Atrios Blog

In case you forgot or never noticed, Drinking Liberally Center City edition happens every Tuesday, 6-?, at Tangier at 18th and Lombard.


A new Fishtown edition happens Mondays at 6 at Johnny Brenda's.

Or, for those not local find a chapter near you...

Daryn and Rush no longer sitting in a tree:

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS First the bad news: I hear that right-wing radio guy Rush Limbaugh and CNN daytime anchor Daryn Kagan — who've been dating for nearly two years — are finally kaput. The good news, of course, is that the fabulous Kagan is back on the market.

Early in my teaching career email was a great way for students to communicate with you. Though as email usage became more and more commonplace it did indeed become downright bizarre what students felt free to express in emails, as did the frequent demand for immediate responses.


Note to all college students: I certainly never expected my ass to be kissed as a professor, and in fact was quite happy for students to not give me great deference, but you win nothing by being an asshole.

Always project. Always.

Congratulations, Republicans. If you or your wives are going to be permanently and seriously disabled due to pregnancy complications there will soon be nothing your doctor can do about it.

But I always enjoy a little New Republic bashing.

(via delong)

Matt Stoller on Beltway thinking.

When the Club for Growth pushed Toomey over Specter in the Pennsylvania primary I don't remember anyone treating them as naive outsiders. Sure there was talk that Toomey would have a harder time winning the primary, but there wasn't this tut-tutting of their stupidity. A lot of money was spent, both by Specter (especially) and Toomey, and Toomey almost won.

I got nothing, but I can promise you that I'm not going to shoot anybody in the face today.

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

If the Kitty Kevorkian thinks that six months from now seniors are going to really love them some Bush/DeLay Medicare Drug scam then he's an even bigger idiot than I thought. Starting in a few months more and more seniors are going to enter donut hole territory, where they have to pay full price for their expensive meds.

Going to be a lot of angry seniors.

Kos is exactly right here:

A thought -- "acting locally" includes blogging your local races. I will be depending on local bloggers (like Say No To Pombo) to keep me informed of some of the hottest races. I'm not interested in doing candidate interviews, but I'll link to such interviews in local blogs. Every congressional candidate, in their press page, should include a healthy dose of blogger articles on their races. Not only does it help us national bloggers when researching a candidate, but it also demonstrates to the local press that the candidate is generating a lot of local buzz. And while us bloggers are (relatively) poor at generating money, we are great at generating buzz.

I know this will take a few cycles to change, but campaigns are still too reliant on the local newspaper article to get their word out when there should be many local activists, on their blogs, willing and able to spread the word and help bypass the media filters that shut out many challengers. Is it a guaranteed path to true legitimate contender status? Nope. That still takes a lot of other things (like money). But it's going to be an increasingly integral part of any campaign's arsenal.

I realize that most districts probably don't have aggressive bloggers writing about their local political scene. But that's something campaigns can help jump start. They should encourage local activists to head over to Blogspot and set up their free site and start writing about the race. I'm not saying create astroturf sites, I'm saying let people know what this blogging thing is and encourage them to start their own sites.

I really am dreading the coming presidential primary season, even aside from the fact that it ushers in the the Extreme Silly Season in American journalism. While in 2003-4 various competing online camps managed (barely) to avoid all out nuclear war with each other over who should win I don't expect that to happen next time. Everyone knows their favorite candidate is the only one who can win, everyone knows their candidate is the one true future of the nation. I see how people are tearing at each other over a Senate primary in Ohio and really don't look forward to what is next...

Glenn Greenwald runs down the latest on the domestic spying scandal. I think last week we got an attempted Rove gambit, aided by a gullible press. You know, Rove's usual "declare victory and go home" attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It doesn't quite appear to be working. We'll see...

The CT edition of the New York Times did a piece on Ned Lamont. He's a pretty interesting guy.

In any case, if Lamont manages to take the right steps to make clear he's running a real campaign early enough my guess is he'll be able to raise a million online between now and August when the primary is.

Sadly I didn't have a chance to see the performance when it came to town as I was on a plane to Europe that evening, but "Tristero's" Voices of Light is quite good. I don't really have an expert ear for choral music, so don't consider my opinion informed, but still I know what I likes.

NBC:

Fans immediately began putting copies of the video online. On one free video-sharing site, YouTube (www.youtube.com), it was watched a total of five million times . NBC soon made the video available as a free download from the Apple iTunes Music Store.

Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, said she contacted NBC Universal about working out a deal to feature NBC clips, including "Lazy Sunday," on the site. NBC Universal responded early this month with a notice asking YouTube to remove about 500 clips of NBC material from its site or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. YouTube complied last week. "Lazy Sunday" is still available for free viewing on NBC's Web site, and costs $1.99 on iTunes.

Julie Summersgill, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal, said the company meant no ill will toward fan sites but wanted to protect its copyrights. "We're taking a long and careful look at how to protect our content," she said.

YouTube and others in the new wave of video-sharing sites have so far managed to avoid major legal problems even though they often carry copyrighted material without permission.

NBC's almost certainly right on their rights under copyright law as I understand it and purely from that perspective what they're doing makes sense. But it reminds me of back in the good old days of the internet when entertainment companies thought they could make money by offering exclusive content deals to the dinosaur "walled gardens" like AOL and MSN and then started going after amateur fan sites for putting up a .jpg of Jean-Luc Picard. Again, within their rights, but going after your fans never seems like an especially good idea especially when they're essentially offering free marketing for your product, the kind of "free marketing" these companies spend lots of money getting advertising consultants to tell them how to get.

Obviously this is a somewhat different situation. Sites like youtube try to get money from advertising revenue and as such are, technically, earning revenue from NBC's product. Still it's hard to see how this is a sensible business decision. Unlike trademark, copyright doesn't have to be aggressively defended in order to maintain it. A company can approach these things on a case by case basis and it's pretty hard to see how imagined lost revenue for NBC isn't outweighed by the marketing benefit for SNL.

As with file sharing the right business question isn't "is someone getting music for free" the right business question is "does this really cause us to, in the net, lose revenue if we adapt our business model to the new reality." Free songs, free videos, they're all marketing techniques. Of course, giving out free songs and videos isn't exactly a new idea, it's what radio and MTV (when it still played videos) have been doing for quite some time...

From Jane Smiley.

Not exactly job 1.

WASHINGTON — For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.

Someday, it might actually meet.

Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.

More than a year later, it exists only on paper.

The president has the right to spy on whoever he wants whenever he wants and if you disagree Dick Cheney might shoot you in the face.

I know everyone will say something along these lines, but every time they're on they seem to cover less of the actual sports and more chit chat about the "human drama" or some such nonsense. Especially since the olympics largely involves sports people mostly don't watch at other times, over time that erodes interest in the actual, you know sport, and fewer people bother to watch the next time around.


Maybe it's just a faulty memory but as a kid I remember sitting there watching things like endless downhill ski runs as they ran a lot of live coverage.