I know what you mean, Randall.
xkcd: Escalators
The Reality-Based Community: Fair is fair
Reposted in its hilarious entirity, “Fair is Fair” by Michael O’Hare at RBC:
The “worst president ever?” meme has floated from bitter-liberal whining lounges to mainstream venues and plutocrats like Donald Trump, who should know which side their bread is buttered on. This piling-on in the face of the clear facts has to stop if Democrats want to keep a shred of intellectual respectability.
History simply will not support this level of condemnation. Never mind presidents from decades back, here are five contemporary presidents who completely refute the idea that
Bush is the worst:
None of the antiwar protesters arrested in Washington Friday night were
beaten in captivity. Not a single fractured skull or broken jaw. Bush is much more protective of civil rights and free speech than Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe.
Bush has never, ever, claimed to have an herbal AIDS cure revealed by ancestors in a dream, nor touted it to replace anti-retroviral drugs. Bush is much less anti-scientific than
Yahya Jammeh, president of Gambia.
The number of US dissidents killed overseas by plutonium poisoning is zero, and the number
of US businessmen ruined and imprisoned for opposing the government is also zero. Bush is much more respectful of law and property than Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.
Bush hasn’t tried to fire even one Supreme Court justice, much less a chief justice. He’s much more respectful of separation of powers than Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan.
Bush hasn’t named a single city, river, month, or day of the week after himself, and aggressive research has turned up no gold-plated colossal statues of him, not even silver-plated. Bush is much less egotistical and narcissistic than Sapurmurat Niyazov, the late president of Turkmenistan.
George W. Bush, better than many presidents; let’s give credit where credit is due.
WSJ vs. NYT in a subscription model deathmatch
Over at the Freakonomics blog, there was some discussion of why the Wall Street Journal has a subscription wall while almost every other newspaper in America allows free online access to its news product. Author Steven Levitt opined that someone has to be wrong: the WSJ or the rest of the newspaper industry.
I posted multiple comments, not so much because I had a lot to say, but because the comment engine on Levitt’s blog (probably wisely) strips out HTML tags and properly renders multiple spaces as a single space. (No, I have no idea what the comment engine here does. I don’t comment on my own blog. That’d be kinda onanistic.) But my point was that the WSJ and the New York Times have almost inverse pay/free models and good/crappy products. To wit:
| New York Times | Wall Street Journal | |
|---|---|---|
| News Pages | Spotty (mostly bad) but free | Good but costly |
| Editorial Pages | Spotty (mostly good) but costly | Bad but free |
(One of the nice things about having your own blog is the ability to drill down to the HTML and hand code a damned table when you need to.)
What may be at work here is that the WSJ is an outlier, a special case: a truly national business paper that is unique and can charge for access to its news content because of its intrinsic value. (Well, that and the added value of being from the Wall Street Journal, whose news pages have been above reproach despite the lunacy over at Editorial, probably a far greater achievement than most people realize.)
Victory Is Not an Option – washingtonpost.com
The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war.
That first line of Gen. Odom’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post is really all you need to read. The rest is Odom’s methodical delineation of what’s gone wrong and what we can do to make it right and just how we can get our collective nuts out of the roaring fire Bush and company lit in Iraq (and are trying, like demented, defrocked Boy Scouts intent on a pyromania badge, to light in Iran). That we have a president (and for real nuttiness, see Vice President Cheney on any given day; it’s quite an accomplishment to make Bush look like he’s in touch, but Cheney sometimes manages it) who can’t see past his illusions is bad enough; that we have one whose illusions are killing and maiming American soldiers and Marines (who come back to be treated like shit at Walter Reed, apparently) by the truckload is unforgivable. I don’t care that the right wing will whip up its nut cases with a cry of “It’s retaliation for Clinton!”, we’ve got to impeach Bush and Cheney before there’s a mushroom cloud over Tehran. The American soul has been besmirched enough, damn it!
The Post-Perfect Storm
Today’s Washington Post may be a weather map to the perfect storm that has hit America.
Upper left: A story about how the government been robbing Peter (in this case climate research) to pay Paul (Mars, bitches!, etc.). I mean screw figuring out what’s wrong with the house we live in, let’s daydream about a trip to Australia by car!
Upper middle: A digital day in the life. I’m always amazed at how amazed professional, top-tier reporters can be amazed by things I’ve known about for months if not years. I’ve ceased to be amazed at their inability to make the leap necessary to take the story from the obvious (e.g., the phone company has tracked phone calls ever since it began charging money for it, i.e., forever) to deeper understanding (it’s the low cost of storage, the consolidation of data, the mining of data, the “national security” backdoors that are so ineptly constructed that they leave portals into people’s lives that a script kiddie could drive a black ice Hummer through that really matter, not that suddenly that we notice how much of our lives occur in public).
Upper right: Bush says after years of running the budget into the ground with a compliant, Republican-run (but I repeat myself) Congress, it’s now up to the new Democratic-run (barely in one house, lest we forget) Congress to change his diaper, clean his backside, exchange any clothing soiled by his excesses, and, for good measure, prevent any further blowouts–all while letting him run amok in Iraq and at home. He needs the Hannibal Lecter handtruck treatment.
Right side, second story: It seems the Iraqi “government” still can’t hold a lynching without screwing something up. Here’s a first step to not embarrassing yourself while hanging people: Stop hanging people. At least bring back the hooded, muscled man with the scimitar and give the beheadings a bit more grandeur, people. Or maybe something more civilized, like not rushing headlong to kill anyone and making sure not only that you have had a fair trial, but fair punishment as well.
Right side, third story: Yes, folks, it’s been five years since the first person was hauled to Gitmo from far off lands, possibly never to return, face anything resembling a fair trial, or otherwise leave the hell on earth America has built next to the Communist Paradise of the West.
And at the lower left: Ladies and gentlemen, one of the things the Post does pretty well, packing a lot of localish crap into a single story on A1. If you’ve driven around here and had to stop for anything other than gas, chances are you got a parking ticket. Along with specious moving violations and other draconian non-moving offenses, this has got to be one of the top revenue sources for local governments in the region.
Metro: Martin Luther King? Look in Metro. He’s not A1 material anymore. Yesterday’s news. Beyond that, today’s Metro section is a prime example of the Post‘s attitudes of “eff local, we don’t need no stinkin’ suburbs” and “Virginia uber alles” (the second prevails if there’s a conflict). Would it have killed them to put a Maryland story on A1 in the Maryland Edition instead of the Virginia parking ticket pastiche? Maybe the big school construction thing? But of course, anyone reading a newspaper is too old to have kids, or too smart to live in Maryland or D.C.
Business: Golly gee, a mirror that has a Web cam and can display IMs. Alert Steve Jobs. (See earlier snark about journalists and technology.) Why the hell, other than the huge monetary impact it has on Big Pharma, is the BioShield (government preparedness for bio-attack) story here? There isn’t even a business mentioned on the section front. Look honey, a navel-gazing newspaper business story (tip to readers: stick to Editor and Publisher, they have a clue about the business without being mired in it), and something about a hotel magnate blogging. Business sections after holidays suck even worse than usual, because that’s when the reporters pretend they’re with the Style section and (usually–there are some fine business writers around, including some at the Post) show why they aren’t.
Sports: Apparently the Sports section’s recipe for survival is 1 part game recap and stats anyone with an Internet connection could have read for 8-16 hours + 2 parts columnists, half panderers and half shockers, + some graphics and agate, most of which has again been available, free, online to anyone interested enough to look for it, plus lots of TV time for Tony “I’ll make you miss Dennis Miller” Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon. I sometimes think the only people who read agate are non-stats freaks following out of town teams.
Health: Decent article on warm-winter caused allergies inside aside, the rest is middling to poor.
Style: Finally, something I’m at an absolute loss for explaining: Yet again, the Style section is far more relevant and important, e.g. today’s coverage of the Appeal for Redress movement, than the “news” sections of the newspaper. Hell, it even does a good job with congressional representation for D.C. But it’s the Style section. The writers, while one of the finest Style section stables in the land, are constrained by the section itself: snappy, scrappy writing in the space allowed by all the Kids Post, funnies, puzzles (not that, heaven forfend, I am advocating a reduction in those three; they are probably the best parts of the paper day in and day out), celebrity trash, television, music, theater, quirky crap and all the other things that help the Style section speak to people with too much free time, free money or both (those latter could be abolished without much crying from me).
So there you have it: Passing of the buck on a monumental scale, not that the story would lead you to any such conclusion; a story far too clueless for consumption in what may be one of the best informed, technologically adept metro areas in the nation; national embarrassment; MLK relegated to Metro because that was yesterday, just like your civil rights; traffic tickets! (please ignore our paltry Metro coverage); well, we have the dysfunctional, blame-everyone-else CEO president, why not cover government in the Business pages; Marriott blogs!; sports is life, Sports section is irrelevant; Style’s got at least two stories that should be on the front page of the paper, much less given the Leeza-Gibbons-in-print treatment. And it’s still a top ten American newspaper, no doubt.
From the "Deranged Data" Files
According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the most stolen car in the state of Kentucky is … the 1986 Olds Cutlass. An ’86 Cutlass Ciera S 2 Dr Coupe with 150,000 miles, 2 barrel carb and automatic transmission in average condition would run you about $196 from a private party in Henderson, Ky. according to Edmunds. (Zip code 42420 chose at random from Kentucky zip codes. Why? Because I can.)
WTFO?
How many of these are even still running and in stealing-worthy condition?
Is there some kind of Cutlass-pimping culture that values the originality and verve of the ’86 above all?
Have the Hatfields and McCoys gone from shooting each other to playing Capture the Cutlass?
Freakin’ weird, it is.
My inner grammar Nazi makes an appearance
Commas, semicolons, colons, lists and “andâ€, and how they work together to handle nested lists.
Poor usage:
“Metro’s operating expenses are paid through three sources: passenger fares, revenue raised by the agency through advertising and other sources and taxpayers in the District, Maryland and Virginia.†— “Metro Considers Increasing Rail Fares†by Lena H. Sun, Washington Post Dec. 11, 2006, Page A11 (from A1).
What’s happening here? There’s a list, the colon tells us that, but then there is but one, wait, no, two commas and three “andâ€s to help us sort it out. No semicolons. Lots of words that go together in confusing ways.
The most likely answer is that there are nested lists and we need some way to sort them out, and this is where semicolons working with colons, commas and “andâ€s shine.
Try this:
“Metro’s operating expenses are paid through three sources: passenger fares; revenue raised by the agency through advertising and other sources; and taxpayers in the District, Maryland and Virginia.â€
Not only is this now clear, but it opens the sentence up to paring unnecessary words.
Thus:
“Metro’s operating expenses are paid from: fares; advertising and other revenue; and taxes from the District, Maryland and Virginia.â€
No need to say “three sources, because our semicolons make that perfectly visible, and this leads us away from other cruft like “passenger fares†and “revenue raised by the agency.â€
My inner grammar Nazi usually stays in the background, but occasionally there’s something that requires action.
Intipuqueños celebrate … someone … or something
Among the anonymous sources floating administration trial balloons and salacious dirt came a nice front-page story in today’s Washington Post about Salvadorans living in Washington who return to their home town of Intipucá in the “state” of La Unión, and the changes in the town and the emigrants. It’s a pretty good story, with a lot of cultural sensitivity and human interest in both El Salvador and Metro Washington. But the narrative hook the reporter chose was the event that drew back the former residents, referred to as a “patron saint festival” apparently honors some saint whose name must not be mentioned. It’s really the celebration of the immaculate conception of Mary, which is rather more of an event than a “patron saint,” unless you’re going to claim that Mary was a different person at each of the celebrated eras of her life.
South America may be the last place outside of Vatican City where the Catholic calendar of saints is still the defining latticework partitioning out the year. Cities and towns traditionally celebrate one (or more) of the festivals much like American ones do everything from oatmeal to pickles to pumpkin chunkin’ on any given weekend, in addition to the major feasts that everyone celebrates like Carnivale, Christmas and Easter (or New Year’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas for the states). Referring to the festival in this way may be intended to preserve its relationship to festivals honoring saints’ entire lives, but it doesn’t make grammatical sense nor does it tell that the city is honoring not only Mary, but what is perhaps one of the most agreed-upon celebrations in Catholicism, and it is only one of several festivals in the calendario de fiestas patronales that honor something other than a single saint, from the divine face of Jesus to the black Christ of Esquipulas, a statue of Jesus in dark wood housed in a nearby Guatemala town that is now the most significant pilgrimage site on the continent. Mary herself is celebrated in many different ways, both as symbol and as person.
Why would a story sensitive enough to use the correct name for a town native, intipuqueño and intipuqueña, including the tilde (though it omits the accent from the town’s name and capitalizes the nouns despite proper Spanish usage, both common occurrences in American newspapers; the presence of the tilde in so many may be due to the difference in meaning between ano and año and the popularity of a telenovela rendered in many listings as “Los Anos Perdidos,” babelfish.altavista.com translation: The Lost Anuses) gloss over the question of what the focus of the festival actually is? After all, this isn’t just a festival of Mary, it’s a festival of the immaculate conception, an event signifying Mary’s lack of original sin, probably the most important reason she is held in adoration by Catholics comparably to Jesus, the only woman of comparable importance among prominent religions and certainly of the Abrahamic strains. It’s probably too much to ask that the writer note that the immaculate conception celebrates Mary’s conception (and existence thereafter) in a state of grace and is set on a date (Dec. 8, though Intipucá starts two days earlier) nine months in advance of Mary’s birth, a parallel to the celebration of the incarnation of Christ on March 25, nine months before Christmas, and not the virgin birth. But in a story about a significant minority in a geographic area with a sizable Catholic population (both Salvadoran and other nationalities), naming the festival wasn’t important?
Pierce Presley is a graduate student in journalism at the University of Memphis and a freelance writer living in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. He received his B.A. from Loyola University New Orleans, a Jesuit Catholic university.
Note: edited to correct babelfish link.
The Death (by Inches) of Journalism
I have rarely read anything I’ve hated to have to agree with more, but Marty Kaplan accurately describes the current situation in big-time journalism.
Since most of us who are in journalism aren’t there, the question becomes (at least in part), what do I aspire for now? How do I make a living doing what I love without selling my soul to the point that I no longer love it? Can I continue to do this in light of the tarnish these idiots have put on my profession, avocation, whatever?
Why isn’t Woodruff isn’t joining Miller on the unemployment line? Even more so and even quicker, since he’s an icon. She was, in many ways, a product of favoritism much like Jayson Blair (and for a similar reason, too; except in her case, it was “see, we do have conservatives” instead of “see, we do have minorities’) and her statements as to her perception of her job clearly illustrate her bankruptcy as a journalist. He is, along with Carl Bernstein, the reason many of us got into this business, someone who spoke truth to power and blew the bastard’s damned kneecap off. (Bonus points for those recognizing the second reference.) But when the leaders transgress, is it not worse than when the flock does? Aren’t they supposed to be somehow elevated, held to a higher standard? (Please don’t give me any of the oversimplified democracy crap about how we’re all equal unless you’re willing to support election to public office by random means; I’m ambivalent and unsure if it would be that much worse.)
If you care at all about journalism and democracy, do something. (I’m writing this, for starters.) Push your paper, station, whatever to cover this, not just repeat the RNC talking points released into the magical media echo chamber. Write something yourself, and send it in. Call, write, fax, moon your representatives and senators, anything to get the message across. (Note: message mooning tends to require the assistance of another person for legibility. Caveat exposor.) Shake the hell out of the next person who says “they’re all corrupt”–if we run the corrupt ones out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered, other corrupt ones will be less likely to try and take up residence in the capital. Same thing for the next person who pillories the entire media–there are still some who can read, think and report,, like Keith Olbermann and the K-R DC Bureau. Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are worth more to a functioning democracy than a thousand Millers and Woodruffs.
Marty Kaplan
11.17.2005
Journalism: R.I.P.
Mainstream journalism has cancer. The diagnosis – stage three, terminal – was made this week, by anyone with eyes to see.
Before now, the symptoms were alarming, but there was still hope. Fox’s “liberal media†lie; the reduction of all debates to polarized left/right shouting matches; the triumph of infotainment and missing-white-women-as-news over information we actually need to know; the substitution of he-said/she-said for shoe-leather and fact-finding; the social coziness of reporters and sources; the bottom-line obsession; the consolidation of power in fewer and fewer owners’ hands’ the politicization of public broadcasting – these, and more, were tumors, but their fatal metastasizing was not inevitable.
But the coverage of the battle between the White House and the Democrats over the use of prewar intelligence, and the reporting on l’affaire Woodward, is the end of the road for the mandarin gatekeepers.
Read the rest at the Huffington Post
What he said, and more
From Billmon:
I know that the freest and fairest societies are those with a free press . . . publishing information that the government does not want to reveal. If they can do that, surely I can face prison to defend a free press.
Judith MillerEven under the best of circumstances, that would have been a repulsive exercise in shameless pandering. But coming from Judy Miller — the Pentagon’s favorite pre-war pipeline for feeding WMD bullshit to the American public — it’s enough to induce projectile vomiting. …
When I read Miller’s little speech, I’m afraid something snapped. Fuck journalistic principles. I was glad Judge Hogan locked the bitch up — I only wished he’d thrown the key away. And since we’re dealing with a critical national security threat here — after all, there’s a traitor running around the White House making things easier for nuclear terrorists — it occurred to me that a few stress positions might be in order for a high value detainee like Miller, or maybe a little of the Fear Up Harsh approach — with a nice lemon chicken dinner afterwards, of course.
Pierce says: You know, if I needed any other evidence that this is just another episode of Judith Miller’s persecution complex theater, this little speech would be it. But she’s dragged far too many journalists on stage with her, and it’s time to stop enabling her sad act.
Note to Ms. Miller: I don’t know exactly why you’re going to jail, whether it’s pure obstinance or protecting one of your pimps, but it sure the hell isn’t as a staunch defender of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. I have a strong feeling it’s much more about not being seen as the obvious tool you’ve been, not to mention part of the fine New York Times tradition of admitting error only when it doesn’t do anybody much damned good; and to try to hide behind the soldiers you helped put in harm’s way for a shitload of lies is crass beyond measure and unforgivable. If you’re a journalist, call me something else; I would hate for anyone to conflate myself and my work with you.
It’s a damned shame so many people in journalism, both individually and collectively as professional organizations, feel they must stand by this useless, self-important hack who’s using the First Amendment as a damned toreador’s cape to distract and distort. I’m all for defending the First Amendment, even on principal alone in cases where the speech (or speaker) is repugnant, but that’s not what is happening here. Miller’s defenders are merely aiding a serial liar.