"Ever wished you could hear the Wonkbloggers just…talking?"

Mmmm. 

No.

I wish I could unhear you just... talking?

Quit talking like that!

What the hell is going on in our culture?

"[T]he pantheon of hungry young men who have moved to Washington and shape-shifted, whether consciously or not..."

"... into something that’s more palatable to the city’s establishment. The blogger who, in 2008, tweeted, 'fuck tim russert. fuck him with a spiky acid-tipped dick,' now styles himself as the evenhanded, empirically driven adult in a room of squabbling, stubborn children. Even his critique of Washington, grounded in data and charts and graphs, is establishment to the core: This place, he says, is not like it used to be."

From "Ezra Klein: The Wise Boy/A tale of striving and success in modern-day Washington," by Julia Ioffe (in the redesigned New Republic). I'm not sure what to make of this long, long piece about Klein, but this is a funny picture to publish:



That's just a photoshoot misfire that ought to have been deleted instantly. To select it to illustrate the article is practically to announce: This is a hit piece.

I pointed out that, in spite of his loathing of being subjected to the journalistic gaze, he had agreed to be profiled not only by me, but also by New York magazine—simultaneously. The “people above me” he said, “seem to think it’s a good idea.” It would bring in readership, and Klein felt it would be “hypocritical” not to cooperate with the press when he, the press, was constantly asking people to cooperate with him. It was almost too meta to bear. “You’re sitting there taking notes and recording while I’m sitting here taking notes and recording,” he said. “It’s a peculiar situation!”...

Klein later told me that he found our exchange “slightly threatening.”

“Don’t take it personally,” one of Klein’s friends explained. “He didn’t get this far being casual about his image management.”

Oh, good lord, this thing has me sympathizing with Ezra Klein! Ridiculous.

By the way, a pantheon is "a temple dedicated to all the gods." (OED.) The figurative meaning is: "The group of people or things most revered by an individual, nation, profession, etc.; a group of people particularly respected, famous, or otherwise significant in some capacity; a set of things having acknowledged value or importance." It doesn't make sense to talk about "the pantheon of hungry young men." Either they hungry or they are in the pantheon. The ambitious young strivers are not the gods.

(Are there hungry gods?)

"Does A Speaker Survive This?"/"Will Boehner’s speakership survive until Plan C?"

Talking Points Memo/Ezra Klein.

Meme watch. Coming in from the left.

ADDED: Here's the presentation of the same material, from the right, at National Review:

The speaker looked defeated, unhappy, and exhausted after hours of wrangling. He didn’t want to fight. There was no name-calling. As a devout Roman Catholic, Boehner wanted to pray. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” he told the crowd, according to attendees.

There were audible gasps of surprise, especially from freshman lawmakers who didn’t see the meltdown coming. Boehner’s friends were shocked, and voiced their disappointment so the speaker’s foes could hear. “My buddies and I said the same thing to each other,” a Boehner ally told me later. “We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and just groaned. This is a disaster.”

"If they decide this [against ObamaCare] by 5-4, then yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud."

"Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty."

So said Yale lawprof Akhil Reed Amar to WaPo journ-o-list Ezra Klein, prompting National Review's Matthew J. Franck to turn the question around exactly the way I was going to before I saw that Matthew J. Franck already had:

If the Court goes 5-4 in favor of ObamaCare, will that be, you know, like, a totally okay, nonpartisan, statesmanlike decision?

But really how is a lawprof's life a fraud if it turns out that the Supreme Court is governed by politics, money, party, and party loyalty? As a lawprof myself, I see the Court as an object of study. Whatever it does, my work has meaning.

And looking back at what Professor Amar said, I now think he's being funny. I haven't seen his office, but I'm pretty sure it's damned posh — along with his salary — and not "silly" or "little" at all. Obviously, like any smart conlawprof, he knows that the real world of human beings interpreting the Constitution isn't pure, that human emotion, swirling with everything that affects human beings — politics, money, party, and party loyalty — must play its part. What would law — this law that supposedly matters — be without the human element?

It's inconceivable. Or if you could conceive of it — truly and honestly, without the impurities of humanity (and how would you, you being human?) — I think you would find it to be something alien, inhuman, and brutal, and you would never want to live under the regime called "the rule of law."

But Professor Amar, who is a political creature, with partisan and money-based preferencse of his own, plays the role of the Yale law professor, applying political pressure to the Supreme Court and to the larger political mechanism (which includes the 2012 presidential election).

Are you enjoying the theater?

The 4 Mistakes of Ezra Klein... [ADDED: or Rich Yeselson].

1. He's written a blog post titled "The four habits of highly successful social movements," but he never talks about any habits.

2. He does have paragraph containing "four things," but the verbiage is mind-numbing and lacking in parallelism:

Whether [the Occupy Wall Street protests] will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

3.  He evokes the best-seller title "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"  which prompts us to think about his ineffectiveness.

4. He promised a list of a specific number of items and then he didn't put it in the form of a numbered list. People love numbered lists. The internet is full of them. They're highly clickable. What's wrong with us? Why do we keep falling for that? 

ADDED: The post is signed by Ezra Klein but has an italicized parenthetical at the top saying he asked Rich Yeselson, a research coordinator at Change to Win, for some "thoughts on Occupy Wall Street." The post I'm complaining about is introduced as "some notes" from Yeselson, which Klein says he thinks are "worth publishing in full." Obviously, I didn't think this was worth reading in full, but now I assume the published text is completely the work of Rich Yeselson. As Bill Harshaw alerts me in the comments, this is "The one mistake of Ann Althouse." This is the great danger of pointing out someone else's mistakes: You look especially bad if you make a mistake yourself — and chances are you'll make the mistake at that point. (It seems everything every time I decide it's worth mocking a typo, I make a typo.)

Why do Democrats want high taxation as their brand?

Ezra Klein's piece this morning is headlined: "Democrats will lose now. But they can win later." The next thing you see is a chart depicting "Tax increases over 10 years if Congress passes..." various proposals (or nothing).  He begins:

Democrats are going to lose this one. The first stage of the emerging deal doesn’t include revenue, doesn’t include stimulus, and lets Republicans pocket a trillion dollars or more in cuts without offering anything to Democrats in return.

Pocket? There's nothing to pocket! All we're getting is a trillion less in overspending. The debt piles up at an alarming rate all the time. Holding back one trillion over the next 10 years isn't much (seen in proportion to the vast spending).

But, in the mind of Ezra, that nonexistent money goes to Republicans, and Democrats deserve something in return: taxing and spending. (Otherwise known as: revenue and stimulus.) That's the Democratic Party brand — as spun by Ezra Klein.

Why is that a desirable brand going into the next election? I would think the Democrats would want to own some of the spending cuts, to pose as reasonably frugal, mature, and realistic. Why cede all that to the Republicans? I understand the preference for taxing over cutting spending, but this giddy enthusiasm? Shouldn't you hide that?

"Whom will the public blame for debtageddon?"

Asks Ezra Klein, with prissily correct grammar and a neologism that reminds us of the recent Armageddon that wasn't: Carmageddon.

I'll tell you who I'll blame. I'll blame everyone who thought about the debt-ceiling crisis in that form, which reveals that it's all been jockeying for position in the next election. Interestingly, asking that question now is part of the jockeying.

Klein, ever biased in favor of Democrats, accordingly says:

In a 2010 paper presented at the American Political Science Association’s annual conference, Asger Lau Andersen, David Dreyer Lassen and Lasse Holbøll Westh Nielsen tried to take a systematic look at....

Oh! Good Lord! I'm crushed under the weight of the appearance of scholarship. Those names! Lasse Holbøll Westh Nielsen? A sketch comedy writer could not concoct a better name to exude the aura of pretentious loftiness.

But, hell! It's systematic.  No way it's ammunition for the partisan Klein to use to urge the GOP to... as they say... compromise.

... Voters don’t like budgetary breakdowns. More interesting was how voters apportion blame. “While governors are punished only when part of a unified government, legislatures are (almost) always punished.”
This suggests that when one party controls the government, voters blame them for budgetary breakdowns. But when the two parties split control, the executive is able to float above the squabbling in the legislature, or at least heavily influence the way the public assigns fault. “Governors may be more adept at the blame game that sometimes follows failures to finish a budget on time,” the authors speculate.

Got that?  The executive, Obama, may be able to "float above" the divided legislature, which is "(almost) always punished."

Got that, Republicans? You will be punished if you don't cave compromise.

Ezra Klein says the Republicans have won and now please can they stop?

Because "if they push it over the brink, they're likely to lose..."

There you have it. Ezra says you've won, now stop winning, or you'll lose.

Ezra Klein "felt a swell of patriotism" when he read that "bin Laden's body would be handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition."

"Somehow, that’s a nice, final touch. But it speaks to what bin Laden was: a bag of bones and meat. A body, like any other. Most of what changed in this country after 9/11 was our choice, not his. And his death is a reminder that changing it back -- or revising it to better fit our future -- is, similarly, our choice, not his. We’ve killed him, but we haven’t revisited the ways in which he changed us, or the ways in which wechanged us in response to his attack. Maybe it’s time we did."

The lefty meme is: It's all about us.

Ezra Klein admits: "Scott Walker’s procedural maneuvering last night was ... legitimate."

A nice effort at making a show of not being a hypocrite:

Certainly as legitimate as the Democrats fleeing the state to deny the Republicans quorum. They did something procedurally extraordinary to stop the bill from being passed, and he did something procedurally extraordinary to get the bill passed.



It seems to me that the system worked. Democrats were able to slow the process down and convince both voters in Wisconsin and the national media that there was something beyond business as usual happening in Madison. National and state polls show they were successful in that effort. Walker and the Senate Republicans ignored the Democrats’ attempts at compromise and ignored the public turning against them and decided to pass the legislation anyway.

That was their prerogative, and now it’s up to the voters to decide whether to recall the eight Senate Republicans who are eligible for judgment this year, and to defeat Walker and the other Republicans in a year or two, when they become vulnerable to a recall election. That’s how representative democracy, for better or worse, works. The representatives can make unpopular decisions, but the voters can punish them for it. I thought that during the health-care debate, and I think that now — though I would be interested to see whether any of the conservative voices who were shocked and appalled by President Obama’s decision to ignore public opinion and finish health-care reform using the reconciliation process are calling for Walker’s head today. If not, I think they need to ask themselves what makes this case different.

Klein also notes the technical question whether the procedural move violates the state's "open records" law.

Young Ezra Klein found himself in a strange predicament.

He'd said something utterly banal. It's what everyone around him has been saying for years. He must have expected that people would either ignore him or shrug him off as a man with no original or interesting ideas. And suddenly he's getting derided, called an idiot or worse. How can that happen?!

The banal thing was that reading the text of the Constitution doesn't get you to the answers to the difficult questions that arise today. The text must be interpreted, and political preferences will tend to pull people along toward the interpretation they want.

Don Surber says (via Instapundit):

Ezra Klein made the biggest mistake that can be made by a liberal — progressive — socialist — communist — no labelist — whatever the heck they call themselves on the 31st of the month.

He was being honest.

He does not believe in the Constitution.

He is cynical about it and he projects that same cynicism onto those who disagree with him.

Now, Klein walked right into that criticism. He stated the banality with an off-handed, wise-guy flippancy. That was red meat for the kind of conservative who likes to stress the constitutional text.

And now we see the value of this notion of reading the text out loud on the House floor. It sets up a trap for people like Klein to say things that let conservatives — like Don Surber — rail against the lefties.

Does that mean that I, like Klein, think reading the Constitution on the floor of the House is a "gimmick"?

In marketing language, a gimmick is a unique or quirky special feature that makes something "stand out"... [T]he special feature is typically thought to be of little relevance or use.... [A] gimmick is a special feature for the sake of having a special feature. It began... as a slang term for something that a con artist or magician had his assistant manipulate to make appearances different from reality.

In the musical "Gypsy," the experienced strippers advise young Gypsy Rose Lee that she has to get a gimmick:



I wouldn't use the word "gimmick" for what the GOP has proposed. But, like stripping, it is theatrical. It's a performance. A performance of belief. I think of the point in the church service when everyone reads the Apostles' Creed out loud. Obviously, many people say it who don't believe it, and you could keep silent and still believe it. But don't mock the ritual unless you're good at predicting the reaction and how you'll respond to that and you have some good reason for wanting the exchange.

Back to Surber:

For 8 years, the Left’s railed against Bush shredding the Constitution, a phrase which came to mean nothing....

See how much Surber is like Klein? He's accusing the other side of saying the words, but not really believing. But Surber has done better at picking his fight. He's got he hypocrisy angle: All those times you lefties acted all aghast at what Bush was doing? You must admit that was all theater, right?

ADDED:

"Because the Constitution is so old, it is written in the 'old-timey' language of people of more than one century ago..."

"... which leads many modern people to get confused and frustrated by it. 'What is this stupid boring thing?' they will ask, then go back to playing Super Mario Cart. These modern people could not be any more wrong, because hidden underneath all the 'so-called' confusing words is an exciting story with twists and turns everywhere. Fortunately, and most importantly, the Founding Fathers also invented the Supreme Court which does a good job of translating the Constitution into modern words and juxtaposing them for all of us, the American people of the United States."

Iowahawk spoofs young Ezra Klein, who's not impressed with the GOP's new requirement that legislation expressly identify the provision of the Constitution that supports Congress's exercise of power.

Here's Ezra Klein's actual column.

It's funny the way people are trying to spin the tax deal, now, before the vote.

There's this from Ezra Klein:

If you look at the numbers alone, the tax cut deal looks to have robbed Republicans blind. The GOP got around $95 billion in tax cuts for wealthy Americans and $30 billion in estate tax cuts. Democrats got $120 billion in payroll-tax cuts, $40 billion in refundable tax credits (Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit and education tax credits), $56 billion in unemployment insurance, and, depending on how you count it, about $180 billion (two-year cost) or $30 billion (10-year cost) in new tax incentives for businesses to invest....

.... Much of what the Obama administration wanted was not that noxious to conservatives. They were tax cuts, many of them for businesses. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels had previously proposed both a payroll tax cut for 2011 and the tax breaks for business investment. Republicans have frequently said that they don't even oppose unemployment insurance.

I elided 4 paragraphs for humorous effect.  The "numbers alone" skew heavily toward the Democrats only because Klein limited the Republican side to "tax cuts for the rich." He also says:

Conservatives saw the extension of the tax cuts as an important pivot point in American politics -- full stop. As my colleague Jennifer Rubin puts it, Republicans "won the philosophical point (tax hikes impede economic growth)..." The Obama administration didn't see the tax cuts as a philosophical point....

Well, that's convenient.

Greg Sargent says:

... Obama's strategy going forward will be to position himself as Washington's lone resident adult in a town full of squabbling children on right and left, and at his presser just now, Obama offered a surprisingly stern, and even angry, rebuke to his liberal critics....

This is a good stance to take for 2012. At that point, we'll see how well the tax cuts worked. If the economy improves, Obama can take credit and warn us against giving too much power to Republicans because they will overdo tax cutting for the rich instead of taking the intelligently balanced approach he brokered. If things go badly, he can say the Republicans got some power in 2010 and forced a compromise that demonstrated that their ideology is wrong.

Meanwhile, both Jim DeMint and Mary Landrieu are lambasting the deal. Landrieu says she's "going to argue forcefully for the nonsensicalness and the almost, you know, moral corruptness of" tax cuts for the rich. DeMint says:

"I’m glad the President recognizes that tax increases hurt the economy.... [b]ut ... most of us who ran this election said we were not going to vote for anything that increased the deficit.... I don’t want to second-guess my leadership, but frankly, I think we need to come away with a lot better than this. We cannot increase the deficit, or keep increasing deficit spending.."

And I'll just end this patchwork post with Rush Limbaugh....

My take is, taken by itself in its own universe, yeah, okay, pretty good.  I like the fact the left hates Obama. I like the fact they're mad at him right now.  I like the fact that nobody's taxes are going up.  But placed in the context of the shellacking and of this huge election victory, it's not nearly what we coulda gotten....

ADDED: My post title is "It's funny the way people are trying to spin the tax deal, now, before the vote." Once the legislation is passed, I assume people will say different things. Extreme claims of victory can't be made now if what you want is to get the legislation passed. And, too, different things will be said about this when 2012 rolls around.

"Any delusions that Journo-List was not, in part, a collusory venture..."

"... to shape the media narrative in ways to benefit Obama, above and beyond ferreting out the truth about any and all candidates, must now be abandoned. Ezra Klein has already been caught in a bald-faced lie about his discretion in picking members; and the notion that this was simply a water-cooler collection of journalistic thoughts is also belied by the emails now published by the Daily Caller."

Sullivan seethes.

This is your liberal media, ladies and gentlemen: totally partisan, interested in the truth only if it advances their agenda, and devoid of any balls whatsoever.

Devoid of any balls. Sullivan, by contrast, had the balls to question Sarah Palin's uterus.

"On Sept. 8, 2008, five days after Palin’s national debut, some members of the group discussed producing coordinated propaganda designed to wound Palin and boost Obama."

Writes Jonathan Strong in The Daily Caller:

Ryan Avent, then a freelance blogger for the Economist, now an editor there, complained that Obama’s supporters were missing a chance to attack. “If we were the GOP, we’d be taking this opportunity to shout long and loud how unprepared Palin is—‘She doesn’t even know what Fannie and Freddie are…in the middle of a housing crisis!’….That’s the difference in the game as played by us and by them.”

Michael Tomasky responded: “So why aren’t Dems doing that? Just wundrin’.”

Luke Mitchell, then a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, asked Tomasky if his paper would be able to help: “Michael – Isn’t this something that can be fanned a bit by, say, the Guardian?”...

“... [I]t seems to me that a concerted effort on the part of the left partisan press could be useful. Why geld ourselves? A lot of the people on this list work for organizations that are far more influential than, say, the Washington Times.

“Open question: Would it be a good use of this list to co-ordinate a message of the week along the lines of the GOP? Or is that too loathsome? It certainly sounds loathsome. But so does losing!”

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, the founder of Journolist, quickly jumped in: “Nope, no message coordination. I’m not even sure that would be legal. This is a discussion list, though, and I want it to retain that character,” he wrote.

So we see the suggestion of propaganda/message coordination, presented as probably too loathsome to do and then immediately nixed by the list founder, Ezra Klein. The headline of Strong's article is "Journolist debates making its coordination with Obama explicit," suggesting that they were coordinating, but this was just the point where they openly talked about what they were doing... except they only talked about doing it in the future.

Over at Media Matters, Eric Boehlert is writing about me.

Eric Boehlert. Eric Boehlert? Oh, I know where I read his name recently. He's a character in Iowahawk's brilliant "I'll Take a Cashier's Check, Mr. Breitbart." He's the one handing out the assignments:

EZRA KLEIN: hey boehlert whats the assignment

ERIC BOEHLERT: 3 part essay

ERIC BOEHLERT: 1. Explain why unemployment report shows stimulus is working

ERIC BOEHLERT: 2. link BP oil spill to teabaggers

ERIC BOEHLERT: 3. spin latest Gallups

JOSH MARSHALL: crap crap crap and I have a lab assignment for global warming due

ERIC ALTERMAN: o fack me looks like an all niter...

Ha. But why is he on my case? "Ann Althouse continues to blog about Journolist; appears to have no idea what it was," he says. Well, then, release the archive so I can cure my terrible ignorance. That's all I want.

Althouse continues to post item after item about Journolist, despite the fact that... Althouse has no idea what Journolist was.

Stop me before I blog ignorantly again, Eric. Send me the archive. Or send it to Breitbart and collect $100,000 and I'll get to it that way.

Boehlert goes on to quote me saying that if I were to sue a Journolist member for defamation — something I'm not inkleined to do — I would be able to get discovery into the archive. Eric B. says:

Althouse, a law school prof and very public blogger, was thinking out loud about suing the owner of Journolist to find out if any of the 400 journalists on the listserv ever wrote anything nasty about her in their private emails. (Ego much?)

Eric Boehlert continues to write about me like that even though he has no idea what the thing I wrote that he just quoted says.  I cited a specific item of defamation against me that was published on the web and that remains there. If I were to sue based on that remark, I would be able to get discovery into relevant evidence about that claim. Moreover, I know that there are specific, related remarks about me in the Journolist archive, because that remark was tweeted, in Ezra Klein's own words, "after I was alerted to her thread on Journolist."

Boehlert imagines that one of my commenters nails his argument for him. Here's that comment:

I would think a law professor might have a better grasp of this. But on what grounds would you seek the archives? To borrow a popular argument of the right, where in the Constitution does it say you have the right to know what others are saying about you, especially when you have no proof they are saying anything defamatory about you.

Clue to Boehlert: Not all law is in the Constitution. The tort of defamation is a matter of state law. The extent of discovery is a matter of procedural law. I don't need a constitutional right. (Conceivably, there is a right that would bar my access to the archive, but I don't need a constitutional right to discovery if I bring a defamation claim.)

So, Boehlert, your post is incredibly lame, but, as a law professor, I'll give you a rewrite. I think Media Matters portrays itself as a champion of truth, so... see if you can get a little closer to something that feels a little more truth-y.

***

On a related note: Yesterday, James Taranto, in Best of the Web, opined that a journalist's shield law would prevent discovery into the Journolist archive in a defamation suit:

Seems to us it would depend on the venue. Most states have some sort of shield law protecting reporters from having to disclose confidential sources, but the specifics vary from state to state. In federal court, however, there is no such privilege.

The privilege is about shielding confidential news sources — informants. The Journolist archive contains the statements of journalists talking to each other. I don't see how the privilege could apply.

[Journalists] should, of course, have all the legal protections of the First Amendment, which among other things mean that Althouse almost certainly would not win her defamation suit against Klein. His offending tweet, it seems to us, is a constitutionally protected opinion rather than a false statement of fact.

One reason I have no interest in suing is that I want the broadest First Amendment rights here. I would not want to have to argue that the statement in question — "Ann Althouse sure has a lot of anti-semitic commenters" — is not an opinion but a false statement of fact. But I'm afraid it is, quite plainly, a false statement of fact.

"Well, I'd like to know whether they are defaming me on JournoList."

That's something I blogged back in March 2009.

I'd still like to know. Don't I have a right to know what a gang of 400 journalists are saying about me, as they endeavor to shape my reputation, decide that all the good people must avoid linking to me, or whatever it is they do?

If I were to bring a defamation suit based on Ezra Klein's lie "Ann Althouse sure has a lot of anti-semitic commenters," I would seek access to the Journolist archive, and I believe I would get it. There is no privilege that would shield this information from discovery. Lawyers, argue with me if you think I'm wrong.

I'm not the litigating type — though when I practiced law, I worked in the litigation department — and I am not threatening to sue. I am saying this to make one more argument for why the Journolist archive needs to be made public.

"Journolist is done now," says Ezra Klein.

"I'll delete the group soon after this post goes live. That's not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. It was a wonderful, chaotic, educational discussion. I'm proud of having started it, grateful to have participated in it, and I have no doubt that someone else will reform it, with many of the same members, and keep it going."

So it's not done. It just got too big. And it needs a new name.

Is Rush Limbaugh an oil-spill truther?

Or is Ezra Klein a humor-deaf Rush-hater?

"Expecting kucinich to bodily ascend to heaven any second now."

Babbling in the Church of Health Care, Ezra Klein-style.