Weekend Tids and Bits

 

 

Pravda and RNC Agree On America’s Direction – The Republican National Committee took some heat for calling the Democrats socialists, but they’ve been vindicated by no less an authority than the online edition of Pravda, the famed Russian daily. Stanislav Mishin writes on May 29 that “It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.” You can catch more from conservative Republicanism’s  apparent new soulmate at:

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-1/

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Never Lie to Liars might be advice former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik would find interesting. He’s been indicted by a Washington, D.C. federal grand jury for lying to Bush White House officials who were considering him for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik’s lawyer says his client is innocent. Some speculate the alleged lies were discovered as part of a routine Bush White House search for weapons of mass destruction.

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Clever, Those Open Meetings Advocates – One of the newspaper heavyweights who showed up at a non-publicized  meeting in Chicago’s O’Hare Hilton to talk about “Models to Lawfully Monetize Content” on the web was quoted in Editor & Publisher as saying the meeting wasn’t secret because a sign on the hotel room door said “NAA Meeting.” That could clearly identify it as a meeting of the nation’s top newspaper brass under the umbrella of Newspaper Association of America, with headquarters on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, VA. Of course, it could also identify a meeting of the National Apartment Association (NAA) also with headquarters on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, VA. Or the National Auctioneers Association (NAA), Overland Park, KS., or the National Aeronautic Association  (NAA) of Washington, D.C., or. . .

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Full and Complete Disclosure And Then Some continues to come to Louisiana politics with the latest announcement by porn star Stormy Daniels that she’s formed an exploratory committee to gauge interest for a possible run against U.S. Senator David Vitter. She’s currently on a listening tour. Political insiders wonder whether or not a possible Senate run would falter on face recognition, since that’s the potential candidate’s least-photographed feature.

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Reporting Well Is The Best Revenge

 

Leaders of supposedly competitive businesses who get together and discuss things tempt both fate and the federal anti-trust laws, especially if the discussion is about prices. And if they lead big enough companies with high public profiles, they can probably count on having five business reporters for every meeting invitee.

 

Unless, of course, they’re the titans who employ most of the reporters. Then they can simply not say anything and feel safe from the glare of the media spotlights they own and control.

 

That must have been the reasoning as a couple of dozen certified media hotshots fluttered into the O’Hare Hilton Thursday for a discreet Newspaper Association of America-prompted discussion sanitarily titled “Models To Lawfully Monetize Content.” The discussion among most major U.S. newspaper publishers was so lawful, in fact, the NAA would later say it took place “with anti-trust counsel present.”

 

That’s reminiscent of a couple of young Alaskans who said they used protection, but anyway, the hush-hush meeting’s agenda was said to have an 8:10 a.m. kickoff.

 

James Warren had it on The Atlantic’s web site at 8:31.

 

In detail. With names of individuals and the companies they represented, the topics to be discussed and Warren’s take on the day, including the full disclosure that as a former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune:

 

 “At the behest of new corporate superiors (yes, some from radio), I helped oversee the painful layoffs of about 100 in the Chicago Tribune newsroom last year, before being dispatched by someone the Marlon Brando character in ‘Apocalypse Now’ might characterize as ‘an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill.’”

 

A less-sanitized title of the NAA’s meeting might have been “We’re All Bleeding Ad Dollars, So How Do We Start Making A Buck From The Content We’ve Been Giving way For Free?” And a person without a trusting soul might speculate that on the advice of counsel, all the participants were thinking individually, by coincidence and without collusion that “if we all stick together, here we might pull this off.”

 

But that’s speculation.

 

What isn’t speculation is that Warren’s reporting found its way into the online worlds of Editor & Publisher, Poynter Online’s Romenesko, Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab, Politico, Slate, The Huffington Post, Gawker, MediaWeek, mediabistro.com and elsewhere. The story even made the AP’s news report, which dutifully mentioned that AP CEO Tom Curley had been at the meeting.

 

You remember reporting. It used to be done in newspapers, and some of it still is.

 

But as James Warren just demonstrated, including to a couple of dozen media moguls who shouldn’t have needed the lesson, reporting doesn’t depend on newspapers. Newspapers, especially ones seeking to replacer ad dollars with content dollars, might hope to depend on reporting.

 

You know, reporting from the folks who’ve been let go by the thousands, or had their salaries and benefits slashed to keep up debt payments or stock prices for the bonus babies at the helm.

 

So here’s hoping reporters will continue to report, but not in newspapers – reporting well is the best revenge.

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See Warren’s Atlantic piece at: http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/james_warren/2009/05/shhhh_newspaper_publishers_are_quietly_holding_a_very_very_important_conclave_today_will_you_soon_be.php

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Sotomayor and Republican Choices

 

 

President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court shows the president at his most gracious towards the Republicans who bedevil him, giving them a choice and a voice in one of a President’s most enduring decisions.

 

Sure, the choice is like that 20 states give condemned inmates facing execution, allowing them a say in method, not outcome. Hey, it’s a choice, right?

 

And if the voice Senate Republicans get is the kind heard after a warden says “Any last words?”  they still can’t claim being denied a voice.

 

Senate Republicans trying to resist a growing urge to lie down in front of any steamroller they see have limited options in opposing Sotomayor, all of them bad.

 

Republicans can oppose Sotomayor because she’s female. Of course, they wouldn’t say so explicitly, but the party’s Cheney/Limbaugh base, which can only see women in either nighties or cooking aprons, would understand and approve.

 

Women voters, of course, might see it differently. In the 2008 presidential election, Republicans lost unmarried women by a 70-29 margin. And they lost women overall 56-43. Opposing the nominee because she’s female would certainly build on that record.

 

Republican can oppose Sotomayor because she’s Hispanic. In a 2001 lecture, she is reported to have said “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

 

“Racist!” yells the Republican core, which admittedly ought to know, but is wrong on this one. If the idea, as it says on the Supreme Court building, is “Equal Justice Under Law,” than those dispensing justice must at least in some way connect with those judged – and with the likely real-world consequences of their decisions.  That won’t wash with the Republican core, which is made nervous by census data showing Hispanics account for more than 15 percent of the U.S. population, and downright jittery when they look at the 2008 results with Democrats taking Hispanics 67-31. If Republicans seek even more distance from the Hispanic electorate, opposing Sotomayor is the ticket.

 

Republicans can oppose Sotomayor because she’s liberal. Of all the grounds for opposition, this is the least odious. It chucks a scrap to the snarling core that that bays attack when it sniffs the L-word, and at least  spritzes GOP Senators with Eau De Principle. But the record of Supreme Court justices voting the way folks who nominated and confirmed them thought they would isn’t good. Soon to-be-retired Justice David Souter, who was supposed to be a safe and solid conservative appointee of President Bush I, ended his career as a mostly liberal vote on the court. This course won’t cause more self-inflicted Republican damage, but it won’t gain any converts, either.

 

Prediction: Republicans will oppose Sotomayor because she’s a female Hispanic liberal. With a sure instinct to find the worst of all possible outcomes in any recent political situation, the Republican party will manage to offend all possible new constituents while catering to a core that sees Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney as the rising young hopes of tomorrow.

 

If the post-Sotomayor confirmation Republicans are offered a last meal, they shouldn’t be surprised if it’s crow.

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New Rules, Same Virus, Same Media

 

The World Health Organization has answered an ancient riddle:

 

Q: When is a pandemic not a pandemic.

 

A: When you call it something else.

 

The World Health Organization said Friday it would revise its rules for declaring a spreading disease a pandemic. The disease-du-jour, of course is H1N1, Swine Flu to its friends, and its rapid geographic spread a few weeks back was the cause of even more rapidly spreading silliness among governments, health organizations and the media.

 

Schools were closed, government offices darkened, dust masks were donned and handshaking, hugging and kissing became antisocial acts as the media went into Energizer Bunny journalism mode. When the W.H.O. raised its threat level to five on a six-point scale, so much dark suit/deep tone manure was spread that the few apparent facts had trouble fighting their way to the surface. Those that made it included:

 

·        The new flu spread rapidly, but no more rapidly than the usual annual flu.

·        The new flu could kill, but far fewer deaths have been connected to it than the routine thousands of deaths from even mild regular flu seasons.

·        Far from being new, the flu strain could have been circulating among pigs for years.

 

On the Monday after it announced it was rethinking things, W.H.O. figures showed almost13,000 confirmed H1N1 cases in 46 countries, with 92 deaths. The same day, a W.H.O. press release on yellow fever mentioned that disease’s estimated toll at 206,000 annual cases and 52,000 deaths.

 

Yellow fever, of course, suffers from bad press relations when compared to Swine Flu, and has been unable to grasp the same amount of worldwide public attention in spite of striking almost 16 times the victims of swine flu and taking 565 times the lives.

 

As far as what the new rules might be or whether Swine Flu might move from Stage 5 to Stage 6 in the Pandemic Pantheon, here’s what I was able to find on the W.H.O. website in the last paragraph of a May 18 report:

 

“Moving from Phase 5 to Phase 6

34. The current process is based purely on geographical spread and not on severity of disease. Several Member States spoke in favour of giving the Director-General greater flexibility in the progression between different phases.”

 

Although this quote is in International CratSpeak, and translation is a notoriously difficult art, it seems the gist is that Member States told the Director-General to lay off the alarm bell and stop scaring folks needlessly.

 

I could find no similar guidance on any of several media organization sites, but if the World Health Organization disease monitor process becomes rational, the media will respond as  they always have to news that contradicts news previously reported.

 

They’ll ignore it.

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Republican Soul,

Convergent Series

 

Republicans are fighting for their party’s soul, which may be welcome news to those who wondered if it had one, but distressing to whole generations of political journalists who are accustomed to easy work reporting on the squabbles between Democrats and Republicans:

 

 WASHINGTON – Democrats in the House said the moon was made of green cheese today, but Republicans declared it evidence of undue influence by the cracker lobby.  All that kind of political journalism took was pairing an absurdity from the Democrats with another from the Republicans -- and both parties were eager to keep you supplied.

 

Now, political journalists are confronted with a Republican party that seems determined to argue itself out of existence, hell-bent on excluding those whose ideology isn’t pure. The current purity standard is agreeing with the Test Committee’s views.

 

The Test Committee, of course, consists of Rush Limbaugh, a radio commentator whose volume is inversely proportional to his intellect, and Dick Cheney, whose pioneering work on the Adjustable Moral Compass speaks for itself.

 

Now the Test Committee is trying to hustle Colin Powell out of the party, saying his endorsement of Barack Obama over John McCain was the final straw. Informed sources say previous straws included Powell’s belief that the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun.

 

All of which, the Test Committee says, amounts to ample reason for excluding a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State from discussion of serious Republican matters. Even if he says he’s a Republican and all that service was under Republican presidents.

 

So the debate pretty much comes down to whether the Republican party is more comfortable in Ronald Reagan’s Big Tent, where it lived in the 80s, or in the much more exclusive Cheney-Limbaugh Club, the one with the prominent  Members Only sign.

 

The Cheney-Limbaugh founders have made it pretty plain that they don’t want Powell around, and Powell has made it pretty plain that they can stick that in their ear. (Ever rational, Powell chose ears as the receptacle after clear evidence that neither Cheney nor Limbaugh could find the other obvious place with both hands.)

 

Backers of the Cheney-Limbaugh Club say their faction will win the dispute and that the Republican party will become smaller but purer and go on forever. And in that, they may be more right than they know.

 

In 1979, science fiction writer Larry Niven published a story in which a demon intent on collecting a soul may only reappear within the confines of a pentagram -- which the protagonist cleverly draws on the demon’s belly. Every time the demon tries to appear, it’s too big for the pentagram, and so shrinks itself and tries again -- and again, and again, since each time it shrinks itself smaller, it makes its target smaller still.

 

Niven called the story Convergent Series, and there’s squiggly-line math about the concept, but the important thing to remember for Republicans is that it’s a story about eternal shrinking.

 

However big the pentagrams on the Cheney-Limbaugh bellies look now, Republicans should think twice about appearing there.

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Memorial Day

 

 

So it’s Memorial Day, and what do you say?

 

Happy Memorial Day?

 

Visit Arlington National Cemetery and you’ll know that it is an honored place, a quiet place, a clean place and even a beautiful place -- but not a happy place. Some there served their country and lived full lives afterward. Some there served their country and got no afterward.

 

Today we honor those who served whether they now lie in Arlington’s ranks or other cemeteries across the world or simply where they fell.

 

We will sing patriotic songs, watch stirring parades, listen to oratory that soars and oratory that drones, sometimes mixing a memory with a tear and sometimes with a smile. But we’ll do it to honor these American men and women we know to be at rest and hope to be at peace.

 

But that’s a job only half done. We have honored our dead. How about the living?

 

Active-duty and reserve members of the armed forces number some 2.3 million, volunteers all. Their work is important, often difficult and obviously dangerous. They do it with distinction and at personal sacrifice.

 

Honor those who lie in Arlington and elsewhere even more by honoring those who wear our country’s uniform and walk among us. Say hello, say thanks, buy a burger or a beer, give a handshake or a hug, a laugh, a giggle, a smile, directions, a ride – anything that might show them we know that they’re doing a good job for us.

 

And they are.

 

We need to remind ourselves to also do some good for them

 

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Looking for a way to help? Start with the USO, which has been helping men and women in our armed services since 1941. http://www.uso.org/howtohelp/