Journolist updates

The Journolist leaks continue this week.

Last month, I failed to notice how former listmember Dave Weigel (forced out of his position at the Washington Post) was criticized for accurately using an inflammatory term with origins in Republican party politics dating to the Watergate-era. I'd say "shame on Jonathan Strong," but that's redundant.

I also originally missed former listmember Scott Winship's interesting speculations about the likely leaker. The post brought several new suspects to mind.

List founder Ezra Klein outed former listmember Gautham Nagesh, who used to work for Tucker Carlson's website that is leaking the emails. Former listmember David Dayen notes that Carlson asked to join Journolist shortly before he started publishing the leaks. Carlson was not asked to join. Nagesh says he is not the leaker -- and confirms that the list was wonkish and not a place for birthing conspiracies.

Klein demonstrates that the latest sensationalist headlines are very misleading and the stories reference individual emails often taken completely out of context. Here's a nice overview of the situation, written by a former listmember, who does not think the tentacles from this story are fully extended. If that's true, Matt Welch of Reason explains that Carlson and Strong have some serious work to do ahead:

The real spade-work on the JournoList trove is not just fishing for a single chunk of Drudge-bait, but tying an off-the-record listserv conversation with a coordinated flurry of on-the-record commentary. Locker-room trash-talk can be fun to spy in on (in a train-wreck kind of way), but if there's a real opinion-journalism scandal underneath any of this it will lie in attempts, concscious or unconscious, to foist political message discipline on disparate and unsuspecting audiences. This ain't that.

Media Matters pursues the fairly obvious conspiracy to make Journolist look like a conspiracy.

BTW, full disclosure, I'm not on Cabalist.

I'd probably like to be.


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To the 400: I miss you

Last spring, I wrote a post on Duck of Minerva concerning a controversial leak of private emails from an off-the-record listserv called JournoList. Membership was said to include left-of-center journalists, bloggers, academics, policy wonks from think tanks, etc.

I didn't acknowledge my own membership, but I did use "open source" information about the list to defend it against charges that it served as a conspiratorial echo chamber.

Frankly, it's only been a few days since JournoList was shuttered, and I'm already experiencing significant withdrawal. I feel like I've been cut off from an invaluable community of smart, funny, and interesting people. Since sometime in 2007, the list had replaced blogs as my first place to read reactions to breaking news. List members also frequently recommended books, evaluated films, cheered their favorite sports teams, or wrote other posts that one might expect in a conversation among hundreds of bright and talented people.

There were also many lurkers on Journolist who never (or rarely) posted and the latest targeted leaks (aimed at a member who covers the conservative movement and media), might have originated from a lurker who violated members' trust. However, as other members have pointed out in various blog posts, it could have been any disgruntled member, or a hacker, or someone else who gained access to an account without permission.

Though I didn't save copies, my posts tended to be about international affairs, presidential elections, baseball, or Kansas basketball -- my areas of specialization or greatest interest. I mentioned my much-linked post on John McCain, political celebrity, on Journolist and some list members kindly linked to it. In the end, many non-members also linked it too, so forget trying to get me to identify those who wish to remain unidentified.

In any event, I already miss JournoList because I came to rely upon group members' reactions to news like the US soccer loss to Ghana, the death of Senator Robert Byrd, or the Elena Kagan hearings. It's a lot more work to track down all their blog posts and articles, believe me, as I've been doing some of that today.

If the list is reconstructed, I hope I'm fortunate enough to be included again.


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Read these posts...

Today, on the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "The Latest on U.S. Militarism," concerning the high profile positions attained by many former generals and admirals within the civilian foreign policy bureaucracy.

March 10, I posted "The Hurt Locker, again," which is my interpretation (and review) of the Oscar-winning film.

On March 8, I blogged "Foreign Policy Charade" about the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine and the indirect U.S. support of that policy.

February 27, you can find "Biological Weapons," which is a bit of shameless self-promotion concerning my latest coauthored journal article, "The Illogic of the Biological Weapons Taboo." I wrote the piece for Strategic Studies Quarterly with former student (and biochemist) Phil McCauley. It considers whether the Bush Doctrine is still alive and well and ready to take the U.S. to war over bioweapons.

Finally, on March 12, I posted about "Comic book sensibility" at the Climate Change blog I write for e-IR. You know, "one for all and all for one." The phrase was used in an important climate speech by chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern.


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Climate updates: fall edition

This personal blog has not been updated for a week, but that doesn't mean I have abandoned the blogosphere. These are the most recent entries on my Climate Politics: IR and the Environment blog hosted at e-IR. The last update covered late summer.


Brazil

November 16, 2009
Will a new climate agreement require developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (ghgs)? Will developing states agree to make reductions? In this post, let’s consider the prospects for Brazil agreeing to such reductions.

First however, keep in mind the history. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 199…Read more

Interim Deal?
November 13, 2009
The Copenhagen climate summit is now less than one month away and observers are not optimistic that states will agree to a deal cementing either specific greenhouse gas emission reductions or increased environmental assistance to the developing world so they can meet the standards without threatening growth vital to fighting poverty.

Last month, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lo…Read more

Hidden costs of the status quo
November 1, 2009
In late October, the United States National Academy of Sciences released an interesting on-line “prepublication” edition of a report called Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use. The October 19 New York Times reported the key finding on the costs of air pollution from burning fossil fuels:

Burning fossil fuels costs the Unite…Read more

Copenhagen: Will a deal emerge?
October 24, 2009
This past week, the news related to the ongoing climate negotiations was quite confusing. On Monday the 19th of October, the BBC reported optimistically:

“It’s an uphill battle, but I just feel today it’s more do-able than (I did) yesterday,” Mr Miliband [UK climate secretary] told journalists in a briefing directly after the MEF meeting closed on Mon…Read more

ICE
October 15, 2009
Do you remember when I mentioned “Greenfinger” on this blog a couple of months ago? Greenfinger would be a rich master environmental criminal — perhaps pursuing climate geoengineering without international approval.

In the October Atlantic Monthly, representatives of the ICE Coalition wrote to the editors to offer a legal solution to the potential Green…Read more

Washington’s 2-level-game
October 6, 2009
This past weekend, Carol Browner, Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy proclaimed that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate bill (which passed the House this summer) is not going to become law prior to the upcoming climate negotiations. The NYT :

“Obviously, we’d like to be through the process,” Carol Browner said durin…Read more

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Climate Politics update

I haven't been providing links to the blog I started in August: Climate Politics: IR and the Environment. So, here's a list of my most recent September posts, complete with opening sentences. You can find half a dozen posts there from August as well.

Dirty energy subsidies 
September 26, 2009 |

Last August, the UN Environmental Programme reported that “around $300 billion or 0.7 per cent of global GDP is being spent on energy subsidies annually.” These subsidies are particularly important because most are devoted to fossil fuels. They artificially reduce the price of those fuels, thereby increasing consumption and

The Problem of China: As viewed from the USA 
September 20, 2009 |

For more than a century, the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gases have been emitted by advanced industrial states. Recently, however, China has assumed the top spot in annual emissions. On a per person basis, of course, China still trails the global leaders by a good distance.

Those statistics highlight the related problems of scale (China is really big) and inequality (mu…

Weep for OPEC? 
September 10, 2009 |

Representatives from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are meeting in Vienna this week and the looming threat of Copenhagen is clearly on their agenda. I wrote “threat of Copenhagen” because OPEC states are primarily devoted to selling a commodity that is a significant source of climate change. The U.S. Energy Information Administration…

What’s the baseline? 
September 4, 2009 |

The Copenhagen conference starts in three months and this blog will cover key negotiation issues. Let’s start with the framework for negotiation, OK?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change dates to the June 1992 Earth Summit. The overwhelming majority of nations are parties to this agreement — even the United States, which did not ratify the fol…

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Just ducky

Wednesday, at Duck of Minerva, I blogged "Silent coup?" about a recent Washington Post op-ed by former ambassador Thomas Schweich. In his editorial, Schweich warned about the danger of the militarization of US foreign policy. He warned of a "silent military coup" against the US government.

On January 3, I blogged "Foreign Policy and the Blogosphere" about the new Foreign Policy magazine on-line venture, prominently featuring several academic IR bloggers. Congratulations to Marc Lynch (aka Abu Aardvark), Dan Drezner and Stephen Walt.

December 29, I posted "I've never met a man..." which was about my family's trip to the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. It turns out that the well-known populist thought Americans are basically good-hearted liberals.


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