The Idea That There Are Sexual Images On MTV Is Shocking… Shocking

Brian Stelter at NYT:

MTV executives have a new hit drama on their hands, featuring the sexual and drug-fueled exploits of misfit teenagers. They also have something else — a fear that coming episodes of the show may break the law.

In recent days, executives at the cable channel became concerned that some scenes from the provocative new show “Skins” may violate federal child pornography statutes.

The executives ordered the producers to make changes to tone down some of the most explicit content.

They are particularly concerned about the third episode of the series, which is to be broadcast Jan. 31. In an early version, a naked 17-year-old actor is shown from behind as he runs down a street. The actor, Jesse Carere, plays Chris, a high school student whose erection — assisted by erectile dysfunction pills — is a punch line throughout the episode.

The planned changes indicate that MTV, which has been pushing the envelope for decades, may be concerned that it pushed too far this time.

“Skins” is a calculated risk by MTV which is eager to get into the scripted programming business. The channel, a unit of Viacom, has long tested American standards for sexuality and obscenity on television with shows like “The Real World” and “Jersey Shore.”

Those reality shows have generally involved adults, but for “Skins,” the producers purposefully cast actors ages 15 to 19, most of whom had never acted before.

MTV’s president and other executives declined interview requests on Wednesday. An MTV spokeswoman, Jeannie Kedas, insisted that the future episodes of “Skins” were still works in progress. She would not confirm that MTV executives were fearful of running afoul of child pornography laws.

Jon Bershad at Mediaite:

According to the article, some MTV executive watched a cut of the show and suddenly freaked out because they were afraid that they had broken child pornography laws. They rushed to have the episode in question edited. And then…just for kicks I suppose…they decided to call up The New York Times to have them report on the whole thing. If you believe that, well, you’re probably pretty naive (no offense!). While I’m sure there’s a possibility that MTV edited a scene from the show after standards and practices got a look at it, I have pretty high doubts anyone was legitimately worried about getting hauled off to jail. No, this seems like nothing but a rumor designed to get a new show some press.

But what does that mean? Basically it means that MTV is now marketing their show with the promise of potential child pornography and the media is helping them. Not only did The New York Times cover this “story” (on the front page!), but a bunch of other media outlets picked it up. Morning Joe did a whole segment this morning that began with Joe Scarborough asking “Why should I be afraid of Skins?” You know there were some good high fives all around the MTV offices when that sentence got uttered.

Shows like Skins have always gotten by on their controversy and the promise of scandalous content. A few years ago, the show Gossip Girl used a brilliant ad campaign that quoted negative and outraged reviews from the likes of the Parents Television Council. However, actually going out and saying the phrase “child pornography” is just so damned cynical. MTV is basically betting that they will get more viewers if people think there are actual naked 15 year olds on this show. They may be right but, God, is it a creepy way to run your business.

So, no, Skins is not child pornography. In fact, it’s a neutered version of the original British show (which, by the way, was actually pretty darn good for two seasons) since MTV isn’t able to feature profanity or nudity.* People are going to say MTV should be ashamed and they certainly should. Not for airing an edgy show, but for trying to profit off the demand for child porn. And anyone who reports this nonsense should feel ashamed for believing it.

Adrian Chen at Gawker:

Of course, the main reason MTV’s target audience will continue to tune into this lackluster remake of the British version is because of its purported edginess. (Tuesday’s premier boasted solid numbers.) And herein lies the problem: How do you make a super-edgy teen drama while simultaneously reassuring some suit back at Viacom that he won’t be carted off as a kiddie pornographer?

Here’s our suggestion: gratuitous violence. Have one of the kids mow down a bunch of pedestrians in an SUV or something—just make sure she’s fully-clothed while doing it.

Erin Brown at Newsbusters:

“Skins” is hypocritical programming for MTV, which has been praised for its portrayalof the reality of teen pregnancy with the hit show “16 and pregnant” and its follow up series “Teen Mom.” The platform of casual sex and living life without consequences as appears in “Skins” stands in direct contrast to the harsh realities that actual teen mothers face and as Michael Inbar for the “Today” show put it, “the often painful resultsof youthful hookups.”

To further entice indecent behavior among teens, the MTV website for “Skins” has launched a new section called, “Where it went down.” Readers are encouraged to anonymously post on a mapof the world where “every kind of trouble” occurred. The website whereitwentdown.com actually encourages posters to “Browse and share the places where memories were made – and the scattered pieces of nights you can’t really remember. Post the truth about the biggest parties, heartbreak, friends, sex, and every kind of trouble.”

Despite the nasty content, one media critic still found a way to praise the show. “‘Skins’ feels raw and gritty… Only the show’s target audience will know how true its portrayal of adolescence is, but it should make many parents pay closer attention to what’s going on in their teenagers’ lives” wrote Amy Amatangelo of the Boston Herald.

Despite its success, the media need to accurately report the consequence-free filth that this show and this network are promoting. Truthful reviews such as this onefrom James Poniewozik from Time magazine can go a long way in exposing the muck of this program.

“There’s far more flesh, swearing and toking on Skins than on the edgiest CW soap, but what may be most shocking to an American audience is how insouciantly it defies teen TV’s unwritten mandate of consequences. On U.S. teen dramas, you can titillate the audience with bad behavior so long as, at some point, there’s a pregnancy scare or a cautionary drug overdose…Skins, like the movies Superbad and Dazed and Confused, instead admits that teenagers seek out sex and drugs because they feel good.”

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

Given MTV’s history of publicity stunts, the network spokeswoman’s claims of Skins’s legality seem convincing. Recall Snooki’s globe-squatting kerfuffle: the Jersey Shore employee was supposedly going to be dropped in a ball over Times Square at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. At the last minute, though, sphere-ensconced Snooki was relocated to New Jersey, as MTV never received permission to conduct the event in Times Square. The ordeal engendered weeks of press coverage.

For other instances of MTV publicity stunts, look no further than nearly every annual iteration of the Video Music Awards, a broadcast that inevitably includes an unforeseen act of animosity (cf. Bruno and Eminem) or adoration (cf. Britney and Madonna).

James Poniewozik at Time:

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but the concerns seem to stem from the fact that many of the actors who play teens on the show (as in the original British version) are under 18. So while there’s not live sex on camera—having seen four episodes in advance, I actually found the series’ depictions of drugs more unusual for American TV than its sex scenes—the definition of pornography is trickier when underage actors are involved.

As Stelter notes, a picture of a naked minor can itself be ruled child porn if it’s sufficiently sexualized. But the one scene the piece describes executives specifically being concerned about—a male character shown running down the street naked—is not, as I recall, a sex-charged scene. (It’s played, like a lot of scenes in Skins, for a combination of drama and slapstick.)

It raises scads of definitional questions: Does the fact that the actor is shown (but not shown naked) in other sexual scenes therefore make this scene more sexualized? Does the presence of other sex scenes involving other characters elsewhere in the episodes make the scene more sexual? Would the scene constitute pornography if it were, say, an underage actor running naked down a street in a war movie? Are depictions of teen characters in sexual situations inherently pornographic, or does the use of teen actors drive it over the line? What’s dirtier: two adult actors playing teens having sex, or a teenage actor shown naked in a scene that doesn’t involve sex?

Again, not a lawyer. (And I haven’t seen every episode shot, so it’s possible there is other, unmentioned material they’re nervous about.) But I have to wonder, if MTV’s executives are suddenly concerned about the legal liability, how could it not have occurred to them earlier in the process—especially since the use of teen actors has been one of the show’s best-publicized aspects, and since the show was very directly adapted from a British show that already exists for comparison?

Goldbook Or Facesachs?

Anupreeta Das, Robert Frank and Liz Rappaport and Wall Street Journal:

It was supposed to be Wall Street’s hottest tech deal in years: the private offering of as much as $1.5 billion in shares of Facebook Inc. And it was a coup for the company’s adviser, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most envied firm on the Street.

Goldman bankers burned up the phone lines in the first week of January, pushing many of their best American clients to invest in the deal. And then, on Sunday and Monday, those same advisers were on the phone with those same clients with some bad news. They wouldn’t be getting any Facebook shares after all.

Now, Goldman has a very different mission to execute: soothing a legion of irate investors.

Susanne Craig at NYT:

Goldman Sachs experienced a slowdown in many of its divisions in the fourth quarter, and earnings dropped 53 percent, to $2.39 billion, or $3.79 a share.

While the per-share profit in the quarter was modestly higher than the $3.76 a share analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were projecting, it was a stark reminder of how challenging the markets had been for firms like Goldman during the last year.

David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, told analysts in a conference call on Wednesday that the revenue slowdown came amid client uncertainty about the economy and regulatory reform. With client activity down, fees dropped, too.

Revenue in its powerful fixed income, currency and commodities unit, known as F.I.C.C., fell 48 percent, to $1.64 billion, from the period a year earlier. Investment revenue, which includes equity and debt underwriting, fell 10 percent, to $1.51 billion.

Over all, net revenue in the quarter was $8.6 billion, off 10 percent from the period a year earlier. For the year, revenue minus interest expenses fell 13 percent, to $39 billion, compared with 2009. Full-year earnings were $8.35 billion, 38 percent lower than 2009.

“Market and economic conditions for much of 2010 were difficult, but the firm’s performance benefited from the strength of our global client franchise and the focus and commitment of our people,” Lloyd C. Blankfein, chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “Looking ahead, we are seeing signs of growth and more economic activity, and we are well-positioned to help our clients expand their businesses, manage their risks and invest in the future.”

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

As the bank was reminded earlier this week, though, money can’t buy Friends: Goldman’s abrupt inability to sell shares of Facebook to select American investors has not sat well with select American investors, or with Facebook. “They pushed me hard to get here and invest, and then they pull the rug out from under me,” one such spurned Goldman client told The Wall Street Journal. “The whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth.” To describe the highly public, fruitless Facebook fiasco, one might even invoke a phrase from Goldman’s recent past: “shitty deal.”

Earlier this month, Goldman solicited certain investors with poorly written offers to purchase Facebook stock. However, given the round-the-clock, breathless coverage of the firm’s $450 million investment in Facebook, Goldman rescinded the offer to U.S. clients in deference to “rules limiting [the] marketing of private securities.” according to Bloomberg.com. “Goldman Sachs concluded that the level of media attention might not be consistent with the proper completion of a US private placement under US law,” the bank said in a statement on Monday. “We regret the consequences of this decision, but Goldman Sachs believes this is the most prudent path to take.”

Facebook executives were reportedly “miffed” about the public scrutiny surrounding the investment opportunity, according to the Journal. The offering “turned out to be far more public than they expected.” Should have checked the privacy settings!

John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

What does this mean? Over at Dealbook, Andrew Ross Sorkin fills in some details: “Federal and state regulations prohibit what is known as ‘general solicitation and advertising’ in private offerings. Firms like Goldman seeking to raise money cannot take action that resembles public promotion of the offering, like buying ads or communicating with news outlets.”

So Goldman couldn’t go ahead with the Facebook offering because it would be getting too many media inquiries? Come on. Only last week, Groupon, the group-buying Web site, raised $950 million in a private placement arranged by Allen & Co., the boutique investment bank. Extensive media coverage of that deal didn’t prevent some of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms from plonking down almost a billion dollars, which Groupon is planning on using to fund its expansion prior to an I.P.O.

Goldman could easily have arranged a similar money-raising exercise for Facebook. However, it probably wouldn’t have been able to do such a deal at a valuation of fifty billion dollars—the price it has purportedly put on Mark Zuckerberg’s business. Despite Facebook’s rapid growth, many venture-capital outfits would have been reluctant to buy its equity at a multiple of thirty or forty times revenues. (Estimates of Facebook’s revenues range from one to two billion.) Rather than tapping the VCs at a lower valuation, Goldman decided to set up a special-purpose vehicle (i.e., a shell company) through which hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of wealthy individuals (American and foreign) would be offered the privilege of purchasing Facebook stock prior to an I.P.O.

With all due respect to Goldman and its high-priced attorneys, it wasn’t a hostile media that upended this plan. It was the fact that it appeared to many people (not just reporters) to be a blatant effort to circumvent the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which decrees that any company with more than five hundred shareholders is legally obliged to issue public financial statements, something that Facebook is keen to avoid, at least for now. Under Goldman’s scheme, all the investors in its special-purpose vehicle would be counted as a single “beneficial” shareholder, thereby excluding Facebook from this disclosure provision. (An illuminating discussion of the legal niceties can be found at Dealbook.)

Having been a keen observer of Goldman for some twenty-five years (sometimes as a critic but often as an admirer of its meritocratic culture and the quality of the people it employs), little that the firm does surprises me. But this entire imbroglio has left me puzzled and raised more questions in my mind about Goldman’s senior management.

It is surely fair to assume that the bright spark in Goldman’s investment-banking division who came up with the original Facebook proposal hadn’t seen the report of the Business Standards Committee. Let’s further stipulate that when somebody more senior asked him (her) if the deal was legit, he (she) said, a) Goldman’s top lawyers had signed off on it, and b) it would give Goldman a lock on Facebook’s I.P.O., which many bankers expect to be the biggest (and most lucrative) yet seen in the United States.

Felix Salmon:

In other words, Facebook has a speculative shareholder for the first time, now that it’s made its decision to get into bed with Goldman. And Goldman will think nothing of buying puts or selling calls on Facebook shares — or even dumping its shares outright, if it’s allowed to do so — if that’s what it needs to do to protect its $450 million investment.

As the same time, however, one of the main unwritten rules of IPOs of young companies is that they always need to be priced at a level above their last funding round. If Facebook can’t IPO at a valuation significantly north of $50 billion, then it probably won’t come to market at all. (That probably explains why bidders on SecondMarket are happy to buy at a $70 billion valuation: they’re betting that when Facebook goes public, it’ll be worth more than that.)

A lot of stuff can happen to Facebook between now and a 2012 IPO. And if Goldman is shorting Facebook rather than massaging its valuation and orchestrating an IPO which values the company at $70 billion or more, then maybe Facebook won’t go public at all next year. Maybe, indeed, Facebook will learn from this whole episode that dealing with investment banks is an unpleasant and expensive exercise, and will try to avoid doing so in future as much as it possibly can.

John Hudson at The Atlantic with a round-up.

John C. Abell at Wired

Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider:

The Facebook deal itself was already going to be controversial, because at first blush it came off like Goldman finding a way to skirt securities regulations (though later it was made clear that regardless of whether it did a real IPO, Facebook would report financials).

As for the current mess, it’s still a little unclear how it happened.

Parker Spitzer: The Break-Up Of The Band

Sam Schechner at Wall Street Journal:

CNN is considering replacing Kathleen Parker, co-host of its new evening program “Parker Spitzer,” according to people familiar with the matter, as the network struggles to reverse a steep slide in its evening audience.

The conservative columnist could be replaced by a new co-host to serve alongside former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, as executives mull a shake-up of the show, the people said, adding that no decision has been made. “Parker Spitzer” hasn’t been able to significantly build its audience since its debut just over three months ago.

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

Middling cable network CNN may dispose of one half of the Parker Spitzer team. Guess which half? “CNN is considering replacing Kathleen Parker,” according to today’s Wall Street Journal. Rumors of a Parker departure have been swirling since as early as December 1, when the New York Post reported that the conservative columnist simply did not care for Eliot Spitzer. At the time, we suggested some possible Parker replacements, including Christine O’Donnell, George W. Bush, and Julian Assange. As those options are under police investigation, presumably unwilling, and under police investigation, respectively, other speculators are now recommending a new roster of potential backups. For example, Gawker proposed that “a piece of string” fill in for Parker. We like it … but think big: what about several pieces of string fashioned together to create a doll?

Flashy replacements aside, a CNN spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the rumors, telling the Journal that “the show continues to improve.” Presenting a similar sentiment last week, Phil Kent, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting, which owns CNN, characterized Parker Spitzer as “a work in progress.”

Mark Joyella at Mediaite:

CNN’s primetime programs performed poorly in 2010, which marked the network’s worst ratings performance in fourteen years.

Max Read at Gawker:

But who could bring the same ability to sit there and not talk? Ashley Dupre? Piers Morgan? Ted Williams? A piece of string?

Glynnis MacNicol at Business Insider:

The problem of course isn’t all Parker.  While her mother hen-like clucking at Spitzer – likely conceived to make viewers feel safer with the disgraced ex-governor — is interminably annoying it is far from the only problem

The show, initially taped and edited ahead of time, often feels awkward and the terrible graphics that float behind the anchor’s heads throughout are irritating and distracting.

But the real problem continues to be that Spitzer never seems to be allowed to be Spitzer: the unpredictably, fiery person New Yorkers heard so much about when he was governor. Airing the show live, and capitalizing on the unpredictability that would come along with that would be the easiest way to grab some attention.

Meantime, who to replace Parker with.   The NYPost hears it may be E.D. Hill a former Fox News anchor and co-host of “Fox and Friends” who got booted for her “terrorist fist jab” remark.

But I think CNN needs to go big here in order to reconvince people to tune.  Someone like Michelle Malkin might work — she has a wide audience, could probably hold her own with Spitzer, but is not so extreme in her views (a la Ann Coulter) as to turn off mainstream viewers.

But perhaps she’s not mainstream enough to solve the problem.  Before Parker Spitzer first went on air CNN did the regular audience testing and discovered Spitzer wasn’t as nationally recognized as they had assumed.

Goodbye, Robert Gibbs, Though I Never Knew You At All…

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

This morning, The New York Timesrevealed the impending departure of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “Robert, on the podium, has been extraordinary,” the president told the Times. “Off the podium, he has been one of my closet advisers. He is going to continue to have my ear for as long as I’m in this job.” Gibbs, whose saucy, churlish manner has been resented on both sides of the aisle, will likely leave in February, possibly for purposes of opening a consulting firm.

Michael Scherer at Swampland at Time:

Obama called the New York Times Wednesday morning to share his appreciation for Gibbs service. Said Obama, “He’s had a six-year stretch now where basically he’s been going 24/7 with relatively modest pay. I think it’s natural for someone like Robert to want to step back for a second to reflect, retool and that, as a consequence, brings about both challenges and opportunities for the White House.”

Moe Lane at Redstate:

…in order to pursue an exciting career as left center on Hollywood Squares – actually, is that program even still on?  No, just kidding: outgoing White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is going to have some nebulous job defending whatever dumb idea the President comes up with that day, just like before – only now Gibbs will be doing it in places where people can actually interrupt him when he says something particularly egregious.  In other words, he’s still going to be a dolt, but one who won’t get the same deference that Gibbs is used to getting, thanks to his (soon-to-be-former) position of trust and authority.  Something to look forward to*: in the meantime, here’s all the send-off the fellow needs.

A replacement has yet to be announced: but the front runner is probably Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton, who likes to mock crippled war veterans and former POWs.  So, really, an appeal to the Democratic activist base there.

Ross Kaminsky at American Spectator:

Personally, I can’t recall a press secretary with a fraction of Gibbs’s smugness or superciliousness, or his tendency to talk down to reporters and the American people.

Don’t let the door hit you in the *** on the way out, Robert…

David Weigel:

Robert Gibbs is leaving the White House to become an outside political operative. As he prepares to do that, a free tip: Don’t be so dismissive of the opposition. The Gibbs moment I remember the most was his response to Rick Santelli’s CNBC rant about mortgage bailouts.

[…]

In the rearview mirror, the Democratic/White House/liberal activist decision to ridicule the conservative backlash to Obama, and to elevate its “craziest” members, looks like an historic blunder. Granted, the ridicule might have worked if the economy picked up faster and Republicans were left with a bunch pf bad faith and bad predictions. But this early response to the Tea Party, which started with facts and ended in a fairly silly diss (“Coffee. Decaf.”), demonstrates how Obama and his allies got it wrong at the start.

Emptywheel at Firedoglake:

Back when Gibbs was attacking the Professional Left, he made a distinction between the Progressives outside of DC and those inside DC squawking on the cable programs.

But if Gibbs is going to stay in DC, hanging out on Twitter, and appearing on the speaking circuit, doesn’t that make him a card-carrying member of the Professional Left?

Except the bit about him being so conservative, of course.

It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s A Tweet From Cory Booker!

Cory Booker’s twitter feed

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

Newark mayor Cory Booker is now taking requests from snowed-in constituents. Since the East Coast blizzard hit on Sunday, residents of Newark have been tweeting appeals for Booker to dispatch snowplows and rescue vehicles to specific streets and neighborhoods. “I need street names and patience,” he told one cold and concerned tweeter. We simply cannot wait for the graphic-novelization (and subsequent Zack Snyder movie!) of Booker’s post-blizzard Twitter feed. (@CoryBooker, can you make this happen?) Let’s review his 10 most heroic moments thus far.

10. “will get someone to your mom’s street, tell her to stay put RT @sexylp40 my mom stuck on 9th ave and 12th that whole block wasn’t plowed”

9. “Can u DM me his phone #?RT @NewNewark: @corybooker rec this text Tell mayor, Mr Lou Jones 224 Richileu ter. He’s disabled needs help.”

8. “I seriously had that fantasy today RT @papistorz: wouldn’t it b easier 2 get a flame thrower n melt the snow?”

7. “God Bless the 5 guys who just stopped to help me dig a van out. I am so grateful for all of Newark’s heroes today.”

6. “I’m coming on the scene now RT @Cutiepie27: come on orange st. and help this truck get out the snow he been stuck for like 30 minutes now”

5. “Sending team immediately back there 2 ensure hospital is clear RT @Babihead: still has yet to clean my street & I live across from hospital!”

4. “I just doug out ur car. All the best RT @MsXmasBaby: Is there NE city volunteers 2 dig some1 out? I’m going 2 have medical procedure done”

3. “Just doug a car out on Springfield Ave and broke the cardinal rule: ‘Lift with your Knees!!’ I think I left part of my back back there”

2. “Just freed a med transport van here at Cottage Place in Central Ward. Private contractor needs 2 be arrested 4 leaving these folks stranded”

1. “Thanks 4 asking, back killing me: Breakfast: Advil and diet coke RT @itsmywayRob Hows ur back from lifting car last night? I hope u’re OK”

Jen Doll at The Village Voice:

A hero has emerged from all the snowflake rubble and ice, and that hero is Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Yesterday Myles (who’s out shoveling as we speak!) mentioned that Booker had been delivering diapers to babies, patroling the streets with his trusty shovel, and even helping kids understand the strength-in-numbers beauty of a snowflake, all the while Tweeting his aid to those who need it

Sam Gustin at Wired:

But Booker’s Twitter clinic wasn’t the only innovative use of social and web-based media during the Snowmageddon of December 2010.

By Tuesday morning, tech-savvy citizens were using Ushahidi, a crowdsourced mapping tool, to collect reports of various problems around New York.

Snowmageddon Clean-Up: New York had more than 100 reports by midday Tuesday, detailing such issues as: “Multiple elders on this block as well as a disabled young adult. Should an emergency arise, the City will have a lawsuit on their hands.” And: “Entire apartment complex snowed in. We cant get out. running out of food…” (That one’s from Highlands, New Jersey, but you get the, uh, drift.)

David Freedlander at The New York Observer:

At Mayor Bloomberg’s Bronx news conference today, The Politicker asked Hizzoner if he had been peering over the river to check out his friend Cory Booker’s efforts to deal with the snow clean-up. Bloomberg after all has been swamped by criticism for suggesting that New Yorkers take advantage of being unable to get out of their homes the Snow Day by checking out Broadway shows.

Booker, on the other hand, earned the nickname “Mayor Plow” for delivering diapers to a housebound mother, digging out snowbound seniors, and for responding to residents’ pleas for snowplows personally via Twitter.

In response to our question, the mayor replied, “I think Cory Booker is a great mayor. And what’s appropriate for Newark and for his people, I am certainly going to take a look and see what he is doing. I am going to call him this afternoon and say, ‘Hey, you know, what are you doing?'”

When pressed by another reporter if Booker was being lauded for presenting an image of working hard to help his constituents deal with the blizzard, Bloomberg said, “I’d like to think that we have that image as well. I can’t work much harder.”

Now Booker has weighed in (via Twitter, of course) writing, “People far 2 rough on @mikebloomberg – still fighting 2 clear snow in NWK & we are 1/29th size of NYC.”

Doug Mataconis:

Nonetheless, Booker’s hands-on approach to digging his city out of the snow has garnered international attention. It’s not a gimmick either. Since becoming Mayor, Booker has been active in turning Newark around after decades of being governed by mostly corrupt Mayors, and he’s allied himself with Governor Christie on issues like education reform even though the two of them come from different political parties. And on that note, there has already been talk among New Jersey Democrats of nominating Booker for Governor in 2013, although nobody seems to know if he’s actually interested in running for that office. If he does run, though, Booker may find that just as snowstorms have been the downfall of politicians like New York Mayor John Lindsey,Chicago Mayor Michael Blandic and D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, Cory Booker could be proof that actively responding to constituents and helping them through a crisis works to a politicians benefits.

Credit for The Simpsons reference must go to Jake Tapper. But everyone would have thought if it eventually.

Status: Time’s Man Of The Year

Lev Grossman in Time:

Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, he started a Web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.” This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day. (See a Zuckerberg family photo album.)

What just happened? In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.

Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. It’s a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.

Mark Joyella at Mediaite:

The announcement was made live this morning on NBC’s TODAY by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel.

When it came right down to it, as Stengel told Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, it was Zuckerberg’s social networking site Facebook (perhaps you’ve heard of it?) that was the deciding factor:

“It’s something that is transforming the way we live our lives every day. It’s social engineering, changing the way we relate to each other.”

Zuckerberg’s also the subject of an Oscar-buzzy film, The Social Network, which portrays the Facebook mogul as a geekily shy CEO. As Stengel put it:

“He’s very affable, he’s in the moment, he’s quick-witted,” Stengel said, but “he has this thing when he gets on camera” and becomes suddenly shy.

Also-rans in the Person of the Year competition were WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, those Chilean miners, and members of the Tea Party.

Sam Biddle at Gizmodo:

Congrats, Zuckerberg! You’ve officially made the list—up there on TIME’s cover issue hall of fame alongside Churchill, some popes, and Hitler. But unlike the awards of their pre-internet era, the selection couldn’t mean less today. POTY, you’re obsolete.Let’s not mistake the irrelevance of TIME’s pick for the irrelevance of Facebook, or even Zuckerberg, in the history of technology. They’ve both changed almost all of our lives, even if only in the most superficial of ways. Some of us use Facebook to talk with wonderful people whose friendship might have otherwise shriveled up and died had it not been for a way to trade photos and messages. Some of us use it as a way of remembering what we did last night. Some of us just use it as another way of being vain (Ugh, do my cheekbones look good in this new profile picture? Is my music section obscure enough?). But putting its merits aside, anything as ubiquitous as Facebook is important qua its ubiquity—as is Zuckerberg. But Zuckerberg’s importance is something for historians to pick over sometime in the near future. The accomplishment that TIME beams over—that Zuckerberg “wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S.”—has taken seven years. It’s an incredible feat, but it isn’t 2010’s feat. So why shine a glossy mag spotlight on him for this one, particular year? I want to ask you—what did Mark Zuckerberg do this year that he hadn’t done before?

Oversee some marginal redesigns?

Get caught in privacy imbroglios?

Find himself portrayed pretty well by Jesse Eisenberg?

How was this Zuckerberg’s year? It wasn’t. For a roundup of entities that actually made 2010 the strange contortion of good and awful it was, you can look, ironically, at TIME’s “Runners Up” list: The Tea Party. Hamid Karzai. Julian Assange. The Chilean Miners.

Well, maybe not so much the Chilean Miners.

But to think that Assange—a man whose actions in less than one year have shocked governments around the world, sent the US State Department scrambling with its face beet-red, put INTERPOL on a controversial manhunt, and triggered internationally coordinated hacker retribution—was overlooked, is asinine. Assange’s determination to make information available at any cost is unprecedented in the history of information—and 2010 was the year his cause ignited, whether you consider him villainous or virtuous.

But we don’t need TIME to tell us any of that. Hell, you don’t need me to tell you any of that. Like the cables he leaked, Assange’s story was everywhere, spread online through a diversity of mediums, un-suppressible and undeniable despite the attempts of world governments.

You blogged about it. You GChatted about it. You texted about it. You commented about it here. And, we now know, you tweeted the hell out of it.

Statistical troves like Twitter’s 2010 Year In Review show (and validate) more than TIME can ever hope to in 2010. We don’t need a magazine to tell us what we care about. We know what we care about—because we’ve make it important, not an editorial board.

On Twitter’s list of most-mentioned people, where is Zuckeberg? Nowhere. Instead, we have Tween Internet Baron Justin Bieber (OMGZ!!), Lady Gaga, Nobel Prize-winner Zilda Arns, and, of course, Julian Assange. But no Zuck. Granted, TIME’s Person of the Year isn’t a popularity contest, but if the man had made such an earthquaking difference in the past 365 days, wouldn’t people be talking about him? Or talking about him at least enough to bump top ten Twitter trender Joannie Rochette—a Canadian figure skater?

Ed Morrissey:

Honestly, though, what other real and significant impact has Facebook had?  It has spawned a Hollywood movie, which is probably why Time bothered to notice it after more than six years.  It’s a popular meeting space, and it allows people to reconnect to old friends, as well as waste vast amounts of time with imaginary farms and wannabe virtual Mafia dons.   Facebook is mostly a time suck.  At least Twitter had an impact last year in the attempt by the Iranian people to rebel against the dictatorship in Tehran.

We deal in politics, and so it’s possible that our perspective on the most significant trend or person this year is somewhat skewed.  However, it seems pretty clear that while Facebook allowed a lot of people to play, the Tea Party dismantled Barack Obama’s agenda and took both political parties by surprise.  Even Julian Assange would have been a better choice; while his impact was certainly malicious, he changed the way the world does diplomacy, at least temporarily, and opened a new front in radical transparency.  I have nothing against Zuckerberg, but this is a silly, insubstantial choice.

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair

Owen Thomas at Social Beat:

For the Person of the Year is an observation, not a celebration. As a young editor a decade ago, I worked at Time magazine and helped on Jeff Bezos’s 1999 Person of the Year profile. Within the Time-Life Building’s corridors, we always discussed the fact that Time’s founder, Henry Luce, defined the annual feature as noting the person who “for better or for worse” had done the most to change the news, even if that message didn’t always resonate in the wider world. Time’s current managing editor, Richard Stengel, dutifully notes that Person of the Year “is not and has never been an honor” and adds that Zuckerberg’s creation is “both indispensable and a little scary.”Zuckerberg himself seems to lack that perspective. “This is a real honor,” he wrote on his Facebook page. The adulatory comments posted on his Facebook wall seem to mirror that naïveté.

Before anyone starts popping champagne corks in Palo Alto, consider the company Zuckerberg has joined: Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Richard Nixon. Okay, and Gandhi, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But still.

Zuckerberg’s not the youngest Person of the Year — that was Charles Lindbergh, the aviator — but he has a long career ahead of him. With more than 500 million users on Facebook, he’s the sovereign of a new nation in cyberspace. Facebook’s corporate structure is designed to keep him in control for years to come. But do we really know how he’ll wield his power? And will it be for better or for worse?

Tim Stevens at Engadget

“Red, Red Wine… Stay Close To Me…”

John Cloud at Time:

One of the most contentious issues in the vast literature about alcohol consumption has been the consistent finding that those who don’t drink tend to die sooner than those who do. The standard Alcoholics Anonymous explanation for this finding is that many of those who show up as abstainers in such research are actually former hard-core drunks who had already incurred health problems associated with drinking.

But a new paper in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research suggests that — for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — abstaining from alcohol does tend to increase one’s risk of dying, even when you exclude former problem drinkers. The most shocking part? Abstainers’ mortality rates are higher than those of heavy drinkers.

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don’t have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

Ben Yakas at Gothamist:

The study done by a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas, and released in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, followed 1,824 participants over 20 years, and found that mortality rates were highest for those who had never been drinkers, second-highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers (which is defined as one-to-three drinks per day). The study used slightly more men, 63 percent; over 69 percent of the never-drinkers died during the 20 years, 60 percent of the heavy drinkers died, and only 41 percent of the moderate drinkers died.

Time magazine points out that the study (which you need a subscription to read) does not do a good job explaining their results, though they try to make sense of this data. Even though heavy drinking is associated with higher risk for cirrhosis and several types of cancer, they note that “alcohol lubricates so many social interactions, and social interactions are vital for maintaining mental and physical health.” It was crazy when we discovered that beer gives us stronger bones, but this is next-level stuff. At least now we know that wine in grocery stores really will solve all our problems.

James Joyner:

I’ve learned over the years to be skeptical of media reports of medical studies.  But we’ve certainly seen a lot of other reports along these lines in recent years.   And this looks to be a legitimate study:  a large sample size, control for a large number of variables, and long time frame.

Alex Balk at The Awl:

It’s not a 100% endorsement of the advanced drinker’s life: middling drinkers (defined here as those who take 1-3 a day) live longer than the professionals. Still, there’s plenty of good to take away from this, unless you happen to be a non-drinker. Although you’re probably happy to die early given your joyless, alcohol-free existence.

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

If the news comes as a surprise to the scientific community—Time calls the statistics “remarkable”—it comes as an even bigger shock to the heavy-drinking demographic, historically a lackadaisical and stuporous group. For reactions to this news, we interviewed four subjects who all characterize themselves as “heavy drinkers” according to the standards set forth by the Center for Disease Control.

One interviewee, Marlin*, notes that the side effects he’s experienced as a result of heavy drinking—“anxiety shakes, blurred vision, weak bowel movements,” he says—are not those that’d he typically associate with longevity. Richard, like Marlin, thought that heavy drinking has contributed to his poor health. “It seems like the more I drink heavily regularly, the worse and more often the hangovers are getting,” he said. Meghan, also a heavy drinker, hasn’t perceived any casual relationship between her increased imbibition and frequent illness. However, Pascal, who counts Kingsley Amis’s Everyday Drinking among his favorite books, was not surprised by the results of the study. In fact, he thinks the stigma against liberal attitudes toward alcohol consumption is the product of media bias. “In a cultural climate where obesity is one of our primary killers, I think we need to stop stressing so much about alcohol and stress more about food,” he said. “People who drink heavily, at least in my experience, don’t seem to eat as much or as badly. This is probably because they have another vice.” Of course, the study also concluded that moderate drinkers have the lowest mortality rates of all three groups. None of the four interviewees said that they would change their drinking habits because an academic paper suggested doing so would make them healthier. “No one is under the impression that heavy drinking is great for you long term,” said Richard. Well, not “great,” but apparently still better than sobriety. Here’s to your health!

Max Read at Gawker:

But why is that the case? One possibility is that heavy drinkers get more of the social benefits of alcohol use than nondrinkers—i.e., the gnarly parties that are vital to your mental and physical health. (And your sexual health, am I right? Parties! Who’s with me?) Abstainers, as Time‘s John Cloud wrote last year, are at a higher risk of depression than drinkers, which makes sense, because I’ve been the only sober person at a party, and let me tell you, it is depressing.

Now, obviously, alcohol can ruin your relationships, and your career, and destroy your liver, and make you barf on the subway and say rude things to policemen. But it’s still better for your health than confronting the world, and social situations, sober.

The Takeaway: If you’re not drunk right now, you are probably going to die tomorrow.

Godwin’s Law: Now With Seals

The wikipedia page with the FBI seal (if it is still there)

John Schwartz at NYT:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia.

The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the F.B.I. seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: “Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter.”

The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the F.B.I.’s letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.

Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. “While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version” that the F.B.I. had provided.

Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, “we are prepared to argue our view in court.” He signed off, “with all appropriate respect.”

Samuel Axon at Mashable:

The New York Times posted PDF documents of the FBI’s takedown request [PDF] and Wikipedia General Counsel Mike Godwin’s bold and catty reply [PDF].The FBI said the Wikimedia Foundation is breaking the law by showing the bureau’s seal in the FBI entry on its website, and that the seal is primarily intended as a means of identification for FBI representatives. Godwin countered by accusing the FBI’s Deputy General Counsel David C. Larson of selectively omitting words from the supposedly applicable law.

Specifically, he said that the letter of the law applies only to things similar to badges, and the spirit of the law is simply to prevent people from posing as government authorities — something Wikipedia () is clearly not doing. He also implied that the FBI is trying to revise the law because of its hawkish concern that people will rip the image from the site and use it for nefarious purposes.

He assured Larson that the Wikimedia Foundation is prepared to go to court to defend its use of the seal if that’s what it takes.

Godwin’s letter is humorous for its directness, but it’s also funny for being passive-aggressive. For example, he says:

“Entertainingly, in support for your argument, you included a version of 701 in which you removed the very phrases that subject the statute to ejusdem generis analysis. While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us.”

Godwin is already famous as the creator of Godwin’s Law, which states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” so this is definitely in-character for him.

Steven Taylor:

In looking at the law, I can see a reading going to either side.  However, it does seem to be more oriented towards either stopping counterfeit badges and/or people making money by making duplicates.  It does not appear to be oriented toward stopping an informational outlet from publishing such information.

At a minimum, I have to agree with the following:

Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the dust-up both “silly” and “troubling”; Wikipedia has a First Amendment right to display the seal, she said.

“Really,” she added, “I have to believe the F.B.I. has better things to do than this.”

Indeed.

Nicholas Deleon at Crunch Gear:

Wikipedia’s counsel recognizes that there are restrictions in place regarding the display of the seal, but that “the enactment of [these laws] was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognisable assertion of authority with intent to deceive.”

And if you think Wikipedia is trying to deceive to deceive the public with the presence of a seal in an encyclopedic article, I don’t know what to tell you.

The one thing that I may see some wiggle room: the high resolution of the seal. You can get the seal in sizes of up to 2000px, so maybe Wikipedia can tell the Feds, “Look, we’re keep the seal, but we’ll kick the resolution down to, say, 500px. Deal?”

Hopefully cooler heads prevail here.

Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing:

The part that’s hard to understand is why the FBI would seek to abuse the law in such petulant fashion, knowing that it will be subject to public ridicule for its actions.

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair

Jim Newell at Gawker:

The FBI is definitely going to raid their offices, like, tonight.

Today We Are All Anonymous Numbskulls

Mark Helperin at Time:

Sarah Palin’s recent Web video making a pitch to conservative women may have again shifted the political spotlight to the former governor of Alaska, but more than a half-dozen other GOP hopefuls are toying seriously this summer with a presidential run.

Unlike four years ago, when presidential hopefuls from both parties were already halfway out of the gate, with conspicuous trips to New Hampshire and Iowa, competitive staffing and heavy courting of donors and party chiefs, Republicans are mostly staying true to their public pledges to focus on the midterms. Given the unusually late start, therefore, Palin isn’t falling meaningfully behind the organizational efforts of her potential rivals. And after Election Day, when the male candidates begin to seriously consider their options and announce their intentions, they will once again be reminded of Palin’s capacity to dominate the stage with her Internet communiqués, book-promotional efforts and TV appearances. (See photos of Sarah Palin’s life since the 2008 election.)

Some of the other would-be candidates and their senior advisers have known Palin over the years, primarily from her days as governor, but most have never met her or had a substantive talk with her. That is a strange situation, to say the least; it forces them to evaluate her without any direct insight into her strengths and weaknesses. But from afar, they increasingly believe she will either become a candidate for President or play a major role in the nominating process. (See photos of the fashion looks of Sarah Palin.)

Still, few express much regard for Palin’s ultimate chances. An adviser to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and, by traditional standards, the putative 2012 front runner, says of Palin, “She’s not a serious human being.” Another Romney intimate warns, “If she’s standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble.”

One of the most experienced Republican national political operatives in the country suggests that while Palin might be envied and sleek, she lacks the endurance required for a protracted nomination fight. “She’s like a cheetah. She can run really fast but not really long.” In the end, according to this school of thought about Palin, she is too polarizing to be seen as likely to beat Barack Obama, and Republicans will be too hungry in 2012 to risk nominating someone who could cost the party the White House — maybe even losing in a landslide.

Andy Barr at Politico:

In possibly the first inter-staff dust-up of the 2012 presidential race, an aide of Sarah Palin is hitting back at Mitt Romney’s camp for saying the former Alaska governor is “not a serious human being.”

A “Romney intimate” was quoted by “Time” magazine’s Mark Halperin in a Thursday column as saying that Palin could not withstand the rigors of a presidential campaign.

“If she’s standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble,” the Romney intimate said.

An additional Romney adviser was quoted as saying the former Massachusetts governor’s team is not intimidated by a possible Palin run. “She’s not a serious human being,” the adviser said.

Asked about the comments by POLITICO, a longtime Palin aide unloaded on Romney’s staff.

“It shocks me that anyone would try to do that,” the aide said. “You’d think we’d all be working together toward a common goal — that being 2010 — and that should be the focus right now. Those who try to claim the mantle of Reagan would be good to follow one of his most sacred tenets.”

“For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Doug Mataconis:

Well, all I can say in response to that is welcome to big time politics, buddy.

It’s fairly obvious that anyone who runs against Sarah Palin, assuming she ever runs for anything ever again, is going to hit her on her relative lack of experience and her disengagement with issues beyond repeating platitudes — something that can be seen fairly evidently in this recent appearance on The O’Reilly Factor. And if the Palin camp thinks that this little comment from an anonymous Romney aide is “disparaging,” just wait for what the media and the Democrats are going to put her through.

If Palin runs, she sure isn’t going to get a coronation.

Philip Klein at The American Spectator:

Last month, Romney had flattering things to say about Rudy Giuliani in a USA Today op-ed and I noted at the time that it appeared the former Massachusetts governor was trying to avoid a problem he had in 2008, which is that he was the most disliked candidate among his rivals, leading to an “everybody vs. Romney” dynamic by the time primaries rolled around. This is one of the factors that helped John McCain get nominated. Clearly he’s trying to win over — or at least diffuse tensions with — prominent Republicans.

Ed Morrissey:

I don’t think Romney really wants the debate to go there at this moment.  Right now, he should get his team focused on the midterms and let 2012 wait until at least 2011.

Update: Right on time, Gallup polls Republicans and Americans in general on favorability among the perceived 2012 contenders.  Among Republicans, Palin gets a 76/20, while Romney gets a 54/19.  In general, Palin’s slightly underwater at 44/47 (and has the highest levels of both favorability and unfavorability), while Romney gets a 36/28.  At least as a candidate and an activist, Palin should be taken seriously by Romney.

Update II: Mitt Romney tried to call a truce in the sniping war with this message on Twitter at around 11:30 am ET: “TIME says unnamed advisors disparaged @SarahPalinUSA. Anonymous numbskulls. She’s proven her smarts; they’ve disproven theirs.”  Hopefully, that will settle things down.

David Weigel at Andrew Sullivan’s place:

The heart-achingly moronic “spat” between Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney tells us how. The rundown, if you can stand it:

THURSDAY: Anonymous aides to Mitt Romney tell Mark Halperin that Palin is “not a serious human being” and will be in trouble in a debate where the “answers are more than 15 seconds long.”

FRIDAY, 6:47 a.m.: Politico’s Andy Barr publishes comments from “a longtime Palin aide,” who gets eight paragraphs to unload on Romney and pump up his/her boss: “She’s not a finger-in-the-wind kind of leader.”

FRIDAY, 10-something a.m.: Romney’s Twitter account (written by him? written by someone else?) friendly-fires on the first aides as “anonymous numbskulls.”

How many people were directly quoted in this spat? None, unless you count the Romney Twitter account. Andy Bar hustled in getting those quotes from Mysterious Palin Aide of the Deep, but his talent is wasted when he plays kid who whispers the gossip about the popular kids to the less popular kids. It’s stuff like this that informs my dark, dark suspicion that 2012 will be more about nonsense than policy, and that people who think Palin needs to bone up on policy don’t get this.

John Dickerson at Slate:

On Friday, Mark Halperin published a column in Time that quoted an anonymous Romney adviser knocking Palin as not unserious. The story was burning through the political Twitter world until @MittRomney tweeted: “TIME says unnamed advisors disparaged @SarahPalinUSA. Anonymous numbskulls.She’s proven her smarts; they’ve disproven theirs.”

Smart move, Governor. It’s too early to get into an anonymous battle with Palin. As an adviser to another 2012 Republican hopeful put it when presented with an opportunity to bash another member of the party, “We’re in the business of making friends.” There’s no upside in knocking Palin, who may not run for president but will certainly be in a position to influence a lot of voters. Romney also wins stylistic points for use of the word “numbskull,” an awfully voicey choice for a candidate who can seem wooden.

In the end, all of this jockeying may have the same marginal affect on the race that road sign jockeying does. But it’s clear that the candidates are taking it seriously as a way to get around the traditional media or present themselves in ways that the traditional media pick up quickly.

The downside to all of this lightning quick, context-free communication seems easier to see. Gingrich proved it when he fired off a blast about Sonja Sotomayor being a racist several months ago. He had to retreat from his remarks from his remarks, but if he ends up running as a national candidate in states with a Hispanic electorate, he’ll probably be asked about that tweet again by the press and his opponents.

There will also come a time when candidates like Romney don’t want to knock down the anonymous quotes in the press. All candidates find it useful to have messages conveyed anonymously without having to own up to them. When this happens, and reporters ask questions, reporters are told the candidate is too busy to sit for an interview and simply can’t answer every claim made by an anonymous source. But now with such a low bar—who doesn’t have time for a 140-character response?—it will be harder for candidates to hide.

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair

Wonkette:

Apparently everyone decided yesterday was the start of the 2012 presidential election, and Mark Halperin of Time (or as Politico calls it, “Time” magazine, snarkily) reported that a “Romney intimate” (GROSS!) does not believe Sarah Palin is a “’serious human being,” correctly. So Politico called up a Palin intimate (ALSO GROSS), and that person does not like these comments at all! The person called it “frankly immature,” and probably knows something about frank immaturity, being a “longtime Palin aide.” And thus we have an election on our hands.Halperin:

Some of the other would-be candidates and their senior advisers have known Palin over the years, primarily from her days as governor, but most have literally never met her or had a substantive talk with her. That is a strange situation to say the least; it forces them to evaluate her without any direct insight into her strengths and weaknesses.

Perhaps it’s best not to assume she is able to do things such as “substantive talk,” candidates.

Still, few express much regard for Palin’s ultimate chances. One adviser to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and, by traditional standards, the putative 2012 frontrunner, says of Palin, “She’s not a serious human being.” Another Romney intimate warns, “If she’s standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble.”

Sounds about right. But “frankly immature!” Take it, Palin aide:

“It shocks me that anyone would try to do that,” the aide said. “You’d think we’d all be working together toward a common goal — that being 2010 — and that should be the focus right now. Those who try to claim the mantle of Reagan would be good to follow one of his most sacred tenets.”

Selling arms to Iran? Funding the contras?

“For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Haha, nice attribution there, Politico: “who spoke on condition of anonymity.” How dare that person SIT AROUND and be anonymous?

The Palin adviser also jabbed at Romney for having changed some of his positions and suggested that Romney does not have full “control” of his team.

But perhaps this is not the cat fight of the century YET. Romney tweeted this:

“Anonymous numbskulls” may sound tame, but that is a major burn for a Mormon.

Jim Newell at Gawker:

20+ more months of this, folks.

UPDATE: Daniel Larison

It Is Far Away, It Is Hot, And It Is Not Named Mel Gibson

Phil Plait at Discover:

Astronomers have confirmed that an object in an image from 2008 — thought at the time to possibly be a direct image of a planet orbiting another star — is in fact a planet.

I’ll explain in a sec, but I want people to understand that this discovery is being touted as the first direct image of a planet around another star. It isn’t. Nor is it the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star. What this is is the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star taken using a ground-based telescope. While that may sound overly picky, it’s actually a significant achievement, and worth noting.

Rebecca Boyle at Popular Science:

“Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other,” says David Lafrenière of the University of Montreal and Center for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec.

The team also took the planet’s spectrum, measuring its temperature and composition. Now that they know it really does orbit this star, Lafrenière retroactively claims firstie on an exoplanet spectrum.

Other famous exoplanet photos have shown us blocked-out stars with fuzzy dots at their sides. This one shows the blazing star, too, putting in context that this is really a solar system.

The planet is also special because it challenges planetary scientists’ best planet-formation theories. It’s far from its star, about 300 times farther than Jupiter is from the sun. It would take the planet roughly 1,000 years to complete one orbit.

The unlikely locale of this alien world could be telling us that nature has more than one way of making planets,” says Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto, who co-authored a paper on the findings, recently accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal. “Or, it could be hinting at a violent youth when close encounters between newborn planets hurl some siblings out to the hinterlands.”

Denise Chow at SPACE.com:

The host star, which has an estimated mass of about 85 percent that of our sun, is located approximately 500 light-years away in a group of young stars called the Upper Scorpius Association that formed about 5 million years ago.

The planet has an estimated temperature of over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,500 degrees Celsius). This makes the planet much hotter than Jupiter, which has an atmospheric cloud-top temperature of approximately minus 166 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 110 degrees Celsius).

The relatively young age of the system — our solar system is 4.6 billion years old — explains the high temperature of the planet, according to the researchers. [The Strangest Alien Planets]

The contraction of the planet under its own gravity during its formation quickly raised its temperature to thousands of degrees. But, once this contraction phase is over, the planet will slowly cool down by radiating infrared light. Within billions of years, the planet will eventually reach a temperature that is much more similar to that of Jupiter.

Robert Quigley at Geekosystem:

Why did the confirmation process take two years? Astronomers had to account for the possibility that the planet wasn’t actually orbiting 1RSX J160929.1-210524, but that it merely appeared to be doing so by chance. Space.com quotes the astronomer who led the research team involved as saying, “Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other.”

Juli Weiner at Vanity Fair:

According to Radar Online, Mel Gibson, anti-Semitic star of What Women Want, yelled racist garbage at the embattled mother of his child. Anyway, speaking of radar, guess what scientists located via telescope today? Alien planet! Alien planet, everyone!

According to Space.com, designated non–Mel Gibson Internet safe haven, “[a] planet outside of our solar system, said to be the first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth, has been officially confirmed to be orbiting a sun-like star, according to follow-up observations.” The planet is around 2,700 degrees Farenheit, approximately the temperature in New York this past Monday. The Huffington Post reports that the planet is orbiting the star 1RXS 1609 and is part of a star cluster known as the Upper Scorpius Association. Now that you are more familiar with our new alien friend, let’s pick a name. We’ll humbly put forth the following for the consideration of the scientific community: Harold, Maisie, Mad Max, Jupiter II: 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Christ, and Planet Hollywood.