Keep in mind this is the same sage economics guru who thinks we need a $700 billion bailout to avoid the Great Depression. That plan, as it happens, is put forward by another former Goldman Sachs man, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Cramer should be thanked for his educational contributions. If nothing else, he has inadvertently reproduced, in a microcosm, the sort of complacent cronyism that led to this disaster in the first place.

It was Bill Keller who in 1995 wrote, "the childhood of [Winnie Mandela], according to Emma Gilbey's meticulous 1993 biography, 'The Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela,' was 'a blistering inferno of racial hatred.'" (Emphasis added.)

Those kind words ultimately led Keller and Gilbey to meet for the first time — and to begin an affair that would see Keller split from his wife, according to a 2006 New York magazine profile.

This time around, the Observer seems to wonder about the qualifications of the reviewer on the basis of her limited journalistic output over the past 11 yeas.

It's worth reviewing how things turned out the last time the Times was accused of favoritism. By mid July, the paper had published a positive early review, editor's choice recommendation, blog write up and page A4 plug for a book by Edward Dolnick, husband to Lynn Dolnick, a Times board member and cousin to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. It had published nothing on a contemporaneous book on the exact same topic (an art forger who copied Johannes Vermeer) by historian Jonathan Lopez and published by Harcourt.

Both the Chicago Tribune and New York Sun reviewed Dolnick and Lopez's books side by side, and seemed to find the Lopez title more comprehensive and, for some readers at least, engaging. The Tribune wrote:

Dolnick is content to paint a vivid, gossipy picture of feuds and backbiting among scholars and curators more eager to discredit their rivals and burnish their reputations with sensational finds than to carefully examine works about which they should have been skeptical.

Lopez's portrait of the art market is fuller and more damning.

At least this time around there's disclosure, unlike in the Dolnick case. That openness, and the fact that her notice is in the ostensibly independent Book Review, gives Emma Keller at least a slightly better shot at emerging from her husband's shadow — once her press tour is over and she's done talking about that shadow.

[Times via Observer]

(Photo via ABC News)

(There's also one of a monkey shitting on McCain's head, in case you want the full, appetite-robbing effect.)

The Atlantic said Greenberg "disgraced herself" and that it assumed she would act more professionally. The writer of the cover story called it "juvenile."

Greenberg, meanwhile, told PDNPulse it was "irresponsible" of the Atlantic to hire her in the first place for "heroic" shots of McCain, given her well-known anti-Bush photography. And she gloated over how she tricked McCain:

Greenberg asked McCain to “please come over here” for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. “That’s what he thought he was being lit by,” Greenberg says. “But that wasn’t firing.”

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. “He had no idea he was being lit from below,” Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she adds.

The photographer would like to sell her more provocative photos to another magazine.

So, counting NBC/MSNBC, this makes at least two news organizations whose contributors have been bitterly divided over political and ethical issues around the 2008 election. Who will be the third?

[PDNPulse via NewsBusters, Post]

(Photos via Imagebam)

Slim's giving is seen by many as simply a way to deflect criticism his monopoly phone business holds back the struggling Mexican economy — and to cozy up to powerful buddies like Bill Clinton.

The Times is surely less than thrilled by the presence of a vulture investor like Slim. The origins of his money should make the newspaper even more queasy.

[Crooks & Liars]

Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line "H-E-R-O." In response to Mr. Fournier's e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, "How does our country continue to produce men and women like this," to which Mr. Fournier replied, "The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight."

Fournier isn't trying to explain how telling the White House's main political adviser to "keep up the fight" keeps his journalism unbiased. Instead he said he's kind of sorry, even though he obviously isn't, at all:

"I was an AP political reporter at the time of the 2004 e-mail exchange, and was interacting with a source, a top aide to the president, in the course of following an important and compelling story. I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence."

Right, breezy. I always use phrases like "The Lord" and "great and free countries" in my breezy emails. In text messages, even.

[TPM Muckraker, House Oversight Committee's Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch report (see p. 21)]

(Photo via GMU)

Last year, you'll recall, it was Lynn Dolnick's son Ben who was the recipient of a helpful Times notice — one he wrote himself, in the form of an op-ed piece. The scandal made Gawker, and was then picked up in Page Six, but the Times shrugged off the incident, setting aside its normally delicate ethical sensitivities.

How could there be a conflict of interest, the Times asked the Post, if "members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have no more or no less opportunity to appear in the pages of the Times" than anyone else? In other words, Times editors are such ethical superheroes that there doesn't need to be so much as a disclosure when they handle a book from a member of the clan that writes their paychecks.

Later, Ben Dolnick's agent was quoted in a friendly Washington Post feature saying that it was not a challenge or big deal to get his op-ed published, as though that wasn't precisely the point.

In either Ben or Edward Dolnick's case, disclosure would at least have let readers discount the paper's praise as they saw fit. Such was the case when Times vice president Alyse Myers received both a glowing review and room for her own magazine essay this past May in connection with the publication of her book about her mean mom — and even with the disclosure, we heard, Times staffers were still in an uproar.

Readers aren't the only ones with reason to feel cheated by the way the Times has handled Ed Dolnick's latest book. A tipster — who from the sounds of things has a dog in this fight — puts forward the name of a competing author as another aggrieved party:

...a serious, competing book [is] coming out in four weeks from
Harcourt. "The Man Who Made Vermeers" by Jonathan Lopez is based on
years of archival research conducted in Dutch and English, as well as
interviews with descendants of Van Meegeren's accomplices. (Dolnick
neither speaks nor reads Dutch.) Parts of "The Man Who Made Vermeers"
have already appeared as major articles in the London-based Apollo
Magazine and as a cover story in De Groene Amsterdammer, the oldest
continuously-published news magazine in the Netherlands. The book has
already been praised as "remarkable" by major museum curators. But
it's absent from the New York Times.

The Times has had advance readers' copies of "The Man Who Made
Vermeers" for months.

...By placing Dolnick's title in so many
outlets – Sunday Book Review, daily paper, blog – it has
effectively blocked the competition from being covered in any of them,
the general topic having been so recently treated.

Unlike his son Ben, Ed Dolnick is an established writer. He is former chief science reporter at the Boston Globe and author of at least three other books. His work on van Meegeren might do just fine without all this notice in the Times, and perhaps he would have recieved some — maybe even all — of it without being part of the extended Times family. Which is precisely why the newspaper should handle his book more transparently. Keeping his extensive connections in the dark makes them look all the more sinister.

The boring truth is that I've known Charles for way longer than I've known David (and no, not "known" in that way!) Because of that, and since the two companies have no formal partnership, I think I'm OK. Otherwise, yeah, that would've been iffy.

Ah, no "formal partnership." Sort of like Karp and Forman!

[Silicon Alley Insider]

Hey, at least they didn't include any of the high-profile women on corporate sibling Fox News. Like... uh... hmmm.

Greta lives in DC still? D'oh.

[Post, AdScam]

Does this writer own a TV? Because Rachel wouldn't have settled for Barry—he was kind of a lying jerk. Remember?

Well, whatever. On the eve of Valentine's Day, we leave you with this:

What I didn't realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you're looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you'll probably be relatively content... I didn't fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you're married, it's not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it's about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.

Look how hard it is for Council Member James Oddo (R-Staten Island), for example. He actually has a girlfriend. But:

"Every Sunday morning, we go get bagels and go to the Perspectives section of the Staten Island Advance. And whether it's letters to the editor, the political column," he said, "my Sunday mornings are going to be filled with agita. And if my Sunday mornings are filled with agita, so are hers. And there's no escaping it... If Kim took my Blackberry away from me, I would start trembling at the table within like 35 seconds. There should be rules. God knows that I need rules."

"'I'm free between 7:36 and 8:12 if you want to grab a quick drink,'" he said. "That's what ends up happening."

[City Hall News]

[Photo: Patrick McMullan]

"While Christian says that the art at the New York galleries he critiques is in a separate sphere from the type of art that would appear in the fairs, we don’t want to put a reviewer in a situation that calls for an ethical juggling act. Since Christian has made it clear that he will continue to fill out the terms of his art-fair contract, we wish him great success, thank him for the excellent work he has done, and feel disappointment that he will cease writing for us."

Sources say Ortega was none too pleased by the revelation; according to one, Viveros-Faune was "working the phones" last night, spreading the word that he was getting some serious flak. We give the Voice plenty of flak ourselves, but we're impressed with how promptly they dealt with this one.

Previously: 'Voice' Art Critic Takes Heat For Conflict Of Interest

The intersection of the arts world and the journalism world is a tricky place. More so, or at least more often, than movie and book critics, reviewers of the arts tend to have had an academic or professional background in the industry. Viveros-Faune's predecessor, the brilliant Jerry Saltz, was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, but then again, that was a nonprofit undertaking.

It's not all that hard to see why newspapers rely on critics with proven industry experience; Joe Schmo editor can usually (usally!) decipher if a book reviewer has no idea what he's talking about—if an editor isn't up on his art history, monitoring that critic is a bit thornier.

"I told my editor, so he knows, and of course I hope the paper is not going to care much." Huh! I'd wager the paper is going to care much—enough to look into the critic's work so far and to set down some guidelines for the future.