HOUSING: The rental market stinks, too.

SO IF THE ATLANTIC’S SALONS ARE ETHICALLY IFFY, WHAT ABOUT THIS? White House Press Corps Spent the Fourth of July Hanging Out With Obama, Off the Record. Or is it just wrong to get cozy with corporate bigshots?

Much of the White House press corps spent the Fourth schmoozing with White House staffers, catching performances by the Foo Fighters and Jimmy Fallon, and watching the fireworks from the most exclusive vantage point in the D.C. metro area, all off the record—not to mention off-the-Facebook and off-the-Twitter. These are the same people who just a week ago were whining in the press briefing about Obama’s malicious and dastardly attempts to “control the press.” . . .

There is a cosmic irony at work here: The party was “closed press.” (Ha!) It was covered, under onerous restrictions, by a pool reporter—the Baltimore Sun’s Paul West. West was ushered in by White House staffers for a mere 40 minutes, so he could record the president’s remarks. He was kept in a pen so that he wouldn’t run amok and interview someone. He shouted questions at Obama as he worked the rope line, which the president ignored. Then he was taken away. West wrote up his blindered account of the party and then e-mailed it to the White House press corps, many of whom were actually at the party, outside of the pen, hanging out with all the other guests. And then, because they had temporarily signed away the right to do their jobs in exchange for facetime with staffers, a few cold Stoudt’s American Pale Ales, and some corn on the cob, their news organizations picked up that pool report and used it to tell their readers what happened at the party. This is how the press covers the White House.

Covers, sucks up to, whatever. Jack Shafer, call your office!

THE ADMINISTRATION WILL BE HAPPY: GMC adds Yukon Denali Hybrid SUV. Too bad hybrid sales are plummeting. Maybe by the time this is out gas prices will have risen.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: Drug extends life: “A study published Wednesday found that rapamycin, a drug used in organ transplants, increased the life span of mice by 9% to 14%, the first definitive case in which a chemical has been shown to extend the life span of normal mammals.” It’s a long way from being a useful anti-aging drug in humans, but it should provide some useful data.

DRINKING while breastfeeding.

JOHN TIERNEY on cats.

IN THE MAIL: A big PR package with a copy of Atlas Shrugged. The press release is headlined: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years.

MICHAEL YON: Girl With No Future.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: A “Reset” with Russia Won’t Cut It.

STIMULUS AS PAYOFF: Billions in aid go to areas that backed Obama in ’08. “Billions of dollars in federal aid delivered directly to the local level to help revive the economy have gone overwhelmingly to places that supported President Obama in last year’s presidential election. . . . Counties that supported Obama last year have reaped twice as much money per person from the administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus package as those that voted for his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, a USA TODAY analysis of government disclosure and accounting records shows.”

FUNNY HOW HONESTY STANDARDS FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS seem so much higher than those for other journalists.

GLENN LOURY: Yes we can!

FABIUS MAXIMUS: A new news media emerges for our new world, unseen and unexpected.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: I didn’t vote for Barack Obama.

Which means, I don’t have to have the scales fall from my eyes over the President’s decision to claim “post-acquittal detention power.” To be sure, I agree with Mark Kleiman (no, that is not a typo) that we can keep prisoners of war for as long as necessary, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Obama Administration is essentially going to engage in show trials when it comes to a lot of the detainees affected by its most recent decision on detainee policy. In the strictest sense, the legal status of the detainees is affected by whether they are found guilty or not-guilty in these trials, but as Kleiman writes, if someone has engaged in warfare against the United States, that person “should be held as long as the conflict lasts, even if that turns out to be forever.” So irrespective of the outcome of a trial, the defendant will remain in prison, and that will mean that many of those trials are going to have no effect whatsoever on the lives of the defendants in question. And that means that the Obama Administration’s guarantee of a fair trial or due process for these defendants is utterly meaningless.

And yet, before the election it was a matter of fierce moral urgency. Plus this: “It looks like Dick Cheney was right. Despite Candidate Obama’s promises, President Obama does not have, and never had any intention whatsoever to give up the powers of the ‘Imperial Presidency.'”

BYRON YORK: AmeriCorps stonewalls questions of White House involvement in IG firing. “A top official of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the government agency that oversees AmeriCorps, has refused to answer questions from congressional investigators about the White House’s role in events surrounding the abrupt firing of inspector general Gerald Walpin.”

And I love this:

Investigators asked Trinity whether he was claiming executive privilege, something that could only be authorized by the president. Trinity answered again that it was a White House “prerogative.” When the investigators pointed out that, in the words of one aide, “there is no legal basis whatsoever” for such a claim, Trinity still declined to answer.

Remember the fierce moral urgency of replacing Bush with Obama so we’d see an end to this sort of thing? I do . . . .

PLAIN DEALER REPRESENTATIVE calls bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks.” This is so 2002. But anyway, the inevitable conclusion:

We’re just going to ignore the phrase “public journalists,” OK? It’s a bizarre formulation — as opposed to, what, private journalists? — but he probably meant something like “citizen journalists,” and we’ll just mark it down to speaking off the cuff. But why, representative of us readers, is it kind of unfortunate that Schultz gave Jarvis a lot of ink? Back to Diadiun:

“… which I thought was kind of unfortunate because Connie’s column is read by 25- or 30,000 people a month, which has to be many times more than this guy gets on his blog, and she gave him more publicity through that column than he would get on his own anytime.”

Thirty thousand readers a month “has to be many times” what Jarvis gets on his blog? Wait, that sounds like one of those unsourced, unreported assumptions you might get from … from … A BLOGGER! Diadiun actually started to say “is,” but than corrected himself and phrased it “has to be.” That was an admission, however subconscious, that he didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He was guessing to make his point.

Why is it so common for print people who criticize the low standards of the Web to go on the Web and say and write things they would never say or write in print? Does Diadiun just guess at stuff in his newspaper column?

Since Jarvis has more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, I would guess that Schultz’s 30,000 monthly readers, as reported by Diadiun, do not dwarf Jarvis’ readership. But I don’t like to guess — even in a blog! — so I did something crazy. I got all newspapery and responsible. I asked Jarvis how many readers he has.

“My web stats say I had 106,000 unique vistors in May,” Jarvis answered via e-mail. “I had about 20,000 RSS readers, last I knew,” though he confessed to having forgotten his password to re-check that figure.

I suspect that a lot of bigger-deal columnists than Diadiun have smaller readerships than Jarvis’s. Newspaper circulation numbers are padded to begin with, but those numbers don’t reflect how many people read any particular part of the paper. Does everyone who picks up the New York Times turn to Maureen Dowd? I doubt it. But everyone who reads Jeff Jarvis reads Jeff Jarvis.

MORE ON JOURNALISTIC ETHICS AND THE ATLANTIC’S SALONS, from Mickey Kaus. “The problem with Bradley’s salons, like the problems with WaPo’s similar, now-cancelled events, is that they create two big conflicts: 1) The need to avoid pissing off the corporations who fund (and then some***) the salons in the hope of getting access to influential journalists and administration bigshots; and, even more corrupting, 2) the need to suck up to the administration bigshots to get them to show up at the salons where they can be accessed by corporations who are paying for them.”

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle reports: “I’m not going to comment much on my employer’s salons except to say that I’ve been to them, and there’s no scandal there. At the paid ones, where the journalists talk, the journalists dictate what we say, and the sponsors are told they have no control. At the unpaid salons, it’s–well, it’s an off the record briefing, of the sort that every other journalist is well familiar with. Either way, I’ve never said or done anything that I wouldn’t say at a regular interview, and neither have the other journalists.”

Looks to me like David Bradley is leaving no revenue source untapped. . . .

INSTAVISION: Who Killed California’s Economy? I talk with Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History, about “gentry liberalism,” media bias, and California’s disastrous economy. Plus, what it means for the rest of America. (Bumped).

UPDATE: Viewers liked Kotkin’s use of the term “Soft Putinism” to describe today’s politicized media. I prefer the term “An Army of Ezra Kleins.” . . .

HOPE AND CHANGE SAME! Administration Using the Same Stimulus Job-Creation Number Obama Did on May 1. Yeah, but the gap between those numbers and reality has expanded, so that’s something.

TIGERHAWK: The 35% Solution: “Because its efforts have been broken into separate initiatives with different justifications, few people other than news junkies have noticed how extraordinary Barack Obama’s agenda is. Perhaps a number will help: 35%. That is the aggregate percentage of United States GDP produced by the three industries that the Democrats hope to restructure from the top down: Health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8% of GDP), and financial services (8% of GDP). Think about that. Without even considering the transformational impact of proposed anti-business laws of general application, such as the Orwellian ’employee free choice act,’ the Obama administration wants to redesign 35% of gross domestic product from the center. And he proposes to do it all in a rush this summer, lest the decline in his popularity and that of the Congressional Democrats erodes his power to do so.”

NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE fires nearly 200 workers because of race. Can this be true?

SMART DIPLOMACY: White House misspills President Obama’s name on diplomatic dokument.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Wanted: Honesty on Health Care.

CROSSING A VERY BIG SEA in a very small boat. “There’s madness, and then there’s crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a 21-foot fishing boat designed for shallow water. Ralph Brown of Florida is doing just that. Go ahead and call him crazy. He doesn’t care.” I think he’s crazy. . . .

THE NATIVES ARE GETTING RESTLESS: That’s great. Now fix the economy.