Earlier this week, some poor woman who got reamed by Liz, repeatedly, in very unprofessional and unnecessarily mean emails, leaked those emails to Politico. Justice! And, plus side for Liz, now everyone knows that she prefers "Elizabeth" (and is a psycho). And now, more Liz emails, from Wonkette!

Last year, some mildly amusing and incredibly harmless emails from House schedulers were leaked to Wonkette. There was mild ribbing, from the famous Wonkette blogstress lady, about how it was kind of funny that no one knows where a grocery store is. Leaking these emails is, like, mild rebuke stuff, right?

Or is it "YOU ARE A POOR EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING" stuff? Liz?

From: Becton, Elizabeth
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 9:55 AM
To: XXX; XXX; Democratic Schedulers
Subject: RE: We Have a Mole Amongst Us

What kind of nasty, petty, poorly written (Did these people graduate from middle school to high school?) site is www.wonkette.com? And what a base, narcissistic, illiterate group of readers they have! I will never venture to that site again. It was a total waste of my time. However, this email is for the mole among us. You are a poor excuse for a human being. You are not a team player. If I ever find out who you are, I will gladly advertise that it was you who forwarded the emails to the low-rent wonkette site. I will further inform the Speaker's Office, Standards on Official Conduct, and all the other appropriate offices of what you did. And if you got paid for it, my lowly, putrid, little wonkette reader, you have committed a crime and you will be punished for it when you are found. I have contacted Telecom and I have informed them of what has happened and since it's a quiet day, they are checking all the forwarded emails from this list serve.

And to my team players and fellow schedulers, I apologize that I had to include you on this email. This email was intended for the lowly loser among us.

Have a nice day!

Elizabeth Becton
Executive Assistant/Office Manager
Office of Congressman Jim McDermott

Hah! The other ones about getting the lunch lady's name wrong, are also instant classics. This woman is a treat.

Alcohol

The president has always denied being an acoholic, though he's copped to "drinking too much" back in his callow youth (which lasted until his 40s, by the way, when he had his convenient religious reawakening). The alcohol provided a convenient excuse for his being a no-good fuckup for his entire 20s and 30s, and the religious awakening and supposed sobering up helped him gain forgiveness for youthful indiscretions like his disorderly conduct arrest and his 1976 DUI.

Anyway. Billy Graham showed up in 1985. In July of 1986, according to the lies he told in 2000, Bush quit drinking for good.

Here is a video of George W. Bush at a wedding that supposedly took place in 1992:

When the president "choked on a pretzel" in 2002, the White House took the step of having the White House physician announce to the press that "There was absolutely, positively, no suggestion on physical examination that any alcohol was involved." He just choked on a pretzel, during a football game, and lost consciousness.

Graydon Carter sez he knows a guy who sez Bush's blood alcohol level was quite high when he was hospitalized after the pretzel incident.

(Around the same time, a number of nuttier lefty sites began blowing up and enhancing photos of the president's face to point out all the burst capillaries that proved his continued reliance on booze.)

Cocaine

The rumors made the rounds in 1999: George W. Bush did coke! This was before 9/11, when everyone started doing coke again, so it was a big deal. If it was true! Proving it became quite difficult when the person with the most damning-sounding "proof" of drug use turned out to be an unreliable criminal (much like how the people with the best proof that Bush went AWOL from the national guard were using questionable documents, FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS). So. Here are some of the rumors:

• Bush was arrested for drug use in the "late '60s or early '70s" but the arrest was expunged from his record after he performed community service. That community service may have been his stint at Houston's Project P.U.L.L. in 1972.
• But that charge comes from the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield was a convicted felon. The book was pulled from shelves. Hatfield turned up dead of an apparent suicide in 2001. He claimed all along that his sources for the cocaine story included Karl Rove, who's known to talk off the record to journalists of all stripes.
• In 2004, Eric Boehlert floated the theory that Bush ditched the air force because they were instituting random drug tests. This seems like grasping at straws (lol) to us, but whatevs. It's out there.
• Bush has simply never denied using cocaine.
• If you take Scott McClellan's diagnosis at face value, Bush probably did plenty of drugs in his college days and beyond, and then more or less convinced himself that he can't even remember if he did or not. Because he's turned into a simple-minded fool.

Amusingly (to us, perhaps, and probably no one else), we now have a major candidate who's admitted to cocaine use... but that admission itself is suspect. Barack Obama famously admitted to experimenting with coke in his first memoir, Dreams From My Father. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though," Obama wrote in the more-than-decade-old book. The New York Times spent god knows how long trying to find anyone from Obama's adolescence who remembered him doing drugs but they came up short. Everyone remembered him as basically a square. He smoked a little weed.

We're forced to ask if Obama didn't exaggerate his drug use for the sake of a compelling narrative!

(We've come so far.)

Because America is not part of Europe. You know what would happen if we joined the European Union? Let's "mark to market" our economic figures to Euros for a second. (This is not a particularly meaningful exercise, but when the Gross Domestic Product is passing for the ultimate barometer of economic health I feel entitled to dabble in the absurd.) In the same amount of time that our economy cracked the $14 trillion mark, it would have shrunk 10% to 9 trillion Euros. In other words, no one would be lining up to buy cheap American exports. Of course, not that that much stuff is made in America anymore, which is why our 13% increase in exports of goods only contributed 0.2% in the way of GDP growth. But 0.2% can make all the difference!

Because The Rest Of The World Is Starving Thanks to land and pork barrel politics, agriculture remains a thriving (if small) sector of the American economy, and thanks to those same pork barrel politics we decided to drive food prices higher than oil prices would have already rendered them by paying people to use perfectly good corn to run cars or somesuch. Well, we make corn in America! And soybeans, and lots of other things that will make you fat if you aren't living on $3 a day in Nairobi.

Because The Rest Of The World Is Still Coming Here (And Fewer Than Ever Are Sending Their Money Home) America's growing population helps our GDP numbers sound good even when everything is actually getting harder for the average person! Between 2003 and 2007, for instance, our per-capita GDP grew less than 1.9% a year on average; Japan's per-capita GDP grew 2.1%! But thanks to our swelling immigrant class (and possibly, the celebrity baby boom) we have a growing populace that pumps that number up to nearly 3% annualized growth when we pool our funds together!

Because Everyone Is Sick, And Getting Sicker Health care a very important sector of the American economy — in fact, it's the only sector that's created any jobs since the nineties — and the costs — hey, every cost has a "benefit," hah! — just keep rising! That means lots of profits for all the companies working hard to remind us how bad heartburn can make you feel. And all the accountants and managers and lawyers responsible for figuring out how hospitals can add treatments and procedures to routine hospital stays so the insurance companies actually pay them; they are drivers of economic activity too! In this most recent quarter, medical care might have been the single brightest spot of a very unhappy chart: costs rose 12.1% over the quarter.

Because banks control all the money. The financial sector might seem like it's a mess right now, but they didn't get to represent more than a fifth of the whole GDP by being unclever. After getting the government to set up a special body giving them "immunity" from failure in the wake of that touching Jimmy Stewart movie, bankers quickly set about figuring out how to control all the money in the universe and take a big a cut possible each year in fear someone would figure out what they were up to and shut the whole thing down. Over time, of course, they realized that they controlled too much money for the government to ever shut any of it down, so at that point they just overpaid themselves because that's what they did last year, and because that's what everyone else was doing, and because if they didn't do it they were the greater fool. By 2005 the average finance worker earned 50% more than the comparable worker in any other field — and a lot of them made a lot more than that. But it's hard to blame them — absurdly profitable ideas like $3 ATM fees and selling repurposed mortgages to old people literally on a "fixed income" are all in a day's work for these guys.

Because "information processing equipment and software" sales increased 10.3%. And they haven't even released the new iPhone!

Because They Hate Us. These are serious times, Americans! We have a beautiful country to defend, and defense spending was perhaps the brightest spot on the latest GDP report of all. The Pentagon spent nearly $700 billion defending our freedoms last year, a 7.5% increase from last. And we haven't even started bombing Iran!

Image grabbed from Refacing Government Tender via Metafilter

BEA Press Release: Gross Domestic Product [Bureau of Economic Analysis]
Economists React: Recession "Still Likely" [WSJ]
Food Firms Profit As Demand Soars [WSJ]
Grossly Distorted Picture [Economist]
FDIC Seeks Hires, Braces For Trouble [WSJ]
Gross Domestic Product By Industry, Winners & Losers [Visualizing Economics]
What's Really Propping Up The Economy [BusinessWeek]
One Guy Who's Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees [WSJ]

I was an intern for Charlie Rose back in '03, and at that time David Gregory was a frequent guest, usually on remote from Washington. I would watch the less-than-congenial, highly abusive, and generally abrasive Rose do the usual pre-show banter with Gregory; whereby they'd both bask in their own sense of self-satisfaction for a while, then make jokes about President Bush (not that everyone doesn't, but it did destroy the illusion of journalistic objectivity for me).

My best guess is Gregory is definitely taking 'star' lessons from the diva/mentor himself, Charlie.

The dude is a total jerk.

Once, I was hanging with some friends in DC and we decided to go to the Capitol. We agreed to meet at a certain point at the front steps when we were done. There were maybe 8 of us. Well it turns out that David Gregory was reporting from the lawn of the Capitol around the spot where we were meeting up. The guy did his report, turned around, and proceeded to berate us and curse at us for being fame seeking assholes for ruining his shot and then asked if we wanted his autograph.

Whiner, arrogant, pious, self centered puke - that's him!!

And Fitted Sweats asks the important question: what if you were stranded on a tropical island with him?

David Gregory would insist being stranded was all your fault in the first place. He'd make a weird headband from an old dress shirt. Go jogging. Then start asking about what Presidents you've met. "Come on," he'd say. "Has to be at least one, right?" You'd say no. Meekly. Then he'd say "What was your GPA in college?" And spend the whole time undermining you. And being his typically douchey prematurely gray self. If he dies, after writing some bad poetry on a cave wall with a rock, he's too pasty to cannibalize.

Not the awkward disaster of Stephen Colbert's too-mean performance nor the intriguingly terrible anachronistic trainwreck of Rich Little's live death of last year. Ferguson's not a political comedian, or an attempted satirist, and he didn't do a political routine. He did, in a little reversal, spend most of his routine bashing the newsmedia. They eat that shit up.

Ferguson first mocked employees of the beleaguered LA Times, but he reserved his most stringent material for the New York Times, who this year decided, a number of years too late, that the schmoozy dinner looks a little improper to folks not in tune with the friendly DC scene, in which the media and the government largely consider themselves to be equals in importance and power. So the Times didn't buy a table. And Ferguson told them all to go to hell. And the crowd applauded.

(You can watch the entire dinner here if you're a masochist or just incredibly bored.)

First, Mead emails Malkin, repeatedly, to no response at all. Then they try her editor at the New York Post—nothing. Then Remnick tries!

Dear Michelle Malkin,

I am the editor of The New Yorker magazine, and I believe that you have received some sort of contact from our office, but I just wanted to assure you that our desire to write about you is serious and genuine. I can be reached through email above or [phone number redacted].

Best regards,
David Remnick

On 2/16/08, Michelle Malkin wrote:

Thanks.

Dear Ms. Malkin, "Thanks..." but can we talk? I am at home at [phone number redacted]. Best, David Remnick

OMG, the home number! Malkin finally responds: she has "neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker's readership."

Ok, Michelle. Whatever.

Hilariously she was more than happy to be profiled by Washington Post Media "critic" Howard Kurtz last year.

Why the Hell Would The New Yorker Want to Write a Profile of Michelle Malkin [Bloggasm]

The rappers have good reason to praise Obama. He has at times been an apologist for their "music." His complicity with rappers dates back to at least 2006.

Late that year he met with the rap giant Ludacris in his Chicago office. Ludacris, who Pepsi dropped as a spokesman in 2004 after Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly exposed his putrid lyrics, said afterwards that Obama felt like family to him. In March 2007 Ludacris, whose hit songs include "Move B——," headlined an Obama fundraiser in Atlanta.

Obama even recorded a voice over for a new album out this June from rapper Q-tip. Will it contain lyrics like these sonnets from another Q-tip song? "Close the door, 'ight let a n—— rock. Cause we 'bout to eat real s—-, not s—- slop."

Further research indicated that those weren't even in proper sonnet form! And that Q-tip is black!

Obama thus far has equivocated on rappers. He has criticized their language, but adamantly refused to denounce the whole sordid genre as the unique cultural problem that it is.

He refused to denounce De La Soul's 3 Feet High And Rising even after it was pointed out that one of the group's members has been photographed in baggy jeans!

Where else but rap do you hear words like these from Obama supporter Jay-Z in his song "99 Problems?"

Now once upon a time not long ago

A n—— like myself had to strong arm a hoe

This is not a hoe in the sense of having a p—-

But a p—— having no God Damn sense

Besides Jay-Z, Obama has also won support from rap mogul Russell Simmons, rapper Nas, whose new album is titled "N——-" and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Mos Def.

All confirmed rappers. Except Russell Simmons. Coincidence?

It's high time the media ask some tough questions. Why has Obama collaborated with rappers? Is he familiar with their words? How could he not be? The senator's spokesperson said that when he and Ludacris met the two men found common ground on AIDS prevention. How do you find common ground on sexual behavior with someone who calls women "b———?"

Ludacris and Obama both like b———!

Evan Gahr, shut your bitch ass up, hoe bag!

[via NJ.com]

In the heady era of dotcom fanaticism, Dov Charney founded the quintessential Old Economy company.

American Apparel is a mass manufacturer. The dawn of mass manufacturing is what enabled the rise of the working class, but by the 1980s America had decided manufacturing, what with its unions and their irksome habit of reminding the market that they are human too, was something less idealistic countries should deal with, and most factories in America had closed. This would not have been of concern to Dov Charney, a Tufts dropout reared in Montreal, had he not been reared North America's Protestant talent for investing in inanimate objects an extraordinary degree of esteem, as in, the T-shirt: Rebellion.

By the 1990s that talent, the knack for Want Creation, for appealing to the desire of people to buy things they don't need in some hope of proving they Are Someone, had begun to eclipse all other talents/knacks involved in propelling the modern American economy. The result was that no one was paying attention to how their T-shirts were made anymore. No one was paying attention because T-shirts were all being made, for pennies on the benjamin, 12,000 miles away. Llike Americans themselves the shirts had become bigger, thicker, rougher, coarser. Dov hated the T-shirts presently on the market. He did not find them sexy. After wading through a few different layers of detachment from labor, Dov found a factory in China to manufacture T-shirts to his liking, but nothing they sent approached his liking, in part because the factory sewing the T-shirts often don't communicate with the factories weaving the bolts of knit cotton. Perhaps the Chinese could simply not intuitively understand the nuances of How Dov Charney Felt A T-shirt Ought to Look; perhaps they simply did not care to, either way Dov decided something radical needed to be done.

Dov Charney found his efforts lionized in a positive, and weirdly prescient New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell. It was the first of many more media stories that would make mention of Dov's "boner."

He opened a factory in the Los Angeles garment district. He decided his factory would weave its own textiles in addition to the more common business of sewing shirts. Dov's command over the intricacies of needle-spacing and fabric finishing and the various manufacturing quirks that represent his "artisan's sensibility" was well-documented in a 2000 Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker.

2000 was the era of the "New Economy," Gladwell chose to profile American Apparel because, like Dov and most Candians, he likes to think of himself as a rebellious thinker. Don't we all? Dov had started an "Old Economy" company.

We live in the age of the entrepreneur, who responds rationally to global pressures and customer demands in order to maximize profit. To the extent that we still talk of Gloversville—and the glove-making business there has long since faded away—we talk of it as a place that people need to leave behind. There was Lucius N. Littauer, for example, who, having made his fortune with Littauer Brothers Glove Co., in downtown Gloversville, went on to Congress, became a confidant of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and then put up the money for what is now the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. There was Samuel Goldwyn, the motion-picture magnate, who began his career as a cutter with Gloversville's Elite Glove Co. In 1912, he jumped into the movie business. He went to Hollywood. He rode horses and learned to play tennis and croquet. Like so many immigrant Jews in the movie industry, he enacted through his films a very public process of assimilation. This is the oldest of American stories: the heroic young man who leaves the small town to play on the big stage—who wants to be an entrepreneur, not an artisan. But the truth is that we always get the story wrong. It isn't that Littauer and Goldwyn left Gloversville to find the real culture, because the real culture comes from Gloversville, too; places like Washington and Hollywood persist and renew themselves only because Littauers and Goldwyns arrive from time to time, bringing with them a little piece of the real thing.

Within a few years American Apparel was the largest apparel factory in the country. The biggest surprise was probably that he didn't have to price the T-shirts any differently. Americans were so used to paying way too much money for T-shirts — because of logos or brand names or symbolism or sheer price insensitivity — the ones made by $12-an-hour tailors working under strict California labor laws did not have to cost bulk customers more than $3 or $4, and all the rock bands and small fashion labels could attach their symbolism to Dov Charney's softer, better-fitting T-shirts with a comfortable markup.

The founding innovator got bored with producing supply and fascinated by producing demand.
Somewhere along the line I think Dov got greedy and/or envious of his customers and friends in the industry, the rock bands and indie fashion labels. He wanted to be a brand as well, to create demand and desire and iconic symbolism. He wanted his iconoclasm and rebelliousness to be noticed. So he began opening retail across the country, manufacturing trendier items and masturbated in front of a magazine reporter. He staffed his new retail business with the cutest youngest coolest kids, kids immersed as he had been in the nuances of the ephemera and nothingness — the drape of a shirt, the taper of a pair of jeans, the razor-cut arrangement of the tendrils — that had come to represent the "rebellious" school of American coolness. To expedite his staffing choices he even retained the services of a friendly coke dealer in the Lower East Side. If there is a Cliff's notes guide to Dov Charney's interpretation of that which was truly cool, it was doing coke on the Lower East Side.

Dov also made his own lifestyle and practice of taking employee concubines a centerpiece of his marketing strategies, keeping apartments throughout the country for the wild parties that doubled as photo shoots for company ads, and to house the employees who best represented the company image. The possibility of getting evicted from one of the apartments at any time kept favored employees' standards in line — not that anyone knew what the standards were. There was no handbook. It was all visceral.

The company grew way too fast, driven by momentum and the geometric growth prospects of the demand business.

Charney opened 187 stores in the space of four years. The process was almost comically hurried, sloppy, and exacerbated by the presence of all the cokeheads and the employee turnover that resulted from coke, low wages and a severe detachment from anything that felt like labor resulting from the fact that work was intended to serve as an extension of a "lifestyle," which left hours upon hours open for pointless alliances and rivalries to form. He got sued for sexual harrassment a few times, a consequence of having sex in the office and, in the absence of rigorous quantifiable achievement standards, often favoring employees he had fucked, was fucking, had some complex about fucking.

At the height of the real estate bubble Dov picked his real estate in the riskiest, most foolhardy fashion, spending millions to refurbish high-profile urban locations that were neither outfitted to handle retail stores nor generally owned by landlords that might give him a good deal on a leases elsewhere.

For driving desire and demand to the company's wares the cool kids who staffed the stores and starred in Dov's gigantic billboards were just as important to the company's sales as the factory workers themselves, but they were not remunerated as such, generally because businesses find it easier to deal with young unskilled recreational drug using hipsters as a consumer than as a human resource. The low wages translated to high rates of shoplifting and employee theft. The first fellow employee I ever liked got fired for stealing from the till.

After trying to make up for its sloppiness with momentum, the company encountered its cash flow problems with a combination of sloppy accounting standards and the perception of momentum. It was tough on the poor Chief Financial Officer!

In early 2005, chief financial officer Mark Schlein died unexpectedly of heart failure, and Mr. Charney and others say a replacement wasn't found for a year. An interim CFO was later hired, though Mr. Charney only remembers that "he had gray hair and quit after a week." Mr. Charney delegated bookkeeping to a few younger staff members and continued to open stores.

Problems developed. According to a chronology of the company's financial history provided by American Apparel executives to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Bank, a Minneapolis-based bank that was backing American Apparel's growth, urged Mr. Charney to secure additional financing amid the company's rapid store openings.

Which is when the real financial wizardry came in.
Adrian found a guy named Jonathan Ledecky who had just pulled off something interesting: he'd gotten a bunch of investors to pretty much write him a $200 million blank check he then took public on the American Stock Exchange, so speculators could trade his shares on its shares before he even did anything with the money. Luckily for Dov, Ledecky decided to buy American Apparel, thinking it might be a good fit for the types of big financial funds that need to buy into nebulous concepts like "Corporate Social Responsibility," which American Apparel, by treating its predominantly Mexican base of factory workers so well, still, despite everything, very much espoused. Thus American Apparel became a publicly traded company using the unaudited 30%-inflated earnings statements someone had been pulling out of their asses.

And Ledecky saved the day!
Dov Charney was now worth more than $580 million! He had to hire a new CFO, however. The new CFO found that American Apparel had "no sense of American accounting standards." Join the club right?

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dov referred to the CFO as a "loser."

Earlier: American Apparel Is All It's Coked Up To Be
Why Retail Breeds Sexual Harrassment
Related: Living On The Edge At American Apparel [Business Week]

Nick Denton Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:26 AM

I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!

* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group. * GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder. * WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web's very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric's bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.

And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty's sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone. I'm 917-XXX-XXXX and Noah is on 917-XXX-XXXX.

Regards

Nick

————————————————————————————————————————

GAWKER MEDIA KEY FACTS
* A dozen sites, Gizmodo first launched in August 2002, most recent,
io9, in January 2008
* Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Defamer,
Jezebel, Valleywag, io9, Consumerist, Fleshbot
* A record 18 "Bloggie" nominations in 2008, way more than any other
blog collective (one of those was for Idolator)
* Audience of 29.7m unique visitors a month for the whole network, up
82% at annualized rate (http://www.quantcast.com/p-d4P3FpSypJrlA)
* Each individual site has at least 1m uniques or, in the case of io9, soon will
* Pageviews of 227m in March — 219m if you take out the three sites
being spun out — up 89% on a year earlier (Sitemeter)
* For those who measure these things, Gawker is the web's leading
independent blog group

Pace's evidence:

• 
  
• number of readers on their Wikipedia pages (Obama 4:1 over Hillary)
• 
  
• website visitors (Obama by 2:1)
• 
  
• share of Web visitors in Pennsylvania, where the next big primary is being held (Obama by 2:1)
• 
  
• hours spent on each candidates YouTube channel (Obama by 10:1)
• 
  

Given the trends noted above, Obama's increasing momentum, and his dominance across almost every measurable statistic, he could pull out a victory next week in Pennsylvania. This of course would be a disaster for Clinton who has pinned all hope on getting a late boost from the final primaries in order to persuade the party's Super Delegates to hand her the nomination.

Had Pace run the numbers last summer, he'd likely have told us that Ron Paul was set to win the presidency. And let's not forget what happened to the last presidential candidate who had a revolutionary Internet presence, raised millions online and inspired lots of young people to get out and vote. His name was Howard Dean, and his campaign ended with a scream.

Politico is owned by Allbritton Communications. If you haven't heard of Allbritton Communications, it may be because you don't watch channel 41 in Harrisburg, PA, or channel 60 in Tulsa Oklahoma, two of the 8 mostly small-market local ABC affiliates that make up the rest of Allbritton's holdings. 8 TV stations and a hype-ful New Media political news organization, from a company that made its fortune with a bank that once laundered money for Augusto Pinochet. In the 1970s, they bought and killed the Washington Star. That was the end of Allbritton's newspaper daze until this Politico thing.

The Politico is now, apparently, launching a weekly television show, which will air on most of those Allbritton TV stations (though not in New York). It will be fast-paced and hard-hitting and EDGY.

"When we think of Politico, we're always talking about, well, it would be nice to build the ESPN of politics," said Mr. VandeHei. "I think part of that would be treating politics like sports, blending in more stats, dusting down the numbers and getting inside the strategy."

Except ESPN makes money, doesn't it? There isn't, we're told, a lot of advertising money, on this Internet, for pure political coverage. Denton describes political reporting as "toxic to advertisers." And what money there is for it will dry up once this presidential election is done. HuffPo is raking it in, supposedly, but there's a good reason why they're expanding their lifestyle and health sections—and trying to be seen as less of a rabidly partisan left-wing niche political site.

So this whole Politico thing? We've been skeptical since day one, primarily because representatives like Mr. VandeHei sound like terrible parodies of hype-spewing hucksters when they talk about the revolutionary new way they cover politics (they HAVE A WEBSITE and SOME AMATEURISH VIDEOS everything is different now!), but they hired enough talent to produce a good product. It's just not a money-making product, on its own. Which means, since they continue to throw more resources at it, that it's a vanity project. For someone. We're just not sure who! Because Allbritton, as amusing as their history is, has not exactly demonstrated a strong interest in becoming a BIG MEDIA PLAYER.

And once the presidential thing is done, Politico will have to go back to what we thought it'd be in the first place—a wonkish, Roll Call-like little trade paper for Congress-watchers and DC insiders. In real newspapers, the political reporting is subsidized by the "fluff." One cannot build a profitable brand on politics alone.

So if anyone smarter than us at this money thing wants to take a stab at explaining to us the economics of Politico, we're all ears.

Slate's ever-griping press critic, Jack Shafer, has already made the point that the Pulitzer judging process is arbitrary. "There's no real science or even fairness behind the picking of winners and losers, with the prizes handed out according to a formula composed of one part log-rolling, two parts merit, three parts 'we owe him one,' and four parts random distribution."

And the former journalist who created HBO's Baltimore drama, The Wire, made one of the last season's villains an editor who boasted of his understanding of Pulitzer judges, because he had once been one. The Wire's semi-fictional Baltimore Sun pretended that its reporting had influenced Maryland's policies with regard to the homeless, because that would prove the impact of its reporting.

But the newspapers' Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet. Pulitzer-winning journalism will win Pulitzers; it won't save an industry which is experiencing double-digit annual declines in advertising revenue.

Take a look across the Atlantic. The British Press Awards are so lacking in respectability that, after a particularly rowdy show in 2005, several newspaper editors decided to boycott the awards. A shocked New York Times reporter wrote: "last night's ceremony — a mind-numbing parade of awards in 28 categories — was not a mutually respectful celebration of the British newspaper industry fuelled by camaraderie and bonhomie. It was more like a soccer match attended by a club of misanthropic inebriates."

And yet the British newspaper industry is in much more robust health. To be sure, circulations are in gradual decline. And standards of journalism are as sloppy as ever. But newspapers such as The Guardian have a much greater share of the online audience than their American counterparts. And the papers, while lacking much of the worthy reporting that wins Pulitzers, are way livelier.

The connection? The respect of peers is a luxury that US newspapers have enjoyed because, for much of the second half of the 20th century, they were local monopolies. They could afford to be respectable, because they didn't need to pander to readers. In the UK, by contrast, 12 national dailies are in vicious competition. Editors fear the loss of their jobs, not their honor.

It is not as if the New York Times and Washington Post can magically invigorate themselves by eschewing the Pulitzers. America's vastness, which mitigates against national newspapers and produces smaller local markets which can only support one title, is an unalterable fact. But, while the Washington Post and other winners may celebrate today, they should recognize a harsh truth: the same monopolies which have allowed a public-service mentality to flourish have also left newspapers unprepared for new competition. These Pulitzers are the totem poles of the newspaper industry; beloved relics of former glory.

• And right on cue: Seattle Times announces it is cutting about 200 jobs.

Burson-Marsteller is perhaps the premier, old-line brand name in all of PR. Its founder, the grandfatherly Harold Burson, is still around, and has assumed a position as the Grand Old Man of the PR industry. His kindly demeanor doesn't mean that the firm doesn't have just as many unsavory clients in its past as all the other major PR agencies, including the obligatory millions of dollars worth of work on behalf of the tobacco industry.

Penn got the job as Burson's CEO in late 2005, and was a surprising choice. He'd never run a PR firm like Burson before, and didn't have any particular reputation as a great manager. Do you think the company had one eye on the 2008 elections when they picked Penn? Of course. Can you imagine the value of the halo effect Penn would have on a firm like Burson—which does plenty of political and lobbying work—if Hillary were to get elected, even if Penn resigned from the agency to work in the White House?

It's a moot point now. Clinton should have insisted from the beginning that Penn resign his job with Burson in order to work on the campaign. The very idea that he could do both at once, without Burson deriving a great deal of unseemly influence from his position, is insulting to the intelligence of everyone. He, and Clinton, were rightly criticized every time Burson handled a high profile controversial client, like mortgage disaster Countrywide or private paramilitary firm Blackwater. The argument that Penn could simply recuse himself from working on such clients is a canard—he is the face of his firm, and his connection to Clinton can remain totally unspoken in new business meetings, while still doing its silent part to draw in clients hoping to capitalize on it.

For a while, Penn was talked up as the Democratic version of Karl Rove. That's not something to which any Democrat should aspire, but it turned out to be a moot point as well—Rove's work for Bush was politically superior to Penn's work for Clinton. And if she loses in her bid for the presidential nomination, not only will Penn's reputation as a political savant suffer, but Burson will have to ask itself whether they really want him running the firm if his direct line to the White House, which was his greatest potential selling point, fails to materialize.

If there's any lesson in all this, it's that there should be a solid divide between politicians, who espouse ideals, and the PR industry, which is definitively one big amoral hired gun. Having a PR consultant is one thing; turning your entire campaign over to a man who is also working as a rainmaker for one of the most high-powered PR firms in the world is quite another. The fact that the Colombian government—which gave Burson the contract that got Penn dropped from the campaign—then summarily fired the firm because of Penn's "lack of respect" as he tried to apologize for meeting them is all the illustration necessary of the fundamental incompatibility of his two roles.

You fools.

Out Magazine, putting the Times' "gay mafia" at number 12 in its power list, names nine Times reporters and editors: Richard Berke, Ben Brantley, Frank Bruni, Stuart Elliot, Patrick Healy, Adam Nagourney, Horacio Silva, Stefano Tonchi, and Eric Wilson.

But Intelligencer's Chris Rovzar thinks the gay magazine has underestimated the true extent of the network. "But come on, Out editors — there are hordes of other gays working in high-powered positions at the Times. You could only come up with nine?" (The list does indeed omit Jeff Zeleny, Sewell Chan, Michael Barbaro, Jeremy Peters and Denny Lee, for instance.)

"Have you slept with no one lately?" asks Rovzar. The 27-year-old Intelligencer writer, pictured right, certainly has: willowy Rovzar's an expert on Times gays in part because he dated Patrick Healy and, by all accounts, broke the political reporter's heart. (Healy's to the left.) We don't feel particularly guilty exposing Healy's private life; he won the enmity of Hilary Clinton's campaign with his enthusiastic coverage of the candidate's problematic marriage.

Incidentally, all three national political reporters for the Times—Healy, Nagourney and Zeleny—are gay. Just saying, in case social conservatives need any more reason to question the political objectivity of the Gray Pink Lady.