Have at it. Also, Jack Russell Terrier puppies meet a Great Pyrenees:
Archives for June 2009
More on the firing of Froomkin
Via Matt Yglesias, the Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander weighs in on the firing of Froomkin:
First, it’s not about ideology. My original Omblog post quoted Hiatt as saying Froomkin’s “political orientation was not a factor in our decision.” In my discussions with Froomkin, he has not cited ideology as the primary reason. And several veteran Post reporters have dismissed that as the cause. In an online chat this week, Post Pulitzer-winning columnist Gene Weingarten, who expressed “respect” for Froomkin and regret that White House Watch was ending, said: “I don’t know why Froomkin’s column was dropped, but I can tell you that the diabolical conspiracy talk is nuts. Froomkin wasn’t dropped because he is too liberal; things just don’t work that way at the Post.” It’s also worth noting that The Post hired Ezra Klein, a liberal political blogger, within the past several months.
Much of that is true, but I still don’t think it’s quite right. Imagine if the Post employed a blogger seen as conservative who had written a respected, substantive (whether one agreed or not) blog/column that was critical of a Democratic president and coverage of the president.
Is there any way on earth that blogger/columnist would have been fired? Of course not.
Froomkin wasn’t fired for being liberal. But he would not have been fired had he been conservative.
Papers like the Post are deathly afraid of being accused of “liberal bias”. And they make a lot of decisions accordingly. This is one example. The bizarre defense of George Will’s global warming claims is another. (Can you imagine such a defense being mounted on behalf of a liberal columnist making liberal claims? Of course not.)
Andy Alexander’s willful naivete about this issue is not surprising, but neither is it constructive.
Update. Michael Calderone makes some interesting points about the Froomking firing:
Interestingly, before management decided to finally pull the plug, editors chose to spike a few Froomkin columns because they fell more on Howie Kurtz’s turf.
It’s strange that a White House columnist — especially one with a unique audience — would be discouraged from writing on the WH press corps. Not to mention, it’s not so out of the ordinary to cross over the two beats: Indeed, Post White House correspondent Michael Shear has a media-related item up today.
And here’s some more from Eric Wemple (who has a lengthy piece on this that is well worth reading):
Froomkin and his editors clicked from the homepage onto other portals of conflict. Media criticism was a good one: The columnist considered commenting on how the media were portraying the White House a significant part of his job; his editors felt otherwise. “They told me they didn’t want me to do media criticism. I could never quite figure out how I could avoid it,” says Froomkin. The friction produced a series of spiked Froomkin columns, which generally got published on the Nieman Watchdog blog, including the columnist’s takedown of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
Saturday Night Open Thread
I’m exhausted.
This is an open thread, sort of, but it should be recognized it is a Sanford free zone.
Also, just a couple more weeks before Steelers camp.
Open Thread
Some pics of Lily from our morning walk, and we don’t even bother with a leash anymore. I just carry it and use it when we are around people in the public areas or when I see someone coming down the path being dragged by a dog they obviously have no control over. Here she is rooting around in the weeds:
And here she is just posing:
I’m not sure what she heard, but we were walking along and she heard something in the woods and stopped for a bit. For a second, I thought I was going to end up chasing her through the woods after a squirrel, but she lost interest a second or two later:
Got a full day ahead of me, so consider this an open thread.
Call the waaambulance
It’s hard out there for a heath care profiteer:
The Senate Finance Committee is pressuring hospitals and insurers to follow the lead of the pharmaceutical industry and pony up to help pay for health reform, industry insiders say.
“They are shaking people down, and it’s fair to say that includes a broad range of health care stakeholders,” said a health care industry insider, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly without fear of retribution. “They’re playing hardball, and they’re serious about it.”
[…..]Policymakers are also considering costly administrative changes, such as forcing insurers to standardize enrollment forms and create a single portal for doctors to use when dealing with the industry’s many companies.
This amount of bureaucratic crap Americans have to go through to get health care sickens me. How on earth can anyone whine about government red tape when, right now, every fucking insurer and hospital has their own crazy set of forms you have to fill out (forms which usually only exist in hard copy or Microsoft Word form, btw)?
I’m less and less convinced that we’ll get anything decent passed this year. I think we’re looking at a 20-30 year fight to put American health care on a par with health care in other western countries.
Update. Commenter DBD has some interesting inside info on how the processing of claims and enrollment forms works.
It’s Getting Hot In Here
Whatever it takes, I guess:
A former mayor found sitting naked and holding a beer at a Rabun County campsite told police he wasn’t the same naked man seen walking around earlier.
Mark Musselwhite, 43, said he was hot and had been in the creek, according to a Georgia Department of Natural Resources incident report. He apparently didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.
Sometimes the heat just gets to you.
Climate contrarianism
Get ready for a lot of contrarianism about the cap-and-trade bill. Yglesias has a pretty good take down:
I’ve heard some clever people who don’t want to be silly denialists about the threat of climate change, and who don’t want to be silly alarmists about the threat of Waxman-Markey, but who don’t have a self-conception as belonging to the same political coalition as Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi attempt to argue that the answer is “decrease.” But I’ve never heard any of the people actually charged with the international negotiations say that. As best I can tell, everyone involved with the Copenhagen process, everyone involved with the U.N., and all the climate negotiators from the major European countries are hoping for something like this bill to pass in order to give the international diplomatic process additional momentum.
Commenter Hob describes the rhetoric perfectly:
“Everyone thinks recycling is better than throwing all our shit in the river, but if you look beyond the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you may be surprised to learn…”
Obviously, the only truly rational position here is to do nothing until we’re sure that aliens won’t pelt us with small asteroids traveling at 99 percent of the speed of light.