Newshoggers.com

Worshipping Mammon On Healthcare

By Steve Hynd

Marc Moore of Poligazette, the self-professed "moderate" group blog that somehow manages always to kiss the rings of it's far-right readership, reveals the truth about conservative opposition to single-payer healthcare.

It would be great if we could provide unlimited medical care to every man, woman, and child in America.  It really would.  But that’s unrealistic and a doctor like Murphy should know better than to get on his soap box and pretend that universal health care can be delivered without a massive transfer of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the poor and a corresponding reduction in the standard of care delivered to those who would be paying for the system.

Translation: "I've got mine!"

He's a callous son of a bitch, Marc Moore. Not for him the "greatest good of the greatest number". There's no sense of social responsibility, certainly nothing akin to "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs". That would be too socialist and his god, Mammon, might desert him - along with Poligaxette's wingnut, money-grubbing, "I'm alright Jack" readership. He just wants to have his healthcare and keep his money too.

But it's apparently a sin to say so, even if you're a doctor.

Even the debate over health care is not immune from commentators whose caustic, even violent rhetoric would be more at home at a third-world pit fight than in a democratic society...Doctor, please, your hatred of free enterprise is showing and it’s not pretty.

I personally think caustic, even violent rhetoric is perfectly justified when facing a drip of self-absorbed shit like Moore. He wants us to be nice to him because he's openly saying he's got his amd the rest of us can fuck off. And if you aren't then you must hate capitalism, not Moore's selfishness, even if the doctor he's aiming at is actually saying he'll support some level of exploitative capitalism if that's the only way to save a few more people.

Fuck that. I value respect more than snide politeness, and Moore's snide demand for politeness even as he reveals himself as a self-serving bastard deserves no respect.

/rant

Froomkin To HuffPo

By Steve Hynd

Glenn Greenwald has the news - Dan Froomkin has been snapped up by the Huffington Post as their Washington Bureau Chief, overseeing five reporters and an Assistant Editor as well as writing his own column.

Congratulations to Froomkin, who had such shining talent that several organisations were falling over each other to hire him. But Glenn also points to a potential conflict:

While this pairing is, in some ways, a natural one (even the Post Ombudsman suggested that "Web sites like The Huffington Post or Politico would seem a perfect fit"), there are also potential sources of tension.  As a practitioner of what he calls "accountability journalism" -- "explaining how Washington works; pulling no punches" -- Froomkin has been a vehement critic of the Obama administration for the last several months, while The Huffington Post frequently trumpeted (some might say "cheerleading") the Obama campaign and even his presidency (though it has become mildly more critical of Obama in recent months; its screaming, red headline today: "White House May Cave on Public Option").  Will Froomkin's harsh criticisms of Obama alienate an Obama-loving HuffPost readership?  

And given the central importance of Arianna Huffington's personal relationships with key media figures and those in power, will Froomkin's unrestrained criticisms of many of those same people undermine a key aspect of The Huffington Post's business and promotional strategies?  Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice. 

I've written in the past that the media's willing stenography for the Powers That Be is bipartisan and far more dependent upon their own fear of losing precious access than on laziness or a willingness to shill for a particular administration, party or ideology. From administration to administration, the players change slightly but the pattern doesn't. Froomkin has been that rare creature, one willing to take the contra position and to dig deep into public sources or do their own investigative reporting to support that position. I doubt HuffPo can squelch that if the WaPo couldn't.

The Thong Of The Dick Whisperer

By Steve Hynd

Mr Smoking Jacket, Dana Milbank, apparently called Nico Pitney a dick during their appearance on Reliable Sources yesterday.

And in an indication of which of the two Blogtopia (ysydctp) thinks has more integrity...

Over at CafePress, you can now buy all manner of clothing, accessories, and gadgets commemorating You’reSuchADickGate. For sale are T-shirts, sweatshirts, polo shirts, hoodies, onesies, baby bibs, coffee mugs, messenger bags, mousepads, water bottles, pet bowls, wall clocks, aprons, boxers, and, of course, “the classic thong” (Made in the USA!)—all printed with a photo of Dana Milbank and emblazoned with the line “THE DICK WHISPERER.” Again: what a proud, proud moment.

Froomkin's Last Washington Post

By Steve Hynd

Dan Froomkin's last column for the WaPo is here. Go read, give him your best wishes and so forth. Froomkin's one of the good guys and the WaPo will be far, far poorer for his going. But whover gets him next will be far, far richer.

Froomkin found his voice in watching the Bush White House lie about everything. But he's also been essential for following the Obama administration's wrongdoings. For this last WaPo post, he identifies some of the areas Obama needs to be watched carefully on.

Now, a little over five months after Bush left office, Barack Obama's presidency is shaping up to be in large part about coming to terms with the Bush era, and fixing all the things that were broken. In most cases, Obama is approaching this task enthusiastically – although in some cases, he is doing so only under great pressure, and in a few cases, not at all . I think part of Obama's abiding popularity with the public stems from what a contrast he is from his predecessor -- and in particular his willingness to take on problems. But he certainly has a lot of balls in the air at one time. And I predict that his growing penchant for secrecy – especially but not only when it comes to the Bush legacy of torture and lawbreaking – will end up serving him poorly, unless he renounces it soon.

Obama is nowhere in Bush's league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

And remember, Froomkin is still writing for Nieman Watchdog.

Faith, Fear and Christopher Badeaux

By Steve Hynd

I think it's a bit rich of Christopher Badeaux to be publishing stuff like this:

Like a real-life, hyper-garrulous Forrest Gump, Sullivan has been present for, or at least has shared his thoughts — stray, organized, rational, and delusional — on most of the major events of the last twenty five years, at a rate that has only increased since he began blogging (before it was cool) and taking long vacations after pledge drives (which has been cool forever). More impressive than his output is his utter lack of fear of self-contradiction, flights of laughter-inducing hyperbole, public obsessiveness, repeated self-contradiction, betrayals of utter ignorance, and failed attempts to mimic the Bard by coining bizarre neologisms to match his wandering moods.

...To say that Sullivan has focused his laser-like mind on human reproductive organs is to engage in an understatement worthy of the master himself. We could simply look at Sullivan’s relentless, years-long focus on circumcision (a relentlessness not well-captured by the internet tubes, as Sullivan’s archives traditionally become difficult to search when he moves from site to site), an unusual genre for a man who will never have children and who is not Jewish or Muslim, though perhaps not so unusual given his general interest in the member in question. One could focus on his decision to start calling a 4,000 year old religious tradition “male genital mutilation,” thus cleverly calling untold generations of Jews child abusers and torturers, a decision that marks the sort of intellectual territory into which only a man bravely unwilling to live in Israel can tread.

When he's responsible for pretentiously written crap like this, in what is ostensibly a simple book review. 

I think it’s fair to say that Cormac McCarthy’s novels increasingly reflect a deeply disordered universe.

That requires some elaboration, and a brief excursion into natural law. A full exposition on that topic is beyond the scope of this essay, and frankly beyond my abilities, but in brief: The Lord made the Universe according to a set of hidden but largely discernable rules, and those rules produce specific, predictable outcomes once the rules and variables are known. Furthermore, all things are made ordered—oriented, if you prefer—to not only the Lord, but also to decent and right outcomes.

This is reflected in little things, like two plus two always yielding four; and in such obvious things that we’ve lost the ability to rationalize them, such as a man and a woman together yield life, where a man and a man together are sterile. In other words, there is not only the obvious physical event, but good things come of the act because it satisfies the underlying order God instilled in things. This order lies not merely in individual acts, but in an interconnected web that binds all things together in ways immediately detectable, often predictable, and usually inexplicable.

Our consciences and our natural inclinations are manifestations of this intrinsic order; disregarding them gives rise to disorder. Indeed, even doing things that are right and good can be taken to extremes that place one outside of that natural order. When we step outside of that order, as anyone who has lived with someone suffering through, say, anorexia or alcohol addiction can tell you, the disorder radiates outward in a spiderweb-crack pattern of pain. Sin itself is definitionally an intrinsically disordered act, because it puts one apart from, and against, God. In a sense, Original Sin is the greatest intrinsically disordered act of all, and we deal with its ripples to this day. [Emphasis mine]

One has to wonder if Badeaux's problem with Sullivan is that he's not succinct enough, not Catholic enough, not conservative enough...or simply not straight enough.

Just Saying.

Michael Calderone, Your Black Helicopter Is Waiting

By Steve Hynd

Nico Pitney of Huffington Post has been far and away one of the best blogging sources on the Iran elections. Like FDL owned the Scooter Libby trial or TPM owned the AG firings, Nico. alongside Robert Mackay at The Lede, has been there first and mostest with news and views, often from Iranians as well as Western sources, as the Iranian election protests and crackdown have unfolded.

So, Obama's staff noticed Nico's coverage and contacted him to say they'd like for him to maybe ask a question of the President at today's presser. He was duly called, and didn't ask a softball question.

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Obama replied:

Well look, we didn't have international observers on the ground, we can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places throughout the country. What we know is that a sizeable percentage of the Iranian people themselves, spanning Iranian society, considered this election illegitimate. It's not an isolated instance, a little grumbling here or there. There [are] significant questions about the legitimacy of the election. And so ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that's why I've been very clear, ultimately this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government. What we can do is to say unequivocally that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with peaceful dissent, that spans cultures, spans borders, and what we've been seeing over the Internet and what we've been seeing in news reports, violates those norms and violates those principles. I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.

Good for Nico. Kudos! I wish there were many more, just like him, working for mainstream outlets. But...

Cue a bunch of puffed up drunken popinjays with their veinous noses out of joint (you don't get nose vein breakout like that from Diet Coke, folks) because the White House didn't follow the established order of things and called upon an unwashed blogger type before the guy from Reuters.

Cue Michael Calderone at Politico, who manages to get not one but two posts out of the ridiculous premise that Nico and the WH "coordinated" their exchange so that Obama knew what question was coming.

And Cue a slew of slavering rightwing conpiracy believers jumping on Calderone's black helicopter for a ride.

Ridiculous. "Gotcha" kindergarten games of the lowest level.

Update: Dana Milbank of the WaPo gets in line for that helicopter too, in a really dishonest bit of reporting. At no point does he actually quote Nico's question, simply writing that:

Pitney asked his arranged question. Reporters looked at one another in amazement at the stagecraft they were witnessing. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel grinned at the surprised TV correspondents in the first row.

Then adding:

As if to compensate for the prepackaged Huffington Post question, Obama went quickly to Fox News for a predictably hostile question from Major Garrett. "In your opening remarks, sir, you said about Iran that you were appalled and outraged," Garrett said. "What took you so long?

"I don't think that's accurate," Obama volleyed testily, calling his toughening statements on Iran "entirely consistent."

Thus giving the impression that Nico's question was a tough one without actually quoting it so that his readers could decide for themselves if asking about a possible betrayal of the demonstrators was a softball for Obama.

D-day already posted this You-Tube today in a post that wasn't about this snit in a teacup:

And writes:

I don't think you can find a more perfect summation of the traditional media inside Washington than this - Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza dressed like fops in bowties and smoking jackets - or more likely, dressed like their own mental projection of themselves - smugly discoursing, with CHAMBER MUSIC in the background, about Beltway gossip.

...I think at this point, we can stop asking "If only the media would cover such-and-such story in THIS way..." For that to be successful, we would have to get such a story covered by someone like these two. That's just not going to happen.

Who does Dana Milbank think he is? This guy?

Douchebag of the Week: Ed Whelan

By Fester:

It is only Sunday night but Ed Whelan has won by acclamation the prestigous award: Douchebag of the Week.

Ed in a very mature manner responded to criticism of his legal argument by outing the previously pseudonomousPublius at Obsidian Wings. 

When one can not respond to an argument, it is always time to throw monkey poo.

Douchebag.

As a pseudonomous blogger as well, I am pissed off, as there are some legitimate reasons for me to remain unnamed but known with attendant reputational costs.  I wear my pseudonym very thinly as it is a useful pretext to divide my real life and my blogging life but anyone in Pittsburgh who wants to know either knows who I am in real life or could figure out who Fester is in a couple of hours and depending on whom they talk to, two cups of coffee or three beers.  I greatly appreciate the wide array of people who know who I am in person and know that I am Fester and respect my decision to keep those two aspects of my identity seperate. 

I greatly appreciate my friends, allies, and occassional political opponenents for not being douchebags and engaging me on my ideas and not on cheap, douchebag stunts such as the one that Ed Whelan pulled this weekend. 

Is Global Post Stiffing The Little Guys?

By Steve Hynd

Back in January, the news website Global Post launched to great fanfare. In fact, there had been a goodly deal of media hype about the new internet news platform throughout last year too. It looked almost too good to be true: a new multi-media website devoted exclusively to international news at a time when mainstream news organizations were downsizing their foreign news personnel drastically.

However, there were always worries about Global Post's business modeland whether it could generate enough revenue to sustain foreign reporting where mainstream organizations couldn't. Gawker predicted a "gaping black money hole " because "International news, see, is the only sort of content less attractive to advertisers than politics". Global Post's plan to charge $199 a year for Passport membership, which would include conference calls with journalists and the ability to "suggest article ideas" was also potentially problematic. Some were uncertain whether that was enough meat for the money to entice sufficient premium subscribers. However, syndication deals with the likes of Huffington Post, CBS Radio News, The Daily News and The Boise Weekly of Idaho lent more promise of a stable revenue stream.

But the business model was never going to work without enough readers of the website - and that's where bloggers like us come in. When Global Post launched, it contacted many political bloggers who dealt with foreign affairs offering a headline widget for their blogs in return for a small payment.

In some cases, the money came up front with an understanding of more to come on a monthly payment. For smaller blogs, like Newshoggers, the offer was to have the blog run the widget for a 30 day trial period, after which a small payment would be forthcoming monthly if there was enough incoming traffic to make it worth Global Post's while. We'd originally suggested they run their widget as an advert, and suggested a rate based on our BlogAds rate. Global Post's Beth Tucker responded that our rate sounded "very reasonable" but that they "like to test run the widget for a month" to see "what kind of response we might get from your community." All well and good and we went ahead on that basis. 

Newshoggers was, I believe, one of the first smaller bloggers contacted and certainly one of the first to host the Global Post sidebar widget. Our own Ron Beasley even helped them with formatting problems before they passed the widget on to other bloggers.

That was a couple of months ago. With the 30 day trial period over, we tried to contact Global Post to see what they wanted to do next - and kept the widget up in good faith while we did so. We've had absolutely no response. Since then, I've discovered that a Top 500 blogger, a friend with a blog getting in excess of 25,000 hits a day, had also made a deal with Global Post to host their widget and was having problems with it. "They paid up front for the first month, didn't cancel, and when I asked for payment after the second month was over said that they weren't getting enough clickthroughs and weren't paying." Other bloggers appear to be having similar problems.

Is this a sign that Global Post's business model is in trouble and they're cost cutting by stiffing the little guys, or perhaps a cynical calculation that bloggers individually don't have clout to be worth dealing fairly with? If Global Post would simply respond to our emails, we'd ask them on the record. In the meantime, though, their widget will disappear from this blog as from tomorrow.

Update 9 June: a Global Post spokesperson has responded:

The widget placements are not representative of how well GlobalPost's business model is doing. Rather, it was an experiment to try to connect with a very select group of blogs (of different sizes) that we thought had interesting things to say, were important, and would connect with a similar audience to ours (like newshoggers). This was a very targeted effort, and was not in any way a part of GlobalPost's business models. There was certainly no intention of stiffing anyone here. We feel that the mission of bringing international news to the forefront is very important, and our hope was that getting our headlines out on relevant sites would help in the overall effort to get the news out...There were no negative intentions here, and I feel that your post was really not based on the truth of the situation. GlobalPost is doing well, we are growing quickly, and are moving forward strongly in achieving our mission of bringing international news to the forefront.

And around 8.30 pm last night I received a phone call from Rick Byrne, Global Post's Director of Marketing. After a long call in which he again stressed that Global Post didn't intend stiffing anyone, that their business model is in no danger of failing and that the widget-placement marketing campaign was not essential to that model, we came to a resolution of the issue satisfactory to Newshoggers and, I trust, Global Post.

What appears to me to have gone wrong is that we bloggers mistakenly believed dealing with Global Post would be like dealing with BlogAds, who are scrupulous about renewals and payments, while Global Post mistakenly believed bloggers would have the billing and diary systems of large companies. However, it is certainly the case that the widget placement campaign was always designed to be a test and that the buys would be short term – in most cases a month; in some cases a quarter, according to Rick Byrne. He also confirmed that Global Post always intended that after that time period, the agreements ended.

So bloggers, if you've still got the Global Post widget up and you've gone past the agreed date, you're providing it for free and no-one to blame but yourself. Perhaps if Global Post decide to use this method of generating incoming traffic to their site on a more permanent basis they'll opt to use the BlogAds networks to ease administration at both ends, as I originally recommended to them.

The AP and homogenous information

By Fester:
The Associated Press is about to launch their content seeking bots and continue their descent into minimal relevance according to Ars Technica. The AP is seeking to prevent 'exploitation' of their content which is usually some of the most generic thing out there; basic information with minimal analysis and value add past the point of a national and international distribution system.

The problem with the AP attempting to firewall their content from re-appropriation from micro-users is that there is very little differentiating content in their work that I and many other bloggers can not find elsewhere.

Agence France Press, Reuters, UPI, CNN, New York Times all do an excellent job of running down the basic facts of most scenarios, situations and events that I am interested in. If the AP hassles me, or more likely poses a credible threat of hassling me, it is not worth my time to seek out and link their work when it is mostly undifferentiated information with minimal analytical value add compared to the other options that are available. I think this policy and my probable response will be replicated by the legions of bloggers with decent audiences but low revenue streams. This is a good way for me, and many other information and opinion leaders to start ignoring and devaluing AP members. And then the death spiral of tying together information gathering, analysis and distribution as a business model will continue.

Get Your AF/PAK fix

By Ron Beasley

Do you want to know what's happening on the Afghanistan/Pakistan front?  We here at Newshoggers can help you.  We now have a separate RSS feed for posts about Obama's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/NewshoggersAFPAK?format=xml 

or

http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/AFPAKFEED.xml