Another Job I Won’t Get

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Not that I would ever consent to work for the company that employs Andrew Sullivan, of course:

Atlantic Media, a national news publisher in Washington, D.C., is beginning a search for two dozen reporters to join its editorial ranks. Our current effort includes recruiting exceptional reporting talent already well-proven in covering the nation’s capital.
As background, Atlantic Media is the parent company for The Atlantic magazine, National Journal magazine, Government Executive magazine, CongressDaily and The Hotline. In the moment, our recruiting is focused on the National Journal magazine, its website and related publications.
In all of its hiring, Atlantic Media seeks two pillar qualities – force of intellect and a personal spirit of generosity.

(“Pathological obsession with obstetric issues of Republican politicians is helpful, but not required.”)

Recruiting down two paths:
Recognizing that these gifts may not present in the same individual, Atlantic Media is recruiting for individuals working down either of two paths: relentless breaking news or original, rigorous commentary.

(“Israel-bashing and paranoid fear-mongering about Tea Party activists counts as ‘rigorous,’ if not exactly original.”)

Breaking News – especially web savvy: The intention here is to identify reporters made for – naturally wired for – breaking news. High metabolism. Relentless. Unstoppable. Prolific.
Original Insight: The intention here, harder to realize, is to identify individuals made for – naturally wired for – original insight, original frames for comment on the large, national issues. Economist rigor; Tom Friedman insight.
Please send resumes – or refer strong candidates – to www.nationaljournal.com/talent.
Atlantic Media is an Equal Opportunity Employer

Wonkette had a laugh because of the expressed interest in “Tom Friedman insight”:

ATLANTIC SEEKS TO CLONE
WORLD’S WORST COLUMNIST

Wonkette also pointed out that “Atlantic Media Group’s National Journal just got rid of thirty (30!) journalists through buyouts, so the net gain of Journalism Jobs is zero (0).” 

This is how the cookie crumbles in the collapsing world of Old Media — experienced journalists are laid off and replaced with low-paid new hires. And, hey, it’s a recession, so . . .

Dear Editor:
You won’t hire me. I’ve been a professional journalist since 1986, I’ve won national awards, been praised hither and yon, achieved remarkable success as an independent blogger, excellent references, etc.
This online application form requires me to attach a resume, and you’ll notice it’s nearly two years out of date. I haven’t bothered to update it, because you won’t hire me. You won’t bother to interview me nor even send so much as an e-mail to say “Thanks but no thanks.” That’s because you’re aiming to hire a bunch of 20-something kids who’ll work for next to nothing, and who can blame you? I’d do the same thing if I were in your shoes.
Nevertheless, I felt obliged to make a gesture, so at least my wife can’t accuse me of not trying. No hard feelings. And good luck finding the next Tom Friedman, although it seems to me that one Tom Friedman is more than enough.
— Robert Stacy McCain
http://theothermccain.com/

It felt good to hit the “send” button on that one.

UPDATE: James Joyner at Outside the Beltway mentions that Andrew Sullivan’s employer hopes to tempt aspiring Friedman wannabes with what “is purported to be a salary . . .  in the low $30,000s.” This is presumably more than they’re paying Obama stooge Linda Douglass:

Completing a full spin through the revolving door, Linda Douglass, a long-time CBS and ABC correspondent before jumping aboard the Obama campaign in 2008 . . . has re-joined The Atlantic as a Vice President who “will concentrate on company strategy and communications,” the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reported online Thursday morning.
Before joining the Obama campaign as senior strategist and senior campaign spokesperson on the road, Douglass toiled for National Journal . . .
.
Atlantic Chairman David Bradley recognizes the conflict between her political agenda and being a journalist, but he told Kurtz “she’s too big an editorial talent for us to keep her out of the editorial product.”

David Bradley might as well hang a sign on the front door: “Help Wanted. Democrats Only. No Conservatives Need Apply.”

UPDATE II: Ah, yes, the auto-reply e-mail:

From: “[email protected]”
To: [email protected]
Thank you for submitting your resume. Our management team is reviewing your qualifications and will contact you if there is a match with our current open positions.
Meanwhile, using your email address and password, you can login to our careers website anytime to update your application information.
We appreciate your interest in Atlantic Media and wish you the best of luck in your job search.
The Recruiting Team
Atlantic Media Company

When you care enough to send the very best . . .

Of Tea Parties and Leaders

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The Washington Post:

Frustrated and lacking agreement on what to do next, self-identified tea party leaders say the movement may be in danger of breaking apart before it ever really comes together.

Bill Dupray at Liberty Pundits calls this article by the Post‘s Amy Gardner an attempt to write a premature obituary on the movement.  Regardless of its intended purpose, however, there was some information of interest in the article:

“We don’t want a leader,” said Barbee Kinnison of Henderson, Nev., who supported one of Angle’s Republican opponents, businessman Danny Tarkanian. Kinnison’s testy e-mail exchange with organizers of Tea Party Express was published in the blogosphere last week. “We like it being a collective group of voices. This is the first time in a generation when we feel like our voices are being heard.”

Who is Barbee Kinnison? She was quoted by the New York Times at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville in February:

At a panel discussion titled “Defeating Liberalism via the Primary Process,” the room erupted in a standing ovation when Barbee Kinnison, a delegate from Nevada, stood up and declared her intention to unite Tea Party groups behind a candidate to defeat Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader.

Evidently, the candidate around whom she hoped to unite Tea Party groups was Danny Tarkanian, and as soon as the Tea Party Express endorsement of Angle was announced in April, Kinnison expressed her dissatisfaction:

The Tea Party Express endorsement provoked a backlash of sorts among some conservative activists, who accused the California-based group of carpetbagging in Nevada and inserting itself into a competitive Republican primary.
“They are drastically overstepping their boundaries,” said Barbee Kinnison, a retired Las Vegas businesswoman and activist who supports Tarkanian. “Anger is brewing. This is not how it is supposed to work.”
Kinnison said she and friends e-mailed the Tea Party Express on Thursday asking for a return of money they had donated.

Why did Kinnison support Tarkanian and not Angle? Why did the Tea Party Express support Angle and not Tarkanian? We don’t know. However, I’m intigued by Kinnison saying she wants to be part of “a collective group of voices” and to “feel like our voices are being heard.”

At the end of the day, making your voice heard in politics — in any really effective way — requires winning elections. Winning elections at the level of a U.S. Senate race isn’t easy, and depends on a lot of details that have nothing to do with national trends, so that the success or failure of any one campaign cannot automatically be taken as evidence of a trend.

Neverthless, if Kinnison and others cannot accept the nomination of Angle as legitimate, that’s a real problem. And if the Tea Party movement ends up encouraging people to be soreheads when they lose a primary, that’s a real problem, too.

When You Land on the Wrong Beach

The Democrats and their labor-goon buddies are going to pull out all the stops to re-elect Harry Reid in November. In fact, they’re already doing so. If Barbee Kinnison is still committed to uniting a movement to defeat Harry Reid — the sentiment that got her a standing ovation in February — she’ll have to get over her disappointment at Tarkanian’s defeat in the primary.

Let me explain it this way: Everybody knows about D-Day on Omaha Beach. Most people, however, don’t know the story of what happened on Utah Beach.

When the first-wave assault troops of the 4th Infantry Division hit the beach on June 6, 1944, the officers consulted their maps, trying to locate the places they were supposed to attack. It took a few minutes before they figured out the problem: They were on the wrong beach.

Because of an unanticipated cross-current in the English Channel, the first wave had been put ashore more than a mile south of their planned objective. The second wave was due to land in a few minutes, to be followed by more and more troops — and all of them were heading for the wrong beach, a mile away from where the division was supposed to be landing.

The officers were in a quandry. In all the planning for D-Day, nobody had planned for this. The success of the entire operation was at stake.

Fortunately for the troops, there was one man on that beach who knew what to do: Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Roosevelt conducted a quick reconnaissance of the area, then returned to the beach and told the battalion commanders, “We’ll start the war from right here!”

And so they did, attacking inland to outflank the positions they originally had been assigned to take by frontal assault.

Barbee Kinnison says people in the Tea Party movement “don’t want a leader.” Fine — be your own leader. And if you’re going to be a leader, you’d better be an effective leader, or you’ll never acc0mplish anything. 

Effective leaders don’t waste time worrying about what might have been. If conservatives in Nevada sit around moping and malcontented because their favorite candidate didn’t win the primary, the result will be the re-election of Harry Reid in November. Complaining to the Washington Post sure as hell isn’t going to make things any better.

“We’ll start the war from right here!”

That’s still good advice.

SHARRON ANGLE FOR U.S. SENATE

Science Validates Bible

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To a fundamentalist, there was kind of a “well, duh” reaction to this recent headline:

Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity

It’s scarcely surprising to learn that members of an ethno-religious group — whose ancient scriptures advocate endogamy and proscribe marrying outside the group — would be genetically similar. What I didn’t realize, however, was that some revisionist historians have cast doubt on the Biblical geneaology of the Jews:

The two genome surveys . . . refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.

So, for those of you keeping score:

Genesis, Exodus, etc. . . . . . 1
Revisionist historians . . . .  0

UPDATE: If you go back and read Genesis, you find that when Abraham’s son was ready to marry, Abraham — a native of Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq — was horrified to think that his son Isaac would be married to a woman from one of the tribes of Canaan. So Abraham sent his servant back to Mesopotamia, where he found Rebekah — who, as it turned out, was the granddaughter of Abraham’s brother Nahor. So it was that Isaac married his own cousin or, to be geneaologically specific, his first cousin once removed. (Genesis 24.)

This custom was continued into the next generation, when Isaac forbade Jacob to marry a Canaanite woman, sending him to take a wife from “the daughters of Laban thy mother’s sister.” (Genesis 28). In one of the famous stories of the Bible, Jacob fell in love with Rachel but was tricked into also marrying her older sister Leah. Jacob fathered children by both wives, as well as by their servant girls Bilhah and Zilpah (Genesis 29-30). Jacob’s children were the original patriarchs of the “Twelve Tribes” of Israelites. By the time they entered Egypt, they numbered just “70 souls” but in the course of just a few generations they became so numerous that the Egyptian pharoah feared them (Exodus 1).

Given that Jacob was the ancestor of all of them, and that most of the 12 patriarchs were also the sons of Rachel and Leah — sisters who were Jacob’s cousins — then the original pattern of endogamy would have created very distinctive genetic traits among these Israelites. The sojourn in Egypt lasted 430 years (Exodus 12:40) during which they were socially distinct, marrying amongst themselves.

By the time of the first numbering at Mt. Sinai (Numbers 1), there were more than 600,000 Israelite men of military age — all descended from the line of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and, for the most part, also matrilineally descended from Abraham’s family via Leah and Rachel. At any rate, all were descended from those original “70 souls” and, the custom of marrying within the group being well-established, you can see what a genetically close-knit tribe it was that made its way through the Wilderness back to Canaan.

If they increased from “70 souls” to 600,000 men of war — counting women, children and old men, certainly well more than 2 million total — in less than 500 years, these Exodus-era Israelites would have left a large, clear genetic “brand” among their descendants. Even allowing for intermarriage and assimilation of converts, the DNA traits of the patriarchs would remain clearly evident, and this is what recent research appears to verify.

Why would revisionist historians wish to imagine that this biblical geneaology was false? Why would Professor Sand assert that “Jews have no common origin”? Very simple:

Professor Sand . . . candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past.

Tough luck, Professor. I believe the word is, “Oy!”

Good Old-Fashioned American Hate!

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America used to be a great country. Alas, we don’t make TV commercials like this anymore:

Hey, don’t blame me. It’s got nearly 2 million YouTube views.

(Hat-tip: Dan Collins via Twitter.)

UPDATE: When America was a great country, little girls just wanted to play dress-up and be pretty like Barbie — and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that!

UPDATE II: You know what else? When America was a great country, we had big steel cars with V-8 engines and tailfins!

Why don’t we have great cars like that anymore? Liberals!

UPDATE III: Now? Hallmark pulls talking greeting card from shelves because NAACP says “black holes” sounds like “black whores.” I kid you not.

A. Because He’s Black, That’s Why

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Q. Why did Alvin Greene win the Democratic primary for Senate in South Carolina with the same percentage of the vote as Barack Obama?

Do I think that putting an accused sexual predator on the Democratic primary ballot was a GOP dirty trick?

Yes, I do.

But a much better question is this: Do I think that getting an accused sexual predator on the Democratic primary ballot was a brilliant GOP dirty trick?

Oh, hell yes.

And is Keith Olbermann an obnoxious a–hole?

UPDATE: How . . . “perplexing“:

The campaign of defeated Democratic Senate candidate Vic Rawl has assembled a team of national academic experts to review Tuesday’s perplexing South Carolina primary results . . .

If any Republican ever suggested something “perplexing” in an election won by a black man? Raaaaacism!

‘Bottles of Hope’

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Shreveport blogger Pat Austin admires the resourcefulness, ingenuity and good humor of her fellow Louisianans:

As awful as this oil spill is, they’re finding ways to fight back, and often keeping a sense of humor about it. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.
Kevin Voisin of Houma is selling limited edition bottles of Louisiana seawater with BP crude in it for $1000. Voisin and his family own an oyster business and are now out of work. He’s doing the bottles in his warehouse and only making a limited number of them with proceeds going to help fishermen who are now out of work.

Order your “Bottles of Hope” now.

‘Marco Rubio Gets It’ on Israel

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That’s from Jennifer Rubin at Commentary, who calls the Florida Republican Senate candidate’s speech yesterday “frankly the best speech on Israel since George W. Bush went to the Knesset.” The text of the speech is online and includes some important points:

We are in the midst of an all out, concerted global effort to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. . . .
If Israel’s right to self-defense is undermined by efforts to lift its legal and necessary blockade of Gaza, which serves to stop Hamas from arming itself with deadly weapons, there will be lasting consequences not only for Israel, but also for the U.S. and the entire world. . . .
We should always remember that the obstacle to peace isn’t Israel; it is Palestinian extremists and Islamic terrorists who will not accept the Jewish State.

Which is exactly right. I am not anti-Arab and not even really anti-Islam, except insofar as Islam is intolerant toward Christianity and/or used as a rationale for violence. Nor am I one of those who, as Russell Kirk said of certain neoconservatives, mistake Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States. Yet the political, military and diplomatic reality is exactly as Marco Rubio describes it:

Israel’s enemies are or will soon be America’s enemies as well. They are emboldened every time they sense any sort of daylight between the United States and Israel.

It must be noted, in this context, that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are supporters of the “Free Gaza” movement. This exemplifies the radical roots of anti-Israel activism in the West. One of the forgotten details of the history of the Weather Underground is that, in their manifestos, Ayers and his terrorist buddies consistently expressed solidarity with the PLO:

SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE! U.S. OUT OF THE MIDEAST! END AID TO ISRAEL!

The Democratic Party is now dominated by the ideological soulmates of Sirhan Sirhan. Radicals like Ayers supported the PLO for the same reason they supported the Vietcong: Any enemy of America is a friend to those who hate America.

Bill Ayers doesn’t support Hamas because of any concern for the well-being of Palestinians, any more than Ayers supported the Black Panthers out of empathy for black people. Ayers hates America, and the violent extremists he supports are mere proxies for that fundamental hatred which is the essence of Ayers’ radicalism.

What is the purpose and effect of such radicalism? To undermine and weaken the United States. Marco Rubio nailed it:

In every incident, every pronouncement and every action related to Israel, enemies like Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah look for signs of weakness in America’s support as an invitation to undermine Israel and move one step closer to her destruction. The stronger the U.S.-Israel alliance, the stronger the moderate, pro-U.S. elements in the Arab world will be. If the U.S. shows itself to be an unreliable ally to Israel, moderate Arab states will take note that they cannot trust the U.S. to be a reliable friend for them either.

This goes back to my childhood memories of the Vietnam War. Back then, peaceniks were always whining about  corruption in the Saigon government and saying that the U.S. was propping up an undemocratic regime. Yet the insuperable argument for defending South Vietnam was that they were our ally, and for America to abandon an ally in time of crisis would be an open invitation for America’s enemies to attack our allies everywhere.

If America is not a reliable ally, soon America will have no allies.

Marco Rubio gets it. Read the rest of his speech.

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll — thanks!