George Rebane

It turns out we really can have two Presidents at a time.  As President-elect Obama was holding his next news conference and giving a “very important speech” exhorting Congress to pass his economic stimulus package (more on that insanity below) before he gets sworn in, the BBC World observed sagely that “Obama knows the meaning of audacity.”

[update 9jan09 – “It was a remarkable speech for someone who isn’t president yet and hasn’t revealed the details of his economic rescue plan,” ABC’s Jake Tapper reports. “The most pointed criticism of the plan came from Democrats who objected to Obama’s plans to cut taxes for businesses and for middle class families.”]

Leading economists from both sides of the political spectrum now publicly agree that last spring’s stimulus package, during which we all received our checks from the government, didn’t work.  And moreover, such checks to the consumers don’t do anything to help end the financial crisis, but do help us along the road to hyper-inflation.  Nevertheless, the sheep do understand money in hand, and while not spending immediately, they will vote accordingly.  So politics again trumps prudence.  It’s hard to decide whether these politicians are evil or just idiots.

Most “persons of information” – a delightful and apropos early 19th century descriptor – are aware that the journalism and news reporting industry is undergoing a massive change in its structure, delivery of its product, and credibility of its content.  A local media professional sent me this report in which the author makes a case for dying newspapers to just quit flogging their dead pulp editions.  And George Friedman of Stratfor re-examines the Watergate affair (‘The Death of Deep Throat and the Crisis of Journalism’), and a side of the story that journalists have either buried or failed to understand.  The Watergate saga had an equally significant side in what the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the dynamic duo of Bernstein and Woodward chose not to reveal about Deep Throat who turned out to be the recently departed Mark Felt, operational head of the FBI at the time and a disgruntled government employee.  The bottom line here is that at the highest and most prestigious levels of an industry that loves to trot out its ‘code of ethics’ at the drop of a hat, a higher value was placed on protecting a juicy source than revealing that a sinister attack was being waged against the Presidency by one of its own agencies.  In short, the Washington Post was “burying a story to get a story”.

[update 9jan09] Seattle Post-Intelligencer is put up for sale – “Hearst Corp. put Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, up for sale on Friday and said that if it can’t find a buyer in the next 60 days the paper would likely close or continue to exist only online.”