Wednesday, July 31, 2002

PERMALINK

Slashdotted! Congrats to Diego Doval's Plan B -- a blognovel. It's the first Salon blog to get a link from Slashdot, and rocket up the charts as hordes of curious geeks amble in to check out the scene. comment [] 5:24:52 PM | permalink

Jenkins' ear I love reading Holman W. Jenkins Jr.'s Wall Street Journal column for its insights into how business leaders think. Not for Jenkins is the conciliatory, "let's look at things from the other side's point of view" approach of his colleague Al Hunt, the Journal's token near-liberal. Jenkins provides the unvarnished master-of-the-universe capitalist perspective -- you can practically hear the squeak of the armchair leather, the chomp of the cigar. This, say his columns, is the way the world works. (Interestingly, Jenkins' bio suggests he has spent his entire career in journalism and has no business experience.) Today Jenkins reviews the business careers of our president and vice president and exonerates them of any wrongdoing. So what if Bush benefited from some sweetheart transactions? So what if Cheney sold Halliburton high before asbestos laid it low? They're businessmen, dammit -- this is what they do! Look, you government-handout-seeking lefties: "Mr. Cheney was hired to open doors... Not to belabor the obvious, but a big part of Mr. Bush's value to partners and investors was his political visibility too." What are you, an idiot? Of course businesses hire politicians because of who they know! Such honesty is disarming. Strangely, though, in Jenkins' analysis, the moment Bush and Cheney got elected, everything changed: "Only a moron suspects Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney went to the trouble to become president and vice president to throw bones to business cronies." In other words, when out of office, Bush and Cheney got paid the big bucks to win friends and influence people, because they were so well-connected; but once they took office, they suddenly cast off all ties to their "cronies" and were transformed into even-handed public citizens. Permit me to be moronic, then, for a moment: Maybe Bush and Cheney did not become president and vice president solely to "throw bones to cronies"; maybe they got elected with the help of those cronies' cash and intend to repay the help with far more than bones. Maybe the "you wash my hands, I'll wash yours" deals that made Bush his fortune as a private citizen bear a striking resemblance to the "you wash our hands, we'll wash yours" relationship his administration has maintained with its friends in business. Maybe it's the way the world works that's moronic. comment [] 3:03:45 PM | permalink

Recession? What recession? Last winter the economics establishment reviewed its numbers and declared that we'd entered a "light" recession in 2001 but that it was so brief -- only one quarter of actual "negative growth" (economist-speak for "decline") -- that it didn't even technically qualify as a recession (two consecutive quarters of "negative growth"). This came as heartening news to the legions of laid-off workers, who could at least console themselves with the knowledge that the Bush administration was planning to bank some of their Social Security money in the collapsing stock market. Now it turns out that the economy actually shrank for the first three quarters of 2001 (most of which predated the 9/11 disaster). Yes, Virginia, there was a Bush recession. For much of the U.S., there still is. comment [] 12:29:32 PM | permalink

Olbermann vs. Coulter Our media class has a hard time focusing on more than one subject at a time. Keith Olbermann's latest column suggests that the media's (and political elite's) mad quest to convict Bill Clinton of adultery helped push more important topics -- like our vulnerability to terrorist attack -- off the national agenda. It's a great piece: "Ann Coulter didn't cause Sept. 11... But with hindsight one has to ask why the prospect of a country unprepared for terrorism wasn't a sexy enough topic for her and the others to use to pound Clinton and the Democrats." Remember, during Monicamania, any time the Clinton administration decided to do anything in the international sphere -- like firing missiles at bin Laden's Afghanistan training camp -- it was accused of pulling a "Wag the Dog" stunt to divert the national dialogue from the more pressing matter of the presidential genitalia. comment [] 12:12:15 PM | permalink

Bloggers vs. journalists, cont'd Howard Kurtz says bloggers help keep big media honest by exposing errors and analyzing bias. I agree: " To lazy reporters, the world of blogs represents their worst nightmare: It's an endless parade of experts in every conceivable subject they might write about, all equipped with Internet-style megaphones ready to pounce on errors." Trouble is, every time someone points this out, many journalists -- instead of welcoming the chance to improve their profession -- get defensive and think that their paychecks are being jeopardized. This us vs. them mentality gets us nowhere. Here's my take, from May 1999:   The emergence of weblogs doesn't eclipse the importance of timely news and entertainment on the Web -- if anything, it enhances the value of such original content. Mostly, it's a sign that we're only beginning to discover the best tools and strategies for helping Web users cope with the vast media terrain we all now inhabit. The webloggers have found a new and fertile niche in the Web's information ecology. They're fulfilling the predictions by Internet visionaries of the rise of a new breed of personal journalism online -- only instead of pounding the physical pavement, they forage for news on the Net itself. comment [] 10:33:38 AM | permalink