Saturday, January 15, 2005

Wake-Carolina. The better team won. Unfortunately, we were rooting for the Tar Heels. Told the kids to save their tears for the post-season, this was one game in January, one to learn from, and then move on. Told self: dammit. Who goes 32 of 32 from the line in an ACC game? Until Wake did it today, nobody. 6:01:26 PM    comment []

Instapundit and Captain's Quarters are both sticking up for the bloggers wronged in the trumped-up Dean blogger flap. CQ: "As much as I dislike Kos (and I do), I have no real beef with him on this score." Big media just couldn't wait to get this one wrong. Digby: "Bloggers aren't whores, they're partisans. It's a huge difference." Well, some bloggers are probably whores, don you think? The Thune guys, for example. And isn't that pretty much Armstrong Williams' argument, anyway, that if you believe in something it's OK to get paid to shill for it? None of which makes the misguided attacks on Kos and Jerome Armstrong right. 11:56:12 AM    comment []

Dan Gillmor had breakfast with some money men who are interested in grassroots journalism. Said Dan, "we need sustainable businesses in this arena, not get-rich-quick schemes like the ones that pervaded the Internet bubble days." Amen. 9:55:19 AM    comment []

Bill O'Reilly and Hugh Hewitt swap lies about the Dean campaign and the bloggers Zephyr Teachout says it tried to influence. Hewitt: ...Daily Kos shows up on the take of the Howard Dean campaign. Daily Kos says, this is one of the bloggers from the left, says he disclosed it, but not to the satisfaction of anyone who watches him. I didn't know." O'Reilly: Aw, this is bunk. This is bull. Nobody knew about this. Hewitt: That's right. O'Reilly: "She's admitting she paid these two guys, all right, $3,000 a month, and they just threw nice stuff about Dean." But that's not what Zephyr said. She said the campaign paid for consulting services hoping the bloggers would write nice things about Dean, NOT that it was a clear quid pro quo, much less that the bloggers "just threw nice stuff about Dean" for the money. Jerome Armstrong wasn't even blogging at the time, and Kos, despite the claims of Hewitt and O'Reilly, disclosed his connection with the campaign. I expect this kind of crap from ego-besotted sexual-harasser Murdoch employee O'Reilly, but doesn't Hewitt sell himself as some kind of honest blogger? Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis gets it right: "Kos and MyDD didn't do anything wrong (one put up a disclosure, the other stopped blogging)...The points that Zephyr raises about our opportunity to define our culture and how the expectations of our public are what interest me." And over at Kos, they're wondering how the WSJ found out about this story in the first place, and they manage to trace it to my link to Zephyr and links from Instapundit and Jarvis. But they miss the first step: I read it on the Harvard conference blog. Jerome Armstrong really got smeared by this whole thing, and he's pissed. I should have been clearer on his role in my original link to Zephyr's post, and I apologize for not doing it right. 9:39:16 AM    comment []