Category: Blog Post

It’s about George Bush. Here’s his comment today when told of the death of Schiavo.

“I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected,” the president said, “especially those who live at the mercy of others.

“The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.”

These preposterous words from the man who signed death warrants with gusto for juveniles, mentally handicapped and sincere penitents while governor of Texas. These from a man who presides over the torture to death or indeterminate imprisonment of people unlucky enough to be rounded up in Afganistan or Iraq. These from the man who blithely sends our soldiers to Iraq without body armor or armored vehicles. These from a man who manufactures evidence to precipitate a war.

Shame.

Our dear old friend Ana Marie Cox , aka Wonkette, has certainly had a hard time staying out of the limelight these past twelve months. As James Woolcott points out today, there are good reasons to worry for the welfare of the funny, smart, cute little pill in D.C.—a town where, we have to admit, someone with a real sense of humor stands out like teats on a boar.

Now the NY Daily News reports that Wonkette may be sniffing around Richard Leiby’s gossip-mongering beat at the Washington Post—this despite her declared preference for humor over reporting. We’ll take her word for it, but we know that Ms. Cox has considerably more staying power than her fleeting daily output of punchlines would suggest— her real strengths lie along editorial lines, both in story concepting and editing, but also oversight.

Now we’re not going to dwell too much on Q-Rating here, but she does seem to have the knack for somewhat less substantive media forms like TV punditry. Her metoric rise to the cover of the New York Times magazine occurred about the same time she stopped answering our emails, so we have no inside information here. But we can say it made us feel a little disappointed, knowing that she deserves to be writing in that magazine, rather than being glorified on its cover.

We may have the distinction of being the last print publication to publish a piece from her that exceeded the blogging threshold of about 150 words with twelve bullet points. As we say, we would not presume to make career decisions on her behalf, and they say you gotta dance with the one that brung you—so we may not see her get off the carousel of blogging conferences and panels anytime soon.

In the meantime, we’re happy to have her doppelganger firmly in place doing the things HE does best.

Last week, a landmark case was settled between freelance writers and some of the nation’s largest publishers. It was a long-running, complex case, but it basically came down to this: Freelance writers believed that electronic archives of their work—from articles on the web, to paid-access databases like Lexis-Nexis—amounted to republishing their work, without any additional compensation to them.

This probably would not be a big deal if there wasn’t a lot of money at stake. In other words, if the magazines and newspapers archived freelance articles and offered free access to them. That approach might be considered a brand of largesse something like the public library keeping back issues on hand, or in microfiche. But as soon as the Times, or AOL-Time Warner, or Lexis-Nexis tried to make money a second time (after buying first serial rights—the right to publish a piece first and once, exclusively), they crossed a line. Now, of course, they explicitly require writers to sign away these rights— and writers are free to negotiate in the event, or take their work elsewhere.

The problem, from a writer’s point of view, is the incredible imbalance in such a negotiation. You have to have some pretty big cajones to say no to the New York Times, when you are trying to make a living as a freelancer. It’s rather like telling your health insurer to go to hell when it informs you that your premium will be going up, please remember to pay promptly in the enclosed envelope, post office will not deliver without postage. We know from experience that any antagonism at all gives editors at prestigious publications the slimmest excuse they need to unofficially black-list a writer just as surely as if she blew a deadline or turned in a page of phone numbers.

Know why? Here’s a shocking figure that came out incidentally in the case: For the period in dispute, the New York Times used more than twenty-seven thousand freelancers to write more than one hundred thousand articles. (Doing some rough math, that averages fewer than four articles per freelancer, probably in the range of a couple hundred dollars per article. That is a number that will be crossing our lips for years to come whenever anyone asks us about the prestigious, romantic, lucrative world of freelance. Despite the fact that some winning freealncers in this lawsuit may receive a six-figure payoff, and despite the fact that this is a huge moral victory for writers everywhere, it is highly depressing to realize why so many editors are merely frustrated freelance writers.

Now, perhaps the next frontier will be the poor, indentured crossword writers at the Times–who are asked to sell all their rights forever for the price of a good dinner, while the Times republishes their puzzles at will and with impunity.

To anyone who has ever built a business, the logic of Bill Bradley’s op-ed piece in today’s NY Times is second nature. Build a strong base, add creative theorists, and hire great strategic sales people. From a strong organization, strong leaders will emerge. And such an organization will continue to grow and prosper.

I’ve always said the reason the Republicans continue to kick Demo butt on a regular basis is that Republicans take a purely business-like approach to politics. They’ve built an organization. They have the thinkers who can construct cogent arguments for their positions. And, they have great marketers who understand how to make their positions attractive to the mass market. If you have such an organization, the actual top leadership is often secondary–indeed, if the presidency of the current moron in chief tells us anything, it’s that anyone can be a leader when the only thing he has to do is sit at the top of the heap and take credit for the work of the organization.

Today, Bradley, one of the few people who seem to understand just what the Republicans have wrought, calls on Democrats to do the same thing. It will never happen though, because unlike the Republicans, Democrats have no patience. They’ll never have the “Emotional Intelligence” top business people possess in abundance. And that’s why they’re doomed.