Conservative wistfulness over Obama

At Human Events, D.R. Tucker posts a thoughtful reaction to my Guardian commentary on conservatives who are willing to give President Obama a chance.

Tucker detects wistfulness on the part of conservatives who wonder how things might have turned out differently if the Republican Party hadn’t spent two generations driving away African-American voters. He writes:

Obama and other post-civil-rights-movement black leaders came of age in a time when they were told, in ways direct and subtle, that the GOP wasn’t really interested in them. Perhaps if the GOP had attempted to attract black support in those days, charismatic and gifted figures like Obama would have become conservative Republicans instead of liberal Democrats.

There’s a missing ingredient here. The Republican flight from empiricism, embodied in such divisive figures as Sarah Palin and George W. Bush himself, has at least as much to do as race when it comes to the GOP’s failure to attract people who like their politics reality-based.

But there’s no doubt that the Republicans have finally shrunk their tent to such an extent that it can no longer hold a majority — at least not as presently constituted.

Gaddafi to Israel: Drop dead

In the endlessly depressing category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” the New York Times today runs an op-ed by erstwhile Boston Globe columnist Muammar Gaddafi, the terrorist-coddling, human rights-abusing dictator of Libya.

Gaddafi has a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: wipe Israel off the map. Funny, but I somehow knew he was going to say that.

The Globe’s Kevin Cullen weighs in usefully on Gaddafi today, and Universal Hub wraps up the whole miserable affair.

Note: Gaddafi, Qaddafi and Khadafy are all the same person. I’m going with Gaddafi because that’s how the Globe recently spelled it.

Why Caroline Kennedy dropped out

Looks like the truth is starting to come out about Caroline Kennedy’s now-ended bid for the Senate. The New York Post reports that Gov. David Paterson is letting it be known through an unnamed spokesman that he never intended to choose her. Among other things, it appears that she may have tax and nanny problems.

The New York Times is catching up, but according to the Politico’s Glenn Thrush, the Post is “lead sled dog on the Caroline exit fiasco.” No gold star for the Post, though, as it adds some entirely unsupported sleaze to the mix.

The future of the Christian Science Monitor

Sometime this April the Christian Science Monitor, one of our most venerable daily newspapers, will cease to be a daily newspaper. Instead, the Monitor will embrace a Web-first strategy, providing news and analysis online on a round-the-clock basis and unveiling a weekly print magazine.

In my latest media feature for CommonWealth Magazine, I interview Monitor editor John Yemma about the transition, what it means for the future of Monitor journalism and how we all might learn from this experiment.

More on the Times Co.’s answer to GateHouse

Blogging at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Zachary Seward takes a deeper look at what I wrote about earlier this week — that the New York Times Co., in its answer to GateHouse Media’s copyright-infringement suit, is alleging similar linking practices by GateHouse, served up with large dollops of hypocrisy and track-covering on GateHouse’s part. (If you’ve just arrived, here’s my best attempt at summarizing the case.)

Seward quotes from an internal e-mail by Howard Owens, GateHouse’s director of digital publishing, in which Owens seems to condone the very linking practices over which GateHouse is now suing the Times Co.

Does this help bolster the Times Co.’s case? Perhaps. What’s missing, though, is any sense of context. What the Times Co. is trying to do with its Boston.com Your Town sites is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the way that those sites scoop up every GateHouse Wicked Local link of value on a community-by-community basis.

As I’ve tried to make clear from the beginning, I’m not taking sides. I’m just trying to show why this isn’t just a typical case of one news site linking to another.

Also worth checking out is this interview with David Ardia, head of the Citizen Media Law Project, which has compiled a useful dossier on the case.

Accurate, but almost certainly not true

If the New York Times doesn’t want to run with something it can’t confirm, I’ve got no problem with that. Still, it’s a little unsettling to see the paper go with the patently ludicrous explanation from “a person told of her decision” that Caroline Kennedy is dropping out of the running for the U.S. Senate because of Ted Kennedy’s illness.

The New York Post, citing anonymous sources, reports that Kennedy withdrew after she learned that New York Gov. David Paterson wasn’t going to pick her.

Ted Kennedy has been fighting terminal brain cancer for months. His seizure yesterday, while scary, changes nothing.

It’s been obvious for some time now that Caroline Kennedy wasn’t going to the Senate. I guess her uncle’s health problems gave her a graceful exit. But that doesn’t mean the Times has to play along.

Obama for sale

The newspaper business may be hurting, but Barack Obama — whether he realizes it or not — is doing what he can to help.

The latest paper to cash in on Obama’s popularity is the Boston Herald. According to a newsroom source, the paper has published an ad-free, 32-page color magazine called “Boston Celebrates President Obama,” which will cost $2.99 when it hits newsstands tomorrow. Overseen by city editor Jennifer Miller, the magazine will include contributions by everyone from Keith Lockhart to Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of NPR’s “Car Talk.”

The Boston Globe, meanwhile, printed 65,000 copies of an eight-page extra on Tuesday afternoon, following Obama’s swearing-in. The Los Angeles Times and several other papers did the same, and those that didn’t printed more copies of today’s paper than usual.

The New York Times is being unusually aggressive. I managed to scarf a couple of copies on Election Day, visions of eventual eBay riches dancing in my head. Yet the Times is still selling copies of that day’s paper, and has now added today’s edition, along with a lapel pin and a photo. So much for the three copies I scored in Danvers Square at 5:30 this morning.

Maybe I should invest in those Obama coins that Montel Williams is pushing? Uh, I think not.

Obama and the right

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that President Obama’s inaugural address succeeded in separating serious conservatives like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan from right-wing loons like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin. It’s not really about getting conservative support so much as it is expanding the field on which he needs to govern.