That Obama is recycling his campaign speeches and pretending that's a smart way to govern?
That it's time to recycle DC, and throw all the bums out?
That I'm learning how to play with layers, and went a bit overboard?
Almost forgot to link a post elsewhere about the NYT photo that this is a play on. Two weeks from now, no one will remember that stupid cross photo, so I'll post a copy below, and a link to the article that was illustrated by it (and is often the case, if something ends up being controversial, it disappears down the memory hole, the article no longer has a photo connected to it at NYT website)
The NYT should adopt the time-tested marketing approach so often employed by drug dealers, 'the first taste is always free'.
TimeSelect was an unmitigated disaster that hurt the brand and lessened the influence its Op-Ed staff have outside of their little Manhattan cocktail circles. Thankfully, they've ended that sad experiment (but the damage to their talent remains), but they're sitting on another potential disaster if they don't do something about it.
Prof. Althouse has started a new project, with a lot of potential, but only if the NYT gets wise. She's blogging the past as if there were blogs back then, taking a random year, and blogging the events of that date as covered in the NYT. Its an interesting concept and would foster interesting conversations, but only if everyone can see the articles she's linking to. Right now, .edu customers get 100 articles per month free, and NYT subscribers get unlimited access to the basic archive, but for everyone else, there's only a link telling you to shell out $3.95 to have a little peek at a musty old article from decades ago (1851-1922 are available, and since 1987, but 1923-1986 will cost you). I don't think too many people are going to be doing that.
So what would a drug dealer do?
He'd (or she'd) give out a taste for free, of course. Get people hooked on the idea that there's fascinating stuff to be mined by seeing the past as it was seen contempraneously. If I were working at the NYT I'd find a way to either bring Althouse's THE TIME THAT BLOG FORGOT directly in with all the other NYT blogs, or at least point to the posts each day. She's written Op-Eds for them, so they've had a working relationship in the past, but this project has started out as a freelance project that she's doing just as an interesting challenge and a new way to look at things (plus its a good excuse to put up that gorgeous picture of her younger self). Besides bringing the blog directly under the NYT (but don't get heavy-handed and exert any editorial control, or I suspect the good Professor would balk), the other brilliant thing to do would be to make access to the articles she links each day absolutely free to any and everybody.
Shouldn't be that hard to do that without creating a backdoor to sneak into the rest of the archive, and as people get curious about the way the past looked when it was the present, they might be compelled to start finding articles of personal interest and go ahead and splurge on the $14.95 a month (or $169 annually) for access to TimesReader (which also gives access to the archives), or even better for them, might spur people to actually subscribe to the dead tree edition (which also grants access to the archive, here in the 90404 area code it's $25 a month for home delivery).
They have a choice, be smart and act like a drug dealer, or be dumb and act like a music executive (and we all know how well holding the line against MP3s and file sharing went in that industry).
Which will it be Grey Lady?
AND . . .
(just cause it was playing in my head while thinking of this analogy, but come on NYT be 'my man' and give me a 'sweet taste')
There will be many people who see that article as the gospel truth, but their truth is purely 'faith based'. Let just an ounce of reality infect their thinking, and they'd see the lies before their eyes, but that would inconvenience their narrative, so the illusion will persist.
Hopefully, the internet helps prevent these false 'truths' from becoming the accepted truth, the way it was regarding Vietnam vets.
William Kristol's first column for the NYT is full of praise and admiration for Gov. Mike Huckabee.
My first reaction is Where's The Feet?!?
My second reaction is, guess he wants people to talk to him at NYT soirees.
My third reaction is that maybe he's making the case that the GOP shouldn't fear a Huckabee nomination so that the Dems will fear him, and the liberal press will begin ripping into him before the primaries are over.
It's not just a head-fake, its a triple fake-out, he's pretending to like an unlikeable candidate, so that liberals think that conservatives might actually like this guy, and by doing so he hastens the attacks on Huckabee that will help change the nature of the primaries so that there is no chance of actually having a Huckabee nomination (which would be just as big of a disaster as liberals would hope it would be).
I'm not a huge William Kristol fan, though I do like the Weekly Standard, he's my least favorite writer there, I prefer a more direct Fred Barnes type. The gnashing of teeth and wailing over his new gig at NYT has been amazing and instructive, though.
It's quite possible that he's loony enough to think a Huckabee presidency is likely to happen, and that it would be good for conservatives. It's not likely, and his conservative Christian tinged populism would be disastrous (not as disastrous as Obama's liberal Christian tinged populism, though).
First off, when interpreting the thou shalt nots of the Ten Commandments, this always seems to be a popular one with certain folks who dislike certain Christian groups. Matt Richtel uses that line as a cute hook for his article, ignoring that this admonition applies to all the Abrahamic faiths as they all consider Moses a prophet.
That's never stopped Jews, Christians, or Muslims from "killing". Clearly the intent, and the more appropriate translation from the original Hebrew commandment into English should have been "thou shalt not murder with criminal intent". I don't ever recall a pacifist movement within the Jewish faith (before WWI), but I'm not a scholar in that area, so maybe there has been a movement sometimes in the past 3700+ years since the Ten Commandments have been followed that there have been Jews that extended the admonition against taking a life to not only include murder for personal reasons, or wrath, or jealousy, but even in self-defense, or to defend your faith and your country (and in the case of Halo 3, the very existence of the human race). Moses "kills" in the bible, yet God doesn't get down on him, cause clearly the commandment isn't an absolute ban on all taking of life, in all circumstances. When googling "Jewish pacifist" it seems pretty clear that this concept didn't exist until the 20th century.
It's a popular slam against Christians, to call them hypocrites for being pro-defense, but anti-abortion, or pro-death penalty (not to say Catholics are wrong to suggest scripture supports their anti-death penalty stance, but Christians who support the taking of non-innocent criminal life have plenty of scriptural support as well) and this NYT headline is yet another example of this anti-Christian prejudice. Seems if there was ever a "Just Cause" for war, and for killing, the preservation of the entire human race against a horde of space aliens (on a religious crusade of their own) ought to be a cause that God (as interpreted by just about any faith) would be on board with.
Matt Richtel, the San Francisco based tech issues reporter for the NYT, sounds clueless about Halo and Christianity in this article, but that's to be expected. This article is meant to be consumed by liberals so they can feel superior to those hypocritical pastors who push their faith by pimping violent video games. And the article is a broad side at teen boys, who will go any where, and listen to anything to play their violent video games.
(and did I include his homebase of operation as an insult or a statement of fact?)
. . . but the NYT exceeded my capacity for ridicule (and that takes some doing as I have a capacious capacitor for ridicule), and as my circuits were overloaded, I was incapable of coming up with anything.
