"People don't read newspapers. Newspapers don't make money because people don't buy their classified ads. End of story."

This sentiment (which seems to be taken as gospel in certain quarters) seems to me to be just plain wrong. Yes, the business model of selling printed broadsheets, and generating revenue through those sales and the sales of advertising is no longer viable. This does not mean however that the accumulation of information is not a commodity that has a value, or that the desire for it has decreased. In fact, given the speed with which the world moves, the demand for timley, accurate information has only increased.

So what’s the alternative? New pricing models based on internet subscriptions, consolidation in certain markets, purchase by one of the large newspaper companies of a wire service. The ways you can make money from timely information is limitless. Anyone who pays for a Bloomberg box can tell you that.

I’ll also note that blogosphere is based on a false premise: that information can be had for free, and that it may be used to substantiate analysis and criticism without cost. If they had to pay for it, then what? How many blogs would be self sustaining if the information used to underpin their work was priced to reflect how much it cost to acquire? Would it still be free to read the trenchant musings of those sitting at Starbucks, or would they have to start charging? If the marginal cost to produce a blog went up, how many would survive?

The newspaper organization that realizes that all it has to do is turn off the spigot is going to be the one that make it in the long haul. The WSJ was smart enough to realize this years ago, and everyone else needs to play catch up.

I don't even know if this is a discussion about people paying for "quality" so much as it is about charging people for the cost of assembling information. Granting that aggregators and RSS streams don't fall from the sky, someone still has to pull that information together. That has a cost.

I'll be the first to admit that the newspapers were very short sighted for giving away the content online in hopes that it would sell broadsheets. Now that they have realized that online adds won't substitute for print, they have to fight from having their content taken away. I know that AP has started a new initiative to fight unauthorized distribution of their content. I think others will soon follow this path.

Inquisition? Hell, the Spanish are just getting around to prosecuting war crimes from the Spanish Civil War. Good that they got it in under the 75 year mark. Funny how they [just like us] move a lot quicker when they get to point the dirty end of the stick at someone else.

Not that this excuses torture conducted under the Bush administration. It does, however, highlight the political difficulty in such prosecutions when political tension exists.

“Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States”

By my count, that’s words derived from Latin, Old French, Middle French, Old French again, plus a name originally used in the 17th century to refer to the Netherlands.

What an ass hat.

“Tu quoque (from Latin for "You, too" or "You, also") is a Latin term that describes a kind of logical fallacy. A tu quoque argument attempts to discredit the opponent's position by asserting his failure to act consistently in accordance with that position; it attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. It is considered an ad hominem argument, since it focuses on the party itself, rather than its positions.” (from Wikipedia)

Sure, it’s a big laugh riot that the Post hasn’t penned an editorial demanding the same from our elected officials. But you would never suggest that our failings as a nation and the failings of the media to highlight or demand the same level of accountability from our elected officials on issues of torture and human rights abuses diminish the evil of the Iranian regime engaging in torture and human rights abuses, would you?

Deficit reduction can be produced in two ways. It can either be brought about through reductions in spending, or it can be produced through tax increases. A few tweaks to the capital gains and top marginal income rate (essentially undoing to Bush tax cuts) would go a long way to reducing the current account deficit and the long term structural deficit.

I see no reasons why – particularly with the signals that Bernanke has been sending – that we couldn’t see this approach.