Irish Trojan in Tennessee

A Dodd scandal, and a Courant catastrophe

By Brendan Loy

The Waterbury Republican-American evidently does not believe in God and Senator Dodd. Well, maybe the former, but certainly not the latter. :) In an editorial Monday, the Rep-Am's editorial board calls Dodd "Tammany Hall's senior senator" and scolds the national media -- as well as, in a subsequent editorial, the Hartford Courant -- for failing to more vigorously cover "the sweetheart mortgages he got from Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Nozilo." (Countrywide is described as "the Enron of subprime mortgages.") "This scandal has legs," the editors assert.

I haven't followed this at all, so I have no idea whether it's a big deal; I just saw the link on InstaPundit, and since it involves Connecticut's, er, other senator, I figured it deserved a post.

Meanwhile, in other Connecticut news -- and speaking of the Courant -- the Nutmeg State's paper of record is eliminating 60 newsroom staffers and reducing the number of news pages in the paper per week from 273 to 206. Here's the memo to staff. (Hat tip: my dad.)

It's times like these I'm really happy I went into law instead of journalism.

Quote of the day #3

By Brendan Loy

"So Drudge is starting his thing, that he does every summer, where he's like, 'It's HOT! Global warming is REAL!' And then in the winter, he says, 'It's COLD! Global warming is NOT real!" --Becky

With "analysts" like these...

By Brendan Loy

...who needs P.R. hacks?

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. ...

[C]ollectively, the...several dozen...military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. ...

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

(Hat tip: copndor.)

The best of times, the worst of times

By Brendan Loy

I've been looking all day for a scan of the Lawrence Journal-World's front page, so I could do a compare & contrast with the front page of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. But the J-W wasn't on Newseum when I checked earlier. Now it is, albeit with a strangely low-quality picture. Anyway, both front pages are after the jump. Heartbroken Memphis fans, you may not want to click the link below.

Does Hillary want McCain to win?, ctd.

By Brendan Loy

Yesterday afternoon, I blogged about Maureen Dowd's column in yesterday's New York Times, in which she argued that Hillary Clinton's willingness to out-and-out attack Barack Obama -- even though the resulting damage will probably inure only to John McCain's benefit, not Hillary's, in the end -- might indicate a self-interested preference for a McCain victory in November. The theory, of course, is that an Obama defeat in the general election would open the door for Hillary, The Sequel in 2012. "Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat," I quoted Dowd as saying.

Silly me, thinking Maureen Dowd had an original thought.

As it turns out, this very topic has been the subject of a raging debate in the center-left blogosphere for almost a week, with various prominent bloggers weighing in both sides of the issue -- creating a dialogue that's much more illuminating and insightful, unsurprisingly, than a Maureen Dowd column. Details after the jump.

Resignation

By Brendan Loy

The New York Times busted out its MAN WALKS ON MOON / CLINTON IMPEACHED / U.S. ATTACKED headline style for Governor Spitzer's resignation:

Meanwhile, the Post, Daily News and Newsday all seem more interested in the latest revelations about the identity of the governor's call girl than about the fact that, er, the governor resigned yesterday. Heh. God bless tabloid journalism. (And some people say the interest in this story is primarily prurient in nature. Puh!)

Oh, Wolf, how I'll miss your calls...

By Brendan Loy

With no primaries or caucuses until April 22, tonight presented the last opportunity for the next six weeks to see Wolf Blitzer "call" a state -- complete with his typical pattern of stammering, stalling and repeating himself, as well as his gratuitous overuse of the word "now," his self-referential commentary, his time-wasting restatements of obvious facts (Democratic primaries are proportional, superdelegates are party leaders, etc.), and his "questions" to CNN's other correspondents and analysts that aren't actually questions at all, but are in fact declarative sentences that again repeat facts that Blitzer has already reported two or three times. Wolfie, you're doing a heckuva job!

Nobody wastes as much time listening to himself talk -- while reporting "breaking news" -- as Wolf Blitzer. And oh, I do love it so.

By the way, with 77 percent of the precincts reporting, Obama leads 58% to 40%. And exit polls find that nearly half of the voters said she isn't honest and trustworthy. These are Democrats, remember.

The New York papers on Spitzer

By Brendan Loy

(Via the Newseum. More after the jump... including a few New Jersey and Connecticut papers thrown in for good measure.)

Wolf Blitzer, Wolf Blitzer

By Brendan Loy

As I noted below, Wolf Blitzer was in full self-caricature mode when he announced that John McCain had clinched the GOP nomination: the rambling run-on sentences, the senseless repetition of people's names and other random words, the redundant recitation of the same facts over and over again, the odd choices of verbal emphasis, the constant talk about everything being "important" and "historic," the endless self-referential comments, the unnecessary references to "right now," "standing by," etc., etc.

I patched together a video of the carnage:

Rove to join Fox News

By Brendan Loy

Drudge: "FLASH: Karl Rove will join FOXNEWS as contributor; likely used throughout Super Tuesday coverage..." Heh. I would say this will make liberals hate Fox even more, but I'm not sure that's actually possible.

Rove, incidentally, has an article in today's WSJ about the "new rules" (and some old rules) of presidential politics.

More racial silliness

By Brendan Loy

Like a duck in a noose.

For your amusement...

By Brendan Loy

2007's corrections of the year. (Hat tip: Becky.)

I don't know whether that site published a similar item for 2006, but if they did, I would argue that Becky herself should have been in it (follow-up here).

Mr. Murdoch, tear down that wall!

By Brendan Loy

Less than two months after the New York Times cancelled its wildly unsuccessful "TimesSelect" pay-for-content scheme and made its website free again, Rupert Murdoch announced that the Wall Street Journal website will be free, too. The WSJ has long, if not always, made would-be readers pay for access to its website, so this is a big deal. (Headline shamelessly stolen from InstaPundit, to whom, a hat tip.)

More Halloween fun

By Brendan Loy

Behold the Hogwart-osphere. (Hat tip: Glenn.)

Glenn Reynolds cracks BCS SSRN Top 10

By Brendan Loy

Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, of InstaPundit fame, has been named one of the 10 most influential legal scholars in America, according to the Social Science Research Network. (Hat tip: Ken Wagner.)

He's also a nice guy.

Anyway, congrats to Glenn on the honor! He should beware, though: rankings are fickle. One minute you're firmly ensconced in the Top 10, and the next minute you lose to Stanford. Don't rest on your laurels, professor! Keep on influencin'! You don't want some lesbian ceramics professor to steal your glory.

Not antiwar, just... an insane killer

By Brendan Loy

I like Glenn Reynolds, and I think he's usually pretty fair-minded. But to the extent he's being serious with this post, I have to take him to task for it. It reads:

NOT ANTIWAR, just on the other side: "Disturbed anti-war protester can't find soldier, kills civilian with axe instead."

"Not antiwar, just on the other side" is something of a catchphrase, generally used to point out particularly egregious instances of bad behavior by the most radical of the antiwar crowd. For example, giving money to Iraqi insurgents, or chillin' with suicide bombers, or suggesting that coalition soldiers are legitimate targets. In those sorts of cases, it's an appropriate moniker, the point being that these traitorous idiots are claiming the mantle of "antiwar" and if the real, legitimate antiwar crowd -- the loyal opposition -- doesn't want its good name smeared, it should condemn them in no uncertain terms.

In this case, though, I think Glenn has gone rather too far. The story he linked is about an obviously deranged person whose actions clearly have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with either psychological illness or sociopathic evil -- with politics being nothing more than an excuse or a trigger. I'm no psychologist, but that's fairly obvious, isn't it? I mean, he walked into a train station and killed some random guy with an ax. That's not really what I would call a political act. There is no indication that he's involved with any antiwar group, nor that his actions are in any way consistent with others in even the most radical extremes of the antiwar crowd. So I think it's a rather significant stretch to use the "not antiwar, just on the other side" label on this particular story. It would be a bit like saying, nine years ago:

NOT SO PRO-LIFE after all: "Sniper Kills Abortion Doctor Near Buffalo."

That would be highly inappropriate, and so is this. There's some serious guilt-by-association smearing going on here, and I guess I just draw the line at holding political groups (of whatever persuasion) implicitly responsible for the depraved acts of deranged murderers.

Now, in Glenn's defense, maybe he's just having a little fun (albeit with regard to an event that isn't terribly funny, but hey, I like dark humor as much as the next guy) and isn't trying to make a serious point, and I'm reading too much into his post. That's certainly happened to me before, so I can sympathize if that's the case. However, given how he and others have used the phrase "not antiwar, just on the other side" before, I think he needs to be careful, because that phrase means something very specific in the right-blogosphere, and so people are going to assume that's how he's using it in this case too.