The Mooch Is Back In The News-- And It's Hilarious

Scaramucci is campaigning against his old pal-- and boss-- Señor Trumpanzee. Look at this clip of him yapping it up on Fox New with Howie Kurtz today. What a laugh fest! Trump and The Mooch are throwing shit at each other like a couple of crazed monkeys. Trump is so funny-- he's like a TV cartoon character; he should go on a stand-up comedy tour.

I think Anthony is really somebody that's very much out of control. He's a nervous, neurotic wreck," said the Projector-in-Chief. "He called so much, and I said, 'Anthony, I'm sorry. I can't do that. I can't take you in.' And I said, 'You got to stop all these phone calls. Too many calls Anthony.'

Scaramucci was laughing when he watched. It was all in Trump's nervous, neurotic wreck of a brain. The Mooch thinks the GOP should dump him in 2020 and that most people who work for him agree but are too scared to say so publicly.

"He's gone off the rails. He's acting in a way that is completely unstable," The Mooch said about Trump, as though he is different today than he was when The Mooch was supporting him and working for him. "He's literally the opposite of George Washington. When he looks at a news feed or a news search, he's focussing on the name Trump and not the name the United States of America. The guy has completely lost it. As it relates to the culture of leadership inside the White House, the cabinet, the people that he's leading, he doesn't lead them. He thinks that his personal charm is going to fix the China situation, the North Korea situation... when in fact it's the very opposite. Now we're in this perilous situation where he's blending racism into the leadership culture..."

"We recognize that the president is a clear and present danger to the American society, to the American culture. The there many people inside the White House, the cabinet... I would ask the left to lets create an offramp for those people. When you're trying to deprogram people from a cult, one of the first things you have to do is allow them to change their mind..."

The Democrats Still Haven't Impeached The Motherfucker-- Passing PAY-GO Is All They're Capable Of

I don't have the kind of sweeping knowledge of the presidency Señor Trumpanzee pretends to have. But I can state that there has never been a president in my lifetime as profane and in the gutter as the intellectually lazy slug currently occupying the White House. Trump was a grotesque pig long before the Kremlin rallied easily-manipulatable fans of The Apprentice to elect him to office. Imagine a carefully curated compilation of, say, The Best of Trump With Howard Stern. But more recently, he got laughs from those Apprentice fans by referring to mu congressman, the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee as Little Adam Schitt.



Who even needs to remember all the way back when people were scratching their heads about his clown-like routine calling Senator Cruz a pussy? This is a filthy-mouthed walking garbage can, pre-pardoned by the religionist-right in return for granting them a few pieces of silver. So then comes the outrage over some earthy remarks by a newly-sworn in congresswoman-- a Muslim no less-- Rashida Tlaib.

And it wasn't just Trump-enabling Republicans who saw this as an opportunity to go on the attack. I was hoping Steny Hoyer might be so overwhelmed that he would die on the spot but, alas, he's still among the breathing from what I hear. Some of his acolytes handled the attack on Rashida. Blue Dog chairman Jim Costa-- the most pro-Trump Democrap in Congress, bellowed, "Inappropriate. As elected officials I think we should be expected to set a high bar… It’s not helpful." Speaking of the bar Costa has set, he is best know in his home state of California for availing himself of the services of child prostitutes-- and he thinks Rashida was being inappropriate? Another Hoyerite, former New Dem chair, swiss-cheese brained Ron Kind, is mixing up Mueller's job of investigating criminal behavior and Congress' constitutional requisite to discover high crimes and misdemeanors for an impeachment process to begin. "Mueller hasn’t even produced his report yet," he wined after Rashida would dare bring up the "i" word. "People should cool their jets a little bit, let the prosecutors do their job and finish the investigation." It's Congress' job to investigate impeachment, not Mueller's.

Kevin McCarthy, who has never even burped when Trump was dragging the United States through the sewer for the last 2 years had the nerve to run to the media to attack Pelosi over it. "She has a new freshman who uses that type of language, who has a determination what she's gonna do with no facts or no basis. How do you work with anybody if this is what they really have planned?"

Well, let's find out from Rashida. She wrote an OpEd for her hometown paper, the Detroit Free Press-- along with John Bonifaz, Free Speech For People president-- Now is the time to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. The tone was perfect from the first sentence: "Trump is a direct and serious threat to our country. On an almost daily basis, he attacks our Constitution, our democracy, the rule of law and the people who are in this country. His conduct has created a constitutional crisis that we must confront now." Isn't it funny how establishment cowards like Kind and Costa haven't noticed?

The Framers of the Constitution designed a remedy to address such a constitutional crisis: impeachment. Through the impeachment clause, they sought to ensure that we would have the power, through our elected representatives in Congress, to protect the country by removing a lawless president from the Oval Office.

We already have overwhelming evidence that the president has committed impeachable offenses, including, just to name a few: obstructing justice; violating the emoluments clause; abusing the pardon power; directing or seeking to direct law enforcement to prosecute political adversaries for improper purposes; advocating illegal violence and undermining equal protection of the laws; ordering the cruel and unconstitutional imprisonment of children and their families at the southern border; and conspiring to illegally influence the 2016 election through a series of hush money payments.

Whether the president was directly involved in a conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 election remains the subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. But we do not need to wait on the outcome of that criminal investigation before moving forward now with an inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives on whether the president has committed impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors” against the state: abuse of power and abuse of the public trust.

Each passing day brings new damage to the countless people hurt by this lawless president’s actions. We cannot undo the trauma that he is causing to our people, and this nation. Those most vulnerable to his administration’s cruelty are counting on us to act-- act to remove the president and put this country on a path to true justice. The Framers distinguished the impeachment power from the power of a criminal prosecution. While Congress has the impeachment power to prevent future harm to our government, prosecutors have the power to seek punishment for those who commit crimes. But it is not Mueller’s role to determine whether the president has committed impeachable offenses. That is the responsibility of the U.S. Congress.

Those who say we must wait for Special Counsel Mueller to complete his criminal investigation before Congress can start any impeachment proceedings ignore this crucial distinction. There is no requirement whatsoever that a president be charged with or be convicted of a crime before Congress can impeach him. They also ignore the fact that many of the impeachable offenses committed by this president are beyond the scope of the special counsel’s investigation.

We are also now hearing the dangerous claim that initiating impeachment proceedings against this president is politically unwise and that, instead, the focus should now shift to holding the president accountable via the 2020 election. Such a claim places partisan gamesmanship over our country and our most vulnerable at this perilous moment in our nation’s history. Members of Congress have a sworn duty to preserve our Constitution. Leaving a lawless president in office for political points would be abandoning that duty.

This is not just about Donald Trump. This is about all of us. What should we be as a nation? Who should we be as a people? In the face of this constitutional crisis, we must rise. We must rise to defend our Constitution, to defend our democracy, and to defend that bedrock principle that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. Each passing day brings more pain for the people most directly hurt by this president, and these are days we simply cannot get back.The time for impeachment proceedings is now.

Fox And Señor Trumpanzee

Tragic-- I was going to write "funny"-- stories circulating the internet for the last couple of days about how Fox News serves as the Trumpanzee Kitchen Cabinet.

Trump is getting his immigration policy from people on Fox News who are telling him ideas that are impractical, illegal, or unconstitutional.

Axios reported that Trump had made DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen his immigration scapegoat, “Since then, she’s taken on an unforgiving role: having to shoot down the president’s frequently unvetted immigration enforcement ideas (including a recent suggestion to send active duty military-- not simply National Guard-- to the border.) A senior administration source said some of Trump’s unvetted ideas are coming from people outside the White House, including Fox News personalities. The source added that Nielsen fully supports the president on the wall and on closing loopholes, but often had to be “Ms. No.” Trump was being fed legally unvetted ideas that would look flashy on TV but are of dubious operational value.”

The idea that Trump was getting his ideas from watching Fox News was bad enough, but it turns out that it was even worse than many Americans suspected. People who talk on Fox News for a living who mostly have no government experience at all are acting as a shadow cabinet for Trump. Presidents often turn to outside advisers when they want a different point of view, but Trump is ignoring the people that he chose to serve in his cabinet and has made people with no qualifications his de facto cabinet.

If Trump was just listening to Fox News as his source of information, there are ways around that problem, but if Trump is turning to let’s say Sean Hannity for immigration advice that is a much more difficult problem.

Trump is not only governing as seen on TV. He is allowing people who play politics on television to advise him on running the country.

See what I mean by tragic/not funny? Our poor country! But the story in The Guardian this morning about Fox was funny: Fox News accidentally displays graphic showing it is least trusted cable network. Everyone already knew Rachel Maddow is more watched than Hannity-- the #1 most watched cable news host, with an average total audience of 3.058 million viewers compared to Hannity's 3.000 million viewers. Forbes reported that "Maddow also won among viewers 25-54, the demographic most valued by advertisers, finishing March with an average audience of 671,000 compared to Hannity's 616,000. CNN finished a distant third in the hour, with 382,000 viewers 25-54."

But it came as a shock when Howard Kurtz flashed the image in the video up on his show on Sunday.

Fox News has inadvertently posted a graphic showing it trails other cable news networks in trustworthiness.

During a segment on Sunday on Media Buzz, host Howard Kurtz was discussing with the Republican pollster Frank Luntz a Monmouth University poll which asked respondents if the media regularly or occasionally reports fake news.

The graphic that came up on screen showed results from another question, about what cable news outlets respondents trusted more. Fox News was last at 30%, behind CNN and MSNBC, both regular targets of attacks by President Donald Trump.

Kurtz, the author of a recent, admiring book about the Trump White House, realized the mistake.

“That is not the graphic we are looking for,” he said. “Hold off. Take that down, please.”

2013 in Review -- A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy,* Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me

Some people really try my patience
(Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.)

[*TO MEET THE JANITOR OF LUNACY, SEE PART 1]



by Noah

What would any Quote of the Year contest be without one of the Republican Party's leading spokesweirdos, Bill O'Reilly? I think the most interesting question about this man is: Is he merely Archie Bunker with a TV show? Or is Roger Ailes broadcasting lunatic Republican propaganda from a remote insane asylum that's buried deep in a lead-shielded mountain somewhere. As the clip above shows, homophobia is not new turf for Bill-O.

This is a deeply disturbed man. Where must his head be to even think of this, let alone actually say it?

"Leahy, Leahy from Vermont. He wants gay illegal aliens. He wants gay illegals to bring their friends!"

He's ranting, fearfully, about Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy, and he sounds like he just awoke from a nightmare: gay illegals -- not just illegals but gay ones, and they're bringing in their gay friends! RUN!!!

I have no doubt that O'Reilly's attendants have to mop the sweat off his expansive bobblehead forehead during every commercial break. Gays everywhere!!! Is he peeing in his pants too? Hell, his chair probably sits above a drain in the floor of the studio.

This guy makes a pile of money saying such things nightly to his fearful, twitchy-nose, 80-year-old rodent audience -- a pile of money. But no amount of money can buy him time against reality or his ever-encroaching dementia. He is one with his audience. He is one with his angry, hate-stewed white-man party. The rest of us can only take comfort in knowing that 95 percent of his audience will be dead in 10 years. I try to be patient, but he is doing a lot of damage to society while we wait.

Just think how easy it would be to push this cretinous nutcase completely over the edge. Three busloads of gay Mexican disco-dancing mariachi bands in Mexican-flag hotpants and "VIVA LA WAR ON CHRISTMAS" muscle shirts, marching and dancing through his hospital suite in a conga line ought to do it, but I'd rather see it happen live some night right on TV during his show. We'd see foaming-at-the-mouth, purple-faced-screaming, crazed-eyed apoplexy. They'd have to put him down like a broken-down horse at the racetrack. That's a ticket I'd buy in a heartbeat, and I'd gladly forgo my senior discount for the cause.


RIGHT-WINGERS: NO SENSE OF IRONY,
OR JUST NO SENSE AT ALL?



OK, I've got Fox out of the way for today. (Not really, as you will see shortly.) Time to move on to the other Republican cable news outfit. Maybe they're not as wingnutty as Fox, but they're certainly working for the same master and goal. Many of you already know my feelings towards the Corporate "News" Network, aka CNN. Some call it Conservative News Network. Whichever. Same thing. I haven't watched the thing (to obtain true knowledge of world events, at least) since their blatant shilling for George W. Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign. I mean, Wolf Blitzer? I've seen more than enough brown-nosing assclowns during my own life in the corporate world. I don't need to turn on my TV to see him and the rest of the CNN crew kissing Washington's butt around the clock, with cloying, smarmy softball questioning that goes nowhere and gains us nothing.

Back in May, CNN managed to top even itself, this time with heaps of irony as Howard Kurtz, whom CNN at the time called their in-house media critic, went on his own show, the absurdly named Reliable Sources, to apologize to his readers, his viewers, and professional basketball player Jason Collins, who had recently come out. Collins was the first active player in any of the four major professional sports leagues in America to come out. He did so in an interview in Sports Illustrated.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport, but, since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. . . . I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.

No one wants to live in fear. I've always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don't sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I've endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew, and yet, when I acknowledged my sexuality, I felt whole for the first time. I still had the same sense of humor. I still had the same mannerisms and my friends still had my back.

Could a man be any more heartfelt and honest? And yet Howard Kurtz pounced. In his column in The Daily Beast, Kurtz got a whole lot wrong about the Collins story -- misinformation that unjustly cast a cloud on Collins' character. Among other things, Kurtz stated in the column that Collins had not mentioned a previous engagement to a woman in his coming-out interview in Sports Illustrated. For those of us who can read, however, there it was, right in the beginning of SI's feature. Facts be damned! There's a smear agenda to push!

The upshot was that Kurtz was fired by The Daily Beast. To his credit, he did go on his CNN show after the fact and put on the hair shirt, admitting his insensitivity and his "sloppy and inexcusable" errors. In other words, busted.

I apologize to readers, to viewers and, most importantly, to Jason Collins and his fiancé. I hope this very candid response can help me earn back your trust over time.

Hmmm, "over time." This is CNN we're talking about. Do we mean geological time? Well, none of us live that long. If you have a show called Reliable Sources, you might start by changing the name. Until you do, calling your show Reliable Sources is just sloganeering -- something akin to Fox saying they are "fair and balanced." Had Kurtz been on Fox at the time, his colleagues would no doubt have decried his firing by The Daily Beast. It doesn't take much to imagine the demented Palins or Hannitys bleating out "free speech, free speech." Instead, Fox simply saw one of their own kind and hired him away from CNN. It's not the first time Fox has used CNN as a farm team.


VIRGINIA IS FOR HATERS



During his campaign for Virginia lieutenant governor this year, Republican candidate E. W. Jackson compared Planned Parenthood to the KKK.

Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was, and the Democrat Party and their black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.

Well, all righty then. The same lunatic also:

• once said that President Obama "sees the world through a Muslim perspective"
• believes that yoga will leave you vulnerable to Satan
• and finds civil rights for gay people to be "icky"

Oh, and homosexuality leads to pedophilia. I can't wait to here what this nutball thinks of rape. Given his party affiliation and his other statements, I think we know. All those cancer screenings that Planned Parenthood provided -- who needs them? Let 'em die, indeed!

I'm old enough to remember that before Reagan people like Jackson were cared for in institutions. Now they get radio shows and nominations from the Republican Party. That Reagan dude sure had him some vision! He foresaw a shortage of future Republican candidates. "What to do? What to do?" he said. "I know! We'll cut funding for mental institutions -- close the doors and let the crazies out into the public! Problem solved! The ones we don't run for office can just sit home and become Fox devotees, if not on-air talent!"

But wait, that's not all! Just in case you don't believe that Republicans are completely insane, there's this: Virginia Republicans proudly announced, on June 13th, that their new state-party black-outreach director would be a man named Joe Ellison, a man who just happens to believe that voodoo causes earthquakes! No wonder they keep saying that all beliefs are valid. What's next? I can tell you this much: If voodoo really worked, I'd have a house full of Republican voodoo dolls and a whole lotta pins.

Epilogue: In November, Jackson got 44.54 percent of the vote

This means that nearly a million Virginia Republicans bought into Jackson's utter lunacy, despite the fact that he is an African-American. It musta been a very hard decision for Republicans to make. It just goes to show that, if a man believes that yoga makes you vulnerable to Satan and civil rights for gays is "icky" and all the rest, then skin tone doesn't always matter to Republicans. Perhaps we can point to this as progress in Virginia. The state has apparently moved from "whites only" to "whites preferred."

Fortunately, Jackson's Democratic opponent, State Sen. Ralph Northam, pulled in 1.2 million votes. Still, in a world without lunacy, would it have been that close?


TODAY'S "QUOTE OF THE YEAR" NOMINEES

1. Sen. Rand Paul (KKK-KY) discusses misinformation as a form of cheating in med school


"I never ever cheated. I don't condone cheating. But I would sometimes spread misinformation. This is a great tactic. Misinformation can be very important. . . . So that's my advice. Misinformation works."

That, folks, is why Rand Paul is a Republican Party natural and a darling of Republican pundits too.

2. Sandy Rios, American Family Association radio host, vies for the "Hostess with the Leastest Integrity" title

Sandy went a long way toward establishing her claim by using September's tragic Kenyan mall massacre as an opportunity to attack President Obama by going once-more-unto-the-breach of birther psychosis. She covered several of the points that Republicans love to blather about -- e.g.," Muslim," "Communist," "born in Kenya." And notice how she dwells on President Obama's "Kenyan lineage without mentioning the white half. Nope. All that matters to Republicans is the black half.


"The implications of this are pretty frightening, and of course it's interesting that this is the country from which our president hails. This is his lineage. We know his cousin Raila Odinga is a Muslim communist. It's just amazing. I think he's the prime minister right now."

Well, Miss Sandy, it's amazing when you think at all. Perhaps Obamacare can get you the care or at least medications that you need -- and at a lower price!

3. Barbara Bush -- old battleaxe, Marge Simpson look-alike, and mother of much evil spawn


"We've had enough Bushes."

Well said! We certainly have. We still don't know if our country will recover from the disaster that was George Dubya. If America votes for another Bush, it will be proof that our country has a death wish, and China will rejoice.

4. John Stossel, World Champion Assclown

Here he is in his natural habitat, Fox and Friends, discussing why government benefits just aren't needed.


"Think about the Depression. That was before there was any welfare state at all. How many people starved? No one."

I love how Steve Doocy responds, "Good point," and the other geniuses nod in agreement. Now that's great television! Like I've said, watching Fox is like peeping in on an insane asylum.

5. Dave Carney, top adviser to Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott, who is the Republican candidate to succeed Rick "1-2-?" Perry as governor of our biggest Loon State

Cheering the results of Colorado's recall elections, Carney twitted out:



This, mind you, came from the man who ran Rick Perry's campaigns from 1998 to 2012. Truly, this man knows intelligence when he sees it, no?

6. Megyn KKKelly, Fox's new Hannity

"Santa is just white...Jesus was a white man too."

Why is it so important, even crucial to Republicans, that Santa and Jesus be white? Jon Stewart, as usual, puts it all in proper perspective.

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A PRAYER TO THE JANITOR OF LUNACY*

Part 1: Take a bow, Repugs! (*including Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy") [Monday]

Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums? (Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obma: Some top Republican lies of 2013) [Tuesday]

Part 3: No Cruz control (Rafael "Ted" Cruz in his own words) [Wednesday]

Part 4: A great anniversary approaches! (Nixon's resignation) (plus more "Quote of the Year" nominees) [Thursday]

Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me -- Some people really try my patience (Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.) [Friday]

Part 6 (and last): In the words of Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" (Exploiting tragedy for a buck; Miss America's not American?; "Quote of the Year" winner) [Saturday]

And don't forget Noah's recent --
"Need a last-minute Christmas gift suggestion?" [12/22]
"50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles" [12/26]
"A Tale of Two Popes -- the one in the Vatican and the one in North Carolina" [12/27]

#

Be still, my heart, the veil of secrecy lifts from "The New Newsweek"

Ohmygosh, is Harvey Weinstein the face of
The New Newsweek? Holy media muck, Batman!

by Ken

Ever since it was announced that the new Newsweek ownership was turning the magazine over to Ms. Tina Brown, to function as a sort of print offshoot of her Daily Beast webzine, two of the most closely guarded secrets in North America have been: (1) when The New Newsweek would debut, and (2) what the heck The New Newsweek would be. Recently word filtered out that the date on which Everything Would Be Changed would be March 7. Meanwhile, as to the sort of content producers and produced content to be expected in it, we've been getting glimmerings from the steady drip-drip-drip of supposedly high-profile talent acquisitions Ms. Tina has been revealing -- not just for the Daily Beast now, but for the new hybrid, er, Online-Offline Media Agglomeration (OOMA).

Most recently I made not very gentle fun of the latest pair of trophy hires I've heard about: the disgracefully lazy, dishonest, and seemingly not very bright Village media megastooge "Howie the Hump" Kurtz and that hard-charging legend in his own mind Andrew "You Can't Be a Professional Whore Unless You Can Get Someone to Pay You" Sullivan. Talk about media star power! Gadzooks, I'm blind!

The Hump, you'll recall, after spending his career at the Post as a Village slut for basically media chump change, has dreams of finally making intellectual corruption pay (he wants to be "more of an entrepreneur online"). Whereas our Andrew . . . well, I think this can be rendered only in his own words:

The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime.

Well, today is March 7, and it turns out that this is indeed the big day. The on-sale date, not the cover date, which is March 14. The March 7 issue is the end of Newsweek's Ancien Régime, the one that, reports NYT "Media Decoder" blogger Jeremy W. Peters, through that issue "had 47 percent fewer ad pages than it did during the same period in 2010, according to the Media Industry Newsletter." You'll be cheered to learn that Vol. I, No. 1 of The New Newsweek --

contained greater mix of advertising categories, including high-end retailers like St. John, the woman’s clothing maker, and David Yurman, the jeweler. Ms. Brown’s magazines -- she edited Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk -- always drew luxury advertisers.

More importantly, though, Ms. Tina has finally had to lift the veil of secrecy from her content lineup. And Young Jeremy (he is young, wouldn't you assume? otherwise what's his excuse?) has three names for us. I hope you're sitting down, with emergency medication handy if appropriate. Okay, let's do it. Gently now, Jeremy. Don't, like, just go dropping bombshell-type names on us.

March 7, 2011, 2:13 PM

Familiar Bylines Grace Tina Brown’s Newsweek

By JEREMY W. PETERS

Harvey Weinstein. Leslie H. Gelb. Kathleen Parker. [Oh man, it's the heavy artillery! Jeez, Jeremy, I asked you not to do that. -- Ken]

Tina Brown reached for some of the more well-worn cards in her Rolodex to find authors for articles in the debut issue of her newly redesigned Newsweek, which hit newsstands Monday.

Ms. Brown, one of the most connected editors in America, has long relied on her friends in political, entertainment and diplomatic circles to contribute to her magazines and her Web site, The Daily Beast. Reporters who work for her know that she is famous for digging into her address book to give out home phone numbers for boldface names who might be good sources.

In the new Newsweek, Mr. Weinstein -- the high-powered film producer and Ms. Brown’s former boss at Talk magazine -- wrote the new back page feature called “My Favorite Mistake,” in which he describes turning down the opportunity to buy the film rights for best-selling novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Mr. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and high-ranking American diplomat whom Ms. Brown recruited to write opinion pieces for The Daily Beast, has a Newsweek piece on the revolts in the Middle East and North Africa.

And Katheen Parker, another Daily Beast columnist who recently and awkwardly left her job as co-host of a CNN show with Eliot Spitzer, wrote about feminism in the context of the current Arab uprising.

Ms. Brown and her staff kept the plans for Newsweek’s redesign close to their vests. But they had been showing off a prototype of the new magazine to advertisers, which appeared to respond with some enthusiasm. The March 14 issue had noticeably more ad pages than recent issues of Newsweek.

Oh, fer cripes' sake.

There's more, but let me give you a moment to digest this much. That's one heavy dose of Beltway bloat and media morass.

Now you're probably asking, what about the look and feel of The New Newsweek? You probably want to know about the paper stock, for example, and how big the pictures are. And maybe even a word or two about the, you know, articles. Do you have anything for us, Young Jeremy?

Apart from new advertisers, what landed on newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes on Monday is a magazine that looks and feels little like the old Newsweek but preserves enough of the familiar weekly news magazine format that it will probably not offend Newsweek’s more purist readers.

The paper stock is thicker and glossier. There are references throughout promoting content in The Daily Beast, which the magazine explains is “Newsweek’s website.” There is a feature called “Connecting the Dots,” an idea that came from Sidney Harman, who purchased Newsweek from the Washington Post Company last year. Mr. Harman is fond of using the phrase to explain what he believes Newsweek’s mission to its readers should be.

Newsweek now prints far more — and far larger — photos than it used to. The new issue has several two-page photo spreads. A new section toward the front of the magazine, called NewsBeast, provides commentary on events from the previous week. The magazine’s famous “Conventional Wisdom” column now appears there.

The bylines in the new Newsweek weren’t the only thing that had a ring of Tina Brown déjà vu to them. For the cover, Ms. Brown chose Hillary Rodham Clinton, who also graced the cover of Ms. Brown’s debut issue of Talk. The subject matter of the accompanying articles is quite different. For Talk, Ms. Clinton discussed the possible psychological origins of her husband’s infidelity. In Newsweek, the story emphasizes Ms. Clinton’s status as an emerging world leader.

Did somebody say "déjà vu"? As in "all over again," as Yogi would say?

Ms. Tina herself has an introductory piece called "A New Newsweek," accompanied by the, er, visual rendering at left. I bet the editor who plunked that in there is going to catch hell from the boss! Oh, wait.

I don't suppose Yogi made it into The New Newsweek. If you find one in your mailbox, let me know. Or I suppose you could buy one at your newsstand, if you're that worked up about it. If you do, be sure to let us know if you're feeling as if your dots are connected.

In fairness to Ms. Tina, she couldn't have kept all this secret forever. Could she? It's something to think about.

#

Stop the presses! Ms. Tina Brown adds yet another magnificent beast to her media menagerie

With all the media studs Ms. Tina is assembling for The Daily Beast and the forthcoming revamped Newsweek, we must surely be witnessing a media juggernaut in the making, no?

"The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime."

-- Andrew Sullivan, as quoted in a NYT "Media Decoder" piece

by Ken

Well, my goodness, Andrew, what is there to say except that every now and then, gosh darn it, dreams do come true?

I assume you've been keeping track of the succession of hires Ms. Tina Brown has been making for her new media entity, which will combine her current Daily Beast webzine with a revamped Newsweek to be under her editorial control as well. I'm not going to regale you with the list of media luminaries. Let Ms. Tina hire her own PR flacks.

But golly gee, Andrew Sullivan! Hard on the heels of the acquisition of (gasp) the Washington Post's "Howie the Hump" Kurtz, as you'll note in the following piece from the NYT's "Media Decoder" today. (Consult the on-site version for links.)

February 27, 2011, 10:31 PM

Andrew Sullivan Joins Daily Beast and Newsweek
By M. AMEDEO TUMOLILLO

The start date of Tina Brown's reinvented Newsweek after its merger with her Daily Beast Web site remains vague, but Ms. Brown's efforts to build an impressive roster do not: Andrew Sullivan announced Sunday that his popular blog, "The Daily Dish," would leave TheAtlantic.com and join Ms. Brown's team in April.

"The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up," Mr. Sullivan said in a blog entry. "And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime."

Mr. Sullivan will join Howard Kurtz, a three-decade veteran of The Washington Post who was lured to The Daily Beast in October 2010. At the time, Mr. Kurtz's move ignited speculation that The Daily Beast would merge with Newsweek, which it did one month later. Mr. Kurtz said then that he wanted to "be more of an entrepreneur online."

Commenting on Mr. Sullivan's move, Ms. Brown said in a blog post that the blogger's "fearlessness and doggedness makes him a natural soul mate of The Daily Beast."

"A rarity, he is willing to admit mistakes and change positions (sometimes radically) in the face of new evidence," she said. "Little wonder he has built one of the most devoted followings on the web, with 1.2 million unique visitors a month, 82 percent of them bookmarked."

Ms. Brown said that The Daily Beast garnered more than six million unique visitors last month. In late 2010, Mr. Sullivan's blog accounted for roughly a quarter of TheAtlantic.com's monthly unique visitors, which reached 4.8 million last October.

Mr. Sullivan's work will be promoted on The Daily Beast's home page, and he will contribute to the ailing Newsweek magazine, Ms. Brown said.

After Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast in November 2010, Ms. Brown, who previously led Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, was given the task of turning both publications into money-making ventures. The addition of Mr. Sullivan to the roster, Ms. Brown said, "will give The Dish a whole new audience and potential for growth and innovation."

The date for the first issue of the revamped Newsweek has not been revealed, but one person briefed on the plan said last week that March 7 was the target.

I trust that for DWT readers it's not necessary to pile on the snark regarding these two acquisitions. Andrew Sullivan is a very bright fellow, but "very bright" doesn't impress me in the absence of, well, something else. True, every now and then -- every 50th time out of the box? 100th? 500th? -- he uses that brightness to offer genuine insight on a topic, but I don't have the spare reading time to play those odds.

As for Howie the Hump, well, what is there to say? If he had been maybe 100 times as competent in his career at the Post he might have qualified as a disgrace. Of course the paper should have been profoundly ashamed of him, but it has long since lost any sense of shame it may once have possessed in its somewhat happier times. Actually, my favorite line in Mr. Tumolillo's breathless account is the idea that our Howie, in making the move to Ms. Tina's house of media, aspires to be "more of an entrepreneur online." Shake it, Howie baby!

From these thrilling announcements out of Ms. Tina's PR pantry, I have two takeaways -- one fairly conclusive, the other merely speculative.

(1) The conclusive one is that neither The Daily Beast nor the new Newsweek is meant for me. Which is A-OK by me. I'm already way overcommitted media-wise.

(2) The speculation is that Ms. Tina's new media empire may be headed for something less than blockbusterdom. I mean, Howie the Hump and Andrew "Look at Me!" Sullivan? If this were some 17-year-old whiz kid in, say, Nebraska making the leap from his high school newspaper to a national media presence, names like this might confer some measure of "credibility." But are there really more people out there than I'm imagining whose heartbeat is racing at the prospect of, um, still being able to read these humps, only now in The Daily Beast and Newsweek?

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Attention, all right-wing princesses living the dream: If you lie down with dogs, be prepared to get up with fleas

It's a sad tale that our defrocked fairy princess has to tell, a story of right-wing Beltway sleazebags devouring one of their own -- a story that will thrill you and chill you and almost certainly make you want to puke.

by Ken

You know how the invaluable News Hounds site has as its motto, "We watch FOX so you don't have to"? Well, I'm here today to cover for those of you who noticed that in Monday's Washington Post "Handsome Howie" Kurtz spilled gazillions of words on poor Emily Miller, who set her sights on being a right-wing Beltway power player and then, when things kind of went wrong for her, found herself being eaten alive by her own kind. Come on, admit it: You saw that piece, and at just that moment you remembered that you've been meaning to clean out the garage for the last four years, or that you have some really important paint to watch dry.

Well, I took one for the team. I read the whole damned thing, top to bottom. That's my normal full year's ration of Handsome Howie in a single day. It's such a moving tale that I'll be damned if by the end I didn't just want to puke my guts out.

Now you may not remember our Emily by name. But think back to the glory days of the last Republican-controlled Congress, when the Republicrooks were frantically stealing everything in sight, when their greed got so out of control that even their own party's prosecutors couldn't look the other way, and it looked like at least 20 or 30 of them were headed for the pokey. (Some of the Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys who lost their jobs in Karl Rove's DoJ purge apparently made the mistake of getting too close to people who were too powerful or knew too much to be treated like the common criminals they were.)

Perhaps our Emily's head was turned when she entered the D.C. political whirl at such a dizzying height -- flacking for that one-man war against democracy and decency, Tom "The Bugman" DeLay.

Specifically, think back to the spectacular fall of lobbyist-crook Jack Abramoff, which sent waves of panic through so many of the congressional Republicrooks, who were up to the eyeballs in Abramoff payoffs. You may remember that Lucky Jack had a sidekick-in-crime named Michael Scanlon, a charmer who -- at least in the popular folklore -- was ratted out to the feds by the babe he had jilted at the altar.

Yes, that was Emily Miller!


WHAT SHE DID FOR LOVE

Oh Emily, Emily, Emily, didn't your mama warn you about men like Michael Scanlon? (Yes, that's Prince Charming at right.) You know, words of wisdom like how if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas?

In 2002, while Miller was DeLay's press secretary, she got engaged to Michael Scanlon, an athletic, charismatic operative who had also worked for the congressman, then the House majority whip. "It was a bad relationship," Miller says. "It was so tumultuous." But, she says, "he was the first person I ever fell in love with."

Ah yes, love. Love makes us do crazy things, for sure. And unfortunately Emily would have had all too much access to her fairy-tale prince in the Bugman's office. Oh, he didn't work there anymore. He had been the Bugman's communications director but had already moved on to the private sector to cash in on his contacts. He was soon enmeshed in Trader Jack Abramoff's Indian casino swindles. And once he'd set up his own lobbying shop, you figure he spent as much time in the Bugman's office as he did when he worked there.

(Among Prince Michael's claims to semi-fame is an e-mail he wrote to a fellow Bugman staffer during the Clinton impeachment imbroglio: "You kick him until he passes out. Then beat him over the head with a baseball bat, then roll him up in an old rug and throw him off a cliff into the pound surf below!!!!!")

The relationship didn't end well. "The day before her bridal shower, Miller says, Scanlon called off the wedding. They reconciled, Scanlon backed out again, and three weeks later he married a 24-year-old waitress." But our plucky Emily pulled herself together and wangled a job as deputy press secretary to Secretary of State Colin Powell. She seems to have brought to the job the ax-wielding attack mode she learned working for the Bugman. Handsome Howie chronicles the following incident without seeming to grasp the full horror-show magnitude of it:

In the spring of 2004 she was traveling in Jordan with Powell, who was doing a round of pre-taped interviews with the Sunday talk shows. Each network was allotted 10 minutes, but while Powell sweated in the hot Mideast sun, "Meet the Press" was running several minutes long. Exasperated, Miller ordered the audio feed switched to Fox, and the camera panned to a wide shot of trees in front of the Dead Sea. But NBC's audio remained intact.

Tim Russert complained from Washington: "I would hope they would put you back on camera. . . . I think that was one of your staff, Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate."

As the delay dragged on, Powell ordered: "Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back, please." Powell's image returned to the screen, and Russert asked his last question.

When the traveling party got to Ireland and saw that "Meet the Press" had aired the dispute, Miller burst into tears in front of reporters. "I'm hysterically crying in the airport," says Miller, still insisting that NBC should have edited out those exchanges. "It was just ridiculous. My job is to protect my boss and make him look good."

So in Emily's mind she was just protecting her boss and making him look good? What I see is the old Bugman school of bare-knuckles bullying mixed with that common far-right-wing "I'll show you" offensive defensiveness that always recalls the free-floating paranoid-psychotic rage of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.


Now we all make mistakes, and sometimes they're bloody big ones. Still, in what corner of her bound-for-success right-wing brain did Emily dream she was either protecting her boss or making him look good?

Oh, I imagine she felt good, taking advantage of this opportunity to by God bash the brains out of those Commie liberal media elites by exercising her power to enforce this sacred 10-minute rule. Handsome Howie somehow divines in this incident heightened mortification from the fact that she had once worked at NBC News, as a researcher. (She went on to ABC News and became an associate producer before embracing her outer Bugman.) However, what I see in the way she retells the story to Handsome Howie is that neither at the time nor at any time since has it registered with her that practically speaking what she accomplished was:

(1) to nearly deny Secretary Powell precious Meet the Press face time, in the process --

(2) making her boss look like a jackass and --

(3) pissing off probably the single most influential TV journalist in Washington.

Talk about a day's work! Assuming her job was to undermine the secretary's job effectiveness.

That wasn't the only thing that happened in 2004. With the Abramoff scandal exploding, press reports surfaced of Prince Charming's involvement with him in the casino scams.

The FBI contacted Miller months later and arranged an interview with two young female agents, who questioned her on matters ranging from Scanlon's strange use of different first names to his work for the tribes. Her lawyer had warned her to limit her answers, but Miller says she babbled on after the agents commiserated with her romantic turmoil. The lawyer chided her afterward: "You won't shut up!"

And in the fall of 2005 Scanlon was indicted. Characterful chap that he is, he couldn't wait to spill his guts. ("Scanlon pleaded guilty three days later, offering to pay nearly $20 million in restitution and help with prosecutors in the case. Scanlon hasn't been sentenced; his lawyer, Stephen Braga, says Scanlon is 'still cooperating with the Justice Department.'" Do you get the feeling that the prince has been stringing those prosecutors along, telling them just enough to keep his sorry ass out of jail?)

It wasn't till 2006, though, that Emily's world really came apart, when a "carefully worded" front-page story in the Wall Street Journal technically correctly reported her role in the investigation of Scanlon. ("'The story makes clear that prosecutors came to her, not the other way around,' says Jerry Seib, the Journal's executive Washington editor.") However, the story ran under the head: "Behind Unraveling of DeLay's Team, a Jilted Fiancee."

Which has become Emily's permanent identity: the jilted fiancee who got her revenge by bringing down Michael Scanlon and Jack Abramoff and who knows who else? I have no difficulty believing that she has been treated brutally by former friends and associates. Even with Handsome Howie as her champion, it's not hard to feel sympathy for what she's been put through.

And at the very end of his piece, HH -- after giving us the impression that Emily has no distance whatever from the person she was once upon a time -- gets around to this:

Miller admits her personality wasn't always pretty. The scandal blew up her carefully ordered world, the world of so many drawn to Washington's marble corridors, and she is still picking up the pieces.

"It's forced me to look at what truly matters in life," she says. "I was so ambitious in my 20s and early 30s. I worked all the time. It was all about success and power. Somehow I thought that would make me happy, and make me feel good about myself.

"It's only by losing that -- by not having the title to use at a cocktail party -- that made me realize what matters is your relationships, friendships, community, family, my church. I've definitely developed a sense of empathy and compassion for others who are struggling."

WHEN THE CLOWNS TAKE OVER THE CIRCUS

Unfortunately, the nightmare isn't over for Emily. In some ways it's just beginning. A character named George Hickenlooper is making a movie called Casino Jack. The impression Handsome Howie gives is that it's another in the long line of right-wing media whitewashes, where history is rewritten to conform to wingnut sensibilities. Facts not only don't matter, they're actively scorned. These delicate geniuses have complete knowledge of the truth, because they make it up themselves.

Emily, to her horror, discovered that she has a prominent role in the film. Alas, the "Emily Miller" in the film appears to be a total invention, barely related to her either personally or factually.

While preparing for the part, [actress Rachelle] Lefevre told Gotham magazine, "I bought these intensely spiky Fendi and Christian Dior stilettos. I felt she was a little bit 'vanity first,' and it helped me find her as a character."

Miller felt she was losing custody of her own name. She is known among her friends for her outdated, lackluster wardrobe. "I wear ugly pantsuits and flat shoes," she says. "Now this dimwit Hollywood actress who knows nothing about me is talking about what I would wear."

And it gets worse.

When Miller finally got a copy of the script from a friend, her shock turned to horror. "I'm a bitch, I'm materialistic, I'm bad in bed," she says. There is an early scene -- set in DeLay's office on the night of George W. Bush's first inauguration -- in which she is making out with Scanlon, who introduces her to Abramoff. [Emily has made a point of telling Howie that she has never met Abramoff.] There is a later scene in which she is going through Scanlon's pants pockets and finds a pair of red lace panties from the girlfriend he's seeing on the side. The Miller character marches to the FBI, indicates she has something to report, and drops the panties on the agent's desk. Later, Scanlon tells Abramoff that his now-former fiancee knew all about their fraud scheme and had blown the whistle, prompting the lobbyist to curse Scanlon and lunge after him.

The false narrative had returned, packaged for theatrical release. "It makes me abetting a federal crime," Miller says. She pauses. "I'm getting all worked up again."

For me the one incontestable reward of slogging through Handsome Howie's hurlathon of hubris was filmmaker George Hickenlooper's astonished response to Emily's unhappiness. He fancies himself as -- hold onto your cookies, kids! -- Oliver friggin' Stone! Forget what a dreadful role model Oliver Stone is, being basically a self-absorbed and self-promoting fantasist who takes advantage of question marks and holes in the historical record to weave intriguing but hare-brained fabrications of history. It appears, though, that by comparison with our Mr. Hickenlooper, Oliver Stone is the great social realist Leo Tolstoy and the peerless documentarian Marcel Ophuls rolled into one.

Hickenlooper describes this project to Handsome Howie as "a labor of love," for which he deferred half of his usual salary. (Not "declined," note, just "deferred.")

The "very balanced" movie, he says, is like an Oliver Stone production, "a narrative interpretation of the events that capture the spirit of what happened, based on research. . . . [sic -- don't ask me what these ellipsis dots mean -- Ed.]

"I'm not sure what Emily Miller is complaining about. She comes across as kind of the hero of the movie. She says, 'It's an outrage, they're trying to make a buck on me.' She's trying to build up attention for herself. She's not misrepresented in the film."

Hickenlooper keeps trying to win her over, writing on Miller's Facebook page: "You are terrific in it! And you look gorgeous!"

But how, in what he admits is a partly fictional work with consolidated characters, can he use Miller's real name, rather than changing it? "Because our lawyer said we didn't have to," Hickenlooper says.

Are you getting this? He's not sure what Emily Miller is complaining about? You mean, besides the fact that, as she has explained to him over and over, just about everything involving her in the picture is a lie?

None of that matters, apparently. All that matters is what "comes across." Not what happened or didn't, or why, or what any of it, viewed honestly, might mean. And I should note here that I'm always deeply suspicious of people who casually mingle fact and fiction. They're wildly different modes of understanding reality, and the people who mix them so casually usually do so because they don't give a damn about reality.

Remember, though, that the lawyer said it's okay.

That's a pretty plucky lawyer compared with, say, my company's, who is eternally vigilant for anything we print that might possibly subject us to lawsuits. Whereas this guy doesn't even care that a real person's name has been attached to a pack of lies.

Maybe he figures that the very existence of this film with its "Emily Miller" character proves that she's a "public figure" and therefore entitled to no protection against libel except following the famous "actual malice" standard. (He might, in other words, be following in the footsteps of Oliver Stone's lawyers.) Or maybe he reckons that Emily would only make herself look worse by suing -- in effect making sure that anyone who doesn't already know her as "the scorned woman" will?


MICHAEL SCANLON FACTS YOU'RE
RESPONSIBLE FOR ON THE MIDTERM

In addition to his involvement in the Abramoff casino scandal, and the above-quoted e-mail advice on how to deal with a political adversary when you've got him down, there's this nugget reported by Wikipedia:

"In 1993, Scanlon was hired by the American Bar Association as a public relations specialist to help improve the image of the legal profession."

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What is it in our culture that makes it so easy to forgive (at least some) people for being wrong, and so hard to forgive people for being right?

Leonard Downie Jr. (in foreground, with his predecessor, Ben Bradlee, at left) was nudged into retirement as executive editor of the Washington Post last summer with the arrival of new publisher Katharine Weymouth. Might it have helped if he'd been forced out several years earlier for the paper's breakdown in covering the run-up to the Iraq war?

by Ken

Howie and Noah and I have all been talking a lot lately about this maddening issue of accountability. Most recently it has come up in connection with the crimes of the Bush regimistas, including the war crimes of the Bush regimistas, which we are required by a host of international treaties to prosecute, even if we find it inconvenient to do so. Hard as it may be to believe, there really isn't an "inconvenience exemption" from our obligation to prosecute, for example, torture.

The argument we keep coming back to is that failure to punish the kind of law-breaking and Constitution-shredding in which the Bush regime not only regularly but systematically engaged pretty well guarantees that all the excesses will be repeated and in all likelihood expanded. Bet on it.

It's not as if nobody has noticed or written about this before. On the great issues of our time, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the housing bubble that on top of all the other chicanery and bogosity brought the economy to its knees, there were plenty of people who got the stories right in real time while the talking heads of industry and the media got them wrong, and the record shows that, overwhelmingly, the people who got the stories right not only weren't rewarded but were punished while the people who got the stories wrong not only weren't punished but were rewarded.

Now Jason Linkins is reporting on HuffPost about what appears to be an especially egregious instance. The Washington Post has promoted, as one of two managing editors, the assistant managing editor for national news who not only played a major role in the Post's blown coverage of the Bush regime's push to war in Iraq, and in particular the question of Iraq's posession of WMDs, but apparently thinks they did just fine.

Jason goes back to a surprisingly tough piece done in August 2004 by the Post's Howard Kurtz, himself one of the paper's most notorious butt-kissing, status-quo-worshiping hacks, reviewing its coverage, with extensive, heavily regretful quotes from the principals involved, from then-Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. on down. Most everyone accepts at least some blame, with one shining exception.

Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news, says The Post's overall record was strong.

"I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone to question the administration's assertions on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . . Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction? Absolutely," she said. "Do I feel we owe our readers an apology? I don't think so." [Note: The ellipsis is in Kurtz's published story.]

Jason points to published pieces in 2004 and 2005 by the Post's then-ombudsman, Michael Getler, which suggest that a lot of readers disagreed about whether they were owed an apology, and the ombudsman sympathized.

Spayd is also implicated in what Jason calls "the curious case of Walter Pincus." To most of us, Pincus is one of the legendary reporters of the last 30-40 years. And he's not one of the people who got the run-up to the Iraq war wrong. He was clearly a pain in Post editors' butt. As a long-time expert on nuclear weapons, he had all kinds of questions about the stories the Bush regime was feeding the public, but he had a tough time getting skeptical stories into the paper at all, let alone getting prominent placement for them.

The 2004 Kurtz story contains some remarkable back-biting at Pincus, mostly anonymous, which is itself interesting when you consider the kinds of mea culpas people were putting on the record. "[S]ome in the Post newsroom were questioning his work. Editors complained that he was 'cryptic,' as one put it, and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten."

Two people go on the record, more or less, about the problems with Walter Pincus:

Spayd declined to discuss Pincus's writing but said that "stories on intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse and to ensure their accuracy and get into the paper."

Downie agreed that difficulties in editing Pincus may have been a factor in the prewar period, because he is "so well sourced" that his reporting often amounts to putting together "fragments" until the pieces were, in Downie's word, "storifyable."

Now I don't doubt that editorial elves were rewriting the dickens out of Pincus's stories, but I'm not persuaded it was because they were unreadable or because it was so hard to "ensure their accuracy." After all, Downie complained (complained?) that his stories were "so well sourced." And I'm not sure I could guess what "storifyable" means.

Jason has a theory about those unnamed newsroom sources:

If I'm playing the *POOF!* NOW I AM ON THE RECORD/*ZAP!* NOW I AM OFF THE RECORD game, I have to conclude that unnamed "editors" and "some in the Post newsroom" are really either Spayd or Downie, and, given the tenor of their responses, likely Spayd.

Anyway, the news, as you have surely guessed, is that Ms. Spayd is one of those new managing editors. She and Raju Narisetti, according to the paper's press release, "will share responsibility for The Post's award-winning journalism, whether in print, online and on mobile devices, and they will lead the integration of The Post's print and online newsrooms." Specifically, Ms. Spayd "will oversee the gathering, editing and production of news. Her brief will include political, general, business, foreign and metropolitan news, as well as The Post's news desk and the print newspaper's day-to-day production."

Jason quotes extensively from the lingering concern ombudsman Getler voiced in 2005 about the paper's failure to expose the Bush regime's misrepresentations. ("I cannot think of a story in the past 40 years that offers more warning signs for journalism and for the role of the press in our democracy.") He stressed the crucial role of editors in communicating to reporters that, with "very important stories out there" ("whether war or health care or budget deficits or other subjects that affect our lives and future"), "there is a determination and commitment to get to the bottom of them in a timely fashion." In the case of Iraq, he wrote,

[I]t seemed to me that editors didn't have their eye on, and didn't go for, the right ball at the right time. It's a lesson that ought to be etched in the culture here as deeply as Watergate.

Not long ago, I cited Paul Krugman's blog-post complaint about the pending appointment of CNN's Sanjay Gupta as surgeon general, recalling his factually erroneous on-air savaging of Michael Moore's Sicko.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Maybe we're wrong about Liz Spayd. Maybe she has actually learned the journalistic lessons that were clearly escaping her in her 2004 look back. It sure looks, though, as if "socially acceptable" wrongness has once again been rewarded.

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