The media gives us bloggers crap all the time about the fact that we don’t have editors, so what we write is not to be respected. What is amazing is the amount of quality that we are able to create without having someone looking over our drafts. So it is not without a bit of schadenfreude that I point you to this First Read post by the fine folks at MSNBC.

PORTLAND — Bill Richardson described the conversation he had with Hillary Clinton on his decision to endorse Barack Obama as “heated” in an exclusive with NBC Nightly News today.

Both Richardson and Obama shared the spotlight this afternoon at a press conference and later in a sit down interview with NBC’s Lee Cowan. (Please insert link to NN spot)

Richardson described the conversation that he had with Clinton last night “tough.”

“It was tough to make the call, but I did. It got a little heated. It got a little tense. But it was understood, and I’m proud of my decision.”

Lee Cowan is listed as the author of this post, but it is pretty clear that Lee is not the one who wrote this, let alone put it up using their CMS.

1) An author would have said “Both Richardson and Obama shared the spotlight this afternoon at a press conference and later in a sit down interview with me.” and not used their own name.

2) You can see that the person who actually wrote this passed it off to someone else to post it up. The note: (Please insert link to NN spot) is showing. Presumably they wanted someone to plug in the hmtl including a link to whatever the “NN spot” is and the person who posted it didn’t notice the note.

Pretty freaking funny. Too bad for Lee, other people’s mistakes under his name reflect poorly on him.

John Edwards has fought to get media attention all along in this race. It has really hurt him. This phenomenon is part of the larger problems with the media. Unfortunately, it has also been a political calculation for people like myself. I have factored in how much the media likes a particular candidate into my support for the candidate. They are going to have to run in the general election and if the media can’t stand them, then they start out behind the eight ball.

This is a good bit from Edwards showing how much this head to head match-up between Obama and Clinton has dominated the media narrative.

The CW all along was that Edwards had to win IA to be in this race, since he trailed all along. Once that didn’t happen the media felt like it was reasonable to further close the door on his candidacy. Right or wrong, it happened. Now he could totally upset the race by winning in NV on Saturday, but he had pulled resources out of there. Now due to the polling he seems to have re-invested. I don’t trust these polls as far as I can throw them. There is no trusted modeling on a likely caucus goer. This is all new.

Duuude. Watch this. Go to the website then come back. Brave New Films rocks!

Earlier today I got the Brave New Films email where the full url was exposed: http://foxnewsporn.com/

But then I noticed a switch to using tinyurl. Turns out that the word porn was getting caught in spam filters. Then Digg decided to ban Fox News Porn posts for violating their terms of service (TOS). Of course, the only thing BNF did was cut together Fox News clips. Thus, Fox News really is porn. Muuwaahaahaa.

Digg users are rebelling, as they are known to do. Join me in digging this post to join the insurrection.

Matt Dowd is widely credited as being one of the masterminds behind the election and re-election of President Bush. So when he started publicly expressing his displeasure at some of the key actions taken by the Bush White House, say the Iraq War or pushing for the hate amendment it was a big deal. I was actually there in the room when he first spoke. Here is how the LAT recalls that incident in today’s profile of Dowd.

His disenchantment with the president built over several years. Dowd went public at a Berkeley seminar on the 2006 California governor’s race; Dowd was both a senior advisor to the Republican National Committee, where he landed after Bush took office, and a top strategist for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection effort. It was a question about the president that set Dowd off and, looking back, liberated him.

“Do you lose sleep at night knowing that you gave this country probably the worst administration we’ve ever had?” asked a young man. “I mean, have you thought about maybe trying to save your soul by calling for impeachment?”

Dowd tensed and leaned forward. Rather than defend Bush, he spoke of the oldest of his three sons, an Army language specialist then facing deployment to Iraq. “Now, am I a person who stays up at night thinking about that? Yeah. . . . Do we have hopes and dreams and disappointments? . . . Yes,” Dowd said.

But when things don’t turn out as hoped “it does not mean that you somehow have to walk down the street in a hair shirt with a sign that says, ‘Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me,’ ” he said. “We move on.”

Dowd now sees the confrontation as “a gift [that] gave me the opportunity to start expressing things more and more publicly.”

Here is what is missing. His fellow panel members, all political hacks and many members of the audience tried to shut the questioner down. The did not want Dowd to have to answer such an aggressive question, particularly one that was not on the subject of the conference. But he overrode their objections and gave an emotional response. It was quite a moment really.

The point is that the hacks were covering for the hacks. They are usually quite good at reflecting questions, but they were rather stirred up at this pretty quintessential Berkeley moment. Dowd broke through that and addressed the question. It seems to have quite acutely effected his life over the past 10 months. Very interesting.

I am for one glad to see him speaking out. We need more voices like his. It is just a shame it took him this long.

Uncle Jay (yes that would be Rosen) is out with another new awesome project. This is under the umbrella of NewAssignment.net and it is called Beat Blogging. I’ll let him explain:

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.http://ruckpad.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Why would you follow this site? To see what happens when 13 pro reporters with real beats give that idea a go, interpreting it in their own way by building useful networks into their beats.

Pretty cool no? The reporters and outlets are incredibly varied, from an NBA blogger at ESPN to a columnist on technology in K-12 classrooms at Education Week.

Uncle Jay is a busy man between Off the Bus, teaching and now this. I would love to see this take off and for other reporters to discover the wisdom of their readers.

Gah! MoDo really has a gem of a column today. The basic premise is that men don’t want to date women who are smarter/more ambitions that they are and place more of an importance on appearance. That is certainly well worth exploring. But why oh why does she title it:

Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant?

The flight attendant reference is to a Sexy in the City episode where Miranda pretends to be a flight attendant instead of a lawyer while attending a speed dating event. The implication is that Hillary needs to dumb herself down to make the men like her enough to vote for her.

Needless to say that there is not exactly a direct link between what men want to date and what qualities they look for in voting for a president. Big tits are not exactly up there on the list.

Hillary Clinton has a highly effective rapid response system. It is operating in high gear since her less than stellar debate performance on Tuesday. It’s not as if she stunk up the room, but the press is eager to cover any stumble and have been engaging on this topic. Thus we are seeing a response by the other candidate’s to Clinton’s response. Here is John Edward’s statement:

“All the distractions in the world won’t undo the fact that on Tuesday night millions of Americans saw John Edwards speak honestly and directly, while Senator Clinton once again took multiple positions on multiple issues. We understand that the Clinton campaign isn’t happy about that, but instead of smoke and mirrors, how about some truth-telling? Forty-eight hours after the debate, we have lots of excuses, but we still don’t have a yes or no answer to a yes or no question.

“That’s not the ‘politics of piling on,’ it’s the politics of parsing.

“After seven years of George Bush, the American people deserve better – they deserve the truth.”

What’s missing here? How about any discussion of the issues? There is no mention of any specific policy difference or heck even the original question. Edwards is feeding right into the media’s narrative rather than hoping to point out any actual difference on the issues. This is a recognition that what the media is after has nothing to do with who is right or wrong about things like drivers licenses for undocumented workers. It is the back and forth they are after and that is pretty sad.

Yesterday, like many bloggers I shared my outrage over Glenn Beck’s comments that it was “unfortunate” that people who “hate America” had their homes burning. h/t to Shayera at Calitics for the response of Beck’s show to the uproar created by his comments.

A spokesman for Beck expressed surprise that bloggers are seizing on this quotation as an example of incivility. “To most rational people, unfortunately still means unfortunately,” Chris Balfe, the show’s producer, tells On Deadline through a spokesman.

Dude WTF? That makes no sense. He is obviously still sticking by his statements.

The personal and political are mixing in a swirl of fear and anger today. Yesterday, I was supposed to have a call with some folks down south about work, but they were evacuated due to the raging wildfires in Southern California. Everybody is ok and they still have their homes. Same goes for my friends in the San Diego area. Everybody checking in on folks in the area certainly is reminding me of 9/11, when I was less than a hundred miles north of the city, surrounded by classmates from the city and my family in midtown.

Now for the political. These comments by Glen Beck are enormously distressing.

I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.

Beck has no clue what he is talking about. These are wildfires and they are burning in largely conservative areas, not the normal people right-winger Beck would normally would be claiming hate America. Just an incredibly offensive and stupid thing to say. And to think this man has a show on CNN. Liberal media my ass.

The second political piece of this story is Arnold’s failure to ensure that the state was prepared to battle fires at this level magnitude. djardin in the comments at Calitics reminds us of this LAT article titled “Fire danger acute as ‘03 lessons fade” from May of this year. It detailed how Arnold failed to follow the recommendations by his Blue Ribbon Fire Commission and vetoed 4 out of 5 bills that would have funded their recommendations. This is what he failed to do:

• Engines: The state remains far short of the 150 additional engines recommended to supplement the governor’s Office of Emergency Services fleet of 110. The first of 19 new engines will be delivered by July. Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman said getting more trucks is crucial to avoid a repeat of 2003, when departments had firefighters available but not enough trucks to get them to the front lines. “We had run out of vehicles,” he said.

• Helicopter fleet. The commission found that the state’s aging fire helicopters needed to be replaced. But no new choppers have been purchased. “The fleet itself is excess aircraft built in the ’60s,” said Mike Padilla, chief of aviation with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “They are still doing the job … [but] they’re getting older.”

• Communications: In 2003, firefighters and law enforcement officers used different radio frequencies, so information didn’t always get passed along. In San Diego’s Cedar fire, radio lines broke down because of volume, leaving firefighters vulnerable. These problems remain. “It’s hard to get everyone on a system or off a system,” said Kim Zagaris, fire chief for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “It’s not cheap.”

• Staffing: The commission recommended that all state fire engines sent to major wildfires have at least four firefighters. Instead, the state puts four firefighters on fire engines based on fire threat conditions. State firetrucks in high-risk fire zones have four-person crews, but crews elsewhere that would come in as reinforcements might have only three, Jones said. “It’s much more productive to have four persons on an engine than three” to hold fire lines and carve fire breaks, he said.

Our firefighters are doing a heroic job with what they have. Hopefully we will be able to assess later if the missing man power and equipment cost more lives and homes. At this point, some of this looks like it could have been avoidable.

I hope everyone gets the information they need and heed the advice of the first responders. While my home is open to my friends, with some luck they will not need it.

Hank Shaw of the Modesto Bee Stockton Record stopped by and left a comment on my post about his column. Here it is, since I love a good dialogue between bloggers and journalists.

Yeah, I know you are from Sacramento and Howie is from Los Angeles. An odd conundrum of covering the Blogosphere is that, as a member of the MSM, I almost *never* quote anonymous sources (some of my colleagues do, but I don’t, for the most part) And most of the bloggers who *are* in the Bay Area go by pseudonyms, such as Babaloo. I asked for his real name, but he declined. So I chose not to quote him. Puts me in a bind, because many of the anon bloggers are saying interesting things…

Hank

Something to keep in mind. It reinforces my decision to switch my screenname on Calitics from juls to Julia Rosen.