Posts

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a stamped of big media figures making their way onto Twitter. During the campaign we had folks like Ana Marie Cox and Slate’s John Dickerson. These days, we have everybody. I wanted to call out the reporter who I think does the best job of anyone using when it comes to using Twitter – Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS Radio. If you ever wanted to know what life is like for a White House correspondent, or you want to keep up with what the President is up to on a daily basis, Mark Knoller is your guy. ...

In business, people talk a lot about accountability. In essence, it means verifying that people do what they’re supposed to, and addressing it with them directly when they do not. There’s a big problem with accountability, though, and it’s that it’s not easy to hold people accountable. Telling someone that they’re not performing up to snuff is one of the most difficult jobs a manager has, in part because it’s uncomfortable and in part because it has to be done in such a way that it leads people to improve their performance. (Unless, of course, they’re being fired. That’s even worse.) ...

I have no idea where this image illustrating the relative size of the Earth compared to other bodies in the universe came from, but it’s amazing. I admit, I’m a total sucker for this sort of thing.

Popular JavaScript-blocking Firefox extension NoScript interferes with popular ad blocking extension AdBlock Plus to insure that ads on the NoScript site are displayed. There are also a number of sites that are included on NoScript’s whitelist to insure that NoScript users see NoScript’s ads.

During the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama attacked the Bush administration for its abuse of the state secrets privilege. The Bush administration was the first to argue that cases could be dismissed entirely because they would require the disclosure of state secrets – previously that privilege could be used to suppress certain sensitive evidence, but not to toss out a case entirely. And yet, when President Obama took office, his administration continued to use the policy exactly as the Bush administration had, much to the chagrin of civil rights activists. ...

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill on why she tweets: Second, as his bar graph showed, I tweet an average of 4 to 5 times a day. This has become a welcome discipline for me in Washington. As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected. After all, I’m in Washington to work for them and this process reminds me of it several times a day. ...

I didn’t migrate my feeds to my Google account in time and have caused some breakage. The problem is fixed but it’ll take a few hours for the DNS change to propagate. Apologies.

Republicans willingly acceded to the Bush administration’s agglomeration of new powers, Katamari Damacy-style, for eight years. Now that they’re out of power, the “unitary executive” seems to scare them more. Despite the fact that this sudden aversion to executive power springs solely from being in the opposition, I think that it’s a good position for Republicans to take. The Democrats did a terrible job of being an effective opposition party. Since the Republicans seem better at it, I strongly encourage them to fight for the things that I care about – like reducing the authority of the executive branch. ...

Jason Scott (of Textfiles.com fame) is leading an effort to archive GeoCities before Yahoo takes it offline: Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I’ve archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It’s not for me to judge. It’s for me to collect. ...

Matthew Yglesias nails one of the central characteristics of American culture: The United States isn’t run along Social Darwinist lines, but we’re closer than any other major developed country. To an extent that I find frankly astounding—and certainly unseen in other wealthy nations—people from modest backgrounds are expected to suffer the economic consequences of poor decision-making or bad luck, all in the name of personal responsibility. But when someone really important screws up, either in terms of provoking a financial crisis or overseeing a policy disaster or breaking the law or whatever, well then it turns out that we have better things to do than “look backwards” at who deserves what. ...