Tales of Kid Journolist

While I'm still not entirely convinced that the exposure of the Journolist is a game changer, some of what we're learning is quite interesting.

First, there's the important matter -- that there was apparently a direct connection to the Obama campaign. Jim Lindgren at Volokh has the skinny:

One question that has arisen in the last week is how closely JournoList members, not only discussed how to shape the news to advance the fortunes of Barack Obama, but coordinated with the Obama campaign. Jared Bernstein’s position as an unpaid adviser and surrogate shows that there was at least one direct link between JournoList and the Obama campaign.

Bernstein’s serving on the Economic Advisory Panel of the CBO is less worrisome, though it appears to violate Ezra Klein’s first rule for JournoList:

At the beginning, I set two rules for the membership. The first was the easy one: No one who worked for the government in any capacity could join.

It would appear that Bernstein’s presence on the list violated Klein’s first rule, since he met the test of working “for the government in any capacity.”

Rules are for suckers, of course, especially when you have to carry the message to the benighted masses.

The second piece is more amusing, though it shouldn't surprise anyone: even lefties don't have a lot of use for Keith Olbermann. The ever-quotable Spencer Ackerman sums up the mood:

The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman said a brutal parody of Olbermann reflected his true nature. “I hate both Ben Affleck and Saturday Night Live, but this should end all debate about the merits of Olbermann,” he said, linking to the parody.

The good news for Olbermann is that Ackerman didn't advocate throwing him through a plate glass window. Then again, others weren't so sure:

Salon’s Rebecca Traister agreed Olbermann regularly displayed his contempt for women. “Olbermann has a terrible record of going out of his way to talk about young, attractive women he believes to be stupid in grotesquely dismissive and oversexualized terms.”

Traister had written the same thing in her columns for Salon, for instance calling Olbermann out when he “felt free to call [Paris] Hilton a slut on air and speculate about whether anyone had ever ejaculated in her face.”

Blogger Lindsay Beyerstein said maybe the time was now to take down Olbermann. “When we liberals were fighting for political survival after 9/11, it was important to be disciplined and to pick our internal battles very carefully. Now that the Democrats are in charge and progressivism is ascendent, we can afford to demand more from our leaders.

“We can certainly afford to smack down Keith Olbermann when he spouts misogynist garbage,” she said.

Not that anyone other than Ben Affleck really did smack down Olbermann, of course. But that's another post.