Category: Dave Weigel

NY-26 Update: Jane Corwin Ad

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Responding to Democrat attacks, the GOP is really trying to blur the Medicare/Social Security issue:

The most effective part of this ad is Corwin’s appearance at the end. She just seems nice, doesn’t she?

Dave Weigel is up in the district covering the campaign, and has a report on Wednesday’s debate between Corwin and Democrat Kathy Hochul. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports that Hochul kept hammering on the Paul Ryan budget plan — Democrats want the NY-26 special election to be a negative referendum on that — while Corwin described Hochul as a “career politician.”

UPDATE: Robert Costa at National Review emphasizes the national implications of NY-26:

Corwin also finds herself in the middle of a proxy war between national Republicans and Democrats over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. Corwin backs Ryan’s effort; Hochul has tethered her hopes to demonizing Ryan’s Medicare reforms, which she claims would harm seniors.
Democrats, sensing disarray in a deep-red district, would love to pick up the seat, mere weeks after Ryan and his House GOP colleagues promoted the budget at town-hall meetings. Republicans, fearful of that spin, are performing triage, sending organizers and volunteers to Corwin headquarters.
“Democrats are going to try to make the 2012 House elections a referendum on ‘Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare,’ which all but a small handful of Republicans voted for,” says Larry Sabato, a political analyst at the University of Virginia. “NY-26 has too many complicating factors for this to fairly be considered a referendum on Ryan, but inevitably that is how many will interpret the election.”

Read the whole thing. At the end, Costa touches on the problem with David Bellavia, who was passed over for the GOP nomination and is now supporting Crazy Jack Davis. Bellavia’s situation and the problems of the New York Republican Party deserve more attention than I can give it here, but it would be an awful outcome if it results in handing Nancy Pelosi a chance to claim victory over Paul Ryan.

Let’s make a few things clear: This isn’t NY-23. Jane Corwin is not Dede Scozzafava; Corwin is ranked the second-most conservative member of the New York Assembly, based on her voting record. And furthermore, Jack Davis is no Doug Hoffman. Davis is a protectionist who ran three times for Congress as a Democrat.

The Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks and other major conservative organizations are backing Corwin.

JANE CORWIN FOR U.S. CONGRESS

PREVIOUSLY:

New York Times Sends an 11-Year-Old Girl to Interview the Jonas Brothers

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Or the equivalent thereof: Shridar Pappu’s profile feature on “Washington’s New Brat Pack” pulses with so much fanzine breathlessness you might think it was February 1964 and the Beatles had just landed in New York:

In only a few years, these young men and others like them have become part of the journalistic establishment in Washington. Once they lived in groups in squalid homes and stayed out late, reading comic books in between posts as more seasoned reporters slogged their way through traditional publications like “The Hill” and “Roll Call.” Now the members of this “Juicebox Mafia,” as they were first called by Eli Lake of The Washington Times, in a reference to youth, have become destination reading for — and respected by — the city’s power elite. . . .
On Friday evenings it’s not uncommon to spot them at rock places like Black Cat or the 9:30 Club, or . . . in grungy enclaves like the American Ice Company. . . .
But they’ve also rerouted the aspirations of young journalists here, for whom a job in print media was once the holy grail. . . .

Pappu’s wet-your-pants hyperventilating enthusiasm about The Next Big Thing(s) in Journalism is rather difficult to reconcile with the February Meme o’ the Month, The Death of Blogging.

Less than five weeks after we were told that the cool kids are doing that Twitter thing, we are now told that these particular 20-something blogger/journalists are Woodward, Bernstein and Justin Bieber all rolled into one gigantic influential wad of pure awesome.

Amanda Marcotte — whose “godbag christofascists” 15 minutes of fame as The Next Big Thing ended even before anybody ever heard of Rielle Hunter — is appropriately bitter:

Hey, NY Times, 2006 is calling.
They want their narrative back.

Ms. Marcotte notes that “all the members of this curious tribe of bloggers-turned-professional have penises. And they’re remarkably pale of skin tone.” But of course, beyond their white maleness, it is the fetishistic obsession with youth — What All the Cool Kids Are Reading! — which provides the justifying rationale for Pappu’s story.

Frances Martel of Mediaite sees the rise of the Juiceboxers as showing “just how quickly a young consumer of media can become a young producer of media on the web, and how those young producers of media can quickly find themselves shifting roles from proteges to role models.”

Which is to say, the cycle time between being this year’s New Pop Sensation and next year’s Golden Oldies Classic has been accelerated, if only because the MSM editors in charge of assigning these trendspotting pieces are (a) so completely clueless as to what the hell anyone actually wants to read about, and (b) increasingly desperate to attract the younger readers who their consultants tell them are the Key To The Future.

So some editor at the New York Times assigns an article on the Young Kids Who Write What the Young Kids Read and — just like last month’s “Blogs Are So 2003″ idiocy — we get a brief glimpse into the self-obsessive insecurities that rack the minds of the fools presiding over the Decline and Fall of the Sulzberger Empire. (Has Bill Keller resigned yet? Because I’ve got $20 that says he’s gone before May 1.)

What the MSM Emperors With No Clothes can’t grasp is that their obsession with youth — New! Improved! Kid-tastic! — is symptomatic of their fatal disease. Go down the list of the New Media carnivores feasting while the Old Media sinks into the tar pit, and it’s not a bunch of fresh-out-of-college punks:

  • The biggest thing in cable news? Fox, where the No. 1 primetime show is anchored by a 61-year-old guy who used to do Inside Edition.
  • The biggest thing on the Internet? The Drudge Report, run by a 44-year-old guy who got his media training from reading the morning papers while working the third shift at 7-Eleven.
  • The biggest thing on the radio? Rush Limbaugh, 60-year-old former p.r. guy for the Kansas City Royals.

We could run down the list much further than that, of course — e.g., 57-year-old Tina Brown recently hired 57-year-old Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast — but the point is still the same: Whatever is killing the Old Media, it’s not because their New Media competitors are all Pretty Young Things providing readers with New! Improved! Kid-tastic! coverage.

The desperation with which the New York Times has recently flailed around in search of The Next Big Thing — “It’s Facebook!” No? “It’s Twitter!” No? “It’s Bloggers!” — betrays the encroaching sense among courtiers inside the castle that the king has lost control of the situation on the other side of the moat, where the peasants live.

And they are now haunted by an eerie sound: A distinct low rumbling noise, as if in the far distance there were many millions of boots treading steadily toward them, marching like an Army of Davids.

UPDATE: A belated hat-tip to Donald Douglas at American Power. Donald had Tweeted me the link to his post on Saturday, and I clicked through to the NYT article from there. But, by the time I sat down to write Sunday, I was just looking at the NYT article and had forgotten where I’d gotten it from.

Also: The dog ate my homework.

I Don’t Hate Trains

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“What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what?”
— David Weigel, Slate

Few things — not even the threat of a coffee shortage — bother me quite so much as what I call the Existential Theory of Liberalism:

Everything that exists must be subsidized by the federal government; ergo, to argue against government subsidies for something is to advocate the abolition of that thing.

The Existential Theory of Liberalism can be seen in action whenever any conservative proposes reducing federal expenditures for, say, the National Endowment for the Arts, and is therefore accused by liberals of being “anti-art.” By the same token, if you criticize the federal Department of Education, you are “anti-education,” and if you oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem-cell research, you are “anti-science.”

(Don’t attempt to use this trick against liberals, however, or you will discover that turnabout is not fair play: If you accuse liberals of being “anti-religious” because they oppose prayer in public schools, they will then accuse you of being a fanatical theocrat who wishes to “impose your beliefs” on others. Of course, liberals routinely use government subsidies to impose their beliefs on the rest of us: “stimulus” grants for gay pornography, anyone? Liberals fervently believe in sodomy, and therefore insist that taxpayers foot the bill to promote their favorite pastime, but I digress …)

When my buddy Dave sent me his train story from Slate — and you really should read the whole thing, which isn’t all bad — I felt obligated to reply by e-mail:

I don’t hate trains. I also don’t hate windmills, ethanol, “All Things Considered” or any of the other things that are subsidized with federal tax dollars because there is not enough market demand for them to be otherwise economically viable. It is an error of logic to conflate opposition to subsidies with “hate” for the thing subsidized.
I do, however, admit to hating Auburn University, “performance artists” and the United Nations, all of which get federal subsidies.
— RSM

Meanwhile, Philip Klein has an article at The American Spectator about the recent epidemic of train-mania among liberals:

“Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union address, making it the most ambitious element of his vision for “winning the future.”
Invoking national pride, Obama mused that “America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the interstate highway system.” Sadly, he lamented, the U.S. now lags behind Europe, Russia, and China in modern transportation infrastructure.
If the nation met his goal for high-speed rail adoption, he said, “This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying — without the pat-down. As we speak, routes in California and the Midwest are already under way.”
To most Americans, the passing reference to California was likely an afterthought, lost amid all the dreamy rhetoric of rebuilding the nation. But upon closer inspection, the state’s proposed high-speed rail system serves as a perfect example of the gap between the promise of transformational liberalism and the reality of big government. Taxpayers everywhere should pay attention, because the project has already been granted $3.2 billion in federal funds, mostly through Obama’s economic stimulus package — and its backers hope to gobble up billions more over the next decade.
The $43 billion transportation project to link Los Angeles to San Francisco with a bullet train by 2020 would be considered grandiose during the plushest of times, yet it’s being pursued during an era when governments at all levels are mired in deep fiscal crises. The plan has been subject to a series of scathing reports by independent analysts, raising concerns about everything from its cost estimates to its business model. The University of California at Berkeley has questioned its lofty ridership projections. And even the Washington Post has editorialized against it.
Although voters in the financially strapped Golden State approved a ballot measure in 2008 authorizing up to $9.9 billion in bonds to build the rail system, the project has encountered a lot of opposition as it has progressed. Several cities are suing to prevent the trains from tearing through their downtowns. Farmers are worried that the tracks will carve up their land. Some environmental groups normally predisposed to supporting high-speed rail have turned against the proposed route, fearing its effects on undeveloped areas. When the High-Speed Rail Authority announced that the initial section of the line would be built in the state’s less inhabited Central Valley region, many were puzzled as to why they didn’t begin by connecting large cities with more potential riders. As a result, critics dubbed it the “train to nowhere.” . . .

You must read the whole thing, because it was written by Philip Klein, who is Jewish. If you don’t read it, that means you hate Jews.

Oh, wait. I’m sorry. I unexpectedly lapsed into thinking like a liberal for a moment, which reminds me of another patented trick of Liberal Logic™ — the Just-Like-Hitler Theory of Republican Policy.

We’ve recently seen this employed in Wisconsin, where GOP state legislators passed a bill to limit the power of government-employee labor unions, resulting in this predictable accusation: “Republicans hate unions! You know who else hated unions? Hitler!”

But as usual, no fair turning this trick against liberals, although it would be pretty easy.

I mean, c’mon: How did Hitler use trains? To ship Jews to death camps!

No wonder Phil hates trains . . .

Malkin Pimp-Slaps Weigel

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MARION, Ohio — My buddy Dave Weigel has got arrogance like Rosie O’Donnell’s got double chins.

His smart-ass attitude already cost Dave a job at the Washington Post (as he has admitted), but his excessive arrogance still gets the best of him, and so today Dave decided to do something extraordinarily stupid: Point his snark at Michelle Malkin.

Dave, Dave, Dave — will you never learn?

I’d take time to explain Dave’s mistake here, but I’m on deadline for an offline project, so I’ll summarize what Dave did wrong in a single word: Everything.

And just FYI to Garance Franke-Ruta: Prank phone calls are not “gonzo journalism.”

UPDATE: Oh, what the hell? If I’m going to get sidelined and procrastinate, I might as well go whole-hog with it. Here’s Weigel’s lede:

MADISON, Wisc. — Michelle Malkin promises to do “the reporting the Tea Party-bashing national media won’t do on the rabid outbreak of progressive incivility and violence at Big Labor protests across the country.” Sounds promising! But here’s what she delivers. . . .

Weigel then goes on to bullet-point the contents of Malkin’s latest column, “Hate-a-rama: The vulgar, racist, sexist, homophobic rage of the Left.” He then wrote, “This isn’t really reporting. This is googling,” a sneer he retracted after Malkin pimp-slapped him and pointed out that she had done follow-up interviews with various victims of left-wing protest thuggery.

But you see that Dave was, once again, doing the arrogant show-off thing, as he made sure to rub that Madison dateline in Malkin’s face: “I just spent four days in Madison and the state Capitol, reporting, and saw absolutely no violence.”

For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter whether you think the Left or the Right is more guilty of over-the-top behavior at protests. Nor does it matter whether you think the mainstream media exaggerates right-wing misconduct while ignoring left-wing misconduct. Malkin has been the target of about as much leftist thuggery as anyone, so she is an authority on the subject, and as to the media’s bias, I’ve certainly discussed that recently (see here and here).

No, the issue here is Dave’s arrogance, his “Look at Me, I Just Spent Four Days in Madison, Reporting” show-off stunt.

And I blame myself.

After he got canned from the WaPo in July 2010, I talked to Dave by phone about his situation, and he said that several news organizations had expressed an interest in hiring him. So I told Dave, basically: “Make sure you get a travel budget.” Given the choice between two jobs with roughly equal salary, I advised him, take the one that offers you more travel money.

One of the sad realities of modern journalism is that there’s less and less money for reporters to travel and do on-the-scene reporting. Whatever Dave’s grievous faults — and grievously hath Dave answered them — he’s a good reporter, so one way he could really distinguish himself from those blogging-from-Starbucks pundit types was to become Dateline Dave, the Man on the Scene.

I haven’t had time to follow Dave’s reporting from Madison, but I reckon my advice might have had a little something to do with his Wisconsin sojourn — and now look what it has led to!

Well, let’s hope Malkin’s Pimp-Slap Heard Round the World knocks some sense into the boy’s head. As for Malkin, she doesn’t do as much on-the-scene reporting as she used to do, but she is still a reporter by habit and training, and she works very hard at what she does. She sure as hell didn’t deserve that sneering condescension from Weigel.

“Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.”

UPDATE II: Any of my conservative friends tempted to derogate Weigel’s reporting skills should check out this article in which he goes behind the scenes with the protesters who turned the Wisconsin Capitol into a radical commune, which includes this interesting sentence:

The “War Room” of the Teaching Assistants Association is tucked away on the third floor.

Hmmmm. So the  University of Wisconsin Teaching Assistants Association — i.e., a bunch of left-wing grad students — played a leadership role in the sit-in.

And “War Room”? #NewTone!

Dave Weigel Calls Himself ‘Progressive’? (Also: Dibs on ‘Arianna Huffington Nude’)

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Did ex-libertarian David Weigel just say what it looks like he said here?

Imagine a future in which AOL, the online portal for millions of people, farms out its news content to the Huffington Post. Imagine a future in which Yahoo!, the online portal for millions of similar people, hires the deputy publisher of Talking Points Memo to launch its blog network.
For a progressive who thinks the Internet is increasingly driving the narrative, this is heartening.

No more Koch money for you, Dave!

OK, so now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk a bit more about the HuffPo/AOL deal, with Tom Blumer documenting the fundamental issue:

Since start-up, HuffPo hasn’t paid its bloggers either, despite getting [more than $35 million in capital investment], and achieving [annual] revenues of about $30 million. . . . AOL is gambling that HuffPo’s apparently across-the-board gratis arrangement with its content providers, who as of mid-2009 numbered about 4,000, will continue. Why in the world should it?

Read the whole thing, because this points to an inescapable problem with the group-blog “community” site concept: If you are relying on unpaid contributors for a significant amount of content at a site where the proprietors are earning enough revenue to pay full-time salaries to some people, how do you justify paying nothing to most of your contributors?

Where is the incentive for “chopped liver” contributors — evidently not valuable enough to merit salaries — to keep feeding free content onto your site? If some people are expected to write for free, on behalf of “the cause,” why are other people getting paid to write for “the cause”?

Oh, right: They do it for the prestige of being able to call themselves a “Huffington Post contributor” (who isn’t good enough to get paid).

If Arianna collects a lump sum of $18 million plus a job with a $4 million annual salary, shouldn’t HuffPo contributors feel that they’ve been shamefully exploited?

Dana Milbank asks: “Did Arianna Huffington just sell out her fellow progressives?” Someone could make a handsome profit selling “Honk If You’ve Been Sold Out by Arianna Huffington” bumper stickers.

If this is how Arianna rolls, why should anyone do anything other than roll their eyes at her declaration that she “hopes to turn AOL into a center of ‘citizen journalism’ in advance of the 2012 elections?”

In that context, “citizen journalism” can only mean: You work for free, and we’ll cash in if you do good work.

Speaking of cashing in: AOL closed last Thursday at $22.24 and closed Tuesday at $20.89. If you owned 1,000 shares of AOL, you just lost $1,350 for “the cause” in the span of three days’ trading. How do you feel about your $1,350 loss, compared to Arianna’s $18 million gain?

Also: People are now trying to get Google-bomb traffic out of the HuffPo/AOL deal. Yeah, it would be a shame if people started Googling for “Arianna Huffington nude” or something like that.

UPDATE: Weigel insists that I’ve misinterpreted what he said and that he did not actually mean to declare himself a “progressive.” By way of apology, I’ve offered Dave the “Arianna Huffington sex video” Google bomb.

The “Arianna Huffington sucks” Google bomb was already taken.

UPDATE II: “Search engine optimization won’t work forever.” True. But it didn’t have to work forever, just long enough for Arianna to sell out. And I’m sorry, Farhad Manj, but you’re too late to claim the “Arianna Huffington blows” Google bomb.

VIDEO: Herman Cain vs. Clinton, 1994

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Watch this video in which the Godfather’s Pizza CEO discusses the economic impact of government health-care with Bill Clinton, and tell me if you can think of any Republican candidate better qualified to argue the case for repealing ObamaCare:

You really ought to read this 1994 Newsweek article that highlights Cain’s key role in helping defeat HillaryCare. A lot of pundits keep low-balling Cain’s 2012 prospects, but Dave Weigel points out how that moment made Cain a conservative hero:

Herman Cain’s political career began when he defeated Bill Clinton on live television. . . .
Conservatives treated the Cain mutiny like a bootleg from a Bob Dylan/George Harrison jam session, passed from fan to fan. Rush Limbaugh played the clip on his short-lived TV show. Cain’s senator, Paul Coverdell, called him a “profile in courage.” Newt Gingrich praised Cain and, after Republicans won Congress in the fall, gave him a slot on a flat-tax study group. . . .
Last week Cain launched a presidential exploratory committee, becoming the first Republican candidate of the 2012 race. . . .
In 2011, the Republican electorate wants to hear from anyone who’s not a politician. . . .
“The political landscape has changed dramatically because of the citizens’ movement spurred by the Tea Party movement,” Cain told me in an interview, giving me the elevator pitch for why he couldn’t win a GOP Senate primary in 2004 but can win a presidential primary now. “Based upon me being very active in that citizens movement, talking to dozens and dozens and dozens of Tea Party rallies, events, conferences all over this country, I believe that people have a better attitude for an unconventional candidate—someone who’s more of a problem-solver than a politician.”
He’s right about the Tea Party. When Cain speaks at conservative conferences and Tea Party rallies, he gets bigger crowds than members of Congress, and only slightly smaller crowds than Fox News hosts. . . .

You should read the rest of that. Be prepared for the usual skeptical snarkiness from Weigel, who doesn’t want to blow his smart-guy rep by being seen as overrating a longshot. But I frankly think Cain’s being underestimated. 

He’s got a rare combination: Business experience and populist appeal. I’ve called him “Steve Forbes with charisma,” but you could also think of him as Ross Perot without the craziness. If you’ve seen how Cain can connect with a conservative crowd, and then you start thinking about the kind of grassroots, hand-shaking, retail politics that it takes to win in Iowa and New Hampshire . . .

Hey, he already beat cancer. You gonna bet against a guy like that?

CITZENS FOR CAIN: Join the Grassroots Army

Party of Sodomy and Abortion Suffers Demographic Decline — Unexpectedly!

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That’s not actually the New York Times headline:

Power in Congress Will Tilt South and West 

The latest Census report is not good news for the Party of Baby-Killing and Barebacking.

“This is about as bad as it could get for Democrats, and as good as it could get for Republicans,” Dave Weigel explains. “The Democratic caucus in the House is about to see internal warfare in the rust belt and northeast, as their members are forced into Thunderdome battle for the diminished number of seats.” Dave lays out the winners and losers of the upcoming House re-apportionment:

WINNERS: Texas +4, Florida +2, Arizona +1, Georgia +1, Nevada +1, South Carolina +1, Utah +1, Washington +1
LOSERS: New York -2, Ohio -2, Illinois -1, Iowa -1, Louisiana -1, Massachusetts -1, Michigan -1, Missouri -1, New Jersey -1, Pennsylvania -1

Read the rest of Dave’s article because he points out that it’s actually worse for Democrats than it looks from numbers alone. In part because of the mid-term wipeout, eight of those states (five winners, three losers) have Republican governors and Republicans in complete control of the legislature, whereas Democrats only exercise such total power in two states (Illinois and Massachusetts), both of which are losers.

This means that the odds of Democrats recapturing the House of Representatives before 2023 are roughly equal to the chances of Andrew Sullivan siring a baby with Ellen DeGeneres. And because lame-duck Democrats couldn’t pass the DREAM Act — under which four semesters at a community college would have made Khalid Sheikh Mohammed eligible for citizenship* — they won’t get any help from their plan to quickly transform illegal aliens into Democratic voters.
* A mild exaggeration.

Of course, because the Electoral College is affected by reapportionment, this is also not good news for Obama’s re-election campaign, which is why he’s handing Republicans a knife and inviting them to cut their own throats:

President Barack Obama told Congressional Hispanic Caucus members Tuesday that he’ll renew his push for comprehensive immigration reform in 2011 — even though such an effort would face even longer odds in a Congress where Republicans control the House.

It’s never safe to underestimate the stupidity of Republicans in Congress, but they would be breaking new frontiers of stupidity if they fall for this one.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: The amazing Ed Driscoll notes that Democrats have had many warnings that the Liberal Lifestyle™ is a demographic dead-end. The future belongs to the fertile.

UPDATE II: Donald Douglas blogs about the four-seat gain in Texas, where Hispanics Latinos Democrats are trying to claim that the GOP risks a “backlash” from partisan redistricting. Because I’m fluent in Spanish liberalese, permit me to translate:

“Whatever you do, Republicans, don’t screw us over the way we’d screw you over if we had enough power to screw you over.”

Let’s hope when the GOP legislature in Texas re-draws the district lines, they remember that the Democrats sent Tom DeLay to prison for the crime of trying to help Republicans get elected.

UPDATE II: Shocking news from Instapundit:

STOP THE PRESSES: States With Lower Taxes,
Smaller Government, Fewer Unions
Seeing The Most Population Growth.

Post-Weigel Journalism? Impossible!

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Once David Weigel left the Washington Independent, they were doomed to oblivion:

The crisis in the world of journalism today isn’t really about journalism — it’s about the bottom line. Reporters and editors everywhere are trying to find a way to keep their very good work alive. We thought our model had a chance. It put up a good fight.

Ah, screw you, whiners. And if those losers at Newsweek had been smart enough to hire Dave, they wouldn’t be Tina Brown’s bitches now.

UPDATE: Trying to live down his reputation as the arrogant punk he actually is (NTTAWWT) Weigel gets serious:

The highest-profile examples of non-profit journalism have been investigative reporting hubs . . . which focused on journalism that really was becoming hard to fund privately — investigations that would take weeks to produce news, if they produced any news.

That’s really the trick: If you know anything at all about how investigative journalism actually works, you know that it requires a publisher who is willing to foot the bill while a reporter — or a team of reporters — roots around on a story that may not actually pan out to be anything. Or, as is more often the case, you get one of those long-run-for-a-short-slide affairs: A five-part series that doesn’t really “make a difference,” as they say.

Weigel notes that even basic reporting that used to be commonplace (e.g., when every good-sized daily paper would send a reporter to cover the state legislature when it was in session) has become too much of a financial burden for most newspapers.

I’m grateful that the tip-jar hitters have contributed to the Shoe Leather Fund to cover travel expenses for campaign coverage and other occasional ventures outside the basement.  On the other hand, I’m disappointed that no deep-pocketed right-wing Sugar Daddy has offered to pony up the few hundred thousand bucks that would be needed as start-up funding for the R.S. McCain School of Journalism, where young punks would get advanced instruction in such valuable skills as smoking, cussing and driving like a maniac.

In the meantime, then, hit the freaking tip jar.