Well, I have read his first paragraph, and I have to say I agree with him. His paragraph says: "Since the election of 1992, the extreme political left has fought a losing battle. Their views on the economy, marriage, abortion, guns, the death penalty, health care, welfare, taxes, and a dozen other major domestic policy issues have been exposed as unpopular, unmarketable and unquestioned losers at the ballot box." Since by "extreme political left" he means "the Democratic party", he is right. The Democratic party has abandoned its traditional commitment to working people, to racial and ethnic diversity and to fiscal prudence. This, it turns out, is indeed a losing battle. When someone decides to lead the Ds out of their Republican-lite political philosophy, the Ds will realize the electoral gains which are theirs by right. I don't see that happening until we go through some really bad economic catastrophe, something like the German hyper inflation period in the inter-war years. There's nothing like an empty belly to concentrate the mind.

Attaway to studiously avoid reality, and that comment really speaks for itself. Volumes.

^{The price of apathy towards government is to be ruled by evil men.}

~Plato

"And when, for the sake of balance, is the Washington Post going to open a Blue State blog?" sums it up for me.

Until there is balance, I have no intention of paying money for any MSCM product - and that includes TV and radio news, as well. We only subscribe to the E-N because Larry is running, and we need to really pour over that toilet to see everything in it (and I admit, I like reading the ads)- it's a hell of a lot more portable than a laptop. I mean, you don't freak if you leave it on a bus seat or at Starbucks, you can take it to the beach without worrying about sand getting in it, and you can read it in the bath. But after the election, we again will be boycotting the thing.

I really don't care what right-wing tripe is spewed, as long as I can find with equal ease news and opinion from the Left. And the WaPo and the NYT and other papers need to wake up and smell the coffee - it is a good business decision to have the equivalent of a "Blue State Blog". It would also be instructive - they could see just where the real bloposhere stands on issues - the numbers would astound them.

I guess I'll be seeing you at the Precinct 3 War Room, and we can talk about this further.

Embrace, extend, extinct - was it Microsoft or Merkel?

To me it seems that over 80% of Americans believe that politicians are corrupt and over 80% of Americans do not like the attitude of GWB to climate change. If democrats can't win in this opinion climate, they can blame only themselves.

-- Let your prophets run and sell the suckers!

It is now a third-rate company newsletter. NO better than fishwrapper. And the Times ain't better...

Whitened Sepulchres

I don't see that happening until we go through some really bad economic catastrophe, something like the Bushco years in power, where from abundance we go to the leading debtor nation.

I don't see that publishing someone who hasn't been a reporter but can make them seem "open to the right" is bad for business. Their readers get the blog buzz without having to work through the "real internet" "It'll catch up to them? well, maybe.

Talking Points Memo

- Rick

_{"Free your mind, and your ass will follow" - George Clinton}

Washington Post's New Conservative Voice a Plagiarist: It's Now a Blood Bath
by Hunter
Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:18:57 PM PDT
This Washington Post thing is rapidly becoming a blood bath. We've moved on from Domenech's funeral-day assertion that Coretta Scott King was a communist, or his comparison of the Supreme Court to the Klu Klux Klan. Those are small things. Now it's getting bad.

From Oregon Guy and fleshed out further by James at Your Logo Here -- who is himself on a spectacular Box Turtle Ben rampage -- we learn that some instances of Ben's much-vaunted homeschooled teen wonderism in college actually came from, well, flagrant plagiarism of published works.

...Ben's lyrical stylings on a real party are completely lifted from P.J. O'Rourke's "Modern Manners" - a chapter entitled "Real Parties." I should have known as this is one of the gifts my older brother gave me years ago that did not involve punching me in the nads.

O'Rourke, p.176: Office Christmas parties. Wine-tasting parties. Book-publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as "Las Vegas Nite" or "Waikiki Whoopee". Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.

BenDom: Christmas parties. Wine tasting parties. Book publishing parties. Parties with themes, such as "Las Vegas Nite" or "Waikiki Whoopee." Parties at which anyone is wearing a blue velvet tuxedo jacket.

O'Rourke: It's not a real party if it doesn't end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.

BenDom: It's not a real party if it doesn't end in an orgy or a food fight. All your friends should still be there when you come to in the morning.

(And more here here.)

Reader silence found another example, in which Domenech plagiarized an entirely different piece, this time from Salon:

From a Ben Domenech review of Bringing Out the Dead:

Instead of allowing for the incredible nuances that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him.

But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he's trying to revive Mary's father, the man's family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, "Do you have any music?"

From a review posted on salon.com, published about a week earlier:

Instead of allowing for the incredible nuance that Cage always brings to his performances, the character of Frank sews it all up for him. ... But there are those moments that allow Cage to do what he does best. When he's trying to revive Mary's father, the man's family fanned out around him in the living room in frozen semi-circle, he blurts out, "Do you have any music?"

[UPDATE -- Atrios is collecting example after example of more plagiarism by Domenech.]

[UPDATE 2 -- silence continues to find more and more. Here's a movie review Ben "wrote" for the National Review that contained snippets taken from Steve Murray.]

[UPDATE 3 -- Oh, the irony... he even bylined material to himself that he took from, you guessed it, the Washington Post.]

[UPDATE 4 -- Via Atrios and his commenters again, the examples keep coming.]

That's one way to polish your credentials as an up-and-coming writer -- copy and paste from someone who actually has talent. Excelsior!

More Washington Post news below, because this is just the story that keeps on giving. Someone's getting fired over this one, if the media as a whole has even a shred of ethics actually left.

http://www.dailykos.com/

Domenech Isn't the Problem. The Problems Are Conservatives and The Washington Post
by DHinMI
Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 06:21:38 PM PDT
As Hunter laid out below, the Washington Post's special quota hire Ben Domenech is quite a plagiarist. He's not just some one-off plagiarizer, he's a recidivist plagiarist. But don't look at him as the main problem in this fiasco at the Washington Post. Ben Domenech is just the example of an ethically and intellectually bankrupt conservative movement, especially its bloggers. And the fact that he was even hired shows that the Washington Post is craven for trying to strike a balance between political fact and fantasy, and is itself so ethically bankrupt that it has forgotten the lessons of the most infamous period of the newspaper's history.

A major element of this scandal at the Washington Post is that it perceives a need to balance out the factually-informed work of a serious journalist with the fantasy rants of a rightwing shill. As Gilliard points out:

The Post does not have a left blogger. Dan Froomkin is a journalist. Racist Redstate Ben is a political operative. See the difference.

Apparently the folks at the Post were too concerned about toadying up to the wingers to notice that distinction. They were intent on balancing out Froomkin's reality-based analysis with screeds from a winger. We should assume the Post hired the best person they could find. The problem for the Post, therefore, is that the intellects and professional ethics of conservative bloggers are so risible that the best person they could hire ended up being a plagarizer.

By doing a laughably bad job of due diligence on Domenech, the Post has earned all the mockery and derision coming their way. But people who care about the Post probably aren't laughing, because this scandal has too many resemblances to the darkest moment in the history of that newspaper: the Janet Cooke scandal.

Let's take a look at this column about the Cooke scandal and other pertinent issues, titled The Perils of Press Arrogance:

The series of fabrications that resulted last week in the resignations of the top two editors of the New York Times is a calamity for all of American journalism...

Anyone who can gloat at their discomfiture is worse than a fool. This is far more than a personal embarrassment or a black eye for the Times. It is a serious blow to the credibility of the press, and it comes at a time when public trust is fragile.

Those of us who work at The Post know what our friends at the Times are going through. In 1980 a talented colleague of ours, Janet Cooke, concocted a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, which The Post played prominently on the front page. It was not until the story was awarded a Pulitzer Prize that it and its author were exposed as phony.

We live with that legacy every day. No matter how much distinguished work is done by this staff -- and there is a wealth of it -- it does not erase the enormity of the failure to prevent the Janet Cooke fiasco...

If the Times' leadership is wise, it will recognize this institutional disaster for what it is and reflect on the culture that produced it. It will not simply change editors but change attitudes.

The besetting sin of big-time journalism is arrogance -- the belief in our own omniscience, that we know so much we don't have to listen to criticism. And the Times as an institution leads the league in arrogance.

More than 35 years ago, as a newcomer to The Post, I recognized that we were dangerously cut off from the forces that were reshaping this country. In the 1968 presidential campaign, we were (and I definitely include myself) slow to pick up on the anti-establishment movements that propelled such different candidates as Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace and Richard Nixon.

The next year, I was on sabbatical at the Institute of Politics at Harvard when elite students trashed Harvard Square in an antiwar demonstration and forced the university to shut down weeks early.

Returning to the paper, I showed no special wisdom in suggesting to Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Publisher Katharine Graham that any institution as large and visible as The Post could expect to be targeted by anti-establishment forces. It was one of many factors that led them to hire the first ombudsman at The Post -- a professional journalist whose sole responsibility is to respond to reader complaints and provide an independent critique of the paper's performance.

When the Janet Cooke story exploded, the ombudsman on duty, Bill Green, conducted his own investigation, and his detailed report to readers was the first crucial step toward restoring the paper's reputation.

By contrast, the Times management has consistently rejected having an ombudsman or readers' representative, asserting that it would enforce its own standards, thank you very much...

The Times has had its comeuppance. Its sins are symptomatic of the press's inflated self-importance. The Times can lead the way back to trust -- if its publisher will.

Who wrote that? The Post's own Grand Protector of the DC Establishment Consensus, His Holiness, St. David of Broder.

Ultimately everyone will take that wretch Ben Domenech's advice regarding plagiarists, and forget him. But has the Washington Post gotten so arrogant that it has forgotten Janet Cooke? Is the Post so cut off from the forces changing the media that it believes it's OK to have a plagiarist on staff, because if people don't like what he has to say, they can just ignore him? Do they think all bloggers and all viewpoints are equally valid? That there's no difference between bloggers like us here at Daily Kos, where we often beat up on the media for disregard of facts and for shoddy reporting and laughably bad arguments, and bloggers like Ben Domenech, who respond to inconvenient facts with laughably bad arguments, shoddy thinking, lying, intimidation, hypocrisy and serial plagiarism?

We'll learn over the next few days if the Washington Post has forgotten the infamy of indulging Janet Cooke's lies. they shouldn't indulge Ben Domenech's lies. As plagiarism expert Ben Domenech argued in a similar case, "no quarter" should be given to such lies. Maybe Domenech will do the Post a favor and resign so he can spend more time with Claude Allen's family. If not, the Washington Post has only one option: admit they were wrong to try to balance sound journalism with ideology and plagiarism, and fire Ben Domenech.

[UPDATE by DHinMI] As Kosmopolitans and others dig through Domenech's publish output to discover that this guy has hardly written an orginal sentence in his entire life, we're finding he had plagarized all kinds of sources. But pb may have just found the sweetest example of all: in this piece Domenech plagarized a page 1 article from--God, if we just made this stuff up nobody would believe it--the Washington Post.

http://www.dailykos.com/