First Looks category archive

Print journalism can pack a large amount of information into a small amount of time and space. Persons can read much more information in five minutes than can be narrated in five minutes. That’s why half an hour with a good newspaper or news magazine gives us a much greater return on investment and much more depth of information than half a day of news broadcasts.

But the economics of print journalism are failing. Reportage, printing, and delivery cost lots of money–money that these days goes to Craig’s List and, God help me, E! Online.

No solutions here. Wish I had ’em, but I don’t.

Clay Shirky in the Guardian (emphasis added):

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

(snip)

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., Tuesday, 6 p. Plenty of public transportation and, for drivers, ample street parking on Front.

Find a chapter near you. The only membership requirement is to show up.

Dick Polman:

Which brings us to the week’s main event, the Republican attack on Obama’s newly-released military budget. Faced with the challenge of painting Obama as a defense wimp, they have simply made stuff up.

Their theme (quoting a number of Republican congressmen) is that Obama is working “to pull the rug out from under our armed services,” that he is seeking “drastic defense cuts that will weaken our national security,” that his “military budget cuts” suggest “a sense of naivete,” that “the one place he wants to cut spending is defense,” and that (in the words of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) “President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war…he undercuts those he sends into harm’s way. It is not just unbelievable, it is unconscionable.”

One would never know, from those assertions, that Obama’s budget actually calls for a hike in military funds of $21 billion; that it includes billions in new money for veterans, particularly those suffering from mental health problems and brain injuries; that it adds $11 billion to expand the Army and Marines; and that, most importantly, it reflects a fundamental shift in war-fighting priorities long signaled by Pentagon chief Robert Gates – who started mapping his plans while working for President Bush.

Oliver Willis takes out the kryptonite again.

A creepy allegiance to violence.

The Lotus Sutra Chronicles on spring.

Over the top hysteria, documented by Andrew Sullivan.

Via Gene Weingarten; follow the link and become a Chatological Humor addict just like me.

Phillybits hits the medium time.

Some Guy with a Website.

From John Cole. Follow the link for the guts of the story.

2009 Pentagon budget: $513 billion
2010 proposed Pentagon budget: $534 billion

Surf on a cloudy Sunday at Virginia Beach, Va.

Oliver Willis, like kryptonite to stupid. David Kurtz has more.

Unlike cake knives, this is the kind of stuff that warrants school authorities coming down like a ton of brickhouse (with apologies to Mr. Brickhouse, who was my mother’s principal for 15 years of teaching):

A student first spotted a handgun magazine and a gun in a classroom at about 10:30 a.m. The student sent a text message to a student at another high school, who notified that school’s resource officer. The resource officer notified authorities.

Students were taken out of the classroom and searched, but nothing was found. Newark police and school officials then searched the classroom, where they found the magazine with three 9 mm bullets on a desk under some papers and a 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol in a bookbag. The gun had one bullet in the chamber, police said.

Off to drink liberally.

At least with a plugged nickel you can get a penny Tootsie Roll:

AIG, still on the hook to pay back the government $173 billion, is attracting interest for its asset-management units, lining up a half-dozen potential buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports today, leading off its coverage. That’s the good news. The bad news is “the sale of the $100 billion portfolio has become complicated by client withdrawals and declines in asset prices,” which value the units potentially hundreds of millions of dollars below what AIG had hoped to get for them, the newspaper adds. The aim is to sell off the units by May, the newspaper adds, but the stricken insurer could pull out of the auctions altogether if it believes the bids are too low.

In other news, William Black tells Bill Moyers that the federal government is afraid to tell the truth about the banks’ insolvency because

. . . they (the government–ed.) are scared to death. All right? They’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits. And we won’t rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it’s foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, “We just can’t let the big banks fail.” That’s wrong.

H/T Brendan for the link to the William Black story.

Q. What was it Susie didn’t say?

The Booman washes the dishes.

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In Republicanland, “strict constructionism” means “rulings we like.” “Judicial activism” means “rulings we don’t like.”

Dick Polman, writing about the gay marriage ruling in Iowa, explains “strict constructionism” (emphasis added):

The judges’ reasoning can be easily summarized: They looked at the 1998 state law which bars gays from getting civil marriage licenses, they compared the language in that law to the equal-rights language in the state constitution, and they came to the obvious conclusion that the former did not square with the latter. And since the state constitution is the ultimate arbiter (“the cornerstone of governing in Iowa”), out went the law.

. . . The Iowa judges explain those workings with a minimum of frills: They start by citing the state constitution’s Bill of Rights (“Equal protection of the law is one of the guaranteed rights”), noting that those rights “are declared and undeniably accepted as the supreme law of this state, against which no contrary law can stand,” and they underscore the preeminence of the state document by quoting the exact words of the document. (From Article XII: “This constitution shall be the supreme law of the state, and any law inconsistent therewith, shall be void.”)

You know how conservative critics of the courts always say that judges should be “strict constructionists” who accept the constitutional language precisely as it is written? Well, that’s what the Iowa judges did.

Aside: My position on gay marriage is a resounding “so what.”

(A never-ending series of paranoiac nightmares from the reality-challenged).

Oliver Willis.