Davos Newbies

I wrote the other day about David Miliband being the first bona fide senior minister to really blog. It looks like Mike Leavitt, the US secretary for health and human services, beat him by about a month. His posts aren’t that “bloggy”, but they’re pretty good. He was interviewed yesterday on All Things Considered and confirmed that he wrote his posts himself, which I think does come across.

I’d be the last to want to credit the Bush administration with anything, but I think the Leavitt blog is a good thing.

Update Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff also “blogs”. I put it in quotation marks because his blog unquestionably reads like it’s written by the communications department. Maybe that’s the real voice of Chertoff, but I doubt it.

Here in northern California, we’re a long way from the wildfires down south, but it rightly dominates all the news. I’m still trying to get my head around 660 square miles, which is how much has been devastated in this series of fires so far. That’s more than all of London. There have been nearly 900,000 people evacuated, which is more than the population of San Francisco and Berkeley combined.

By the way, The New York Times is making up for its amazingly poor news judgment yesterday by covering every angle of the fires now.

Here’s a headline from today’s Financial Times: Iraq fades as hot political issue.

I think this is terrible political judgment from their Washington bureau chief, Edward Luce. He’s swallowed the Bush administration’s spin that Iraq is now under control thanks to general Petraeus and the surge, and that the crucial new frontline of foreign trouble is Iran.

I think that’s way off the mark. Consider yesterday’s front page of The New York Times. Three stories across the front page: the Blackwater mess, potential disaster between Turkey and the Kurdish region of Iraq and the mistrial in the Dallas terrorism financing case. Not much sign of Iraq fading there. (Of course, the Times has its own bizarre misjudgments. Huffington Post pointed out the glaring absence of anything other than the most minor play for the wildfires in southern California from that front page.)