Greetings TPM readers.
Michael Crowley has burned a brilliant path these last few days at the helm of Josh’s operation. I’m going to have to talk with him about the “white smoke” stuff though as I’ve just returned from a trip to Rome and was caught off guard by the embalmed popes on display at St. Peter’s. Did Lenin follow in this tradition? or did the Popes get the idea from Stalin? I’d really like to know.
It seems that Michael and I both used to hang out with Josh in the earliest, uncertain days of Talking Points’ beginning at the Connecticut & R Starbucks. Josh’s daily diet primarily consisted of S’bucks black & white cookies and a venti ice latte. In New York, a more stressful town, he’s now moved to straight-up venti ice coffee.
Josh Marshall changed my life — or at least seriously reduced the number of hours I sleep. He drove me to launch my own blog, The Washington Note, because he thought I had some things to say that just wouldn’t perk well in my day job at the New America Foundation. My latest serious blogging focus had been attempting to keep John Bolton from the United Nations. While my fellow-travelers in the effort and I succeeded in blocking Bolton’s confirmation by the Senate, we did not sufficiently alter the environment such that President Bush couldn’t get away with a recess appointment.
But with Josh’s focused blogging efforts on social security reform, and TWN‘s campaign on Bolton, some are arguing that certain models of blogging campaigns — hitting a controversial issue in its soft spot — with high-road reporting mixed with some advocacy can yield results.
More on that later.
For the moment, just wanted to introduce myself; say a “big-time” (as Dick Cheney would say) thank you to Michael Crowley; and just chuckle with all of you that John Bolton’s first big move at the U.N. was to tell the other envoys that there is precious little time left to push reform and then rip up 400 separate passages in the current U.N. reform plan.
Hey, maybe the U.S. should be tearing apart the U.N. draft reform plan, but Bolton’s negative credibility rating means that few buy what he is saying, even if he might be right.
More later.
