Excerpts from a quite fun edition of Morning Jolt:

Are you starting to get the feeling Andrew Breitbart clanks when he walks? With a small pile of cash and a pair of brass, he suddenly makes every member of JournoList who ever wrote anything on it they didn’t want public very, very nervous: “I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full ‘JournoList’ archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse . . . Ezra Klein’s ‘JournoList 400′ is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because — to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough.”
NRO’s Daniel Foster wins the day, for remembering the ferry scene from The Dark Knight.
I’m sure that right now Ezra Klein is sending out e-mails to the entire list insisting “snitches get stitches”, but this is a prisoner’s dilemma that John Nash and Harry Houdini couldn’t team up to solve. I suspect the JournoList crowd often liked to call the likes of us “brown shirts,” but with Breitbart’s bounty on their least-ready-for-prime-time ramblings, they’re probably now the “brown pants.”
Frances Martel of Mediaite seems confident no one will leak, whistling past a graveyard loudly enough to violate several noise ordinances: “Like the initial Big Journalism reward dollars, it seems unlikely that anyone would step up and pocket the cash. Many of the people on Journolist, supposedly, were already big-name liberal journalists, people for whom $100,000 would be nowhere near enough of an incentive. Many of them, for many years, kept to the promise that the list was off-the-record. Then there are two people who seem the most likely to take the bait. One has already proven they have no problem leaking the emails, but if their intent was to silence Weigel because he was too conservative, as Breitbart argues, then it doesn’t make sense they would want to expose people like Ezra Klein to similar humiliation, or would trust Breitbart in any way. The other person would have a motive to see the people on the list humiliate — that motive being a mixture of revenge and the age-old saying that misery loves company — and could do with the money. But Dave Weigel has already proven to have certain standards of ethics about what’s on and off the record in his body of work, so as delightful as watching that unfold would be, it’s not worth holding your breath.”
Oh really? The original leaker wouldn’t trust Breitbart and his pile of cash after giving those off-the-record messages to Tucker Carlson for free?
Even beyond the original leaker, there are 400 or so members, and not all of them have had the long and presumably lucrative careers of Paul Krugman or Joe Klein. If Weigel’s description is accurate, about 300 or so never made many comments, so they wouldn’t be personally embarrassed by the leak. It’s not like Breitbart needs a quorum; he needs one — the one who could most use $100,000 in this economy. Paraphrasing another famous cinematic scene, first prize is $100,000 and the second person who offers Breitbart the archives might get a set of steak knives, or couple bucks so that he can verify the veracity of the first archive sent his way.

Apparently the newsletter is being sent in some new format that doesn’t work well on some e-mail systems; I’ve forward the issues to the powers that be to ensure Chaka is appropriately flogged.