"The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation."

Writes Martin Peretz in the Wall Street Journal. Peretz was editor in chief of The New Republic from 1974 until 2011.

The magazine now seems to live in a space where those "little insurrections of the mind" are unwelcome. It is akin to the atmosphere in many colleges and universities: There are prevailing orthodoxies but they aren't recognized as such. Mr. Obama himself is the main one. The president is an object of fealty at the New Republic in a way that Woodrow Wilson and even Franklin Roosevelt never were.

After beginning its new design era with an Adorable Obama cover...

... which looked like this, The New Republic comes out with its next issue, addressing the subject of "The Republicans" ("The Party of White People"), and it looks like this:



That came in the mail today. Yes, I've subscribed. The toy robot is there to cover up my address label. And yes, I understand the reference to "The Beatles" (i.e., The White Album).

I subscribed to the redesigned New Republic website, but I can't get it to work... [UPDATED].

... on my digital devices and I can't find subscriber help on the website.

When I go to the website in my browser from my desktop computer, I can see that I'm signed in. I am certain I know my sign-in information and my password. I've downloaded the iPad app, but when it asks me to sign-in, it doesn't recognize my information. When I go back to my desktop computer and search the website through my browser, I can't find any relevant place to go for help with my subscription.

I subscribed because I wanted to have the app experience on iPad. I thought Chris Hughes, having succeeded in co-founding Facebook, would have the functionality worked out in a lovely way. The display of articles actually is pretty nice, and the free app works without a subscription.

I know they want to make money, and I was willing to credit Hughes — if he pulled it off — with finally figuring out how to make traditional print media into a digital experience worth paying for. I would have given this project good press if I could, but I'm getting nowhere.

Another thing. When I filled out the form to subscribe, I filled in many blocks of the form — name, address, credit card number — before clicking to continue. The page refreshed with a completely empty form and the information that I'd done my credit card number wrong. I can't believe I bothered to do the whole form a second time.

It's incredible, after all the Hughes hoopla, that they didn't test out the site in advance to see how it worked with ordinary people attempting to use it intuitively.

UPDATE: I sent an email to the address that thanked me for subscribing. I explained the problem, and I got a response saying that "the current issue on the iPad is free and therefore requires no login. So we've disable [sic] this for the short-term in order to give everyone a chance to read our relaunch issue. You'll be able to log in as normal when we release our next issue in two weeks."

So the message I was getting saying they didn't recognize my login information was misleading. They really would, presumably, recognize it, if it were needed, but it's not needed yet. This was incredibly annoying!

This also means that my statement "the free app works without a subscription" is wrong. 

"The journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias..."

"... although it will showcase passionate writing and will continue to wrestle with the primary questions about our society."

Our purpose is not simply to tell interesting stories, but to always ask why these stories matter and tie their reporting back to our readers. We hope to discern the hidden patterns, to connect the disparate facts, and to find the deeper meaning, a layer of understanding beyond the daily headlines.

So writes Chris Hughes about the redesign of The New Republic, which I was cranky about yesterday, because it kicked off with a kissy interview with Barack Obama.

I must say, I'd never paid any attention to Chris Hughes before, and I didn't yesterday until pushed by my commenters. On the evidence of the interview he and Franklin Foer did with the President, I saw him as another media suckup doing Democratic Party politics under cover of journalism. Seeing this "free of party ideology or partisan bias" business now only inclines me to scoff. If that's what you wanted as your brand, why did you lead off with that interview?

But I realize I need to get up to speed on this Chris Hughes character. I didn't even bother to name him in yesterday's post, and I've only just made a tag for him now. Sorry, I didn't bother watching "The Social Network." To the extent that I follow celebrities, I'm not particularly drawn to new media businessmen. I can keep track of Mark Zuckerberg up to a point, but I've never paid attention to the lesser Facebookians.

Here's a HuffPo article from last March about Hughes's purchase of TNR, noting that he was "a key player in President Obama's online organizing efforts in 2008." Why would we expect this man — who's only 29, by the way — to strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias? I've got to assume the striving is toward seeming to be free of party ideology and partisan bias, because that's what journalists always say they are doing when they have ideological and partisan goals.

Based on that interview with Obama, I'd say Hughes is not striving that hard or he's not good at what he's striving to do or — most likely — he only wants to appeal to Democrats, so he only wants to do enough to seem to be free of party ideology and partisan bias to Democrats. Is this enough to make our target audience feel good about the nourishment they're getting from this source? The good feeling is some combination of seeming like professional journalism while satisfying their emotional needs that are intertwined their political ideology and love of party.

"Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?"

The New Republic promotes its "redesign" in email that says I "signed up to get an early look at." (I did?) I'm sent to this interview with Obama, which takes so absurdly long to load that I go off and write other posts before rediscovering the open tab. I see Obama's smiling eyes peeking out over the top of the headline "Barack Obama is Not Pleased." I pause and contemplate 2 things: 1. Do the redesigners not understand the rules of capitalization? and, 2. Did they intend to allude to the famous Queen Victoria quote "We are not amused" — that is, did they intend to imply that Obama uses the royal "we"?

The subtitle is "The president on his enemies, the media, and the future of football," so I guess that's what he's "not pleased" about. I can see not being pleased by one's enemies, but how can he not be pleased by the media? The media fawn over him. What more can he want? And the future of football... I guess TNR threw that in to signal that there's going to be some fun somewhere on this page that took so long to load.

I scroll down past 6 paragraphs of introductory text to get to the actual interview, and that's the first question: "Can you tell us a little bit about how you've gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?" See what I mean about fawning? My first bite of the "redesign" is thoroughly cloying. It seems to be cloying even to Obama. He says:

I'm not sure it's an intellectual exercise as much as it is reminding myself of why I ran for president and tapping into what I consider to be the innate common sense of the American people.

I wish I could read what went through his head when he heard that question, before he said, in so many words, that's a stupid question. I think it was something like: These elite media guys are so in love with their idea of me as an intellectual. 

That first question was asked by Chris Hughes. It took 2 fawning elite media guys to interview Obama. The other one is Franklin Foer, and his first question is: "How do you speak to gun owners in a way that doesn't make them feel as if you're impinging upon their liberty?" Later, FF comes up with:

Sticking with the culture of violence, but on a much less dramatic scale: I'm wondering if you, as a fan, take less pleasure in watching football, knowing the impact that the game takes on its players.

Wait. We were talking about the "culture of violence" when we talked about gun rights and we're continuing to talk about "the culture of violence" when we talk about football?! Noted.

By the way, credit to FF for extracting from Obama that he shoots guns "all the time," "up at Camp David," where "we do skeet shooting." I never hear about Obama going to Camp David. Where are the photos of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David?

There's some mystery within that pronoun "we."

I must say I find the ongoing back and forth between these 2 judges irritating.

Both know what the other is saying, which is what he's been saying for years. Why must they act out their diva drama in public… if TNR may be considered public.

"What else an one expect from a Republican magazine, they probably dislike themselves."

Outrage over photoshopping Kate Middleton's teeth for a magazine cover about how something's "rotten" in Great Britain. But the magazine is The New Republic... not the New Republican.

"[I]f the court overturns Obamacare 5 to 4, Roberts’s 'stated goal of presiding over a less divisive court will be viewed as an irredeemable failure.'"

"Oh? Viewed by whom?"

George Will, pushing back Jeffrey Rosen (the source of the internal quote).

In case you're wondering why I never blogged about that Jeffrey Rosen article (which got a lot of attention), I thought it was the usual propaganda, quite boring to someone who's very familiar with all the law.

Did I fail you? Did you want me to pick it apart... explain everything... because it's being talked about... because it was in The New Yorker?

I have an interestingness standard, not an it-was-in-The-New-Yorker standard.

Oh, wait! I'm mixing up my Jeffreys. Jeffrey Toobin wrote the article in The New Yorker that I thought was the usual propaganda. Jeffrey Rosen's usual propaganda was in The New Republic.

Seriously, tell me if you want me to do more dissecting of the Jeffreys. They talk about law to the general public and thus have a lot of influence. Should I be more vigilant? Please advise.

A paywall comes tumbling down.

At TNR.

This decision is in line with our desire to enable new readers to discover and share the best of what TNR’s writers produce each day....

Yes, exactly, you want to be read... as much as possible, by as many people as possible. It's all so obvious.

When will the NYT cave?

"[T]he things that matter in the world don’t have to be boring and guilt inducing."

"And the addictive stuff we love doesn’t have to be completely substanceless."

To that end, Upworthy, which is meant to be spread via social media, is using strong visuals along with arch, but serious, curation to find the sweet spot between things that are both “awesome” and “meaningful.” Among the memes they’d like to start, the “17 sexiest pictures about income inequality.”

A nice NYT boost for a very early stage effort at a political website (which I'm not sure is really ready to be looked at).

The site is small and rudimentary, but it has some backing from Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook who recently doubled down on seriousness by buying The New Republic.

The founders of the website come from The Onion and MoveOn.org.

"I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us..."

"... is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact. And, frank -- for that matter, if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they're the opposite, of what you're taught in Sunday school."

Said Newt Gingrich, from the New Republic's "Long List of Terrible Things That Newt Gingrich Has Done and Said."

"'I couldn’t be a woman,' Steve Martin once joked, 'because I’d play with my breasts all day.'"

"Now he has written a novel about a young woman, but nearly the only thing he can imagine about her is wanting to play with her breasts. The Object of Beauty is a nasty exercise in narcissism, particularly in the narcissism of the famous."

A nasty review that considers a book nasty because it seems only to say look at my breasts begins with 2 sentences that say look at my breasts.

"So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse."

Marty Peretz, The New Republic's owner, opines about Muslims.

The New Republic illustrates a serious piece about the Tea Party movement with a gross photograph that's meant to evoke the pejorative "teabagger."

Here's the article. Quite apart from the childishness of evoking the term "teabagger" and creating a image to convey the term (to those in the know), it's quite an offense to Mark Skoda, whose name appears next to the image. Since there is no caption, it creates the impression that that is a picture of Mark Skoda! I'm surprised TNR isn't more careful about provoking lawsuits. Basically, TNR is flaunting its stupidity here.

Maybe they don't want us to take the serious article seriously.

Ironically, that's a reason to read it.

... I couldn’t help but watch Skoda as he sat in a huge ballroom on the convention’s second night, listening to Joseph Farah, the mustachioed editor of the far-right-wing website WorldNetDaily, work the crowd of 600 into a frenzy. “If Barack Obama even seeks reelection as president in 2012, he won’t be able to go to any city, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’” Farah crowed from the podium.

Mustachioed? Now, we're left wondering if that's Farah in the photograph.

[Skoda] couldn’t have been pleased. Skoda and convention mastermind Judson Phillips have ambitious goals for the Tea Party movement. They aim to build their respective groups (Skoda is founding a Tea Party PAC; Phillips heads an organization called Tea Party Nation) into political players that can influence votes and tug candidates in their direction. But their quandary is as plain as the expression on Skoda’s face during Farah’s paranoid Friday night monologue: How can a movement whose base detests mainstream politics--not to mention, has a few screws loose--possibly build political clout?...

Skoda rationalizes some of the Tea Party’s rough edges as a necessity of movement-building. “I think it’s always useful to get people excited,” he says. “Part of this movement is visceral. It’s perfectly okay.” But he is much more interested in practical politics than in bombast....

Political realism, however, isn’t what the Tea Party base wants to hear....

To the sidelined activists, Skoda’s approach and the Nashville convention are the antithesis of what the movement should be about....

Whether the tea partiers will prove too busy fighting among themselves to fight the Republicans, the Democrats, and the system writ large is anyone’s guess. But Skoda is pragmatic enough to know that he can’t cut the non-pragmatists out of the coalition altogether. 

Ironically, the author of this article — Lydia DePillis — is a Mark Skoda type, sensible, moderate, and analytical. And whoever put that photograph on the article is a Joseph Farah, stirring up the readers, getting people excited and visceral.

UPDATE: TNR has swapped in a different photograph, so it's good that I got the screen capture. The "teabagger" picture also went out in TNR's email alert titled "The New Republic Politics Weekly Newsletter: The Tea Party's frustrated moderates."

ADDED: Ace links here and says: "They only do that one story, eh? The 'moderates' are always so close to ditching the party over the wignuts; we're almost in a state of civil war. It's always that way in the GOP. Now it's that way in the Tea Party, too. Meanwhile, no wingnuttery or frustrated moderates in the Democratic Party, eh?"

The New Republic redesigned its webpage to make things look nicer...

... and wrecked all the old links to it!

"Although I thought Ann's Rush apologism was unseemly and unfounded, I have to say I basically agree with Jon Chait..."

Eve Fairbanks reflects on our Bloggingheads encounter and displays the high regard TNR folk have for other TNR folk.

And what exactly is Apologism? (Homophone fans see "Apollo jism.") Wikipedia says:

Apologism is the metaphysical philosophy that argues that it is wrong for humans to attempt to alter the conditions of life in the mortal sphere of influence. It is opposed to the idea that absolute "progress" is a desirable goal for the pursuit of human endeavors...

Apologism stands solidly in opposition to the metaphysics of meliorism, which states that absolute "progress" is the desirable goal of all human endeavors. Apologism is not to be confused with apologetics.

Oh, I'm sure it all makes sense over at TNR as explained by Jonathan Chait or some other genius. Over here, we will quaff the nectar of the gods and allow the unseemliness to rage on.

Stodgy old TNR whines about how cool Politco is.

That's how I read this. You have to win readers, you losers. Up your game.

The first line of this post is what I would have made the title if I didn't feel the need to be somewhat discreet.

"There is a Barack Obama dildo. You can purchase it in either blue or gold, and if you stare at it long enough, you will begin to question the morality of free markets. Is a smiling Obama phallus really what Adam Smith envisioned? And the dildo’s just the beginning; scour the Internet long enough and you’ll be able to purchase just about anything with the president-elect’s likeness or name on it. So, with this in mind, we’ve created a slideshow of the worst online Obama kitsch we could find."

Hmmm... well, the free market I'm noticing here is magazine publication, and The New Republic is looking pretty desperate. (Only the second "slide" is NSFW — and only mildly.)

By the way, the Obama dildo is wearing a flag lapel pin.