Not me, but one my best* employers.

Microsoft had been talking about selling Slate for months, but for some reason I thought it would never happen.

It did. The Washington Post is the proud new daddy. Nice fit. This could mean good things for them. Hopefull. My one concern was all the traffic MSN delivers, but apparently a continuation of that arrangement is part of the deal. For now, at least.

Stories: from WP's Howie Kurtz, NYT's David Carr, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg.

*(Best not in terms of quantity, but definitely in quality. They've used me twice in a year and a half, and I was extremely please with both the editing and the coverage. They made them both cover stories and they drew a lot of attention. The Columbine piece got me two write-ups in the New York Times, and eventually led to a book deal.)

And in an odd little twist, this change may come just in time to assist me in my sudden subpoena battle with the Air Force.

Oh, did I not mention that yet? I've kinda had my hands full with this sudden subpoena battle with the Air Force. Ugh. No, I'm not kidding. And I know I'm burying my lead. It gave me a little chuckle. More on that soon. (The battle, not the chuckle.) I just got the word Friday.

---

I wonder if this will give a nice boost to Salon stock?

Update:

No sir. Salon dropped 18% today. Odd. It's volitale, so that's no biggie, but I would have thought it would help. Maybe a lot. Wrong.

That's the headline of my Slate story, just posted.

Long story of how it came about, but the short version is that last week I came to the conclusion that I may never revive my Columbine book project, and made a last minute decision to pitch the pretty big news I had uncovered researching it as a magazine piece during the media window of the five-year anniversary (today).

Slate really got behind it, and they will be moving it into the cover slot as soon as they get the graphic set. And they just notified me that MSN is picking it up as their cover shortly, too, which will mean a lot more exposure, which this story really needs.

And best of all, I really like the edit they did on it. Thank God. I always worry. We had to cull it down from 10,000 words to 3,000, including the sidebar--which is still extremely long for them--and I had nightmares about whether we could do the ideas justice. But I'm really pleased with the way it turned out. I really like my editor there, David Plotz. Really talented guy. Which is great, because that is NOT always the case with editors. He really made it better--trimmed the fat, kept the meat. How it's supposed to work.

I'm also really happy that they're going as aggressive with the conclusions as I believe they deserve. (So nice to have an editor believe in your story.)

The head of the FBI's investigation in the case and the other top shrinks they brought in don't believe the "why" of Columbine is not any great mystery at all, and they're ready to explain why.

I always get excited working on a big story (to me, and what I've spent a good chunk of the past five years on, it's a big story), and I was in this case as well, but I'm also incredibly relieved to get it out there, and off my chest. I have spent so much time with Columbine over the past five years--it really had an effect on me. And the frustrationg so many people felt about how it could have happened really bothered me, when I had access to a very different view and could not share it. I have never felt this kind of relief as a journalist before.

(God, I hope this doesn't sound self-serving. I'm just spilling my thoughts and feelings as I feel them--same as I ever do on this blog. Feels a bit weirder knowing strangers may come here after reading the story, though, and then see me blabbing like this about it. But that's what I do here. Blab like this. Heeheehee. I also have barely slept in the past 24 hours, so consider cutting me a little slack.)

And I'm eager to hear what you all think. I'll try to answer any questions here. I'm sure there will also be a discusson in Slate's The Fray.

Check out my friend Rolf Potts in Nicaragua in Slate. (It's called Virgin Trails: Travels in the Other Central America. More on the piece later.)

He's making his way round the planet top to bottom (and round again), in a nine-month Drive Around the World.

Think I should take his place?

Seriously. He needs to leave when they get to the bottom of Chile (or is it Argentina?) in a few weeks. He wants me to take over somewhere in SE Asia or India. I really want to, but a little uneasy about leaving this job for 4-6 weeks. Let me know what you think.

And definitely check out Rolf's Vagabonding book from Random House (he used to write the Vagabonding column for Salon), and his Vagblogging blog. He's a great guy and a really interesting writer.

(And there's a link to his blog on my blogroll to the left. In fact, it's at the very top of the list, and has been since about the time I restarted this blog this past summer. Rolf will keep posting reports from South America there.)

That question headlines the Slate co-cover story at the moment. There and everywhere else.

Or lord, give me strength.

Here's the opening of the Slate piece, by William Saletan, whose coverage this year has ranged from occasionally insightful, to generally annoying and idiotic:

Is Howard Dean toast?

That's what pundits are suggesting, Republicans are hoping, and Democrats are fretting in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture. Dean surged to the front of the Democratic presidential pack by opposing the war in Iraq. As the postwar turned bloody, expensive, and stagnant, it looked like a brilliant bet. But this morning, reporters and analysts seem convinced that the latest card drawn from the deck leaves him with a losing hand.

The first problem with that argument is the premise: "Dean surged to the front of the Democratic presidential pack by opposing the war in Iraq." That's the standard pundit line, in spite of historical evidence to the contrary. It's just so easy, I guess. And the only explanation they could come up with. For some reason, "Because he really connects with people" just doesn't work for them.

The point of the Saletan piece is that Dean is not necessarily toast, but the point of my post is how retarded the freaking question is.

But since we're talking about Saletan, and the question, he makes a nice case for how Bush swept Gore's acheivements into past history, and how skillfully Dean is reframing the Saddam capture with this statement:

"Our troops are to be congratulated on carrying out this mission with the skill and dedication we have come to know of them," he said this morning. "This development provides an enormous opportunity to set a new course and take the American label off the war. We must do everything possible to bring the U.N., NATO, and other members of the international community back into this effort. Now that the dictator is captured, we must also accelerate the transition from occupation to full Iraqi sovereignty."

Notice how Dean repeats every element of the 2000 Bush approach. Somebody other than the president—in this case, our troops—gets the credit. The mission becomes history. Capturing Saddam becomes a means to a more difficult end: getting the United Nations into Iraq, and getting the United States out.

But the funniest thing about Dean, the military and the media is that Dean was never the anitwar candidate. If you listened at all to his remarks, right from the beginning, he has been a pretty hawkish guy, with a strong opposition to this war.

The mischaracterization in the press may have helped him in the primaries, and his correction of the record will get him back where he needs to be in the general. Saletan refers to this as repositioning, which I guess it is, though no mention is made about who mispositioned him in the first place. Regardless, the Slate piece ends on a positive note for Dean:

It's clear from interviews Dean gave to reporters Saturday (written up in Sunday's Washington Post and New York Times) that he's repositioning himself as a more hawkish candidate in the general election. He was planning to claim that position tomorrow in a major foreign policy speech. Now he'll have maximum attention as he does so. Bush's aides would be unwise to assume that Dean can't make their latest triumph vanish into history. They should know.

Eventually Saletan gets a clue. If only we could hope for half as much from the rest of the media.

---

You can read the full text of the Dean speech in question via the Dean blog here.

My apologies if you have had trouble accessing this site the past few days. The RadioUserland people who run it for Salon claim it's because one of the Salon blogs, The Julie/Julia Project, was featured in the New York Times this week, getting so much traffic she doubled the normal Salon-blogs usage. That should peter out soon, or they'll figure out the real problem if that's just a smokescreen.

In the meantime, I'm going to drop the number of days appearing on my home page to four (it may take awhile for it to take effect). If you're interested in General Wesley Clark's run, I had a lot on him on Monday, so click there on the calendar, or his name under categories.

And problems have been pretty intermittent: when a page fails to come up for me, it usually works if I try it again a minute later. Please email me or post in the comments any difficulty you have been having. It will help a great deal in solving it. Eventually, I may have to switch providers.

. . . And the new Carter, and Goldwater, and McGovern, and Reagan . . .

This Slate story/chart is hysterical. That's the headline above, here's the brief copy:

Brown may be the new black, but Howard Dean is the new Brown. Jerry Brown, that is: a former governor who seems impervious to the tempering influence of focus groups. Or maybe Dean's the new George McGovern: an anti-war candidate destined to destroy his party. Or perhaps he's the new John McCain: a tightly wound straight-shooter known for his (usually) winning candor.

Dean, the once-obscure Democratic presidential candidate who doubled up on the covers of Newsweek and Time this week, has officially gone mainstream. But it's not like Dean came out of nowhere, campaign-watchers agree. He came straight out of the history books—they just can't decide which one.

So, here's Slate's brief guide to the many faces of Dean.

For each person he's compared to, they list the number of Nexis hits, "Who said it best," "What he said" and "What he meant." Only 43 for Ronald Reagan and one for William Jennings Bryan. Click here for the chart.

Funny as this is, I do think McCain is a good comparison. Not on the issues, but it's the same feeling capturing both campaigns--the driving appeal.

USA/TODAY/CNN/Gallup released a new poll tonight showing Dean surging 36 percent in ten days nationally among registered Democrats or Dem-leaners. He jumped from fourth place to a tie for second.

Mostly name recognition, surely, but that's mostly what he was lacking. The Time and Newsweek covers and all the followon publicity brought him to the attention of a lot more people, and they apparently liked him, or at least didn't hate him.

Of course it's important to keep the raw numbers in mind: he went from 11 percent to 15 percent, so he's got a long way to go, but 15 percent isn't bad for a nine-person field, especially against guys who most people likely to vote have heard of. (If you haven't heard of Lieberman, you were either in high school the last election, or there's very little chance you're going to vote. That guy has probably peaked already. He's still in first because he was already on the ballot, but he continues to drift downward. Dean cut his lead from ten points to three points in the ten days.)

Can't be pleasant news for Kerry either. Half the pack has been stuck in virtually the same spot all year, but four have seen dramatic changes, and except for Edwards, they're all accelarating. Dean has risen 150 percent since April, Lieberman dropped 18 percent in the same period, and Kerry plummeting 33 percent, 20 percent just in the past ten days. Edwards--christened early as the golden boy the press was sure would take it--has dropped the furthest, 38 percent, though most of it came in the first month.

(USA Today set up a separate page with a table of all the raw data since April, which you can access directly here.)

Kerry had finally arrested his fall late last month, and ticked back up a couple notches, but Dean grabbed all the coverage and whopped him back down in a week and a half. Dean's four-point rise nearly matched Kerry's three-point slide in the past ten days exactly. Sounds like a lot of soft Kerry support, who were only behind the man they thought was going to win it. (Read this wonderful Slate story for a some convincing anecdotal illustrations of that from right inside the Kerry campaign.)

Of course much of the new Dean support is probably soft as well, and Kerry or Biden or Clark or somebody else will surely grab some of it back again. It's a little early to pop the corks for your man reaching a lofty 15 percent.

But these campaigns tend to be about momentum, and the Dean momentum has been like a steamroller. The latest round of exposure brought him better poll numbers which mean more exposure and more money, which will help his poll numbers and lead to more exposure . . .

The big factor though, is that as people get exposed to Dean, a lot of them fall into a swoon. Now if he can just resist the urge to shoot himself in the head.

Great. Now Cuomo is urging Gore to jump back in.

No, really, and it's Mario, not Perry.

I'm sorry, but what an asshole? Shouldn't he know better?

This just gets under my skin, because it is so typical of the freaking political establishment. You just can't pound some things through their thick skulls. How dense did you need to be to see that Gore would never excite the electorate before he ran. (And yes of course I was saying this in 1999. How hard was that?) After his disaster against the dufus, what more do you need? (He won a slight majority of the popular vote against a total nimrod when he had everything going for him to win a third Clinton term. Wow, great accomplishment.)

Thank God for Calvin Trillin. He made my night on Charlie Rose last week with this little observation:

"When they said about Al Gore: Well, he just has this horrifying inability to make contact with his fellow human beings, BUT ... {No emphasis I can create here can possibly capture the theatricality of how he wailed the "but."}

That pretty much said it all, but he continued, "That's like saying he's a great second baseman, but he can't make the double play, otherwise he's wonderful. Wait a minute, that's his job."

(Aside: I actually heard from a Salon blogger bragging the other day that Kerry was unexciting. Sorry dude, that's his job. Kerry is no Gore-alien, but he's got a bit of work to do in the charisma department.)

Al Gore's nomination should be laid out in textbooks as a prime example of a candidate that any fool can tell should not be running for president. And who virtually the entire contingent of beltway boys decided was the only conceivable choice for president, by virtue of holding the vice presidency, a job specifically reserved most years for presidential losers. Because those political imbeciles--and yes, in this regard, imbecile is too kind a word for them--christened him so unbeatable for the nomination that only the sleep-inducing Bradley would run against him, we were stuck with a miserable option who couldn't even beat the bumbler.

(And to a lesser extent they did the same thing with Bush, though that time it was mostly the Republican moneymen and Old Guard who refused to let McCain in when the R electorate began going wild for him. If McCain had run on the Dem side, he easily would have cast Gore aside and trounced Bush in November. But no one with any sort of appeal ran against Gore for the nom, so we were stuck with him.)

It was infuriating enough when the beltway boys foisted Bush and Gore on us the last time. Now some of them want to do it AGAIN! (God, even a Salon piece last December pegged Gore as the frontrunner for this election. I nearly choked. Even Salon. Luckily it was one of the few very-establishment editors who is no longer there.)

Luckily, Gore seems to know better, but they're determined to foist some other block of deadwood upon us instead--based on their same old tired checklist of inconsequential factors they worship.

WAKE UP! you morons in the establishment. There is a groundswell around Dean because he really ignites people. And a smaller one around Clark for similar reasons even before he has announced and has never run for office in his life. God knows, we may even witness a groundswell for Biden. (I wouldn't count on it, but who knows.) And maybe Kerry will get his act together and we'll see some real enthusiasm for him.

But the press remains grudging on Dean, and power brokers like the DLC are positively beside themselves. Time and Newsweek were finally forced to recognize his momentum this week, but only half-heartedly. Both began their stories by illustrating how his quest was probably hopeless. They came into his campaign with an agenda, and by golly and they're sticking to it. (Luckily some of the other media has been more willing to report what they're seeing, including several pieces in Slate, Salon, Dan Balz in the Washington Post and a wide assortment of other outlets.)

They'll do the same thing if and when Clark announces. They'll keep reporting his two percent poll showings as proof of his lunacy, as if his name recognition could escalate overnight. They are nursing a long, long love affair with the "conventional wisdom" they like to make fun of for its pathetic prediction rate, then immediately return to worshipping. It's pathetic, they're pathetic, why don't they just give it up? 

Why not listen to what people are actually responding to, instead of your idiotic pre-conceived notions about who ought to get elected?

This just drives me nuts.