"The biggest and weirdest myth out there about the $1 trillion platinum coin is..."

Matthew Yglesias debunks a myth without establishing that anyone believes it.

Clue to Matt: No one believes it.

This is one of those glaring examples of the attitude of superiority leading to missing humor and subtlety. You may think you're smart, but it's not smart to assume other people aren't smart too. I recommend a working assumption that other people are smart, and when you think you're reading something ridiculously stupid, go through the exercise of reading it with the thought that the writer is wonderfully clever. This is especially important when you are reading something concise/elliptical. Look at every word. Think before you mock.

The economics of legal(ish) marijuana in Colorado and Washington.

It won't be cheap for users. And it will be hard for the producers — or the states (with their taxes and fees) — to make money.

"Getting kicked out of Zuccotti Park... was the best possible endgame" for Occupy Wall Street.

Says Matt Yglesias. This fits with what I was saying the other day about the problem with the "Occupy" protest format: There's no exit strategy.



But police breaking it up imposes an end. That solves the no-exit-strategy problem.

Matt Yglesias is pointlessly pigheaded about his misstatement of what Ron Paul has proposed to do about abortion.

Yglesias responds to a post of mine:

Ann Althouse chooses for some reason to dispute that Ron “respecting the God-given right to life—for those born and unborn” Paul wants to ban abortion. 

No. I dispute that he has "loudly trumpet[ed a] plan to impose criminal penalties" on women who have abortions. Those are your words, Matt, and it is quite dishonest to change the language as you embark on your attempt to discredit me.

Since she’s apparently incapable of reading between the lines of such proposals as “Defining life as beginning at conception by passing a Sanctity of Life Act’” she might be interesting [sic] in some other quotations from Congressman Paul such as....

Well, the fact is, Matt, I really am interesting. I'm so interesting that you ought to pay attention to the precise words that I use in disputing you. Pay attention to the text before you embark on your flights of interpretation that you gratuitously insult me for supposedly lacking the capacity to perform. Pay attention to my text and to your own text (which needs editing). You ought to learn to read and be honest about what you have read.

Yglesias goes on to quote something Ron Paul said about the fetus being a person. I'm well aware, as my post clearly shows, that Paul believes the fetus is a person who deserves rights. The issue, however is whether he has "loudly trumpet[ed a] plan to impose criminal penalties" on women who have abortions. He has not done that.

Ron Paul's proposals are about diverting the matter to the state courts, as I clearly describe in my post. Now, if you want to say that voters who care about preserving abortion rights should not trust Ron Paul, then I agree with you. But you should agree with me that he most certainly did not "loudly trumpet[ a] plan to impose criminal penalties." Why can't you just fix your misstatement? Why this pointless pigheadedness? You're doing yourself no favors, Matt, and insulting my intelligence — "she’s apparently incapable of reading between the lines" — is — as they say — incivil.

"[Ron] Paul’s experience in science and medicine only reinforced his belief that life begins at conception..."

"... and he believes it would be inconsistent for him to champion personal liberty and a free society if he didn’t also advocate respecting the God-given right to life—for those born and unborn. After being forced to witness an abortion being performed during his time in medical school, he knew from that moment on that his practice would focus on protecting life.  And during his years in medicine, never once did he find an abortion necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman."

From a page on Ron Paul's website that I got to from a link in a Matthew Yglesias post titled "Ron Paul's Strange Freedom." Yglesias says:

[I]f it weren’t for his loud fanbase of self-proclaimed libertarians you wouldn’t really think [Ron Paul is] a libertarian. He’s loudly trumpeting his plan to impose criminal penalties on women who terminate their pregnancies...

Would Ron Paul punish women who get abortions as criminals? His website says he "will continue to fight for the same pro-life solutions he has upheld in Congress, including..."

* Immediately saving lives by effectively repealing Roe v. Wade and preventing activist judges from interfering with state decisions on life by removing abortion from federal court jurisdiction through legislation modeled after his “We the People Act.”

* Defining life as beginning at conception by passing a “Sanctity of Life Act.”

Does either of those proposals represent a plan — "loudly trumpet[ed]" or not — to prosecute women who have abortions? It seems to me that both of these bills are about cutting federal jurisdiction, which would leave the matter of abortion to state courts. Those courts would still be bound by Supreme Court precedent, by the way, although they'd be left to their own devices about following that precedent.

Yglesias makes some good points about the less-than-fully-libertarian quality of Ron Paul's libertarianism. He shouldn't shoot his credibility to hell with statements like "He’s loudly trumpeting his plan to impose criminal penalties on women who terminate their pregnancies."

UPDATE: Yglesias responds to this post:

Ann Althouse chooses for some reason to dispute that Ron “respecting the God-given right to life—for those born and unborn” Paul wants to ban abortion. 

No. I dispute that he has "loudly trumpet[ed a] plan to impose criminal penalties" on women who have abortions. Those are your words, Matt, and it is quite dishonest to change the language as you embark on your attempt to discredit me.

Since she’s apparently incapable of reading between the lines of such proposals as “Defining life as beginning at conception by passing a Sanctity of Life Act’” she might be interesting [sic] in some other quotations from Congressman Paul such as....

Well, the fact is, Matt, I really am interesting. I'm so interesting that you ought to pay attention to the precise words that I use in disputing you. Pay attention to the text before you embark on your flights of interpretation that you gratuitously insult me for supposedly lacking the capacity to perform. Pay attention to my text and to your own text (which needs editing). You ought to learn to read and be honest about what you have read.

Yglesias goes on to quote something Ron Paul said about the fetus being a person. I'm well aware, as my post clearly shows, that Paul believes the fetus is a person who deserves rights. The issue, however is whether he has "loudly trumpet[ed a] plan to impose criminal penalties" on women who have abortions. He has not done that.

Ron Paul's proposals are about diverting the matter to the state courts, as I clearly describe in my post. Now, if you want to say that voters who care about preserving abortion rights should not trust Ron Paul, then I agree with you. But you should agree with me that he most certainly did not "loudly trumpet[ a] plan to impose criminal penalties." Why can't you just fix your misstatement? Why this pointless pigheadedness? You're doing yourself no favors, Matt, and insulting my intelligence — "she’s apparently incapable of reading between the lines" — is — as they say — incivil.

Requiring patients to sign over copyrights to reviews of doctors so the doctors can make websites take down bad reviews.

If you've chosen a doctor based on all the good reviews in Yelp, and he won't treat you unless you sign a form that gives him ownership of whatever you might write about him, then you need to know how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act works, so you can see that the doctor has seized the power to remove his patients' bad reviews.

Or maybe doctors are just adopting this standard-form Medical Justice agreement and they're not really monitoring and censoring the on-line reviews... in which case they are unwittingly making savvy patients suspicious of what are genuinely good reviews.

(Via Matt Yglesias.)

"Have you ever had a thought on the topic of race that isn't set generations into the past? Have you ever thought about the future?"

A commenter questions Matt Yglesias's questioning of Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich talked about having "a voting standard that says to vote, as a native born American, you should have to learn American history." Yglesias liken this to "the kind of techniques that were used to prevent African-Americans (and many poor whites as well) from voting in the Jim Crow South."

Well, you can expect to hear the Jim-Crow-South meme from Democrats whenever there's any talk about about restrictions on voting. We're hearing it in Wisconsin over the voter ID law. Republicans who want to pursue these issues need to have some good responses ready.

The most conventional response is: The Jim Crow South was the work of the Democratic Party. But Republicans shouldn't be too smug about that. Obviously, Democrats think all those Democrats would be Republican today.

The question I've used as the title of this post suggests the beginning of one response, but it needs to be filled out with some substantive, believable vision of a better future. Gingrich had some substance: He wants schools to do a much better job of teaching American history. But he could have stayed with that, not brought up the notion of "a voting standard." If that was an idle rhetorical flourish, it was incompetent, because he handed a chunk of red meat to his enemies.

Yglesias: "Osama Bin Laden’s Death Could Be a Great Time To Declare Victory In The 'War On Terror.'"

Love the scare quotes, Matt. Yeah, Obama should be all "Mission Accomplished!" Great advice.

The threat to the physical security of Americans posed by terrorists needs to be put alongside the threat to physical security posed by “ordinary” criminals, by car accidents, etc. 

Oh, lord! Remember after 9/11, some people were asking why we got so upset about 3,000 deaths, when that many Americans die in car crashes every 5 30 days or so? Let's just make safer cars, and it'd be about the same as fighting terrorism, okay? Pass a law requiring parents to keep their kids in booster seats until they're 8 or 9 and it's pretty much the same as killing Osama. Thanks for the brilliant idea, Matt.

"If you put a gun to their head and they had to choose between one or the other..."

"... they'd pay the higher taxes without a peep. That's because, on the level of raw power, they know how the world works."

That's Kevin Drum in Mother Jones on January 22, providing an egregious example of the left using violent gun imagery to make a political point, even after the Tucson massacre and all those calls for new civility. I found that via Matt Yglesias, who quotes Drum and even puts the gun-to-the-head business in boldface but takes absolutely zero note of the extremely violent rhetoric.

So who did the conservative bloggers decide were the most annoying left-wing and the most annoying right-wing bloggers?

From The 8th Annual Right Wing News Conservative Blog Awards:

Most Annoying Left-Of-Center Blogger

3) Matt Yglesias (6)
3) Kos/Daily Kos (6)
2) Charles Johnson (10)
1) Andrew Sullivan (11)

Most Annoying Right-Of-Center Blogger

4) Allah (4)
2) Dan Riehl (5)
2) Debbie Schlussel (5)
1) David Frum (8)

More awards at the link, of course. I'm just a particular fan of the concept of annoyingness.

"Beyond the ethics of lying and smear[ing] one’s opponents, I would think liberals would worry..."

"... about the fact that a large portion of liberal media is dedicated to lying to liberals. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information."

Writes Matthew Yglesias, except I replaced his word "conservatives" with "liberals" (as devilishly and aptly suggested by my darling husband Meade).

Let's compare 2 men and 2 women in the same situation — about to hang up the phone.

2 men (the subject is Israel):



2 women (talking about Obama's and Palin's books):



Discuss!

Are long novels still worth reading?

"The up side of blogging: you can be reasonably confident people aren’t reading you on the john."

A seriously deluded comment on a post about the difference between what bloggers know about their readers' habits and what magazine writers know.

The post, by Matthew Ygesias, is mainly about how bloggers know they've got to write short items. Ironically, the post is way too long.

That "racist" cop is a real person, Sgt. James Crowley, and he's been called a racist before.

The Boston Herald reports:

The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics superstar’s life 16 years ago Monday.

“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward’s fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.

It’s a date Crowley still can recite by rote — and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete.

“Some people were saying ‘There’s the guy who killed Reggie Lewis’ afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights,” he said.

Crowley, 42, said he’s not a racist, despite how some have cast his actions in the Gates case. “Those who know me know I’m not,” he said....

Though he harbors no “ill feelings toward the professor,” a calm, resolute Crowley said no mea culpa will be forthcoming.

“I just have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “It will never happen.”

And The Smoking Gun has the police report, so Crowley's version of the incident is easily read. (It's detailed and well written.)

And now we know the name of the woman who called the police. I suppose her life will be ruined now, as she'll be portrayed as a racist. Lesson learned: If you think you're witnessing a crime, mind your own business. Somewhere, the new Kitty Genovese walks into the alleyway.

ADDED: Wow! Matt Yglesias abysmally misreads the Boston Herald article:

Now we see the Officer Crowley edition of the saga, as he explains that he once tried to save the life of a black man, so he must not be a racist.

Come on, Matt! Crowley was talking about how he was accused of racism for not doing enough to save that man. Incredible!

"The salient thing about Franken isn’t that he used to be a satirist."

"It's that he used to be a satirist who was so interested in politics that he transitioned to becoming a political satirist and then a candidate for office. All because he was really interested in the issues and wanted to make a difference. Most comedians probably aren’t very well-informed about policy issues, but comedians do have both the time and the means to inform themselves if they’re so inclined, and Franken very much was and is so inclined."

Matt Yglesias assures us that we don't just have a clown in the Senate.

(Now, why do I feel that I can predict the first comment?)

One of the great lessons of the blogosphere: never Palmieri on an Yglesias.

"Maybe it’s just me, but this post is kind of creepy." That's the first of nearly 500 comments on a post at Matt Yglesias's blog -- a post that is not written by Matt Yglegias. Here's the post:

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

If "the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own," then what the hell is this? Lady, you are on Matt's blog! How did you get there? Did you just barge in like some burglar in the night? Do you know the first thing about blogging and a blogger's relationship with his readers?

I'd never heard of "Third Way" until I read this post. Now, I think it sucks. Not because of something Matt once wrote about it -- which I hadn't noticed -- but because of this completely creepy intrusion into Matt's space. Why didn't Palmieri email Matt and ask him to quote a statement from the Center for American Progress Action Fund? Maybe she did and he refused. But either way, the invasion of a man's blog is unjustified, wrong, and also stupid. It's stupid, because even if you don't mind pushing around a respected blogger, you're doing it where everyone can see.

Let me quote some more of the comments:

"Why did Matt leave The Atlantic? This ‘bullshit’ post reveals the limits how independent-minded one can be when associated with this website. (Not to say CAP doesn’t do a lot of good - it does) I think this really is a big deal - Matt needs to decide if he is a independent thinker or an activist. This post shows how hard it is to be both. Did he even approve this post - on his blog?"

"Think of all the posts that didn’t merit a ghostly materialization of the CEO! Perhaps CAP really does support all those other views of Matt’s. The CAP Action Fund hates turkey."

"Next post from Jennifer Palmieri: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia."

"VERY CREEPY. that being said, matt said he left the atlantic because he wanted some skin in the game. well, i think perhaps his indy days gave him some impolitic ticks that now coming back to bite him now that he’s part of The Movement."

"Fuck off Palmieri. If we were interested in what you thought, we’d read it on your own blog. Jeez."

"Sadly, after his workplace retreat in the Pine Barrens, Matt was never heard from again…"

"Dear Jennifer, Nice boneheaded move. Dear Matthew, You left The Atlantic for this? Take your fucking balls—er, blog—back man, and perhaps you won’t suffer a loss of readers. This is just embarrassing."

"Jennifer, fabulous job. In one short post, you managed to focus attention on Matt’s original post, convince folks Third Way is nothing but a bunch of lame frauds, alienate loyal readers, cast a pall on CAP’s credibility, and possibly shoot your job prospects in both feet. Heckuva job."

And Kos has posted on it too:

The Center for American Progress should not make a habit of doing this.

And for the record, the editors on the site can say whatever they want about whoever and I won't get all creepy and Big Brother on them.

p.s. And yes, the Third Way is a bunch of assholes who make the DLC look downright palatable.

Kos points us to the original Yglesias post:

I’m getting sort of tired of the endless discussion of whether Barack Obama is a wholesome liberal or an evil centrist, but I have to say something about one aspect of this story:

“Barack Obama has never made any bones about it: He is a moderate,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate public policy think tank. “People who ignored that did so at their peril.”

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago.

The irony is: I'm the sort of person who actually likes the sort of thing Matt would call "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit." I voted for Barack Obama because I was betting that he really is a pragmatic moderate. And now Palmieri has made me hate the Third Way.

We have now learned one of the great lessons in the history of blogging: Never Palmieri on an Yglesias.

UPDATE: Yglesias now has several posts since Jennifer Palmieri dropped that turd on his blog. One obliquely refers to the stink:

As we’ve clarified, speaking as ever purely for myself and not as an institutional position of CAP/AF, Third Way’s First 100 Days agenda strikes me as pretty weak tea. For starter’s here’s their retirement security agenda [blah blah blah].

Sample comment:

“As we’ve clarified …” We?

More sympathetically:

What’s going on here is pretty obvious: Matt doesn’t like that Third Way demanded the editorial wrist-slap that appeared on his blog, but doesn’t want to directly criticize his boss. So, having covered CAP’s ass with the previous post, he is now going to make a project of picking on Third Way with special relish. What is it people want Matt to address here, exactly?

AND: Julian Sanchez says it well:

It’s like they made a list of the dozen ways they could’ve handled some minor internecine friction—including just ignoring it—and asked: “Which of these is really guaranteed to blow up in our face in the most self-defeating way possible?”...

So congratulations, Third Way, a whole lot of people who’d never heard of you now know exactly one thing about you: You’re thin-skinned whiners.

AND: Yglesias finally gets around to addressing the question directly, not that he says anything interesting.

"Morally speaking, what [Bob] Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random."

Says Matt Yglesias — about Novak's hit and run accident today.

ADDED: Above the Law's "Lawyer of the Day" award goes to David Bono, the law firm partner who bicycled after Novak and blocked his escape. You can see him on video here. He must have been agile on his bike, and I like his verbal agility as he says — responding to Novak's claim not to have seen the struck pedestrian — "There was a pedestrian splayed on his windshield. I don't think there's any way you could miss that." A perfectly upstanding, observant, and articulate witness. Tough luck for Novak.

IN THE COMMENTS: Seven Machos:

The important thing here is that an evil person did an evil thing and that a good person (on a bicycle! which is quasi-sainthood) stopped it.

We can't let common sense get in the way of the narrative.

AJ Lynch:

Yeah he was splayed on the windshield then he just slid off like one of those mishaps you see in a cartoon on TV.

Matt Yglesias asks: "Does This Blog Suck? Do All Blogs Suck?"

"This," meaning his, not mine. He's responding to a reader who wants to know "What'd you think about David Appell's smackdown of you?" Matt's defense is: "I don't think the post was really about why I suck, it was about why the punditsphere as a whole sucks with me just as a prominent example." And the first commenter says, "No, it's a pretty good smackdown of you in particular." Hmmm.

Here's the main thing I found interesting in Appell's piece:

[W]hat's especially bad, "professional bloggers" seem so intent on posting 20 times a day that all of their individual posts are basically useless, conveying nothing whatsoever.

For example, I think Andrew Sullivan, by becoming a blogger, has completely ruined his standing as a writer of serious political and gay analysis. Now he posts 40 times a a day [sic], and includes so many insipid or inconsequential things and meaningless pieces of campaign gossip, and very, very little (i.e. none) of what he writes changes my life in any way whatsoever. I have stopped reading him.

Appell goes on to pick apart a post by Matt Yglesias, who, like Sullivan, blogs at the Atlantic. So I'd say it's not so much "a pretty good smackdown of [Matt] in particular" as it is an expression of concern about the efforts of writers and readers. Appell would like people to read more weighty writing by serious experts, and this, I think, misapprehends human nature. People will study difficult things sometimes — mostly, when it's necessary in the pursuit of their career. But with or without blogs, people read for fun. And blog reading — especially when there's a comment section — provides a kind of social interaction that you can't get from a book. It's a different experience from reading a book, and it's probably richer than what most people would be reading if they weren't reading blogs.

The question whether blogging is ruining the writers is quite different. Posting 40 or even 20 times a day does seem excessive, and I have a problem if Sullivan and Yglesias are cranking out posts because their employer imposes a quota. I think there is a kind of prolific, money-driven blogging that would suck the life right out of you. Sullivan had 37 posts on Friday! Did all of that just spring out of his fertile, energetic, overflowing brain in the pure joy of blogging or is this commerce?

I love prolific, eccentric blogging on divergent topics, and I do blog for the sheer intrinsic pleasure of it. Could I put the same energy into writing a serious book every year? I would have more time for other projects if I didn't blog, but I can't just take the energy and put it somewhere else. Blogging creates its own sort of energy. To say take that energy and write a serious book is like saying to someone who is in love with a guy who's no good for her that she should take that love and give it to this other guy who's got a steady job and stays home in the evenings.

But I don't know why Andrew Sullivan is blogging the way he is or how valuable the books he doesn't write would be. Nevertheless, his blog is wonderful. It's a model of multifariousness. I don't trust anyone who thinks writing like that undermines the other, longer, focused writing that he happens to get done at the same time. The notion that he has "completely ruined his standing as a writer of serious political and gay analysis" is quite simply insane (or jealous). Being serious all the time is not the only way to be serious, and it's probably not even a good or healthy way to be serious. It might be that Sullivan, with his elite, advanced education, could have become more of a scholar and less of a polemicist, but he went right into journalism after he got his Ph.D, long before blogging was invented.

Yglesias is another matter. He's young and unproven. Unlike Sullivan, he hasn't written books that have made a difference. Nor does he have an advanced degree that would make us think he should be writing scholarship. He's just a young pundit, and who knows if he has anything more useful to offer than his blog and his blog-like book? I'd rather read his blog than his book, but what difference does it make if he writes in a book or on a blog? If it's on the blog, people can comment — unlike Sullivan, he has comments — and other bloggers can cut and paste and link. That's all perfectly fine. Who thinks there is a more profound book that we're missing out on?

As for me, I'm old and I've written plenty of scholarship. Hardly anyone has read it and it has had approximately zero effect. Blogging is my métier. That's just the way it is.

Matthew Yglesias might want to chide his commenters.

Matt writes: "Shocking news that Tim Russert has died of a heart attack at the young age of 58." And his commenters act like jackasses. The second post is by "Dick Cheney":

Damn. That was the one non-Fox show where I could control the message.

And it's downhill from there:

i say good riddance.
he was the best example of the worst of journalism today.
we should not forget his role in helping get this war started.
after all, cheney went on his show because he knew that he would be able to "control" the message.
he was a fraud and a hypocrite and the world will be better off with him gone.
the only people who will miss him will be the republican politicians who knew they could go on his show and lie with impunity.
Posted by frankie d | June 13, 2008 4:22 PM

So now people feel the need to say what a great guy he was? Now I hope we can get someone that will ask real questions and not just gotcha's.
Posted by rob | June 13, 2008 4:24 PM...

so all of a sudden we are supposed to forget about all of the outrageously harmful things people like russert do?
if he had practiced his craft of journalism, there is a very good chance that we would have never gotten involved in such a harmful war.
if people like condi rice and cheney did not feel that they could go on his show and lie through their teeth about matters of life and death, it is very possible that they would have never felt comfortable lying, continually to the american people.
if he had actually been the "tough questioner" he supposedly was, perhaps he would have actually torn cheney's smug assurances about the coming war to shreds and the administration would not have taken us to war and wasted thousands of american lives and hundreds of thousands of iraqi lives.
he'll have to deal with his complicity in his own terms, but i have no qualms about pointing out a bunch of inconvenient truths.
if pointing this out makes me a dick and less than a class act, i wear that proudly.
Posted by frankie d | June 13, 2008 4:40 PM

Good to know I'm not the only one Sam. Seemed like a decent enough guy. This really is going to ruin my R. Kelly, "not guilty" party tonight.
Posted by laborlibert | June 13, 2008 4:40 PM...

This push-back sort of restores my faith:

Might the D in Frankie D stand for dipshit? You sound like AJ on the last season of the Sopranos.
Posted by laborlibert | June 13, 2008 4:51 PM

Oh, those last 2 comments were by the same guy!

The horrible virulence is back:

... Russert loved life you say? What a sick thing to say when you have read the kind of qualms that have been raised about Russert's moral shortcomings on this thread.
What about those million dead Iraqis? I bet they loved their lives too until they were ended by unsought and unjustified violence -- as opposed to gluttony.
Posted by The Fool | June 13, 2008 6:34 PM

ADDED: I see that not long ago, Matt wrote a little article trashing Russert:

So Meet the Press thrives, delighting precisely the sort of person who doesn't realize that a hardball is a kind of ball whereas a curveball is a kind of pitch.

Actually, the balls Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance....

Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience. He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News. The politicians, in turn, go on the show determined not to make news. And why do they bother? Because... it's a rite of passage, and any politician too chicken to play Russert's inane games would never garner the respect of the political class.