I think he makes a good point ...

Listen to Bubba from 2004.

Thank you TalkingPointsMemo.com!

Congratulations to TPM!

The first blog I go to any time I'm online is Talking Points Memo. I have blogged about this site before here, and how it is changing the nature of online journalism. Today, TPM and its founder Josh Marshall won a prestigious George Polk Award.
Here is another excellent blogger, Will Bunch of Attytood.com with details:

A landmark day for bloggers -- and the future of journalism

The George Polk Awards are kind of like the Golden Globes of American journalism . Not as well known as those Oscars of the news business, the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Awards are nevertheless probably a close second in terms of prestige, and this year I am especially blown away by the quality of the work they honor. But I want to highlight one Polk Award that shows there are emerging models for using the very tool at the root of the turmoil of the news business -- the Internet -- as a newfangled way to re-invent investigative reporting -- by using new techniques that emphasize collaboration over competition and by working with readers and through collective weight of many news sources to expose government misconduct.
It would have seemed incredible a couple of years ago, but a George Polk Award was given this morning to a blogger.
Not just any blogger, of course. Josh Marshall (top, with his son Sam) of Talking Points Memo may have started back in 2000 as a kind of blogging stereotype, posting late at night from his small D.C. apartment and from the corner Starbucks and -- in just two years -- shining a light on the remarks that cost Sen. Trent Lott his GOP Senate leadership post, but he's turned his operation into much, much more.
Since 2002 Marshall has moved to New York and -- thanks to increasing ad revenue -- made Talking Points Memo into a new kind of journalistic enterprise for the 21st Century, hiring a staff of a half dozen talented young journalists and rewriting the rules with a mix of commentary and original muckraking while highlighting the work of other to focus like a laser on the big political questions.

There is much more to read ... go do it!

Lies R Us!

Over at TPM Muckraker, Paul Kiel says:

Somebody had to do it. And hooray to the Center for Public Integrity and Fund for Independence in Journalism for doing it. The groups counted and documented every Bush administration false statement made in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Every one. It was a bit like counting snowflakes, to be sure, but here's what they came up with:

They documented 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Nope. Stay behind the rope. You're not on the list.

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo and its associated sites are gaining greater recognition every day for their aggressive reporting of the many political scandals in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. The TPM team is "building the prototype of what an Internet-based news-gathering organization might one day look like" according to the Columbia Journalism Review. It is definitely a "must-read" site for me nearly every day. They have not been kind to some of the leaders over at the Justice Department over the past year, but they have been accurate and more than fair in their coverage.

They've done so well that the Justice Department's Office of Public Affairs has taken a stupid, punitive action that demonstrates how much they got under people's skin. They removed TPM from their automatic e-mail press release notification system. Not a big deal really, the folks at TPM can still get the info of the department's Web site, just a little later than other reporters. But the reason the Public Affairs staff gave for the e-mail removal is absurd and ... once again, shows how petty this administration can be. Paul Kiel writes:

"I asked one of our TPM research hounds, Andrew Berger, to call their Office of Public Affairs every day until we got back on their distribution list -- or until we got an explanation. He started his mission last Monday. Finally, today, we got our answer, one that will strike TPMm readers as vintage Bush DoJ. They just don't have room for our email address on the distribution list:

"Mr. Berger, I appreciated your desire to be in tune with DOJ press releases, however, unfortunately I am not able to add you to our distribution list. As you may realize we have a lot of requests to be put on our media lists and we simply are not able to put everyone on the list. We do however have all our press releases on our website and update them the minute they are released so I would suggest looking there. You can also always call us with press inquiries. Thanks again for your interest.
Sincerely,
Jamie Hais, Press Assistant
Office of Public Affairs, Department of Justice"

They just couldn't fit one more little e-mail address into that bulging address database and risk blowing up their computer system. Maybe they should call the Geek Squad.