Sarah Longwell’s focus group is hands down the best ever. I need to chuckle when MSNBC has her own to air a 30 second clip about her work. That 30 second clip does not provide close to the enlightenment of a complete track listen. It really is prime time material.
I subscribe to both the NYT and WaPo, as well as NYT Games. I finish Wordle and the CW before my feet hit the floor in the AM. The NYT is all-around pleasure but WaPo is political coverage from the political town itself.
Re the Times vs WaPo, in fact the NY Times is in a much larger city surrounded by a larger region. So the Times natural audience is far larger. I live 40 miles from Times Square and with the collapse of most local newspapers in NJ, the Times is where I go. I get paper on Sat/Sun and digital for all the rest.
But regarding all those things that newspapers can offer, the Times lives in the home of Broadway, of most book publishing, of Wall Street and even of much of the music industry. It is also home to many major museums, so from book reviews, to business news, the Times is head and shoulders about even the best regional newspaper, just by virtue of access to newsmakers.
WaPo cannot match that. No amount of business strategy can make up for what the Times has is its back yard.
Decades ago, my brother worked at the Paterson News. Even though it was a mediocre newspaper, when he wanted to review a broadway show, the show was just a relative few miles away. It is just easier here to get access to all of the extra stuff that builds interest besides the news.
I am late to the party. I do actually agree that the Focus Group is worth the subscription all by itself. It is consistently fascinating. Am I going to have to re-subscribe on Apple podcast?
Also, I have a girl crush on Sarah Longwell. She’s consistently more fiscally conservative in her views than mine. However, she speaks with logic and clarity, and with such equanimity and good humor it has helped me understand the value of practical fiscal conservatism.
I am a (kind of) subscriber to the NYT-my daughter has the subscription & I pay for HBO, Netflix, etc. The Cooking newsletter is what hooked us; my entire repetoir is recipes from Clark, Slagle, Tanis, Komolafe & Kim etc.
But WaPo's political writing was always better. Unfortunately for WaPo I decided to keep my Star Tribune subscription & give up WaPo; there's only so much reading one can do in a day!
Very glad to be a Bulwark plus member. Great value and well worth every penny. It is very important to support and be a part of sane and intelligent discourse.
Completely off topic, but National Geographic Channel is showing 9-11 all day with footage I've never seen before. Dear God, it feels like it happened today.
With respect to Josh Barro's piece, I will cop to a huge dollop of quasi-hometown bias: I've read the Washington Post on and off (and mostly on) since my undergrad days at Georgetown, when reading the local paper was considered to be a badge of honor by many of us. I still do today. But I have to admit, Mr. Barro (and by extension, the NYT) seems to be more right than wrong. I'm absolutely a Never-Trumper, but WaPo's reporting has seemed more and more hysterical to me as time has gone on. Their single-minded crusades for a single side of some issues, notably on immigration, have no place on the news pages of any paper that claims journalistic standards. And I'm with him on his funny but oh-so-true footnote, "Relatedly, I would drop the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — the first step to becoming more than just a #resistance publication is taking that self-important dreck out of your goddamned web header."
I'm not quite there yet, but I'm starting to imagine myself going over to the Gotham enemy in the not too distant future.
I subscribe to both the WaPo and NYT. I think I’m closing in on my 10th anniversary as an on-line only subscriber of the latter. I actually find both papers more woke-type socially liberal then I’d like (NYT in particular) but maybe that’s all that’s coming out of J School anymore.
I will be dropping one of them soon and its def true NYT is more bang for the buck. That said, I’m paying nearly $30 a month for the NYT and much less for the WaPo.
I don’t foresee dropping my Bulwark+ membership under any circumstances.
I subscribed to both at one time and then I got annoyed at the comments and the woke stuff they seemed to be pushing as a paper, and how they treated some of their employees... but every day I wonder if I should join again ( offering me a great deal) , because I miss the magazine, the ethicist column, the puzzles, some of the columnists etc...I just don't know if I can be disciplined and stick to that stuff...lol
The only advantage crypto offers is it’s by far the best way to launder dirty money - for drug cartels, organized crime, Russian oligarchs etc crypto is the cats meow that keeps the cat away from these rats. For other potential buyers it’s a fools game aptly describe by Charlie Munger as “rat poison”. Perhaps Gensler’s game is to encourage crypto to poison so many credulous rats that much of its business is erased leaving only hard core criminals as customers.
Excellent newsletter choices again but we feel the need to mention The Comics as a great WaPo highlight. We get both papers, but there are historic jewels in the comics. For instance take Doonsbury: BD is named for a former Yale football player who was always getting injured. A smile & a link, one might name Chris Sale “Crystal Chris.” Isn’t a chuckle or smile of the day worth a crossword puzzle?
Thanks for the Sarah hard sell! Here’s a data point: I joined Bulwark+ because of The Focus Group pod. I think it should be required listening for anyone who wants to have a prayer of understanding this country.
It's pretty hard to fault the SEC for their approach relating to the regulation of crypto.
Blockchain technology is usefull but every single cryptocurrency makes absolutely zero economic or business sense. They are all pump and dump schemes fundamentally.
So how can thh SEC "regulate" a financial product that is based on a pump and dump model?
I mean seriously, I challenge anyone to cite a single financially sound aspect of crypto beyond the pump and dump model.
1) Is it useful as a currency vis-a-vis engaging in commercial transactions in the real world? Nope, the conversion transaction fees are insanely high and the currencies are all far too volatile to be remotely useful for commerce (the latter being a reason why the gold standard is a dumb idea).
2) Are cryptocurrencies at least useful to allow for privacy (including engaging in crime) in financial transactions? Nope, contrary to popular belief, blockchain transactions are by definition far more public than going through say a coroporate entity and normal banking. The whole POINT of blockchain crypto is that EVERYONE has access to every single transaction that is made using that currency, and even hopping between different crypto currencies (incurring massive transaction costs in the process) is easily traceable by law enforcement or any tech savy member of the public. Sure, the users can maintain a level of anonymity during the transactions, but that anonymity is unveiled the second that a SINGLE transaction can be linked to the person holding the account (i.e. anytime the user actually does something with the funds accruing, in the real world). Theoretically sure, an anonymous user can accrue a huge fortune in crypto, as long as it stays in the crypto world. But if said person actually wants to translate that into money/purchases in the real world, all it takes is a single mistake for the blockchain information to then reveal every single transaction that person made, be it legal or illegal.
The only thing crypto currencies do is to serve as a very unpractical symbol of libertarianism in the financial word for extremist libertarian types.
To that end, I'd argue that crypto is the equivalent of libertarian survivalist folks who get together once a year to live in a libertarian fantasy camp for a weekend where chunks of silver and gold are the only currencies permitted (but at least silver and gold have real world useful applications).
I've come to realize that the success of their subscription model has essentially gutted local papers and funneled all that money into the single entity that is the NYT. This is a problem in itself, but it's not even as if the NYT has used it's influence/funding effectively or even ethically.
1) I subscribed to the digital NYT with an introductory offer that was reasonable at $5 a month. Ah but then they nickle and dime your for additional content that should be part of the subscription, like having to pay extra for the food areas of the paper and the crossword.
2) The Daily podcast (no exagerration, they actually ADVERTISE this) employs TWO composers to generate the music used in the podcast. That's just an illustration of the silly amount of money they have to burn.
3) In my experience the NYT is one of the worst offenders of rarely pushing right wing politicians in their interviews (the Daily podcast being the worst offender) in order to both maintain access to Republicans, but also to feed a false sense of "balance" in an environment where Republicans are categorically different in their misconduct than Democrats. Yet when there's a liberal person being interviewed they actually do their job and probe into weakness of their arguments, but more often than not they do so in excess.
4) Oh and on a sheer financial ethics level, you can subscribe to the NTY electronically, practically with the push of a button. Unsubscribing however took me, no exageration, a full hour because there are no automated options for doing so, you actually get put on hold to speak to a person (there is a theoretical way to unsubscribe via a messaging area on their site, but funny, it kept failing).
5) My biggest criticism with the NYT is that they are a paternalistic news organization that is frankly easily duped by the Feds when they cover stories affecting national security. On more than one occassion, they've delayed publishing stories of national importance and electoral importance. A prime example being their refusal to publish their knowledge of the mass domestic surveillance under the Bush administration until AFTER the 2004 election, keeping voters in the dark about something that would allow voters to make an informed voting choice:
In contrast the Washington Post has been doing solid work, doesn't pull punches, and frankly even their daily podcast is far more informative than the Daily.
The NYT frankly has too much money and old school paternalism to be an effective news organization.
Yup. The way mainstream media take the Hunter Biden shit seriously makes me want to rip out my hair, let alone "her emails" scandal.
Trump's family used a private email server from day one in their administration and his kids and Trump himself directly profited from the Presidency. To name a few examples
--Trump violating the law by keeping the Trump Washington hotel despite the fact the lease specifically saying the hotel could NOT be leased to a government functionary.
--Said hotel's fees doubling overnight and foreign governments and lobbyist renting out entire floors, unused to suck up to Trump.
--Ivanka Trump mysteriously getting copyright protection in China for her failing businesses
--Melania Trump extorting Trump through the U.S. government to the tube of hundreds of millions of dollars of Secret Service protection in Manhattan by refusing to move to the White House until she could renegotiate a better separation agreement than the prenup she originally signed.
--Trump doubling the membership fee for Mar-a-Lago when he became president.
--Trump literally spent 1/3 of his term in office at Mar-a-Lago, biliking the government to pay for his protection service's stay at his home.
--and for F's sake he's even now violating the local laws by living in Mar-a-Lago when the property is NOT zoned to be a primary residence.
And that's even neglecting to get into him stealing classified documents, storing them in an insecure manner, and openly sucking off Putin.
Yet for the sake of "balance" the likes of the NYT treat Hunter Biden's attempts to profit from the Biden connection, with zero evidence tying Biden himself to anything, as an equivalent transgression.
Judith Miller's reporting in the run up to the second Gulf war was a scandalous example. She was an open pipeline for Chalabi's bs propaganda about WMD's that was the justification for going into that war.
While Judith Miller's stories from the Times ran under banner headlines of her stories on my local paper the back pages contained reports from a couple of reporters from Gannet or Knight-Ridder or AP (I forget which) which called into question her source. They reported that she was relying on Ahmed Chalabi as her primary source and that the US intelligence agencies were skeptical of his allegations. The administration steered him to Miller and then used her reports to justify their march to war.
I remember the Cuban missile crisis. There were surveillance photos nearly daily showing, first, the Russian freighters with crates of the type used for aircraft and other equipment on their decks, heading to Cuba. Then photos of the ships docked in Cuban ports being unloaded of that freight. Followed by photos of the aircraft being uncrated and reassembled at the airstrips. And the missile launchers and associated equipment being set up at various sites. The whole thing was indisputable.
Colin Powell was a decent and honorable person who would have made a fine President. He knew that the administration's case was bullshit. He reportedly said so. Yet he evidently felt it was his duty to support the President when he agreed to go the UN and give the speech making the case for war. I was stunned to watch it. It was nothing like the run up to the missile crisis. There were laughable artist's conceptions of mobile chemical/biological labs, cryptic snippets of intercepted Iraqi military communications about getting rid of that stuff, conflation of chemical or biological weapons with a nuclear threat, a comical bit where he held up a small vial of white powder and said that if it were anthrax it could thousands of Americans. Yeah, and if pigs had wings they could fly. Plus a total avoidance of acknowledging that the IAEC investigators on the ground had been unable to find any evidence of a active nuclear program. It was a laughable dog and pony show. Worse yet was that the Times and the overwhelming majority of pundits and politicians claimed it was a slam dunk when in fact it was the thinnest pretext of a casus belli.
Worse than that they didn't correct the problem, I got one of those cheap comeon subsc. For both Wapo and NYT, I quickly realized that Judith Miller style of reporting was a feature not a bug.
Sarah Longwell’s focus group is hands down the best ever. I need to chuckle when MSNBC has her own to air a 30 second clip about her work. That 30 second clip does not provide close to the enlightenment of a complete track listen. It really is prime time material.
I subscribe to both the NYT and WaPo, as well as NYT Games. I finish Wordle and the CW before my feet hit the floor in the AM. The NYT is all-around pleasure but WaPo is political coverage from the political town itself.
I agree that WaPo should drop the stupid motto.
News is food for thought,
Whether served on silver plate,
Or poor man's pewter.
Re the Times vs WaPo, in fact the NY Times is in a much larger city surrounded by a larger region. So the Times natural audience is far larger. I live 40 miles from Times Square and with the collapse of most local newspapers in NJ, the Times is where I go. I get paper on Sat/Sun and digital for all the rest.
But regarding all those things that newspapers can offer, the Times lives in the home of Broadway, of most book publishing, of Wall Street and even of much of the music industry. It is also home to many major museums, so from book reviews, to business news, the Times is head and shoulders about even the best regional newspaper, just by virtue of access to newsmakers.
WaPo cannot match that. No amount of business strategy can make up for what the Times has is its back yard.
Decades ago, my brother worked at the Paterson News. Even though it was a mediocre newspaper, when he wanted to review a broadway show, the show was just a relative few miles away. It is just easier here to get access to all of the extra stuff that builds interest besides the news.
I am late to the party. I do actually agree that the Focus Group is worth the subscription all by itself. It is consistently fascinating. Am I going to have to re-subscribe on Apple podcast?
Also, I have a girl crush on Sarah Longwell. She’s consistently more fiscally conservative in her views than mine. However, she speaks with logic and clarity, and with such equanimity and good humor it has helped me understand the value of practical fiscal conservatism.
I am a (kind of) subscriber to the NYT-my daughter has the subscription & I pay for HBO, Netflix, etc. The Cooking newsletter is what hooked us; my entire repetoir is recipes from Clark, Slagle, Tanis, Komolafe & Kim etc.
But WaPo's political writing was always better. Unfortunately for WaPo I decided to keep my Star Tribune subscription & give up WaPo; there's only so much reading one can do in a day!
Outstanding synopsis of what's important!
Very glad to be a Bulwark plus member. Great value and well worth every penny. It is very important to support and be a part of sane and intelligent discourse.
I love Josh and I hope when I get a little more discretionary cash I will subscribe. Been reading his free stuff in the meantime.
I am a Bulwark + member and I love The Focus Group and agree with your assessment of it's value...if I wasn't I might be tempted myself.
And I love Tim Alberta
Completely off topic, but National Geographic Channel is showing 9-11 all day with footage I've never seen before. Dear God, it feels like it happened today.
With respect to Josh Barro's piece, I will cop to a huge dollop of quasi-hometown bias: I've read the Washington Post on and off (and mostly on) since my undergrad days at Georgetown, when reading the local paper was considered to be a badge of honor by many of us. I still do today. But I have to admit, Mr. Barro (and by extension, the NYT) seems to be more right than wrong. I'm absolutely a Never-Trumper, but WaPo's reporting has seemed more and more hysterical to me as time has gone on. Their single-minded crusades for a single side of some issues, notably on immigration, have no place on the news pages of any paper that claims journalistic standards. And I'm with him on his funny but oh-so-true footnote, "Relatedly, I would drop the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — the first step to becoming more than just a #resistance publication is taking that self-important dreck out of your goddamned web header."
I'm not quite there yet, but I'm starting to imagine myself going over to the Gotham enemy in the not too distant future.
I subscribe to both the WaPo and NYT. I think I’m closing in on my 10th anniversary as an on-line only subscriber of the latter. I actually find both papers more woke-type socially liberal then I’d like (NYT in particular) but maybe that’s all that’s coming out of J School anymore.
I will be dropping one of them soon and its def true NYT is more bang for the buck. That said, I’m paying nearly $30 a month for the NYT and much less for the WaPo.
I don’t foresee dropping my Bulwark+ membership under any circumstances.
I subscribed to both at one time and then I got annoyed at the comments and the woke stuff they seemed to be pushing as a paper, and how they treated some of their employees... but every day I wonder if I should join again ( offering me a great deal) , because I miss the magazine, the ethicist column, the puzzles, some of the columnists etc...I just don't know if I can be disciplined and stick to that stuff...lol
WaPo Comments are a horror show. And they shield some of their writers by simply not having comments at all.
Yeah, I noticed that and when thinking about why, I assumed it was because they knew the regulars would be awful....
The only advantage crypto offers is it’s by far the best way to launder dirty money - for drug cartels, organized crime, Russian oligarchs etc crypto is the cats meow that keeps the cat away from these rats. For other potential buyers it’s a fools game aptly describe by Charlie Munger as “rat poison”. Perhaps Gensler’s game is to encourage crypto to poison so many credulous rats that much of its business is erased leaving only hard core criminals as customers.
Excellent newsletter choices again but we feel the need to mention The Comics as a great WaPo highlight. We get both papers, but there are historic jewels in the comics. For instance take Doonsbury: BD is named for a former Yale football player who was always getting injured. A smile & a link, one might name Chris Sale “Crystal Chris.” Isn’t a chuckle or smile of the day worth a crossword puzzle?
SallyJones
Brian Dowling. He’s probably 75 now.
Yes. “Brittle Brian”
I love Prickly City - still mad that LA Times took it out.
Thanks for the Sarah hard sell! Here’s a data point: I joined Bulwark+ because of The Focus Group pod. I think it should be required listening for anyone who wants to have a prayer of understanding this country.
It's pretty hard to fault the SEC for their approach relating to the regulation of crypto.
Blockchain technology is usefull but every single cryptocurrency makes absolutely zero economic or business sense. They are all pump and dump schemes fundamentally.
So how can thh SEC "regulate" a financial product that is based on a pump and dump model?
I mean seriously, I challenge anyone to cite a single financially sound aspect of crypto beyond the pump and dump model.
1) Is it useful as a currency vis-a-vis engaging in commercial transactions in the real world? Nope, the conversion transaction fees are insanely high and the currencies are all far too volatile to be remotely useful for commerce (the latter being a reason why the gold standard is a dumb idea).
2) Are cryptocurrencies at least useful to allow for privacy (including engaging in crime) in financial transactions? Nope, contrary to popular belief, blockchain transactions are by definition far more public than going through say a coroporate entity and normal banking. The whole POINT of blockchain crypto is that EVERYONE has access to every single transaction that is made using that currency, and even hopping between different crypto currencies (incurring massive transaction costs in the process) is easily traceable by law enforcement or any tech savy member of the public. Sure, the users can maintain a level of anonymity during the transactions, but that anonymity is unveiled the second that a SINGLE transaction can be linked to the person holding the account (i.e. anytime the user actually does something with the funds accruing, in the real world). Theoretically sure, an anonymous user can accrue a huge fortune in crypto, as long as it stays in the crypto world. But if said person actually wants to translate that into money/purchases in the real world, all it takes is a single mistake for the blockchain information to then reveal every single transaction that person made, be it legal or illegal.
The only thing crypto currencies do is to serve as a very unpractical symbol of libertarianism in the financial word for extremist libertarian types.
To that end, I'd argue that crypto is the equivalent of libertarian survivalist folks who get together once a year to live in a libertarian fantasy camp for a weekend where chunks of silver and gold are the only currencies permitted (but at least silver and gold have real world useful applications).
RE: NYT
I've come to realize that the success of their subscription model has essentially gutted local papers and funneled all that money into the single entity that is the NYT. This is a problem in itself, but it's not even as if the NYT has used it's influence/funding effectively or even ethically.
1) I subscribed to the digital NYT with an introductory offer that was reasonable at $5 a month. Ah but then they nickle and dime your for additional content that should be part of the subscription, like having to pay extra for the food areas of the paper and the crossword.
2) The Daily podcast (no exagerration, they actually ADVERTISE this) employs TWO composers to generate the music used in the podcast. That's just an illustration of the silly amount of money they have to burn.
3) In my experience the NYT is one of the worst offenders of rarely pushing right wing politicians in their interviews (the Daily podcast being the worst offender) in order to both maintain access to Republicans, but also to feed a false sense of "balance" in an environment where Republicans are categorically different in their misconduct than Democrats. Yet when there's a liberal person being interviewed they actually do their job and probe into weakness of their arguments, but more often than not they do so in excess.
4) Oh and on a sheer financial ethics level, you can subscribe to the NTY electronically, practically with the push of a button. Unsubscribing however took me, no exageration, a full hour because there are no automated options for doing so, you actually get put on hold to speak to a person (there is a theoretical way to unsubscribe via a messaging area on their site, but funny, it kept failing).
5) My biggest criticism with the NYT is that they are a paternalistic news organization that is frankly easily duped by the Feds when they cover stories affecting national security. On more than one occassion, they've delayed publishing stories of national importance and electoral importance. A prime example being their refusal to publish their knowledge of the mass domestic surveillance under the Bush administration until AFTER the 2004 election, keeping voters in the dark about something that would allow voters to make an informed voting choice:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/08/nyti-a22.html
In contrast the Washington Post has been doing solid work, doesn't pull punches, and frankly even their daily podcast is far more informative than the Daily.
The NYT frankly has too much money and old school paternalism to be an effective news organization.
And what about that email server 🙄
Yup. The way mainstream media take the Hunter Biden shit seriously makes me want to rip out my hair, let alone "her emails" scandal.
Trump's family used a private email server from day one in their administration and his kids and Trump himself directly profited from the Presidency. To name a few examples
--Trump violating the law by keeping the Trump Washington hotel despite the fact the lease specifically saying the hotel could NOT be leased to a government functionary.
--Said hotel's fees doubling overnight and foreign governments and lobbyist renting out entire floors, unused to suck up to Trump.
--Ivanka Trump mysteriously getting copyright protection in China for her failing businesses
--Melania Trump extorting Trump through the U.S. government to the tube of hundreds of millions of dollars of Secret Service protection in Manhattan by refusing to move to the White House until she could renegotiate a better separation agreement than the prenup she originally signed.
--Trump doubling the membership fee for Mar-a-Lago when he became president.
--Trump literally spent 1/3 of his term in office at Mar-a-Lago, biliking the government to pay for his protection service's stay at his home.
--and for F's sake he's even now violating the local laws by living in Mar-a-Lago when the property is NOT zoned to be a primary residence.
And that's even neglecting to get into him stealing classified documents, storing them in an insecure manner, and openly sucking off Putin.
Yet for the sake of "balance" the likes of the NYT treat Hunter Biden's attempts to profit from the Biden connection, with zero evidence tying Biden himself to anything, as an equivalent transgression.
Re: 5)
Judith Miller's reporting in the run up to the second Gulf war was a scandalous example. She was an open pipeline for Chalabi's bs propaganda about WMD's that was the justification for going into that war.
-Edited to correct Judith Miller's name.
Agreed, I was going to use that as a second example. They just fell hook line and sinker for the Bush administration's Iraq war propaganda.
While Judith Miller's stories from the Times ran under banner headlines of her stories on my local paper the back pages contained reports from a couple of reporters from Gannet or Knight-Ridder or AP (I forget which) which called into question her source. They reported that she was relying on Ahmed Chalabi as her primary source and that the US intelligence agencies were skeptical of his allegations. The administration steered him to Miller and then used her reports to justify their march to war.
I remember the Cuban missile crisis. There were surveillance photos nearly daily showing, first, the Russian freighters with crates of the type used for aircraft and other equipment on their decks, heading to Cuba. Then photos of the ships docked in Cuban ports being unloaded of that freight. Followed by photos of the aircraft being uncrated and reassembled at the airstrips. And the missile launchers and associated equipment being set up at various sites. The whole thing was indisputable.
Colin Powell was a decent and honorable person who would have made a fine President. He knew that the administration's case was bullshit. He reportedly said so. Yet he evidently felt it was his duty to support the President when he agreed to go the UN and give the speech making the case for war. I was stunned to watch it. It was nothing like the run up to the missile crisis. There were laughable artist's conceptions of mobile chemical/biological labs, cryptic snippets of intercepted Iraqi military communications about getting rid of that stuff, conflation of chemical or biological weapons with a nuclear threat, a comical bit where he held up a small vial of white powder and said that if it were anthrax it could thousands of Americans. Yeah, and if pigs had wings they could fly. Plus a total avoidance of acknowledging that the IAEC investigators on the ground had been unable to find any evidence of a active nuclear program. It was a laughable dog and pony show. Worse yet was that the Times and the overwhelming majority of pundits and politicians claimed it was a slam dunk when in fact it was the thinnest pretext of a casus belli.
Worse than that they didn't correct the problem, I got one of those cheap comeon subsc. For both Wapo and NYT, I quickly realized that Judith Miller style of reporting was a feature not a bug.