Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1152 Editor's Choice: 107
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Not comparable
[Read the article: Kos vs. Rove: Who won the Newsweek primary?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kos is a blogger, not a political operative. Rove is a political operative, and so the two are just not comparable — nor, in the context of commentary on political campaigns, are they equal.
Bloggers are news nerds — they do research, collect data points, make value judgments about journalistic and quasi-journalistic pieces, and maybe, at their very best, they do good policy analysis.
Above all else, bloggers function in an essential reactive way. That's their outlook, their training, their entire mode of operation. And in that sense campaign strategists are the exact opposite — they make the news, not react to it. (At least, if they're any good.)
Rove wrote the script for the play in which Kos and the entire Greek chorus of the blogosphere are still performing. For Kos to ever win on Rove's turf will require more than just toughness — he will need to transform how he thinks and writes about politics.
Fortunately for Kos, he has a lot more imagination than Rove, who isn't nearly as bright as he's used to having people tell him he is. But Joan Walsh is right — in a sense the dichotomy between the two is a reflection of the larger dichotomy between Democratic and Republican political cultures. And we know which one has, until very recently, been winning.
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Anonymous on nobody saying anything
[Read the article: WayLay]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...Salon hasn't told us and nobody knows why they haven't...
Salon ran a new comic on Tuesday and ran Waylay in the old slot once occupied by the late lamented Dark Hotel. Their chronologically-ordered comics page links were rearranged accordingly.
If it helps, imagine a tiny red line that reads "Kansas O'Flaherty is our new Tuesday comic, and Waylay is moving to Friday." Ici n'est ce-pas un message.
What else? You want them to apologize for the inconvenience to your schedule? Seriously — what about this is hard to understand?
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Piracy normalized
[Read the article: Chinese pirates can't touch the Brits and the French]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And then, of course, there's the American-on-American piracy problem.
No kidding! There was even a software company out in Redmond, WA, that for years implicitly depended on piracy as a domestic distribution strategy for its operating system.
I wonder how they're doing in China, these days.