When I saw what Zombie posted at Pajamas Media, I was so profoundly shocked that I sent out the link on Twitter with a short headline, a link and “OMFG.” Then I tried to sleep for a few hours, and when I woke up, I found I had more than 90 re-Tweets.
Few things annoy me more than having my news judgment questioned. Disagree on policy or doubt me on politics — we might argue, but such arguments do not call into question my competence as a professional journalist. And, by God, after 25 years in the news business, I know what’s news.
So I don’t mind the good-natured kidding I get about being all-Weiner, all-the-time for an entire week. While I initially reacted to Anthony Weiner’s apparent Twitter faux-pas as a mere joke, as soon as I began researching the background of last weekend’s incident I realized, Hey, there’s a legit news story here.
What’s more, there was a perfect opportunity to get ahead of the story, because the mainstream media had been initially reluctant to report it. Saturday afternoon, I checked Google News and there was zero, zilch, nada from major news organizations. Yet I anticipated (correctly) how the story would develop, and so began hoovering up every fact I could find online and aggregating every tidbit of information other bloggers were reporting.
Simple fact: Weiner is from New York, home of America’s best tabloid press. If you thought the NY Post and the Daily News weren’t going to make this front-page news, you’re crazy. And while no one could have predicted the spectacular awfulness of Weiner’s Tuesday press-conference meltdown, once it happened, it was blood-in-the-water time.
Members of the House Democratic leadership have talked repeatedly to Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-New York, to try to get him to end what several Democrats call an unwelcome political distraction, a member of the party’s leadership tells CNN.
“It’s frustrating because we’ll talk to him, and say clean it up, and then he goes out and does stuff,” said the member of the House Democratic leadership, who declined to speak for the record about private discussions with Weiner.
“He’s got to put the period at the end of the sentence,” said the Democratic source, “it’s painful.”
Rep. Anthony Weiner’s onetime Democrat allies were quick to abandon the lawmaker yesterday, just hours after he admitted it certainly could be his bulging crotch shot that was sent to a cute co-ed from his Twitter account.
Party backers in New York and Washington publicly criticized the randy rep’s attempts at damage control and his inability to shake the scandal. . . .
And in a major blow, some pols said outright that Weiner has crushed his dream of becoming the Big Apple’s next mayor — and may even have undermined the next election for his Brooklyn-Queens congressional seat, which he has held for six terms.
“Something like this better be put to rest,” said power broker Vito Lopez, the Brooklyn Democratic chairman.
“If it’s left outstanding, it could have damaging impact, even if it means the difference of 3 or 4 percent of the vote in a very competitive four-way or five-way race,” Lopez said about Weiner’s chances in a mayoral contest.
You see what I’m talking about? As silly or as trivial as the whole situation may seem, Weiner has painted himself into a corner and it’s hard to see a good way for him to get out of it. Here’s an Associated Press video:
The one way out is the way Weiner has refused to take — call the cops:
There’s one way Rep. Anthony Weiner could show that he didn’t send a salacious photo to a female college student from his Twitter account: Ask law enforcement to investigate.
The New York congressman has so far declined to ask for an investigation into the photo, saying it’s not a worthy use of government resources. The U.S. Capitol Police said it would not launch an investigation unless requested.
In asking a private security firm to investigate instead, Weiner won’t be able to prove his innocence by obtaining logs from Twitter showing where his account was accessed from. Twitter says it requires a subpoena or court order to hand over such information. A subpoena or court order would have to be initiated by police or the FBI, not private detectives.
And, with hat-tips to Ace of Spades and Iowahawk, here’s the latest viral video sensation:
U.S. stocks fell Friday to cap their first five-week losing streak since July 2004, as a dismal jobs report added to the drumbeat of investor concerns about a slowing economy.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 97.29 points, or 0.8%, to 12151.26, led lower by Alcoa, which dropped 28 cents, or 1.7%, to $15.92. The blue-chip index has dropped 5.1% during its five-week losing skid and closed Friday at its lowest level since March 23.
Friday’s declines come after the DJIA had slumped 321 points in back-to-back sessions. The average registered its biggest three-day drop since March 16.
Meanwhile, the D.C. press corps — which would be crediting Obama as a miracle worker if the economic picture was looking up — must instead endeavor to exculpate him from blame:
See how this works? You can be sure that if a Republican were in the White House and unemployment was at 9.1%, there wouldn’t be any “Don’t blame the president” headlines in the newspapers. Here’s a video report from Associated Press:
Yeah. The desire to get fame for fame’s sake — fame without talent, fame without achievement, fame you don’t actually have to work for — is one of the great evils of our age. Nowadays, I’m often reminded of a line from Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara says of one of her envious rivals: “She’d walk down the street naked if she thought anybody would look twice at her.” But we’ll save Ginger Lee for later . . .
I should probably write an essay about the underlying lesson here: How inexperienced, irresponsible and unscrupulous people, trying to play citizen-journalist, muck things up for everybody else in the “Army of Davids.” On the other hand, maybe we wouldn’t have this problem if the regular media could be trusted to do their job with minimal competence and fairness.
“U.S. hiring slowed dramatically in May and the unemployment rate kept rising, adding to concerns the jobs market will take years to heal as the economy remains weak. . . . . The jobless rate . . . unexpectedly rose to 9.1% . . .”
— Wall Street Journal
“May’s job gain was about a third of what economists had been forecasting. . . . ‘The economy clearly just hit a brick wall,’ said Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics. ‘It’s almost as if it came to a complete standstill.’”
— New York Times
Why is it that economists — at least the “expert” economists who do all this forecasting for the media — have been so reliably surprised by bad news the past couple of years? And where do the media find these idiotic financial journalists like the guy who, as The Lonely Conservative notes, tried to blame U.S. unemployement on the Japanese tsunami?
It’s almost enough to make you think that the people who run the media are unusually stupid.
While this administration promised job creation and an unemployment rate under 8 percent with the passage of the stimulus spending packages, based upon today’s unemployment report, the unemployment rate still hovers around 9 percent. We have yet to see the positive results from the billions of taxpayer dollars spent in that process.
Wednesday’s jobs figure shows only 38,000 new private sector jobs were created, a number significantly less than the projected 177,000 in previous forecasts. Experience has taught me that government cannot create jobs. Instead, government is responsible for creating a favorable environment for businesses to thrive and succeed.
If we are to fix this problem,we must focus our efforts on increasing access to capital and availability of new markets, adjusting unfavorable regulations for corporations and, in many instances, retooling and retraining our workforce.
It’s time we have a discussion about real job creation and what must be done to raise consumer confidence and create stability in the marketplace. Real results are needed now.
No, he didn’t ask the cops to start an investigation of the insidious hackers who stole his crotch-photo and Tweeted it to a 21-year-old. But when a reporter for WCBS-TV in New York started asking questions . . .
