I have to agree with Michael Hirsh on this one. I’m fine, probably more than fine, with Obama’s economics appointees. But there’s one problem. Where’s Joe Stiglitz? He should be in the mix.
Biden taps economist and … how can we not say it … frequent TPMCafe blogger Jared Bernstein as his chief economics advisor.
The RNC paid $110,400 on hair and makeup artistry on Sarah Palin for her two months in the sun.
Plus $55,000 more for clothes.
(ed.note: Let me stipulate that the title refers very broadly to the insufficiency of expenditures on superficialities to compensate for Palin’s shortcomings as a candidate.)
As Minnesota Senate recount officially ends, Franken camp claims a lead that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Kevin Philips has written persuasively about how the official unemployment rate understates the actual jobless numbers, and you get a glimpse of that in some of the employment numbers that came out today. From the NYT:
A mass departure from the labor force helped to hold down the unemployment rate in November, which was up only two-tenths of a percentage point from October’s 6.5 percent. The so-called underemployment rate, however, jumped to 12.5 percent, from 8 percent in October. Most of the underemployed are people working part time who want to work full time but cannot.
The 12.5 percent is the highest level of underemployment since the statistic was first compiled in 1994.
More than 420,000 men and women who had been working or seeking work in October left the labor force in November. Most presumably gave up looking for a job, the bureau’s report suggests. If they had continued that search, the unemployment rate in November would have been closer to 7 percent.
Late Update: The NYT has revised its story since I first posted the above excerpt. It appears they got the October underemployment number wrong. It was 11.8 percent, not 8 percent. (Thanks to TPM Reader RC for the catch.)
Let me preface this post by saying that it will include little new for those who work in media or those who follow the business side of the media business. This post is written for the vast audience of people who are consumers of newspapers, either in their traditional paper or newer digital forms.
Everyone probably realizes that over the long run paper newspapers face a daunting threat from digital news sources that have vastly lower distribution costs (bytes versus paper) and a growing population of people who would rather get their news online than on paper. What probably isn’t clear to a lot of people is just how fast that change may be coming.
Let me start with a few recent news items. A few days the Newspaper Association of America announced that during the third quarter of 2008, newspaper ad revenues dropped 18% vs. the same quarter last year. And that number includes growing online ads. Print ads alone were down 19% and classified ads were off 31%. That’s compared to a 7% overall decline last year. And that’s a decline that has been accelerating since 2005 — in other words, right through the cash-rich housing bubble years.
On the same day, Cox Newspapers announced it was shuttering its whole Washington Bureau. Gannett just announced it’s cutting 2,000 jobs nationwide which will affect all 85 of its papers, with the exception of USAToday and the Detroit Free Press. And, as I noted earlier today, there’s now some suggestion that Scripps may be preparing to simply shut down the Rocky Mountain News.
The key here is that this is not about the dire economic circumstance the country finds itself in now. This is a secular, not a cyclical trend. The economic collapse is only accelerating it.
In a sense we’re part of this question, since we’re on the other side of the divide. But in journalism as in life, no one is an island. And while I’m confident ‘journalism’ will survive this in the medium run, there’s no getting around the catastrophic dimensions of what’s happening for a whole generation of journalists. There’s a lot I don’t know about newspaper financing. But the year over year revenue declines across the whole industry just seem unsustainable.
Last night at a Harper’s-NYU forum on how to deal with Bush-era war crimes, TPMtv caught up with renowned civil liberties lawyer Burt Neuborne, legal director at the Brennan Center For Justice, who has sued every president since Lyndon Johnson. Among the topics discussed: Neuborne’s idea for a “shaming commission” that could make life uncomfortable for Bush officials as they flee for the private sector …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
WANTED: Former second-tier state elected official to chair national political party struggling to recover from devastating election losses and its own history of racial intolerance.