Do people realize/remember just how few news outlets there were before the web, the narrowness of their concerns, and the inability of average people to talk back to the media barons? How difficult it was to get foreign news sources?

Most papers have always been crap, and, in smaller markets particularly, their crap dominated public discourse. Good riddance to their monopolies.

Particularly with the web, multiple cable channels, etc etc. I don't quite get the zero-sum logic that celebrity "news" is somehow antithetical to hard news. You can have both. We've actually always had both, but there is more room for both now.

I call bullshit on the notion that the NY Times and other hard-content news sources don't publish well-researched and relevant articles. Yes, there are Judith Millers and Jayson Blairs. But they are certainly not the whole story. I usually don't defend the snobby East-Coast-centric Times, but we will miss it when it's gone, and Salon will publish a eulogy about how its demise symbolizes the end of serious content. We need more Times-type vehicles to challenge its supremacy on discourse, not less.

It's hard to write good content. And content is expense relative to current revenue streams--both ads and subscriptions have tanked. Newspapers are tied to the expensive paper delivery model. But producing serious journalism is cheap compared to the total money available in the market place. Maybe the answer are third party endowments, private and, perhaps, public.

Look at Kindle and the like. They basically solve the delivery issues. They aren't ad-splattered. Bazillionaire Bezos, the gigaGooglionaires and the like should be able to throw together an insulated one-time endowment (run by someone else, someone newsy) to keep the substance coming. Hell, let's AIG-tax those Richy-Rich's and throw the money in a big pot.

I also liked Rainn Wilson, both B.O.B. and the alien's animation seems to come together with the voice characterizations. The others sounded more like actors in a sound booth.

The gollum eyes in these cartoony things are creepy.

that means me and my ilk can get back to worrying about fluff.

Seriously. Keep an eye on global warming while you're at it.

Cheers.

Jack

Waxman's blunt statement that the goal of cap and trade is to raise energy prices was deeply off-message for green groups, which have long insisted that energy efficiency and conservation would prevent energy prices from rising.

Waxman, the greenies, and the authors are confused by their limited notions of possible cap and trade systems. Niether the elitist Obama system's obsession with high-level economic actors, nor its initial auction (the part that resembles a tax) are necessary or desirable parts of a global-warming cap-and-trade system.

Much as the Paulson/Geithner plan to stimulate the economy failed because it was designed to protect the devious wealthy at the cost of true trickle-up stimulus, current cap and trade systems become sleight-of-hand transfers through high-level offsets and other easily corrupted mechanisms.

Here's what Waxman and the greenies should pitch to average Americans: If we initially raised your living costs $500 a year, but then increased your income by $500 or $700, would you be a net loser? If you then lowered your living costs by using less gas, but you still got to keep the cash, wouldn't that be sweet?

Start simple and low, quantify, and verify, verify, verify.

Oil consumption flows through a highly monitored and measured delivery system. Cap total national consumption. Divide buying rights equally among citizens. Give all consumers a) the right to buy their share of x gallons b) quantified credits to measure that right and c)a simple method to buy or sell the credits at the pump or online or on their cell.

Companies will have to buy oil credits from citizens in the market, and of course they will pass on that added cost through their products. But consumers will also recoup costs by selling their excess consumption rights. Both corporate users and consumers will have cash incentive to use less oil--corporate conservation means decreased production costs, and personal conservation means increased excess credits to sell. That drives better conservation choices.

The government, meanwhile, profits by taxing the trades. The government can spend the revenue on new technologies if it wants to do the right thing, or start another war if it doesn't.

Perhaps Romm meant this piece as a satire on the occasional self-righteous obliviousness of us environmental types. Whether or no, it made me laugh.

The pirates, like most working class Americans, have the most powerful people in the world arrayed against them. Like most Americans, they watch the powerful and wealthy cruise on by, living it up.

But unlike most Americans, the pirates motor out and get theirs.

The media has it wrong. These pirates, with their written rules and business-like deal-making and relatively tiny fire-power, look like freaking heros compared to the corrupt and heavily-armed Geithners and Summers and congressmen and bankers and AIG execs that we're told to revere.

Who would you choose to walk the plank? Some skinny teenage Somali?

Arrgh.

This week elite pundits from Reich to Broder have boasted of Obama's successes.

As if.

Where is the people's stimulus?

Just so we get the rules:

If you're an impoverished teenager and demand ransom, Obama will order you shot. Or maybe just tortured-in-good-faith.

But if you're a wealthy exec and demand ransom, Obama will take money from poorer children to make sure you can continue your lavish lifestyle.

These pirates have been going at this nasty ransom stuff for years now. Why start shooting them just when it appears that Obama's economic bailout-payoff scheme has failed?

If the Obama administration is so interested in law and order, why doesn't our AG go after those folks living just a few miles away from him, who tortured people against both US and international law?

Maybe the pirates could claim they "robbed and kidnapped in good faith" and we would leave them alone.