Permanent link to MTA daily media news

That didnt’ take long (by Eric Boehlert at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
The unhinged Right, egged on by hate bloggers and AM talkers, let their true feelings out at an anti-Obama rally in Orlando.
Remember when we couldn’t nominate Hillary because she’d be attacked by the right, but Obama wouldn’t be?  I remain, as always, the bad guy for reminding the bots how wrong they were—about almost everything.

The Big Takeover (by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, thanks to Susie at Suburban Guerilla)
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations…

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

Obama: destroyer of the Left… (by J –SOM at Liberal Rapture)
Cannonfire hits at a point I have been throwing into posts – sometimes at random – for a year. Obama will destroy the Left. “The country thinks that Obama is some sort of lefty. He isn’t one, but that’s what people think. If his plan fails – and it will – all left-ish solutions (real left and faux left) will be discredited.”

New rescue effort called key to resuming lending (AP)
The Obama administration says it hopes a new bank rescue initiative will generate $500 billion in purchasing power to buy up toxic assets and get them off the books of the nation’s banks.
But wasn’t the last rescue effort called the key to resuming lending?  And the one before that?  And the one before that?

Worthless Shit For Sale (by Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
As far as I can tell from the description, Geithner’s plan is the following:
1) We have big honkin’ piles of worthless shit.
2) Rather than admit that, we will pay other people to buy the worthless shit – while pretending it isn’t worthless. (Because, as my nana used to say, the fishmonger doesn’t yell, “Rotten fish for sale!”)
3) To entice them, we will guarantee they will not lose any money while buying the worthless shit – or at least, none to speak of. So who’s taking the bath? Let me guess: We, the People.

Obama and the Altar of Greed (by David Michael Green at Counter Punch)
Barack Obama is dumber than a bag of hammers. I never thought I’d say that about the guy… But if you’re willing to risk the entirety of a potentially great presidency on making sure that a handful of already wealthy sociopaths who got rich destroying the global economy are not denied massive taxpayer-funded bonuses to keep them in jobs they’ve already completely mishandled, despite the fact that many of them took the money and left the job anyhow — if that’s you, and you’re the new president of the United States with a load of challenges and lots of public good will solidly behind you — well, then, you’re dumber than a bag of hammers.

Despair over financial policy (by Paul Krugman)
[I]t’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem…

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess.

James K. Galbraith Reponds to Geithner’s Toxic Asset Plan (thanks to  Susie at Suburban Guerrilla)
If I’m right and the mortgages are largely trash, then the Geithner plan is a Rube Goldberg device for shifting inevitable losses from the banks to the Treasury, preserving the big banks and their incumbent management in all their dysfunctional glory. [Emphasis added.] The cost will be continued vast over-capacity in banking, and a consequent weakening of the remaining, smaller, better-managed banks who didn’t participate in the garbage-loan frenzy.

A piece of tape (by Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire)
Galbriath keeps repeating the phrase INDEPENDENT EXAMINATION OF THE LOAN TAPES… The term is a holdover from the days when computerized information was stored on tape. A “loan tape” offers a precis of the relevant data for each loan; if you’re looking for signs of fraud, start with the tapes. Examining that data is the only way to determine how much each asset is truly worth. Otherwise, you are relying on the word of someone who may be a con artist. Geithner refuses to do that kind of investigation… Why does Geithner refuse to EXAMINE THE LOAN TAPES? Why does he refuse to do the necessary Sherlock Holmesing?

Because Holmes caught bad guys, and Timmy does not want to do that. Geithner is of the Street, and he wishes to protect his Street brethren. The Geithner solution encourages bankers to loot the system, because Uncle is paying the bills and no-one will hold the miscreants accountable for past or present misdeeds.
Of the Street, by the Street, and for the Street.

Does a Single Independent Economist Buy the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke Approach? (George Washington’s Blog)
Does a single independent economist buy the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke approach? On the left, you have: Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz saying that they have failed to address the structural and regulatory flaws at the heart of the financial crisis… Nobel economist Paul Krugman saying their plan to prop up asset prices “isn’t going to fly”… Prominent economists like Nouriel Roubini, James Galbraith, Dean [Baker], Michael Hudson and many others slamming their approach

On the right, you have: Leading monetary economist Anna Schwartz saying that they are fighting the last war and doing it all wrong. Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and former editor of the Wall Street Journal Paul Craig Roberts lambasting their approach. Economist John Williams saying “the federal government is bankrupt … If the federal government were a corporation … the president and senior treasury officers would be in federal penitentiary.” Prominent economist Marc Faber and many others tearing their approach to shreds.

Treasury’s toxic asset plan could cost $1 trillion (AP)
The Obama administration’s latest attempt to tackle the banking crisis and get loans flowing to families and businesses rely on a new government entity, the Public Investment Corp. to help purchase as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets on banks’ books.

New Deficit Forecast Casts Shadow on Obama Agenda (New York Times)
The Congressional Budget Office placed a new hurdle in front of President Obama’s agenda on Friday, calculating that the White House’s tax and spending plans would create deficits totaling $2.3 trillion more than the president’s budget projected for the next decade… Moderate Democrats from competitive districts and states have already expressed nervousness about some of Mr. Obama’s plans, especially as Republicans have grown increasingly emboldened to stay on the attack.
And why again was it supposed to be so good that Obama attracted so-called moderates to the Democratic Party?

U.S. Rounding Up Investors to Buy Bad Assets (New York Times)
Obama administration officials worked Sunday to persuade reluctant private investors to buy as much as $1 trillion in troubled mortgages and related assets from banks, with government help… But some executives at private equity firms and hedge funds, who were briefed on the plan Sunday afternoon, are anxious about the recent uproar over millions of dollars in bonus payments made to executives of the American International Group. Some of them have told administration officials that they would participate only if the government guaranteed that it would not set compensation limits on the firms.
By damn, they HAVE TO HAVE their golden toilet seats!

Banker fury over tax ‘witch-hunt’ (Financial Times)
Senior executives on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday warned of an exodus of talent from some of the biggest names in US finance, saying the “anti-American” measures smacked of “a McCarthy witch-hunt” that would send the country “back to the stone age”.

JPMorgan Chase To Spend Millions on New Jets and Luxury Airport Hangar (by Brian Ross at The Blotter, ABC News)
Embattled bank JPMorgan Chase, the recipient of $25 billion in TARP funds, is going ahead with a $138 million plan to buy two new luxury corporate jets and build “the premiere corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard” to house them, ABC News has learned. The financial giant’s upgrade includes nearly $120 million for two Gulfstream 650 planes and $18 million for a lavish renovation of a hangar at the Westchester Airport outside New York City.

They lied about the amount of the bonuses:
AIG Gives Connecticut’s Blumenthal Data on Bonuses (Bloomberg)
American International Group Inc., whose compensation policies before and after its U.S. bailout are being investigated, turned over information on its executive bonuses to Connecticut’s attorney general, who said the insurer paid out $218 million. That amount is more than the $165 million in bonuses previously disclosed by the New York-based company. The insurer provided a list of bonus amounts and contract terms to Blumenthal, who said the information supports his view that the basis for paying the bonuses is “completely unjustified,” according to a statement he issued yesterday.

As credit markets froze, banks loaned millions to insiders (McClatchy)
Banks nationwide hold $41 billion in loans to directors, top executives and other insiders, a portfolio that experts say should be stripped of secrecy.

Wall Street and the Economy (by Dean Baker)
Suppose Timothy Geithner announced a new program that would tax every family $10,000 dollars and give the money to Wall Street banks and hedge funds. (Any resemblance between this hypothetical program and real world programs is purely coincidental.) We would expect the stock of Wall Street banks and other financial sector firms to rally based on the anticipation of higher profits. Is this good for the economy? It’s not in any obvious way. After all, we can always tax people more to raise profits for Wall Street, but that doesn’t help the economy.

Reporters should remember this when assessing Wall Street’s response to the plan proposed by Geithner for buying bad assets from banks. The larger the subsidy, the better the news for Wall Street. It’s not clear that most of the public should be happy about seeing more of their tax dollars going to Wall Street.

Obama Backs Geithner Despite Vast Criticisms (Washington Post)
Embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s job is safe and the subject of resignation has not come up in his conversations with President Obama despite calls from some in Congress for Geithner to step down, the president said in an interview [broadcast Sunday Night] on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

VP Economic Adviser: Bonus Tax ‘May Be Dangerous’ (by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post)
Jared Bernstein, chief economic adviser to the vice president, offered on Sunday the strongest White House pushback yet to the bonus tax bill passed by the House of Representatives Thursday. Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Bernstein said that the bill “may be a dangerous way to go.” The president was “concerned that this bill may have some problems in going too far in terms of some legal issues, constitutional validity,” Bernstein explained. He went on to say that the bill, which taxes the bonuses of many bailout recipients at 90 percent, would use “the tax code to surgically punish a small group.”

Obama Pulls Back on Bonus Tax (Political Wire)
President Obama “is no fan of bonuses paid at a financial institutions being kept afloat by taxpayer dollars but also says he would not ‘govern out of anger’ despite Americans’ frustration with such perks,” the AP reports… Meanwhile, Politico reports a Senate bill to be considered this week “is less punitive, but could affect more companies receiving bailout funds. It would impose a 35 percent excise tax on the companies that paid bonuses and a 35 percent tax on the employees receiving them.”

Populist Rage Could Devour Obama (Political Wire)
Frank Rich: “A charming visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed…

“Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.”
Yes, well, you helped put the guy in the White House, Frank, with your endless trashing of Hillary Clinton.

Get ready for the next zombie Obot invasion, friends, I’m seeing in emails that the new meme will be to blame Obama’s failures on hiring people who once worked for Clinton.  Once again, it’s Clinton’s fault.  Four score and seven years from now, they’ll still be blaming the Clintons for everything that goes wrong.

The only political cartoon you’ll ever need (by lambert at Corrente)

The virtues of public anger and the need for more (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
With lightning speed and lockstep unanimity, opinion-making elites jointly embraced and are now delivering the same message about the public rage triggered this week by the AIG bonus scandal:   This scandal is insignificant.  It’s just a distraction.  And, most important of all, public anger is unhelpful and must be contained or, failing that, ignored.

This anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong.  The public rage we’re finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions.  The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing…  We’ve had far too little public rage given the magnitude of this rot, not an excess of rage.  What has been missing more than anything else is this:  fear on the part of the political and financial class of the public which they have been systematically defrauding and destroying.

Congress’s Potemkin Populism (by Robert Reich)
It’s nice to see that when the public gets sufficiently angry about something, Congress responds. In a rare show of bipartisanship, members are eagerly registering shock and outrage at AIG’s bonus payments by coming up with an assortment of ways to reclaim the bonanza, including taxing them away retroactively. Who says democracy is dead? But much of this is for show. When the public isn’t looking, Congress reverts to its old ways…

Angry populism thrives on stories about the rich and privileged who use their influence to get cushy deals for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. AIG’s bonuses provide a perfect example. It’s too bad the same populist outrage doesn’t extend to issues involving far more money, affecting many more people, and entailing far more insidious abuses of power. Congress’s potemkin populism over AIG’s bonuses disguises business as usual when it comes to the really big stuff.

After AIG bonuses, Congress sours on more bailouts (McClatchy)
Forget about any more bailouts anytime soon.

Administration Seeks Increase in Oversight of Executive Pay (New York Times)
The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation… Officials said the proposal would seek a broad new role for the Federal Reserve to oversee large companies, including major hedge funds, whose problems could pose risks to the entire financial system. It will propose that many kinds of derivatives and other exotic financial instruments that contributed to the crisis be traded on exchanges or through clearinghouses so they are more transparent and can be more tightly regulated. And to protect consumers, it will call for federal standards for mortgage lenders beyond what the Federal Reserve adopted last year, as well as more aggressive enforcement of the mortgage rules.

How about some sensible regulation that takes human nature into account?
Towards a rational exuberance – Knowing and Making (Knowing and Making, thanks to Economist’s View)
There are clear ways in which irrational behaviour can be guided or corrected by specific stimuli. Specific examples: 1. Framing of choices. The right kind of framing can influence people to take more or fewer risks, to consider the future more or less, and to put a higher or lower value on assets… 2. Visibility of irrationality. People tend to become more rational either if they have more time to reflect, or if their irrationality is made visible to them… 3. Lengthened time horizons. Buyers generally make less rational decisions when they consider the consequences over a shorter time period… 4. Increased scope of social contract. Buyers who act purely as individuals will make different choices to those who also consider the effects on their family, their social groups or their society…

I am confident that direct methods to help people and groups to be more rational will have a more powerful, and more timely, effect than relying on banks’ capital cushions to make the corrections for them. This isn’t all about correcting for overconfidence; it will also work on the risk aversion and underconfidence we’re seeing now. Exuberance can be rational, and growth will be more steady and reliable when it is.
But the Masters of the Universe don’t want steady and reliable growth.  If they did, we’d have it.

AIG is chump change — let’s find corporate America’s hidden billions (by Joe Conason, Salon)
It’s time to reform offshore banking, and see what untaxed wealth big business is hiding in overseas tax shelters.

Economy Board Meeting in Private (Political Wire)
Six weeks after President Obama “appointed a blue-ribbon panel to help him dig America out of its economic crisis, the board has yet to hold an official public meeting,” Politico reports. “Comments from board members and Obama himself indicate that some members of the panel are meeting, in smaller gatherings that have not been announced or opened to the public. And that raises the question of whether an administration that prides itself on openness and transparency is in fact finding it more convenient to conduct public business in private.”

So much for the “good corporate citizen” concept on card check (by lambert at Corrente)
Bloomberg: “Starbucks Corp., Whole Foods Market Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. are offering a compromise on union-backed “card-check” legislation [Employee Free Choice Act, EFCA] that U.S. business groups are spending millions of dollars to defeat. Under the compromise [Translation: gutted version] being sought by the three companies, management could still demand a secret ballot election, and the provision of the bill that requires binding arbitration for union contracts would be dropped. Penalties would be increased for companies that take action against workers before union elections and refuse to participate in collective bargaining.”

And now, enter our corporate Democrats!

As Starbucks, others seek Employee Free Choice compromise, anti-union lobby stands in the way. (Think Progress)
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Costco Wholesale Corp., Starbucks Corp. and Whole Foods Market Inc. are seeking to compromise with union groups to support a modified version of the Employee Free Choice Act. The compromise would allow a union to be formed if 70 percent — instead of the current bill’s 50 percent proposal — sign a card favoring unionization. However, the anti-union lobby refuses to back the deal… The Workforce Fairness Institute’s (WFI) Danny Diaz slammed the proposal in his morning e-mail, Politico reports, calling it a “non-starter” and “even worse” for workers. WFI’s executive director Katie Packer said, “Calling a proposal which exposes 70% of employees to intimidation instead of 50% a ‘compromise’ is beyond absurd.”

WaPo ignores views of labor in article about labor (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America )
[Sunday’s] Washington Post article about the Employee Free Choice Act notes “the widespread perception in Democrat-dominated Washington that there is not a level playing field between labor and business.” As if to prove the accuracy of that perception, the Post manages to devote nearly 1,000 words to the Act without ever once quoting or paraphrasing a representative of the labor movement. The Post did, however, manage to quote three CEOs and devote several paragraphs to anti-labor views… Gee, why would anyone think there is not a level playing field between labor and business?

AP quotes “labor lawyer” who is really an anti-labor lawyer (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Turns out the AP is even worse [than the Washington Post—see above.  Its] article doesn’t quote any labor sources, though it does quote a Starbucks spokesperson, the vice president of the anti-labor National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a Whole Foods spokesperson, a Chamber of Commerce official, a representative of the anti-labor Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, and “Washington labor lawyer Jay Krupin.”… Here’s a 2000 restaurant industry newsletter that says Krupin “represents a range of restaurant and other foodservice companies dealing with unions” and quotes him calling unions a “cancer”:

Watching us become like them: (by Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler)
[Friday], the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial about the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, the so-called “card check” legislation. Labor wants it–management doesn’t. Here’s part of what the Journal said: “The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act but in practice makes it a dead letter.”… That statement, of course, is barely distinguishable from saying that the bill in question would ”remove the secret-ballot option.” Question: How can a pseudo-progressive deal with this sort of problem? Of course! With a bit of creative “editing!” Here’s the way a pseudo-progressive might want to “edit” that quote…

HOW TO QUOTE WHAT THE JOURNAL SAID: The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act. If you “quote” the editorial that way, you get to pretend the Journal agrees with you, although it basically doesn’t. This isn’t about your view of the bill. It’s a question of your respect for your readers–of your respect for the truth. The use of the bogus “quotation” has long been a staple of pseudo-con wars. As it turns out, pseudo-progressives like playing you too.

Management bonuses anger unions at American Airlines (McClatchy)
When it comes to corporate greed, union leaders at American Airlines say “AMR” sounds a lot like “AIG.”

Iran’s supreme leader dismisses Obama overtures (AP)
Iran’s supreme leader rebuffed President Barack Obama’s latest outreach on Saturday, saying Tehran was still waiting to see concrete changes in U.S. policy. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was responding to a video message Obama released Friday in which he reached out to Iran on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian new year… In his most direct assessment of Obama and prospects for better ties, Khamenei said there will be no change between the two countries unless the American president puts an end to U.S. hostility toward Iran and brings “real changes” in foreign policy.

“They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice. We haven’t seen any change,” Khamenei said in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad.

Israeli President Contradicts Obama’s Message To Iran, Urges Iranians To ‘Topple’ Their Government (Think Progress)
On Thursday night, President Obama sent “a special message to the people and government of Iran”… [P]erhaps somewhat overlooked, Obama indicated that he is willing “to deal with the current government” and that his goal is not regime change. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Iran ”twice in the message and stated specifically that it has the “right” to exist… Israeli President Shimon Peres also delivered a “special message” to Iran on Nowruz, but “was addressed specifically to Iran’s people and not their government, reprising the tone of [former President] Bush.” And Peres explicitly contradicted Obama and called on the Iranian people to overthrow their government.

Anti-Drug Effort at Border Is Readied (Washington Post)
President Obama is finalizing plans to move federal agents, equipment and other resources to the border with Mexico to support Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s campaign against violent drug cartels, according to U.S. security officials. In Obama’s first major domestic security initiative, administration officials are expected to announce as early as this week a crackdown on the supply of weapons and cash moving from the United States into Mexico that helps sustain that country’s narco-traffickers, officials said.

Obama on Leno: Ratings Three Times More Than Usual
Highest Metered-Market Rating Since ’05 Carson Tribute
Still a celebrity.

WHAT WOULD YOU ASK PRESIDENT OBAMA? (First Read, MSNBC)
NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd wants to know what questions you’d like for him to ask President Obama during his prime time news conference next Tuesday night? Send him your ideas here.

[Some of the questions submitted so far:]
• How does the White House plan to deal with the blue dog democrats in the Senate?  Senators like Evan Bayh?
• When does the President and Eric Holder plan to reinstate Habeas Corpus?
• The ICRC recently confirmed that the United States did indeed torture. How can we move past this dark episode in our history without putting those responsible for approving torture on trial for war crimes.
• What are your plans for returning the U.S. back to a PAYGO system, and working toward paying off the national debt.
• Mr. Obama, you’re the President now, right? That is so cool.
Click through for more.

What happens if there’s a thud and no one notices? (by Pacific John at Alegre’s Corner)
As you may know, Organizing for America, the permanent campaign wing of the Obama Democratic Party planned a HUUUGE event this weekend, asking all 10 million supporters on their vaunted email list to hold events and knock on doors in support of Obama’s budget. They hit the ground. With a thud. And no one noticed. [Below is one of only two pictures at the Obama blog is of this "event," from a CA farming town… Meanwhile, the Freepers and Dittoheads were evidently able to muster hundreds or thousands to their "tea parties." When you're out-organized by Michele Malkin, you are truly f*&%d. 

Is Kagan the Next Supreme Court Justice? (Political Wire)
On Friday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as the nation's first female Solicitor General, "a position informally regarded as the 10th Supreme Court justice and, for her, a possible audition for a spot in the starting nine," the AP reports. Kagan "is widely regarded as a serious candidate for any opening on the high court that would be filled by President Barack Obama, her former University of Chicago Law School teaching colleague. Justices John Paul Stevens, 88, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 76, and David Souter, 69, are considered the most likely to retire during Obama's presidency."

Quote of the Day (Political Wire)
"Everybody likes to think they did it all by themselves. I don't believe in the great-man theory of history. You really have to see change as a continuum. It doesn't come in packets, it comes in waves." -- Howard Dean, quoted in the Boston Globe, hitting back at those in President Obama's inner circle who kept him out of the administration.

Coleman Attorney: 'I'm Done'; Concedes Franken 'Probably Still Ahead' After Contest Verdict (The Brad Blog)
According to a transcript of a radio appearance this week by former Senator Norm Coleman's attorney, Joe Friedberg, the Republican will most likely lose his election contest against Al Franken for the U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota. Friedberg as conceded that Coleman will "probably" lose when the 3-judge panel currently deliberating the case, which both sides rested last week, announce their verdict. "I think it's probably correct that Franken will still be ahead and probably by a little bit more," Friedberg admitted, after announcing that he was "done" with the case...

Just Like With Stimulus, GOP Lawmakers Slam Omnibus While Touting Its Funding For Local Projects (Think Progress)
Last month, every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Yet, as Thinkprogress noted at the time, as many as 22 Republicans who railed against the stimulus then touted the projects the stimulus would fund in their home districts. (A few Democrats who voted against the bill have done the same thing.) Now, many of those same Republican lawmakers are pulling the same bait-and-switch with the FY2009 omnibus spending bill.

Palin's office seeks to calm furor over stimulus funds rejection (McClatchy)
Dozens of protesters held signs Saturday criticizing Gov. Sarah Palin for turning away federal economic stimulus money they said is vital for education and other services for Alaskans.

Palin's Legal Bills Pile Up (Political Wire)
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) owes more than a half million dollars to an Alaska law firm that has defended her against ethics complaints -- and she may create a legal fund to pay the bill, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

NYT Ignores Protectionism for Banks (by Dean Baker)
If the U.S. government were to hand checks for tens of billions of dollars to the domestic auto industry or the steel industry to help them survive, presumably it would be viewed as a form of protectionism. However, when the checks to the banking industry, for some reason the question of protectionism never arises. The NYT had a front page story warning of the rise of protectionism. Remarkably, it makes no mention of the hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. government is paying to keep the financial industry afloat. All the claims about the inefficiencies of protectionism apply as much to banking as they do to the auto and steel sector (we can use the same graph for all three), however protectionism for the banks never seems to raise any concerns in the media.

Those Persistent Anonymous Sources (by Clark Hoyt, Public Editor, New York Times)
THE Times has a tough policy on anonymous sources, but continues to fall down in living up to it. That’s my conclusion after scanning a sampling of articles published in all sections of the paper since the first of the year. This will not surprise the many readers who complain to me that the paper lets too many of its sources hide from public view.

Various matters (by Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory, Salon)
What makes the NYT's constant, reckless violation of its own anonymity policy most notable is that the policy was promulgated in 2004 as a response to two NYT scandals:  the Judy Miller/Michael Gordon Iraq "reporting" and the Jayson Blair fabrications.  The more stringent anonymity policy was ostensibly designed to assure the public that the NYT was committed to avoiding a future repeat of those debacles.  So what message would a rational person infer from the fact that the NYT now routinely violates and ignores that policy?

WaPo runs Chris Mooney's rebuttal to George Will (by Jamison Foser at County Fair, Media Matters for America)
Three weeks ago, Chris Mooney submitted an op-ed to the Washington Post, in response to George Will's controversial global warming column.  [Saturday], the Post [ran] Mooney’s column… Mooney graciously says he is “heartened” that the Post ran his column.  The Post does deserve some credit for doing so, but I have to wonder what took so long.  Three weeks is an eternity in the modern news cycle, and many people have probably forgotten all about the controversy surrounding Will’s column.  In the meantime, Will’s false claims have had three weeks to solidify in Post readers’ minds. The paper would have done better by the public — and the truth — had it published Mooney’s column much sooner.
Not good enough.  They should have stopped the publication of Will’s column.

Networks Not Happy About Obama Press Conference (Political Wire)
The Hollywood Reporter says the television networks are “reluctantly” pulling their prime time programming to cover President Obama’s press conference on Tuesday night. “Fulfilling their scheduling civic duty is starting to seem increasingly cumbersome to broadcasters, however. Between a struggling economy and ratings sagging in midseason, every interruption costs networks advertising dollars and momentum.”

Matthews Renews Contract at MSNBC (New York Times)
Chris Matthews, the host of “Hardball”, signed a contract for at least four years, guaranteeing he will be around to cover the next presidential election.
Great, another Hillary hater gets rewarded.

MSNBC In Talks With Radio Host Ed Schultz (TV Decoder, New York Times)
MSNBC is in talks with Ed Schultz, the progressive radio talk show host, about a permanent position at the cable news channel, a source with knowledge of the talks said Friday. The source requested anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss the network’s deal-making.
Great, another Obamaton gets rewarded.

Media Matters for America headlines

• NY Times falsely claimed that Obama “campaigned as an antiwar candidate” [Sorry, MMA, I have to disagree with you on this one.  If Obama didn’t campaign as an antiwar candidate, his minions did it for him.  Which means he campaigned as an antiwar candidate.  I was called a warmonger many times for supporting Hillary.—Caro]

• Wash. Times forwarded false GOP suggestion that Bush administration played no role in AIG bonus controversy

• Scarborough falsely claimed Orszag “admit[ted]” Obama budget “will create an unsustainable debt”

• Perpetuating falsehood, Wall Street Journal’s Fund claimed “AIG bonuses … were in the stimulus bill”

• Wash. Post still reporting GOP attacks over bonuses while ignoring IG testimony implicating Bush administration

• CNN’s Whitfield advanced false GOP claim that recovery bill created right for AIG to pay bonuses

• At work for new boss, Fox News, Rove understated debt run up by old boss, Bush

• Hannity whopper: Budget reconciliation process would deprive Republicans of vote

• Major media outlets yet to report IG testimony implicating Bush administration in AIG bonuses

• Fox’s Gallagher suggested Obama speech caused Dow to drop — but Fox’s own graphics show absurdity of suggestion

• Fox News buries significance of its own scoop implicating Bush administration on AIG bonuses

N. Korea Says It Is Holding Reporters
North Korea confirmed that it had detained two American journalists on charges of “illegally intruding” into the Communist state through its border with China.

Australian Internet `blacklist’ prompts concern
A whistle-blower organization claims a secret list of Web sites that Australian authorities are proposing to ban includes such innocuous destinations as a dentist’s office. Australia’s government denied that the list — published by renegade Web site Wikileaks.org — was the same as a blacklist run by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA. However, a manager at the dentist’s office said the ACMA had confirmed her site’s inclusion on the ban list. Wikileaks’ publication of the list this week reignited a debate over whether a government proposal to impose an Internet filter for all Australians could have unintended consequences for innocent businesses.

New Zealand withdraws controversial Internet law
New Zealand Monday withdrew a controversial law which could have forced firms to disconnect Internet users accused of illegal use of material such as music or films.

US Posts Videos of High-seas Encounter With China on YouTube
The U.S. Navy released eight videos over the weekend that offer a closer look at a controversial encounter between a U.S. vessel and five Chinese ships in the South China Sea.

Open Government Advocates Pleased with Obama FOIA Reforms
“The Lights are back on.” That is how one open government advocate reacted to the news that the Obama administration was beginning to implement its FOIA reform policy. The Justice Department has followed through on its pledge to reform the government’s approach to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests, which are a tool used by journalists and the general public to get access to government information.
Click through to read B&C’s synopsis of the key points.

Bloggers Ponder the Decline of Religion, Economic Prosperity and Newspapers (Project for Excellence in Journalism)
As the economy struggled, a major newspaper shut down and a survey highlighted the diminishing appeal of organized religion, bloggers and social media pondered the dramatic social changes that might be taking place and what the implications could be. The top subject was the decline in people claiming an affiliation with organized religion, as documented in a new study… The second largest story, at 24% of the links, involved the continuing problems in the U.S. economy… Third (at 11%) was more  grim news for the newspaper industry as bloggers contemplated whether papers would be missed and what role online journalism would play.

Media Giants Want to Top Google Results
Major media companies are increasingly lobbying Google to elevate their expensive professional content within the search engine’s undifferentiated slush of results. Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they’re newly upset that Google’s algorithm penalizes paid content.

“You should not have a system,” one content executive said, “where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately.”
Why can’t there be a reliability rating capability, and the ability for searchers to choose their preferred rating?

What Sulzberger and Isaacson said about online journalism in 1995
Zachary Seward digs up the transcript of discussion held 14 years ago during which Walter Isaacson … said he was sure that readers would pay a monthly subscription fee for Time Inc.’s digital magazines. NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said of making money from online journalism: “I don’t think that’s going to be as difficult as we think it is today, because I think the ethos and ethics of the web are changing. I guess I’m betting on that, aren’t I? Am I wrong?”

Future May Be Brighter, but It’s Apocalypse Now (by Bob Garfield at Advertising Age)
Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived…

Newspapers
Amid 23% population growth in the past two decades, U.S. newspaper circulation has dropped 20%… Craigslist, siphoning off $7 billion worth of classifieds, is another… As Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News boss Brian Tierney told me at the end of January, “Clearly a free internet model online — if you build it, they will come — I don’t think is working for media like ours. … I think we’re going to have to start to find a way to charge for it and not just rely on advertising.” By the time anyone figured that out, it was too late. The audience doesn’t imagine that all cars want to be free, or that all toasters want to be free, or that all paper towels want to be free, but it somehow believes that all content wants to be free.

Magazines
In 2008, newsstand sales — the profit engine of the industry — fell 12%. According to Media Industry Newsletter, gross ad pages so far in 2009 have dropped a staggering 22% — that coming off a dismal 2008… [T]his is structural, as articulated a few weeks ago by Wenda Harris Millard, co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. “Advertising simply cannot support all the media that’s out there.” Or as the publisher of another famous-name, high-circulation title recently told me, begging for anonymity on the grounds of not wishing to be stoned to death: “We are living the Chaos Scenario.” Nicely phrased.

Broadcast stations
Remember how Clear Channel, the radio-TV-billboard colossus, was going to destroy our very democracy by voraciously swallowing every broadcast station in America?… Yeah, well, we’re probably safe. After being purchased by two private-equity firms (for $38 per share, down from $100 in 2000), Clear Channel dumped its 56 TV stations and tried to unload more than 500 of its small-market radio stations, but has been stymied by the credit freeze and declining value of those assets… S&P said it was considering downgrading the company yet again. The fearsome juggernaut has just laid off 9% of its work force.

TV networks
According to Nielsen Media Research, in the last reporting period, CBS’s prime-time audience was down 2.9%. ABC was down 9.7%, Fox was down 17.5% and NBC was down 14.3%… Now the advertiser exodus, too, is under way. As of mid-February, 71% reported having slashed their 2009 budgets, and 6% more said the cuts were on their way. That’s why [NBC’s Jeff] Zucker finally admits to considering a once-unthinkable proposition: once affiliate contracts and pro-sports deals expire, ceasing to be a network at all. NBC: the cable channel.

Cable
Just fair warning, guys: Cable has problems of its own. It’s no more DVR-proof than broadcast. It is also suffering a sort of distribution autoimmune disease, wherein the body attacks itself. The very coax the industry has been stringing for 50 years is now the pipe for broadband, which households increasingly are using to bypass pay cable entirely… Boxee is such a threat to the business model of both cable and broadcast that Hulu — which distributes NBC, Fox and Viacom programs online for free with minimal advertising — demanded to be removed from Boxee’s offerings. Because if you can watch TV programs on your actual TV, with very few ads and no subscription fees to a cable middleman, why wouldn’t you?

Online publishers
Yahoo, at about 3.5 billion daily page views, is the most visited website in the world. In 2008, it had a profit of $424 million on $7.2 billion in revenue. Not too shabby, unless you compare it with 2005, when the company had a profit of $1.9 billion on revenue of $5.3 billion. Last spring, after a prolonged dance, it finally rejected Microsoft’s takeover bid at $33 per share, or about $50 billion…  As (my former Ad Age colleague) Rothenberg details, “Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are built into her laptop…” So the biggest online publishers, with all their vast overhead, have no more access to audience than Courtney the eighth-grader. And there are hundreds of millions of Courtneys, millions of them on Google AdSense, driving the price of ad space down, down, down.

Morford: Big-name, big-brained futurists don’t know how to solve the newspaper crisis
Mark Morford on Clay Shirky…, Dave Winer, and Steven Johnson: “Each has fired off his own high-profile, widely disseminated, well-Twittered and blogged and cross-posted essay and counter-essay, each analyzing and prognosticating about what’s to become of print newspapers and the classic, centralized newsroom model. The grand upshot? They don’t really have any idea.” What they do have, says Morford, are “hopeful, but ultimately disappointing theories.”

Nickel-and-dimed to death (by Jeff Jarvis)
[T]his is what I want to say to many of the believers in the pay meme: “…[Y]ou find many ways to say that papers should charge and that readers should pay, without saying why, without addressing the value to the public and the competitive economic environment for the publisher, and without getting specific about the complete financial projections of your model… We should view the [Wall Street Journal] pay model with suspicion precisely because that is the only example ever raised. I repeat: Its subscription fees are paid on expense accounts. And I would love to see a full accounting of the revenue from joint subscriptions — print and online — that are attributed to each medium…

How much do you think a paper could charge? For what? How many subscribers would you forecast? What would the impact on audience size and advertising inventory be? What would the impact on search-engine optimization be? What do you project as the cost of subscriber acquisition?

Bloggers Say They’re Open to Paying for Online Content
According to a report, 40 percent of bloggers — on their own blogs or on message board postings — said they would, or already do, pay for news content online. One of the most common reasons why was because they “don’t want the quality of news to decline.”

A simple, viable business formula for online news
Jonathan Weber shares it: “Take advantage of new tools and techniques to cover the news creatively and efficiently; sell sophisticated digital advertising in a sophisticated fashion; keep the Web content free, and charge a high price for content and interaction that are delivered in-person via conferences and events. And don’t expect instant results.”

‘Buffalo News’ Editor: We’re in Better Shape Than Most 
Margaret Sullivan, longtime editor of the Buffalo (N.Y.) News, penned a column for the Sunday paper calling her paper “fortunate” during this crisis time for newspapers, and listed several reasons why.
1. We’re making a profit. The decline in advertising revenue is significant—and likely to get worse— but we’re still in the black and planning to stay that way.
2. We have none of the crippling debt that many newspaper owners are carrying. Many of those debt-heavy papers would be making money if it weren’t for their debt load.
3. We have extraordinarily high acceptance among local residents…
4. Our Web site is the leading Internet destination, by far, in Western New York. When you combine the Web site and the newspaper, we’re reaching 80 percent of Western New Yorkers on a regular basis.

A Web Site’s For-Profit Approach to World News
The founders of GlobalPost.com have created a hybrid business model of free content and paid subscriptions, combined with ads, to try to cover the globe.

Give Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers
That’s a proposal from John Nichols and Robert McChesney. “We need to think about an immediate journalism economic stimulus, to be revisited after three years, and we need to think big,” they write. “Let’s eliminate postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20 percent of their revenues from advertising. This keeps alive all sorts of magazines and journals of opinion that are being devastated by distribution costs. It is these publications that often do investigative, cutting-edge, politically provocative journalism.”
Yes, but some of those publications promote vicious lies.  How will the Post Office determine which is which?

What Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Twitter, And Digg Don’t Do (by Steve Smith, MIN)
Magazine folks are doing things online that other media entities probably couldn’t do. Magazines at their best online are not just keeping up with digital. They now, finally, are providing truly unique and indispensable content and models to the mix.

Jon Stewart’s Next Target for a Spanking: Sumner Redstone! (by Simon Dumenco, Advertising Age)
Given all the recent media-fueled outrage over the obscene bonuses paid out to AIG executives, I have a simple request: I’d like the same media that have been raising holy hell about AIG to investigate the often completely unjustified compensation of the executives that have been driving the media business into the ground — often preserving their own cushy jobs while laying off the rank and file and even killing off storied media properties.

Time Spent at Newspaper Sites Stalling?
The average time spent on newspaper Web sits stalled if not dropped in February. Many sites still maintain single-digit averages for an entire month.  The data is the latest from Nielsen Online. Nielsen defines time spent as the average time spent per person at a site during the month.

Questioning the Motives and Bias of Prominent Newspaper Critics 
Randy Siegel, president of Parade Publications, writes: “As many newspaper companies try to turn themselves around in a brutal economy, under huge debt loads and against a backdrop of increasingly funereal media coverage, it’s worth looking at the behavior and motives of some of the industry’s harshest critics.”

Morris Communications to Reduce Wages for All Employees
Morris Communications Co. has told its employees it will reduce wages 5 to 10 percent, effective April 1. The reductions will affect both hourly and salaried employees… Morris Publishing Group was formed in 2001 and publishes 13 daily newspapers, including The Florida Times-Union, The Augusta Chronicle, the Savannah Morning News and the Athens Banner-Herald.

As papers die, expect no tears from crooks (by Leonard Pitts, Chicago Tribune)
On the day the last newspaper is published, I expect no sympathy card from Kwame Kilpatrick. Were it not for a newspaper—the Detroit Free Press—his use of public funds to cover up his affair with one of his aides would be unrevealed and he might still be mayor of Detroit. And I will expect there won’t be any condolences coming from Rod Blagojevich. Were it not for the Chicago Tribune, he might still be governor of Illinois…

In short, the day the last newspaper is published—a day that seems to be rushing at us like a brick wall in an old Warner Bros. cartoon—I will not be surprised if the nation’s various crooks, crumbs and corrupters fail to shed a tear. But the unkindest cut of all, the “Et tu, Brute?” dagger in the back, is the fact that, according to a new survey from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, most other Americans won’t either. Pew found 63 percent saying that if their local paper went down, they would miss it very little or not at all.

Rainey: What political stories aren’t being covered because of newsroom cuts?
“The political pros I interviewed talked about stories missed and questions not asked,” writes James Rainey. “Wouldn’t a more robust reporting corps have delved by now into gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman’s stock trades when she headed eBay? Everything may be perfectly kosher there, but in the old days, one operative said, someone would have checked by now.”

WSJ presses reporters to break news for DJ Newswires
Managing editor Robert Thomson says Journal reporters “will be judged, in significant part, by whether they break news for the Newswires.” He writes in a memo: “A breaking corporate, economic or political news story is of crucial value to our Newswires subscribers, who are being relentlessly wooed by less worthy competitors.”

WaPo Forces Name Change For ABC News Web Series
Monday, March 9 ABCNews.com launched “The Fix,” a daily Web series featuring various ABC News correspondents and anchors. But lawyers from The Washington Post sent a cease and desist letter to ABC News telling them the name “The Fix” is theirs. And it appears ABC News has complied.

GM uses a corporate blog to “take on” WSJ
General Motors’ press office claims the Wall Street Journal’s news pages have been pushing bankruptcy as a viable option for the car company. “We have had a series of discussions with them about their misrepresentation of GM’s position on this highly sensitive issue,” GM News Relations director Tom Wilkinson writes to Romenesko. “We have finally resorted to taking them on in one of our corporate blogs.” (A response from the WSJ is welcome.)

Big newsprint firm may have to declare bankruptcy
Last year, newsprint consumption tumbled 16% among daily newspapers. That plunge in demand has left AbitibiBowater struggling to shoulder its substantial debt burden. If it doesn’t reach a deal with its bondholders today, the company may be forced to file for bankruptcy protection.

Economist, Elle, People Top AdWeek Media’s ‘Hot List’
‘The Hot List’ and ’10 Under 60 Hot List’ annually recognize consumer magazines with a recent track record of standout advertising revenue and page performance. To be considered, a title’s ad results must be tracked by the authoritative Publishers Information Bureau.

Conde Nast publishes its slimmest monthly magazine ever
It’s the 106-page April Portfolio. The magazine has only 21 ad pages, reports Keith J. Kelly.

Recession Has Conde Nast Cutting the Fat
As Conde Nast continues to take a pounding, with ad pages off 30 percent to 40 percent in many titles, some industry observers are expecting that the perks doled out to the highest-ranking executives and chief editors, among the most lavish in the industry, may be the next to take the hit.

Who Threw the DVD From the Train?
Instead of banking on suddenly shaky DVD sales, Hollywood is beginning to concentrate again on making the kind of films that do well at the box office.

’3-D’ in movies no longer just a gimmick
Nowadays, studios shoot their biggest-ticket items in 3-D, from DreamWorks Animation’s “Monsters vs. Aliens,” which comes out Friday, to “Titanic” director James Cameron’s much-anticipated holiday 2009 sci-fi movie “Avatar.”… “Home theaters have gotten so nice, with HD and surround sound, that when people go out to a movie theater they are looking for something they can’t get in their home,” said Doug Link, director of Sacramento’s Esquire Imax Theatre, which opens “Monsters vs. Aliens” on Friday. “3-D lends itself to taking people to that place.”

Video Games Continue Strong Sales in February
The video-game industry is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise grim economic environment. According to figures compiled by market research firm NPD Group, sales of games and hardware were 10 percent higher in February compared to a year before, bringing in a robust $1.47 billion in revenue.

Sony in Expansion of U.S. and Foreign TV Business
The company hopes to capture new formats and programming ideas overseas and promote its domestic content abroad more efficiently.

Layoffs at ABC Imminent
Nikki Finke: I’m told Disney/ABC is, gulp, finally ready to start pinkslipping studio and network showbiz execs as part of the fallout from the January merger of ABC Entertainment and ABC Media Studios. “The firings should start next week,” a source said over the weekend.

Late-Night Shows Bask in Success
Late-night is resisting the declines this season in prime-time viewing on broadcast television. The prime-time average is down an aggregate 4.7%, but so far in 2009, the number of people between 18 and 34 who watch live TV between 11:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. has grown 1.7% above 2008′s average.

TV stations may consider farming out sportscasts (by Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune)
The games are the same, as are the scores. Highlights and interview sound bites vary only slightly. What differentiates the sportscast on one local newscast from another—occasionally memorable enterprise features and reporting notwithstanding—is mostly the writing, the reading and the rapport of those who bring it to us. So what would happen if one station’s news operation farmed out its sports segment? What if a deal was struck with, say, Comcast SportsNet to produce and deliver that part of the newscast? If such an arrangement could get past the unions, would that be an effective way to reduce costs? Or would the loss of identity, control and other potential pitfalls make it a mistake, no matter how shrewd it might initially seem?

Yes, Stewart, CNBC Still Trusts Cramer
Despite Jim Cramer’s personal brand taking a beating last month, CNBC continues to air the commercials that were blasted by Jon Stewart.

How Fox Business and Bloomberg Can Gain Ground on CNBC (by Jon Friedman at Marketwatch)
Now is the time for Fox Business and Bloomberg to make progress. Visibility is an issue for both, as they have to hammer out deals with cable operators to increase the reach of their programming. They also need to strengthen their identities.

Broadcast TV or Cable, It’s All the Same to Consumers
Advertisers Also Making Less of a Distinction as Ratings Gap Narrows

Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube Seek Big Break on TV
Video content from Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix and YouTube is becoming commonplace on devices that stream Internet content to the living room TV. You’ll find some or all of the services pre-loaded on a variety of streaming devices, from connected TVs and Blu-ray players to DVRs to stand-alone media streamers. [Click through for] desciptions of the content offered by each service, along with release dates and pricing information.

Seamless Web TV Experience Meets Resistance (by Michael Learmonth at Advertising Age)
Media Morph: Boxee
WHAT IS IT? A New York-based start-up that makes free, open-source software that turns your computer into the equivalent of a powerful set-top box that can play anything from Hulu to iTunes to videos saved on your hard drive. Furthermore, it’s formatted for the big screen, meaning it makes the PC-to-TV connection even more appealing, and, with a handy app, it turns your iPhone into a remote…

So, what’s the problem? Well, Boxee got noticed by cable and broadcast networks, which pressured Hulu to start blocking it two weeks ago. Since then, it’s been a cat-and-mouse game as Boxee engineers devise work-arounds and Hulu engineers stop them. The issue is that Boxee made it a little too easy to watch web video on TV, which causes two problems: First, when users watch a show online, the networks earn a fraction of the ad revenue they earn when people watch on TV. Second, it’s likely Boxee might encourage people to just drop cable, depriving operators of subscription revenue.

As Rights Clash on YouTube, Some Music Vanishes
Some videos on YouTube are disappearing in a disagreement over fees for Warner Music’s copyrighted works.

Social Web sites face transparency questions
Yelp.com prides itself on being a site where people can write reviews about pretty much anything and connect with similarly critical peers. Yet as the site grows, some of the businesses scrutinized on Yelp are turning the tables and griping about the company itself.

QLess Changes the Way You Wait in Line (Mashable)
When you show up to a restaurant and it’s fully booked, sometimes you’ll get lucky and they’ll have some sort of electronic coaster you can take with you to roam around within a few yards of the establishment. Other times, you’ll just have to sit and wait or risk losing your spot in line. QLess is looking to provide a more logical system that uses your mobile phone. The idea is that you can check into a line by sending a text message or making a phone call, without even the need for someone to physically check you in. Then, you’ll simply receive a text message or phone call when your turn in line has come up.

Shaq ‘tweets’ at halftime of Suns game
Suns center Shaquille O’Neal posted a note on his Twitter feed before a home game against Washington on Saturday night, suggesting he planned to post to the popular social networking Web site during halftime.  And sure enough, a brief message was posted on Shaq’s feed before the third quarter.

Study: Ads equal stability.
A new Nielsen IAG study shows consumers have more reliability in financial services companies that are still on the air. Researchers say “out of sight” suggests “out of business” to many Americans.

Ad ID targets accountability.
Radio commercials are getting specific Ad-ID codes, similar to UPCs on package goods. It’s part of an effort to make advertising easier to track and verifiable across all platforms. Developers say it’s also the first step toward bringing radio closer to e-commerce.

Web Ad Firms Bet on Phones Getting More PC-Like
As mobile phones become more like PCs, Internet companies are betting that they’ll find a new medium in which to thrive. But that’s still some time away, experts said here today at the ThinkMobile conference and expo. After all, mobile advertisers and content providers have barely begun to bring the techniques that work on the Internet to mobile phones. And today, it’s the wireless carriers who dominate the cash flow in the mobile content industry, from advertising to subscription services. (ThinkMobile is produced by Mediabistro, which is part of WebMediaBrands, the parent company of this Web site.)

Still, the expectation is that as smartphones proliferate and grow in power, they’ll enable their owners to escape carriers’ locked-in environments — paving the way for a true PC-like Net experience, along with benefits for online media companies, advertisers and other Internet firms.

Instapaper: Because the Device Shouldn’t Matter (by Amy Gahran at Poynter Online)
Now that I own (and use daily) a laptop, iPhone, and Kindle, I’m developing a new relationship to text content. I realize that I shouldn’t have to care about the device. The news and other content I choose to read should just be there — available on whichever of my devices I prefer at the moment, in a format friendly to that device… So I was pleased to recently discover an online service called Instapaper, which makes it easier to read electronic long-format content and to share that content across multiple devices.

How the iPhone 3.0 Will Create a New Mobile Economy (Mashable)
The [new feature] to watch … is the ability to purchase items within an application… iPhone users have already downloaded over 800 million applications, but that download has always been the end of the interaction with the developer. With this feature, iPhone applications can sell virtual gifts, ebooks, and application upgrades. The iPhone app store was a major innovation for mobile software. The iPhone 3.0 takes it a step further. The ability for the creators of applications to build relationships with customers by selling items and create stores within applications is a bold step towards the iPhone becoming its own micro-economy.

Play Xbox Games on Your Cell Phone
Imagine playing what looks like an Xbox 360 game — on a $100 cell phone. That, according to Remi Pedersen, graphics product manager at ARM, is exactly what could be possible as soon as winter 2009 with its new higher-end Mali-200 and Mali-400 processors.