Every now and then, The National Review does something worthwhile.
It’s an interesting snapshot of the internal processes of the Times, and it’s rumored that this story is what got them to publish the McCain story in the first place.
The real question is why the Times sat on it for 3 months, and I think that the answer is because they love that sick old man.
The Michigan Higher Education Student Loan Authority will stop making loans under the Michigan Alternative Student Loan, because it cannot raise money in the capital markets to lend out. You can see their notice here
Student loans are about as safe as it gets. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy, and they are very safe, but no one is willing to buy the paper, both because the bond insurers are basically belly up, and because no one trusts anything.
In a similar vein, though more directly related to the bursting housing bubble, Freddie Mac cut nearly in half the size of its REMIC (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits) issue, because it cannot find buyers.
And in the useful congressional hearings area, i.e. not Roger Clemens and steroids, we have hearings on the collapse of the bond insurers.
In another sign of a slowing economy, media company Belo corporation is showing a loss.
Part of this may be the fact that, and I speak from experience having experienced their flagship Dallas Morning News, that Belo is to journalism what Osama bin Laden is to wet t-shirt contests. When you have a crappy product, you get hammered.
Hillary was at an event at the Yale Child Study Center, where she volunteered in law school, and she teared up when her former boss there, Penn Rhodeen, said how proud he was of her.
This is not a story. This should not be a story. Public figures tear up all the time.
Bill Clinton teared up a number of times, his doing so while listening to PMaya Angelou’s poetry comes to mind, Poppy Bush did so at the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Reagan did every time a boyscout said the pledge of allegiance.
This is, nor should it be a big deal, though doubtless the Sunday gasbags will talk about nothing else..
McCain lies about Romney’s position on the Iraq war*, and Time’s Michael Scherer calls him out on it.
I’m stunned.
What happened to the media’s role as “fluffer” for John McCain?
Martin Wolf, a columnist and editor for the Financial Times, is calling for regulations regarding the remuneration of banking executives.
Basically, he sees the current pay structures of banking, with enormous bonuses for short term results, as being a major factor in the current banking/credit crisis.
Further, he sees banking as an industry with an amazing talent for, “privatising gains and socialising losses.”
He says, “My attitude to the banking industry is not a prejudice. It is a ‘postjudice’.”, or to be translated into more prosaic language, he learns from the mistakes he observes, and prior behavior colors his attitude towards the industry.
It is the nature of limited liability businesses to create conflicts of interest – between management and shareholders, between management and other employees, between the business and customers and between the business and regulators. Yet the conflicts of interest created by large financial institutions are far harder to manage than in any other industry.
That is so for three fundamental reasons: first, these are virtually the only businesses able to devastate entire economies; second, in no other industry is uncertainty so pervasive; and, finally, in no other industry is it as hard for outsiders to judge the quality of decision-making, at least in the short run. This industry is, in consequence, exceptional in the extent of both regulation and subsidisation. Yet this combination can hardly be deemed a success. The present crisis in the world’s most sophisticated financial system demonstrates that.
Basically, he is saying that these institutions are immature and short sighted in outlook, but they possess the ability to destroy the output of the most of the rest of society, and so they need aggressive regulation.
Word up.
This guy has been infesting the Washington Post for years, and if you know the topic, you generally don’t have to read him.
His standard schtick is something like, “Social Security and Medicare? They are bad, they make you stupid. You should be an overpaid pundit like me,” so you could have knocked me over with an adolescent tuna when I came across Mr. Samuelson railing against excess salaries and lack of accountability:
Here are estimates for 2007:
Investment banker: $2.1 million, consisting of $275,000 in base pay plus $1.2 million in cash bonus and $625,000 in long-term bonus. (An investment banker helps firms raise capital by selling new stocks and bonds and also advises on mergers and acquisitions.) Bond trader: $1.5 million, with $240,000 in base pay, $975,000 in cash bonus and $310,000 in long-term bonus. Hedge fund manager: $1.8 million, split between a salary of $265,000 and $1.5 million bonus. Just why investment bankers and traders out-earn, say, doctors or computer engineers is a question I’ve never heard convincingly answered. Are they smarter? Unlikely. Do they contribute more to the economy? Questionable. True, Wall Street often performs a vital function. It channels savings into productive investments. It helps provide access to capital and credit. In 2006, U.S. companies raised nearly $4 trillion through new stocks and bonds. Many financial innovations, including mortgage-backed securities, have benefited individuals and companies.
But Wall Street also frequently misallocates capital and credit. The “tech bubble” of the late 1990s was one episode. Now we have subprime mortgages. Why? Well, the herd mentality of financial crazes has a long history. But compensation practices skewed so heavily toward bonuses based on annual profits make matters worse.
You know, these lessons are not only the same ones that were used to change public policy (Glass-Steagal anyone?) following the Great Depression, but they are actually predicted by free market theory.
If I can make a million or so dollars, and and do not lose this money when the crash comes, why the hell should I care about long term consequences?
One hopes that the current crisis will lead to a re-evaluation of the slavish devotion to the unregulated market as a solver of all problems.
While I appreciate their Edwards endorsmennt, I still cannot figure out why the press has their tongue so far up the rectum of John McCain.
Interestingly enough, they are endorsing McCain because of his populist message, when the mainstream press is ridiculing him because of it.
I though that journalism was extinct in the wild, existing only within specific preserves, like The Daily Show and Countdown, With Keith Olbermann, but it appears that a specimen has escaped to the wilds of ABC.
In a report on his nationwide cable TV buys, which BTW are a very good idea in terms of bang for the buck, the Obama stated that, “The DNC has consistently said that we have not broken that pledge.”
Well it appears that ABC News’ Teddy Davis actually checked the facts about that claim:
Obama’s claim is not true.
“The DNC has not weighed in on the pledge because it was a pledge with the state party chairs from the four early states, not the DNC,” DNC spokeswoman Stacie Paxton told ABC News.
I’m stunned and amazed.
I’m also waiting for the same scrutiny to be applied to Senator Keating 5 McCain.
It will probably be a while.
Would that this would happen.
Some reporters should drop out of the campaign
By Martin Schram –
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, January 13, 2008The verdicts of Iowa and New Hampshire prompted a handful of the 2008 political players to depart from the presidential campaign trail.
But far too many remain for our own good.
Along with the handful of presidential candidates who dropped out so far, voters might be better served if a hundred or so of my political-reporter and pundit colleagues dropped out as well – and were replaced by journalists whose beats are about national security, economics, environment and health care.
For our coverage has not been serving the public interest by providing the sort of information voters really need to know – especially in the last weeks when many voters make their decisions.
I would add something more significant. That among top tier political reporters, not only is there a lack of understanding about the political issues of the day, there is actually an active disdain for knowing these issues.
It’s all about the game, not what it means to win or lose.
The coverage is cynical and juvenile.
Last night Olbermann brought on Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss issues with regard to Nevada, and the Obama’s whole “I loveReagan” crap.
What he was unaware of was the fact that Lawrence O’Donnell wrote a truly stupid article on HuffPo a few days earlier titled “John Edwards is a Loser.
His thesis was that John Edwards should get out of the race, because he was in Obama’s way, and because Obama was black, it was borderline racist for him to run against him and strengthen Hillary.
The article was stupid for the following reasons:
Well, a number of folks (not me) took the time to drop a line (hopefully a polite one) on Olbermann, and he responded on Daily Kos about 18 hours later.
He did the unthinkable, he apologized, and he says that he will be addressing it tonight.
Lawrence O’Donnell Hotlist
by Keith Olbermann [Subscribe]
Fri Jan 18, 2008 at 02:00:01 PM ESTForgive the fairly minor focus here but I spot at least three diaries on his appearance on Countdown last night to discuss Obama, Reagan, and Edwards.
Those of you complaining about it are right.
His HuffPo piece was news to me.
Shouldn’t have been, obviously, but it was.
I don’t read every blog, nor everything written by my guests. I often don’t know until an hour beforehand who will be a guest on a given show (if it matters to you, these scheduling nightmares tend to come in waves for some reason, and last night was a Nor’easter). Also, to announce, on-air, each guest’s preferences, prejudices, shillings and shiv jobs, would reduce the rest of the show to “Good Evening. Call Me Ishmael. My Boat Sank. The End. Good Night.” And Lawrence O’Donnell’s insight is almost always perceptive, relevant, and enlightened.
But even with these caveats, the point about this appearance, especially in the wake of such a freshly-written piece, is well-taken and I’m very sorry.
It will be addressed tonight on the show.
Thanks.
It’s already been delayed at least once, and now the first flight of the 787 is delayed until at least 3 months, to the end of the 2nd quarter.
In a statement, Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief executive Scott Carson says “we continue to be challenged by start-up issues in our factory and in our extended global supply chain”.
Well, duh.
It was originally supposed to have a first flight in August of 2007, and now they are saying may or June of 2008.
Of interest is the fact that the press, particularly the American press is not running around saying, “the sky is falling”, as they did with the roughly 18 month delay on the A380.
Part of the reason is that it’s easier for the press to find some Eurocrat tied into Airbus to wring his hands publicly, not surprising given its origins as a state sponsored enterprise, and part of it, at least in the US is a cultural bias against Airbus because of its state origins (kind of necessary, everything in Europe had gotten the %$#@ bombed out of it 25 years prior).
His proposals are pretty common sense, but they would improve coverage a lot:
Then there’s the additional problem that the longer a reporter spends with a campaign, the more likely they’ll develop either a kind of contempt for the candidate and the campaign or a strange version of stockholm syndrome. Clearly this was the case during 2000 and 2004 when the dislike for both Gore and Kerry was palpable. This might be natural and human, but it breeds awful journalism.
Finally, we have the perenial complaint that the coverage focuses on the horse-race and the theater of the campaign and not on the issues. But I don’t really think that’s the fault of reporters. First, they have to file constantly on short deadlines. So even if Obama releases a tax plan one day, and you write a piece about that, that’s still only a one-day story. What do you write about the next day? Why, Obama sniping with Hillary or somesuch. Second of all, consider the imbalance in expertise between a campaign and those who cover it. When Obama releases a tax plan, it’s a product of a team of policy experts, who know the terrain inside and out. But the reporter who has to file the deadline piece about it doesn’t have any expertise on tax policy. So how could their coverage be anything but shallow?
His proposals:
The only thing that I would add is that, particularly for papers like the LA Times, WaPo, and Times, who can pick and choose their talent, don’t hire innumerate reporters.
I don’t care if you are covering politics, or architecture, or fashion, if you cannot read a balance sheet, you have no business being a reporter.
We are not talking differential equations, or even calculus, we are talking Algebra that should have been mastered in high school.
Michael Scherer of Time Magazind, has Tan analysis of the GOP debates that actually is a good analysis of the election:
I’m not sure if I’m impressed at this guy’s perception, or terrified that the Republican nominee fits into the memes of hich school cliques.
Kennedy Gondwe got himself circumcised on BBC Radio and the web as a part of a story about how the procedure decreases the possibility of contracting AIDS.
Ummm….I’m Jewish, so let me say that I don’t have a specific memory, but my guess is that my first memory of wine was…shall we say….unpleasant*.
*A drop of wine is placed in the infant’s mouth prior to a Brit Milah.
What’s more, he also cooked the books to conceal this:
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
But wait, there’s more, he also provided a police driver and city car for his chippie.
In a world of real journalism, this would be the lead story for the next week…In Rupert Murdoch’s America??? Page 12.
I have this theory about the nature of things. Specifically, there is always a sort of a tipping pointy, and after that, nothing goes right.
I think that we may be seeing that the right wing has truly jumped the shark, who in this case is Judith Regan, who I have been told has very sharp teeth.
Ex-Publisher’s Suit Plays a Giuliani-Kerik Angle
By RUSS BUETTNERJudith Regan, the former book publisher, says in a lawsuit filed yesterday protesting her dismissal by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate, that a senior executive there encouraged her to lie to federal investigators about her past affair with Bernard B. Kerik after he had been nominated to become homeland security secretary in late 2004.
The lawsuit asserts that the News Corporation executive wanted to protect the presidential aspirations of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik’s mentor, who had appointed him New York City police commissioner and had recommended him for the federal post.
Ms. Regan makes the charge at the start of a 70-page filing that seeks $100 million in damages for what she says was a campaign to smear and discredit her by her bosses at HarperCollins and its parent company, News Corporation, after her project to publish a book with O. J. Simpson was abandoned amid a storm of protest.
…
One of Ms. Regan’s lawyers, Brian C. Kerr of the firm of Dreier L.L.P., said she had evidence to support her claim that she had been advised to lie to federal investigators who were vetting Mr. Kerik and who might have sought to question her about their romantic involvement. But Mr. Kerr declined to discuss the nature of the evidence.
…
(emphasis mine)
Word on Olbermann is that there are tapes…..With Republicans, there are always tapes.
A Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution The object of this story, the Phoenix New Times, got the hed for this story correct when they called it Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution. The story begins a few years back, when the The Phoenix New Times, a Phoenix, AZ alternative newspaper began looking into the affairs of the very prominent, and very controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio*, and found that since his election as sheriff, he has accumulated millions of dollars in real estate investments on a $78,000 sheriff’s salary, and he used “an arcane statute meant to conceal home addresses of law enforcement officials to shield his investments.” In commenting on Arpaio’s extensive real estate holdings, the New Times published his home address in an OP/ED on their web page, to show how this information was already publicly available, and the Arpaio filed a criminal complaint with the DA, Andrew Thomas†, who appointed one of his cronies, Dennis Wilenchik, as special prosecutors, to see if there was a violation of the law in publishing this information. ‡ Then, in a stunning abuse of the grand jury process, Wilenchik issued a grand jury subpoena to the Phoenix New Times, requesting:
The publishers of the paper, published that they had been subpoenaed, along with this analysis of the entire affair:
The seemingly picayune matter of Sheriff Arpaio’s home address getting printed at the bottom of an opinion column on our Internet site — and the very real issue of commercial property investments the sheriff hid from public view — have now erupted into a courtroom donnybrook against a backdrop of illegal immigration disputes, Mexican drug cartels, the Minutemen, political ambition, and turf disputes between prosecutors and the judiciary.
What’s more, the special prosecutor attempted to use a third party to set up an ex parte meeting with the judge supervising the grand jury, in direct violation of the most basic canons of legal ethics. Well, the newspaper, or more specifically its founders Michael Lacey, the executive editor, and Jim Larkin, chief executive, had had enough, so they published about the secret grand jury subpoena, and they were promptly arrested. Well, if they wanted news of the subpoena, and abuse of the grand jury process, covered up, they got it wrong, because, it got coverage from the New York Times here, and here, Slate, and (FINALLY) the Arizona Republic, to name a few. At this point, realizing that they were completely screwed, Thomas ended the investigation, with much press coverage. As an poster on the New Times web site said, “Not surprising. Cockroaches never do like being exposed to daylight.” *He has created a jail tent city, and sold himself as the “America’s toughest sheriff”. †Who appears to be so close to Arpaio that they could share a bathroom stall with Senator Larry Craig. ‡No, there wasn’t. You know the first amendment allows for reporting stuff like this. It’s news, and furthermore, it is germane, as they are covering the corrupt sheriff’s real estate holdings, which include his house, which he has covered up by misusing a that refers only to his home.
I thought that thistranscript from: On The Media warrented some comments:
RON ROSENBAUM: Yes, and the many repercussions for the many layers of flunkies and lackeys that this cold had. You can learn more from an investigative reporter who doesn’t speak to the person. I’ve called investigative reporters “sociopaths for truth” —
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]
RON ROSENBAUM: — because they’re a different breed of cat. They’re not afraid to hurt feelings if it means telling the truth about someone.
I think that this is very true. Investigative reporters are there to make people uncomfortable, and they delight in doing so. They are generally not acceptable in polite society.
Unfortunately, the increasing professionalization of reporting, by which I mean the Journalism degrees and the whole “w(h)ine and cheese” mentality that goes along with this* has led to a snark replacing insight, and cocktail party chat replacing investigations.
*Best exemplified by the white, pampered, Ivy League staff of The New Republic.
The White House offered NPR an interview with George W. Bush, with the stipulation that Juan Williams (Softball Interviewer, Toady to Right Wingers, and Incompetent) interview him. NPR said no interview unless they chose the interviewer, so the White House had him interview Bush on….wait for it….Fox News.
I never how Juan Williams has managed to keep a job. I have never heard him do a story, or an interview, competently, and he brushed off Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment without revealing that he himself was a sexual harasser.
My conclusion is that he has been coasting on his book Eyes on the Prize* for about 25 years.
*I bet you were expecting me to accuse him of an being an affirmative action hire, but I don’t think that he is. I think that he has gotten his job because on the fact that he was prominently competent once (never to be repeated).
Though Fox has a lock on the Geriatric set that advertisers don’t want to sell to. Dat here.
Maybe the folks at MSNBC should get a clue, and program some people around him who aren’t whiny right wing nut jobs like Tucker Carleson.