The lady doth protest too much, methinks

Dan Lyons has a funny, pointed post covering what I mentioned earlier, in the context of Path's privacy violations:

Arrington and Siegler can try to play journalism police all they want, but the fact is they have turned themselves into hacks for hire and as such have lost all credibility. They’re not the only ones working this racket. Now we have PandoDaily, a new tech blog crated by their TechCrunch pal Sarah Lacy and funded by CrunchFund and a bunch of other VCs and angels whose companies PandoDaily aims to cover.

But what is hilarious is the reaction Dan's attack provoked, Arrington:

He says that our insanely over subscribed venture fund is just a joke. He says our work at TechCrunch over the last six years is a joke. He says MG is a joke. He drags Pando Daily and Techmeme into the fight and trashes them too.

I’m surprised that my mother wasn’t mentioned, frankly.

Oh my fur and whiskers!  Then Siegler:

That passion is conveyed in our writing. And it’s conveyed when we meet with startups. Ask any company in our portfolio why they accepted us as investors. That Dan Lyons would imply it’s some sort of shakedown shows how very clueless he is.

And it shows exactly why he could never do what we do. His words reek of jealousy. Of disillusionment. He’s angry. He doesn’t get it. And worst of all, he simply does not matter anymore. The only time he did was as a joke. He’s that guy who used to be that guy that was pretending to be Steve Jobs once upon a time. That must be extremely frustrating.

It's hard to believe people could be this obtuse, the other possibility is that Lyons hit too close to home. Given the amount of projection the latter is most likely. Then again Siegler just discovered how defensive patents work, and only recently discovered how ignorant he is, so maybe he really is that dim.

Newt as a Republican Symptom

Tom Edsall, in his opinion piece Newt Gingrich and the Future of the Right in the New York Times, echos my Newt take:

But the country is going through a profound restructuring in moral and economic thinking and the danger for Republicans is that their current coalition might become obsolete. If the party doesn’t adapt, the alternative is that its power centers — the Christian right, anti-immigration forces, and proponents of policies that benefit the affluent at the expense of the less well-off — will refuse to adjust, in which case the party risks going the way of the Studebaker.

It's not just the growth in hispanic voters that threatens the viability of the Republican coalition, the entire country is shifting away from them.

Suicide is part of their culture

The perfect intersection of blogger boiz, o-bot and reality distortion

Exactly what Anglachel was writing about.

https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/164196027333750785

The Best Defense

There have been a flurry of wild claims that Google is Evil lately, mostly around social search and Google's new privacy policy. A bunch of TechCrunch alums at their new site Pandodaily are particularly incensed, posting dozens of sensational posts in the past week with titles like I Guess We Have Google’s Answer: Search Results Are No Longer Sacred (a classic in the "when did you stop beating your wife" genre), Evil, Greed, And Antitrust Aren’t Google’s Real Problems, Relevancy Is (good old anecdata), and that old yellow journalist's trick SPYW Update: Is Google Back-Pedaling Ahead of Company All-Hands?. Most of these pieces take decent reporting by people like Danny Sullivan and twist it beyond recognition.

Meanwhile Apple released it's fiscal 1Q2012 numbers (covering 4Q2011), showing obscene profits, and the New York Times front-paged a huge story on the abusive conditions in the factories that generate Apple's profits, showing how Apple has been complicit in the abuse. Somehow the Apple news only merited a few mentions in Pandodaily's ticker.

Muddying the waters is a classic technique of crisis PR, usually accomplished by pitching sympathetic reporters. Setting up a whole news site for the purpose is audacious. We'll see how this works out for Apple.

Obama Mitt Newt

I'm emerging from pessimism about Obama's chances. There is a decent chance that our economy won't be significantly worse by election day than it is now, and a small chance that unemployment will be marginally better. His Osawatomie, Kansas speech shows him beginning to grapple with the real issues for people, and could mark a new, Democratic trajectory for his campaign. European trouble makes Obama look good, and then there is the Republican field.

At this stage the Republican candidate will be either Romney or Gingrich (hard to believe). Romney, who was doing a decent job staying above the fray, is being weakened by the primary and a long slog against Gingrich will really damage him. Between being tarred by the Republican field's inanity and depressing his own base, Romney may hand the game to Obama. Gingrich is the perfect dope for Obama's favorite game, rope a dope. Going by primary state poll numbers Gingrich may win it.

An ascendant Newt may indicate my long anticipated collapse of the Republican party as a serious contender in national politics. They may be facing a period in the desert, like the 80s Democrats.

The origins of the financial crisis

What is the contribution of the financial sector?

via Krugman. A deeper view of what the financial sector's profitability was built on.

History repeats itself

 When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump.