It’s always disheartening to see someone from your own camp take a bad hit as Dave Weigel has.  The Washington Post blogger, who was hired to provide coverage “inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party,”resigned over recently leaked emails from the Journolist listserv, in which he used some less than flattering language in his personal commentary about many of the people he was covering.

While I’ve always been respectful of Weigel’s insights and his writing, I would be being less than honest however if I’d said there wasn’t something about his posts that I’d also found worrisome.  The revelation of the Journolist emails only strengthened my gut feeling, especially when I saw how nasty the rhetoric was in the emails.  Frankly, that part surprised even me.

It’s not that I wasn’t open-minded to the views that Weigel has always presented; I could appreciate that he has criticisms of the right.  But as someone assigned to provide conservative insight, his commentary sometimes struck me as being penned more from a liberal viewpoint than that of a conservative or libertarian one.  It almost seemed more targeted to pleasing Media Matters’ readers.  And since I already follow a number of liberal journalists to balance out the material I read from conservative and libertarian leaning authors, Media Matters’ tone isn’t exactly what I’m usually looking for.  But perhaps there was a reason his posts sometimes seemed that way to me. (more…)

In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes. (more…)

Recently, Matt Welch and I utterly destroyed Eric Boehlert’s ridiculous claim that nobody at the L.A. Times was ever allowed to casually denigrate President Bush:

And I don’t even have to do a Google search to know for a fact that when President Bush was in office, there was nobody on staff at the Times, and certainly nobody writing off the opinion pages, who was allowed to so casually insult the office of the presidency on a regular basis.

Hahahahahahaha! Read Welch’s post and mine for the destruction of that singularly clueless claim.

I also observed that Boehlert’s whine about The Times’s terrible lack of respect for the office of the presidency was considerably undermined by the fact that he cross-posted his whinge at a site called The Smirking Chimp.

Boehlert has now responded — not with any undermining of Welch’s evidence, or mine, concerning his central complaint, but with this:

Fact: I did not “cross-publish” my column at The Smirking Chimp. Patterico might not now [sic] this, but in the wonderful world of the Internets, sometimes sites independently reproduce other writers’ work, which is exactly what The Smirking Chimp did with my column about the LA Times. As it does with many of my columns.

But Patterico makes a patently false claim about me in an attempt to portray me as a hypocrite; that I specifically cross-published my LA Times column at The Smirking Chimp. I did not.

Interesting, that word “specifically.” Almost like it’s a weasel word.

Let’s take a look at this claim that The Smirking Chimp “independently” republished Boehlert’s work, with no input from Boehlert. My conclusion: Boehlert is dissembling at a minimum, and more likely just flat-out lying.

Boehlert’s post appeared at something called “Eric Boehlert’s blog” at The Smirking Chimp: (more…)

Writing in Reason, Jacob Sullum’s got this one dead right:

Last month New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak said two recent Supreme Court cases “suggest that the Roberts Court is prepared to adopt a robustly libertarian view of the constitutional protection of free speech.” Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, was on the losing side in both.

As solicitor general, of course, Kagan has an obligation to defend federal laws against constitutional challenges. But her pro-censorship positions went beyond the call of duty. Together with some of her academic writings, her arguments in these cases provide grounds to worry that she will be even less inclined than Stevens, who has a mixed First Amendment record, to support freedom of speech.

The Obama Administration has already made its view of the First Amendment quite clear; as the president said just the other day, “Information becomes a distraction.” Indeed, the radical left has all but forsaken a tool it once used as a bludgeon against the establishment — free speech — and now seeks to constrain and even eliminate free speech on campuses and, increasingly, in the public arena as well.

More from Sullum: (more…)