NYSE says trading floor trademark protected

The New York Stock Exchange sent the editors of Talking Points Memo a cease-and-desist letter to stop the online publication from using wire photos of the trading floor. The NYSE argues that the floor is trademarked, so any images of the floor are a violation of NYSE's trademark rights. Which is nonsense. TPM republished the photo that triggered the threat letter, alongside a sassy blog post from TPM Editor Josh Marshall.

Former Neon Tommyer goes to TPM

Former Neon Tommy Editor-in-chief Callie Schweitzer has accepted a job as assistant to the publisher at the liberal news blog Talking Points Memo. She'll work under TPM founder/editor/publisher Josh Marshall.

For those unfamiliar, Neon Tommy is the online news site run by USC's journalism school. Schweitzer's new job was reported by Gorkana.

Wikileaks blocked by Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has blocked access to Wikileaks from its computers, Talking Points Memo reports. The U.S. government, miffed over CableGate, has put pressure on a number of private companies to chase Wikileaks off their servers, forcing the site to retreat to Switzerland.

The Christine O'Donnell kerfuffle

If you are a candidate for U.S. Senate who's made some misleading statements about your educational background and then someone finds more false claims in a profile posted on a popular social networking site, you probably need to craft a serious response. And if you respond that someone else created the profile to embarrass or entrap you, you need to do more than shrug it off an annoying hoax. (Especially when new evidence comes to light.)

Which basically brings us up to date with Christine O'Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, and the mysterious LinkedIn profile that got yanked offline yesterday. After the Washington Post and this blog pointed out inaccuracies in the profile, she called the profile a sham. Who planted this alleged educational time bomb? No one knows, and the O'Donnell campaign doesn't seem that interested in finding out.

For those who'd rather dismiss this as a liberal media witch hunt, conservative blogger Patterico offers some wisdom:

I am amazed (and yet I’m not) by the people who want me to ignore this.  Joe Biden misrepresented his own academic record and I mocked him unmercifully for it.  Why would O’Donnell deserve different treatment?

Had she simply padded the resume and then fessed up, mockery would probably be all that O'Donnell had to contend with. If it turns out she lied about constructing the LinkedIn profile page, the political repercussions could be much worse.

More on Christine O'Donnell and the Claremont Institute

Talking Points Memo continues to dig into Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's questionable claims about her education background. The liberal news site reported today that, when O'Donnell applied for a 2002 fellowship at the Claremont Institute, she listed the University of Oxford on her resume. The same claim was made on a LinkedIn profile that carried O'Donnell's name, but O'Donnell says the profile is a fake. The fellowship resume indicates that she's fudged this questionable association with Oxford before.

O'Donnell also appears to have told the Claremont Institute (a private, conservative think tank that somehow morphed into the respected and wholly unaffiliated Claremont Graduate University on the LinkedIn profile) that she had a bachelor's degree at the time. As I noted here Tuesday, the Institute listed O'Donnell as a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University. We've since learned that O'Donnell did not receive her degree until this month.

The education of Christine O'Donnell

Did Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell lie about her educational background on a social networking website? Or was she merely the victim of the website's poor design?

Or have we all been duped - either by a malevolent prankster who wanted to embarrass O'Donnell or a careless do-gooder who failed to do his or her research?

Yesterday, after reading a Washington Post story that disputed the accuracy of O'Donnell's LinkedIn profile, specifically a claim that she'd attended the University of Oxford, I decided to check whether she had attended another school listed on the profile, Claremont Graduate University. A spokesman for the school said without hesitation that were no records of her attending classes or registering there as a student.

The implication, of course, was that O'Donnell had padded (i.e., lied on) her resume.A writer for the conservative RedState blog admonished the attack-dog media to withhold judgment, saying it had failed to take into account LinkedIn's quirky design:

Depending on when O’Donnell created her LinkedIn profile, at one point you could only enter educational programs that were in the LinkedIn system. And even today, you have to hard-code in the text for places like Claremont, which are not recognized Institutions or Companies, but exist only as search terms in their system.

The idea, I guess, is that O'Donnell or one of her staffers might have been flummoxed by the website's lack of options and unfriendly design and, as a result, mistakenly listed Oxford University and Claremont Graduate University under the education tab.

The argument lost any relevance, however, when O'Donnell's campaign contacted Washington Post writer Greg Sargent and told him flatly that the LinkedIn profile was a fraud. Her statement reads in part:

There have been reports that I have released false information on a LinkedIn profile under my name. This is categorically untrue. I never established a LinkedIn profile, or authorized anyone to do so on my behalf.

This would mean someone else created the online profile and misstated O'Donnell's educational background either on purpose or by mistake.

Talking Points Memo talked with the O'Donnell camp, which says it will investigate who created the profile. A campaign spokesman would not explain why the issue of the profile's authenticity wasn't raised in the first place.

It should be noted that Sargent did reach out to the O'Donnell campaign, as any good journalist would, before he published the initial story. The campaign did not challenged the profile's authenticity and instead tried to explain why the Oxford University listing was an innocent mistake.

O'Donnell's profile has 84 "connections" - meaning 84 people have chosen to link to her profile. It would interesting to know whether any of them have ever communicated with the profile's creator. Also, all LinkedIn profiles require a working email to get them established. I've asked LinkedIn if it would release the email address associated with this account, but I won't hold my breath.

Other stories about O'Donnell and her educational background are here, here and here.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez catches foot-in-mouth

Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Garden Grove, told Univision that the "Vietnamese and the Republicans" are trying to steal her seat away to the detriment of the Latino community. Here's the story and here's the video.

Rolling Stone gathers few comments

New media hawks have noted that Rolling Stone magazine failed to garner the attention it deserves on its website commensurate with the media attention it received for publishing Michael Hastings's profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal - you know, the article that apparently got the hand-picked commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan fired by the man who hand-picked him.
Here's how Nieman Journalism Lab saw it:

After the piece ran, it started picking up incoming links, presumably driving tremendous traffic to the site. I checked in on the story today, exactly 24 hours later, to find that, despite the story completely dominating the news cycle — TV, blogosphere, Twitter, newspapers — only 16 comments had been posted to the story (not counting a couple dozen comments responding to those comments). When you try to view all 16, you get a 404 error message. No users had “shared” or “liked” it, according to the story’s social media meter. (Although that’s probably an error — I tried liking it and it still says zero.) In any event, that’s rough — the vast majority of the conversation is happening elsewhere.

Does the lack of comments mean the story or the publisher failed in some way? Or does it show that most readers no longer worry about checking original sources for information, choosing instead to digest the fast-food version of complex and important news reports?

O'Keefe gets charges reduced

Anti-ACORN pimp James O'Keefe won't be facing felony charges after all for allegedly trying to tamper with Sen. Mary Landrieu's office phones. Justice Department prosecutors have decided to reduce the charges against O'Keefe and his three cohorts to one count each of entering real property of the United States under false pretenses, a misdemeanor. TPM

A way back in

From Talking Points Memo:

Canned at CQ?

We're hiring. Details here.

TPM in DC

Talking Points Memo has hired two additional reporters, Christina Bellantoni of the Washington Times and Evan McMorris-Santoro from National Journal's The Hotline, in anticipation of opening its Washington, DC bureau next week.

Four today

1. Richard Serrano, late of the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, has landed at the Las Vegas Sun. LAO

2. A Gannett paper in Utah has refused to print a same-sex wedding announcement. AP

3. Newspaper cuts in Wisconsin. Wisconsin State Journal

4. Josh Marshall gives an early nod to the LA Times redesign. TPM

All apologies

Politico's story catching the Washington Post with its ethics down has caused repercussions inside and outside the newspaper. Post publisher Katharine Weymouth wrote a long letter to readers apologizing for a flier that promised corporate-sponsored off-the-record meetings between editorial staff, White House officials and paying lobbyists. She's also asked for an internal review of what happened and talked with the newsroom staff.

All the hullabaloo inspired Talking Points Memo to report that the Atlantic magazine has been holding corporate-sponsored salons since 2003. Atlantic Media publisher David Bradley responded with a long letter of his own.

Someone's hiring...

Posted on Talking Points Memo:

We'll do more formal job announcements next week. But for our regular readers and for those who might be interested in joining our team, I wanted to let you know that we're going to be adding eight new editorial positions to our staff. Most of those slots will be new reporter-bloggers in New York and Washington. But there will also be new junior editorial positions.

We plan to hire for six of those positions this summer. And then two more in early fall. Together, that will more than double the size of our editorial staff.

TPM is news with a view, so probably not something worth applying to unless you share the site's politics.

Dowd admits lifting line

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd appears to have been pinched for plagiarism. After being accused of stealing a passage from a post on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, Dowd told Huffington Post that she "inadvertently lifted" a line of text and used it in her weekend column. But TPM's thejoshuablog isn't ready to let her off the hook.

For sale: Texas (shipping not included)

Why secede when you can sell - and help pay down the national debt in the process)? Before Gov. Rick Perry can make do on his threat to unhitch Texas from the Union, an alert eBayer has opened a bidding war for the Lone Star State - all 268,820 square miles of it. (h/t TPM)

*Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight says Democrats should take a second look at Perry's secession idea. Among the considerations: A filibuster proof majority in the Senate.