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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, August 14, 2009

On How Journalism Dies 

...if this report at Politico is true - a concept that all by itself triggers all sorts of wild riptides of cognitive dissonance - the New York Times has demonstrated, once and for all, why wingnut bullies are so effortlessly effective at stealing all the other kids' lunch money out there on the journalistic playground. The structure of the complaint by John Solomon, the Washington Times Executive Editor, is a classic example of intentionally misdirected conservative outrage: How DARE the NYT disparage the fine World Class Objective Journalism of the Washington Times newsroom staff! The only problem, and one that the leadership at the NYT can't seem to understand (but that leadership couldn't or wouldn't figure out Judith Miller back in the day, so there's no surprise here), is that there isn't any particular reason for the Washington Times to object to this particular line from the NYT story:
..."an outlet decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama, The Washington Times...."

Objectively, the Washington Times is an outlet that is decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama. While Mr. Solomon may want to make his newsroom staff shed hot angry tears at the alleged suggestion that all of their earnest efforts of Pure Journalism have been ground into dust by a few harsh words in the pages of the Gray Lady, the fact remains that the political leanings of the editorial leadership of news outlets has generally informed the manner in which those outlets have addressed and pursued "hard news" since sometimes before the day that Johannes Gutenberg first cooked up that movable type thing...

There's no need to be merely speculative about this, though. Let's go to the tape, Bob...

There's this 'straight news' story about how Obama is going back to the well six months into his presidency by blaming Bushco for the problems he faces. It is perfectly true, with regard to the basic facts, but ignores both the fact that Obama's observation is itself objectively true and that George W. Bush and his minions were still playing this same game six years after Bill Clinton left the White House...

There's this fascinating 'straight news' story that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that matters, but that consumed precious time and resources in the newsroom that finds itself so horrifically aggrieved by NYT accusations of partisanship. Apparently you can only tip your hat to the journalistic excellence on display here as the newsroom staff of the Washington Times cuts to the heart of all that matters, revealing in an exclusive report that people who object to a Democratic presidency are starting to buy stuff online that expresses their disgust with the whole idea of a not-Caucasian 'liberal' Democrat living in the White House; the on-line comment thread reaffirms just how objective this report is. This certainly demonstrates "News You Can Use"...

Probably the most useful example of the objective journalistic excellence of the Washington Times newsroom (which, if one understands Mr. Solomon correctly, is located on some desert island many thousands of miles distant from the editorial office spaces) is this particular recent EXCLUSIVE story about concerns raise by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about some aspects of some of the health care bills that are circulating through the House of Representatives. The objective journalistic excellence of the Washington Times newsroom is fully on display in this article:

A) Early in the article, the opinions of Dr. Amitabh Chandra of Harvard University disparaging elements of various House health care reform bills somehow neglect to mention that Dr. Chandra isn't actually a real live medical doctor speaking some sort of truth to power. He is, in fact, a 'doctor' of economics captured in the thrall of 'free market' health care processes that have nothing to do with effective delivery of health care and everything to do with the study of health care delivery as an economic activity...

2) The objectively journalistic reporting of the 4-2 vote to release the report neglects to mention that the two "Independent" members of the Commission on Civil Rights who voted with two Bush Republicans are, respectively, a law professor who is a contributor to a conservative blog called "The Right Coast" and the Director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation...

This is the sort of objective journalistic excellence that the NYT apparently disparaged when it characterized the Washington Times as being 'decidedly opposed' to the mere fact of Barack Obama. Assuming that the Political report about this little "inside baseball" disagreement is accurate (see above), what we really have here is a perfect example of the sort of institutional cowardice that has destroyed any understandable sense of what the 'fourth estate' was supposed to be about. The NYT story in question was exactly correct in identifying the Washington Times as being a politically-motivated adversarial voice to any initiative offered by the Obama administration and only the simplest fool would attempt to argue that the selection of stories that the newsroom staff are directed to feature and pursue is not somehow connected to the larger political and editorial philosophy of the "outlet". If the leadership of the NYT decideds that it needs to offer an apology to the Washington Times, you will know all you need to know about how, why, and where real journalism died...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:35 PM 2 comments

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Note To Self 

...as the following clip demonstrates, if you don't actually know much about a subject that you worked hard to muscle to the front of the town hall meeting line to prattle on about in front of all those cameras, don't agree - under any circumstances whatsoever - to go on Hardball, even though you think this may be your shot to become the next Joe the Plumber and you think that's a good thing. Exhibit A:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy


In real time, this got so brutal that I turned away to watch "Baseball Tonight" on ESPN. So, note to self; just say NO...
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:08 PM 0 comments

Speaking Truth To Deather Power 

...every so often (as in "once a week or so") my local wingnut fishwrap slips in a column on the weekday editorial page from somebody other than the normal desperate fare of a Kristol or a Krauthammer or a Brooks, presumably in order to support its own argument that it is something other than a print version of "fair and balanced" FAUX News. The effort is usually pretty lame, so I have to confess that it was a bit of a shock to see this particular column by Froma Harrop in tonight's paper...

I haven't seen much talk about this particular piece (it is probably an arguable fact that The Providence Journal isn't a major player in political commentary), but I've been kinda busy with real life the last several days, so maybe I just missed all the to-ing and fro-ing. Regardless, Ms. Harrop simply nails it with this column, at least as far as my narrow perspective as a parent is concerned...


The reaction of aging supporters of the whole "deather" argument opposing health care (or health insurance reform, if you prefer) has been bothering me for a few weeks now. My younger child is standing on the verge of moving out into a strange and difficult work situation. Assuming he can find a job in these difficult times, the odds are pretty good that his job won't have health benefits. As a Type 1 diabetic, he will be facing at least $500 per month in costs to just simply stay alive if there isn't a health plan out there that he can afford to purchase. At the same time, the very same senior citizens who don't believe he should have a "public optioin" insurance plan availabe to him will continue to see their physicians and get their drugs to treat their Type II diabetes - a disease that is almost entirely the result of poor choices they made over decades, even though they were told over and over that they should know better and do better - courtesy of Medicare coverage that my son has to pay for with his payroll and income taxes...

Like I said above, Harrop absolutely stuck the landing on this one. Since created YouTube-friendly flashmob action seems to rule the day in this healthcare debate, it is clearly time to round up a bus full of uninsured twenty-something Type 1 diabetics to drive around to all of these town hall meetings to front up against the birthers and deathers and all the rest of the fascist forces that want to kill heath care reform with noise alone. Far too many of these "greedy geezers" are an embarrassment to any clear understanding of that whole concept of 'paying it forward' that we thought they, our parents, were trying to teach us. Their selfish hunger to make sure they "get theirs" at the expense of the rest of the country, even though they may not get that "theirs" is a socialist program, is something that their grandchildren - who have to pay for all that "theirs" even though they can't afford their own health insurance - probably aren't going to understand...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:28 PM 0 comments

Monday, August 10, 2009

A Country Music Post....Because I Can 

...I can point to almost the exact point on the road map of my life where I began to listen to country/western music for enjoyment. It was during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, when I first started working at my small home-town radio station. For reasons I still don't understand, the station manager decided I should work the time slot from sign-on at 5 a.m. until 7 a.m. Monday through Friday (there's an attractive proposition for a teenager: get up at four o'clock in the morning every day). Even though there was a strict programing format at this MOR AM station, I reasoned that the only other people who were up at that time of the morning were Central Idaho working folk like loggers and ranchers and wheat farmers, and I figured that they would probably be more interested in hearing country music than the mild early 70's Top 40 pop music that filled most of the pie slices on each hour's circular playlist chart...

Long story short, I threw out the format, playing mostly country music, and nearly got fired. It was only through influence-peddling by my parents, who responded to friends' questions concerning why I had quit playing "good" music and had gone back to that "hippie-dippy" stuff (I used my real name on the air, and - it being a small town - everybody knew whose strangely deep-voiced kid I was) by saying that I would be fired if I didn't follow the format, that my job was saved. Since some of those friends were major advertisers, pressure was applied (although I didn't know that until later), and the station manager revealed to me that he had had an epiphany about the early morning format and I should keep doing what I had been doing. In any event, I started playing mostly country music because I thought it responded to the likely audience (on night shifts, I smuggled in the music I listened to: albums by Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, The Who, Pink Floyd, Chicago, and other groups whose singles didn't often show up in our playlist stack; nearly got fired for that, too). I ended up playing country music because some of it - not all of it (I'm looking at you, Conway Twitty), but some of it - had a raw emotional purity that captured my attention...

Some of it, I must also admit, was just simply fun to listen to...

I'm recounting this history of mine to set the context for headline that caught me by surprise this evening: "Country duo Brooks & Dunn to break up". OK, so this isn't on the scale of the Beatles breaking up, but - in the world of country music - it is pretty big stuff. Other people somewhere down the line will need to decide how they stack up against Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, and Patsy Cline in that whole "Greatest Music Evah" competition, but Brooks and Dunn are the most successful country music duet of all time and, in an interesting side note, one of the few country music acts that I have actually ever spent money on (my purchases of CD's and digital music generally runs toward various jazz genres; figure that one out)...

A lot of the most successful airplay released by Brooks and Dunn are their up-tempo honky tonk songs (and if you haven't ever spent a night drinking and dancing in a small smokey cow/logger/farmer bar...well...you have the wrong Bucket List), but some of their greatest music can be found in the ballads that featured Ronnie Dunn's spectacular voice. I'm a little bit sad tonight at the loss of further additions to that particular part of their body of work, but I survived the breakup of the Beatles and any number of other groups that I loved to listen to; I'll get over this, too...

In the meantime, one of my favorite songs and an example of the work of Brooks and Dunn; a "duet" with another giant of country music, Reba McEntire:


Posted by: Jack K. / 7:18 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 09, 2009

The Confessions Of A Bank Failure Statistic 

...I suppose I should have expected that my bank would fail. I mean, it's not like I have any particular experience dealing with my bank going under in the past, but I am one of those people who used to be a customer of First Interstate Bank. I know what it's like, even in the best of economic times, to wake up one morning to find that the perfectly good bank that holds all of one's checking accounts, savings accounts, and various loans has now become some entirely different corporate entity that will, before all is said and done, plunge one's entire financial life into a frenzied maelstrom of account number confusion that eventually makes it rather easy to come with a quick answer to the question "so, sure, I could rent a Cat™ D9R with some special options, but what would I do with it?"...

If for no other reason, I should have anticipated the possibility of the 'karma' thing...

The obvious solution - or at least so I thought on the heels of that Wells Fargo experience (incorrectly, as it apparently turned out) - was to place my bet on and my money in a small "hometown" bank run by the guy down the street who understood the community's financial pulse. I was WRONG, but I didn't know that until I stopped by my local branch early Saturday morning to extract some cash from my branch's ATM for an unexpected and unplanned weekend trip, only to notice that the employee parking spaces were remarkably fully occupied for an early Saturday morning and that there was a Community First press release taped to the left side of the ATM machine announcing the failure and takeover by Home Federal Bank of Nampa, Idaho...

And this may be one of the truly interesting aspects of this whole "Banks In Trouble" story. Even though I have been a faithful and responsible customer of this bank for 15 years (it was called "The Bank of Prineville" when I decided to abandoned my acquired Wells Fargo masters back then), I never received any direct indication that my bank was in trouble. There were, on reflection, warning signs that probably would have tipped me off if I only understood how to read the tea leaves; it was about at the time that regulators were sending warning notices to my bank last spring that I started receiving regular notices telling me that overdraft coverage was a privilege rather than a right. I found this to be a curious notification, given that I have never had an overdraft, but I never was able to make any sort of logical connection between those exhortations and bank troubles. I don't think I'll miss that clue again...

As the linked article shows, however, there was lots of stuff going on in the background. It's perfectly understandable that all of this stuff was going on behind the scenes, since I'm confidant that I'm not the only customer who would, on learning about the shaky underpinnings of my bank, show up with a friendly harmless smile and a burlap bag insisting that the nice ladies behind the teller window fork over all my money so I could do the responsible thing and bury it in Mason jars on my property out back behind the septic drain field. On the other hand, I can assure you that it is a pretty grim situation when you find yourself hitting the road for an unplanned emergency 750-mile weekend road trip having suddenly and unexpectedly discovered that at some point circumstances will probably force you to flash a card under the nose of some vendor of either food or lodging that prominently bears the name of a bank that the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities and the FDIC have declared no longer exists...

We can leave aside for now the prospect of having one's bank being taken over by a financial institution based in Southern Idaho. As a Central Idaho native, I'm not at all down with all that, but that discussion is for another day...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:43 PM 0 comments

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