"As a plain-vanilla candidate, Romney is never going to win the excitement primary."

"A telling moment occurred when Sarah Palin stole the spotlight by taking her bus tour to New Hampshire on the day that Romney was officially kicking off his candidacy there. He lost the battle of the headlines as the Manchester Union Leader splashed Palin on the front page and ran Romney’s announcement inside the paper. But he remains the front-runner—though his staff recoils from the term—and she remains a long-shot celebrity with high negatives."

Howard Kurtz. The article is called"Mitt Romney, Boring Genius?" I think the suggestion is not that Romney is a genius but he's boring. It's that he's a genius at being boring.

"I could not have imagined doing this five years ago, as a guy who just plain likes paper."

Howard Kurtz, on leaving The Washington Post to join The Daily Beast.

Reporters [have] asked me what this meant for the death of print or the decline of The Post. I pushed back, as I happen to believe that newspapers are going to be around for a long time. Let's not get carried away here.... Still, there's an awful lot of energy and excitement in the Web world.

Yes, there is.

"Sarah Palin rips non-Muslim Obama over mosque while Lady Gaga remains silent."

Sorry. I'm just trying to rip off Howard Kurtz.

"We have the nirvana that people are looking for."

Says Rick Stengel, the managing editor of Time Magazine.

Eh... I think I'll look for the nirvana that you can't look for. That seems more nirvana-y. 

"It was meant to be funny and insightful and translate the superb journalism Chris and Dana do in print and online into a new format."

"I don't think the series worked as they intended."

LOL. Cringe.

The withering and often personal criticism of Milbank and Cillizza exploded Friday afternoon after the liberal Web site Talking Points Memo posted and criticized the latest video. Both men, who frequently appear on television, became high-profile targets, particularly among left-leaning bloggers but also on such outlets as Twitter.

"It's a brutal world out there in the blogosphere," Milbank said. "I'm often surprised by the ferocity out there, but I probably shouldn't be."

Yeah, and you shouldn't be such a pussy either. You don't have the monopoly on public discourse that you would like, so you whine that it is "brutal" and "feroci[ous]." But you were given a huge mainstream media platform for a comedy routine and you did bad comedy. You wanted to be big professionals and big amateurs at the same time. You deserved a takedown and you got it. Man up. It was you not the bloggers who lacked standards.

Perez Hilton thanks Miss California for giving him the chance to make gay marriage a big news topic all last week.

Oh, and of course, he lets President Barack Obama off the hook for having exactly the same "hateful" opinion that infects the feeble mind of the pathetic Miss U.S.A. contestant. This is all a big media performance. Don't you understand that, Howard Kurtz? Don't you get Perez Hilton? I don't know if you've read his website before....



(Via Newsbusters, via The Rhetorican, via Instapundit.)



And I love that new word "espew," which I take to be a portmanteau of "spew" and "eschew." I'm not going to espew it. I mean, I'm going to espew it everywhere. Use it in a sentence today.

So is Franklin Raines an Obama economic advisor or not?

The Obama campaign does not like this ad:



And it's denying that Raines is an advisor. But then the Washington Post would have to be wrong. You can't bash McCain for basing the ad on the info in the Post and specifically identifying the Post as the source.

Here's what the Post has today:

The McCain campaign cited a July Washington Post profile of Raines as the source for his connection to Obama. In that profile, it was reported that he had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." In a statement issued by the Obama campaign late Thursday, Raines strongly denied having provided counsel to Obama, saying: "I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters."

That's all, which I take to mean the WaPo stands behind its original reporting. If the original reporting is true, then Raines is an Obama advisor and a liar.

AND: WaPo's Howard Kurtz says:

The commercial's main charge is based on an April story in The Washington Post that said Raines has "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." Reporter Anita Huslin says Raines told her that during an in-person interview....

Whether viewers will somehow hold Obama responsible for the Fannie Mae collapse because of what is at best a slight association with its former head is open to question. The commercial seems intended as a response to an earlier Obama spot charging that McCain can't clean up Washington because seven of his top campaign officials are former lobbyists.

MORE: Time's Karen Tumulty says "McCain Plays the Race Card"!

This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.

2 black men: Obama and Raines!

AND: Tumulty makes much of the fact that the ad doesn't mention Jim Johnson: "Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black." But the campaign does have an ad based on Johnson:



UPDATE: WaPo says it's a stretch to make much of anything out of the Obama-Raines relationship:

I asked [the author of the Raines profile Anita] Huslin to provide the exact circumstances of that passage. She said that she was chatting with Raines during the photo shoot, and asked "if he was engaged at all with the Democrats' quest for the White House. He said that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said, 'Oh, general housing, economy issues.' ('Not mortgage/foreclosure meltdown or Fannie-specific?' I asked, and he said 'no.')"

"If you were really savvy, you'd 'manipulate' the media into a stampede of lurid drivel deriding her as a Stepford wife and a dominatrix..."

"... comparing her to Islamic fundamentalists, Pontius Pilate and porn stars, and dismissing her as a dysfunctional brood mare who can't possibly be the biological mother of the kid she was too dumb to abort. Who knows? It's a long shot, but if you could pull it off, a really cunning media manipulator might succeed in manipulating Howie's buddies into spending the month after Labor Day outbidding each other in some insane Who Wants To Be An Effete Condescending Media Snob?"

Mark Steyn is particularly amusing lashing at what WaPo's Howard Kurtz has to say about the McCain campaign trying to manipulate the media. Power Line has something to say too.

I'd say something about it myself too, but I simply haven't got the time this morning. Please carry on without me.

ADDED: I have a few minutes now, so let me read Kurtz closely:

The McCain camp has already accused the MSM of trying to "destroy" the governor of Alaska. So any challenge to her record or her veracity can now be cast as the product of an oh-so-unfair press. Which, needless to say, doesn't exactly please reporters.....

As for the sudden insistence that Palin is a delicate flower who must be shielded from harsh rhetoric, take this example.

She doesn't need to be shielded. Bring on the "harsh rhetoric." It's made her the most popular politician in America. We bloggers ravenously await your next nugget of harsh rhetoric. And we will make you look bad when it's sexist or unfair. If that makes you mad... well, who cares if you're mad? But it's not going to win you back the respect that you lose when your "harsh rhetoric" is biased.

The lipstick imbroglio is evidence that the Drudge/Fox/New York Post axis can drive just about any story into mainstream land. Does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama was calling Sarah Palin a pig? What about the fact that McCain has used "lipstick on a pig" before? What about the book by that title by former McCain aide Torie Clarke? Never mind: get the cable bookers to line up women on opposite sides of the lipstick divide and let them claw at each other!

Blah! I'm sick of the lipstick thing, but please. The fact that there is an old expression isn't enough. What if Obama opponents took to saying "pot calling the kettle black" or "call a spade a spade." There would be no end to the outrage... and rightly so. I don't what to hear the "old expression" argument from anyone who won't say they'd make the same argument if the tables were turned.

And Howard... "line up women on opposite sides of the lipstick divide and let them claw at each other..." Now, you're using the image of the catfight! You're trying to say that Obama didn't mean to refer to a pig, and you're clearly referring to cats and doing so in a way that is traditionally used to diminish women.

Ah, enough of this for now.

"At Off the Bus, because they're not part of the professional gaggle, they can come up with their own views of what's happening..."

About that blogger who got Bill Clinton to call Todd Purdum a "scumbag"... and 2,500 other blogger-reporters boosted by Huffington Post.

Mayhill Fowler says she never planned to ask Bill Clinton the question that unleashed a decidedly unpresidential tirade....

Fowler had her tape recorder going when [Barack Obama] made his ill-fated remarks about frustrated small-town residents turning to guns, God or anti-immigrant sentiments....

Mary Katherine Ham, a conservative blogger, says that while she would insist on identifying herself, "politicians need to learn that anyone can break news, and citizens who run into you -- even if you're not writing for the Huffington Post -- can post it anywhere."

In an e-mail, Fowler says she has come to realize that her presence "flummoxes some longtime journalists -- because suddenly here I am, unpaid but as a consequence with much more freedom to find out what's going on out there, and writing for a new and encroaching media that is a Wild Wild West of lawlessness."

A Wild Wild West of lawlessness — otherwise know as a marketplace of ideas.

Everybody loves Obama.

Even the conservatives:

The media overall are being swept up by a wave of Obamamania, in which normally hard-bitten journalists watch the orator in action and come away dazzled by his gifts... The journalistic scrutiny usually visited on instant front-runners has been replaced by something akin to a standing ovation.

What's more, the applause extends even to pundits on the right, many of whom routinely denigrate Democratic politicians and yet are strikingly warm toward Obama. There is gratitude, to be sure, that he seems poised to knock off their longtime bete noire, Hillary Clinton -- especially if he wins today's New Hampshire primary -- but also admiration for his inclusive approach to politics and for his sheer talent.

We'll have to see what happens after the hard work of sweeping Hillary aside is accomplished, but I think everyone really does like him. Not that they won't attack him in the end. In any case, he'll be hard to attack. Ask Hillary.

"What we cared about was that he was real."

Sorry about the light blogging this morning. You might want to talk about this Howard Kurtz piece which looks at CNN's approach to selecting questioners for its YouTube debate. The quote in the heading is from David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief, justifying using a question from Retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr, who's on Hillary Clinton's steering committee on gay and lesbian issues.

How dare you question her! To question her is to wish my son had died!

Howard Kurtz notes that the candidates are using a type of ad that looks very mellow but is designed to inoculate them against future attacks.

Here's the Hillary ad he mentions:



UPDATE, Sunday, November 25: "Using a man to talk about trust — is that an admission that she has a problem with men and that she has a problem with the trust factor?" Tim Russert asks on today's "Meet the Press."

"Get away, Onions."

Am I the only one that thinks of that as a famous catchphrase? Remember "The Adventures of Philo Kvetch," with the character Onions Oregano?

Anyway, there's been some talk about onions around here lately. A quirky post about a Clinton campaign video touched off a giant blog swarm and what I think was my highest traffic day ever. Based on an earlier blog swarm last September, I now know that what sets the left blogosphere into intense, concerted action is calling attention to Bill Clinton's old sexual problems. I wonder why.

The most pathetic member of the swarm was Christopher Orr, who blogs at The Plank, which is part of the New Republic's website. He seems to have gotten his ideas not from trying to read my post but from consuming the tripe of lefty bloggers who went into a tizzy trying to protect Mrs. Clinton:

Althouse's reading of the scene inspired a fair number of incredulous posts from other bloggers ...

"Other bloggers"? Don't you have the responsibility to say that the "incredulity" was entirely from left-o-sphere bloggers? This wasn't neutral. And it was phony incredulity. Really, are you that gullible or are you part of the effort to protect Mrs. Clinton?

He goes on to make some embarrassing blunders, but I don't want to bog down this post explaining them. I've written three comments over there -- demanding two apologies. And then Andrew Sullivan dips his toe in the controversy by linking to Orr's post. Brilliant.

Do you think I'm dissuaded from writing any more about the Clenis?

ADDED: "Ann Althouse is getting heat for her sexual interpretation of Bill & Hillary's Sopranos scene." That's the style of link I like, from WaPo's Howard Kurtz.

AND: I just want to emphasize that I stand by my original sexual interpretation. You've got a married couple talking about two foods, one of which is obviously a hole, and the other of which is so clearly phallic that this Google search gets over 70,000 hits.

The man wants the hole-shaped item, and the woman forbids it. She insists that he confine himself to the phallic item, which has been sliced down to puny, thin stick form. The man looks at it sadly, and the woman tells him it's for his own good. If you don't see sexual imagery there, you exist on a very narrow band of human imagination. I don't see how you are competent to watch film. Christopher Orr appears to be a film critic, too!

When Clinton sadly bites into the carrot stick of his own castration, it makes a crunch noise -- ouch! -- and it's that noise that causes the ominous looking man at the bar ("Johnny Sack") to turn and look at him. He then walks by and gives him a glare. What does that glare mean in the Clinton video? I think it means: "What kind of man are you?"

UPDATE: Christopher Orr tries to respond to my criticism of his attack on me. I respond in his comments this way:

1. You miss the whole point of the part about suing, which was an allusion to another controversy we'd been discussing on my blog, and not anything about me thinking I could sue. You write "after complaining that the blogger wrote 'sexual things' about her, she theorized that he had a small penis and would therefore prefer phallic calamari to vagina-like onion rings." You omit that the blogger calls himself "Instaputz." I wrote: "By the way a 'putz' is a little penis, so he might want to order the fried calamari instead of the onion rings." So you deceptively laundered out the whole quality of the joke and made me look as if I were just sour and vindictive. Incredible!

2. I write what I think, including what I think about the sexual connotations of a wife denying her husband circular food items and confining him to a bowl of pared-down cylindars. I am aware that my writing is popular, and I realize that things like that bring readers, which I enjoy, but I admitted that that one line was a taunt intended to poke other bloggers to respond. So what? Blogging is something of a game sometimes. I have fun with it, you know? And in that aspect of blogging, the Site Meter keeps score, and it's part of the fun to watch the score. I never say that I think the traffic was only a result of that line, so, again, you miss the point.

3. I defend myself from attacks. Not always, but to the extent that I choose. There were some high-traffic bloggers saying vicious things about me. I hit back, totally justified, and in a mostly humorous way -- as with the calamari wisecrack.

Finally, you say "I fear the best I can do is to say that I'm rather sorry to have engaged her at all." Ha! You'd prefer to slam people and have them silently take it, right? Bloggers don't do that. The comfy old days of MSM are gone. Thanks for admitting that you can't handle the new situation where the people you attack have a way of fighting back.

Covering the unknown Supreme Court nominee.

Hmmm... just checking the Site Meter referrals and seeing that I'm getting traffic from the Washington Post. It's this article (on page 2) -- Howard Kurtz, writing about the Supreme Court appointment -- or, really, the strangeness of all the media coverage of the appointment in this period before anyone's been selected. Kurtz quotes this post of mine. And he collects lots of other commentary -- quite interesting -- about the unknown nominee and the Senate response to him/her.

I notice Kurtz refers to me only as "Ann Althouse," not "blogger Ann Althouse" or "law professor Ann Althouse" or "blogging law professor Ann Althouse" or "law professing blogger Ann Althouse." Not sure whether that makes me feel famous or obscure.

WaPo on HuffPo and some blogging advice.

Howard Kurtz in the WaPo addresses HuffPo criticism in the blogosphere. He gives me some credit I don't deserve:

Ann Althouse begins with a bit of satire: "Hello everyone! This is my first post!! Ever. I've never posted before! Anyway. . . . . "

"Nothing particularly clever or pithy coming from the celebs, and there's too much verbiage to give them all a chance. No one seems to have given much thought to how to write a blog. Have they even read other blogs?

The italicized quote is not satirical writing by me, just quote selection from a real HuffPo blogpost.

Kurtz also quotes Kevin Drum:

"I guess I don't get it...250 contributors? And 65 posts on the first day? (83% by men, BTW, just to toss another match on the whole women-in-blogging thing.) Is anyone really going to plow through all that?...

"Maybe I'm missing something here. My taste is not everyone's taste, after all. But I read blogs because I enjoy the author's voice and enjoy seeing them engage with the rest of the blogosphere. An enormous dumping ground of miscellaneous paragraphs parachuting out of the sky, on the other hand, doesn't seem that appealing."

Exactly.

Drum links to Marc Cooper to note that HuffPo got 8 million hits on the first day. Ah! I bet it was all bloggers like me looking for stuff to make fun of. I'm sure I hit the site at least 20 times!

And I thoroughly agree with Cooper about the widely-linked Nikke Finke piece (which I haven't mentioned before because I thought it was too stupid to talk about): Who cares if David Geffen doesn't blog?

Another thing about that Nikke Finke piece -- now that I'm bothering to talk about it: It's ridiculous to compare a blog to a movie -- as she did -- and to judge it a "bomb." When a reviewer sees a movie, that's it, that's the whole movie. You can say if it's good or bad. But a blog is a continuing flow of material. It might develop into something good. It might start big and peter out. You can't make a final call on the first day.

In fact, I don't like when bloggers make a big thing out of their first day and say "Look at me, I'm launching a new blog!" Why not blog low-profile for a while and get a feel for what your voice is going to be, what makes a good post, how to mix up the subject matter? Then one day when you've got a particularly good post on a subject some prominent blogger would want to link to, send out an email on that post. Then if you get a link and people follow it, they'll see this is some kind of a real blog over here -- there's a whole flow going on -- and that link will have some potential to lead to a regular readership. That's what I did.

Let's spare her that detail.

Why do so many of the news stories about the runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks leave out the detail that she told the police that the man who abducted her was Hispanic? When you're making up a story about a crime, what motivates you to make the criminal a member of a minority group? I think leaving out this aspect of the story is an attempt to help her with her reputation. Why, we might associate this nice woman with Susan Smith, who drowned her children and then made up a story about a black man kidnapping them.

Newspapers that left out the detail: SF Chronicle, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, ABC News, Chicago Sun-Times, NY Daily News, Houston Chronicle, New York Times.

Newpapers that included the detail: NY Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution has a second piece, "One volunteer's perspective on Wilbanks: Charge her." The volunteer was especially angry that Wilbanks blamed a Hispanic man: "The Hispanic community has it tough enough. Some of them even volunteered with the search! Fliers were printed in Spanish."

Blaming a Hispanic man was an important fact that belonged in the report. Leaving it out was -- it seems to me -- an attempt to save Jennifer Wilbanks from additional harm to her reputation. I don't see how that sort of pity is part of journalism, and I don't see why someone who plays upon prejudice this way deserves pity.

UPDATE: WaPo's Howard Kurtz links to this post and agrees that the detail belongs in the article -- assuming you're going to cover this story at all, which is a questionable choice in the first place. Here's my critique of Nancy Grace's coverage of the show -- on Friday night, when she thought it was a new Scott-and-Laci.

I imagined it.

Howard Kurtz reports:

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences hit President Lawrence Summers with a vote of no confidence after he privately wondered about the abilities of women in science and math.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."

Studies need to try harder to amaze me.

(And, yes, I know, everyone has already linked to this. But I've been trying to put up this post since this morning, and Blogger's been down -- they really were fixing something today -- so I'm going to put this up at long last.)