
Since then, the USDA has banned salughterhouses from selling green tripe, so if you want to try this yourself, you’re out of luck. But on that lovely warm evening, I learned that a few Oglala Lakota women could turn cow guts into magic. They didn’t use all of the colors on the culinary palate to make that meal, but with what they did use, they communciated culture and history; love and family. To me, they cooked food well.
A double rainbow appeared Saturday, July 10, 2010 in the early evening near Kadoka, South Dakota, USA, viewed South across I-90.
UPDATE: This digital image is posted as a camera original without resampling. Feel free to right-click or drag it to your desktop and play with it, or make it a wallpaper.
It’s no news that Nancy Pelosi is dumb as a box of rocks. But her notion that unemployment insurance payments are a great way to create jobs is so incandescently ignorant, it’s stunning that a person so stupid could ever become a leader of any kind.
By her logic, we could achieve full employment by laying everybody off.
Taxation does not create wealth. Taxation only uses wealth.
If you’re unemployed, you’re not adding value to the economy by your labor; you’re just using resources (unemployment benefits) of others who are adding value.
Jobs are created by reducing the cost of production, which enables employers to hire people. To create jobs, government must lower taxes, and lower the other structural barriers to employment, like reducing the minimum wage and reducing disincentives to fire people.
If you don’t understand why, read up on Frédéric Bastiat.