In case you were out drinking last night and missed it, the Wikileaks Iraq document dump was released last night. Here’s the Times coverage, and here’s the Guardian’s. One thing that jumps out is the Guardian’s story of how the US ignored torture, or what the Times calls “detainee abuse”.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
Wikileaks
Memo to NPR: GTFO
Whatever you want to say about Juan Williams, and much of it was said yesterday on this blog, it’s pretty obvious that NPR management just can’t handle opinionated political journalism. They’re so piss-pants scared of being called “liberal” that they have to instruct their staff to stay away from the Stewart/Colbert rally while off-duty, and they bobbled that so badly that their ombudsman needs to go into full explanation and defense mode. For editors like that, having Juan Williams on the payroll is as gut-wrenching as driving around with a trunk full of plutonium.
Only management paralysis caused by fear can explain why the NPR politics roster has been the same for years. When Williams started, he, like E.J. Dionne, David Brooks and Mara Liasson, was one of the most innocuous voices around. As Juan began his journey to FOX, editors clearly didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing, the default choice of all chickenshit managers. It’s only when he crossed some line far beyond the stated NPR ethics guidelines that their hand was finally forced, and they came up looking like chumps.
If Williams were an isolated case, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Unfortunately for NPR, high-end DC pundits are under constant pressure to appear on FOX or MSNBC spouting ever more tendentious bullshit. Even if NPR replaces Williams with a sane, conservative Casper Milquetoast, the cash involved in extremist punditry will ultimately drive that replacement to views that are too extreme for the network to tolerate.
There’s just not enough Immodium and Priolsec in the world to deal with the agida that pundits will cause NPR editors in the next few years, so they should get the fuck out of that business now. If they must do political analysis, it should be as non-ideological as possible, something like Ken Rudin’s approach. But the best thing they could do is just to devote more resources to good old-fashioned reporting. They’re still going to be called “liberal” no matter what they do, but they may be able to avoid shitstorms like the current Williams debacle.
PSA – USAA
I’m finally moving my banking away from a big corporate bank. I’m not normally a boycotter, but over the years not only has that bank tried to ruin the rest of the country, they’ve also made a noble effort to screw me, personally, so there are macro and micro reasons to go through the pain of moving accounts.
I looked at the local credit unions and locally-owned banks, but finally decided to move to USAA. USAA started as an auto and property insurance program for military officers, but it has expanded over the years into a full-service financial services company. You need to meet eligibility requirements to buy auto and property insurance from them (and if you do, check out their rates), but their bank is open to everyone.
As with all their other services, the bank has been a pleasure to deal with, both over the phone and via the Internet. Somehow, even though they have no shareholders and redistribute profit to members, which means that they should be withholding their productivity, they manage to do a better job than corporate banks.
How Dinosaurs Become Extinct
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has a new business model: filing lawsuits against everyone who reprints their stories online. Fair enough, but Righthaven, the company that bought the Review-Journal’s copyright and is managing the lawsuits, got greedy. Yesterday, a judge threw out a suit where Righthaven claimed infringement by a blogger who quoted 8 sentences of a 30 sentence story and linked back to the Review-Journal.
There’s another lawsuit pending where Righthaven sued the Democratic Underground for a five-sentence excerpt that included a link back to the Journal. That suit claimed damages of up to $150,000. The Review-Journal position is that anything but a quote of the headline and first paragraph is not fair use.
Here’s a little hint for the Review-Journal: when you have a competitor in town, bloggers who want to discuss Las Vegas politics will link to their stories about voter suppression, the Angle/Reed race, the Tea Party Express and anything else that happens in your neck of the woods.
Are People Wrong to be Pissed About TARP?
The news that TARP earned a 8.25% rate of return is good, and a lot of the emotion over TARP is irrational, but I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to still be upset about TARP. If a private investor were taking on the kind of risk, they’d want a rate of return far in excess of the average corporate bond return (which is now about 6%), because at the time the TARP investment was made, it was far riskier than the average corporate bond.
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They Pay This Guy Good Money, Too
Stu Rothenberg is starting to walk back some of his “sky is falling” rhetoric about the House. Here’s an example:
In North Dakota, veteran Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D) is proving that initial reports of his demise were exaggerated. Weeks ago, I spoke with someone who told me that Pomeroy had privately acknowledged that his chances of surviving this midterm were small, and early polling suggested that GOP challenger state Rep. Rick Berg was headed to a relatively clear victory.
While the two parties have different polls showing who is ahead, they agree Pomeroy and Berg are in a dogfight. The cycle still favors the Republican challenger, but the Congressman is not going away.
The only independent pollster polling in North Dakota is Rasmussen. And Pomeroy has out-raised his opponent by over a million bucks, and he’s outspent him 2:1. That’s a big deal in a cheap media market like North Dakota.
The fact is that the indicators in this race always pointed to a dogfight, and that Rothenberg, like Charlie Cook, tend to exaggerate uncertainty early in the cycle to drive subscriptions to their expensive publications. When it looks like they’re going to be wrong, they can always trot out a “little bird whispered in my ear” “I’ve got a secret” explanation that reinforces their positions as high priests in the cult of the savvy.
And To Think That People Pay Him Perfectly Good Money
Let’s file away this Charlie Cook nugget for 2012:
Should the Senate end up with a 9-seat net gain for Republicans, or even eight, there will be immediate speculation about what Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., do. Both are up for re-election in 2012 and neither is likely to be oblivious to the fact that Democrats have twice as many seats at risk in 2012 and 2014 as Republicans. Whether the GOP captures a Senate majority this year or not, the odds are pretty good that they will have one in either two or four years. That kind of exposure is enormously important, particularly given the rarefied circumstances in which Democrats won some of those seats in 2006 and 2008.
For Nelson, who turns 70 next year, it’s hard to say what would be more difficult: seeking re-election in 2012 as a Democrat or winning a GOP primary.
This year, the party establishments had a tough time protecting party-switchers or iconoclasts in primaries. Just ask Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
If Nelson decides to run for re-election, he might opt to do so as an independent. Personally, I think retirement sounds pretty good. I hear he has a nice fishing and hunting cabin, which sounds particularly inviting given the war zone that the Senate has become. For Lieberman, he might have just found his sweet spot, running as an independent and sitting with whichever party is most hospitable. [italics mine]
Here’s Public Policy Polling two weeks ago:
There’s one thing Democrats, Republicans, and independents in Connecticut agree on: they want this to be Joe Lieberman’s last term in the US Senate. Only 24% of voters in the state say they would vote to reelect Lieberman in 2012 to 66% who say they will vote to replace him. Majorities of Democrats (72%), independents (63%), and Republicans (61%) alike say it’s time to swap out Lieberman for someone new.
If that’s Charlie’s definition of a “sweet spot”, keep me away from his candy dish. Unless all of Ben Nelson’s grey matter has been crushed under the weight of his ridiculous toupee, he won’t be switching parties. It’s an act of sheer desperation that works once, if you’re lucky.
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