To no one’s surprise the “temporary” Village Voice Media suspension of cartoons continues indefinitely. I haven’t been contacted myself, but one of my colleagues got this email:
I had said we would review syndicated cartoons after the first quarter, so wanted to get back to you.
Sadly, the results were disappointing, so we’re going to have to extend our moratorium on syndicated cartoons for at least another quarter.
Wish I had better news. I hope we can resume our relationship when things finally turn around.
Possibly the funniest thing I have ever read on the internets
The Huffington Post, Daily Kos and other left-leaning sites benefit from the right’s belief that there are rules and decorum in political debate and civic engagement.
Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another’s businesses…
“Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”
The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system.
Thank God this Summers guy no longer has any power over American economic policy.
David Carr on the Austin Chronicle, and why it is holding its own in these difficult times:
Part of the reason may have to do with price (free) but there is something else afoot. The Chronicle is knit into civic and cultural life in Austin to a degree that may make other newspapers nervous. While other regional news outlets do house ads and commercials about their connection to the community, The Chronicle started the South by Southwest conference, its founders have helped finance local filmmakers, and when you step off the airplane and see a huge bookstore branded with The Chronicle’s name, it’s clear that the weekly plays big for its size.
Louis Black, The Chronicle’s editor and founder — along with Nick Barbaro, the paper’s publisher — does not want to tempt the angry media gods. A very conservative person in some regards, he points out that the business has lived on cash flow since the outset and never has taken on any significant debt or partners. They own The Chronicle’s building and the building where the festival is set up.
The festival was founded by Mr. Barbaro and Mr. Black, along with their friend Roland Swenson, back in 1987, which, come to think of it, is just about the time that the newspaper took off as well. After taking a big hit from Craigslist — “let’s just say that the unlicensed massage category suffered significantly,” Mr. Black said — the newspaper has been stable and healthy.
It’s best not to generalize too much about a newspaper that covers a city whose unofficial battle cry is “Keep Austin Weird,” but there is a palpable connection to The Chronicle here. Many people will also point out that Austin is a notoriously liberal, literate place, but that hasn’t done a lot for The Austin American-Statesman, which, like so many other daily papers, is in decline and up for sale.
“They are a big part of the story here and always have been,” said Frank Hendrix, who owns Emo’s, a club here, and was overseeing three stages during the festival.
A friend at the Yale Project on Climate Change forwards the results of a survey they conducted prior to the 2008 elections, trying to determine who is listening to and/or watching O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Hannity, as well as Olbermann, Stewart and Colbert. Short answer: a disproportionately small percentage of the population.
The very last of the magnets go out today, and that’s probably the end of that for awhile, due to another project moving on to the front burner. My industry is dying and my career’s in meltdown, but I’m very busy! Anyway, as I’ve said numerous times, it’s a foregone conclusion that a few orders will get screwed up — just email me if you have a problem and we’ll sort it out.
Also: this project I’m taking on is likely to keep me pretty busy for most of the next month or so, which means that updates to the blog will be even less frequent than usual.
SEATTLE — The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will produce its last printed edition on Tuesday and become an Internet-only news source, the Hearst Corporation said on Monday, making it by far the largest American newspaper to take that leap.
But The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting.
But I did not expect this cartoon to start coming true quite so quickly (or so literally). I mean, we’re not even wearing those funky triangular tunics yet!
HERSH: Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us. It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized. In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
