Nov 12, 09 | 7:02 AM
At the top of the Internet boom, Lou Dobbs left CNN to start his ill-fated Space.com, from which he returned ignominiously not long after. Dobbs left CNN again yesterday, at what is possibly the top of the conservative pundit boom, to, as CNN put it with a certain dig, pursue his “advocacy journalism” elsewhere. The progression of Dobbs from a straight-arrow, voice-of-God-type news guy into a dark, wounded, paranoiac, conspiracist and hater of various ethnic groups is something that took place off-camera. One day, a seemingly not very interesting fellow suddenly took up the cause....
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Nov 11, 09 | 9:07 AM
It seems to be coming to this: Was he a Muslim or a nutcase? The nation’s two most sententious conservative columnists have weighed in with their view. Both David Brooks, in the Times, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, believe that the evidence—ie, he was a practicing Muslim, and, to boot, he shouted “Allahu Akbar”—shows that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was committing an act of terrorism, rather than having a psychotic breakdown, when he shot dozens of people at Fort Hood last week. Their analysis is aided by Anwar al-Awlaki,...
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Nov 10, 09 | 9:18 AM
Rupert continues his war with the Internet. Over the weekend, he told an interviewer (the interviewer, on Sky News Australia, works for him) that as part of his campaign to charge users for reading his content, what he plans to do is to block Google from indexing his newspapers. As of a year ago, Murdoch had never used Google—never once, by himself, run an Internet search—and so it might be reasonable to assume he doesn’t know what’s involved here. It is quite possible he doesn’t realize—and can’t fathom—that removing News Corp.’s newspapers...
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Nov 9, 09 | 10:52 AM
I think they have it. If they don’t have the votes for the best and purest version of the bill, I think they at least have a fallback position which holds 60 votes. I believe this has to be true because you wouldn’t risk your presidency and place in history and epochal humiliation if you did not have the votes. You would not have brought it down to the wire like this. On the other hand, I could very well be wrong. It is not just the Obama White House, but something about all politicians that, these days, makes them look like amateurs. None of them fill you with confidence....
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Nov 6, 09 | 9:26 AM
How is it that we get a major insider trading scandal every two decades or so? The last big one, which ultimately ensnarled Michael Milken, the legendary junk bond king, happened in the late eighties. The current one, with a mass of arrests yesterday, threatens the hedge fund industry. It seems reasonable to assume from the intermittent decades of prosecution that this particular sort of financial larceny is quite a rare bird and when it rears its head the Feds pounce. And yet, as reasonably, we know the trading of information, the imperative to have such market-moving information, has...
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Nov 5, 09 | 8:41 AM
The Wall Street Journal was a great paper. It is still a pretty great paper but it is not the great Wall Street Journal. That former paper, with its particular look and feel and characteristically myopic focus on business and finance, has departed the stage, replaced by a vigorous, strong-minded paper focused on equal parts business, politics and public policy, and great events of the day. To that, its owner for almost two years now, Rupert Murdoch, is now adding a specifically New York focus. Murdoch is a singular fellow and a simple one. When he bought the Journal...
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Nov 4, 09 | 8:33 AM
I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs—true entrepreneurs—pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a punch. But there aren’t too many second chances. Not like the second chance that is unfolding right now. Among the greatest pieces of communications technology in our age of great communications technology, and...
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Nov 3, 09 | 9:11 AM
The strange business that is going on in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, which occupies some other universe than the one commonly associated with New York, wherein the designated middle of the road Republican fell to a crypto-fascist sort conservative, is meant to signal, at least for liberals, an internecine death struggle within the GOP. The hardliners, along with Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Fox News, will force the party so far to the right that it will be merely an oddball outpost. At the same time, the changing color and changing demographics of the US mean, almost...
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Nov 2, 09 | 8:40 AM
Of all the outcomes of the 2008 presidential election, the strangest, beyond the rise of Sarah Palin herself, is the success of Levi Johnston. He, in fact, may be the antidote to her rise, dogging her with his smile and his scabrous asides. Or, as likely, they enable each other. Both stoke the other’s publicity machine. Levi wouldn’t be anything without Sarah. Sarah might well have been just an ordinary failed VP candidate were it not for the too-late-to-do-anything-about-it revelation that Levi had gotten 17-year-old Bristol pregnant. That’s the story that most rescued...
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Oct 30, 09 | 9:21 AM
I participated the other night in an oddly formal, anglophilic, Oxford-style, for-and-against-the-proposition debate on the topic of (you guessed it) the mainstream media. I was on the side arguing (you guessed again) that it should be buried as fast as possible. My side, with radio host John Hockenberry and Politico founder Jim VandeHei, resoundingly lost. This seemed surprising, if not inconceivable, because mainstream media is being buried by the stampede of Americans who’ve deserted it without a second thought, who you think would have voted for us. But the audience for this...
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