Paging Mickey Kaus

Why did we have to read about the new Maybach in the Financial Times. It's a $250,000 automobile, made by Daimler Chrysler, that has the auto world in a tizzy. The blogosphere depends on kausfiles to keep us ahead of the news in the automative sector. Scooped! And by the FT! Can he ever live it down?

Dumb Democrats

Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday rejected President Bush's nomination of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owens to the US Court of Appeals. And in so doing, damaged former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk's campaign for the US Senate. Kirk himself certainly didn't help matters by opposing Owens last summer. But his opposition would have been rendered moot by Senate approval of the Owens nomination.

Kevin Phillips wrote years ago that the big three "Rs" of politics are race, religion and regionalism. The Owens issue is a regional issue; one of ours getting snubbed by a bunch of them. You'd think someone in the Democratic Party would have thought this through. In dissing Owens, the Democrats have dissed Bush and given the president and his party a good regional issue to use against Kirk. And use it they will.

Will He Ever Shut Up?

Former President Bill Clinton weighed in last night on the coming war with Iraq. Mr. Clinton, whose opinion on this matter may be the least sought-after piece of intellectual property on the planet, said that the Bush Administration should find and kill bin Laden first, then deal with Saddam Hussein later. As Paul Wolfowitz might say: "thanks for sharing."

Blogging

Andrew Sullivan and Kurt Andersen have been emailing back and forth about blogs. Both are friends. My wife and I are contributors to Andrew's website. I was a columnist for Inside.com and Inside magazine (which Kurt started). Kurt's wife, Ann Kreamer, and I may soon be working together on various consulting projects. And so much for all that.

Both men make good points. The most interesting idea came from Kurt. Raise $30 million (as he did for Inside). Invest that money in T-bills. Use the roughly $1.5 million annual interest to create a Blogazine, with smart editorial direction, strong back-end technology and the talent pool that already exists within the Blogosphere. If nothing happens, the investors get their investment units back. If Blogazine finds a workable business model, the investors make a healthy return. As "Internet" ventures go, not a bad proposal.

And it seems clear to me (at least) that such a thing could be profitable, if one of the big advertising and marketing services companies was engaged to develop what you might call "just in time" advertising. "Just in time" advertising is a service we all need, but don't get. It works like this. We need something. We need as much available information about quality/price/design as possible. We need to be one double-click away from that information, so that we can make a smart choice.

So, for example, bedding. People need to buy a new bed, if memory serves, every seven years. Right now, bed-selling companies advertise every day in the newspaper, even though they know that only 1/2500th of the population is in the market for a bed. The better solution for bed-sellers is to have the bed-buyer make his or her need known to the seller and then have some intermediary handle the information transfer as well as the transaction itself. Double click on bedding and an email arrives that gives a range of deals on a range of beds. This is an on-line advertising model that would work very well. And Blogazine (working in concert with, say, OMC or IPG) would be a good place to develop such a model.

The second revenue stream that Blogazine could develop is syndication. Good columnists are hard to come by, as anyone who has ever read a Gannett newspaper will attest. Blogazine would be full of good writers, people whose work would fit in every part of a local paper. Sell it at below market rates and my suspicion is that Blogazine could quickly compete with every syndicator in the business (and with a roster of hundreds of bloggers).

The third revenue stream is the one Sullivan already uses. Buy these books from Amazon (by linking through andrewsullivan.com) and andrewsullivan.com gets a small cut. The problem here is home page clutter. The best home pages are like the best front-pages; they're all editorial content. But you can banner and sidebar these "adlinks" without detracting (too much) from the home page front.

Moving right along, there are three things that the blogosphere does very well. First, it connects communities of interest. If you're into tech gadgets, as I am, then Hiawatha Bray's blog was really great. (I say "was" because he seems to have stopped blogging.) If you're into Massachusetts politics, as I am, then Hublog is very helpful.

Second, blogs are great infomediaries. RealClearPolitics neatly sums up political op-eds. The Political Wire collects most of the major US political news. Watch puts most of the War news in one place. Etc.

Third, blogs enable great voices to be heard (for the first time or more frequently). Truth be told, there aren't a ton of great voices in the blogosphere. But there are many. Six that you should bookmark are Sullivan, Kaus, Reynolds, Lileks and JaneGalt.net and Simmons.

I agree with Andersen (although, of course, he didn't put it this way) that there is something very sad in thinking that "fact-checking" The New York Times matters much. I suppose it keeps them on their toes. I know they read it (never have people so critical been so thin-skinned). But at the end of the day, I just cancelled my subscription. I'd rather read Lileks than Frank Rich.

Postscript

Maynard Handley points out that the current T-bill pays 1.5 percent interest. So we'd have to put that $30 million into Sam Israel's hedge fund (Bayou Securities), which is having another great year and could probably produce the $1.5 million return needed (annually) to fund Blogazine.

And So It Begins

Last week, the Iraqis "radar-locked" US and British warplanes in the "no-fly zone" in Northern Iraq. The US/British response is described here.

Cuomo's Collapse

Successful campaigns for governor depend, in large measure, on a rationale. Ed Koch lost the New York State Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1982 because his campaign lacked a rationale. He was a popular Mayor, he was bored, he wanted to be governor. The whole endeavor was entirely self-interested. Voters got that and sent him back to his day job.

As it happened, Koch lost to Mario Cuomo. As my friend Mishkin points out, it's interesting that Andrew Cuomo's campaign collapsed (albeit more spectacularly) for precisely the same reason that Koch's campaign fell short. There was no rationale. There was name recognition and Kennedy family borrowed interest and a blizzard of policy papers, but no compelling argument. And since most New York State Democrats view this year's gubernatorial election as a certain loss, the question of who should be the nominee involved picking the most useful loser.

From the point of view of any number of leading New York State Democrats (especially the state's two US Senators), Carl McCall makes an almost perfect sacrificial offering. There's no chance he can win. But they all get credit for backing the black guy. That's a rationale people like Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton can understand.

As General Motors Goes

It is said (by me, among others) that big, bureaucratic corporate organizations are almost incapable of leadership. But one big, bureaucratic corporate organization -- General Motors -- took a leadership role in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and in so doing may have saved the country from recession. It's a good story and you can read it by clicking here.

Thanks to my brother-in-law Tom Smith for the heads up.

A Human Ferret

George Will's column today on the loathsome and shameless Senator Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) is worth reading twice.

The 11th of September

The picture that is as clear today as it was then is the one of the jumpers. Hanging on the ledge. Heat from the fire burning their backs. The last ten seconds before the last ten seconds of free fall. In that documentary by the two firehouse Frenchmen, the sound of the dead weight of one jumper and then the next, hitting the roof over the entrance. A dreadful thud. And another. And another. Osama did that.

The other picture that is as clear today as it was then is the one of other jumpers; Special Forces guys parachuting into the mountainous regions of Northern Afghanistan. I counted roughly 35 of them in the AP photograph; all of them laden down with equipment and weaponry. Thirty-five guys from places like Beckley, West Virginia and Emirald, Montana and Tyler, Texas. Jumping into a truly forbidding country, by themselves.

In less than two months, they changed the face of that country. And changed the calculus of terror.

The men and women of Special Operations and Special Forces will never ever get the recognition they deserve. Goes with the job. Salute them anyway.

Egghead Convention

Is there anything more tedious than a gathering of political scientists opining about the Bush presidency? David Broder's report is priceless.

Wolfie on Afghanistan

Good interview with Paul Wolfowitz in the London Daily Telegraph. Here's an excerpt. The interviewer is Ahmed Rashid of the Far Eastern Economic Review.


Rashid: There is a kind of perception that DoD is dominating policymaking on this, particularly on Afghanistan, on this part of the world.

Wolfowitz: Certainly that's not a perception here.

Rashid: There's a perception outside Washington and a lot of people inside Washington think that.

Wolfowitz: The perception I have is that the President is dominating policy. It's his policies and there's a lot of healthy debate that goes into formulating them, which he encourages.

But I think there's -- even from the inside I have to tell you there's a great sense of cooperation with the State Department. I was just in Turkey accompanied by Marc Grossen the Under Secretary of State. We were constantly discussing what to do next. We were never in deep arguments. He was enormously helpful to me. That's, to me, the typical experience. But of course what makes for better journalism is when there's some degree of difference. But I would, certainly our view isn't that all those differences fall our way. I'll tell you that.

Clinton Cabinetry

My hope was that the three Clinton cabinet members -- former Attorney General Janet Reno, former HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich -- would win their party's gubernatorial nominations in Florida, New York and Massachusetts, respectively. And then be trounced by Bush, Pataki and Romney, respectively.

Well, bad news. Janet Reno is going gone. Cuomo is a goner (see below). And Reich is heading for certain defeat.

This leaves us with former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, who is hard to dislike and a very able man. He'll probably lose to Elizabeth Dole in the North Carolina Senate race.

Makes Sense

Word is circulating that New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo will soon withdraw from the race. Given that Carl McCall is going to win the primary and lose the general election anyway, Cuomo is making the right move. Now all he has to do is work his heart out for McCall. How he behaves for the next two months will largely determine whether he has a future in New York State Democratic politics.

Update: He's out.

Commercial Free

Next year's Masters golf tournament will be broadcast without commercials. The prospect of four more minutes of Jim Nance and Lanny Wadkins yammering away is daunting. On the other hand, we will be spared those dreadful Coke and Cadillac commercials. On the third hand, it seems likely that the inevitable compromise will be CBS promo advertising. So choose your poison.

Osama Bin Hidin'

Some US military commanders want to redeploy Special Operations forces that have been searching for Osama Bin Laden, according to The New York Times, on the theory that he's probably dead. They're probably right, he probably is dead.

But here's a question. If Osama is dead, wouldn't there be a huge battle over his estate? Wouldn't the wives be in there fighting for a bigger slice of the pie? Wouldn't large numbers of accountants and bankers and lawyers be hassling over the distribution? The resolution of the estate "issue" seems to me the best argument that Osama remains alive and at large.