A Suprising Truth

This one:

Of Sarah Palin I know nothing except her lack of grace. She lashed into Barack Obama after a week in which he was the only public figure to defend her against the press, or at least to excoriate those who had focused on her daughter. She might have started with a thank you.

Eastern Elite

Mitt Romney just lashed out against "Eastern Elites" - you know, the kind of people who spend part of their time in college in France, receive both law degrees and MBAs from Harvard, then become billionaires by running consultancy and investment firms, and then use the money they made to enter politics.

You know, Eastern Elites.

Are scoops still important?

Many of the things Sarah Palin has done are probably no worse than some of the things Mitt Romney/Joe Lieberman/Joe Biden/any other VP candidate have done, but the reason the press is focusing on them is because the press had never heard of any of them. That's Jack Shafer's diagnosis, and I think it's 100% correct.

But this leads me to a second point - how important are scoops anyway? If the Washington Post scoops the Baltimore Sun on a story about Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, do Sun subscribers leave en masse and sign up for the Post? I don't think so. That's an odd example, because the papers aren't direct competitors, but there are very few direct competitors left in the newspaper industry.

For example, The Boston Globe isn't really competing with the Boston Herald. They're going after two different sets of geographical, political, cultural, etc. demographics. Generally, both papers are competing against everything else people could do with their time: play Scrabulous, watch a movie, etc.

But I don't think many journalists or newspaper execs realize this yet. People like to know about the news, but very few have to read the newspaper. Or, to put it another way, it's not the Huffington Post that's killing newspapers, but the internet in general. The 30 minutes someone once spent reading the paper isn't automatically going to reading online news (although it oftentimes probably is), it could be going to watching an episode of Arrested Development on Hulu.

"Architectural Determinism"

George Will, after describing the cushy home FDR grew up in:

People who believe in architectural determinism should believe that FDR's housing must have prevented him from empathizing with common folks.

I believe that phrase is a keeper.

Andrew Sullivan

For all his professed devotion to the issues, he seems to be awfully obsessed with certain scandals. He posted way too much about both the Palin pregnancy/nonpregnancy/daughter's pregnancy and the cross in the sand story McCain told during the Rick Warren forum. I think this is partially a function of the fact that Andrew posts all the freaking time, but it still seems weird coming from him.

Discredited experts

A guess at what David Brooks means when he says this (via Matt):

There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats.

I'm guessing he's saying that a lot of the Republican experts have the taint of Bush on them. McCain can't hire Wolfowitz, Feith, Andy Card, etc., etc. because they are too closely tied to an incredibly unpopular president. Or, like Jack Goldsmith, they've written tell-alls and are now persona non grata to the Republican party.

Chris Beam is on a roll

After last week's great piece about Lanny Davis, he has another entertaining piece on RNC protesters.

100% True Statements

Michael Kinsley:

The whole "experience" debate is silly. Under our system of government, there is only one job that gives you both executive and foreign-policy experience, and that's the one McCain and Obama are running for. Nevertheless, it's a hardy perennial: If your opponent is a governor, you accuse him or her of lacking foreign-policy experience. If he or she is a member of Congress, you say this person has never run anything. And if, by any chance, your opponent has done both, you say that he or she is a "professional politician."

Fossil Fuels Beer

Occasionally science just makes you stand up and clap.

Sometimes a story writes itself

A professional wrestler, a mayor, and local cable access television.