DefinitiveInk

Notes From The Front: My father's latest financial newsletter

My father, Peter Mack, sends a newsletter to his clients called Note From The Front: In the Great Battle for Investment Victory. His latest called Restoring Trust  about the causes and stages of the financial crisis is a great read.

NYT Presidential Endorsements Through The Ages

The NYT endorsed Obama today. They also put up an interesting time-line of all of their endorsements. Of the 37 prior elections they chose the winner 21 times, a 57% percent record. Surprising to me they didn't endorse TDR of FDR (in his 1st term). They have endorsed 12 Republicans. Six of them from 1860 through 1884 Lincoln (2 terms), Grant, Hayes (2 terms), Garfield. and then Wendell Wilkie. And again in the 40's and early 50's with Wilkie, Dewey and Eisenhower. The time-line also links to .pdfs of the endorsements.

Can you hear me in the cone of silence?

I kept hearing the words Cone of Silence today and it sounded so familiar. It came from Get Smart as the wikipedia and this commercial point out. Of course to our national debate and Presidential election are now referring to a failed technology on a television show about an inept (no offense meant Maxwell)  spy with no regard to the absurdity of its source. Still if this becomes something, bad form to cheat in a church.

Quote from Barbara Boxer

"I've always said that you need to keep it on the table, and you need to look at these things, because now people are dying because of this administration. That's the truth. And they won't change course. They are ignoring the Congress. They keep signing these signing statements which mean that he's decided not to enforce the law. This is as close as we've ever come to a dictatorship. When you have a situation where Congress is stepped on, that means the American people are stepped on." - Barbara Boxer in a interview yesterday.

A link to the Suskind article in Esquire mentioned in Frank Rich's May 13th editorial

In his editorial,  Earth to G.O.P, the Gipper is Dead  (Times Select needed), Frank Rich mentions Ron Suskind's article Why Are These Men Laughing in which John DiIluio says "...What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." Below is the author's note that sits in front of the article.   

Author Note: "Why Are These Men Laughing" contained a series of critiques of the Bush administration from an ex-White House official, John DiIlulio. DiIluio, whose thoughts were sent to the author in a polished, elegantly constructed seven-page memo, was the first ranking administration official to publicly criticize his boss. According to DiIulio, the political team at the White House was making every policy decision, ignoring the advice of experts. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, commenting on this article, said it was now clear that the Bush White House had "no interest in the substance of policy, caring only about political payoffs." Shortly after the article appeared in Esquire, the White House went on the offensive, forcing DiIulio to apologize for his assessments that drew a comparison to Stalinist Russia in the Washington Post.

(Note: I've had the distinct pleasure of working with Ron on the Esquire site and later in helping him put his valuable work online and I remember the blow-by-blow of the days that followed the initial posting of this article. There were at least three versions of apology issued. Other items of note on the Suskind's site are documents that are referenced in his book The Price of Loyalty. Among those are indications of regime change in Iraq being on the top of the agenda in Feb of 2001.)

The text of a speech Rham Emanuel gave today at The Brookings Institution " it's a broad indictment of the Bush administration that argues that all-pervasive partisanship, not incompetence, is the common thread linking all of the administration's manifold failings." (via Talking Points Memo)

Important video from The Onion, the most trusted news source around

Crowdsourcing document discovery

Interesting thing going on over at Talking Points Memo's TPMmuckracker site. They are asking for help in poring through the latest "document dump" from the Justice Department. Readers are asked to go through the documents now online at the DOJ site as .pdfs and then post comments on the TPM site. They have issued a naming convention to keep the whole thing manageable. 

I love this. A friend of mine was working on a project, that never came to pass for the ACLU that was going to do something similar.

I would have loved the opportunity to do something similar when Ron Suskind and I built the site for his book the The Price of Loyalty. We put up a selection of documents from Sec. O'Neill's hard drive and contemplated doing a "dump" that would have made policy wonks very happy but were prevented by several factors from doing so. Perhaps one day we will revisit it or at the very least turn on comments.

Links for 3/27/06

Patricia Volk's NYT article about NYC Jews and Chinese Food is genetic revelation for me. I think it explains that my once a week craving for dumplings is not just habit but could in fact be a genetic trait going back thousands of years. It also makes me yearn for a restaurant I never knew, Bernstein-on-Essex which featured kosher chicken liver lo mein served by Jewish waiters wearing skull caps with tassels. Lastly I am just thrilled to learn that in China they actually serve General Tso's chicken.

From the blog of my new friend, Shel Holtz, comes a post "Podcasting: What's in a name?" about the semantic debate currently raging around the term. For Shel and the Wikipedia, the fact that you subscribe to an RSS feed to retrieve the content makes it a podcast, not whether the audio is listened to on a device or not. I actually agree with that, but am also very aware that the term podcast  is being used to describe a kind of episodic show which is sometimes too limiting a factor. This is similar to the issue of blogs and people thinking that a blog, is well like this one, as opposed to other forms of sites using blogging engines. I understand why the promoters of these "new words" do it but ,some days more than others, resent its effect. I do agree with his last point which is to stop worrying about it too much and to just stay focused on the exciting potential of the medium.

Also on podcasting paidcontent reports that NPR is doing a deal with melodeo to make their podcasts available on mobile phones.

IWantMedia's interview with Elizabeth Spier's, the first editor of Gawker, on her new blogging play DealBreaker. I agree with her points about the model being very appealing for traditional media.

Q: Can blogging be a good business?

Spiers: I think it's a good business if you do it correctly. I also think that blogs could be used for testing editorial concepts. For print, broadcast, anything.

I'm surprised that more big media companies don't use the Web for concept testing. Especially in broadcasting. They put millions of dollars in a TV pilot, don't know if it works and waste all that money. Many pilots are thrown away that don't even go into syndication anywhere.

Now that we have iTunes syndicating old CBS shows, I think there's a model there where people could produce really cheap TV pilots and get better user data on what viewers actually think.

Blogs are starting to integrate with social networking apps, which is very interesting. That's the next generation -- the user who thinks of the Web as this necessary kind of way of life and sculpts his entire social world around it.

Lastly - Very important stuff from Daily Kos:

The netroots have won.

Not an election, mind you - though those victories will come - but an official governmental recognition that what you all do is a valuable part of the democratic experiment, and one which should not be thwarted by the incursion of the federal government.