FatMixx has just earned $100 in one month (first time ever). That’s more revenue than a lot of these Web 2.0 startups. Anyone want to buy FatMixx for a few million bucks?

Brace yourselves. As the Democrats get closer to taking Congress, the Republicans are rearming and reactivating their 90’s attack machine. There will be attacks and smears often created whole cloth from nothing. Thankfully, Congress won’t spend millions investigating these rumors, but it’s going to be annoying and ugly. Left-wing blogs call this the “Clinton rules of journalism.” Republicans and their operatives spent years just throwing imagined misdeeds and overblown garbage at the wall. Eventually, they got one to stick, and it gave them a shot at the 2000 election.

Nancy Pelosi gets the pleasure of being the next Bill Clinton, it seems. So far, I count three imagined storylines and scandals that Republicans have tried to push. They’re clearly trying to build a storyline around Pelosi, attempting to undermine her ability to govern before she’s even taken the job. So far nothing is sticking, but then nothing has involved sex or money. First, there was the whole Hoyer/Murtha silliness. Then we’ve had the fun and slowly ending Hastings/Harman faux controversy. Neither story was sexy, but were part of this story building: can Pelosi lead? They’ve tried silly traditional political attacks, but so far they’ve been easily debunked.

It is ridiculous that this is what we spend so much time on these days. Fake scandals and personal attacks instead of meaningful reporting and debate. We should want more. We need more. We also can ask for more. Local news offered less than 2 minutes worth of coverage to election news each night. That’s awful.

I wish I could think of a way to bring together the best political reporting around the web and put it together in a compelling and consumable format. Aggregation is what people need, the filter to help them find the stories they should focus on. None of the automated solutions seem to work all that well. Memeorandum is the closest I’ve seen and even that isn’t really right.

You may have heard the “big” news today: NBC is now calling the situation in Iraq a “civil war.” This is apparently big news. Of course, not everyone is doing so. The Washington Post isn’t calling it a civil war, for example. The reason they’re not? They say it’s because the Iraqi gov’t doesn’t use the term.

NBC said more or less the same thing this morning when they announced their change in policy, claiming that the White House’s reluctance to call it a civil war was a key reason they hesitated to make the change. I get that, but at the same time, I’m confused why it matters.

At some point we’ve become a press and a society that requires the government stamp on things to make them “true” or “real.” I’m not really sure why this is, as we should be able to look at something and call it what it is. If a news organization feels like the situation in Iraq has become a civil war, why does it matter that the White House doesn’t endorse that view?

It’s just weird to me. I don’t need them to simply repeat what the White House says, but to provide an intelligent analysis and reporting on top of whatever the government is saying. Highlighting meaningful contradictions between official policy/pronouncements and what their own reporting is saying is pretty much their core function, isn’t it?

Of course, I think it’s telling that the only two articles on MSNBC.com (the web site for the Today Show and NBC News, not just MSNBC) about this new policy from NBC are from Reuters. After all, how much original reporting actually happens in ABC, NBC, or CBS these days?

Update: This isn’t to say that there isn’t something worth debating in whether it’s a civil war or not. More on the subtleties of the debate at TPM. For what it’s worth, I’m with Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: This is a civil war, albeit an unconventional one.

I linked to a video yesterday that described the level of violence in Iraq. Atrios and Hilzoy both link to this video from CNN where reporter Michael Ware describes what he’s seeing in Baghdad and why there’s no choice but to call it a civil war.

He doesn’t mince words, does he?

I was working on some tweaks to a small research project here and made this handy little chart of blog posts that link to content at ESPN.com. It’s not a perfect tool, as it only captures links to stories on our major properties, but it gives a rough idea of the size of the sports blog universe as captured by Technorati. The data was captured using their developer API.

As you can see, there was a gap in data processing recently (hence the fact that I’m looking at this). I’m planning on exposing some of this data on the site. I think it’s a curiosity, more than anything else, but I’ve found some good blogs this way.

No, not a regular feature, but Atrios has some good videos linked up and I wanted to show all of you.

Here they are. The first is a video about some weird video doctoring on the White House web site:

The other video is from CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz. After starting out with the typical “the troops resent the media coverage,” Kurtz talks to CNN’s John Roberts who just came back from Iraq. Roberts provides a different perspective, where the violence is worse than what we see or appreciate via U.S. media coverage. I recommend that you watch the foreign press now and again. You’ll be surprised at the differences in tone and quality of coverage.

Enjoy.

Update: The first video is wrong. It’s a black box that’s inserted by the captioning software. The explanation of why it was considered doctored didn’t sound all that likely, but I didn’t know enough to say so. It’s why I left it with little commentary.

Atrios and Matt Stoler at MyDD both point to this Editor & Publisher article about Thomas Edsall, author of Building Red America and new columnist at the New York Times. Edsall’s column for this week seemed a little detached from reality. From E&P:

So what does he do on Saturday? He offers advice to the Democrats on how they can avoid certain disaster for the party and stop trudging along as “No.2.” He also states that liberalism is “dead” and “rigor mortis” will soon set in, and the party as a whole must undergo a “painful transformation.” This comes on the heels of the Democrats’ electoral triumph, and it comes from a man who in his recent book was prescient enough to write, “The Republican Party holds a set of advantages, some substantial and some marginal,” meaning that “the odds are that the Republican Party will continue to maintain, over the long run, a thin but durable margin of victory.”

Whoops.

Talk about bad timing. Just weeks after the release of Edsall’s book, the GOP lost that predicted edge in the House, the Senate, statehouses around the country, and governorships. It’s amazing they still kept their majority at FoxNews.

…

Edsall was so eager to sell his new book that he appeared recently on rightwing radio host Hugh Hewitt’s program, where he admitted that the mainstream media has an “overwhelmingly” strong liberal bias — making the job for his former colleagues in the industry so much easier — and estimated that Democrats outnumber Republicans in newsrooms by 15 or 25 to 1. This margin is not sustained by a single survey, even the slanted ones frequently cited by Hewitt and has brethren.

E&P and MyDD both rip into the column. Both are worth the read, but I want to highlight something from the MyDD column:

It’s not hard to figure out why Edsall believes this - peer pressure. Edsall’s crowd is that of Harold Ickes, Rahm Emanuel, and Steny Hoyer, people who live in a rarefied world of Democratic elitism. On the Republican side I assume his sources are equally DC establishment; that’s where he lives and that’s what he knows. I remember his reporting on subjects I know a little bit about, like Democratic data infrastructure, were informed by people who knew nothing about the actual tools being developed.

This is a pretty common criticism lately and it has some teeth. There’s something to the idea that political reporters in Washington, especially at the larger papers, are reporting for and to each other. It’s why folks like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly and even Jon Stewart are able to play populist outsider to the “mainstream media” even though they are on the biggest media platforms available. Populists will always exist, but their role has been magnified directly by the behavior of Beltway insiders.

I don’t really have much to add, but the one thing that’s seems to be missing in this entire discussion is that we’ve ended up at a place where taking down a politician for some off-the-field activity is equated with being Woodward and Bernstein. I don’t like what Clinton did, either, but I don’t really feel like we needed a $80 million investigation to tell me he cheated on his wife. I don’t really care how Dean feels about Hillary Clinton unless it actually matters to the business of government.

I don’t know if insiderism, or consolidation, or profitablility is to blame, but somehow we need a press that understands their job is to be the fourth estate, to be vigilant in the face of both abuse of power and bad policy. I don’t know how to make that profitable, or make it appealing to a wide audience, but I know it’s important that we have someone or something doing that.

The March of Folly looks like an interesting book. From Richard Clarke’s article in TNR’s “Iraq: What Next?” issue:

Still, President Bush insists on staying in Iraq, and it is easy to understand why. In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman documented repeated instances when leaders persisted in disastrous policies well after they knew that success was no longer an available outcome. They did so because the personal consequences of admitting failure would be very high. So they postponed the disastrous end to their policy adventures, hoping for a deus ex machina or to eventually shift the blame. There is no need to do that now. Everyone already knows who is to blame. It is time to stop the adventure, lower our sights, and focus on America’s core interests. And that means withdrawal of major combat units.

People really haven’t changed much over the years, and our leaders are, after all, people. Seems like it might be an interesting read. You can read more in the comments over at the Washington Monthly post where I found the links to the TNR article.

Monday after class, I tried to get a Wii at the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Center. Sold out. Tuesday, Toys R Us.

Got a ticket, got in line outside. Yes it’s the third day. Still a line.

Best quote so far, by two women in Burberry, with five kids in tow: “what are these people doing?”
-”they must be waiting to buy something.”
-”what do you think they are waiting for.
-”I don’t know.”

Maybe the marketing isn’t working

I just saw a goofy Travelocity commercial during Monday Night Football that was set up as a breaking news story about the Travelocity Gnome disappearing. Mildly funny, but unremarkable except for the fact that there was a URL at the end of the commercial pointing to GnomeWatch.com. Being a sucker, I typed it in to see what was there.

I was surprised to be redirected to a Yahoo 360 page for a user called GnomeWatch. The page is highly customized with a ton of external content complete with Yahoo videos and a Flickr photostream. For those that don’t know, 360 is Yahoo’s social networking platform (similar to MySpace, ESPN Fan Profiles, etc.). Just like shows like FX’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia have done on MySpace, Yahoo and Travelocity are trying to get people to add GnomeWatch as friends, join the GnomeWatch group (hosted by Yahoo Groups) and watch videos (hosted by, naturally, Yahoo Videos).

I can’t imagine that enough people will care about the Travelocity Gnome to sign up for the Yahoo Group, but anything that gets people to realize that Yahoo even has 360 will probably be a good thing.

Of course, considering the recent rumblings coming out of Yahoo-land, perhaps this is something that should die.

Fox News is apparently launching a “conservative” satire show a la The Daily Show. I’m sure it’ll be hilarious.

What’s amazing to me is that Fox News and their Republican blinders still can’t see that the Daily Show made (more) fun of “the right” or Republicans because they ran all branches of government. I realize Fox News doesn’t feel any obligation to reality, but it might be hard to write a political satire show focusing on people who run nothing…

From a Joel on Software post where Joel is complaining about something:

Recently Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer. They introduced a bug in proxy detection code which caused a very small number of Copilot customers to experience crashes. Meanwhile, the Copilot development team, informally known inside Fog Creek as “Ben,” was busy trying to get Copilot 2.0 out the door. But you know what? Our customers who had installed IE 7 were experiencing crashes. This was not acceptable. Ben stopped what he was doing, installed the old version of the compiler, checked out the old source code, fixed the crash, and pushed a patch out to the server. It interrupted and delayed Copilot 2.0, and the context switching was harmful. But it was still the right decision to make. Being able to do mentally difficult things like context switching makes our product better. This Is Why Programmers Get The Big Bucks. The whole reason you gave them Aeron chairs, unlimited M&Ms, free catered lunches, and the kickass computers with the 30″ LCDs is so they can deal with new bugs Microsoft introduced in their code by messing up a DLL that used to work.

I have the Aeron chair. I also have a decent computer with 2 17″ monitors (I guess that counts as 34″?). Anyway, it’s a decent point and I thought it worth passing on.