Category: Media

Please forgive me for quoting myself, but on March 23rd I said this:

One fallout of the President’s new dismal approval rating is the certain death of this Social Security reform proposals. But what’s more important, retirement security for all Americans, or a few more gallons of liquid for one person in a persistent vegetative state?

Today a law professor in Tennessee says this:

Perhaps the Republicans think this will all be forgotten by 2006, or at least by 2008. And perhaps they’re counting on the Democrats to remain so feckless on national security that it won’t matter. Perhaps they’ll be right, but they’re certainly suffering short-term declines in the polls that hurt the President’s ability to act right now. I think that if he had a 60% approval rating, or even a 53% approval rating, he’d be making more progress on Social Security reform and on his various nominations. Was it worth this damage to solidify the social-conservative base? They seem to think so, but I’m not so sure.

It takes 18 days for Mossback’s observations to hit the New York Times, but 35 days for them to hit Instapundit. That’s not so “instant”, is it? But I digress. Jeff Jarvis is on the story as well. This being a hot topic, perhaps I should clarify it.

Bush is basically a moderate, centrist politician who attracts votes from the religious right by paying lip-service to their values issues without doing anything substantial for them. So he wins elections by combining the right’s votes with those of the moderate majority who actually like his policy positions. So moderates support Bush on a policy basis knowing the courts will prevent the religious right from getting anything. With his outrageous pandering on Schiavo and the pending nuclear option on judges, Bush support doesn’t look risk-free to moderates any more, and the religious right are waking up to the fact that they haven’t really got anything out of his presidency. So the carefully cobbled-together coalition of different interests can just as easily go against him as for him, and right now they’re against him. This is the problem with having it both ways – you can lose it both ways too.

So all that leaves for Bush is the people who support him because he’s a likable guy, even if he does hold hands with autocrats. Not a large group.

There’s no going back for Bush, because he can only win the moderates back by alienating the religious people, and vice versa. So we’re going to see a caretaker presidency for the next three years, nothing more.

It’s over for the Bush coalition.

UPDATE: Young Andy Sullivan notes the professor’s concerns, and muddles them up with his own issues. Sullivan has been a real piece of work lately, bashing the Catholic Church for its opposition to homosexual sodomy, but also bashing it for its coverup of, well, homosexual sodomy between priests and altar boys. He doesn’t see the connection, of course.

Jeff Jarvis is down on sports:

In newspapers, according to studies I once read (but can’t Google now), about 20 percent of a newspaper’s audience reads sports. And sports sections get little advertising, apart from tire ads. Yet a large proportion of the editorial and paper budget of a paper goes to sports and in these days of declining revenues, that’s an important consideration. (More on that in a bit.)

On cable TV, I have to pay for lots of sports channels I never watch. Why should I? Maybe everybody else should help pay for my broadband internet bill, huh?

Let’s correct one misunderstanding: Jeff isn’t paying for “a lot of sports channels” on cable TV. He’s paying for ESPN, and the sports fans who subscribe to the extra-cost channels are subsidizing his TV bill; he should thank them.

Then he shoots at an easy target, public funding for pro sports stadiums:

In New Jersey, the state just agreed to build a new $750 million stadium to keep the Giants — a profitable, independent business, last I checked — with considerable taxpayer support. But very few taxpayers will ever get to see a game at that stadium; hell, season tickets are only inherited.

This is a complicated fiscal issue. While it’s not clear that public funding ends up costing the tax payers in the long run, it is clear that pro sports are manna for working people. So it’s appropriate for people in Jeff’s income bracket to show a little appreciation for the people who wash their toilets and cut their lawns by giving them a few bucks toward a baseball team.

When did we get so miserly that we begrudge people of modest means a little happiness?

This cover-up is quite hilarious.

Ken Layne has finally sold his soul to the Devil.

See Buzzmachine for the details of the transaction, and more at Ken’s own blog.

First impression: the site is way over-designed, too graphics-heavy and slow to load. Ken Layne’s a brilliant writer, but the evil Denton’s design choices make his wit inaccessible. Drudge has nothing to fear.

John Cole has been blogging up a storm at Balloon Juice and so has Bill at InDC Journal. Both are center-right bloggers annoyed by the grandstanding and exploitation of Terri Schiavo.

The soap opera that’s been created by such shameless acts as the Palm Sunday Overreach reminds me of the Elian Gonzalez case. One of the parallels is the willingness to throw family rights to the wind if there’s a sexier symbol to be had, as anti-Castro was for the Cuban Mafia and “Life” as a lifeless abstraction is for the anti-abortionists. There’s nothing more important to a real conservative than family unless it’s privacy, and having your private life smeared all over cable news while people like Tom DeLay try and score points by slandering you (as they have Michael Schiavo) calls a lot of principles into question.

This is a kind of mass hysteria, and I’ll be glad when it’s over.

It’s amazing what a little evidence does to conventional wisdom. This Steven Levy character was whining earlier in the week about the dominance of the evil white man in the blogosphere, and there was lots of cluck-clucking around it, but nobody questioned the premise. Well here’s the The Blogosphere Ecosystem’s Traffic Ranking of top blogs:

1) Daily Kos 326004 visits/day (3)
2) Gizmodo 175938 visits/day (100)
3) Instapundit.com 160929 visits/day (1)
4) Gawker 146854 visits/day (129)
5) Defamer 143443 visits/day (397)
6) lgf: don’t panic right away 95297 visits/day (2)
7) Eschaton 87070 visits/day (7)
8) Power Line 61442 visits/day (4)
9) Wankette 56427 visits/day (37)
10) Michelle Malkin 38947 visits/day (5)

It looks to me like three or four are white male enterprises: Instapundit, LGF, Power Line, and maybe Gizmodo. Four are owned by homosexual foreigner Nick Denton (Gizmodo, Gawker, Defamer, and Wankette), the top one by a Greek-Hispanic, and at least a couple are joint exercises between boys and girls (Eschaton and Kos.)

So the next time somebody wants to play the Oliver Willis game with the blogosphere, check the facts before explaining.

Cathy’s World pretty much owns the story on the Susan Estrich/Michael Kinsley cat fight over women on the opinion pages, but neither she nor anybody else has commented on the gender balance at California’s second largest daily, the Frisco Chronicle (known as “Comical” in the Bayarea.)

When I left California a couple of years ago, all of the Comical’s opinion columnists were female: Joan Ryan, Stephanie Salter, Debra Saunders, and Ruth Rosen (who was a feminist studies professor to boot.) I see they’re a little more balanced now, with the addition of Ken Garcia and the subtraction of Salter and Rosen.

But nobody in the elite media complained when the Comical’s Op-Ed pages were dominated by people of one sex, so why the hoopla today over a similar situation at the LA Times?

And who do you think reads the Op-Ed section, anyway?

About every six months, some genius determines the blogosphere isn’t as diverse as it should be and proposes some sort of quota system. The current offender is some dude named Steven Levy who writes for Newsweek. Jeff Jarvis and about half the known blogosphere take him to task.

There are a couple of interesting variations on the meme this time around: Levy doesn’t complain about a dearth of gay bloggers, presumably because Andrew Sullivan and the Denton empire make that charge a non-starter, nor does he mention non-American bloggers for similar reasons.

Halley Suitt jumps aboard, acting surprised, but she’s been pushing this female-bloggers-rule thing for a while, so it’s pretty disingenuous, and Chris Nolan does some explaining.

As I’ve said before, racial and gender quotas are a non-issue in the blogosphere because we generally don’t care about such trivial attributes as race and gender. If you’re smart, insightful, witty, or industrious you’ll be read. You may even be read if you’re none of these things but you can get people excited by appealing to their fears, their libidinous impulses, or their aspirations. But we’re not going to read you just because you have some invisible biological characteristics that aren’t germane to the quality of your thought.

To those who’d rather see more diverse sources of a certain one-dimensional point of view (diversity in Newsweek terms means liberals of all colors and sexes), the blogosphere isn’t for you. If you care about smart and interesting points of view, come on down.

Levy, thanks for playing the Oliver Willis game, now go home.

Tonight’s Bill Maher was the most unbelievably bad episode of an intolerably formulaic program. BuzzMachine has a transcript of the segment with pseudo Indian Ward Churchill that was the most glaring example of leading the witness I’ve ever seen. Maher is still playing the victim over his firing from ABC when his show ceased to be amusing, and he tried to rope Churchill into his cause. But all it did was illustrate that people involved in controversy over idiotic ass-kissing generally deserve what they get.

In Churchill’s case it’s not at all important what he said about the people in the WTC getting what was coming to them – he’s too inarticulate and plain stupid to hold any job at a university above shelving books, and even that’s a stretch.

We’re becoming a nation of morons.

A recent episode of The West Wing featured a character named Larry Lessig as a law professor who’d written a book called The Future of Ideas. This Lessig was advising Belarus on constitutional principles and the White House Spin Doctor was upset about the role of presidential power in the US constitution. The character was loosely based on reality, according to Lawrence Lessig of Blogistan:

The story is based (loosely) upon a true story. I was involved in the drafting of one early version of the Georgian constitution. But the story ended up in the West Wing because I told the story to my students in Constitutional Law at Harvard, and a current writer for the West Wing was in that class.

Well, I dunno about all this. The Future of Ideas is one of the corniest books ever written, and The West Wing is one of the corniest teevee shows, so it stands to reason they’d get together at some point. I figured the connection would be through the corniest man in Hollywood, Mr. Sterling creator Larry O’Donnell, so I’m actually surprised it was some guy named Josh Singer.

Technically, the Larry Lessig on TWW was fictional because the real Lessig didn’t actually have diddly to do with the Belarus constitution, but who’s quibbling?

I used to think Future of Ideas was the worst book ever written about the Internet, but Hugh Hewitt’s Blog tops it by a considerable distance. How fleeting is fame indeed.

One of these days I’m going to review Blog like I did FOI, only more so.