making the whistle-blower more of a whistle-sucker.

* scott horton's show has "Christopher Deliso of Balkanalysis.com about events in the Balkans and the neocon crime ring. In the second hour, I’ll be talking with Congressman Ron Paul about empire and gold money."

* btw - scott has a new blog and has asked me to groupblog over there - i havent decided how it will work, or what i'll post over there, or when.

* wapo inadvertently makes a good point re the nyt/nsa scandal: "The Post was in contact with senior administration officials before publication last month of its story on the CIA prisons. But officials did not seek to stop publication of the article, only to remove information that could jeopardize national security, said Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's executive editor."
wapo got *slammed* for not naming those two countries, at least they found a satisfactory way to get the story out despite the purported national security interest. how much worse is the nyt's behavior? the nyt should be forced to close down.

* wow - people have really gone nuts over this domestic spying thing. can anyone really be surprised? for some reason people tend to assume that this maladministration actually follow some rules. its astounding to me that people believe that, but there you go... here's a tip for everyone: however bad you think these people are, they're twice as bad. actually, let me describe the limits more precisely: if the egadministration can plausibly attempt to justify any behaviour as being 'in the national interest', then they will be doing it.

i was so unsurprised by this turn of events that i only quoted the bit about the nyt holding their story for a year - and correctly suggested that it will become infamous - but given the reaction to the spying story, this could be much, much worse for the nyt. there's no bad apple or missrunamok. this is the newspaper at its institutional core, and the timing will bring back memories of the nyt spiking the story about blinky being wired during the debates. what other stories are they holding? people will be shocked, shocked if they ever learn. maybe one day they'll tell us that they knew all along that zarqawi was fictional but they were asked not to reveal it.

i love journamalismists - they try to argue that their source-anonymity rules are really important because it creates a channel for whistleblowers to help 'keep the bastards honest' - but when a whistleblower risks him/herself, the nyt ducks for cover. the whistleblower goes to substantial exposure risk, but the paper wont uphold its end of the bargain - making the whistle-blower more of a whistle-sucker.