The Journal itself says the deal is not yet done, though they seem to say that consummation is indeed close: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11839298 9354660261.html?mod=us_business_whats_ne ws

As a full-time daytrader, I will still read the Journal, and Barron's (also a DowJones property) unless they go downhill like Forbes did (I used to love Forbes until it became a rightwing rag as noted above). Already, though, I also read things like Bloomberg's free site, theStreet.com, as well as financial blogs like The Big Picture. Eventually I will likely pony up for a Bloomberg terminal to get their proprietary feeds in addition to the free site.

Re: "In the media climate where partisanship is considered a four letter word."

In the MSM, partisanship is only a four letter word if it is Democratic partisanship. The MSM narrative accepts Republican talking points as the God-given reality and paints the reality based community as "shrill." That is one of the things we need to change, and, yes, electing a Democratic president would be a step in the right direction, as would re-instating the Fairness Doctrine.

Right on David.

We have at least three powerful points with which to hammer the Republicans, and all Democratic Members of Congress should have been doing this all year.

(1) The Pentagon's own Inspector General's Report found that Rumsfeld's rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special Plans, sexed up the case for invading Iraq while ignoring evidence for continuing to use sanctions on Saddam Hussein. The Pentagon ITSELF admitted it lied about Saddam's "WMD" and Saddam's "connection" to al Qaeda. The Pentagon ITSELF admits it lied us into this war. We need to have that line pounded in EVERY media venue all the time.

(2) We have sustained nearly 4,000 American dead, tens of thousands of Americans wounded, and (according to the Johns Hopkins Medical School Epidemiology Department, and published in Britain's most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet) 650 THOUSAND IRAQI DEATHS. The liars betrayed our soldiers, sent them to die for nothing, and by causing innocent Iraqis to die have stained American honor.

(3) President Bush preened about the Iraqis who defied sectarian violence and held up their purple fingers after their Parliamentary Elections. Well, now 144 of 275 of Iraq's democratically elected Members of Parliament, signed a petition asking the United States to leave Iraq. We are now an illegal occupier who defies the will of Iraq's own elected representatives. Operation Iraqi Freedom must now be renamed.

If we pounded the truth -- and it is very simple and easy to commumicate -- we can beat Bush on the airwaves and in the Congress.

And yes I just e-mailed my Senators (Durbin and Obama) to vote against any Iraq supplemental that contains a blank check to wage war in Iraq. My congresswoman (Judy Biggert) is an extreme Bush loyalist and she is not worth the effort unfortunately.

NYT Opinionator today (May 23) stating that senior officials in Clinton campaign are telling her to avoid the Iowa caucus and concentrate resources on other primary contests. Looks like others agree with the MyDD polling data.

John Mills is right about Bancroft family control. There is a two tiered stock structure in which the family controls a majority of votes that can be cast in a shareholder meeting because they own the "supervoting" shares. Holders of the supervoting shares can cast more votes per share than ordinary shareholders, these shares have additional voting rights attached. Therefore no one can make the Bancrofts sell and no one can buy control without their consent.

Having said that, I don't want WSJ sold either. I feel about it the way I do about NYT -- not as ideal as I would like, but among the best resources we have now. We can only hope that the Bancrofts will hold onto their role as stewards of WSJ the way the Sulzbergers are holding onto their stewardship of NYT.

It's time to repudiate the whole idea of declaring war on everything we don't like and calling these declarations a policy. The war on drugs. The war on poverty (whoops, the Republicans surrendered on that one). The war on cancer (ROFL).

Not only is it senseless to talk of war against a tactic, it elevates random bandits to a position of important enemies of the United States, handing them priceless prestige. Dumb.

Terrorists are common criminals. Had Bush allowed the the Marines to advance on Tora Bora and capture bin Laden, it would have been great to have tried him in Manhattan criminal court like any other lowlife suspect. Hopefully he would have been sent up the river for life without parole rather than executed (why make a martyr of him?). And that would have been the end of a rather small (but tragic) chapter in our history.

Matt,
It's important to get out the word about how you pay for hosting. Even important economists at places like Brookings have put out confused messages on this point. If we can destroy the free rider argument we will be halfway home.

Reframing the debate: the telecom companies want people to pay twice for broadband.

Allowing shareholders a vote on CEO pay is actually a very capitalist thing to do. Shareholders have a percentage ownership share of corporations, they are the CEOs' partners and should be treated as such. The CEO is being hired to manage assets owned by the shareholders. If they are doing a poor job for a company's owners, the owners should be able to say so. But the Republicans want donations from corporate managers who want to be free to loot corporate assets regardless of how well they perform. It is that simple.

One of the reasons that we repealed Prohibition is that the Mob prospered so much from supplying alcohol back in the day. Today the drug trade enriches terrorists in Afghanistan, drug lords in Colombia, and gangs in the US inner cities. Legalization would put all these criminals out of business. Regulated but legal drugs would also have known purity and potency, eliminating the risk of poisoning for users.  I agree with the posters who say that the same kind of education that has discouraged smokers, would also discourage drug users.

Mr. Walsh has it exactly right. In Ricardo's day the currency of all fiscally sound countries was backed by gold, and the gold standard prevented trade imbalanaces such as the surpluses that Asian tiger countries run -- and our own trade deficit. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement disconnected us from a strict gold standard and allowed the possiblity of consistent trade imbalances for the first time in modern history. When Nixon ended convertibility of US dollars into gold in 1971 the last vestige of market discipline that prevented the US from running current account deficits, went out the window.

Also, in Ricardo's day, there was a very small class of wealthy people, consisting of capitalists, merchants, royalty, and churchmen; the so-called Iron Law of Wages obtained. Under this law, workers around the world, tend to get paid a bare subsistence wage and no more. Ricardo could not imagine the current situation, in which the wage earners in advanced countries actually have something to lose due to international competition. It may well be that under the pressure of Chinese competition this Law is reasserting itself.

Furthermore, Ricardo could not have imagined today's situation in which the transportation of goods is cheap and the movement of information costs next to nothing. Under early 19th century conditions information and goods moved slowly, on horseback and under sail, so imported goods were rarely cheap. Now cars cross the Pacific in containerships, chips by 747, and information on the Net.

Under the conditions Ricardo laid out, free trade makes all partners better off but those conditions simply do not obtain in today's world. Economist Richard Duncan lays this out in a seminal volume called, "The Dollar Crisis."

At the time free trade orthodoxy was just about invincible; even now it is considered outre to oppose free trade. Back then even to think that free trade might not make America better off was to risk being called a kook or worse in almost every intellectually "respectable setting." Even now, in most places (especially among economists, unfortunately) you are not only risking being called a kook for such opinions, it is a dead certainty.

I think Princeton economist Alan Blinder's piece in last week's WSJ is very instructive. Blinder worked for the Clinton Administration before becoming vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System. He noted that during his tenure, industry came to him for trade protection, and said that he felt bilked when the increased costs were passed on to consumers. So Blinder came out of the experience a stronger free trader than ever.

But in China or Japan, allowing business to profit from protection against imports is precisely the point. Protection makes it easier for business to make money... and in those countries, at least, the national government does what it can to make sure that consumers also have jobs.

I also note that when Blinder made a very scary list of white collar occupations whose jobs are endangered by foreign competition. But does Blinder suggest that these workers be protected? No way. He calls for more help to compensate the losers from free trade. Not too swift in my book -- we have a system set up to destroy American jobs in the tradable goods sector in many white collar occupations too -- and trying to patch things up under these conditions is like try to push water uphill.

Of course officers of the United States ranked lower than the Vice President can be impeached, and the poster above was correct to cite Belknap. John Dean did a useful analysis of this topic December 15. http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/200612 15.html

Since I started this part of the ball rolling... if indeed the "1984" ad was made by a supporter without Obama's explicit or tacit support, that would put this issue in a different light. That said, I hope it is clear that I am glad Obama has frozen out Fox and the more we can marginalize them, the better.

Well I hope Obama and the CBC pound Fox hard. On the other hand I think Obama has come rather close to surrendering the high ground by implying that John Edwards is gay and also running an attack ad against Hillary Clinton based on Apple Computer's "1984" commercial. Why isn't he using these hardball tactics on Fox rather than against other Democrats??