And while we're avoiding the topic

-of Super Tuesday...

Can somebody explain these visuals to me?

Newsweek.com as of 5 minutes ago:

CNN.com as of 5 minutes ago:

I get that unfolding results may invalidate some predictions, but it's not like there are a slew of ongoing counts right now.

What the hell?

Well, thank goodness the Iraqis didn't like it...

(Yes, yes - Super Freaking Tuesday, but there are better resources than me discussing it - or just giving you the scoreboard.)

But this item from CJR jumped off the monitor:

The CLCs—Concerned Local Citizens—are no more. Just a week ago, people couldn’t keep the acronym, which refers to the U.S. military’s effort to turn groups of former insurgents into paid allies, off their lips.
...
But now, no one is mentioning the CLCs. With the amazing speed of an acronym-happy military, the new, Iraqi-approved term is “Sons of Iraq.” SOI for short. Seems that “Concerned Local Citizen” didn’t translate into Arabic so well, and the Iraqis didn’t like it.

Let's go through that again.
According to Gen. Petraeus - the Sunni militias that had been killing US soldiers will now be referred to as Concerned Local Citizens, since they have "promised" not to kill Americans in exchange for military aid. The weapons we provide are supposed to be used against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Sunni militant with weapon pointed at me = "Islamo-fascist"

Sunni militant with weapon pointed away from me = "Concerned Local Citizen"

Got that?

Well, this nomenclature is unacceptable - to the Iraqis - who prefer to be known as the "Sons of Iraq."

So henceforth:

Sunni militant with weapon pointed away from me (for now) = "Son of Iraq"

What the hell is wrong with these people?

If MoveOn.org was looking to run another full page ad trashing Gen. Petraeus, now would seem like a good time.

I hate dynasties...

...so thank you G-men

And now the Patriots can finally go away.

It's not that good people are doing nothing...

...just that the Senate is not full of good people.

If Emptywheel and Gleen Greenwald are to be believed, evil will almost assuredly triumph in the FISA/Telco immunity battle. The Senate is lining up to declare "Mission Accomplished" and then sell us all down the river.

Harry "DiNO" Reid has brokered a last minute compromise on FISA legislation and it would appear that the amendments that the GOP does not object to will be allowed to pass. The ones they don't like will be given a 60 vote threshold, and will die.

One of those is the immunity amendment. Which brings up the question of why on earth did the Democratic Majority Leader bring the bill with immunity to the floor?

Harry Reid has advanced the immunity cause to the point where you wonder - what on earth is compelling this man?

Write your rep in congress - if the Senate caves, the only place to stop this is in the House.

Can't we be friends?

Glenn Greenwald just posted (again) a pretty key data set when you're evaluating what kind of collaboration exists in the US Senate:

To support the new Bush-supported FISA law:
GOP - 48-0
Dems - 12-36

To compel redeployment of troops from Iraq:
GOP - 0-49
Dems - 24-21

To confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General:
GOP - 46-0
Dems - 7-40

To confirm Leslie Southwick as Circuit Court Judge:
GOP - 49-0
Dems - 8-38

Kyl-Lieberman Resolution on Iran:
GOP - 46-2
Dems - 30-20

To condemn MoveOn.org:
GOP - 49-0
Dems - 23-25

The Protect America Act:
GOP - 44-0
Dems - 20-28

Declaring English to be the Government's official language:
GOP - 48-1
Dems - 16-33

The Military Commissions Act:
GOP - 53-0
Dems - 12-34

To renew the Patriot Act:
GOP - 54-0
Dems - 34-10

Cloture Vote on Sam Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court:
GOP - 54-0
Dems - 18-25

Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:
GOP - 48-1
Dems - 29-22

Once again, it is worth pointing out that in those key votes - a grand total of four GOP senators did not vote in lockstep with their party.
They'd be:

-on Kyl-Lieberman Resolution on Iran:
Hagel (R-NE) Retiring in 2009
Lugar (R-IN)

-on Declaring English to be the Government's official language:
Domenici (R-NM) Retiring in 2009

-on the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:
Chafee (R-RI) Lost 2006 election

Of those four, three are gone this year.

There's a lot of ink out there about GOP 'maverick' senators, a lot of press conferences about 'breaking with the administration' - but on these issues - it's abundantly clear that it's all a lot of talk.

Not really usable, but...

...you have to admire their sense of whimsy.

A dutch department store's website:


Let the page load and wait a few seconds.

Tipping point? Are you kidding me?

Sivacracy is a great blog. They bring me all manner of light, fun stuff - and then drop a big bag of awesome like this:

Ever since it came out, I have had big problems with Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" thesis. I had even bigger problems with Blink. But that's another issue.

I am thrilled that Clive Thompson has profiled the brilliant sociologist Duncan Watts and asks the question, Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.

Duncan Watts's research tells advertising execs precisely what they don't want to hear: All their clever (and lucrative!) targeted viral campaigning may ultimately be less effective than good old mass marketing.

K? So you have Gladwell saying trends can occur due to the actions of a small few - Watts says he's full of it.

Jumping into the detail we have Gladwell:

To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target. It famously took roughly six links to deliver each letter. But in a finding that particularly excited Gladwell, it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link for half the letters that arrived successfully. They were the Connectors, as Gladwell dubbed them, who govern the flow of social information. If you wanted to get to that stockbroker, you couldn't approach just anyone. You had to go through those three friends. Possessed of huge Rolodexes, these folks are the gatekeepers, Gladwell wrote, "and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."

vs. Watts:

But Watts, for one, didn't think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn't match what he'd found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target.

Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it's simply because his sample was so small--only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. "And since Milgram's finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment," Watts shrugs.

No experiment is bulletproof, but based on this alone - I sure know which of these two I'd be asking to repeat their results.

Gladwell? Your retort?

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, thank you for saying so...

From CJR:

Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas...delivered this line early in her Democratic response to the presidents’s [State of the Union] address:

SEBELIUS:[R]ight now tonight as the political pundits discuss the president's speech, chances are they'll obsess over reactions of members of Congress, how many times was the president interrupted by applause, do Republicans stand, did the Democrats sit? And the rest of us will roll our eyes and think, what in the world does any of that have to do with me?

A-freaking-men. Live TV can't all be great, but can we at least be spared "insight" that consists of some intern making marks on their tablet while watching the feed.

I mean, what are they trying to do? Compare bursts of applause this time to his lifetime average? Postseason?

Really, Larry, his numbers have fallen off this year. I'm thinking the GOP is going to bench him.

Truth in Art

I heard this story on NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell me!

What is this picture about?

Depends on who you ask.

According to the current President of the United States, it's called A Charge to Keep (via Harpers):

When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

So in Bush’s view (or, perhaps I should say, faith) the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century.

If you bother researching the actual origins of the painting, you get a different story (via Slate):

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

And there it is - the perfect metaphor for the Bush Presidency.

Belief, uncontaminated by fact.

Keeping up appearances

Suppose, one day, I actually got my sh!t together. Would I get a medal?
-MC 900 Ft. Jesus

Lately, the logistics of life are really starting to get to me.

Use to be, work was the pressure cooker. I'd go home to be the hero – help the boy, cook a meal, spring for pizza –whatever.

Then home life got the baton, and so going to work was the place where I'd exhale and shake it off.

Now they're both dialing up the pain – and well, I'm not likin' it.

The doomsday project at work has detonated to a colossal degree. I've had fellow team members asking "to review" my past work documents. They're nice and polite – but it's clearly a CYA audit.

"Mind if I review these?" (i.e. The boss has ordered me to review your work to determine if you've screwed up, where you've screwed up and how badly you've screwed us.)

It's not personal and everyone is polite – but it's hard not to feel like the accused in some legal proceeding. "Anything else I can get you?"

"No, this is fine." And besides, we have all the digital files; I'm just here for the hardcopy.

So there's that.

At home, the boy is an enthusiastic three – making simple things complicated and complicated things impossible. Baby E is mobile and doing all the things that make 'child-proofing' seem like such a laughable term.

E and I are just on the verge of a nap at most moments of the day. We have given into the dark side and let our children watch their shows just so we can get time to do chores, get downtime, or just lie on the couch in a drooling heap.

We are closing on our house soon – and this freight train of a fact has a number of equally large problems in tow.

Financing the deal is becoming far too interesting. The lending rate that all the advice sites assured me would rise – has plummeted. So we need to back out of our earlier rate lock and sign another batch of forms. I'd like this to be done – but there are still a few more variables in play that could have us squaring our financing mere days before we close.

Closing – we need to decide on how best to finance – given some of our down payment is in investments that are (even as I type) down about 10% from where they should be. Using these funds means we eat the loss. Not using them means we will have a larger mortgage payments that will need to be paid in part from investments. Making fixed monthly payments using an ever-fluctuating amount of money is not an idea I am fond of.

Then there's the remodel – originally we'd planned on overhauling the kitchen before we moved in – this will not happen. We will now move in in a heap – and attempt two minor projects in a hurry, and do the kitchen after we're there. This means we will be without a kitchen for a good chunk of time.

Snapping back to this past weekend.

I needed to get out of the house and goof off – so I did. The forces of the universe had arranged that this activity would occur after we drove down to the house to make some measurements for the kitchen, drop off some bank paperwork, and buy groceries for brunch tomorrow.

Oh yeah, brunch. See, the Boy was talking the other day about having his cousins over to "the impartment" and E decided to make it happen. This means that Jen and her husband will come over and they will see –

Well, the total sh!tpit that E and I usually inhabit. At the point that I connect the dots on this, both kids are asleep in the back of the minivan and E and I are considering picking up coffee. E, of course has done this particular math already – but given that I will be out all night with friends, she'll be home with two kids, and my sister's family will be ringing our doorbell in less than 24 hours-

I was having one of those smash-zoom TV storyboard sequences in my head:

• mounds of dirty dishes in both sinks (we have nothing to cook with)
• junk mail, old socks, and dried food stains covering our table (no place to eat)
• laundry everywhere (on couches, the kitchen floor)
• the doorbell ringing
• scrambling to open the gate while food burns on the stove
• Jen and family politely refusing to act horrified at the sights and smells they-

-You get the gist.

Now, my sister is not a white glove kind of person, but it's hard to fess up to family that your average day is spent in a sleep-deprived haze while everything falls apart around you. Add to this that Jen is the kind of person who just gets it done. Granted, she is a stay at home mom – but she has many other challenges.

Frankly, running a house with two children makes a day job look like vacation and somehow Jen always manages to have things under control. When we're over, it's pretty seamless: there are things for guests to do – food for them to eat, and Jen never looks like she's got a care in the world.

This is why I'm imagining a sort of culture shock awaiting her as she plunges into the unending chaos that has defined our life lately.

Despite this, I go out and goof off. Mental health and all. I'm back around midnight and E's still up. Our house is still a pit, but the kids are in bed and we have groceries. E and I crank for awhile and pass out.

Morning turns into one of those "denial of reality" moments.

I'm not here. There is no brunch. Perhaps if I refuse to move out of bed this madness will stop.

Reality is not impressed.

E (who walks on water by the way) allows me to sleep in until 9am. This is Nobel Prize material in our household. Jen's ETA is 11:30.

We start. E gets the kitchen set, I start hiding the bodies in the living room. E's making her family's scone recipe and a frittata. I lamely get the sausages started and perform a few other semi helpful activities. I don't remember most of them – I think I was asleep.

The Boy insists on pouring coffee for the guests, even though they won't be here for an hour. No amount of explaining will convince him otherwise. "Dad! I need to pour the coffeeeEE!

Then he starts serving E's fruit bowl with his hands, putting huge amounts of fruit on every plate.

It's starting to unravel. We had a chance for a second, and then -

Ding dong.

They're here.

At this point, I'm figuring we'll survive, but the kids will all have to kneel around the coffee table and I'm thinking they won't want to eat anything we have. Then they'll be bored because we don't have enough to do and we only have the crappy coffee, because the stuff I bought was whole bean and the grinder's in storage and-

---And it goes great. There was nothing to worry about. E's scones are awesome, the frittata is awesome. The kids have no issues because they have something to do: play with their cousins.

Kids occupied = time to relax and chat, so we do. It's indescribably cathartic. Baby E is having a good time, the Boy and his cousins are goofing off watching Supernanny (yeah, I know – but what the hell, eh?)

E totally rocks. I was so dreading this, and this was such a good time.

Now I'm wondering if we just don't have enough company, because for awhile there, we actually had our sh!t together.

They must have naked pictures...

What do the Telcos/GOP have on these guys?

I cannot otherwise explain how the Democrats are not only failing to stop Telco immunity, but are actively trying to get it passed - and using strong armed tactics to boot.

Glenn Greenwald kicks it off with a rundown of why Rockefeller is a complete tool

When Rockefeller smugly announces that he "thinks we will prevail," the "we" on whose behalf he is so proudly speaking is Bush and Cheney, lawbreaking telecoms, and all Republican Senators. The only parties whom Rockefeller is so happily "defeating" are civil liberties groups and members of his own party. That is what is making him feel pulsating sensations of excitement and "smugness."

There is some rumbling according to Open Left's Tim Tagaris that might stop this, but it's pretty much up in the air.

If we are able to ward off the cloture vote, there is almost no way in hell a bill gets passed before that deadline. None. Not with all the amendments, debate, and Dodd filibuster pending. Which makes it all the more likely that one of two more things will happen.

a.) There will be an extension of some kind. Maybe a month, maybe two weeks ... we shall see.

b.) We have a real showdown on our hands: No bill has been passed because Dems don't want to eavesdrop on terrorists vs. Republicans think its more important to give telecoms a free ride than to eavesdrop on terrorists.
Even more drama? Ok. Presidential style ...

Everyone is going to be in D.C. for the State of the Union Address, that is a given. Which means, Obama and Clinton will actually have to vote (that's novel!). What's more, they can show some real leadership by convincing their endorsers in the Senate (McCaskill, Nelson, Bayh) who voted to table Judiciary to stop the Republicans on Monday.

And if Republicans do manage to get sixty votes, a filibuster is certain to ensue in the subsequent 30 hours. Which of them will stick around into the next day to support that effort?

I'm not sure how the House's refusal to pass Telco immunity plays into all of this, but hopefully there isn't some (oft used, little mentioned) method to sidestep that with some conference committee shenanigans.
ARRRRgh!


I declare today "National Bitch-slap Your Democratic Senator day"

I'd love to see the Dem Presidential candidates grilled on their view of Telco Immunity. Pity it's too late for Carolina.

Praise as a defense mechanism

"That was the greatest performance I have ever seen in a goalkeeper. It was an honor to be on the field with him."
-Brazillian striker on US goalkeeper Kasey Keller, after Brazil's 1998 loss to the United States

I remember being impressed with this quote. "Romario thinks our keeper is the best. Wow!"

Seamus Malin took the wind out of my sails the day after. "Of course Romario thinks he's the greatest. He just lost to him, and he needs to save face."

I learned something that day.

So now, when I hear the French Central bank say that the trader who screwed Société Général out of seven billion dollars is "exceptional" and a computer "genius," I know they are just covering their ass.

The key quote in that NYT article comes from (of all sources for ethical guidance) Cantor Fitzgerald:

Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, said that if one trader had managed to undertake fraud on this scale it revealed bigger weakness in the risk management system of the bank.

“One person could engineer it, but how could one person finance it?” he asked. “The question for the risk management department is: How was this kind of fraud financed? Where did that money come from?”

No kidding. Guy costs his employers seven billion dollars, before anyone notices and (this part I love) the guy is still at large.

Of course they're going to get him – just like that dork who brought down Barings but I mean, cripes. You'd think after the first few billion they might have noticed and, um started ratcheting up the scrutiny maybe?

You have to hope that this guy left an "I'm sorry" note before he bolted, that would be too perfect.

Société Général says they are "serene," that's nice – never mind the SWAT team of accountants tearing through the building behind me.

The only thing missing would be "No one could have conceived of this happening," although I'm sure that was floated in their PR sessions.

Cry for the republic

...the Democrats are here.

Harry Reid on FISA, again

Give me the documents, or else I'll join with you in a spirit of bipartisan unity....

I think I just pulled all my eye-rolling muscles.

Maybe you don't want to reconcile

From CNN:

[Joshua Milton Blahyi], has returned to [the Liberia] his troops [formerly] terrorized to confess, saying he is responsible for 20,000 deaths.

"I could be electrocuted. I could be hanged. I could be given any other punishment," the 37-year-old Blahyi said in a weekend interview following his truth commission appearance last week. "But I think forgiveness and reconciliation is the right way to go.

"I have been looking for an opportunity to tell the true story about my life -- and every time I tell people my story, I feel relieved."

Even the bloodiest of bleeding hearts would find it hard to be impressed with this kind of 11th hour change of heart.

However there is a side note to this story that is impressive in its own way:

Joshua Milton Blahyi… [is] known as Gen. Butt Naked…His nom de guerre is derived from his platoon's practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy.

Okay, that's just over-the-top freaky. Dude's into human sacrifice, cannibalistic ritual and fighting naked.

And he had followers.

Followers who are willing to watch his [bare] back as he repeatedly charged into combat. Even accepting the [all but explicit] implication that drugs were involved – how many like minded-psychopaths did this freakwad manage to recruit?

Makes you question the notion of reconciliation – I mean, without the hope of amnesty, the truth may not be known – but once the truth is known, how do you forget stuff like:

Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.

The sacrifice was typically "the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat," he told The Associated Press Saturday.

Look! In the caucuses, in the primaries, it's a bird-

-no it's a superdelegate.

If that word sounds like the protagonist in the least interesting comic book ever, you might want to check out CNN's site explaining "Why delegates matter"

It does a nice rundown of a process most people (myself included) are only dimly aware of.

With Clinton claiming a victory based on percentages of caucus goers - and Obama claiming victory based on numbers of delegates won, you can see why these terms will start to matter.

This thing goes to the wire, we all may get to see more than we care to about how this particular presidential sausage gets made.

The definition that kind of reaches out and grabs you is the Superdelegate:

Superdelegates comprise 796* out of the total 4,049* delegates. Superdelegates are usually Democratic members of Congress, governors, national committee members or party leaders (such as former presidents and vice presidents). They are not required to indicate a preference for a candidate, nor do they compete for the privilege like pledged delegates.

Essentially, these are the well connected people within the Democratic party (the asterisks on the totals are there because the number can drop if people cannot make it to the convention, are deleted by the winning candidate and a host of other bizarre reasons).

Pledged delegates are selected with the understanding that they will vote for a given candidate at the convention. Superdelegates are not elected and, in perhaps my favorite understatement on the site-(emphasis added)

There is no official process to win superdelegates because they can vote for whomever they choose. But a candidate can use whatever powers of persuasion they have at their disposal to win the support of a superdelegate.

I'm sure they can, and I'm sure they will.

Given that the magic number to win the nomination is 2,025 - it's rather jarring to think that almost 800 people in the delegate pool are independent from the will of the electorate.

If Obama takes South Carolina and Super Tuesday doesn't result in a crushing win for somebody - this could be a veeeEery interesting group of people to watch.

The political animals on cable are already rubbing their hands in the hope that there might actually be a national convention that chose a candidate instead of just another pep-rally.

Part of me would really love that to happen - but I have to say, it's really an ointment or suppository kind of choice:

A primary system that anoints a favorite based on a few states (disenfranchising the bulk of the party faithful), or a convention where the preferences of the electorate are traded as commodities - and where a small group of partisans can overrule popular will.

Not exactly the kind of process that inspires monuments and statues, eh?

Thank you, Ian!

Okay, how many things do we do simply out of habit?

I mean, I'm in the business of looking for easier ways to do things - and I'm no different. "This is the way I've always done this."

Apparently this Ian guy has come up with a better way to tie your shoes.

From my (admittedly limited) testing - the two top knots look really promising.

One's a faster way to tie your shoe in the same old knot.

The other's a quick version of a double knot.

The fact that I can learn them in seconds and have a reasonable shot at remembering them speaks volumes about the knots and the way Ian shows you how to tie them.

Neat!

Getting a handle on Plastic-Man

It should be obvious, but I would love to be the people at CJR.
Getting paid to dig into media coverage like a rabid dog.

Here's the Campaign Desk laying into the latest dust up with Romney:

The most interesting part of the video to watch, for my money, wasn’t Johnson, but candidate Romney—and, specifically, Romney’s reaction to the questions Johnson was asking. The candidate seemed flustered and angry that Johnson was questioning his assertions. And surprised about the follow-ups.

Let me repeat: a journalist questioning him made Romney angry and surprised. Which is telling—and I don’t mean about the candidate.

Bingo.

We've done almost two terms with a "how-dare-you-question-me" administration. I'm thinking we could do with a bit more humility from those in power - and a hell of a lot less in those questioning them.

Finding smoke, looking for fire...

Emptywheel has a nice post on the Vanishing White House Emails, and the ever changing description of what is and isn't missing.

Tony Fratto vs the press:

Q Tony, on the subject, could you address the missing White House emails and the law suit? It is a subject of reports this morning. Are there in fact the emails missing? What's the likelihood of their recovery versus the --

MR. FRATTO: I think our review of this, and you saw the court filing on this, and our declaration in response to the judge's questions -- I think to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that. There's no -- we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart. And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our backup systems, we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.
...

Q So that would mean that if you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?

MR. FRATTO: Yes, which documents? I mean, if someone has a specific request for documents and they would like us to search for particular emails, of course we could search for emails -- and we have. And we have been responsive to requests in the past.

Which begs the question -- "Does this even matter?"

Hell, yes.

You have (yet another) instance where an investigation cannot proceed because documents have (yet again) disappeared.

Read Rep. Waxman's response to Fratto. Priceless.

I F-ing H8 IVR

The creation of IVR has made contacting corporate America by phone even more annoying than it already is.

There's a great website out there, GetHuman.com that maps shortcuts through IVR and phone tree hell and posts them for all to see.

This is good, but LifeHacker found another shortcut that (while not work safe) can also lower your stress level:

2. Swear like a sailor to skip directly to a human operator.
When that Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system's making you navigate an endless menu of options, put your potty mouth to good use. Some IVR's are programmed to listen for naughty words and speed you along to human help when they hear them. Adam gave this trick a try and dropping the F bomb did indeed zap him right through to a human.

Love it.

Zing!

CJR with a spot on observation about dateline manipulation.

Maureen Dowd’s New Hampshire morning-after column was probably written in Jerusalem, despite trumpeting the words “DERRY, NH” right up top.
...
The New York Times has acknowledged that the people-on-the-scene quotes from Clinton’s victory party were collected by an assistant, as is common practice. And they’re defending the bylining as totally kosher, claiming she’d been in Derry, for some time, at some point.

Well, okay. But if the in-house rules allow—indeed, sanction—such easy manipulation, what good could they be?

Not like anyone's assessment of an article hinges on where the author claims to have been while they wrote it, but at this point - you might as well drop the location from the byline entirely.

This can be distinguished from the assumption that a TV reporter knows more about what happened at a location when they are standing in front of it. They can be just as ignorant back in the studio, but at least the camera will establish that they were, in fact, there.

Putting a fabricated byline in the article, would be like the TV reporter green-screening themselves to report "from the scene."