Gambit Number One

From tomorrow's Financial Times:

"Iraq said late on Monday it would agree to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors without conditions, potentially opening the door to an agreement that could stave off US military action against the regime of Saddam Hussein." You can read the rest of the story by clicking here.

Timing

"It's hard not to notice that the sudden urgency of war with Iraq has coincided precisely with the emergence of the corporate scandal story, with the flip in the congressional [poll] numbers and with the decline in the Republicans' prospects for retaking the Senate majority," said Jim Jordan, director of the Democrats' Senate campaign committee. "It's absolutely clear that the administration has timed the Iraq public relations campaign to influence the midterm elections . . . and to distract the voting public from a failing economy and an unpopular Republican domestic agenda." This quote is taken from a remarkable Dana Milbank story in today's Washington Post.

Is this going to be the Democratic position on the most urgent national security matter facing the United States? That it's really about whether Sen. Susan Collins (R) gets re-elected in Maine?

Wolfowitz on the War

The Associated Press September 11th interview with Paul Wolfowitz is now posted on the DOD website. It is a must-read.

The Debate Debate

Andrew Sullivan's most recent piece on the debate about Iraq is well worth reading.

Down Time

I'll be off the blog for a week as I tend to other matters.

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.