Pelosi and Obama particularly can put an end to this mess. Rockefeller and his band of merry appeasers have too much power, making life really difficult for Reid. But if Reid holds firm and refuses to take up the bill on the Senate side first, then Hoyer has got to try to figure out how to get it through the House—a tougher proposition. But Pelosi could be a leader and say "no." Obama could make one phone call—whether to Hoyer, Pelosi, or to his friend and supporter Rockefeller—and say "no."

This "mcjoan" blogger is talking about FISA, but I'd just as soon have Alberto Gonzales grappling-hook his way into my living room because I said "Muslim" on the phone than have to read through that perspiring and heaving paragraph again. What mess has Nancy Pelosi ever put an end to, praytell? And couldn't mcjoan wait until the bill in question were passed or defeated before obsessing about it like that? I'm beginning to worry about her family's unwillingness to wage a C-SPAN intervention on her behalf.

"But you don't get it, Weiss! We have to stop the Bush-Cheney junta until term limits force it from office like all juntas!"

Yeah, yeah. At least Michelle Malkin sis-boom-bahs and Andrew Sullivan claps to Muppet videos.

I am depressed, and it's got me feeling nostalgic. Not too long ago there was a great Entertainment Weekly for the ivory tower called Lingua Franca, in which a celebrated essay by one Jim Miller was published under the title, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" Miller held up two leftist intellectuals — Theodore Adorno and George Orwell — as examples of opposing prose styles that the modern lefty political writer would invariably adopt. Broadly speaking, one was difficult and esoteric, the other common but by no means vulgar. Adorno thought "lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision" were tricks perpetrated by "ideologies" of service mainly to money-grubbing editors and writers (he was kind of a Marxist); real culture demanded jargon and allusions that only a select readership would understand. Orwell, meanwhile, dug lucidity and concision — he would have agreed all writing was subjective — and thought you couldn't change people's opinions unless your stuff was universally comprehensible. Brute facts mattered, as did a window-pane transparency of meaning. Sexing up language to the point where it lost all semantic value was the stock-in-trade of totalitarianism. For the muddled democrat, it was a sign of insecurity ("Maybe my opinions are weak after all. If I hide them, no one will notice.")

The updated version of Miller's thesis, in this our dread age of blogorrhea, surely concerns the mirth factor. Postmodernism is dead, but tragedy is not. Even when the lefty blogs try to be cute or amusing, they fail horribly. When did "wanker," MyDD's epithet of choice, become a mordant insult? Two days ago, Think Progress teased me by promisingly titling a post "McCain Hates Condoms” (kudos to Cindy if they're even relevant in the marriage anymore) and then ending on this note: "Indeed, McCain is not what women want."

Indeed, no one saw that movie and Mel Gibson's not what they want anymore, either. Stop perusing Congressional testimony and update your fucking Netflix queque.

Perhaps the problem is that a sense of humor is innately conservative, as G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis (after whom I named my Cocker Spaniel), Christopher Buckley, Judd Apatow and others have either explicitly or implicitly attested. Even Mark Twain was at his best when he was fusty and backward-looking.

Though that lets the other side of the aisle off too easily, I think. Feel free to use the space below to compile a list of great progressive wits and satirists for today's Balloon Juicers and Firedoglakers to model themselves on, or at least steal better nicknames from. Help put a smile on a Gitmo detainee's face.

[Daily Kos]
[Think Progress]

To the staff

About six weeks ago Bill Keller announced that the newsroom would need to reduce its head count by about 100 jobs, as a result of the worsening financial picture facing this newspaper and the rest of our industry. To that end, we put on the table a round of buyouts, and began seeking volunteers among both our Guild and excluded employees.

The window for those voluntary buyouts closes officially next week — on Monday, April 21, for excluded members of the staff, and on that day and the next (Tuesday, April 22), for Guild applicants.

While we will not know the hard count until that time, every effort to handicap the outcome suggests that we are almost certain to fall short of the number of volunteers we will need. If that is indeed the case, as we expect it will be, we will — regrettably — be forced resort to some limited number of layoffs within the core newsroom.

While layoffs have become all too common across our industry, this is the first time the newsroom as a whole has confronted that blunt reality, and we approach it with a heavy heart. Even as people and jobs go away, the reductions will have a continuing impact across the newsroom, as we regroup and reorganize departments and even juggle some assignments to ensure we are able to continue to produce the kind of quality journalism that is our hallmark.

I wish I could offer some clearer sense of scale. An effort by the Guild to predict the outcome a few weeks back, based on what they knew from the people who had asked to get a buyout package, concluded it was too soon to tell if there would be enough volunteers, across the staff. Their own estimate, at that time, fell short of the mark, and the basic calculus has not changed.

Because the voluntary buyout window is still open for a few more days, and because we know many of you might still be contemplating what to do, we urge you to give the offer serious consideration, if you believe there is some financial advantage in it for you and your family. Each buyout we record before next Tuesday reduces the number of layoffs we will have to seek.

If any of you have any questions, or seek further information in the coming days, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.

Bill Schmidt

Leprechauns? People who wear scrubs to work? Anyone?