Month: December 2009

Categories
Conservativism Health care Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy

Real Fiscal Responsibility & Deficit Politics: Republicans

[digg-reddit-me]See Part 1: An Introduction here. Parts 3 and 4 discussing the Democratic approach and then lessons from this moment of “welfare scleroris/imperial overstretch” coming tomorrow and Friday.

Republicans have called themselves, and are once again trying to position themselves, as the party of fiscal responsibility. This is the pendulum swing of deficit politics in its second repetition – as Republicans run up massive deficits during their time in power and then attempt to pass off the blame for raising taxes or cutting programs onto the Democrats who succeed them in office.

The political challenge the Republicans face is intriguing. Their ideology holds the solution to the deficit is to shrink the size of the government. Yet the Republican base consists of corporate America, the military, and the elderly – the largest beneficiaries of current government spending. Given this, it’s not surprising that while in power Republicans have expanded rather than shrinking government. Bush expanded Medicare further than anyone since LBJ created it all while cutting taxes and engaging in two wars and allowing Congress to engorge itself with discretionary spending increases never before allowed. Bush was not an isolated example. Like his apparent role model, Ronald Reagan, he saw deficit spending as a way to win politically in the short term as you gave everyone what they wanted – and protected those interest groups who supported you – while in the long term the incredible irresponsibility would force government to shrink, and perhaps even discredit the idea of a competent or sustainable government program. In other words, deficits were the way to “starve the beast.”

Republicans did not jettison this approach along with Bush when they began to repudiate his legacy. John McCain – for all his talk of fiscal rectitude – offered more of the same in his campaign agenda. He proposed dramatic tax cuts without commensurate spending cuts (while masking this by proposing the elimination of pork barrel spending which represents a minuscule portion of the federal budget.) As an alternative to the stimulus, McCain and the Republicans attempted the same trick – attacking the plan for adding to the deficit with spending while proposing a plan that would add even more to the deficit through tax cuts (which the Congressional Budget Office determined was a less effective way to stimulate the economy.) For Republicans, increasing the deficit by cutting taxes is “fiscally responsible” – while increasing the deficit with spending is “generational theft.”

What’s tricky is how Republicans position themselves with regards to the looming fiscal crisis. The business conservatives who make up an influential portion of the Republican base tend to propose pragmatic but politically impossible solutions like cutting spending to the other core Republican constituencies – the elderly and the military, and sometimes, even the tax and other subsidies to big corporations. The other groups seem primarily concerned with ensuring that their own government dollars continuing to grow. The past two times a liberal has taken office following several terms of extreme fiscal irresponsibility by a Republican though, a semi-independent movement has sprung up, thus changing the political dynamics in the Republican party. This movement of citizens concerned about the size of government, of government debt, and especially of liberals being in charge of this government (which suddenly seems more intrusive now that it is in the control of those they don’t sympathize with) was incarnated in Ross Perot’s two presidential campaigns, the 1994 Republican Revolution, and today, the Tea Parties. In each instance, this movement has coalesced around an inchoate frustration with the way things are coupled with the remarkably fixed position of opposing everything the Democrats do, opposing tax increases, and supporting the reduction of the deficit. Though this logically must lead to cutting government programs, which programs will be cut always remains vague which works well enough until a Republican gets in power.

To balance and rally these constituencies while out of power – the anti-tax fiscal hawks, the elderly relying on government programs, the military reliant on government spending, and the corporations who profit from government favors – Republicans have adopted a framework whereby they condemn any new spending as “generational theft” while protecting the status quo. Within this framework, Republicans claim their protection of the status quo which is screwing over my generation is actually about protecting my generation. This language also comforts the elderly who don’t wish to see any reduction in their benefits. Under the Republican approach, the only elderly who will see a reduction in benefits under the Republican plan are the eventual elderly of the younger generations – as the government programs they are now paying for cease.

The challenge Obama has given to the Republicans though is to propose a solution to the looming fiscal crisis through health care reform. Republicans have responded by claiming that the plans will add to the deficit (contrary to the Congressional Budget Office) while at the same time they have been attacking any measures in the plan which might actually cut costs. For example, Senator Coburn has said, “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill” – which is a difficult position to maintain while at the same time holding that any deficit spending today is “generational theft.” But it is of course, the only political answer they have.

The Republicans – for short term political expediency – are creating an interesting political dynamic (and an impossible situation for the country.) They are telling the elderly that any spending that adds to the deficit is stealing from their grandchildren and children – while telling them to be afraid of any cuts to the programs they like. Meanwhile, as they filibuster any attempts to alleviate the situation, they inculcate the belief among the younger generation that the government cannot do anything right – pointing to the approaching fiscal disaster as proof. The hope must be that if they are correct that this disaster cannot be averted, their obstruction of any attempt to avoid it will be forgiven, especially if the disaster itself discredits the government, thus bringing the younger generation ideologically closer to the Republican position.

Thus is the logic of deficit politics and starve-the-beast governance.

Categories
Criticism Environmental Issues The Media The Opinionsphere

The NYT and WaPo bet their reputations on contrasting approaches to climate emails.

James Fallows:

Not to overdramatize, but: in a way the papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another “-Gate” style flap where it’s hard to get to the bottom of the story.

Categories
Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Real Fiscal Responsibility & Deficit Politics: Introduction

[digg-reddit-me]Last week I wrote a semi-irresponsible post about how Republicans are waging a generational war* by opposing fiscally responsible health care legislation. It was a variation on the common refrain from the right that all sorts of government programs are in fact “generational theft.” This memorable phrase was coined by John McCain to describe the stimulus bill, but there is nothing in principle to distinguish it from all deficit spending.  Bill Frezza writing in Real Clear Markets in a more recent example of this right wing meme called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme” which in which the younger generations are being screwed. The general message of the “generational theft” meme is that the young shouldn’t expect to benefit from government spending – but should only see it as a burden.

Few would dispute that it is my generation that is being screwed if our current policies remain in effect. The deficit we face now is big but manageable. But the real reason we are being screwed is that the projected deficits are not manageable, specifically because of the rising costs of Medicare. (Graph source: CBO.)

We know that projected spending is unsustainable: so the question moves to why has this issue not been addressed? To answer that, you need to look at who benefits from the status quo and wants to protect it. The federal budget and tax system consists primarily these components:

  • Entitlement spending on the elderly, mainly Medicare and Social Security, which together represent the largest projected expenditures of the federal government. (For 2010, Medicare about $453 billion and Social Security about $695 billion.)
  • Military spending. (For 2010, $664 billion. Or as commentor John Rose points out, including non-DOD military spending, the total would come to somewhere in the $900 billion range.)
  • Medicaid and other aid to the poor. (For 2010, $290 billion on Medicaid; some portion of the $571 billion in “other mandatory spending.”)
  • Interest on the debt. (For 2010, $164 billion.)
  • Subsidies to corporations in the form of tax loopholes which makes our effective corporate tax rate among the lowest in the world (even while the nominal rate is among the highest.) Also, more traditional subsidies to large corporations in favored industries, specifically agriculture. (More than $75 billion on tax subsidies; some portion of the $571 billion in “other mandatory spending.”)
  • Education and infrastructure. (Combined, for 2010, about $120 billion, plus some portion of the $571 billion in “other mandatory spending.”)

People of all political stripes acknowledge the approaching fiscal apocalypse, but each party’s responses and proposed solutions have been shaped by their core constituencies and their ideology.

The next two posts will explore each party’s approach in more depth, but in short:  Republicans, believe government is the problem; yet as the currently elderly, along with big corporations and the military are core interest groups and the primary beneficiaries of the status quo, they implicitly propose a deal whereby they maintain the status quo today – and then eliminate or drastically reduce entitlement spending on future elderly, the young Democrat-voting generation now, as well as, presumably, shrinking the government by eliminating other spending programs that do not benefit their interest groups.

The Democrats meanwhile, believing government programs can work, propose a three-step approach culminating in a “grand bargain,” to finesse the issue:

  1. Get the GDP growing again. A growing economy expands the tax base and reduces welfare spending, and – most important – reduces the size of the deficit in relation to the economy making it easier to pay off.
  2. Curb the growth in health care costs – thus alleviating the biggest factor leading to the explosion of the deficit.
  3. With these two factors relieving pressure, strike a Grand Bargain. Either through a technocratic commission or through bipartisan legislation, push through some combination of taxes and adjustments to current programs to make them sustainable.

Both of these plans are risky. But any path we choose now will be risky – due to the incredible and seemingly deliberate starve-the-beast-style (see next post) fiscal irresponsibility of George W. Bush’s administration, coupled with a downturn and the looming fiscal crisis.

Part 2 on the Republican approach found here. Parts 3 and 4 discussing the Democratic approach and then lessons from this moment of “welfare scleroris/imperial overstretch” coming tomorrow and Friday.

*I know that’s a bit unfair, a bit too pithy to be true. But the simple messaging – the oversimplification – can be a useful tool to get people to think if it is not used to reinforce the conventional wisdom. All too quickly, using such an oversimplified scheme, one can come to the wrong conclusions – which is part of the reason George Orwell in his “Politics and the English Language” stressed using original phrases. The first time one encounters such a phrase – it can prompt thought. But all too quickly, it solidifies into dogma and ideology.

[Image by Vermin Inc licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Political Number Games

A more proper post coming later, but for the moment, I wanted to provide you with two graphs and one poll result.

First, from the always insightful Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, who points out that all these polls touting the fact that Americans are almost evenly split on the health care legislation before Congress, 12% of those counted against the bill are those that want it to move farther to the left:

By “left,” Silver means those who think the bill doesn’t go far enough to reform health care – though I suppose those could be people on the right as well. Either way, breaking down the data like this gives a lot more insight than the headline numbers.

Via Andrew Sullivan, an enterprising individual mapped out the “geography of the recession,” with the mounting job losses per county places on a map of the United States and animated over time.

Finally, in a rather misleading piece of analysis, Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times uses recent poll data to suggest that Sarah Palin has a shot in an electoral race against Obama. Rather than looking at head-to-head polling results, he looks at the favorability ratings of Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and Dick Cheney. He points out that Obama’s are dropping and Palin’s and Cheney’s are rising. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that these last two individuals have no power and thus those favoring them are only supporting the vague promise of an individual. But – on the other hand – this does demonstrate that Palin and Cheney have become the voice of the Republican Party, and does bode well for my prediction that at least one of the two will be on the Republican ticket come 2012. Those suggesting we write them off and ignore them because they represent fringe views are engaging in wishful thinking.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

A Unified Theory of Obama

[digg-reddit-me]Last week, Politico’s John F. Harris wrote a story detailing 7 different stories “Obama doesn’t want told.” Its a misleading headline – as it is about anti-Obama memes that Republicans are trying to get the media to cover. Andrew Sullivan takes the set of Republican talking points offered as a news story, observing:

What strikes me about the attacks is how scattershot they are. The right wants to argue both that Obama is a mean-ass Chicago pol and a push-over… The inconsistencies are legion, because, I suspect, Obama’s enemies have yet to get a single, compelling narrative that rings true. They didn’t manage it in the campaign and they have not managed it since. He’s too big and interesting a figure to be caricatured that way. [my emphasis]

I think both Harris and Sullivan have missed something though – a single, compelling narrative that has been developing about Obama, and one that rings true to a significant subset of Americans. I call it the Unified Theory of Obama. It involves several, though not all, of these narratives listed by Harris. Charles Krauthammer wrote the best single synthesis of this theory in a cover piece for The Weekly Standard last month entitled “Decline is a Choice.” The piece was a brilliant example of “the Big Lie” which is plausible only after a leap of faith, but which because of its sheer audacity affects the entire political conversation. The core “insight” Krauthammer offered was that Obama’s liberalism is a deliberate attempt to undermine America’s power in the world both domestically and abroad. Postulating that the decline of American power is a choice, he suggests that Obama is deliberately choosing to make America decline in power.

You can see this narrative coming together if you listen to enough talk radio. See this interview with Rush Limbaugh; this article by Charles Krauthammer; this speech, upon which the article was based; this interview with Krathammer; and this profile of Krauthammer in the National Review which oddly is behind a firewall unlike most of National Review‘s content.) You can see the narrative animating the statements of Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, of Charles Krauthammer, of Sean Hannity, and of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck (though these last two also have potential to go off script.)

The narrative goes like this:

This narrative is audacious. And it’s compelling. And it ties so many anti-Obama memes together. It goes well with the ominous music constantly playing on Sean Hannity’s television show. It goes well with the transformation of right wing politics and media into a form of entertainment in which news is presented as if it is the plot of a thriller.* This narrative explains why Obama is popular around the world. (“Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.”) It provides an explanation (about the only plausible one) for why Republicans should be so adamant in their opposition to everything Obama proposes. It provides a storyline that can rally the base behind any alternative candidate. It taps into the inchoate sense that “something’s wrong.” It provides a scapegoat for the end of America’s unipolar moment. Those who feel they are “losing the America they knew” are also given a scapegoat. (“America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”) It plays off of the foundation of anti-Obama attacks from the 2008 campaign – that he was somehow foreign, un-American, radical. The various factual inaccuracies in this narrative are unimportant – because it is fundamentally so at odds with reality that it requires a leap of faith to believe in the first place.

All of these pieces are directed only to the faithful. They aren’t meant for the general public. They are meant to keep the faithful in line. And despite the fact that Krauthammer has articulated this Unified Theory of Obama to the faithful, his columns have not pushed this rather extreme take on the President. Instead, Krauthammer chips away at Obama with smaller pieces attacking this and that, while for the sake of each column conceding that Obama might not be an anti-American radical intent on destroying the nation, as he tries to get the public to see this bigger picture one piece at a time.

This, I believe, is the narrative that the next Republican nominee will carry into the 2012 election in some form. I believe it will founder specifically because most Americans will balk at someone characterizing the president as anti-American. But Krauthammer and his allies have several years to try to figure out how to sell this message – how to convince a majority of Americans to accept it, or barring that how to rally the base using it while keeping it away from the rest of us. And The Weekly Standard has already determined the logical proponent of this Unified Theory of Obama, the logical response to Obama’s “new liberalism – someone to carry Republicans to victory in 2012 by leading a “new populist” movement:

Someone who will give voice to the millions who don’t want government aggrandizing the powerful; who don’t want government risking dangerous fiscal imbalances; who do want public policies that create the conditions for a general prosperity. Someone, in other words, who can play the same role in contemporary politics that Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan did in the past.

She lives in Alaska.

Edit: Two other “unified theories of Obama” that are more sympathetic can be found in Jonathan Chait’s description of Obama using civility and respect as political weapons and in Andrew Sullivan’s description of Obama as a Road Runner constantly inducing his opponents to overstep a la Wile E. Coyote.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

*Not my own idea. It’s from a piece in The New Republic from this November which I can’t find online. Update: The piece by Jason Zengerle is now online.

Categories
The Web and Technology

Brief Thoughts for the Week of 2009-12-04

  • The Republican’s Generational Warfare http://2parse.com//?p=4346 #
  • "Virgo:Your superhuman ego may be tellin you that you can do it all w/o help but you cant" Meaning all Virgos've superhuman egos or just me? #
  • Instead of watching New Moon, read this LOLcatz interpretation. http://bit.ly/4xLTcd #
  • Charming use of Biblical quotes by the right-wing opposition “Pray for Obama – Psalm 109:8” http://bit.ly/5VkB23 #
  • My mom, seeming to use a computer mouse for the first time, "How do I click?" #
  • Obama’s FY2009 performance = relief pitcher entering game in the 4th inning trailing 19-0 & allows another run to score http://bit.ly/4ExioH #
  • Are my tweets 'Meforming' of 'Informing'? http://bit.ly/7UNKw8 Ans.: I think I write my blog to inform and tweet to meform about the blog. #

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Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Republican’s Generational Warfare

[digg-reddit-me]All the blogosphere (and indeed, the political conversation of which it is a part) is abuzz with outrage over Obama’s Afghanistan decision – from those towards the left who believed Obama has betrayed them by escalating this war (despite the fact that it was a campaign promise to escalate the war) to those others on the left who just oppose the war to those on the right who (with a few exceptions) have decided to attack the decision as weak, not Churchillian, and to paint Obama once again as a weak, anti-American thug. Then there a significant chorus of the voices of reason – who acknowledge that to withdraw seems perhaps as bad of an option as to escalate; both of which in turn could be less worse than the way things are now. Some of these voices are opposed to escalation; some are in favor; many seem weary of the discussion entirely.

But while all of these pixels are being devoted to Afghanistan, we are taking our eyes off a far larger issue – the one that we have never quite bothered to look at despite months purportedly focused on it. The Republican Party has now declared war on this cute baby! Along with me, probably you, and the rest of the younger generations. Paul Krugman today issued a call to arms that was – to adopt a metaphor of the right – virtually Churchillian in its starkness, if not in its vivid imagery:

For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Krugman – in typically Churchillian fashion – does not mention that many of the best options to control costs have already been stripped from the bills being considered – from a public option pegged to Medicare rates to a more open health insurance exchange. Instead, the bill’s potential would be with a strong public option trigger or the many, many experiments in the plan any of which may or may not be able to bend the curve of health care spending growth downward. As important, as even the foremost free-marketeer Milton Friedman acknowledged, our rapidly escalating costs are the result of our hybrid system but that “once the whole population is covered…attention turns to holding down costs.” None of the bills under consideration would achieve universal health care either – but they would make significant progress to this goal.

In short this bill will not be enough to fix our problems, but when the House and Senate bills are merged, the resulting bill will almost certainly be the most significant attempt at cost control in a generation if not more. And it is long past due. As Krugman points out: our long-term fiscal outlook is dire. The tax cuts and deficit spending during our years of plenty under Bush aren’t the primary reason for this. The stimulus spending by Bush or Obama isn’t the main cause either. The primary reason for this impending disaster is that our population is getting older and health care costs are growing exponentially. Thus the only way to avoid drastic cuts in the future is to slow down the rate of growth today.

Part of reducing the rate of growth today is restraining the growth of spending in Medicare and other government programs. In other words, a vote to not cut a dime in Medicare today is a vote to make sure my generation doesn’t have Medicare at all. Back to Krugman:

[T]he G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans.

For once, Krugman understates things. The G.O.P. is waging a generational war on the younger generations. While they complain of stimulus spending to get the economy moving (which the younger generation, especially those just graduating college desperately need), these old men are demagoguing cost control today such that tomorrow, when I am too old to continue working, there will be no safety net. If it sounded a bit off to you that these Republicans who not long ago were looking to dismantle Medicare and Social Security (and whose patron saint warned that Medicare would lead to socialism and the end of freedom in America) are now defending these institutions against any any cuts, perhaps you haven’t heard of “starving the beast.” This right-wing fiscal-political strategy explicitly subscribed to by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (who not coincidentally each ran huge deficits) uses “budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government. The term ‘beast’ refers to government and the programs it funds, particularly social programs such as welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.” In other words, those who subscribe to this strategy would rather drastic cuts in the future that would eliminate Medicare for me than moderate cuts today that would make the system sustainable. This is nothing less than an attempt to make war on my generation in the name of ideology.

Krugman, in issuing this call to arms, must know that this bill is not ideal. But he also knows that it holds promise, and that its success would lead to more serious efforts. Its failure though would mean that yet again the “fiscal conservatives” whose goal is to “starve the beast” will have won yet another battle in the war on the younger generations, and the Baby Boomers who have for too long subjected us to their petty distractions will be the last generation to enjoy the benefits of the programs their parents created.

If these starve-the-beasters get their way, America’s power will be diminished and our society less just, and us younger generations who have paid into will not be able to benefit from this safety net.

[Image by tandemracer of her baby’s six-month doctor visit licensed under Creative Commons 2.0]

Categories
History National Security Politics The Opinionsphere

“Hardly Churchillian.”

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve mentioned before that the  contrasting stories of Churchill and Chamberlain in the lead up to the Second World War have become the founding myth of neoconservative foreign policy. Neoconservative foreign policy is based on the counterfactual presumption that if Churchill had been prime minister, Hitler’s rise would have been thwarted. The appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain thus caused Hitler’s rise in the neoconservative view.

However this myth took root, it is now the framework which neoconservatives use to understand every foreign policy issue: Every threat to America thus becomes Hitler’s Germany, no matter how marginal – from Kim Jong Il’s North Korea to Ahmadinejad’s Iran to Chavez’s Venezuela to Putin’s Russia. There are two possible responses to the rise of these existential threats: appeasement or confrontation. The right thing to do is to project confidence and bellicosity to deter the next Hitler from rising. Every sign of restraint is debasing appeasement; every Democrat then who advises restraint, who seeks to put these threats in perspective thus is portrayed as Chamberlain – from Carter to Clinton to Kerry to Obama. Every leader of this war, of our warrior nation, is compared to Churchill for his resolve and rhetoric. This neoconservative root myth thus leads to a policy of constant belligerence against every possible foe as a homage to a man who was belligerent for a lifetime and memorably right once.*

In a sense it seems, neoconservatives looked with hope to Obama Tuesday night (see especially these responses by Kagan, Kristol, and Gerson), as he promised to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan as they hoped. They hoped he could be their Churchill. Many on the right wing though not all, having been trained to focus most of all on symbology and rhetoric over substance, believed Obama had failed to meet their Churchillian expectations, and so took the comfortable position of assailing him.

Anyone who doubts this story of Churchill’s intransigence is at the core of neoconservative foreign policy can find evidence looking at the right wing responses to Tuesday night’s address:

The National Review‘s lead editorial:

Churchillian it was not.

Rich Lowry:

Is Gen. McChrystal in Kabul regretting that Obama didn’t strike a more Churchillian tone…?

Fred Thompson:

In the first part of his speech he sounded like Winston Churchill.
In the second part of his speech, he sounded like Lady Churchill.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Stanley Baldwin, not Winston Churchill.

Charles Krauthammer on Fox News:

Not exactly the kind of speech you’d hear from Henry V or Churchill.

Matt Lewis:

Hmm. What to say about Obama’s speech… Well, he sure as hell ain’t Winston Churchill.

John Hannah:

Hardly Churchillian.

* I quite admire Churchill – and he was also prescient about the specter of Communism and had a remarkable view of history, as if from a distance. But the single opinion of his that created his out-sized reputation was his steady belligerence against Germany during its rise.

[Image of Winston Churchill not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

And it was said that bloggers shall inherit the earth.

A bit under the weather – but not with swine flu apparently. That accounts for the lack of Tuesday blogging.

So, let me briefly blog about…..blogging. Ezra Klein chews on something I’ve been thinking about, as I set my opinions into the public domain day after day, with my name attached to it.

As the Internet becomes more and more pervasive and job applicants have a longer and longer paper trail, prospective employers are going to have to overlook a public record containing opinions that, in previous eras, they would never have seen, and would never have tolerated.

Klein’s reflections note that both he (who had criticized and is now employed by the Washington Post) and economist Willem Buiter (who blogged extremely harsh things about Citibank and has now been hired to be their chief economist) support this hopeful point.

And Andrew Sullivan highlighted a Choire piece observing a little-noticed but significant event – as Joshua Micah Marshall, blogger for Talking Points Memo and Peabody Award Winner has now hired a publisher for his blog.

My friend’s point was: here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering…[I]t’s high time media publishing—where, nearly everywhere across the industry, the business side that has failed so utterly at its duties is currently squeezing every last bit of blood out of editorial—tried something different.

And it was said that bloggers shall inherit the earth.