Czabe has some thoughts on LeBron to Miami:

In a span of 27 eyeball glazing minutes on ESPN, LeBron James morphed himself from potentially “The Greatest Player of All Time” into a jezebel Scottie Pippen.

I don’t follow the NBA closely enough to know, but the superficial answers would have been (1) Go to NYC for the money or (2) Go to Chicago for the long-term run at championships. I’m not sure what goal Miami satisfies.

The most interesting question is whether or not players are allowed to formally collude in the way in which it seems James, Wade, Bosh, and possibly Paul may have. (The operative word here is “formally,” not “collude.” Players informally collude all the time.) Owners almost certainly couldn’t act this way without running afoul of anti-trust. Legally, I suspect the players are fine–although I’d love to hear a smart lawyer’s thoughts on the matter.

From the league’s perspective, however, this might not be fine. It will be interesting to see how the owners–and eventually the league office–deal with this affair.

He’s giving Andrew Sullivan a run for his money with this blog entry today:

But there’s something else in David’s column, which I see a lot: the argument that because a lot of important people believe something, it must make sense:

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

Yes, I am. It’s called looking at the evidence.

Because, you see, no one else on the other side has ever even bothered to look at the evidence!

You could fill a small sand bucket with what I know about economics, so I’m not interested in the rightness or wrongness of Krugman’s position vis-a-vis demand side economics in the present recessionary environment. What is truly amazing is that he argues not that he’s probably right. Or that the evidence supports his case more so than the opposite. He has absolute, God-given certainty as to his total and complete correctness and equal certainty that anyone who differs is a fool or a liar.

Whoa.

Even he was talking about, I don’t know, outlawing abortion or invading Iraq, you might think he was a blinkered ideologue.

Another reason to object to World Cup soccer: Its appalling lack of diversity!

Steve Sailer has a fantastic post about the SWPL-ness of the World Cup:

At the highest levels of global soccer, about 75 percent or more of the top players are white. Soccer in 2010 is like basketball in 1959. . . .

The World Cup is a paradox: it’s pretty random but the results always come out about the same: traditional soccer powers get to the finals. . . .

Much of the glamor of the World Cup stems from it being a mostly white sport. Do you think up-and-comers like the South Koreans would be fascinated by the World Cup if it were traditionally dominated by, say, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Bolivia? Would SWPLs in the U.S. love soccer if it were associated in their minds with “Kinshasa” rather than with “Barcelona”?

He also makes an interesting note about the paradox of World Cup soccer: “It’s pretty random but the results always come out about the same: traditional soccer powers get to the finals. “


Mind you, at the end of the day, I’m pretty much with Czabe: For all its many, many faults, the World Cup makes for a pretty good time for a casual sports fan.

I’d give just about anything to sit across the board from Niall Ferguson.

Fire up the wave-motion cannon, Wildstar.

And . . . I’m spent.

There’s so much to say, but let’s start with this little dare from Weigel in his self-congratulatory, “I shall return” essay for Big Government:

No serious journalist has defended the leak of my private e-mails; no one who works in politics or journalism would accept a situation where the things they said off the record could immediately become public. (Side note: On a conservative listserv, there is, apparently, an internal debate going on about leaks, after I learned of its existence and content. These conservatives have not opted to publish their private e-mails, and they shouldn’t.) But no serious journalist — as I want to be, as I am — should be so rude about the people he covers.

I’ll take that action. Not only is the leak of Weigel’s rantings defensible, it was nearly a professional duty for any serious reporters who witnessed them on Journolist. Not doing so is like having been at the infamous Strom Thurmond birthday party and deciding not to mention what Trent Lott said. Weigel was revealing himself on a (semi?) frequent basis to be something opposite what he was advertising to readers and the public. He was making himself a story. Hiding behind some sort of Journolist Omerta policy wouldn’t fly for a person of note who was overheard making bigoted remarks at a private club. It shouldn’t shield Weigel. Whoever leaked his writings was a whistleblower performing a public service.


(Also, “private emails” is a deceptive term of art. What Weigel was doing was more akin to posting on a bulletin board that he believed could never be seen by outsiders. Writing something that is read by a circle of 400 people, at least some of whom you have never had any formal contact with, is not sending a “private email.)


The Weigel incident creates so many unhappy questions–about why 20-somethings are encouraged to pontificate instead of report; about why the Post never even bothered to call someone at Reason and ask about their prospective hire; about why any media employer would tolerate reporters being participants in a project like Journolist. One of the niggling questions that bothers me is why, in the wake of scandal, people feel the need to air-brush fallen bright young things. Remember all the chin-tugging about Jayson Blair? Oh sure, he was a plagiarist (fabulist?), but it was a double tragedy because he was such an immense talent! Ditto Stephen Glass. There’s a lot of this going around with Weigel: Oh, sure, he was privately a jerk making terribly uncouth generalizations about people he was supposed to be covering fairly, but the real tragedy is that he was such a great reporter!


Really? Maybe by the standards of blogging. I can’t claim intimacy with his entire oeuvre, but I can’t think of a single, blockbuster piece of Weigel’s. David Grann? Great reporter. Matt Labash? Great reporter. Mark Bowden? Great reporter. On the next level down you have guys like Ryan Lizza and Tom Edsall. Below that, guys like the Politico crew and the platoon that does NYT and WSJ work. (Go read Brooks Barnes some time to see what great, every-day reporting looks like.) Below that I’d put a class of writers who deal with numbers and theory, as opposed to personalities and palace intrigue–people like Michael Barone and Jay Cost. They don’t pound the shoe leather, but they spend a lot of time researching what they write.


It seems safe to say that Weigel would be so far down the list that it’s not even worth doing the math. What people mean, I suppose, is that compared to other 20-something bloggers, Weigel makes more than the average number of phone calls and goes on more than the average number of field trips. And hey, that’s great. We’d rather have more of that in the blog world. But let’s not re-touch this in post to make him into Bob Woodward. Or Jeff Toobin. Or even Adam Nagourney, for that matter.


Finally, there’s Ezra Klein’s explanation that he needed to keep Journolist a liberals-only group in order to make it a safe-space, trust-tree, etc. This seems exactly wrong.


Being free from the consequences of your writing is rarely a good thing. Take a look at message boards that allow anonymous comments. It allows discourse to devolve into, well, ratfucking and back-biting. The best way to have kept a group like Journolist civil and productive would have been to put people together who had reason to mistrust one another. It would have encouraged self-policing and, if the circle was well-chosen, might have gotten participants to engage with the best of each other’s arguments, rather than the worst. By larding up with fellow-travelers and pretending that the dialogue would always-and-forever be off-the-record, Klein was creating a rant box, doomed to implode exactly as it now has.


For whatever it’s worth, the idea of having smart people openly engaging one another on topics of great import and in good faith is worth pursuing. And there is a fantastic conservative version of it, too.


It’s called the Claremont Review of Books.


Update: Say what you will about Ross Douthat, but he’ll never be a traitor to his class. After defending Weigel initially, Douthat now calls Weigel’s “I shall return” essay “a model mea culpa: Forthright and self-critical rather than defensive and self-justifying.” Sure.

“I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school.”

“It was the hubris of someone who rose — objectively speaking — a bit too fast . . .”

“Anyone who wanted to force me out of this business will have to settle for the consolation prize of me having to tediously inform sources of a new e-mail address.”

And that leaves aside Weigel’s coloring of his firing from Reason to make himself a martyr–which does not square with Matt Welch’s version of events.

Douthat then defends Weigel by saying that lots of other Journolist participants surely said worse and didn’t lose their jobs, so Weigel shouldn’t have lost his. Okay. Of course, there are people walking around today who committed murder and were never caught. Should the justice system not prosecute someone who is discovered committing robbery? 


Finally, Douthat can’t help referring to Weigel as a “talented reporter.” QED, this says more about Douthat’s work, than it does about Weigel’s.

Galley Friend P.G. sends word that Fournier has been named “editor in chief” of the National Journal Group. Who knows what that title implies in terms of org chart authority.

What we do know is that two years ago Sullivan wrote this about Fournier in an item headlined “The AP Going Fox?”

Ron Fournier’s dramatic use of opinion in the first paragraph of the Biden story going out on all the wires is an aggressive Republican spin. Fournier has already weakened the AP’s rep for pretty straight-up reportage. It just got a lot weaker. Last spring, by the way, Fournier was lambasting Obama for arrogance. Now, apparently, it’s a lack of confidence. Whatever works, I guess. But please, get a blog.

Update: Boy, Sullivan really doesn’t like Fournier. Makes you wonder how he could possibly–in good conscience–work under him.

On Fournier’s skills as a political analyst.

On a Fournier column about the possibility of criminal charges being filed against Dick Cheney.