Weekend Tids and Bits

Governor Go Go Is Right for a change in a way not connected with the political spectrum. Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin visited New York City and went to a Yankees game with her 14-year-old daughter Willow, prompting CBS Late Show host David Letterman to make a joke about Willow getting “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” The governor snarled and Letterman offered a half-hearted, half-baked apology that boiled down to saying he meant to insult Bristol, Palin’s 18-year-old single-Mom daughter. That’s supposed to make it better? With Palin herself working so hard to keep comedy writers across the nation busy, her kids should be left alone. Those who want to follow the result of John McCain yielding to the Dementia Side of The Force should bookmark Anchorage Daily News’s politics reporting at http://www.adn.com/politics/ and take a look at http://www.adn.com/sarah-palin/.

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Saudi Arabia’s Tentative Steps to the Twelfth Century continued in June with the showing of a movie in Riyadh, the first such wild and crazy behavior in more than three decades. No women allowed of course, and no girls over the age of 10. Still, conservatives in the kingdom demonstrated against the obvious slide to decadence that could lead to –gasp! – mixing of the sexes. Contact between unmarried men and women is very strictly prohibited in the oil-rich kingdom. No wonder those camels always look nervous.

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Newspapers keep “preparedness” obits on hand so that when some notable sounds a final note, the obit is ready for quick updating and publication. Now that newspapers themselves are stumbling towards the Last Checkout counter, whoever will do the obit should ponder this tidbit: only about an average 14 percent of a paper’s operating budget goes to produce content. The rest is gobbled by printing, delivery and the suits who supervise. Look for more and a link at: http://news-cycle.blogspot.com/2009/06/moody-analyst-newspapers-cost-structure.html a page in the News Cycle blog.

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Magazine covers shouting doom are hardly new and not limited to Time Magazine, but the venerable news weekly has had some doozies. They’re neatly presented at Reason Online, the web presence of Reason Magazine. Look at http://reason.com/news/show/134038.html and enjoy the yucks that 20-20 hindsight makes possible. And enjoy it while it lasts, because if daily new publications are keeling over, weekly news publications shouldn’t be making long-term plans.

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Here’s a look at what we discussed this week:

n Monday we talked about child care tips for fathers that are very unlikely to come from mothers (or allowed to continue once discovered). http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/fathering-tips-fathers-day-is-less-than.html

n Tuesday was a ho-hum day talking about Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor’s broken ankle and Alaska’s Governor Go Go being accused of plagiarizing Newt Gingrich. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/news-is-busting-out-all-over-actually.html

n Wednesday was Federal Follies day as we follow our government’s relentless attempts to drive common sense out of the public arena. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/federal-follies-current-edition-tuesday.html

n Thursday’s topic explored free speech issues that develop when an employee says unkind things about a customer and an employer raps knuckles, Not a real sexy issue, but an important one if you’ve ever told your Facebook buddies that your boss needs the front half of a horse for a complete life. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/mind-your-mother-revisited-seems-like.html

n Friday covered the strange turn of events in Washington, where things are actually getting done. http://larryblaskosaid.blogspot.com/2009/06/strange-washington-signals-things.html

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Strange Washington Signals – Things Getting Done

Something out of the ordinary is almost always a sign that trouble may be afoot. That scratchy feeling in your throat, the car that chugs instead of purrs, the clothes dryer that sounds like The Incredible Hulk – all are signals experience has taught us to handle.

But there’s something extraordinary happening in Washington lately, and it’s so strange that most of us have no idea what to do. Difficult as it is to believe, it must be said in the open:

Washington is getting things done.

Now that’s not supposed to happen, of course. Washington in general and Congress in particular is where good ideas and citizens go to languish and fade. It is supposed to be a place of bitter partisan strife and naked personal ambition where duty and expediency are synonyms.

So how did it happen that the United States Senate passed a bill allowing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco at last, giving it broad powers over the product that kills 400,000 Americans a year? The bill is expected to be accepted by the House, which passed a similar measure earlier. President Obama, himself a struggling sometimes smoker, is eager to sign it.

This 79-17 Senate vote ends more than four decades of malign neglect after the first warnings that smoking cigarettes could kill you. And it happened in Washington.

That’s the same place where Congress and regulatory agencies nodded complacently while corporations floated all sorts of financial balloons and paid lavishly for the executive hot air that filled them. Or it was until the balloons popped. Now Washington is into regulation, whether by public law or public shame, to curb the worst excesses.

Corporate fat cats coughing up compensation hairballs are only part of the picture. Washington seems determined to do something about the national health system.

Started by employers trying to compete around World War II wage freezes, employer-provided health insurance became an assumption for most Americans – except those who didn’t have it.

As the have-not numbers increased and American health standings fell to a par with former Soviet republics, insurers and doctors wrapped themselves in the banner of free enterprise and fought off all attempts at change with the mighty club of “socialized medicine.”.

Now Washington is not talking about whether we will have health care reform, but what it will look like – an earthquake change in assumptions. “Socialized medicine” is now not so much a club as one of several proposals. That overdue earthquake follows economic legislation and other action that happened with a speed and sense of purpose not seen in Washington in decades.

Since any president’s administration takes lumps for things it couldn’t have controlled and accepts bouquets for being just plain lucky, it’s too soon to hand laurels for this change of tone and pace to an Obama administration yet to celebrate its first anniversary.

But it’s not too soon to say that a Washington where more problems are solved than are caused could get to be a pretty comfortable thing.

Let’s see if it continues.

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Mind Your Mother Revisited

Seems like Richard Richtmyer might want to rethink his Facebook friends while the rest of us rethink how public or private social networking forums really are and whether employers may discipline employees over postings.

Richtmyer, a newsman for The Associated Press, commented on Facebook about the executive management of McClatchy Newspapers, saying, according to a wired.com article, that “It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters.”

That was a reference to the woes at McClatchy, whose stock price has been wearing lead water wings since acquiring Knight-Ridder in time for The Great Newspaper Recession. The Facebook comment drew a reprimand from Mother AP, apparently tipped by one of Richtmyer’s “friends.”

The AP’s ethics policy is pretty clear: “Anyone who works for the AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP's reputation as an unbiased source of news. They must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum, whether in Web logs, chat rooms, letters to the editor, petitions, bumper stickers or lapel buttons, and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.”

The policy itself may be the last clear thing in sight for a while.

The News Media Guild, which represents AP employees, says on its web site that it has “has asked The Associated Press to provide copies of all its written communications with staff regarding Facebook postings and a copy of all the written reprimands given to employees since Jan. 1, 2009, because of comments made on Facebook.”

The Guild on its website mentions the National Labor Relations Act, which allows employees to discuss job-related things. McClatchy’s troubles are part of troubles in the news industry at large, and McClatchy is an AP member, so are comments about that job-related? The Guild’s web site explains that “Switching from job or labor issues to general attacks on the company's or a members' product, unrelated to any labor dispute, could fall outside the realm of protected speech under the act.”

So is it acceptable to say “the company (any company) made bonehead moves and that’s why we’re having layoffs,” but not acceptable to simply say “the company (any company) made bonehead moves because its leaders are boneheads?”

The flap also raises issues about how public Facebook postings are. Are they postings in “any public forum” as mentioned in the AP policy? Or is it just a password/privilege-controlled private discussion among friends? How many friends participating in a “private discussion among friends” turn it into a de facto public discussion?

These questions go far beyond the AP/Guild/Facebook kerfuffle and have their echoes in discipline and terminations in other industries that started when an employee said something their employer didn’t like. The online world, where employee and employer have digital megaphones of potentially equal volume, just highlights the issues.

Curious about how this will all sort out? Start with the assumption that all parties here are attempting to do the right thing, and start following the web discussions. Here are a few urls:

n http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/facebooksword/

n http://newsmediaguild.org/newsroom/guild_news/guild_presses_facebook_posting_reprimands

n http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090609/1837405183.shtml#comments

n http://gawker.com/5285261/ap-spanks-reporter-for-patently-true-facebook-post

n If the AP addresses this issue in a general press release, try looking for it here: http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressreleases/preleaseindex.html

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Federal Follies – Current Edition

Tuesday brought another fun day of our federal government at work working on appearing to be working. The highlights:

FALL NOW, HEAL LATER was the apparent message as the United States Supreme Court upheld the sanctity of the law that allows debtors to screw creditors. The decision capped roughly a day of anxiety over the pending sale of what’s left of Chrysler to Fiat. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on Friday issued a stay, the Legalspeak equivalent of “Hold on while we take a look.” What the court looked at was a claim by pension fund folks in Indiana that they were being screwed over more than was reasonable and customary in the Chrysler bankruptcy settlement. And looking is all the Supreme Court did, saying only that the sale could go forward without ruling on the merits of the Hoosier’s claims. The idea at the court is that a claim someone else’s action will cause harm is best settled by letting things happen and sorting them out later.

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SUCH A DEAL WE’VE GOT FOR YOU 789 Chrysler dealerships heard when a federal bankruptcy judge said Chrysler could terminate their franchises. The New York Times reported that Chrysler offered during the lengthy hearing to find others who would take the unsold inventory of dealers who got the judge-blessed axe; the AP reported the offer was good until Monday. Whether all this agida amounts to a future for a Chrysler governed by Fiat’s fiat remains to be seen. When Fiat left the U.S. market the last time, wags said the company’s name was really an acronym for Fix It Again Tony.

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NO RUSH TO JUDGMENT HERE was evident in New York when Ahmed Ghailani told a federal judge he was innocent of charges in connection with the August 17, 1998 bombing of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Nabbed in Pakistan in 2004, he went to the Bush administration’s Land of the Judicially Undead at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2006. On Tuesday he became the first Gitmo inmate to be tried in the United States civilian court system. Republicans have howled that trying Gitmo folks in the United States would be dangerous, inviting terrorism. No howls about the United States detaining someone for five years without a trial were readily available, nor were plans on what to do if the Tanzanian is acquitted.

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PAYING THEIR DEBT TO SOCIETY, or at least the U.S. Treasury, ten big banks got permission to pay the feds back $68.3 billion they got under the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). That program dipped into taxpayer wallets to cover losses banks took on loans to anything breathing and complicated derivative deals whose sole purpose seemed to be generating gigantic executive commission and bonus payments. Part of the rules for getting TARP coverage included rules limiting executive compensation and other restrictions. Of course, with the TARP dough back with Uncle Sam, the big banks are free to go their way, promising to sin no more. It’s all part of a new government financial tool called a Belief Swap – banks promise to believe government threats to regulate them in return for the government believing banks will reform.

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News Is Busting Out All over

Actually, not much, at least not much worth comment – and one of the joys of the web is that unlike newspapers or broadcasts that have to fill space whether or not anything interesting happened, blogs can call a ho-hum day when they see one. Tiny ripples of interesting stuff from Monday’s otherwise placid news waters:

Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor broke her ankle Monday morning at New York’s La Guardia airport as she boarded a plane to meet with senators in Washington. Conspiracy theorists were unable to connect any of the Republicans who have been sniping at Sotomayor’s nomination with the incident and most observers were content with the general observation that her ankle was not the part of Judge Sotomayor that Republicans wanted to see in a sling.

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Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was buzzed in some corners for allegedly plagiarizing from Newt Gingrich in a speech she made in Anchorage. You know, the one in which she mustered all the dignity of her office and declared “screw political correctness.” Issue seems to turn on whether or not Governor Go Go credited Gingrich enough in her speech. A quick look at the newt.org website found no striking mention of the issue, perhaps reflecting obvious disbelief that anyone would actually want to plagiarize him. Palin, in the meantime, continues to be the focus of high policy debate, including a poll on The Huffington Post website that wonders what, if anything, Governor Palin had on top of her red-painted toenails at a Sunday appearance. Study the issues and contribute to democracy by making your choice at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/08/sarah-palins-toenails-wha_n_212863.html

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The Beaver is Back, and we’re not talking the late 1950s/early 1960s TV show. The New York Times reports Tuesday that the critters once near extinction have become a dam nuisance – literally. Back from a 1900 population of 100,000 or so, they’re now somewhere between 10-15 million and build their ponds without bothering to get zoning or property permissions. They join a growing list of native critters that once hovered near extinction and now hang around suburban backyards, including deer, coyotes, bears, alligators and cougars.

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Fathering Tips

Fathers Day is less than two weeks away, an afterthought sort of holiday in which we honor Fathers, having honored Mothers the month before. Never mind that most Mothers wouldn’t have attained their exalted status without a vigorous assist from those who would become Fathers – the devil is in the PR war and Mothers have won.

That’s why the once-potent threat “Wait until your Father gets home,” has withered to “Wait until your Father gets home because it’s his turn to cook tonight, and don’t forget to tell him you all need a bath before bedtime.”

But just as Fathers once banded together to hunt the wooly mammoth and passed strategy and tactics from survivor to survivor, veteran fathers must now pass child-care and housekeeping tips to the new generation. After 40 years and three kids, these are gleanings from my wisdom.

BASICS

n Get a detachable shower head, the kind on a hose, and install it the bathroom your wife is least likely to use if you have more than one (bathrooms, not wives). It is invaluable for Infant and Toddler Care.

n Learn how to make rice. It is the basis of “Rice Surprise,” which is the name of every meal you will cook for the children. Beyond rice, vary the ingredients with whatever the refrigerator yields, which adds the “surprise” element.

n Get a dog. They are great for advice, assistance and not saying a word to your wife.

n Demand discretion. What happens when Daddy is in charges stays with when Daddy is in charge. For toddlers, forbidden treats will seal the deal. For older children, currency works wonders.

SITUATIONS

MESSY DIAPER – Stand kid in the bathtub previously equipped with the detachable shower head. Remove diaper, flushing contents into nearest toilet. Direct warm water stream to impacted area until water runs clear. (Note: If child is unable to stand, put them tummy-down on the tub edge with the target area inside the tub.)

DINNER TIME (also breakfast, lunch and snack) -- Use an ice cream scoop to put a ball of rice and a scoop of whatever was found in the refrigerator on each child’s plate. Microwave for two minutes, and serve, showing the ice cream scoop and saying “This is a scoop. It can scoop dinner and it can scoop ice cream. If you want it to scoop ice cream, it must see you finish your dinner.” Avoid specific descriptions of whatever food you’re serving, referring to all of it as “something nutritious,” so when your wife asks the kids what they ate, they can reply with honesty. Save leftovers.

DICIPLINE – That’s why you saved the leftovers. “Do that again and you’re going to get another helping!” works on the most intractable child.

TODDLER BATH TIME – Undress everyone and put them in the tub. Call the dog and put the dog in the tub. Using the detachable shower head, wet down all hands. Pour shampoo over the dog, scrubbing vigorously until there’s a good lather. Start rinsing the dog, which will shake, getting the kids all soaped up. Keep rinsing both kids and dog until the water runs clear. Dry all hands with the same towel.

WIFE COMES HOME EARLY – Play dumb. This should not be difficult. When she calms down enough, ask “Honey, how should I have done it?” and as she starts demonstrating, take the dog for a good long walk.

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